Given the extent to which metaphysics has been chased out of the lecture theatre, and indeed out of cultural theory itself in the past few decades, it may seem rather surprising for me to herald its return. And I do so not on the balance and tone of any purported majority of recent publications, but solely on the writings of one, albeit erudite, literary critic, co-opted by me to strengthen my unashamedly biased wish to see this subject informing scholarly discourse in the humanities once again.

I say subject: what I really mean is harder to define than even that slippery word. I guess the issue at stake here is not specifically the revival of a small branch of the philosophical discipline so much as the more general need for us all, philosopher, literary critic, musicologist, all those in the theory industry, to ‘face-up’ to matters of being and non-being, death and eternity, heaven or its non-existence and other such ‘big’ questions. Because on these topics, in reality, there is a tendency to run with the narrative of post-modernity a little too far. Thus, it is routine to think that we have come through the universals of enlightenment, the metas of modernity, and arrived at the micros of post-modernity; and here we stay. This is logical, historical, reasonable, and utterly, utterly wrong. The consequences of this reasoning are deadly. If it means that no-one talks of evil, life, morality and love anymore (and something about these words seems repulsive to the modern, sensitive historian with a carefully thought-out research portfolio centring on the 1832 reform act), then we run the danger of denying the exploration of meaning, an exploration many see as a basic yearning, simply because we fear an institutional inability to find answers for all but the most miniscule of questions.

Please don’t read this as a thinly-veiled attempt to argue the case for religion. I am, in fact, not averse to doing so, but not here. I will not even mention Richard Dawkins. I will, however, more than mention his recent interlocutor (LRB Oct 2006), Terry Eagleton, author of the acclaimed 70s bestseller Literary Theory, not for his views on our national atheist’s work but rather for his timely (from my point of view) turn towards the metaphysical in works such as After Theory (2003) and The Meaning of Life (2007). Eagleton, like me, senses a vacuity present in much theoretical writing:

Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on.

On top of this, Eagleton similarly berates ‘the western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day’. Put together, these two quotes take their place in an impassioned series of polemics arguing that, not only do some critics fail to face up to such higher realities as fear, deities and joy etc, but also that they fail to look outside their highly privileged western existence. Exactly who is being criticised here? It would seem to be most readily applicable to myopic, post-Derridean litcrit writers who use reading the text ‘against the grain’ as an excuse to exercise their unfulfilled libidos on Marlowe. Such problems as poverty and deprivation, exploitive capitalism and oppressive Marxism, water shortages and civil wars, are left out of a cultural theory that feels that, given its roots, can never escape the western canon, and must, therefore, continue searching for elements of pre-Heideggerrean Dasein in Hegel. Post-colonial studies, feminism and Foucault are all massive exceptions to this idea that post-modernity ignores the more ‘worldly’ aspects of society. Indeed, political discourse can hardly be said to ignore inequality and the two-thirds world, but the point still stands: ‘literary theory’ takes for granted air-conditioned faculties and a full stomach on which to ‘de-centre’ Proust, whilst virtually all other ‘theory’, at least acknowledging the non-west, joins it in refusing to acknowledge that there is anything outside this existence and its human population on which to dwell. Talk of meaning or meaninglessness is even less palatable than talk of Darfur. And thus it seems unfashionable and strangely irrelevant to let a conversation on culture stray into the metaphysical realm, to be influenced by belief, to ask what being is, whether purity of heart is attainable, what part morality plays in sex, why we feel happy when we love and are loved, what happens when we die, and how it comes to be that this event happens for a Zambian on average fourty-four years before it does for somebody from Japan. Goodness, how ‘unscholarly’ it would be if we let a seminar on the sociology of religious belief stray into a discussion of whether there actually is a God; a supervision on narrative in Molière disintegrate into talk of the possibility of predestination, a key speech on medieval plagues [not plaques?] descend into the revelation that the speaker’s son has leukaemia and that he is scared to death about what tomorrow may bring. These topics may be necessarily infused with subjectivity, but they are hardly best served by being avoided.

What is needed to counter this? I am sure it will be unpopular, but we may need to consider the possibility that metaphysics – the science of truth married to the art of meaning – can play a real part of academic and intellectual life. This is where Eagleton’s approach to scholarship and intellectual discourse is applicable and, perhaps, indispensable. Always seeking to coax his fellow academics down from the ivory tower, Eagleton argues for wanton depravities and ideologically unsound metaphysical principles such as value, objectivity, virtue and fidelity. He acknowledges, like many post-modernists, the futility of ‘detached study’ in the humanities, but instead of retreating from life, he seeks to bring it right into the centre of modern thought. Eagleton also seems, outrageously, to believe in absolute truth, of the theologian’s kind rather than the physicist’s. This curious synthesis is clear when he simultaneously states

‘nothing of world-shaking significance is at stake here. There is nothing loudly authoritarian in progress…those who believe in absolute truth may well be the kind of people who are pathologically cautious about accepting anything as true unless it seems plainly undeniable. They may stumble through life in a haze of scepticism and a miasma of doubt. It is just that when they do, perhaps once every decade or so, come grudgingly to accept a proposition as true, they recognise that its opposite cannot also be true, and that its being true for them means its being true of everyone else as well’

and

‘to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope shouldn’t get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.’

The result of metaphysical discussion in the humanities would not necessarily lead to Evangelical takeovers of our campuses, nor Sharia law in place of University statute, or even mandatory Kabbalist approaches to text. Rather, to use Eagleton’s word, it would lead to a rather delightful sense of roughness in the arts, the idea that, though life is fragile and temporary, and even though many may live precariously close to non-life (so that we may live a little further from it), there may be something outside ourselves, something transcendent. Some actions are better than others; life may not be the end; evil should be avoided; all of these beliefs are suddenly legitimatised. Though nothing can be fully understood and no one can be complete, faith, in its variety of forms, can be contemplated.

Unfortunately for the anti-dogmatist, this will involve engaging with the one discipline that entertains the possibilities of ‘answers’ rather than ‘questions’. For some this may be beyond the pale; for others it may bring an overdue sense of relief. Chesterton remarked as far back as 1908 that ‘we have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on he wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers’. One hundred years of doubt later, could the tiring business of sneering at those who believe in angels perhaps be replaced with the angelic itself?