Sunday, October 4, 2009

After Theory - Terry Eagleton

The book “After Theory” by Terry Eagleton, is a great read. At first glance it appears to be a book about Cultural Theory but on closer inspection you could make a strong case for describing it as a philosophical self help guide. He is urging his fellow cultural theorists to look past the fetishistic intrigues of our incredibly diverse 21st century culture and to examine what is really important and fundamental to leading a fulfilling human life. Today when even an idle glance at our modern living gives the feeling that things are out of balance it is not so hard to imagine that we have somehow divorced ourselves from what is truly important, that we have lost our way and just as cultural theory has moved away from examining these questions perhaps, collectively so have we all.

This book is written very much from the western philosophical perspective surveying the ideas of key thinkers, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein among others.

He points out that, while it seems obvious that most people seek happiness and most seem to be working and searching for it any attempt to define what we actually mean by “happiness in life” is surprisingly difficult. Certainly it is hard for us to believe that happiness should only mean idle contentment. Most of us feel that our lives should have some kind of meaning, and we periodically check our lives for it and demonstrating our egocentric flare for the dramatic we ask ourselves more generally “what is the meaning of life?” We do this despite the fact that all other life here on earth seems totally fine without having to attach any meaning to it all and is perhaps even looking at us with faint bemusement at our inability to “get it”. At least I am sure the cat gave me such a look today.

Eagleton argues that we need to return to the greek notion of flourishing. Aristotle had the idea that we are not born human but rather we learn to become human. Likewise someone is not inherently good they learn to become good. (Funnily enough Aristotle was also a silly git who didn't question slavery). These qualities like goodness or generosity get reinforced with practice. In this way virtue is a skill or technique which is based on the knowledge of the qualities we deem human. When we master these we flourish and that is the true source of well-being. Of course with this idea we now must answer the question what are these virtuous human qualities.

However the thought that our well-being might stem from the cultivation of skill is a very interesting one that is also present in eastern philosophy. Any discussion of well-being should not get locked to the western philosophical tradition alone as this would be to ignore some very valuable insights into the human mind and what existence could be and might mean. But this is the subject for another post.

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