Stanley Fish

Here is a link to Stanley Fish's column in today's New York Times.

The column seems to be a concise recounting of Terry Eagleton's "Reason, Faith, and Revolution", which, if Fish's portrayal is accurate, is a religious apologetic.

The column mostly veers into predictable arguments that our current "liberal", science-centric world is so off-base precisely because we've failed to ask (this is where the blood boils) the appropriate theological questions, such as "Why is there anything at all?", "Why what we do have is intellectually intelligible to us?", and "Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?"

These questions are clearly not theological if one asks them vitally, i.e. in their questionableness. For both Eagleton and Fish feel they may confront (and answer) these questions through religion or some other form of "spirituality" rather than appreciating these questions in their questionableness (i.e. as philosophical quanderies that are only answerable by accepting them as real grounds in the first place, i.e. by presupposing their truthfulness). These are questions that don't have answers. These are questions that reveal the terra firma underlying people qua communal beings. Our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility "come from" the same well as our notions of truth, power, and agency (another terrible parenthetical remark from Fish: "although how there can be agency before there is being and therefore an agent is not explained[?]" Being imply agency! Ontology implies economic rationality! But its those damn "rationalists" that are the confused/wrong-headed ones!).

The part that really stands out, though, is:

When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Then

And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”?

So Eagleton (and presumably Fish) overlook the persecution of Galileo that was conducted in order to preserve the rule of the fiath that God's people were the physical center of the universe (along with countless meddling by the church into religion and the current politicization of science because of religious influence) is to be overlooked while we ascribe "the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism" and "the generation of poverty and famine" to be consequences of "liberalism"? All of these phenomenon regularly appearing throughout human history points to the following question: Are these guys shitting me?