Regarding Eco's motivation

(Yet more on Eco's lecture)

In the Jacques Rivette movie Va Savoir there is a scene of a tense dinner: former lovers meet for dinner à-quatre with their respective new partners in tow. In the course of the dinner, the new wife begins telling the story of the difficult times she had gone through before meeting her new husband; and how the wisdom of the east – yoga and feng shui – have been her salvation. Her husband interrupts her brusquely to cut himself off from her views:

“As for me, I do not care for the wisdom of the east. The older I get, the more European I feel.”

We had been told he is a doctoral student working on a never-ending thesis on Heidegger; so his interjection may be a matter of an intellectual’s just revulsion at the inanities of the wisdom of the east movement, with its diets, massages, crystals, pyramids, etc. This is understandable: I, too, am irritated by it, though no more than I am irritated by pap versions of the wisdom of the West, or, more generally, stupidity of any sort, anywhere. (Neither yoga nor feng shui represent their respective culture’s most noble intellectual attainment; both are considered somewhat cooky in the countries of their origin also, occupying a position comparable perhaps to speaking in tongues in the west).

But the public nature of the husband’s announcement, and its vehemence, clearly indicates that something else is also at work: embarrassment at his new wife’s stupidity, desire to retain good opinion of himself by ex-wife and her new husband, the wish to state clearly that his current marriage is not a perfect meeting of minds, perhaps to suggest that it could be negotiable.The precise motivation for his outburst is not clear, but the situation provides us at least some possible clues as to what they could be.

But there are no clues at all as to Eco's motivation.