Kantian Scepticism or Metaphysical Anarchy?
Terry Eagleton's book 'Reason, Faith and Revolution; Reflections on the God Debate" is a gold mine (or more appropriately coal mine) of bluster, caricature, conceit, a good deal of dry wit and even more wet (very wet) madness.
My dogma is the starting point for any discussion on the philosophy of religion should be Kant. The Koningsbergian was in spirit a sceptic who thought metaphysical speculations about the real world, the heavens and the nature of God would require a perspective outside space and time, but such an aspatial, atemporal celestial bird's view is impossible for us because our perceptions are “schematised” through space and time. For Kant, metaphysics, defined broadly as speculations about what is real, was the goldfish's attempt to leap out of the bowl, but the audacious fish who wanted to see outside his glassy prison was destined for nothing more than a few seconds of flapping helplessly while its gills expired.
Kant would have shock his head grimly if he heard Richard Dawkins deride the concept "beyond space and time" or any other hubristic goldfish who took his spherical residence as necessarily representative of reality, but he would have equally opposed hubristic, grill breathing vertebrates like Terry Eagleton who want to take their gills where gills cannot breath.
At the end Kant defied his own theories and took a perilous expedition into the glacial Noumenon (Kant's name for the ice plateau beyond space and time) in search of God, beauty and the moral law. A hopeless expedition maybe, but at least what Kant brought back was icy, colourless and rational (noumenol in the truest sense). Beauty was a coolly disinterested judgement neither intellectual or sensual, the moral law was, in the words of Schopenhauer “cold and egoistic" and God was the God of grave but benign German legislators and Judges.
Terry Eagleton has undertaken the same journey. His point is that Dawkins (or rather Ditchens, Eagleton's catchy sobriquet for the Dawkins/Hitchens axis) do not understand religion, they treat it as archaic and discredited science. This seems fair enough. If I went into a Catholic mass on a Sunday (for instance) how many congregants would raise their hands if I asked "how many people are here because science doesn't know where the first self-replicating molecule came from?" or "how many people are here because although natural selection explains the process from which organisms evolve it doesn't explain how such a random process could yield such a fortuitous result?"
Presumably Dawkins and Hitchens wouldn't deny this, and what they mean is the only rational value religion has is as a scientific theory, rather than people believe actually have religious beliefs for scientific reasons. Yet the idea that the only truth is scientific truth is also a narrow minded, dogmatic and surprisingly torturous view to have. Does not science point to our own perceptual and cognitive limitations, four dimensional space in geometrical vectors, spacetime and the concept of physical indeterminacy in Quantum theory, and if the proposition "there is no truth except scientific truth" is true its not something that can be verified by scientific/empirical means, so we are back to the same sort of hopeless circularity that maligned Freddie Ayer’s "verifiability principle".
Terry Eagelton, a Wit and the Cause of Witlessness in Others?
Eagleton does demonstrate "Ditchen's" apparent misunderstanding through weaving a series of charming analogies and metaphysical conceits worthy of a contemporary tongue in cheek disciple of Elizabethan poet John Donne; my own particular favourite is "(treating religion as botched science) is like treating ballet as a botched attempt to run for the bus". All this brilliantly poetic fun-poking is fine, but Eagleton brings more back from his expedition to noumenon pole than Kant's benign German Judge God. Terry Eagleton's version of Christianity (on the basis of this book) is a 1960's, anti-intellectual, occasionally quite sentimental, “dymythologised” version of liberation theology. Swapping Richard Dawkin'spositivistic majisterium for Eagleton's religious stable is swapping one poison for another; its swapping the megalomania of cocaine for the hallucinations of LSD, the power fix of an eighties stockbroker for the chimerical delusions of a sixties hippie.
While I agree Christopher Hitchens, in his entertaining tract "God is not Great", reads the Bible as either archaic cosmology or tribal warfare propaganda, which ignores its moments of ironic doubt (Job or Ecclesiasticus), tragic poetry (psalm 139) and moral sophistication (some of Jesus' sayings) this re-branded, dymythologised Jesus figure of Eagleton's is either a proto-Marxist or even a proto-Nietzschean, does not seem to believe in supernatural entities like demons, the existence of hell, miracles, has very little to say about God, whether we should consider him God's son, whether God is both three and one and so on (Eagleton, for his part does not make it clear that he even believes in God, except for having some vague connection with transcendentally transforming this flawed world the Comintern failed to transform.) At one point he remarks "the antagonism between Ditchens and those like myself then, is quite as much political as theological." This is a fascinating insight into Eagleton’s unreformed and unreconstructed Marxism.
Sure, Dawkins, Grayling and Sam Harris are politically naive, they make the 18th century blooper of equating scientific and technological "progress" with moral progress, which could only be defended if you believed in Victorian canards like the more educated or rational a person is the automatically more moral they are, or a technologically, scientifically advanced society is necessarily more moral or "enlightened" than a more “backward” one. I'm not a fan of Dawkin's naively “progressive” politics (that’s “progressive” in the 1860’s rather than 1960’s sense).
Yet in some blustery passages Eagleton suggests that belief in God is necessarily incompatible with a belief in progress, liberal values, free markets or any other articles on the North Oxford credo. The following has to be one of the most hair splitting mid-boglers Yale University press have ever committed to print; "It is hard to imagine informing some hard bitten political lobbyist in a Washington bar that only through a tragic process of loss, nothingness and self-dispossession can humanity come into its own. In such civilised circles God talk is not really any more acceptable than talk about socialism." Hasn't Eagelton ever heard of the proverbial wall street bell that is ceremonially accompanied by a prayer of thanks to the Lord?Of course he probably has but goes on to make that self-deluded, indefensible and intellectually short sighted assumption that the God he believes in is the only God, and the God believed in by George W Bush, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and William F. Buckley is some nefarious demiurge. True devotees proscribe to a masochistic sounding "process of loss, nothingness and self-dispossession" while devotees of that other demiurge believe in greedy capitalism, nuclear warfare and write shamelessly narcissistic, self-gloating, and bristling with the eighteen year old jock’s need to project onto something big, phallic and powerful, books like "No Apology; The Case for American Greatness."
What God means to religious believers may be just as difficult to define as what their loved ones mean to them, but Christian liturgy has always visualised God as a heavenly father who promises to protect and reward his children on the condition they obey his commands and perform certain necessary worshipful rituals. Why doesn't George W Bush believe in this? Eagleton remarks "the advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is Godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them." Now obviously Eagleton doesn't mean God in the general conceptual sense, then the assertion would make no sense, as George W. Bush believes in God and clearly does not find the capitalist system “inherently atheistic”, (and surely the best way to determine how "atheistic" something is is the testimonies of religious believers) but more narrowly the Christian God, or more narrowly again is own peculiar Marxian, intellectually narrow version of Christianity.
Eagleton mentions his ancestor Dr. John Eagelton died of Typhoid during the Great Irish Famine, does Eagleton not know that Lord Russel's Whig government justified the laissez faire dogma of withdrawing poor relief by appealing to the providential theology of the day? The invisible laws of the market (that's the market Eagleton thinks is "inherently atheistic") reflect the inscrutable plans and wisdom of God put in place for man and the devastating potato blight was this God's way of punishing the Irish for their adherence to the papish religion. If one wants to understand belief in God surely devout believers like Lord Russell and George Bush have to be considered. And perhaps Dawkins science/religion analogy stands in one important respect, both science and belief in God can't explain why people behave morally, science can be a force for good (penicillin) as well as evil (the hydrogen bomb) while acts of evil (the inquisition) as well as acts of good (the abolition of slavery) are justified by appeals to the deity and his commandments. Saying the capitalist system is "inherently atheistic" is like saying Cameron Todd Williingham (the Texan serial arsonist who killed his three sons after he burned down their house) was not a father. There are as many versions of God-devotion out there as fatherhood, but how can Eagleton deny that the splendid variety of religious believers are worshiping and praying to the same entity?
Of course what Eagleton really wants to say is the "capitalist system is inherentlydevoid of my version of religious worship. Of my version of belief in God.". And the fact that the vast majority of Christians accept the capitalist system, either tolerate or for the most part enthusiastically partake in its "material practises" and happily, and religiously, proscribe with the "beliefs and values implicit in them" doesn't seem to matter to Eagleton. This self-delusion is characteristic of some of the most robustly intellectual and self-assured Christian apologists, they fail to realise (or aren't troubled by the fact) that their sunny, sophisticated, wholesomely moral version of Christianity is extraordinarily rare.
Yet what about the possible Biblical basis for Eagleton's weird beliefs? Eagelton is legendary for marxian extrapolations of Christianity, although at one point his Jesus seems more proto-Nietzsche that proto-Marx; "the Gospel calls 'eternal' life, life at its most richly and exuberantly human, intoxicated with its own high spirits and self-delight". "Intoxicated with its own high spirits and self-delight" sounds more like a citation from Nietzsche's Dionysian prophecy “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” than the synoptic gospels. How anyone can reconcile such heady life-affirmation with "if anyone wishes to come after, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me", is beyond me.
Terry Eagleton and the Philosopher's Blender
There is a chance readers will find Eagleton's journalistic garbling of the history of philosophy more interesting than the above post-mo apologia. He makes the predictable observation that Dawkins is captive to Cartesian subjectivism, or in other words he sees the human mind as a static, analysing, collecting and dominating "subject" acting on dumb, mute objects. Eagleton suggests this typical enlightenment picture is misleading, the cold analysing subject is too removed from bodily and lived experience, the subject should be considered a perpetually fluid activity rather than a static entity; "Being for Aquinas is an act rather than an entity. Even God for him is more of a verb than a noun. The body itself dismantles the duality between subject and object....as a participatory agent in the world I find myself in the midst of it, rather than peering dispassionately at it out of the corner of my eye sockets."
Criticism of Cartesian metaphysics is a very serious debate in philosophy, (it is one incidentally very close to my heart), so it’s a shame its treated in such a shamelessly name dropping (if occasionally sharp and amusing) way by Eagelton, clumsily stewing every philosophical idea, intellectual movement and abstract concept into one tasteless and unsatisfactory pottage. The idea that we are "participatory agents in the world" rather than removed subjects is straight out of Heidegger. Perhaps its more Kierkegaard, as Heidegger's existential Tengwar ensured you either agreed with him fully or not at all and Heidegger's strategy wasn't to "dismantle the duality between subject and object" it was to pretend it didn't exist. However It has absolutely nothing to do with the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
Actually Eagleton’s intellectual instinct to always drop everything into a journalistic blender is at times hair splitting. Consider the following; "For Aquinas, as for Heidegger and Wittgenstein, our experience of the world is a function of our bodily engagement in it". Some would call that encyclopedic (I would call itwikipaedic). Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian, for all Aristotelians motion is perfection, so motion (activity) is unsurprisingly central to his theology and psychology. Yet Aquinas's thought is still essentially anthropocentric, while Heidegger's is essentially anti-humanistic and anti-anthropocentric.
"Dasein", the being of existing in(or “thrown in”) the world rather than existing as a removed analysing subject may be "our" being, but we exist to reveal the “Dasein” not the other way around. Heidegger deserves to be called a radical anti-humanist as he tried to subvert the subject-centred metaphysics that Aquinas for all his subtlety and brilliance is captive too. And Heidegger probably invented the mysterious Tengwar because he anticipated Terry Eageltons would come along and try and stick him into the leveling out blender, whenever someone attributed something like "our experience of the world is a function of our bodily engagement with it" initiates could come along and substitute the defiled language with the sacred idioms.
And Wittgenstein thought that if language didn't exist philosophical problems wouldn't exist, it’s a characteristic attitude of "analytic philosophy", and while Wittgenstein was responsible for interrupting the naively self-satisfied Fregean chess and billiards by knocking over the billiard boards and chess boards at the analytic philosophy party he never retired for tea on the Aristotelian floor or joined the motley of poets and eccentrics at the Heideggeran floor of being.
Of course Eagleton knows this, the chapter on the Bavarian master in his book "The Ideology of the Aesthetic", is a fascinating if not exactly rigorous critique. Yet for some reason “Terry Lecture” audiences and Richard Dawkins gets the blender Why, I don't know. What a depressingly intellectual world philosophy would be if Aquinas, Heidegger, Wittgenstein (and Adorno, Charles Taylor and of course Marx are chopped up for the blender as well) more or less agreed on the nature of the human subject and its relation to the external world. Surely a good scholar relishes and lives for fine subtle difference while a flat, average one finds vague and superficial similarities, a good scholar loves nuance, differences and argument while a bad one settles for similarities and agreement. It would have been more interesting if Eagelton chose one philosophical idea to champion (say Aquinas) rather than stinking the room with a potpourri of dried and dead philosophies.
Oxford Atheism or Haight Ashbury Christianity?
You may ask what do I prefer, Dawkin's positivistic atheism or Eagleton's transcendent Marxism/ Marxist Christianity. I find both a little unsatisfactory. I think religion has something to do with our inescapable mortality, we are the only species that know we are going to die, which necessities the need to commemorate death and provide answers to life’s mysteries. Religion also provides an invaluable ceremonial function, it can't be surprising that the only two Catholic sacraments that can command almost absolute punctuality are weddings and funerals; death and marriage are occasions where people thirst for ceremony and tradition. It is in regard to these uniquely commemorative and ceremonial functions that religion and science represent "non-overlapping magestaria". The relationship between ceremony and the sense of the sacred is quite mysterious, difficult to verbalise but probably indispensible.
Also, while Eagleton’s Christianity is fatally non-representative and dymythologised, Dawkin's idea of rationality is as narrow as a test tubes flared lip. Surely the most potent religious-spell-breaker is not scientific rationality but introspection. Old atheists like Nietzsche and Freud, (who could easily be called "introspective atheists") see the origin of religion is fear and emotional needs, however sublime the doctrine or beautifully ceremonialised the liturgy it comes from what Yeats called "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart".
What challenge can abiogenesis in cosmology or natural selection in biology pose for someone who believes flying Boeings into the trade center towers is acquiescing to the will of God or toting around in gas guzzlers and residing in a spacious Mcmansion in the Hamptons is a "Christian life"? Perhaps appeals to any kind on intelligence aren't powerful enough to brake the psychological barriers and intellectual paralysis, but surely the most effective strategy is to shed light on why someone really wants to believe in a blood thirsty God who isn't satisfied until worshiping followers crush and incinerate thousands of infidels who refused to obey his commands or why people have a need to delude themselves into thinking their comfy, gas guzzling, gluttonously materialistic life is typical of a "Christian family" (especially since, considering the undeniable social radicalism of the Bible, it’s precisely the opposite.)
A more robust, broader understanding of rationality stands a better chance of saving us, not from death and evil, but from these exalting fantasies harder to detect because of their abuse of the justified prestige of science. Yet its important this rationality also saves us from Terry Eagelton. How are we supposed to react when we hear implausible, maudlin maxims like "that only through a tragic process of loss, nothingness and self-dispossession can humanity come into its own" or delusional simplifications like "the capitalist system is inherently atheistic"? Shall we 1. Except them as impossible and make good out of what is possible, or shall we 2. Like Terry Eagleton see these archaic wisdom sayings as resplendent and glittering with hopeless dreams of human and cosmological perfection.
The problem with dreams and chimeras is they can without warning turn into nightmares. I'm sure Terry Eagleton's sleep is routinely disturbed by several nightmares; the Tea Party getting into the Whithouse, a Muslim brotherhood dictatorship in Egypt, a thousand year geo-political conflict between Whabbist Islam and cruel, hard man Texan capitalism. All these nightmares started in dreams, and the only for us to stop the dreams and nightmares is to wake up and console ourselves with some introspective coffee.
No comments:
Post a Comment