Agreeing and Disagreeing with Terry Eagleton

I jumped into this text knowing a couple of things about Eagleton: (1) he is a marxist, (2) the last piece we read by him was just this side of unintelligible. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to find the blurbs on the book to be accurate: Eagleton is both articulate (something the other article was surely not. Intelligent: absolutely; Articulate: absolutely not) and witty.

(I suppose writing must be like abstract art, demonstrate that you are able to communicate in the medium so that Joe average can understand you for a long enough time and you then get blanket permission to be incredibly obtuse and impenetrable in any further attempts at communication with the public. Ah well. But I digress...)

I have posted several times this semester on the fate of knowledge in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. I maintain my argument developed in a previous post that the accepting of any givens in this intellectual climate is an act of faith, as there are no longer universal givens to which we can appeal even at a cultural level. Renee, in replying to my previous post suggested that it can be a form of intellectual laziness to reject truth as it allows one to sit back and refuse to do any heavy lifting intellectually or morally ("if not everyone's take on reality carried equal validity--well, just how many apple carts would that upset? At very least, many individuals would need to make some substantial changes--this would involve getting up off their butts [figurative and literal]"). Relativism, in this view would be the equivalent of ditching one's homework, or refusing to take responsibility for one's actions/life by abdicating all decision making on the grounds that all choices are absolutely equal and it is impossible to determine between them. How much rage can be generated over a crimes or injustices of any kind and how hypocritical is any form of law or restriction if we truly believe that there is no truth, that there are no absolutes?

I agree with Eagleton's arguments in favor of truth, and with Renee's about the intellectual laziness underlying relativism. When Eagleton said that "Principles can be flexible and still be principles" (144) I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Incidentally, I think if you injected that thought into the brains of those "serving" in Washington, most of their heads would explode.)

Unfortunately for Eagleton, comparing arguments about the truth of physical statements (There is a tiger in the room, for example) with arguments about truth and other abstract ideals is comparing apples and oranges. Given our limited knowledge of Reality and the mind's shaping power in creating the world we perceive, one has to make certain assumptions that Eagleton takes for granted before one is even able to have the discussion he wants. Eagleton is able to make these arguments and they appeal - indeed, they seem ultimately logical - to those who agree that there is some center around which the world functions.

It isn't necessary to agree on that center, or even to have an entirely clear idea of what that center is, only the agreement that there is one is necessary. If it is there, than there is truth (at least of a kind) and we can then move to discussing its nature. In comparing Marxism to postmodernism and post-structuralism (or at least in comparing Eagleton's marxism to these theories) one discovers that Marxism has far more in common with traditional, idealistic thought than it does with these modern "theories." Marxism assumes a center - history, i.e. class struggle - and attributes everything at (varying removes) to the effects of this conflict. This is far closer to putting the Gospel at the center of one's world view than it is to accepting a centerless, relative world. In fact, the de-centered reality posited by post-structuralism and postmodernism is anathema to Marxism, because if history isn't the center (or if it is one of many centers, or if there is no center, or the center is unknowable) than not only their argument but their world collapses.

The point? At the risk of beating a dead horse the systematic destruction of all of the pillars of epistemology on which our culture was built by the extreme ends of rationalism and postmodern/post-structuralist thought makes the choosing of any center arbitrary. Without a center there are no givens, everything is truly in freeplay. As Eagleton's argument assumes a number of unvoiced givens, it requires a center to make sense.

Nothing has yet replaced these traditional ideals and values as unifying elements in this brave new world. Instead as Eagleton notes, we are left with freedom alone to guide us, and we find that threatening, because in our experience on this planet anything goes generally means a whole lot of bad stuff happens. So we cast about in search of something to cling to, something that will make this existence tolerable. Or alternately, we ignore the implications of the thought shaping the world around us.

Before we can accept Eagleton's arguments as common sense and move toward any of the reforms he implicitly calls for we must discover givens that we can share (Eagleton posits several here: truth, virtue, species-nature, love [agape], not to mention good old history/class struggle) at least enough to create a common world where we're able to talk to each other and begin the process of developing that "consensual morality" that President Obama talked about on the very first day of class. Only once we have discovered the value in greater unity as a goal, and stopped fetishizing change and difference for their own sake, will we even be able to get large numbers of people sufficiently together to begin the conversation that Eagleton demands in this text. We must literally restore a common reality (at least to a greater extent than we now have one) before we can move forward in any significant way.