Sentient Bodies

 “Materialism” by Terry Eagleton, 2016

In this book Eagleton looks at various kinds of materialisms,11 in all, somewhat from a Marxist perspective. He's most adept at analyzing culture and in this book there is a bit of quasi-religious intellectual peacocking which I'm going to ignore. What here is useful or new to the Left in theoretical terms?

Eagleton takes a look at the “New Materialism”, a pagan environmental analysis that is similar to the concept of Gaia and deep ecology. It borrows from other materialisms in that it posits connections between all matter, consciousness and energy, but reduces the role of humans to just another form of matter. Rocks, sky, wind, water, soil, animals, trees, humans, frogs, etc. It dispenses with idealism by investing matter with vitalism, but ignores society, human uniqueness and the role of labor.

Other forms of materialism that Eagleton mentions are historical, dialectical, mechanical, cultural, reductive, semantic, speculative, greedy (the common understanding, ala Madonna's Material Girl) and anthropological / somatic materialism. In Eagleton's understanding, this latter puts the human body at the center of social life. He makes fun of dialectical materialism by referring to others' comments on it as 'bullshit' and nonsense. He does not mention the long tradition of philosophic / scientific materialism. He is an opponent of cultural relativism and post modernism.

Eagleton's main initial focus is bodily materialism – the role of the physical human body as the center of thought and society. Or as Marx put it, our “sensuous consciousness,” a view which completely bypasses the false mind/body dualism. Here is where he associates Aquinas with Marx, with language and sensory / emotional experience, with labor and agency as outgrowths of our bodily nature. Somatic materialism eventually turns into historical materialism.

Some quotes:

* Marx came up with “an anthropological theory of cognition.”

* “Sensory capabilities and social institutions are sides of the same coin.”

* Marx … “had a brisk way with what he thought of as fancy ideas.”

* “It is the body that lies at the root of human history.”

* “In Marx's eyes, Nature is more fundamental than history...since it allows us to have a history in the first place.”

* Capitalism reduces the poor to alienated abstraction: “You do not care what you eat if you are starving, or what kind of work you can obtain if the alternative is to go hungry.”

* The only reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you find disagreeable, is that you don't like having to work.”

* For Marx: “Philosophy is an activity whose primary aim is its own abolition.”

* “The anarchist and the authoritarian are terrible twins. The laid-back libertarian is the prodigal son of the paranoid father...they share the same logic.”

* Wittgenstein makes: “...a material rebuke to the callow intellectualism which hopes to repair our human ills by rearranging our speech...”

* “Bourgeois individualism's … defiant cry is “You can't have my experience!”

Eagleton compares materialists and anti-philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein to Marx, especially in their focus on the human body. He admits Nietzsche's far-right politics and 'will to power' would be called a form of cosmic capitalism by Marx. Eagleton thinks Nietzsche has aspects of a Boy Scout and a personal trainer, which is an example of Eagleton's sly wit. He looks at both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in critical detail, but I'm not sure why except they both practice different forms of materialism and anti-metaphysics – which is the loose subject of this book. Ultimately the book is a grounded philosophic attack on philosophy.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: "Marx" (Eagleton); “Marx and Human Nature,” “The Robbery of Nature” and “Marx and the Earth” (both by JB Foster); “History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” "Marxist Criticism of the Bible."

And I bought it at an English bookstore in Budapest

Red Frog

November 28, 2022