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“I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to [care for] the best possible state of your soul [psyches therapeia].”-Socrates Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly have written a scholarly and reader-friendly book, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011), that, although intended for a nonspecialist audience, holds significant implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. Although their explicit references to Heidegger are surprisingly scant,1 in my reading the authors draw heavily both on his (1927/1962) elucidation of human existing as a rich contextual whole, being-in-the-world, and his (1954/1977) analysis of how entities, including human beings, have come to be intelligible to us in our technological era as mere “standing reserve”-resources to be measured, manipulated, and exploited. The book presents a fascinating historical account of how the intelligibility of entities has evolved-or devolved-from Homer's ancient world through the Middle Ages to the nihilism that became heir to Enlightenment thought:
The world used to be…a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now seem far away. The book is intended to bring them close once more…[and] to uncover the wonder we were once capable of experiencing. (Dreyfus and Kelly, 2011, p. xi)
Dreyfus and Kelly examine and seek to resuscitate a kind of sacred practice, still marginally available to us, that the ancient Greeks called poiesis:
Until about a hundred years ago, the cultivating and nurturing practices of poiesis organized a central way things mattered. The poietic style manifested itself…in the craftsman's skills for bringing things out at their best…. This cultivating, craftsman-like, poietic understanding of how to bring out meanings at their best was alive and well into the late nineteenth century, but it is under attack in our technological age. (Dreyfus and Kelly, 2011, p. 206)
Using woodworking as their principal example, Dreyfus and Kell