All Things Shining- whoosh

But the memory tells you nothing about how to act once the situation is gone. This makes our contemporary notion of the sacred and the real radically different from many others we are familiar with. This situational notion of what grounds our existence, for example, is nothing like the eternal, everlasting kind of certainty and security that philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant desired. And it is nothing like the monotheistic, unified kind of certainty that the Judeo-Christian religions offer either. Rather, this pre-Axial kind of certainty is transient and multiple and it requires care. As Homer knows it carries you along for a while but it cannot last forever. Second, this characteristic of the sacred as we experience it in our culture ties it very closely to the Homeric Greek conception of what is real. In Homer's age the name for nature, or what there is, was physis. This is the word from which our word physics derives. Physics today is likewise the study of what there is, but we now have a very different conception of what there is than Homer had. For us, the ultimate elements of nature are quarks and leptons and other subatomic particles that have mass and charge. Or perhaps the ultimate constituents are minuscule multidimensional strings that vibrate. Or maybe the final physics will tell us something different still. But whatever physics ends up saying about the universe, the story it gives will be a story about basic constituents and the laws that govern how they casually interact. For Homer this notion of reality isn't wrong on the facts, as if some other physical, causal story could get it right.'' Instead, for Homer, the causal account starts in the wrong place altogether. For the word physis in Homeric times wasn't the name of some ultimate constituent of the universe; it was the name for the way the most real things in the world present themselves to us. The most important things, the most real things in Homer's world, well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go. If we had to translate Homer's word physis, then whooshing is about as close as we can get. What there really is, for Homer, is whooshing
up: the whooshing up of shining Achilles in the midst of battle, or of an overwhelming eroticism in the presence of a radiant stranger like Paris; the whooshing up of a rock in the turbulent sea that calls forth Odysseus's hand to grab it. These were the shining moments of reality in Homer's world. And whooshing up is what happens in the context of the great moment in contemporary sport as well. When something whooshes up it focuses and organizes everything around it. The great athlete in the midst of the play rises up and shines—all attention is drawn to him. And everyone around him—the players on the field, the coaches on the sidelines, the fans in the stadium, the announcers in the booth—everyone understands who they are and what they are to do immediately in relation to the sacred event that is occurring. In Homer's world what whooshes up is what really shines and matters most. And we can still sense this in the moment of sport. It is worth emphasizing that this Homeric notion of reality is orthogonal to our contemporary scientific understanding—they are simply not explaining the same kinds of things. Indeed, one could embrace both notions—and we think one should embrace both notions—without any conflict. The scientific conception of what there is focuses on the causal basis of reality; Homer's account, by contrast, describes the way the most important or meaningful mo-ments of existence present themselves to us. Of course it is true that meaningful events—like great moments in sport—involve entities that have a causal basis. But the causal structure of the leg muscles in Lou Gehrig's left thigh is neither here nor there when it comes to the question what it is like to be caught up in the response to one of his extraordinary plays or his moving farewell. The third point to make is that the physis phenomenon is not unique to sport. It may be that in our culture sport provides the cen-tral locus for the phenomenon—that in general it is in the context of sport that contemporary Americans are most likely to feel this sense of community and focused meaning, this sense of understanding ex-actly what one is about, if only for a while. But that is not to say it can't happen in other contexts too. Many people, for instance, felt their sense of themselves and their world come into focus during the speech by Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall. For someone else it might happen occasionally in the context of an important fam-ily meal at Thanksgiving. Perhaps some other folks feel this kind of focused, communal meaning taking them over in the context of the classroom. There is nothing in our position that requires the story to focus on sports. It's just that this is the place in contemporary Ameri-can culture where the phenomenon seems most familiar. But the sports example is important for another reason too, and this brings us to the fourth point we want to make. Namely, there is something inherently dangerous in the phenomenon we are describ-ing. Inherently dangerous, and perhaps even repellent. We need now to address this final point about physis.
AT A DINNER PARTY recently one of us was describing the phenom-enon of whooshing up. A colleague at the table—himself a kind and clearheaded philosopher who thinks deeply about related issues—had an immediate response. "I know exactly what it's like to feel that kind of energy pulsing through a crowd," he said. "And every time I'm near it I want to get as far away as possible." The discussion was cut short at this point, as social conversations often are, and the source of this colleague's concern was never explicitly articulated. It is clear, how-ever, what someone might mean by a comment like this, and there is a very serious worry behind' it. Without attributing any of the fol-lowing views to our friend, therefore, we need to lay out the danger of whooshing up. First we need to notice that to be overtaken by some potent force is to have one's actions no longer completely under one's control. When I find myself rising as one with the crowd in the presence of some great athletic feat, there is an important sense in which I am not the source of my own activity. It is my muscles, of course, that generate the motor actions—straightening the legs, raising the arms, emitting the inarticulate utterance that means "Hooray!" But there is a strong sense in which I perform these movements without ever having decided to do so. The activity is out of my control in the sense that I do not perform it voluntarily. It's not as if I was forced to jump up and cheer either, of course. It was always an option for me to adopt a kind of ironic distance from the situation, or even, as our colleague recommends, to walk away. But so long as I find myself taken over by the situation, there is an important sense in which I am no longer the source of my own activity. From the point of view of the Enlightenment, this condition is appalling. In a famous essay, Kant argued that "enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity." To be imma-ture, in the Kantian sense, just is to allow oneself to act in ways that one has not chosen freely on one's own. Failing to resist the mad-ness of crowds is a prime example. Maturity, by contrast, is having the resolve and courage to use one's own understanding in choosing how to act, without guidance from anyone or anything external to oneself The mature thing to do at the baseball game therefore, in this Kantian sense of maturity, is to resist the power of the community response in order to decide as a rational individual what the appro-priate response to the situation should be. One might well decide that an athletic feat merits applause, and if so, one might express one's approval appropriately. But rising as one with the crowd is out of the question. This might sound like a boring way to act at a baseball game, but there is sense behind Kant's caution. There is, after all, a vanishingly small distance between rising as one with the crowd at a baseball game and rising as one with the crowd at a Hitler rally. Indeed, insofar as Lou Gehrig's farewell address is properly considered an act of rhetoric instead of an act of athletic greatness proper, perhaps the distance there is smaller still. So the power of the whooshing up phenomenon is revealed to be Janus-faced. If we cannot articulate a distinction between Gehrig and Hitler, then perhaps Kantian maturity, though relatively boring, really is the wisest course.