After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  Not many of the standard objections to cultural theory that we have examined hold water. Some of it has been intolerably jargon-ridden; but the impulse behind it is attractively democratic, and it has probably produced more fine stylists than its non-theoretical counterpart. Anyway, some forms of specialized language are desirable rather than distasteful. It is not true that cultural theory avoids close reading. It is neither clinical nor cold-blooded. It is not out to abolish the human spirit, but to bring it down to earth. It does not necessarily interpose itself between the art-work and its recipients. If it can sometimes be an obstacle to real understanding, so can other forms of art criticism. It does not believe that Jeffrey Archer is as good as Jane Austen; it simply inquires what we mean when we make such claims.

  Most of the objections to theory are either false or fairly trifling. A far more devastating criticism of it can be launched. 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, embarrassed 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. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions. Let us see if we can begin to remedy these deficiencies by addressing these issues in a different light.

  5

  Truth, Virtue and Objectivity

  No idea is more unpopular with contemporary cultural theory than that of absolute truth. The phrase smacks of dogmatism, authoritarianism, a belief in the timeless and universal. Let us begin, then, by seeking to defend this remarkably modest, eminently reasonable notion.

  It is a mistake to think of absolute truth as a special kind of truth. On this view, there are truths which are changing and relative, and there is a higher kind of truth which is neither. Instead, it is fixed for all eternity. The idea is that some people, usually those of a dogmatic or authoritarian turn of mind, believe in this higher kind of truth, while others, such as historicists and postmodernists, do not. In fact, some postmodernists claim not to believe in truth at all – but this is just because they have identified truth with dogmatism, and in rejecting dogmatism have thrown out truth along with it. This is a peculiarly pointless manoeuvre. In less sophisticated postmodern circles, holding a position with conviction is seen as unpleasantly authoritarian, whereas to be fuzzy, sceptical and ambiguous is somehow democratic. It is hard in that case to know what to say about someone who is passionately committed to democracy, as opposed to someone who is fuzzy and ambiguous about it.

  For this strain of postmodernism, claiming that one position is preferable to another is objectionably ‘hierarchical’. It is not clear on this theory why being anti-hierarchical is preferable to being hierarchical. A certain postmodern fondness for not knowing what you think about anything is perhaps reflected in the North American speech habit of inserting the word ‘like’ after every three or four words. It would be dogmatic to suggest that something actually is what it is. Instead, you must introduce a ritual tentativeness into your speech, in a kind of perpetual semantic slurring.

  People who see truth as dogmatic, and so want no truck with it, are rather like people who call themselves immoralists because they believe that morality just means forbidding people to go to bed with each other. Such people are inverted puritans. Like the puritan, they equate morality with repression; to live a moral life is to have a terrible time. But whereas the puritan thinks that having a terrible time is an excellent thing, and remarkably character-building to boot, these people do not, and so reject morality altogether. Similarly, those who do not believe in truth are quite often inverted dogmatists. They reject an idea of truth that no reasonable person would defend in the first place.

  There is not, in fact, a class of mundane, historically changeable truths, along with a superior class of absolute truths which you may believe in or not, as some people believe in angels and some do not. Some statements are true only from particular viewpoints: a celebrated example is ‘France is hexagonal’, which is true only for those who look at the world from within a specific geometric framework. But there are lots of other truths which are absolute, without being in any sense lofty or superior.1 ‘This fish tastes a bit off’, if it is true, is just as absolutely true as ‘I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am’ claims to be. That truths of this kind are absolute is of no great moment. It simply means that if a statement is true, then the opposite of it can’t be true at the same time, or true from some other point of view. It can’t be the case that the fish is both a bit off and not a bit off. It can’t be fresh for you and putrid for me, even if putrid is the way I like it. This does not rule out the possibility of doubt or ambiguity. Maybe I am not sure whether the fish is off or not. But if I’m not sure, it is absolutely true that I am not sure. I can’t be sure and not sure at the same time. It can’t be that I am sure from my point of view but not from yours. Maybe the fish was fine two hours ago and is now distinctly dubious. In that case, what was absolutely true two hours ago is no longer true now. And the fact that it is not true now is just as absolute.

  ‘Absolutely true’, here, really just means ‘true’. We could drop the ‘absolute’ altogether, were it not for the need to argue against relativists who insist, as their name implies, that truth is relative. Not many relativists are rash enough to claim that ‘I am now in Damascus’ and ‘I am now in Doncaster’ could both be true if spoken by the same person at the same moment in time. They are more likely to suggest that the same proposition could be true for you but not for me, or true on Monday but not on Friday, or true for the Flemish but not for the Azande. As far as many truths go, however, not much of this is very convincing. What is true of you is also true for me. If it is true that you are feeling dispirited while I am feeling ecstatic, then it is true for me that you are feeling dispirited. If you were feeling liverish on Monday but feel fine by Friday, it is still true on Friday that you were feeling liverish on Monday.

  Nothing of world-shaking significance is at stake here. There is nothing loudly authoritarian in progress. That truth is absolute simply means that if something is established as true – a taxing, messy business, often enough, and one which is always open to revision – then there are no two ways about it. It does not mean that truth can only be discovered from some disinterested viewpoint. In fact, it says nothing about how we arrive at truth. It simply says something about the nature of truth itself. All truths are established from specific viewpoints; but it does not make sense to say that there is a tiger in the bathroom from my point of view but not from yours. You and I may contend fiercely about whether there is a tiger in the bathroom or not. To call truth absolute here is just to say that one of us has to be wrong.

  If it is true that racism is an evil, then it is not just true for those who happen to be its victims. They are not just expressing how they feel; they are making a statement about the way things are. ‘Racism is an evil’ is not the same kind of proposition as ‘I always find the smell of fresh newsprint blissful.’ It is more like the statement ‘There is a tiger in the bathroom.’ One could imagine someone murmuring consolingly to the victims of racism that he understands just why they feel the way they do; that this feeling is of course entirely valid for them – indeed, that if he were in their shoes he would doubtless feel just the same way; but that in fact he is not in their shoes, and so does not consider the situation to be racist at all. This individual is known as a relativist. He might conceivably be known, less politely, as a racist. Perhaps he might seek to pile on the consolation by adding that the situation at the moment may well be racist, but that in a few years’ time those on the sticky end of it will look back and see that it was not racist at all. This is not just cold comfort; it
is utterly incoherent.

  If it is true that a situation is racist, then it is absolutely true. It is not just my opinion, or yours. But of course it may not be true. Or it may be partially true – in which case it absolutely is partially true, as opposed to being completely true or not true at all. Defenders of absolute truth are not necessarily dogmatists. In any case, dogmatism does just not mean thumping the table with one hand and clutching your opponent by the throat with the other. It means refusing to give grounds for your beliefs, appealing instead simply to authority. There are plenty of courteous, soft-spoken dogmatists. Holding something to be absolutely true does not mean affirming it against all conceivable evidence and argument, and refusing in any circumstances to concede that you are mistaken. Those who believe in absolute truth may well be the kind of people who are pathologically cautious about accepting anything as true unless it seems plainly undeniable. They may stumble through life in a haze of scepticism and a miasma of doubt. It is just that when they do, perhaps once every decade or so, come grudgingly to accept a proposition such as ‘The head gardener has just shot himself through the foot’ as true, they recognize that its opposite cannot also be true, and that its being true for them means its being true for everyone else as well.

  Nor does ‘absolutely true’ mean true independently of any context. We can only judge the world from within some kind of framework. But this does not necessarily mean that what is true from one viewpoint is false from another. Elephants may be sacred for you but not for me, if this represents a difference between our ways of signifying them. But it cannot be true that elephants really are sacred, in the same way that they really have four legs, and that they are in the same sense not sacred. Cultures make sense of the world in different ways, and what some see as a fact others do not; but if truth simply means truth-for-us, then there can be no conflict between us and other cultures, since truth is equally just truth-for-them. This is tolerable enough when it comes to the sacred status of elephants, as well as being extremely convenient for us if we hold that forcing sexual relations on toddlers contributes to their emotional well-being and psychological stability in later years, and the culture next door does not. Since their view is entirely relative to their own way of life, it can naturally have no effect on our behaviour. In any case, if each cultural framework constructs the world differently enough, it is hard to see how they could share the same proposition in common. A different world yields a different meaning.

  Absolute truth has nothing to do with fanaticism. It does not necessarily mean the kind of truth to which you are fervently committed. ‘Erlangen is in Germany’ is absolutely true, but one would not go to one’s death for it. It is not the kind of truth which sets the blood coursing and quickens the heartbeat. It does not have the same emotional force as ‘You strangled my great-aunt, you despicable bastard!’ Most absolute truths are pretty trivial. Much the same goes for the word ‘absolute’ when used in some moral discourse. For Thomas Aquinas, ‘absolutely wrong’ does not necessarily mean ‘very, very wrong’. The word ‘absolute’ here is not an intensifier. It just means ‘shouldn’t be done under any circumstances’. Aquinas thought rather strangely that lying was absolutely wrong, but not killing; but he did not of course believe that lying was always more grievous an offence than killing. Being of reasonable intelligence, he appreciated well enough that lying is sometimes pretty harmless. It was just that for him it was absolutely wrong.

  Absolute truth is not truth removed from time and change. Things that are true at one time can cease to be true at another, or new truths can emerge. The claim that some truth is absolute is a claim about what it means to call something true, not a denial that there are different truths at different times. Absolute truth does not mean non-historical truth: it does not mean the kind of truths which drop from the sky, or which are vouchsafed to us by some bogus prophet from Utah. On the contrary, they are truths which are discovered by argument, evidence, experiment, investigation. A lot of what is taken as (absolutely) true at any given time will no doubt turn out to be false. Most apparently watertight scientific hypotheses have turned out to be full of holes. Not everything which is considered to be true is actually true. But it remains the case that it cannot just be raining from my viewpoint.

  Why does any of this matter? It matters, for one thing, because it belongs to our dignity as moderately rational creatures to know the truth. And that includes knowing the truth about truth. It is best not to be deceived if we can possibly help it. But it also matters because a ludicrous bugbear has been made of the word ‘absolute’ in this context; and because if the relativist is right, then truth is emptied of much of its value. As Bernard Williams points out, relativism is really a way of explaining away conflict.2 If you maintain that democracy means everyone being allowed to vote, while I maintain it means that only those people may vote who have passed a set of fiendishly complicated intelligence tests, there will always be a liberal on hand to claim that we are both right from our different points of view. If true loses its force, then political radicals can stop talking as though it is unequivocally true that women are oppressed or that the planet is being gradually poisoned by corporate greed. They may still want to insist that logic is a ruling-class conspiracy, but they cannot logically expect anyone to believe them. The champions of Enlightenment are right: truth indeed exists. But so are their counter-Enlightenment critics: there is indeed truth, but it is monstrous.

  If absolute truth is out of favour these days, so is the idea of objectivity. Perhaps we can begin the rehabilitation of this idea by considering it first in relation to the question of human well-being. All men and women are in pursuit of well-being, but the problem lies in knowing what this consists in. Perhaps it means something different for everybody, or for every period and culture. It is because what counts as well-being is far from clear that we need elaborate discourses like moral and political philosophy to help unravel it. If we were transparent to ourselves, there might be no need for these esoteric ways of talking. We might be able to know what it was to live well just by looking into ourselves, or simply by instinct.

  This is the enviable situation of toads, who know by instinct how to do what it is best for toads to do. They simply follow their toad-like nature, and for them to do this is for them to prosper. It is to be a good toad rather than a bad one, living a fulfilling, toad-like existence. Good toads are very toad-like. This is not the kind of goodness you can congratulate them on, however, since being toad-like is something they can’t help being. It is not an achievement. Toads do not win medals for being toads. You can have a good toad, but not a virtuous one. On one view, however (not the most popular view today, especially among cultural theorists), human beings have to work fairly hard to become human beings, and so can indeed be congratulated on being human. Because we are able to be false to our natures, there is some virtue in our being true to them.

  It may be, then, that we resemble toads in the sense that we, too, have a nature, in the sense of a way of living which is peculiar to being a successful human, and which, if we are true to it, will allow us to prosper. It is just that we are not sure what it is. Or perhaps it changes from one time to another. Because we are linguistic animals, our nature, if we have one at all, is far more tractable and complicated than that of toads. Because of language and labour, and the cultural possibilities they bring in their wake, we can transform what we are in ways that non-linguistic animals cannot. To discover what we are, to know our own natures, we have to think hard about it; and the result is that we have come up over the centuries with a bewildering array of versions of what it is to be human. Or, if you like, what it is for a human animal, as opposed to a slug or a daisy, to live well and to flourish. The history of moral philosophy is littered with rusting, abandoned models of the good life.

  Take, for instance, the notion of happiness. To believe that happiness is what human beings are after – that this is the name for their particular mode of living well – is very persu
asive. It would explain most of what we see going on around us, from people rising promptly at some unearthly hour of the morning to assiduously drying their toothbrushes at night. But what is happiness? If it means simple contentment, then human beings can presumably be happy slumped sluggishly in front of the television set for fourteen hours a day, glazedly munching great fistfuls of potentially lethal substances. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that living a good human life might involve a touch more than this. It sounds too much like being happy in the way a rabbit might be happy.

  Does this mean, then, that the glazed munchers are not really happy? Perhaps so, if happiness involves more than sluggish contentment. People can be grossly self-deceived about themselves, including about whether they are happy. It is possible to be thoroughly miserable and not know it. If a galley slave chained to his oar raises his wind-battered head to croak hoarsely that he can conceive of no more privileged way of serving his emperor, before collapsing again in an exhausted heap, we might just suspect that there is some ideological mystification at work here. Or he may be a masochist who can’t believe his luck in having stumbled upon such a sadistic psychopath as his captain. Or his previous situation may have been even worse, and this is paradise in comparison. Or he may just not be able to imagine any fuller sort of life. We would need to ask him again whether he was happy once he had tasted a spot of liberty, ecstatic love and sensational success at some esteemed craft on shore.