After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  Even so, people like the munchers who say they are happy may well be right, at least in one sense of the word. They enjoy what they are doing, have no desire ever to lever themselves out of their armchairs (if that, indeed, remains a practical possibility), and don’t have a care in the world. Maybe they are not happy in some deeper sense. At a quick glance, they do not seem to have plumbed the rich depths of human potential. But those depths include miseries as well as ecstasies. There may be different ways of being happy, and this may be one of them.

  Besides, people who are brutal and violent can be happy, at least in the sense of feeling content with their lives. Gangsters can reap a lot of job-satisfaction from what they do, not to speak of enjoying themselves on the proceeds. You can gain considerable pleasure from murdering doctors who terminate pregnancies, if you feel that you are acting as an instrument of God’s will. Military commanders return to their headquarters after a hard day’s massacring the local population, quietly satisfied that they have made the world that little bit safer for freedom. It may be, again, that these people are not happy in some deeper sense. But that does not mean that they are not happy at all – that they actually detest having to murder abortionists or Aboriginals, but have managed to convince themselves otherwise. One should not always let people off the hook with an appeal to ideological self-deception. The wicked can be content with their wickedness, and do well out of it. It is pleasant to read salutary tales of them coming to a sticky end, but fiction is not real life. Henry Fielding has his villains come a cropper, but usually sends out ironic signals that this is only because they are in a novel. In real life they would probably have become prime minister.

  If the wicked can be happy, the good are often not. Being virtuous in a predatory world, as with some of Fielding’s gullible innocents, probably means that you will be atrociously put upon. In such a society, the innocent need to look sharp for themselves; but then how can they still be innocent? You can be virtuous under torture, refusing to betray your comrades, but you cannot be happy. A martyr is someone who sacrifices his or her own happiness so that others may thrive. You may find this fulfilling, but hardly a matter of felicity. It is not what you would have chosen had the situation not seemed to demand it. A martyr who dies deliriously happy is only questionably a martyr. Martyrs give up their lives because they are the most precious thing they have, not because they are only too eager to die.

  Despite all this, there is something in our intuition that human beings were made for more than murder and chip-munching. Take the well-known story about George Best, perhaps the finest footballer in history until alcoholism brought him low. Best the ex-footballer was lounging in a five-star hotel room surrounded by caviar and champagne, with a former Miss World lounging amorously beside him, when a member of the hotel staff entered, weighed down with yet more luxury goods. Gazing down at the supine star, he shook his head sadly and murmured: ‘George, where did it all go wrong?’

  The joke, of course, is that one would hardly claim that life had gone wrong for a man with such a lavish lifestyle. This is how Best tells the story himself. Yet the hotel worker was right: Best’s life had gone wrong. He was not doing what it was in him to do. He was certainly enjoying himself, and might even in some sense have been happy; but he was not flourishing. He had failed at what he was supremely equipped to excel at. It is true that his life was probably more pleasurable than it had been in his footballing days, when he was constrained to break off nightclubbing from time to time in order to train. It is not that he had been happier as a footballer in the sense of enjoying himself more, though he managed to enjoy himself enough for a whole league of players even then. Nor is the point that his post-footballing lifestyle actually brought him a great amount of suffering, apparently confirming the Evangelical view that the dissolute always get their comeuppance. It is rather that he had ceased to prosper. His life might have been happy in the sense of being opulent, contented and enjoyable, but it was not going anywhere. The casual greeting ‘How’s it going?’ suggests something morally significant. Best had come unstuck as a human being. Indeed, one suspects that he used to tell this story so gleefully partly as a way of disavowing the fact.

  But where are human lives supposed to be going? They aren’t, after all, like buses or bicycle races; and the idea that life is a series of hurdles which you must leap in order to attain a goal is just the punitive puritan fantasy of scout masters, major-generals and corporation executives. What had come unstuck in Best’s life was not that he was no longer achieving, but that he was not fulfilling himself. It was not that he was no longer piling up goals, silver trophies and salary cheques, but that he was not living, if the pun may be excused, at his best. He was not being the kind of person he was able best to be. Indeed, he was actively out to destroy it. The post-footballing ‘dissipation’, as the sniffier commentators tended to call it, was perhaps a substitute way of trying to achieve. Best was now desperately scrambling from one starlet or bottle to another, in a grotesque parody of winning more and more matches.

  Throwing up his football career, even if it was getting difficult to carry it on, could be seen in one sense as a courageous rejection of the success ethic. It was a recognition, however bleary-eyed, that life was not a matter of goals, in every sense of the word. Best was now free to enjoy himself, not live as some kind of self-entrepreneur. In another sense, the frenetic high living was a shadow of exactly that. The emptiness of desire replaced the hollowness of achievement. For both ways of life, the present is fairly valueless. It is just a bridge to the future, which will turn out to be just the same. How Best might genuinely have enjoyed himself would have been by carrying on playing football. It would not have been pleasant all the time, and there would no doubt have been times when he felt discontent; but it would have been how he could best thrive. Playing football would have been the moral thing to do.

  Perhaps what helped to bring Best down was the fact that he was not able to play football just for its own sake. No footballer can, in a sports industry which is about shareholders rather than players, artistry or spectators. It would be like a hard-pressed commercial designer imagining that he could live like Michelangelo. To live a really fulfilling life, we have to be allowed to do what we do just for the sake of it. Best was no longer able to play just for the delight of it, and turned instead from delight to pleasure. His hedonism was just the other side of the instrumentalism he chafed at.

  The point about human nature is that it does not have a goal. In this, it is no different from any other animal nature. There is no point to being a badger. Being a giraffe does not get you anywhere. It is just a matter of doing your giraffe-like things for the sake of it. Because, however, human beings are by nature historical creatures, we look as though we are going somewhere – so that it is easy to misread this movement in teleological terms and forget that it is all for its own sake. Nature is a bottom-line concept: you cannot ask why a giraffe should do the things it does. To say ‘It belongs to its 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.

  If someone asks you why you do not want to die, you might reply that you have a trilogy of novels to finish, or grandchildren to watch growing up, or that a shroud would clash horribly with the colour of your fingernails. But it would surely be answer enough to say that you wanted to live. There is no need to specify particular goals. Living is enough reason in itself. There are certainly some people who would be better off dead; but those that would not do not need a reason for carrying on. It is as superfluous to explain why you want to live as it is to explain why you don’t enjoy being nuzzled all over by buzzards. The only problem is that something which is or should be valuable in itself, like living, does not seem to need to end. Since it is not instrumental for something else, there is no point at which we can say its functi
on is fulfilled and its purpose over. This is one reason why death is always bound to appear arbitrary. Only a life which had realized itself completely could seem undamaged by it. And as long as we are alive, there is always more self-realization where that came from.

  The idea of fulfilling your nature is inimical to the capitalist success ethic. Everything in capitalist society must have its point and purpose. If you act well, then you expect a reward. For Aristotle, by contrast, acting well was a reward in itself. You no more expected a reward for it than you did for enjoying a delectable meal or taking an early morning swim. It is not as though the reward for virtue is happiness; being virtuous is to be happy. It is to enjoy the deep sort of happiness which comes from fulfilling your nature. This is not to suggest that the virtuous will always fare well in the world – a doctrine which, as Henry Fielding observes, has only one drawback, namely that it is not true.

  You are, in fact, probably more likely to fare well in the world if you are brave, loving, resilient, compassionate, imaginative, resourceful and the like. Other people are less likely to drop iron bars on you from a great height, and even if they do you may have the resourcefulness to dodge them. But the virtuous can of course come unstuck. Indeed, it may be their virtue which unsticks them. And then they cannot be said to be happy. But though virtue might bring unhappiness, it was in Aristotle’s view a source of fulfilment in itself. Think, for example, of how being physically healthy might somehow get you into trouble. It might leave you with such a ripplingly muscular physique that puny bar-flies can’t resist taking an envious smack at you. But being healthy remains enjoyable in itself. Aristotle also thought that if you did not act well, you were punished not by hell fire or a sudden bolt from heaven, but by having to live a damaged, crippled life.

  You cannot, of course, believe all this and be an anti-essentialist as well. Anti-essentialists do not believe in natures in the first place. They imagine that for something to have a nature means that it must be eternally fixed and unalterable. In their view, talk of nature also brings out what is common to certain things, an unpopular thing to do in an age which makes a supreme value of difference. Critics of essentialism also suspect with some justice that, when it comes to human beings rather than giraffes, the answer ‘It’s just in my nature’ is usually a shifty self-rationalization. Destroying tribal communities in the pursuit of profit is just part of human nature. Being a wife-beater is simply what I am. Anti-essentialists are therefore wary of the idea of nature, just as the apologists of capitalism are. Capitalism wants men and women to be infinitely pliable and adaptable. As a system, it has a Faustian horror of fixed boundaries, of anything which offers an obstacle to the infinite accumulation of capital. If it is a thoroughly materialist system in one sense, it is a virulently anti-material one in another. Materiality is what gets in its way. It is the inert, recalcitrant stuff which puts up resistance to its grandiose schemes. Everything solid must be dissolved into air. The conflict between a traditional belief in human nature and a ‘progressive’ rejection of it breaks out between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, just before they set about killing the king:

  MACBETH:

  I dare do all that may become a man;

  Who dares do more is none.

  LADY MACBETH:

  … When you durst do it, then you were a man; And to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man.

  (Act 1, scene 7)

  It is a quarrel between those like Macbeth who see the constraints of human nature as creative ones, and those like Lady Macbeth for whom being human is a matter of perpetually going beyond them. For Macbeth himself, to overreach those creative constraints is to undo yourself, becoming nothing in the act of seeking to be all. It is what the ancient Greeks knew as hubris. For Lady Macbeth, there is no such constraining nature: humanity is free to invent and reinvent itself at will, in a potentially endless process. The more you do, the more you are. For his part, Aristotle would have sided with Macbeth. He thought that the idea of economic production for profit was unnatural, since it involved a boundlessness which is alien to us. The economic, for Aristotle as for socialism, had to be embedded within the moral. Once this unnatural economic system known as capitalism was up and running, however, it was socialism which came in time to seem contrary to human nature.

  No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism. In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, it has no time for the idea of nature – for that whose whole existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for its own sake and without any thought of a goal. This is one reason why this social order has a boorish horror of art, which can be seen as the very image of such gloriously pointless fulfilment. It is also one reason why aesthetics has played such a surprisingly important moral and political role in the modern age.

  There is no need to imagine, as many anti-essentialists do, that natures need be eternally fixed. The most dramatic example we have of a nature which is perpetually re-making itself is human nature. The champions of transgression are right at least to this extent, that it is in our nature to go beyond ourselves. Because we are the kind of labouring, linguistic, sexual, sociable animals we are, it is in our nature to give birth to culture, which is always changeable, diverse and open-ended. So it is easy to mistake the peculiar kind of nature we have for no nature at all, and come like the champions of transgression to cultivate a Faustian image of ourselves. We can fantasize, as so much so-called ‘materialist’ cultural theory does, that culture takes over from our material nature entirely, eradicates every last trace of it, and so can dance on its grave.

  Another reason why it is easy to think this way is because the concept of nature is often linked to the idea of function. When a watch is fulfilling its function of telling the time accurately, it is a good watch, doing the kind of thing that watches ought to do. At the risk of sounding mildly ridiculous, we can speak of it as fulfilling its nature. But what is the function of human beings? What are human beings for? The answer is surely: nothing – but this, precisely, is the point. Our function is to be functionless. It is to realize our nature as an end in itself. We need the word ‘nature’ here to avoid having to say ‘realize ourselves as an end in itself, since a good deal of what we are capable of should by no means see the light of day. So ‘nature’ here means something like ‘the way we are most likely to flourish’. And since what this involves is by no means obvious, this is another reason why it is easy to mistake this situation for not having a nature at all.

  This is the mistake of the anti-essentialists. They might concede that humans have a nature in a physical, material sense – that there are certain peculiar features which characterize us as a species. (Though there is no need to assume that there is therefore a sharp break between humans and other animals, Nature abhorring sharp breaks as much as it does vacuums.) It is just that they see no particular moral or political consequences as following from this. For them, it is too general a way of talking to tell us anything very informative. It is true enough, but vacuous. The anti-essentialists are right to complain that talk of human nature is disturbingly general. But one danger for them is falling into a form of idealism. If you play down the material ‘species being’ of humanity, you may be left assuming that human beings exist only at the level of meaning and value. And this is a convenient mistake for intellectuals to make.

  The political philosopher John O’Neill has pointed out that most of what postmodern thinkers criticize as ‘essentialist’ is a caricature of the doctrine of essences which is defended by nobody.3 Essentialism, he points out, is the belief that there are properties which some things need to have if they are to be the kind of things they are. For something to be copper, it must have ductility, malleability, fusibility, electricial conductivity, atom number 29, and so on. It does not follow that all the properties of an object are essential to it, or that there cannot be a great deal of differenc
e and diversity between objects of the same class. All sheep are unique. Essentialism does not mean uniformity. Neither does it follow that all the objects assigned to the same class actually do share essential properties in common. We have to look and see. Essentialism does not involve ignoring the difference between natural and cultural phenomena. Cultural phenomena can have certain properties without which they would be something else. If songs don’t have sounds they are not songs. Anti-essentialism is largely the product of philosophical amateurism and ignorance.

  Talk about human nature is indeed embarrassingly general. (Though Aristotle, who subscribed to the idea himself, did not believe that ethics was a matter of universal principles.) ‘Human’ can be a term of approval (‘Despite being the world’s leading authority on ectoplasm, he seemed surprisingly human’), or a pejorative judgement, as in ‘all too human’. Even if we go a bit further and speak of the good life as one in which you can fulfil your nature as freely and fully as possible, it is still not clear what this means in concrete terms. Human beings have many different powers and capacities at any given historical time, and it is not obvious which of these they should strive to realize, or in which ways. Are we to fulfil our capacity to strangle others, simply because we are physically able to do so? If we are able to torture others, then there is a sense in which torture is natural to us. ‘Human nature’ can describe the kind of creatures we are, or it can mean how we should behave; and it is not easy to see how we can leap from the descriptive sense to the normative one.