Hubert Dreyfus the Teacher
Hubert Dreyfus died nine years ago today, on April 22, 2017. He had lived “a full and enviable philosophical life,” in the words of as his longtime colleague at Berkeley, Professor Hans Sluga.
Professor Dreyfus taught philosophy at Berkeley for almost 50 years, from 1968 until his death in 2017. I met Bert (as his friends called him) for the first time in 1998 when I came to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate transfer student from Tampa; an inadvertent Florida Man mystified by the mist and the smell of Eucalyptus that blankets the moist campus in the fall mornings.
Bert was officially retired by then, so he didn’t teach a full load of classes. I was lucky that Fall of 1998 was one of the semesters he happened to be teaching Heidegger’s Being and Time. This class launched me on my own journey to becoming a philosopher and Heidegger scholar myself.
I went on to get my PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University (where I studied with the brilliant Cristina Lafont at the recommendation of Dreyfus), but I actually sat down to write my dissertation on Heidegger’s hermeneutic conception of the self1 here in Berkeley after coming back to study with Dreyfus as a visiting scholar in 2009-2011.
This stint included working as the teaching assistant for Bert’s course on Being and Time in the Spring of 2011 (last time he would ever teach it), one of the most gratifying full circle of life moments one could instantiate. I then stayed on as a post-doc and semi-permanent visiting scholar (“Where are you visiting from?” — “Here!”), continuing to assist Bert in almost every course he taught for the last years of his life.
In this period I also had the delightful role of serving as Bert’s default or clutch dining partner for countless lunches at the Women’s Faculty Club on campus, or on the deck of the Berkeley Thai House on Channing Ave. After lunch at the Thai House, we would routinely stop by Cream to split a chocolate malt milkshake, that is, if the line wasn’t too long.
Bert relished in the fact that lines seemed to miraculously dissipate just as he was walking up. He even referred to this jokingly as “The Bert Dreyfus Phenomenon.” This was like how he enjoyed marveling at his good luck in finding prime spots in an otherwise unfriendly parking situation. But in this case, he usually thanked the “angels” that were looking out for him.
His appeal to “angels” wasn’t purely in jest or out of character. He had a whole elaborate interpretation of “existential angels” that he presented in his lectures on The Brothers Karamazov. An existential angel is someone who quasi-miraculously reveals new possibilities for another person not through magic or supernatural powers, but through an act of openhearted love.2
I was able participate as an existential angel in those last years of Bert’s life partially because he had introduced me to Fernando Flores in 2012, another encounter which deeply has shaped my world. Working with Fernando gave me both a sufficient salary and sufficient flexibility in my schedule to be able to spend such time with Bert in those years. But the Fernando connection here is a story for another time. . .
Although he was renowned as a perceptive and ultimately vindicated early critic of artificial intelligence (starting with his controversial 1965 report for the RAND corporation, “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence”), and was one of the foremost interpreters of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, above all, Bert thought of himself as a teacher.
In his own telling, teaching was his ultimate calling in life. He credited this fact to his parents one day telling him that they were giving him the gift of a little brother, Stuart, almost exactly two years after Bert himself was born. Bert took to the responsibility of being a big brother and taking care of Stuart with the utmost care and dedication. It permeated the rest of his life.
Given how beloved, prolific, and influential Bert was as a teacher, it is no wonder that there is practically a whole literary genre of expressions of gratitude to Bert and his teaching. I bet one could fill a whole volume by just collecting the “acknowledgements” sections in the scores of scholarly books, articles, and doctoral dissertations that give thanks to him. I’ve made a few contributions to the this genre myself.
For example, in the Acknowledgements sections of my doctoral dissertation, I wrote:
The origin of this dissertation can be traced ultimately back to the fall of 1998 when I took Dreyfus’s course on Heidegger’s Being and Time at Berkeley. Dreyfus’s continued support and inspiration for my work on Heidegger in the years since have helped to shape both my approach to Heidegger and my whole philosophical orientation. Working as an assistant to Dreyfus for his Being and Time class at Berkeley in the spring of 2011 and intensively discussing Heidegger’s thought with him during the final months I was writing were awesome and invaluable experiences.
Next, in a handwritten letter of gratitude from January 2007 that I sent after we met in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris to discuss my dissertation proposal, I wrote (in part):
For a student coming to your class or office hours, there is an exhilarating feeling of cooperative inquiry into questions that, as you also wonderfully help to see, are of fundamental importance. You are always generously prepared to take the ideas of your students seriously and to help them see how to push their questions deeper and to appreciate the implications and contours of the views they attempt to articulate. I can see now how this approach is combined with what one could call your basic hermeneutical principle: Keep your eye on the phenomena!
(This letter was found among Bert’s papers after he died, and I recently had the chance to view it as the Dreyfus family was organizing the archive of his printed materials. )
As a teacher, Bert created an intensely inspiring experience by cultivating an atmosphere of a shared adventure in philosophical inquiry. He always taught, as he put it, from the edge of his own understanding.
He also operated with a startling receptivity to the questions, comments, and objections from his students. This is in keeping with his relating to teaching as a way to learn, rather than as an occasion to distribute fully formed philosophical views from a position of authority. In a conversation with me, he once compared his teaching style to Kafka’s “Hunger Artist.”
Professor Dreyfus always came with a fully developed lecture and agenda for each class, but he lived for the moments when the in-class discussion would take off from what he was saying, developing it in unexpected ways. He had faith that following the various meandering paths that the student questions opened up would occasionally disclose important new perspectives, clarifications, or questions. In practice, however, it could also turn out to be a waste of time. This was a risk that he was willing to accept. It is what enabled that mood of shared, high-stakes philosophical inquiry to arise in the class.
Bert’s teaching made the abstract texts and questions of philosophy come alive and hit you in your existential core. These weren’t just stuffy old texts. The questions they posed could make a difference to the fundamental quality of your life. For example, in his Existentialism in Literature and Film class, he presented each of the main philosophers treated in the class as offering an existential style that was available for you to emulate, a possible stand you could take on your own being:
Kierkegaard’s “unconditional commitment” to a relationship or project that defines you; Nietzsche’s playful, groundless, and stylistic individual self-invention; or Dostoyevsky’s existentialized Christian community of agapé love. At the end of each semester he took an informal poll of the students to discover which style of existence they found most appealing.
Geneviève tells me that in the 1970s when Kafka was on the reading list, the students often found his existential stance most relatable. In the archive of Dreyfus’s philosophy lectures there are many versions of his Existentialism class. Future researchers will be able to investigate the changing responses of the students to Bert’s end of class existential poll. But this will become a possibility only when we realize our dream of creating the authoritative audio archive of Bert’s lectures. Learn about and support that project here.
I was recently a guest on the awesome Love & Philosophy podcast (the episode will post on April 27). Toward the end of our conversation, the host, Andrea Hiott, asked me to share about what I learned from studying and working with my two main mentors, Professor Dreyfus and Fernando Flores. What I found myself saying tracks pretty closely with what the 2007 version of me said in my letter of gratitude to Bert and the elaboration I presented just above.
However, in reflecting on what else to say here in celebration of Bert’s teaching style, I can’t resist sharing some reflections from two of his favorite students and collaborators, Mark Wrathall (now a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University) and Sean Kelly (now Dean of Harvard’s Arts and Humanities Division).
Allow me also to recommend Wrathall’s recently rewritten entry on Martin Heidegger for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Mark Wrathall on Dreyfus’s Teaching Style
In March of 2013, Professor Dreyfus gave the John Dewey Lecture at the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco. The Dewey Lecture is delivered by a distinguished senior philosopher who is invited to reflect in a broad, autobiographical spirit on their intellectual journey and on the state of philosophy in America.
Dreyfus’s Dewey Lecture was called "Standing Up to Analytic Philosophy and AI at MIT in the Sixties” (you can read if for free at that link if you make an account on jstor).3
Mark Wrathall gave brief opening remarks that wonderfully evoked Dreyfus’s teaching style. Here is an excerpt from what he said.
He would literally work up a sweat, his shirt drenched in perspiration, intensity of thinking on his feet and listening, really listening to student comments and objections. I had never before heard a professor respond to an undergraduate student’s comment by saying out loud in front of the whole class things like,
“No, you’re right. I made a huge mistake. Now I have to remake everything!” And Bert would make good on his words. The first ten minutes of every class consisted of Bert taking back things he’d taught the session before, acknowledging his mistakes, and fixing them. The result of his public vulnerability was electrifying. Students stopped sitting back and passively transcribing what they were told. Instead, they were drawn into a shared project of understanding.
That was the open, charming side to Bert. But there was also a darker side. Bert would say other things to students that I’d never heard a professor say before or since. He might respond to a student comment with an outburst like, “No! What a disaster!”
Or, “Stop, that’s enough, you’re confusing everything!” Or once even, “You can’t talk in class anymore. Every time you open your mouth, it makes things worse.”
His charming, vulnerable and his dark side were both manifestations of the same thing, his dedication to being a teacher. It’s because Bert identifies himself deeply with the practice of philosophy that he reacts passionately to how things are going in the classroom. Working as his teaching assistant, I saw firsthand how Bert would suffer when a class went poorly, and also how ecstatically he felt when class went well.
It was this passion and this investment and this anxiety and this vulnerability that made Bert into a master teacher. I see the same investment and passion in Bert’s scholarship. For Bert, there’s something important and worthwhile at stake in the practice of philosophy. As we’re about to hear, Bert has shown that philosophers can make a real difference in the way people work and think, research, live their lives, understand themselves, and experience the world.
Mark gave a touching speech at a memorial event held for Bert on June 1, 2017 in Berkeley. You can view it here: “Joy and the Possibilities of Existence.”
Sean Kelly on Hubert Dreyfus’s Teaching Style
Next, here is passage from an obituary for Professor Dreyfus that Sean Kelly published on the Harvard Philosophy homepage and crossposted to the philosophy blog, Daily Nous;
Like Kierkegaard, a philosopher whom he revered, Dreyfus believed that teaching is learning. He refused to teach any text that he felt he already understood sufficiently well, and much of his time in the classroom involved not only getting the students to the edge of his understanding but, crucially, soliciting from them and discussing with them their suggestions for ways forward.
Because his basic topic was the phenomena of human existence, he believed that any living human being had the resources to contribute to the conversation. Because the history of philosophy had covered up these basic phenomena, he believed that the naïve freshman was just as likely to see the way forward as, or perhaps even more likely than, even the most seasoned graduate student or colleague. His courses were genuine, live conversations in which everything was always on the line. They were electrifying.
I’ve also always loved the line of mutual gratitude that Professors Dreyfus and Kelly include at the top of their Acknowledgements section in their co-authored book, All Things Shining:
Isaac Newton said famously, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants.” Unable to climb to such lofty heights, we have articulated in this book intuitions that have come primarily from standing upon each other’s shoulders. Each of us is, therefore, grateful in the first place to his coauthor for the contortions, extensions, offerings, suppressions, and support that have made such a wonderful working relationship come to be.
You can view Sean’s moving speech from the June 1, 2017 Bert memorial event in Berkeley here: “The Great Sperm Whale Shall Lord it.”
Hubert Dreyfus on Hubert Dreyfus’s Teaching Style
The discussions in Professor Dreyfus’s classes would often have an improvisatory feel. He drove them by diving thoughtfully into student questions. But he was a master who had developed his style with the utmost care. He knew exactly what he was doing and what the risks were.
To see this, check out this little blurb about Professor Dreyfus’s teaching written on the occasion him being presented with UC Berkeley’s 2004 Distinguished Teaching Award. Here are the key passages:
Hubert Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School, says his ultimate goal in teaching is learning.
“Since I see my lectures not primarily as occasions to teach but rather as opportunities to learn, I take students’ questions and objections as essential to the course of the lecture rather than a distraction from it,” said Dreyfus. Over the years, he has taught such courses as Existentialism in Literature and Film, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and The Effect of Disembodiment on the Internet.
His dedication is clear. For the past two decades, he routinely has made audio tapes - now audio files on the course Web site - of each of his lectures so students can catch up on any classes they have missed and can review the class discussions when writing their papers.
And each day before he lectures on a certain topic, Dreyfus listens to the tape of the last time he gave that lecture. “I feel elated at the moments when things went well and the students and I learned something together, and discouraged when a long discussion led nowhere,” said Dreyfus. “Somehow this helps me get in the right mood and to profit from past successes and failures.”
The reward for his efforts, he said, is sharing along with his students the pleasure of learning from the greatest thinkers of all time.
“But that would not be rewarding unless what we learned was relevant to our lives,” Dreyfus said. He noted a special satisfaction he experiences when former students come up to him in the supermarket or send him an e-mail “saying that what they learned in one of my courses changed their lives.”
Let me emphasize the mention here of Professor Dreyfus’s habit of recording his lectures so that he himself could listen back and learn how he could keep improving his teaching.
This practice is the source of the astonishing archive of over 1,000 cassettes that he left behind.
As I’ve mentioned above and in previous posts, I’m helping the family turn this treasure trove of cassettes into a carefully curated and professionally digitized audio archive. We are raising money for that project here. Please donate if you can and help spread the word of this project. And let me know of any grants or philanthropic donors you know of who might be a good fit.
In fact, I was just working on the labeling and sorting this amazing philosophical time capsule last night. Here is some of that:
Here is an example of some tapes on which Professor Dreyfus left notes for carrying over something important he learned from the class:
These are from a class on Heidegger’s Being and Time, given in the Spring of 1986. In the bottom cassette, you can see the parenthetical remark in red: “(Good on Space)(use)”; in the middle tape it says at the bottom: “Good on Dos. [Dostoyevsky?] middle of side two.” The top tape says, in the upper right “Excellent on the Temporality of Authenticity.”
One of my favorite finds of my work in the archive last night is the recordings of the Being and Time class from the fall of 1998 — the first class I took with Bert! I can’t wait to hear the 20 year-old me grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy for the first time in the class discussions. Sean Kelly gave guest lectures this year on the sections on Understanding and Interpretation, and these are also included in the cassettes.
Bert’s Final Course
In the Fall of 2016, Dreyfus signed up to teach one of his favorite undergraduate courses, a subtly subversive “great books” course that read the history of Western literature as exemplifying what Heidegger identified as the hidden “history of being” of Western metaphysics. The class was the basis of his 2011 book with Sean Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.
The official title of this class was “Philosophy 6: Man, God, and Society in Western Literature.” Dreyfus gave it a catchy unofficial new title that tracked the argument he unfolded throughout its arc: “From the gods to God and back.”
This 2016 rendition would turn out to be the last class he would ever teach. Like many people at this stage in life (he was 87), he had good days and more difficult days. The difficult days were getting more frequent, and he was falling down more often.
For the previous several years, I had been helping him prepare and deliver the lectures for his various classes. But as this particular class progressed, I took on more and more responsibility for delivering the lectures, using Bert’s own lecture notes as the basis. Having had all that previous experience working with him on his lectures, I could readily speak from his compressed bullet point notes and decipher the code he used to refer passages in the text.
(His simple citation code used a page number plus a parenthetical number to refer to a specific place on a page that had a quotation he wanted to read to support the point he was making, e.g., 255(1). The parenthetical 1 meant that the passage was near the top of page 255, marked by a “(1)” in the margins.)
Bert came with his wife Genevieve to every class, sitting up front, and contributing to the lectures. He showed up early to check in with me regarding the class plans for the day. Here is such a moment captured by Geneviève, Bert and I discussing Moby Dick before class:
Dreyfus treated the writings of Homer, Aeschylus, the Gospel of John, Dante, and Melville, as works of art in Heidegger’s sense, meaning that they “open a world” serving to reveal, focus, and articulate an epoch’s understanding of the meaning of being, “giving to things their look and to humanity their outlook on life,” as Heidegger put it in his essay “On the Origin of the World of Art.” In Dreyfus’s hands, a traditional “great books” class became a Heideggerian “artworks working” class.
On this reading, the genius of these classical authors lay not in their creativity or craft of writing, but in their ability to attune to and render intelligible the understanding of being that was in the background of their cultures, tacitly guiding the everyday lives of normal people, giving them their sense of orientation in the cosmos and their sense of what it takes to lead a worthwhile human life, enabling them to make sense of the inevitable human dramas of birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace.
The class thus traced the gradual narrowing of Homer’s pluralistic ontological openness into the monolithic hierarchical monotheism of Dante. It culminated in an intensely adventurous reading of Melville’s Moby Dick as an anticipation of and response to what Nietzsche would later call “the death of God”: the realization that this traditional monotheistic God (and associated explanation of reality) is gradually becoming more and more unbelievable.
This ontological recession of the one and true God and the overcoming of the need for any single ultimate explanation of everything is represented by the final submersion of Ahab’s monomaniacal search for the white whale, and the self-destruction wrought by his conviction that the white whale is the single, ultimate explanation for his suffering. This opens up a space again for a kind of polytheism, a joyful embrace of the multitudinous, abundant sources of meaning that people can attune to, if they render themselves properly receptive.
In December of 2016, the class concluded. A few months later, on April 22, 2017, Bert died at his home in the Berkeley Hills at the age of 87. His mark upon philosophy and upon the lives of countless students is indelible. The experience of being his assistant, helper, and friend for those last years of his life was a profound existential gift.
I captured audio recordings of the lectures I gave on Melville’s Moby Dick in this class.
Here is the full playlist of my lectures on Moby Dick in Philosophy 6, Fall 2016.
Start here, with the first lecture in the series. It outlines the transition between Dante’s hierarchical monotheism and Melville’s retrieval of a pluralistic, polytheistic understanding of being, the traces of which had been left in the margins of our culture since the time of Homer:
A Punk Rock Existential Coda
Bert seemed to associate me with the pluralistic openness he celebrated in Moby Dick. He was fascinated by the fact that in addition to being a philosopher, I am a lifelong drummer in punk bands. He always introduced me as “a punk rock drummer.”
Whenever I told him how I combined playing punk shows in same trip as traveling for philosophy conferences; or how, while studying philosophy in Paris for a year I also played in an all-femme (except me, obviously) punk band called BLUTSCHWESTER that played fashion week afterparties, he would say, “What a life!”
In fact, Bert came to see two of my punk bands play live. His first punk show was on September 16, 2011, when he came to see my band, NO STATIK, at the legendary punk club in Berkeley, 924 Gilman Street.
The huge cavernous room was packed because a celebrated hardcore-punk band from the 1990s, RORSCACH, were playing a reunion show that night. Bert, then 81 years old, slept in his car while the opening bands played. Then he stood on a table in the back of the room next to sound booth to watch us play.
At the end of our set, he walked eagerly up to the stage, beaming with smiles, as I stepped off stage, drenched in sweat and emitting clouds of steam from my body heat (I am the drummer!).
He asked me, in a joyful confusion, “Was that one piece of music?,” attempting to apply a category from classical music to the foreign realm of hardcore-punk. In fact, we had played something like 10 songs, but we strung them together with feedback and little composed transitions. So, in a sense it was indeed one chaotic piece of unlistenable music. Bert got a little jostled in the rush of the crowed while exiting the room and twisted his ankle. “It was worth it!” he assured me.
Geneviève reports that one of Bert’s final quips was “It was worth it.” As she observed in an email from not long after Bert’s death: “Although the context is restricted to having had too many chocolate malts at Cream, I am sure it can be applied to his entire life.”
I would like to give my deep thanks to Geneviève Boissier-Dreyfus for feedback on an earlier version of this post and for helping me remember many important details that I had left out of my stories.
This is the performance of NO STATIK that Bert saw from atop the table back by the sound booth at 924 Gilman. I am drumming.
Around the same era, Bert and Geneviève also came to see my band REPLICA play in the back of a little record shop in Oakland called 1-2-3-4 Go! Records.
Bert was impressed (and we ourselves were absolutely shocked) when the New York Times featured REPLICA on cover of the arts section in a story about the show we played at the now bygone Bushwick venue, the Acheron. (For local Oakland coverage of REPLICA, see this 2014 piece in the East Bay Express).
Here is a live video of one REPLICA song from the back room of 1-2-3-4-Go! records, from around that time period. It may have been the very show that Bert and Geneviève attended:
Thanks for reading! Long live Bert!
Let me know what you think. And check out this flyer for the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project:
B. Scot Rousse, Thrown Projection: An Interpretation and Defense of the Hermeneutic Conception of the Self in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’. PhD Dissertation. Northwestern University. December 2011.
I coaxed Perplexity create this short report on Dreyfus’s conception of existential angels. I can vouch for what it came up with:
Dreyfus on “Angels” in The Brothers Karamazov
Dreyfus does not treat Dostoevsky’s angel-imagery as a literal or theological claim. Instead, he uses it as a phenomenological and existential diagnostic: to be called an “angel” or to aspire to angelic purity reveals something crucial about a character’s mode of self-relation — how they relate to the conflicting “factors” that constitute the human self. This is the hinge of his interpretation.
Alyosha as Angel, Rakitin as Devil
The most direct use of “angel” language in Dreyfus’s reading is the contrast between Alyosha and Rakitin. Throughout the novel, characters spontaneously call Alyosha an “angel,” and Dreyfus takes this seriously. In the lecture transcript from the 2015 Oxford talk, Dreyfus notes:
“We know that Rakitin has been a devil and he is the devil and we know also that Alyosha is an angel — people are constantly saying that, and at one point Dostoevsky really gets carried away… where the person says they hear his wings unfolding… as he’s doing his Good Deed.”
For Dreyfus, this is not mere metaphor. Alyosha “hearing his wings unfold” during an act of agape love — the miraculous transformation of Grushenka’s despair into forgiveness — is Dostoevsky marking, and Dreyfus exposing, a phenomenological event: a real-world “miracle” (in the existentialized sense) in which sacred love creates new possibilities for life without violating the laws of physics and chemistry. Rakitin, by contrast, embodies cynical manipulation and self-interest — the devil-figure who orchestrates Alyosha’s near-seduction and sneers, “So you see the miracles you were looking for have now come to pass,” inadvertently naming the sacred event he was trying to destroy.
Ivan’s Failed Angelism and Pascal’s Warning
The deeper and more philosophically charged use of “angel” appears in Dreyfus’s reading of Ivan. Drawing on Pascal’s dictum — “Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête” (”He who would play the angel plays the beast”) — Dreyfus argues that Ivan’s failure is precisely his desire for an angelicdetachment from the earthly, embodied, contradictory dimensions of the self.
Ivan is a self-made man who wants intellectual and moral purity of the Greek kind (Reinheit in German): to purge the “servant” side, the “Karamazovian” sensual-earthly factor in himself, and achieve clean rational clarity. This Platonic angelism — wanting to ascend to a heaven of pure thought, free of the entangling mess of human relationships — is, for Dreyfus following Dostoevsky, not saintly but dangerous. The person who seeks angelic detachment ends up in the cold isolation of betrayal, like Dante’s frozen traitors at the bottom of Hell, who are self-sufficient to the point of being capable of betraying anyone. Ivan’s hallucinated devil is the self-projection of his own repressed earthly half; his breakdown is the consequence of having tried, and failed, to be an angel.
The Real Angel: Lauterkeit, Not Reinheit
By contrast, the authentic “angel” in Dreyfus’s reading is not someone who has transcended the earthly but someone who has transformed it. Dreyfus uses the German distinction between Reinheit (cleanliness — removing dirt) and Lauterkeit (purity — transmuting darkness into light) to gloss Dostoevsky’s Christian-Jewish spirituality. Alyosha does not suppress the Karamazovian “insect” in himself; he integrates both the celestial and the earthly, achieving what Dreyfus calls a “positive R3” self-relation — binding the self’s contradictory factors together through connectedness to others in the chain of agape love.
This is why Alyosha, called an “angel” by everyone around him, is also described by Dmitri using the image of the insect and the Madonna simultaneously. Dostoevsky (and Dreyfus reading him) does not want us to choose between angel and beast — that Pascalian binary is the trap Ivan falls into. Alyosha’s “angelhood” is paradoxically achieved through full immersion in the world: he accepts care from strangers, forgives others, creates what Dreyfus calls “sacred forever memories” for the boys at Ilyusha’s stone.
Angels in the Apostolic Chain of Agape Love
Dreyfus’s broader argument in the 2015 Oxford lecture frames even the angel-language within his central thesis: Dostoevsky is “existentializing” Christian sacred practices so that they remain available in a scientific age. Angels, in this reading, are not supernatural messengers but phenomenological markers that Dostoevsky plants in the text to signal when agape love is being transmitted through the “apostolic succession” of caring relationships. When Grushenka calls Alyosha “you Angel, why did you not come before?” (p. 327), and when a character hears “his wings unfolding” during a good deed, Dostoevsky is telling the careful reader: here is where the sacred is still alive — not in miracles against the laws of nature, but in this unrepeatable act of love passed from person to person.
In sum, Dreyfus’s interpretation treats Dostoevsky’s “angel” not as a theological category but as an existential one. The true angel is the person who has achieved sacred wholeness through active love and full engagement with others — epitomized by Alyosha. The false angel is the one who, like Ivan (and Pascal’s warning), tries to escape the contradictions of embodied existence into pure intellect, and ends up playing the beast. The novel’s angel-and-devil imagery is, for Dreyfus, Dostoevsky’s most vivid shorthand for the difference between authentic and inauthentic ways of being human in a secular age.
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Volume 87 (November 2013), on pages 78–92. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43661448 (You can read the text of the lecture for free if you make an account and login to jstor).
Such a wonderful reflection. I’m glad you were given the great gift of learning from, and being a friend to, one of the greats - Bert Dreyfus.
love this idea of teaching from the edge of one's understanding. I run an artist fellowship program that involves text study and this is such a wonderful way to frame what we aspire to do.