Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton [Eagleton, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education & Reference, History, Historical Study & Educational Resources, Social History, Humanities, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Politics & Social Sciences, Cultural, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780393088984
Google: D5qImgEACAAJ
Amazon: 0393088987
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
Published: 2013-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

Nature and the Will

America’s disquiet with the body is not just the familiar tale of dieting, obesity, frenetic exercising, or trying to thread your jaws together with wire and a pair of pliers in front of the bathroom mirror. The country has a problem with the body because it has a problem with the finite. The desire which drives the nation—its hunger for progress, achievement, expansion, advancement, possession, consumption—is an infinite one which brooks no restraint. On this view, there are no natural limits to aspiration, only those obstacles thrown up by one’s failure to achieve. It is a vision of reality far removed from Macbeth’s “I dare do all that may become a man;/Who dares do more is none.” It does not see that some confines are creative rather than obstructive, some limits enabling rather than impeding. In a time-worn Romantic fallacy, expansion and self-expression are viewed as good in themselves, and what is bad is whatever reins them in. One thing which thwarts them is the body, which must therefore be worked upon intensively. Human flesh is appallingly feeble. It must be disciplined and remoulded if anything good is to be plucked from it, rather as some conservatives hold that people must be bawled out and knocked around if they are to give of their best.

On this view, what is supremely positive is the will. In a certain sense, it is all that exists. The will is a raw force that pounds the world into order, and occasionally pounds it to pieces. This includes the body, which is the bit of the material world which is part of us. In order to shape things to its needs, however, the will risks knocking the stuffing out of them, leaving them void, valueless, and so not really worth shaping in the first place. Yet it can do its work all the better if there is no meaning inherent in the world itself. Once things are drained of significance, they put up less resistance to one’s projects. Reality becomes endlessly pliable stuff. It can be pummelled into whatever form you fancy, as in the gym or cosmetic surgery. “Political principles, laws, and human institutions,” comments de Tocqueville of America, “seem malleable things which can at will be adopted and combined.” Maybe even our mortality will buckle in the end to the all-conquering mind. Among the most typically American features of Michael Jackson was the fact that he wanted to live forever, a wish which not every member of the world’s population was eager to see realised.

The will lies at the core of the self, which means that the self is what bestows meaning and value on things. But the self is also part of material reality. So we, too, are part of what has to be hammered into shape. We are clay in our own hands, awaiting the moment when we will transform ourselves into an artefact of great splendour. The self is always a work in progress. It is a

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