Hubert Dreyfus Quotes

the internet are the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment

Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves.

The old gods of revenge, the Furies, who are all women, put the family ahead of all other values; the new gods, mostly men, are for detached universal law that makes no exception for particular individuals, families, or cities.

It is an echo, in fact, from the last lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the lines in which Dante describes what it is to feel ecstatic bliss in the mystical union with God, to give up your entire identity and subsume it beneath the sacred power of God’s divine love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

universalistic demands of morality. Faith requires

Philip Amato, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Wesley Emerson, Werner Erhard, Fernando Flores, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Goldstein, Martin Heidegger, Joan Holmes, Randy MacNamara, Jim Selman, William Shakespeare, and Constantine Stanislavsky.

Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, researchers on expertise, have a simple explanation: Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics, they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in the videos did the best thing possible

To say that all men need the gods therefore is to say, in part at least, that we are the kinds of beings who are at our best when we find ourselves acting in ways that we cannot - and ought not - entirely take credit for.

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.76 If you tried to listen to all the sounds of the universe at once it would be deafening. All the various meanings would cancel each other out. You would hear the chaos of white noise instead of the single, hidden truth of a rational universe. This is exactly parallel to what would happen if you tried to see all the colors in the world at once. It would look like something that has a meaning, you would be driven to find out what that ultimate meaning was, but you would be driven mad in the search. Because when it is universal it is deafening, it is a chaos; and although this chaos is itself the ultimate nature of the universe, you can only fathom it from one perspective at a time. That is why, on Melville’s account, Ahab’s fanaticism is ultimately mad. The multiple meanings of the universe simply don’t add up[…]” Excerpt From: Hubert Dreyfus. “All Things Shining.

Luther’s story reminds us that not every kind of mental, spiritual, or psychological effect can be achieved by dint of hard work and control. Like falling asleep, some spiritual tasks require a more glancing approach. But Wallace is not alone in thinking that self-control is the key. Western culture in the twentieth century can be read, in part, as a series of responses to the death of God—to the death in the culture, in other words, of a grounded, public, and shared sense that there is a single, unquestioned set of virtues—Judeo-Christian virtues—in accordance with which one’s life is properly led.

In the history of the West we have only two figures who do such a threefold reconfiguring job. They are an odd pair: Jesus and Descartes. Jesus as presented in the Gospels is a successful reconfigurer who sets up the Christian World in which there can be a savior as well as saints and sinners; Descartes sets up our Modern World in which people and things become subjects and objects.

THERE ARE AT LEAST two kinds of people who manage to avoid the contemporary burden of choice, but in the wrong way. First, there is the man of self-confidence (usually it is a man). He plunges forth assuredly into every action he takes. He presents the world as obvious— “How could anyone wonder about the right move here?” he seems to ask—and in certain cases his assurance draws others along with him. (...) THERE IS A SECOND WAY to avoid the contemporary burden of choice, but it is at least as unattractive as the path of manufac- tured confidence. We are thinking here of the person who makes no choices about how to act because he is enslaved by obsessions, infatuations, or addictions. Such a person is, it is true, drawn by something beyond himself to act in the way he does.

I let you find all those polytheistic truths yourself; life in them, find the joy in them, and even sorrow. But in these joys and sorrows rest content with the thought that they give meaning to our world.

Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain, “To say that we live in a secular age in the modern West is to say that even religious believers face existential questions about how to live a life.