Cockeyed Platonist (CP) in his December 30, 2010 column titled ‘The Arena Culture’ reviews a new book by Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly titled All Things Shining. ‘They take a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy.’ Sound like the trivializing tone of Cosmo magazine, circa 1970? CP is a man able to find the perfect literary pitch. His reductivism, penchant for abstractions and an idiosyncratic nominalism finds its next expression in the Cambridge/Berkerley Parochialism of both authors. Eternal Truths and David Foster Wallace are next to appear on the scene. Eternal Truth is asserted as being believed in by those not Eternal Truth or Mr. Wallace, perhaps an attempt at comic relief? And the awkward marriage of the abstract and the nominal continues before our confused gaze. Sports, Spiritually Unmoored People, Yankee Stadium, Lou Gehrig, Wimbledon, Roger Federer are the next arrivals. The intellectual stage is becoming crowded but as yet still manageable. ‘Whooshing up’ a clumsy metaphor concocted by Dreyfus and Kelly, stands in for a certain transcendental experience of self-forgetfulness, that makes recreation and the experience of being a part of a larger whole valuable and dangerous to human freedom.

Amid the confusion of quick walk-ons here is a statement that is at the center of CP’s argument with the Godless Mr. Dreyfus and Mr. Kelly:

‘Most people have a powerful sense that there is a Supreme Being over us, attached to eternal truths. Though they try, Dreyfus and Kelly don’t give us a satisfying basis upon which to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies.’

CP is here talking about himself, in the thrall of his self-created bourgeois religious smugness. His rhetorical frame is the ‘most people’, an utterly anonymous identification of some and no consequence, a place holder for an unasserted personal belief. The Arena is our future; the collective experience is the one that matters? Is this the Dreyfus/ Kelly argument or the CP argument?  Do we not already experience The Arena in our daily lives, via television, that is watched in billions of homes all over the planet? A communal and individual experience at the same moment: supplying, in reality, a denatured, ersatz pseudo-transcendental experience.