Research: Selected Text

This book by Terry Eagleton about cultural theory and post-modernism interested me because he addresses a lot of things that are undermined by the "dogmatic" approach of people who believe that their truth about life is the "absolute truth". Many of these things include human virtues and what it means to actually have human nature if there is one at all. 

“Because we are able to be false to our natures, there is some virtue in our being true to them. It may be then that we resemble toads in the sense that we, too, have a nature, in the sense of a way of living which is peculiar to being a successful human, and which, if we are true to it, will allow us to prosper. It is just that we are not sure what it is.”

“Because of language and labour, and the cultural possibilities they bring in their wake, we can transform what we are in ways that non-linguistic animals cannot. To discover what we are, to know our own natures, we have to think hard about it; and the result is that we have come up over the centuries with a bewildering array of versions of what it is to be human.”

- Eagleton, T (2004), After Theory, 1st edn, Penguin Group

The quote highlighted above is what really spoke to me through this passage. This being from my perspective, it's absolutely right. No single thing defines our own nature so we have to stop and think about who we actually are. Also, it speaks of the ever changing definitions of what human nature really is. But the quote is suggesting that there is no single definition of human nature as there is for the nature of a toad as Eagleton plainly puts it. We are complex beings and we all have different approaches to what the nature of a human being is. This in turn makes all have different and individual philosophies of being human and living life. 

From my understanding of  the quote, it asks the question of if we really can be called a collective species like that of a wolf pack, a flock of birds (or a toad as Eagleton describes); when in reality, in western culture at least, we all live in a society of capitalism and work for our own interests, beliefs and truths rather than together as a species.