"The
golden age of cultural theory is long past. The
pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi Strauss,
Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault
are several decades behind us. So are the path-breaking
early writings of Raymond Williams, Luce Irigaray,
Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida,
Helene Cixous, Jurgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson
and Edward Said. Not much that has been written
since has matched the ambitiousness and originality
of these founding mothers and fathers." (p.1)
Terry
Eagleton' s book is fundamentally about what kind
of fresh thinking does our new era demand after the
golden age of cultural theory. "Theory"
for Eagleton is fundamentally the most general form
of critical self reflection. We do not need some impossible
Archimedean point to reflect critically on our situation.
Because "reflecting critically on our situation
is part of our situation. It is a feature of the particular
way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible
light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves
when we are not there. Curving back upon ourselves
is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a
wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of
our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would
not have survived as a species." (60)
Self-reflection
is part of what we are. As
linguistic animals we have the ability to ask ourselves
the moral question such as whether our beliefs are
sound or whether their reasons are good ones. Theory
is necessary because things are not transparent, "if
we were transparent to ourselves there might be no
need for these esoteric ways of talking."
(110) In spite of its major
achievements, theory has some fundamental weaknesses.
"Cultural theory as we have it promises to
grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the
whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about
morality and metaphysics, embarassed about love, biology,
religion and revolution, largely silent about evil,
reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about
essences, universals and foundations, and superficial
about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness."
(101-102) "After Theory"
seeks to remedy those deficiencies.
Eagleton
advocates a kind of essentialism inspired by the thought
of Aristotle and Marx. The essence of human beings
is to realize their nature as an end in itself, the
full realisation of our capacities. "Nature"
here is understood by Eagleton as the way we are most
likely to flourish. And fulfilling one's nature brings
happiness. The justification he offers for this argument
is that it is "natural".
"Nature
is a bottom-line concept; you cannot ask why a giraffe
should do the things it does. To say 'It belongs
to nature' is answer enough. You cannot cut deeper
than that. In the same way, you cannot ask why people
should want to feel happy and fulfilled. It would
be like asking what someone hoped to achieve by
falling in love. Happiness is not a means to an
end." (116)
The
virtuous life is a particular way of living which
allows us to be at our best for the kind of creatures
we are. Virtue is thus implicit in our own nature,
as opposed to transcendent in origins. Happiness is
not the reward for virtue, being virtuous is to be
happy. Failure to lead a virtuous life will not result
in being condemned to the flames of hell but in a
crippled life. Eagleton explains for example that
George Best has become unhappy because "he
was not being the kind of person he was able best
to be". Throwing away his football career
for alcohol, money and women, he was no longer fulfilling
himself, he failed at what he was supremely equipped
to excell at. "Playing football would have
been the moral thing to do." (115)
What is most valuable about the ethics proposed by
Eagleton is that they are able to intrinsically relate
description and prescription, how human beings are
and how they ought to be.
For
Eagleton virtue is a reciprocal affair, it is what
happens between people, that is a function of social
relationships. "We live well when we fulfil
our nature as an enjoyable end in itself. And since
our nature is something we share with other creatures
of our kind, morality is an inherently political matter."
(124) This is why he refuses
to separate ethics and politics. For Eagleton, we
have to try to organise political institutions so
that self realisation can become reciprocal. You realize
your nature in a way which allows other to do so too.
For
Eagleton, socialism makes that fulfilling life of
a kind proper to human beings possible. To quote the
Communist Manifesto, it is "an association
in which the free development of each is the condition
for the free development of all." Eagleton
presents Marx as a kind of closet Aristotelian. He
was a moralist in the classical sense of the term,
in so far as he sought the political determination
of the good life. And such twenty-first century Aristotelianism
is a call for social revolution. "If the good
life is one of fulfilling our natures, and if this
is true for everybody, then it would take a deep-seated
change of material conditions to make such fulfillment
possible all round." (126)
Marx follows Aristotle in thinking that economic production
for profit is un-natural when he shows how some people
can hijack the social capacities of others for their
own selfish purposes rather than end in themselves.
"In class society, even those powers and capacities
which belong to us as a species -labour, for example,
or communication – are degraded into means to
an end. They become instrumentalized for the advantage
of others." (172) On
this basis, Eagleton comes to the conclusion that
it is not socialism, but in fact capitalism which
is contrary to human nature.
One
of the most original ideas in the book is how Eagleton
argues that ethics and politics are ultimately rooted
in corporeality. It is true that as labouring, linguistic
and sexual animals our bodies are materially geared
to culture because meaning, symbolism and interpretation
and the like are essential to what we are. Culture
is what is natural to us, but we are above all bodily
creatures. This is why for Eagleton "it is
the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent,
desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis
of all moral thought." (155)
He roots universality in the body and shared material
practices. To use Wittgenstein's example, if lions
could speak no one could understand them as their
bodies and material practices differ so radically
from our own. The material body is what we share most
significanlty with the rest of our species, extended
both in space and time. "Our material bodies
are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle
capable of feeling compassion for any others of their
kind." (156) This is
based on our material dependency on each other. We
need to work together to survive economically, sexuality
is necessary for the species to be reproduced. Human
beings share a "species being" in common,
which makes solidarity (and conflict at the same time)
possible. "It is a material fact that we are
dependent on others for our physical survival, given
the helpless state in which we are born. Yet this
material dependency cannot really be divorced from
such moral capacities as care, selflessness, vigilance
and protectiveness, since what we are dependent on
is exactly such capacities in those who look after
us." (169) Ethics and
politics will have their foundation on our species
being or shared material nature.
For
Eagleton human existence is essentially contingent,
rough-textured and open-ended, and a certain fundamentalist
ideology has sought to fill it with dogma, first principles,
fixed meanings and self-evident truths. "It
is the fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate,
as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity."
(203) This fundamentalism fears
the "non-being" which haunts human existence.
Examples
of "non-being" are death and desire; they
show us the ultimate unmasterability of our lives.
Eagleton shows how in our culture there is both a
fascination and a disavowal of non-being. He discusses
the problem of evil as a form of hatred of impurity
of being. His discussion is centred on the crimes
of nazism, racism and fundamentalism, and avoids more
"ordinary" forms of evil. For Eagleton what
is necessary is to oppose a bad sense of non-being
with a good one, constructive rather than corrosive
-"non being as an awareness of human frailty
and unfoundedness", (221)
rather than the present order based upon the non-being
of human deprivation. "It represents the non-being
of those who have been shut out of the current system,
who have no real stake in it, and who thus serve as
an empty signifier of an alternative future."
(220) It is not suprising that
as a left-wing Catholic, there is room in his thought
for religion, but as a form of spirituality without
fetishes or idolatry. Eagleton is particularly fond
of the Book of Isaiah which connects God with the
non-being of the wretched of the earth.
"After
Theory" is overall an excellent book. This
is a genuine work of popular philosophy, Eagleton
is not one of those "Meaning of the Universe
Merchants". The author is able to present highly
complex and controversial ideas in a very accessible
format. Eagleton excells in what Slavoj Zizek calls
"a unique combination of theoretical stringency
and acerbic commonsense witticism, of critical historical
reflection and the ability to ask the 'big' metaphysical
questions". This book is a realisation of
Bertolt Brecht's desire that thinking might become
'a real sensuous pleasure'.
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