Amy Marsh
As an undergraduate, I took a class on Buddhist philosophy
from a visiting professor who spent more than a decade as a Buddhist monk
before all the meditating on his knees led to massive knee surgery and a switch
in professional course. The class
remains one of my personal foundations.
On the first day, our professor posed the dilemma that if Buddhism is
considered non-dualistic (thus taking a relativistic approach by not
distinguishing between “good” and “bad” or seeing the world in binaries), then
how is it possible to have Buddhist ethics? If all phenomena are interconnected, how can you judge
anything as absolutely unacceptable?
Our professor distinguished between what he called “California Zen,”
which he posited as a wishy-washy “everything is equal” relativism lacking an
ethical edge, and more traditional Zen traditions. Throughout the semester, we
developed metaphors as a way to approach this question. I don’t have the time or recollection
here to recreate that entire process, but the short of it is that many Buddhist
philosophers do see a way for Buddhism to make moral decisions (“this is bad”)
even while engaging in a very relativistic philosophy. You could try to quickly summarize this
as resulting from “big mind” versus “little mind” or “Truth” versus “truth.”
As I type this up, I realize I am doing a very unconvincing
job of laying out how this is possible, but I think that I will leave that
alone for now, as I think my point here is more that I believe this is
possible, and that this is what I have meant by “relativism.” Reading Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, I realized that I have
often used such words in a loose and inaccurate way. Or maybe this not just laxness on my part, but also a matter
of how terms get used differently in different fields or contexts.
When I used the word “relativism,” I generally meant it more
in the sense that there is often not one truth, not that (absolute) truth is
not possible. (It is true that I
have class tonight, and I had better finish my response. But, as Eagleton points out, this is an
example of banal absolute truth.
When I talk relativism versus absolute truth, I am usually referring to
something different—say, the general black/white George Bush approach to truth
versus a nuanced shades of grey let’s understand the context and at least try
to look at it from multiple perspectives sort of approach. There might be multiple (absolute) truths,
in the sense that there are a lot of true things out there in the world.
(Tomorrow, for example, will be Tuesday, and I will have a response for a
different class due. That is also “true.”) This is not to dismiss what Eagleton
was saying, but to point out that I think this discussion over relativism can
mean multiple things. (Now how’s that for relativistic! Although I think it is
also [absolutely?] true.
In my anthropology and religion theory classes, we often
talked about relativism in the sense of having more than one tool in a tool
box, and Eagleton also discusses this concept. Eagleton, before he gets around to dismantling relativism,
says that one of cultural theory’s achievements is to disabuse us of the “idea
that there is a single correct way to interpret a work of art” (95). After reading Eagleton’s discussions of
relativism, Absolute Truth, objectivity, etc I never really felt myself
disagreeing with him, but just feel like I am sloppy with my terms and my
thinking, a matter that should certainly be cleaned up, but this is different
from a fundamental revisioning.
Did I just write a completely wishy-washy response, or was
there some kind of actual point in there?
These things seem clear when you start out, but by the time you’ve held
them up to the light and taken a theoretical stab or two, it all starts seeming
blurred.
Which perhaps might be a decent transition to Eagleton’s
work as a whole. I appreciated his early chapters, which helped provide context
and a historical background and evolution for many of the theories we have
discussed in class. I felt like Eagleton provided some depth to the discussion
in the way that Bressler never has for me. The last few chapters, however, take on a very different
tone as Eagleton seeks to establish an afterlife of theory. While I found many of his discussions,
such as on morality, interesting, I also caught myself stopping mid-chapter
with the astonished realization, “This is a literature
theory book!” I sometimes
struggled to see the relevancy to theory.
I also struggled a bit to see what exactly Eagleton was
offering that is so different that it challenges the existing orthodoxy of the
field. Is it just a matter that
you can’t separate the ethical and political, and that fundamentalism is creeping
back in? That you need to be able to say that something is “true” while also
being able to distinguish between “Truth” and “truth”? This book helped me understand existing
theories much better—his discussion on Marxism, for example, addressed the elephant
in the corner, which is that many of these theories can seem passé, but then
goes on to show, I think, how Marxism is still a useful tool in the toolbox.
Very helpful. But as to what’s
next? What’s “after theory?” I am
still struggling to see how Eagleton offers something fundamentally new.
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