One suspects
I was stopped cold by a paragraph in Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book in the LRB (it’s subscription, so I can’t link to it; a kind reader sent me a copy). I’ll show you why.
Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.
Staggering, isn’t it? One suspects – one suspects – that very few of ‘those’ ‘right-wing’ dons had read much Derrida; one suspects, but one doesn’t know, and one certainly doesn’t offer the reader a shred of reason to share one’s suspicion, or evidence that would back it up, but, nothing perturbed, one immediately proceeds to spring off from one’s own unexplained and unargued suspicion to point out that the ‘right-wing’ dons would doubtless be cross with students who hadn’t done the reading. But one has forgotten – how very quickly, in the space of one sentence – that one doesn’t know (or one would have said so) that the ‘right-wing’ dons hadn’t read much Derrida, one merely suspects it. One has forgotten that one doesn’t know, and one blithely proceeds to use the suspicion to bludgeon someone else, as if a suspicion were the same thing as an established fact.
Then he has the brass to call Dawkins bumptious. One suspects that it is not altogether unfair to think Eagleton is a little bumptious himself, and one directs a bumptious and suspicious raspberry in his direction.
Yes, one suspects. Unless one is more openly in the histrionic mode, in which one feels theatrically. But it all pretty much comes out to the same thing, doesn’t it? One just can’t get away with nasty blithering in print about “feelings” nearly as easily as one can get away with nasty blithering about “suspicions”.
I bet he will get away with it, too. I bet not many readers will notice that little leap. It’s so annoying, that kind of thing…
Terry Eagleton’s ‘intellectual’ voyage over the past few years makes the Vicar of Bray look like a rigid moralist.
Yeah, he’s a funny guy. Eclectic, would be one way of putting it. Mind like a windmill would be another.
Well, I asked a brilliant sheep farmer of my acquaintance what he felt were must-read books. He listed Cryptonomicon and Eagleton’s ‘Literary Theory’. So I read it. I loved Eagleton’s inclusive and chirpy tone, though I was too technically-minded to feel competent to pick on his thinking at that time.
But this is a clear ‘argument from ignorance’, and I feel a large dose of public sneering should be delivered. Its like the smarties who label people KKK because they like to own a gun; those smarties are full of ‘I can just imagine you doing X’ and daring you to prove you wrong.
Thouless’ dishonest tricks of argument numbers 16 and 38.
One suspects, rather, that Eagleton is just being nice about it. What I recall of the matter is that the statement denouncing Derrida was remarkably ignorant — the typical “deconstruction means that nothing means anything!” nonsense.
Some of the “right-wing” dons were members of the Philosophy faculty who objected to a man they saw as a philosophical charlatan being proposed for an honorary degree by non-philosophers. I wonder how the English faculty would react if people from another part of the University tried to nominate Dan Brown for an honorary degree for his services to literature? Would they read his complete works before deciding to shout “non-placet”? Or would a few pages or paragraphs be enough?