Essentially Contested America

Stanley Fish “reviews,” if  that’s the proper term, Terry Eagleton’s latest book “Reason, Faith and Revolution.” Apparently, (I have not read Eagleton’s book), Eagleton attempts to defend the faith of his fathers against the attacks of such irksome atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Fish’s summary doesn’t explicitly reveal what he himself thinks of the book, but it it does explicitly reveal his feelings about “the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.” The contrast seems to be between those who have faith in faith and those who embrace something called “liberal rationalism.” Fish never mentions the possibility of a third approach to understanding our penchant for believing in something greater than ourselves. To understand this third approach one must recognize one’s own morality as an influential power in one’s self-consciousness. To oversimplify shamelessly, appreciating one’s own morality is like no other phenomenological experience conceivable. How can it be that I (or you), someone who can engage in both theoretical and practical reasoning, a being that can take an impersonal stance toward oneself, can make oneself an object of one’s own examination, how can such a being perish, permanently exit existence? For those who can appreciate the significance, force, and import of these type of query, the gods we constructed, whether they be God, science, rationality, progress, and so forth. These are all easily recognizable as monumental attempts to distract ourselves from existential anxiety over our impending death.  How many years is it for you?  Thirty? Ten? Five? We all await death and the civilizations we construct are all designed to repel, negate, and “falsify” the permanence of our own deaths. Both sides in the controversy between Eagleton, on the one side, and Dawkins and Hitchens, on the other, simply haven’t the courage or understanding to appreciate how puerile their controversy in the face of death.  But where does Fish stand on this issue?