Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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'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.

Aus dem Klappentext

'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.

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Trouble with Strangers

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

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...