Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics - Softcover

Eagleton, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405185724 ISBN 13: 9781405185721

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008

Synopsis

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS

‘Written in Eagleton’s very readable, clear and witty style, this book may achieve the unthinkable: bridging the gap between academic High Thought and popular philosophy manuals.’
Slavoj Žižek

‘This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment.’
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University

‘Written with Eagleton’s usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions ... this is an important book by a hugely important voice.’
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

In this ambitious new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the world’s greatest cultural theorists, turns his attention to the now much-discussed question of ethics. In a work full of rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, weighing the merits and deficiencies of each theory, and measuring them all against the ‘richer’ ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In a remarkably original move, he assigns each of the theories he examines to one or other of Jacques Lacan’s three psychoanalytical categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, and shows how this can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of an ethics of personal sympathy, an impersonal morality of obligation, and a morality based on death and transformation.

About this title

About the Author

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include How to Read a Poem (2006), The English Novel (2004), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), The Idea of Culture(2000), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1999), and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), all published by Wiley-Blackwell.

From the Back Cover

'Written in Eagleton's very readable, clear and witty style, this book may achieve the unthinkable: bridging the gap between academic High Thought and popular philosophy manuals.'
Slavoj ??i??ek

'This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment'
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University

'Written with Eagleton's usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions ... this is an important book by a hugely important voice'
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS

A Study of Ethics

In this ambitious new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the world's greatest cultural theorists, turns his attention to the now much-discussed question of ethics. In a work full of rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj ??i??ek, weighing the merits and deficiencies of each theory, and measuring them all against the 'richer' ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In a remarkably original move, he assigns each of the theories he examines to one or other of Jacques Lacan's three psychoanalytical categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, and shows how this can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of an ethics of personal sympathy, an impersonal morality of obligation, and a morality based on death and transformation.

From the Inside Flap

'Written in Eagleton's very readable, clear and witty style, this book may achieve the unthinkable: bridging the gap between academic High Thought and popular philosophy manuals.'
–Slavoj ??i??ek

'This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment'
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University

'Written with Eagleton's usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions ... this is an important book by a hugely important voice'
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS

A Study of Ethics

In this ambitious new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the world's greatest cultural theorists, turns his attention to the now much-discussed question of ethics. In a work full of rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj ??i??ek, weighing the merits and deficiencies of each theory, and measuring them all against the 'richer' ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In a remarkably original move, he assigns each of the theories he examines to one or other of Jacques Lacan's three psychoanalytical categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, and shows how this can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of an ethics of personal sympathy, an impersonal morality of obligation, and a morality based on death and transformation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Trouble with Strangers

A Study of EthicsBy Terry Eagleton

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-8572-1

Chapter One

Sentiment and Sensibility

It is commonplace nowadays to acknowledge that the eighteenth century was as much an age of sentiment as of reason. Certainly there was a good deal of fashionable snivelling, swooning, twitching, tingling, snuffling, gushing, glowing and melting. Sensibility, that key term of the age, represents a kind of rhetoric of the body, a social semiotics of blushing, palpitating, weeping, fainting and the like. It is also the age's riposte to philosophical dualism, since for the ideology of sentiment body and soul are on as cosy terms with each other as a jerkin and its lining. As a kind of primitive materialism, eighteenth-century sensibility is a discourse of fibres and nerve endings, vapours and fluids, pulses and vibrations, excitations and irritations. 'Feelings', remarks Vicesimus Knox, 'is a fashionable word substituted for mental processes, and savourying (sic) much of materialism.' Indeed, the very word 'feeling', which can mean both physical sensation and emotional impulse, the act of touching and the event of experiencing, provides the age with a link between the excitation of the nervous fibres and the subtle motions of the spirit.

The Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) bemoans in her memoirs her 'unhappy physical organisation, this nervous susceptibility to every impression which circulated through my frame and rendered the whole system acute', but she is really just boasting of how compassionate she is. Her husband Sir Charles Morgan wrote a treatise on physiology, perhaps influenced by observing his exquisitely impressionable wife. Isaac Newton's Principia, not unlike Bishop Berkeley's eccentric work Siris, regards the whole of creation as permeated by the subtle spirit of ether, which creates sensations by vibrating the nerves. Sensibility is the spot where body and mind mingle. It is now the nervous system rather than the soul which mediates between material and immaterial realms. Morality is in danger of being superseded by neurology. Laurence Sterne sends up sensibility as a kind of social pathology in A Sentimental Journey, despite purveying the stuff himself in plenty. For its abundant critics, the cult of sentiment is a mark of the neurasthenically overcivilised. The Man of Feeling is a moral pelican who feeds off his own fine emotions.

In contrast to the frigid hauteur of the patrician, a middle-class cult of pity, benevolence and fellow-feeling was sedulously fostered. Richard Steele writes:

By a secret charm we lament with the unfortunate, and rejoice with the glad; for it is not possible for a human heart to be averse to any thing that is human: but by the very mien and gesture of the joyful and distress'd we rise and fall into their condition; and since joy is communicative, 'tis reasonable that grief should be contagious, both of which are seen and felt at a look, for one man's eyes are spectacles to another to read his heart.

We have here some of the primary elements of the imaginary: a projection or imaginative transposition into the interior of another's body; the physical mimesis of 'by the very mien and gesture (of the other) we rise and fall into their condition'; the 'contagiousness' by which two human subjects share the same inner condition; the visual immediacy with which the other's inner state is communicated, so that the inside seems inscribed on the outside; and the exchange of positions or identities ('one man's eyes are spectacles to another').

Or consider this statement from Joseph Butler's Sermons:

Mankind are by nature so closely united, there is such a correspondence between the inward sensations of one man and those of another, that disgrace is as much avoided as bodily pain, and to be the object of esteem and love as much desired as any external goods ... There is such a natural principle of attraction in man towards man, that having trod the same tract of land, having breathed in the same climate, barely having been born in the same artificial district or division, becomes the occasion of contracting acquaintances and familiarities many years after ... Men are so much one body, that in a peculiar manner they feel for each other, shame, sudden danger, resentment, honour, prosperity, distress ...

Once more, we are offered some of the chief components of the imaginary: correspondence, the exchange of inward sensations, the merging of two bodies and a quasi-magical principle of magnetism, along with a rather clubbish disregard for difference which assumes that others are of much the same inner stuff as oneself. Indeed, for Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, such affectionate sentiments are due as much to oneself as to others. Only those who are amicably disposed towards themselves, Aristotle argues, are truly capable of love for others, while those who feel no affection for themselves 'have no sympathetic consciousness of their own joys and sorrows'. The necessary corollary of treating others as oneself is to treat oneself as another. For Aristotle, the condition in which each takes place in terms of the other is known as friendship.

Before we delve more deeply into Butler's idea of inward correspondences, however, we need to investigate its social context a little further. In the culture of sentiment, the virtues of civility, uxoriousness and blitheness of spirit seek to oust the more barbarous upper-class values of militarism and male arrogance. They are aimed equally at the unpolished earnestness of the petty-bourgeois puritan. 'The amiable virtue of humanity', Adam Smith observes, 'requires a sensibility much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind.' The delicacy of your nervous system is now a reasonably reliable index of social class. A new kind of anti-aristocratic heroism, one centred on the man of meekness, the chaste husband and the civilised entrepreneur, becomes the order of the day, to reach its consummation in that ineffably tedious prig Sir Charles Grandison, last and least of Samuel Richardson's protagonists and a kind of Jesus Christ in knee-breeches. There is a general embourgeoisement of virtue: Francis Hutcheson offers as types to be commended not only the prince, statesman and general but 'an honest trader, the kind friend, the faithful prudent adviser, the charitable and hospitable neighbour, the tender husband and affectionate parent, the sedate yet cheerful companion'. It is, in Raymond Williams's phrase, 'the contrast of pity with pomp'. Mildness, gallantry and joviality are weapons to wield against both the hatchet-faced Dissenters and the bellicose ruffians of the old-style squirearchy. Adam Smith sees economic self-interest as a kind of displacement or sublimation of the lust, power-hunger and military ambition of the ancien régime, while Francis Hutcheson distinguishes a 'calm' desire for wealth from the more turbulent passions. The Earl of Shaftesbury speaks with remarkable blandness of the possession of wealth as 'that passion which is esteemed particularly interesting'; while Montesquieu, whose Esprit des Lois is the source of much of this philosophy of le doux commerce, has a touching faith in the civilising power of bills of exchange.

One thinks, too, of Samuel Johnson's celebrated remark that a man is never as harmlessly employed as when he is making money – a comment which goes to show that a falsehood authoritatively enough proclaimed ceases instantly to sound like one. As far as economic life goes, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher John Millar even ropes the proletariat into the sentimentalist project, incorporating them into a single social sensorium or community of sentiment. When labourers are massed together by the same employment and the 'same intercourse', he asserts, they 'are enabled, with great rapidity, to communicate all their senses and passions', and the basis for plebeian solidarity is accordingly laid. For the English middle classes of a later historical era, such solidarity would prove more a source of anxiety than edification.

In this pervasive feminisation of English culture, pathos and the pacific were now the badges of a bourgeoisie whose commercial ends seemed best guaranteed by social decorum and political tranquillity. Sensibility was among other things a response to the bloody sectarianism of the previous century, which had helped to fashion the political status quo but which now, having accomplished its subversive work, was like many a revolutionary heritage to be erased from memory and thrust into the political unconscious. Within a still despotic patriarchy, there were calls for a deepening of emotional bonds between men and women, along with the emergence of 'childhood' and the celebration of spiritual companionship within marriage. A cheerful trust in Christian providence was to oust an old-style pagan fatalism. A style of mannered moderation was fashioned by social commentators such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, one which would seem to succeeding generations the very essence of Englishness. Properly indulged in, sentimentalism allowed you to be ardent or enraptured, lively or lachrymose, without for a moment violating decorum. It is this which Jane Austen's emotionally unkempt Marianne Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility has yet to learn.

In the domain of ideas, a militant empiricism sought to discredit rationalist systems with too little blood in their veins, embracing instead the raw stuff of subjective sensation. Concepts were to be rooted in the rough ground of lived experience, where the honest burgher felt rather more at home than on the pure ice of metaphysical speculation. It was a style of philosophising appropriate to an age which witnessed the rise of the novel. Perception and sensation – the human body itself – lay at the source of all our more elaborate speculations. Meanwhile, buoyed by the nation's economic prosperity and political triumphs, many of the intelligentsia felt free to cultivate a sanguine trust in the beneficence of human nature. An oozy, self-satisfied air of benevolence and humanitarianism suffused the clubs, journals and coffee houses. Despite the prevalence of malice, envy and competition in society, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson was still able to believe that 'love and compassion [were] the most powerful principles in the human breast'.

Sensibility and sentimentalism were, so to speak, the eighteenth century's phenomenological turn – the equivalent in the realm of the emotions of that turn to the subject which was Protestant inwardness and possessive individualism. In such extraordinarily influential journals as the Tatler and Spectator, sensibility took on programmatic form, as the uncouth reader submitted himself to a crash course in civility. This brand of journalism, with its adroit blending of grace and gravitas, represented a new form of cultural politics, consciously educating the reading public in the virtues of meekness, simplicity, decency, non-violence, chivalry and connubial affection. 'I have long entertained an ambition to make the word Wife the most agreeable and delightful name in nature', Steele writes in the fortieth number of the Spectator. He was hardly a cynosure of virtue himself: he drank too much, killed a man in a duel, was familiar with the inside of a debtor's prison, married a widow for her money and was arraigned for sedition before the House of Commons. Yet the writ of his and Addison's cultural authority ran all the way from the reform of dress to homilies against duelling, from modes of polite address to eulogies of commerce. Among their journalism's gallery of exemplary social figures were Cits, Snuff-Takers, Rakes, Freethinkers, Pretty Fellows and Very Pretty Fellows.

Moral codes were to be aestheticised, lived out as style, grace, wit, lightness, polish, frankness, discretion, geniality, good humour, a love of company, freedom and ease of manner, and courteous self-effacement. Francis Hutcheson recommends as quasi-moral virtues in his An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil 'a neat dress, a humane deportment, a delight in raising mirth in others', along with sweetness, mildness, vivacity, tenderness, certain airs, proportions and 'je ne sais quoys [sic]'. It is a far cry from the moral philosophy of Plato or Kant. As in the fiction of Richardson or Austen, stray empirical details can prove morally momentous: it is in the crook of a finger or the cut of a waistcoat that virtuous or vicious dispositions may be disclosed, a notion which would have seemed absurd to Leibniz. Bodies, and countenances in particular, are for Hutcheson directly expressive of the moral condition of their possessors, so that in the manner of the imaginary, interiors and exteriors are easily reversible and seamlessly continuous. In this unity of manners and morals, states of consciousness are well-nigh material affairs, visibly inscribed on the surfaces of human conduct, incarnate in too servile a gait or too haughty a tilt of the head. Dickens will inherit this brand of anti-dualism. The most admirable of Jane Austen's characters reveal an inward sense of outward propriety, dismantling the opposition between love and law, spontaneity and social convention. Politesse goes all the way down: civility means not just not spitting in the sherry decanter, but not being boorish, conceited or emotionally tactless as well.

The cult of sentiment was the feel-good factor of a successful mercantile nation, but it was a social force as well as a state of mind. Feeling could oil the wheels of commerce, allowing the Irish-born poet and novelist Henry Brooke to write rhapsodically of how the merchant 'brings the remotest regions to converse ... and thus knits into one family, and weaves into one web, the affinity and brotherhood of all mankind'. (As a rapaciously mercenary character who wrote pro-Catholic pamphlets for profit despite his robustly anti-Catholic views, Brooke knew a thing or two about the market.) Here, in a nutshell, is the ideology of so-called commercial humanism, for which the proliferation of trade and the spawning of human sympathies are mutually enriching. Laurence Sterne uses the phrase 'sentimental commerce' with the economic meaning well in mind. Economic relations between men deepen their mutual sympathies, polish their parochial edges, and render the conduits of commerce more frictionless and efficient. Trade, as a kind of material version of civilised conversation, renders you more docile and gregarious, a doctrine that the associates of Defoe's Moll Flanders or Dickens's Mr Bounderby might have had trouble in believing. Commercial wealth, being diffusive and mercurial, has an affinity with the ebb and recoil of human sympathies; and the same quicksilver quality provides a mighty counterweight to the insolence of autocratic power.

Yet these rituals of the heart had their utopian aspect as well as their ideological one. Sensibility, of all things, was perhaps the most resourceful critique of Enlightenment rationality which pre-Romantic British culture was able to muster. Feeling may have oiled the wheels of commerce, but it also threatened to derail the whole project in the name of some less crassly egocentric vision of human society. The man of sentiment, Janet Todd comments, 'does not enter the economic order he condemns; he refuses to work to better himself or society'. There is a smack of the Benjaminian flâneur about the Man of Feeling, whose lavishness of sensibility, and smug or generous-hearted refusal to calculate, cut against the grain of a crassly utilitarian order. His cavalier carelessness of proportion, as well as his habit of giving for the sheer sake of it, represent an implicit assault on the doctrine of exchange value, rather like the later extravagances of an Oscar Wilde. At the same time, carelessness of proportion was just what the critics of sentimentalism find hard to stomach: an excess of sensibility means a failure to sort the central from the marginal, since 'feeling' itself will yield you no clue to such vital distinctions. Sentimentalism, and the literature produced by it, tends to be whimsical, digressive and idiosyncratic, preferring the pale sheen of a snowdrop to prison reform. It is in every sense a luxurious ethics.

There is, however, a need for such affective rapport in a social order no longer held together by an absolutist state. An individualist society requires a framework of solidarity to contain its anarchic appetites. Otherwise, those appetites are in danger of subverting the very institutions which permit them to flourish. It is, however, a concord increasingly hard to come by, given that social relations are in danger of being reduced to the purely contractual, political power to the instrumental, and individuals themselves to isolated monads. Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, gloomily contrasts the solidarity of a tribal culture with the 'detached and solitary' individuals of modern life, for whom 'the bands of affection are broken'. In these conditions, it is not surprising that men and women should fall back on the natural affections to secure themselves a degree of fellowship, given its shrinking availability in the social world. What cannot be found in human culture must now be located in human nature.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Trouble with Strangersby Terry Eagleton Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405185724
• ISBN 13: 9781405185721
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368