I give this article by Terry Eagleton a strong recommendation.
Where does culture come from? by Terry Eagleton
I’ve been warning of a modern age – and modern environmentalism – floundering on the twin reefs of culturalism and naturalism/biologism for a long time. I have criticised, too, the twin fetishisms of scientism and nature romanticism, which are also characteristic of the age and of environmentalism.
My article for Monthly Review
And my book:
E.F.Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, is celebrated for his advocacy of appropriate scale and technology. His insistence that ‘metaphysical reconstruction’ is the key challenge of the age, and the central task of environmentalism, is much less appreciated and still ignored.
I want to focus on another aspect of Eagleton’s article, though. Eagleton understands that not all our potentials are to be realized and not all our powers are to be exercised. He asks by what criteria do we evaluate such realisation; and raises the question of instances when one’s self-realisation clashes with that of others.
The questions make it clear that only those potentials and powers that are healthy and are conducive to the flourishing not only of ourselves but also of others are to be realized and exercised. That view has its roots in Aristotle. Eagleton focuses on Hegel and Marx.
Hegel and Marx have an answer of a kind to the problem of clashing self-fulfilments, which goes like this: realise only those capabilities which allow others to do the same. Marx’s name for this reciprocal self-realisation is ‘communism’. As the Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. When the fulfilment of one individual is the ground or condition of the fulfilment of another, and vice versa, we call this love. Marxism is about political love. I mean love, of course, in its real sense – agape, caritas
That passage offers a concise summation of the conception of ‘rational freedom’ that has been the organizing principle of my philosophical work. It centres on Hegel and Marx, but reaches back to ancient and Christian sources – which is precisely what I did in my doctoral work of 1995-2001, and which I continue to develop. My work attempts to weave the moderns like Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx together with Athens and Jerusalem, Plato and Aristotle and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, taking in ‘traditionalists’ like J.R.R.Tolkien. My influences and interests may seem divergent, but are tied together by the ideal of rational freedom: the idea that the freedom and happiness of each is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom and happiness of all.
Up to 2010, I argued that this rational freedom could be constituted by a self-legislating reason and self-creating labour. In time, I came to appreciate that such self-authoring independence was a delusion, and a dangerous one, consuming its own foundations to deliver us into a world of arbitrary power and iniquitous hierarchies. I now argued that rational freedom needs to be grounded in a transcendent ethic. This, of course, is an unfashionable view. But it is a conclusion I came to draw after an intense study of Marx. I argue, strongly, that Marx needs a transcendent ethic in order to make good his normative claims and emancipatory commitments – claims and commitments I share – as opposed to having vanguards make bad of them, which happens all-too-often in politics.
It is for this reason that God and religion – expunged and expelled by the Enlightenment tradition – returns in my conception. To understand my reasoning here, Eugene McCarraher’s review of Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God (2014) is pertinent.
McCarraher writes that ‘since the Enlightenment, various “surrogate forms of transcendence” have scrambled for the crown of the King of Kings—reason, science, literature, art, nationalism, but especially “culture”—yet none have been up to the job.’
Quite. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that God and religion return, simply that human beings should cease trying to fill the God-space. The question is: can they? Nietzsche feared that human beings would continue to live lives of inauthenticity under the sway of self-created surrogates. He argued that human beings once human beings came to understand that there was no space to fill, and become what they truly are, freedom would follow.
But
Nietzsche’s true genius as an atheist lay not in his denial of God, but in his resolute opposition to any humanism or metaphysics. God will finally give up the (holy) ghost only when the idea of innate meaning expires; “the Almighty can survive tragedy,” Eagleton remarks, “but not absurdity.” Yet because Nietzsche himself abhorred nihilism, he ultimately failed as an atheist. Fashioning his own values out of nothing but his own ingenuity and will to power, the Übermensch, Eagleton observes, “has more than a smack of divinity about him”; his aristocratic hauteur and his indomitable volition recall the Almighty in all His lordly potency. Like culture, Nietzsche’s atheism turns out to be yet another ruse of “counterfeit theology.”
That leaves us with Marx or postmodernism.
I knew postmodernism to be a dead-end. I would also describe postmodernism as a modernism stripped of its modernist delusions.
And Marx?
Eagleton rejects the idea of Marxism itself as a proxy for religion and implies that Marx, not Nietzsche, was really the first real atheist. For Marx, the humanity that finally replaces God is not utterly independent or self-fashioning; men and women will remain limited, material beings even in the realm of freedom. Thus, Eagleton asserts, Marx refrains from turning humanity into yet another surreptitious stand-in for God. Yet he also acknowledges some “clear affinities between religious thought and Marx’s vision of history,” especially the eschatological imagination: the arduous struggle for justice, the final conflict of oppressor and oppressed, the ultimate victory of the subaltern and the establishment of peace, freedom, and abundance. Marxists, Eagleton admonishes his comrades, should be grateful for this prophetic legacy.
I have gathered a number of essays I have written over the years on rational freedom and published them as a book. The essays present the idea of rational freedom adumbrated above in accessible - but still comprehensive - form. I would encourage those who find the articles by Eagleton and McCarraher stimulating to explore my own work in this area.
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