Author: Ophelia Benson

I read something interesting in M H Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp this morning.

Ever since Aristotle, it had been common to illuminate the nature of poetry…by opposing it to History…But to Wordsworth, the appropriate business of poetry is ‘to treat of things not as they are…but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions,’ and as worked upon ‘in the spirit of genuine imagination.’ The most characteristic subject matter of poetry no longer consists of actions that never happened, but of things modified by the passions and imagination of the perceiver; and in place of history, the most eligible contrary to poetry, so conceived, is the unemotional and objective description characteristic of physical science. Wordsworth therefore replaced the inadequate ‘contradistinction of Poetry and Prose’ by ‘the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science,’ and similar formulations became a standard port of departure in romantic discussions of poetry…Such statements are intended only as logical devices for isolating and defining the nature of poetic discourse. The prevalence of philosophical positivism, however, which claimed the method of the natural sciences to be the sole access to truth, tended to convert this logical into a combative opposition. To some writers, it seemed that poetry and science are not only antithetic, but incompatible, and that if science is true, poetry must be false, or at any rate trivial.

This perhaps does a lot to explain what Eagleton is getting at – but he apparently considers it beneath him to put it in Romantic terms – which would be too naive, too sentimental, too vieux jeu for someone as hip as he is, for whom only toasters and Chekhov will do. But he seems to be speaking Wordsworth all the same.

That’s probably what he means about religion – it’s not facts but feeling, just as it is with Wordsworth. That is at least intelligible, though not really a good defense of religion, given the temporal, political, institutional, rhetorical power it has, and given the fact that it does make literal factual truth-claims about the world and what is in it.

But it is at least intelligible. I don’t strictly think it’s ‘true’ that the mountains are full of meaning – but I do think it’s true that humans feel that way – and in fact that they ought to. I think less of people who don’t. I’m chilled by people who are dead to natural beauty, and to beauty of other kinds. I think beauty is an illusion in a sense, or in several senses, but I think it’s a necessary one. I would loathe to be without it. Imagine a brain lesion that made one indifferent to the blossoming fruit trees, the lilacs, the saturated blue of Puget Sound on a bright day, the swallows, the hummingbirds, the long grass, the stars, the sunset. Imagine what life would be if all that and everything like it became just so much Stuff, like a heap of sawdust or a dirty cement wall or a bucket of decomposing slime.

So perhaps Eagleton’s claim is that religion is like the brain without the lesion – it’s the ability to feel a particular way about things. Well – if that’s what he thinks, I can to some extent understand his vehemence. Perhaps he thinks atheism is a kind of machine for draining all of that kind of feeling from the world.

But it isn’t. It just isn’t. If it were…I might be tempted to see if I could force myself to believe too. But it isn’t. Feeling that way is part of the human equipment. Religion is probably one door into it, for a lot of people, but there are others. Music, art, sport, work (drugs) – there are lots of doors. Mind you – it may be that religion does it better for a lot of people than anything else does. Merlijn de Smit once told us that was true for him – growing up in a drab town he could find lavish beauty in the Catholic church that just wasn’t available elsewhere.

Hummingbirds. The world needs more hummingbirds.

Mark Bauerlein had some thoughts on Terry Eagleton almost a decade ago.

[I]t is a mistake to treat social constructionism as preached in the academy as a philosophy. Though the position sounds like an epistemology, filled with glib denials of objectivity, truth, and facts backed up by in-the-know philosophical citations (“As Nietzsche says. . .”), its proponents hold those beliefs most unphilosophically. When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith…Save for a few near-retirement humanists and realist philosopher holdouts, academics embrace constructionist premises as catechism learning, axioms to be assimilated before one is inducted into the professoriate. To believe that knowledge is a construct, that truth, evidence, fact, and inference all fall under the category of local interpretation, and that interpretations are more or less right by virtue of the interests they satisfy is a professional habit, not an intellectual thesis.

Take, he suggests a couple of pages later, Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction for an example.

[T]he conceptual analysis is thin, the methodological description hasty. Instead, the book reads like a textbook case of commentary by genetic fallacy and ethical consequence. To the patient exposition of terms and concepts Eagleton prefers the oblique adumbration…In the chapter on post-structuralism, Eagleton spends little time detailing the arguments of founding tests like “Différence,” and instead strings together deconstructive platitudes…Literary Theory: An Introduction hardly counts as a serious discussion of literary theory, but its tactics have come to dominate humanities criticism. Commentaries on ideological origins and ethical results far exceed conceptual analyses and logical expositions. Evaluating concepts and arguments by their political backgrounds and implications has become a disciplinary wont, a pattern of inquiry.

Does it not sound familiar? Does it not sound like the Eagleton (and the Fish too) that we have just been reading, and gently but firmly disputing?

Constructionist notions have become so patent and revered that their articulation need no longer happen, except as reminders to professors who stray from the party line (many utterances begin with “We must remember that. . .”). Those who raise objections soon find themselves trapped in debates shaped by us versus them forensics, enunciated in an idiom of brazen philosophical avowals and insinuations about the character of adversaries. Non-constructionists feel not so much refuted, as ostracized. The humanities become a closed society, captive to a weak epistemology with a mighty elocution.

And the result apparently is that Eagleton and Fish manage to get through their entire careers without ever being compelled to argue properly, with the sad and poignant result that we see before us now – a couple of grizzled sages who think they’re making a case when they’re just making word salad.

Jerry Coyne, after discussion with other scientists and upon reflection, refused an invitation from the organizers of the World Science Festival to participate on a panel that would discuss the relationship between faith and science. One of the Festival’s sponsors was The Templeton Foundation, ‘whose implicit mission,’ Coyne said, ‘is to reconcile science and religion (and in doing so, I think, blur the boundaries between them).’ The people at the SWF wrote to him and other concerned scientists.

[T]he Festival has programs that not only focus on the content of science traditionally defined, but programs that seek to illuminate how science interfaces with other disciplines and outlooks…For the Festival to have programs exploring the art-science relationship, the government-science relationship, the business-science relationship, the literature-science relationship, and yet to willfully ignore the prominent and tumultuous religion-science relationship would be a strange and, dare we say, cowardly omission.

No, it wouldn’t, at least not necessarily. One can organize and arrange and categorize such things in more than one way. One could decide that such a Festival should be about science and everything, so that inclusiveness and breadth would be the first criterion. But one could also and instead decide, say, that such a Festival should be about science and other human endeavors that are compatible with science. The second looks, frankly, a lot more interesting than the first. It is genuinely interesting and rewarding to explore various kinds of human activity that can co-exist with science, and enrich or illustrate or expand on it. It’s also, I would think, a better way in the long run to get people interested in science, because the science and everything idea would be too broad and undemanding to hook onto anything. Science and cookies, science and fashion, science and ghosts, science and religion…it’s everything and nothing. But science and history, science and criminal investigation, science and journalism, science and art? Those all indicate the presense of some content, and thus something to think about.

Anyway, as Coyne points out, religion has a problem in this context that dance and literature don’t.

you consider faith as a topic appropriate for discussion in your Festival. You mention that you feature programs that integrate science with dance, with public policy, with literature, and so on. But these are quite different from religion. Neither dance, public policy, nor literature are based on ways of looking at the world that are completely inimical to scientific investigation. Science and religion are truly incompatible disciplines; science and literature are not. That is, one can appreciate great literature and science without embracing any philosophical contradictions, but one cannot do this with religion (unless that religion is a watered down-deism that precludes any direct involvement of a deity in the world).

That of course is just what the Templeton Foundation would like to deny and make disappear, which is why Coyne refuses to take their dime.

The issue is that, by saying it sponsors the Festival, the Templeton Foundation will use its sponsorship to prove that it is engaging in serious discussion with scientists. Like many of my colleagues, I regard Templeton as an organization whose purpose is to fuse science with religion: to show how science illuminates “the big questions” and how religion can contribute to science. I regard this as not only fatuous, but dangerous. Templeton likes nothing better than to corral real working scientists into its conciliatory pen.

Kudos to Jerry Coyne for blowing the gaff on them.