God, the Universe, Art, and Communism

Terry Eagleton

T
he world is divided among foundationalists, antifoundation-
alists, hybrids of the two such as foundherentists,1 those who
have no definite view on the question, and those who have never
even heard of it. I want to argue in this essay that these do not, in fact,
exhaust all the possibilities. I also want to claim that what one might call
unfoundedness is in a certain sense a project still to be accomplished
rather than a given.
To hold that there are some beliefs which are justifiable indepen-
dently of the support of other beliefs is to be an epistemological
foundationalist, and these days to be egregiously out of fashion. There is
a coherentist alternative to this casethe view that a belief is justified if
it coheres with beliefs which in turn cohere with othersthough
conventionalism is an antifoundationalist option rather more in vogue
with postmodern thought. There is also the foundherentist case, which
holds rather plausibly that some beliefs may be partly founded and
partly supported by others. But it is also possible to be an ontological
foundationalist, which in a broad sense means believing that there is
some basic stuff or furniture to the world, and (in the narrower, more
historical sense in which I shall be using the phrase here) claiming that
there is somethingGod, Geist, Mind, Reason, Will, power, economic
production, or some other so-called transcendental signifiedon which
the whole of our activity rests. And this ontological substratum is not
itself capable of being reduced to any other reality. This kind of
foundationalism is close to a belief in grand narratives, though there is
no reason why the thing which supports everything else should be a
story. The turtle who holds up the elephant who holds up the world is
not a narrative.
There is a third kind of foundationalismrational foundationalism
which holds that our arguments must be supported by reasons, and
which is sometimes rather negligently thrown out with the other two
sorts. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that epistemological and ontological
foundationalism do not necessarily go hand in hand. One could hold,
for example, that there is an ontological foundation to human affairs,
but that one cannot establish this other than by a network of mutually

New Literary History, 2001, 32: 2332

24 new literary history

supporting ideas. One could even combine epistemological founda-

tionalism with ontological antifoundationalism, claiming that there is no
irreducible basis to our activity and that this can be foundationally
established. More commonly, as with much postmodern thought, anti-
ontological foundationalism undermines epistemological foundation-
alism too, so that the proposition that there is no solid basis to things
seems as uncertain as everything else. It is thus hard to see how the claim
that there is no ultimate truth could itself be ultimately true.
Essentialism, one might argue, is a kind of foundationalism, since
here what we say about a thing comes finally to rest in the question of its
inherent nature, which will brook no further reduction. We cannot on
this viewpoint provide a noncircular answer to the toddler who asks why
water is wet, or why Michael Jackson is stupid. We can demonstrate what
wetness is, or even, to a precociously intelligent toddler, what it is about
the chemical composition of water which makes it fluid. But if the
toddler inquires whether there is somewhere in the world a species of
dry water, we feel constrained to respond that water is just the kind of
stuff that is never dry. We then await its inevitable response to this
statementwhy?while wondering how to shift it without undue
heavy-handedness to another subject. The common form in which
foundational arguments are advanced to toddlers is the phrase just
because. Just because arguments, like the rules of a game, seem both
arbitrary and absolute. There is no gainsaying them as things stand, but
one might always wonder whether things might not have been different.
Just because is among other things a polite way of shutting up two-year-
old metaphysicians. The child who has learned to use the phrase just
because has become a kind of foundationalist or essentialist, and the
political implications of this are naturally disturbing. Once you accept
that water just is wet, you might well be on the slippery slope to
accepting that some people just are inferior to others, or that touting a
Kalashnikov just is essential to a free society. In this essay, I want to back
the case for shutting up the toddler by holding that essentialism is
indeed here the correct view to hold, but that its political implications
are far more radical than those of the great majority of antiessentialist
and antifoundationalist arguments.
The problem with a foundation is that it always seems possible to slip
another one beneath it, thus depriving it of its foundational status.
(Wittgenstein said much the same of origins: it is hard to posit one
without feeling that you can go back beyond it.) As soon as we have
described the foundation, determined it from some outside standpoint,
we have already in a sense displaced it. And this would then seem to
open up an infinite regress of pseudo-foundations. As the antifoun-
dationalist famously remarked, its turtles all the way down. Founda-
god, the universe, art, and communism 25

tions have to go all the way down, but all the way down to what? The very
metaphor deconstructs itself by forcing us to imagine a rock bottom on
which the foundation itself is resting. All the way down to infinity
might be an alternative response, but it is hard to see, infinity being in
notably short supply in human affairs, how this is not simply a fancy way
of denying a foundation altogether. The fact is that any plausible
foundation would have to be in some sense self-supporting. It would
need to be the cause, ground, and end of itself. This, indeed, is the
missing possibility which I touched on above: that which is its own
foundation does not have a foundation in the sense of being sustained
by one from below, but it is not without a foundation either.
Does foundationalism, however, necessarily involve one in an infinite
regress? One might always regard such a giddying mise-en-abyme as a bit of
spurious metaphysicsa case, in Rortyan phrase, of scratching where it
doesnt itch, which seems pretty much the view of the later Wittgenstein.
The Philosophical Investigations admonishes us not to claim that there is
no last house in the village simply on the grounds that we could always
build another one. So we could; but this does not alter the fact that
there is indeed a last house here and now. The subjunctive cannot be
allowed so glibly to trump the indicative. A foundation may go all the
way down in practice but not in theory. Explanations, as Wittgenstein
famously remarks, have to come to an end somewhere. If I have
exhausted the justifications, he remarks in his tiresome simple-peasant
persona, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am
inclined to say This is simply what I do.2 If I know what would count
for you as a satisfactory explanation in particular circumstances, figure
as an end-point at which you feel able to stop, toddler-like, raising
question after fatiguing question, then we might agree that we have
arrived at a foundation of kinds. It is not, to be sure, a very grand sort of
foundation, of the sublime variety of Geist, Will, History, or a priori
rational principles, but this seems to Wittgenstein no reason to refuse it
the title of a foundation. On this view, the mistake made by those who
refuse to call this a foundation is similar to the mistake made by those
who think that Heat is no answer to the question What caused the
water to boil? because it does not explain where the heat itself came
from, and that to account for the boiling satisfactorily you would finally
have to go all the way back to a First Cause to whose throne all chains of
causality are tied.
The later Wittgenstein believes that he has unearthed a foundation of
sorts to our language games, which he dubs, rather cryptically, forms of
life. It is what we do which is the turtle upon which the elephant of our
discourse stands. Knowing, doubting, convincing, and the like make
sense only against a taken-for-granted background of propositions which
26 new literary history

are, at least for the moment, exempt from doubt since they are the very
grounds of our doubting. They are interwoven with our ways of doing
things to the point where, providing as they do the very substratum or
scaffolding (Wittgensteins own terms) of our knowing and doubting,
they could not themselves be called into question. A form of life is the
grammar presupposed by what we say and do, which could no more be
itself the object of our judgment than we could judge the grammar of
Malay to be superior to that of Eskimo. But this would seem to ground
our existence only at the cost of relativizing it, and so digging it up
again.
It is thus scarcely the kind of foundation which would appease the
metaphysicians, since in their eyes a foundation so shifting would
presumably seem no foundation at all. And since there are many forms
of life, we would now seem to be confronted with a surplus of
foundations rather than a dearth of them. But for Wittgenstein himself,
a cultural form of life is a bona fide foundation just because there is no
way in which we could possibly dig deeper than it. We can change what
we do, to be sure; but this for him lies on the same ontological plane as
what we have at present. It is not a matter of breaking through to some
deeper level of being. Foundations are generally thought of as the
reverse of arbitrary, but here, as with much contemporary neopragmatism,
it is the very arbitrariness of our forms of life, at least from a Gods-eye
viewpoint, which makes them foundational for us. It is just because the
rules of a game are in some sense arbitrary that they confront the players
as absolute. If we could adduce a reason for our forms of life, or for such
rules, then they would cease to be foundational, just as the majesty of the
law would be diminished if we obeyed it not because it is the law, but on
rational grounds which would then fall perilously beyond its own
determination. Besides, any rational grounds which might be thought to
prop up our forms of life would surely be in some sense internal to
them, and thus, once again, scarcely a foundation at all.
The most obvious name for a foundation which is the ground, cause,
and end of itself is God. God is Spinozas self-causing Cause. For Thomas
Aquinas, God is not a foundation in the sense of an ontological bedrock:
he is not an entity, a rational principle, an impersonal force, or a person
in the sense that Al Gore is arguably one. God and the universe do not
add up to two. He is a foundation in the sense that he is the condition
for there being anything whatsoever, the answer to the question of why
there is anything at all, rather than just nothing. But the theological
claim is that there is a way of relating to this foundation which appears
to kick it away, and that this is what is meant by living well, or the life of
grace. Our utter dependency on God is for Judaeo-Christian theology
the source of our freedom, not an infringement of it. If God lies at the
god, the universe, art, and communism 27

source of my identity, then he is the ground of my autonomy too. To

acknowledge our groundedness, which is known to theology as faith, is
exactly what allows us to be free-standing, self-fashioning subjects in the
first place. To share in the life of God is to share something of his own
self-groundedness. There is no need to worry about what God himself
stands on, since to call him God is not to assign him a name like Fred
or marmalade, but to claim that he is the ultimate work of art in the
sense that he contains his ends and purposes entirely within himself.
Indeed for Aquinas this is precisely what makes God so supremely full of
life. That being which does not have what belongs to it by nature
determined by another, so Aquinas considers, has life in the highest
degree.
Equally, to claim that God created the universe is not to say that he
is some kind of master-craftsman, but that the universe belongs to him
in the sense that it, too, has its ends and purposes entirely in itself. God
did not fashion it for any particular reason; he created it as part of his
eternal self-delight. He made it, in short, just for the hell of it, as a quick
look round will testify. To call the world created, rather than, say, the
necessary outcome of some process prior to it, is thus among other
things to say that it is pointless. It has no more teleology than a twitch.
(Eschatology, as Walter Benjamin understood, is almost the opposite of
teleology.) Part of what it means to call God transcendent is to say that
he does not depend on the world in the sense that he needed to create it,
any more than one needs to pierce ones nose or play badminton. And
since God is not bound by time, the world has no origin in the sense that
it was created, let us say, at precisely 3:27 p.m. on a Friday in July. A
divinely created world is thus one which does not have a foundation, in
the sense that it has its foundation in itself. Of course, one might demur,
it has a foundation in God; but God is among other things a way of
describing how things exist purely for their own sake. The universe itself
is the ultimate refutation of an instrumental rationality. And God is in
any case a curious kind of foundation, since he is no kind of thing or
individual or rational principle, any more than subjectivity is. It is for
this reason that the tradition of so-called negative theology finds
nothing the most appropriate way of characterizing him.
Theology, in short, long ago grasped the point that what dismantles
the opposition between foundationalism and antifoundationalism is the
autonomous or autotelic. That which has its grounds in itself seems in
one sense precariously free-floating, while in another sense it seems
anchored about as securely as one can get. One of the major ironies of
modernity, however, is that it was led by just this autonomy and
autotelism to reject the notion of God, as opposed to seeing it as the
place where he could be located. If the world worked all by itself, what
28 new literary history

need was there for a divine regulator? Paradoxically, it was the autonomy
of the world which helped to breed a brand of instrumentalist reason,
known largely as science. But to resist that reasons most barbarous
excesses, the autotelism of an increasingly discredited theology had to
be smuggled in again by the back door. And this was known as the
aesthetic. What now secreted its ends and grounds wholly in itself was
not the Almighty but the artifact.
Indeed the aesthetic artifact resembled the Almighty in remarkably
exact ways. Not only was it self-founding and self-fashioning, but its
relation to its own determinations uncannily mirrored the traditional
relationship of the human subject to God. If the artwork was autono-
mous, it was not so much because it stood grandly aloof from any
material foundation, but because it seized upon that foundation and
transformed it into the very source of its own self-determining. Rather
than viewing freedom as the knowledge of necessity, it converted
necessity into freedom, remaking the profane materials of the world
into the medium of its own self-communing, and thus transmuting
content into form. Like humanity in the presence of God, it was thus
founded and unfounded at the same time. It deconstructed the opposi-
tion between freedom and necessity just as God did, a being whose very
essence is freedom but whose beingprecisely because of this, in
Spinozas viewis also necessary in the sense that mine, or that of a
jellybean, is not.
But the work of art could never quite overcome the embarrassing
contradiction between this formal autonomy and its actual dependency
as a commodity on the material world it spurned. To this extent, an
artwork which was now for the first time coming to see itself as a kind of
subject rehearsed the contradiction of the bourgeois subject itself,
which was now supposed to be entirely self-grounding and self-determin-
ing, but which found it increasingly hard to convince itself of this truth
while it was laboring away in a factory or feeling the cold winds of market
competition. For Heidegger, the unfoundedness of Dasein is the source
both of its Angst and its authenticity. The aesthetic thus provided among
other things an idealized or utopian version of this split subjectivity,
compensating in the noumenal sphere for what was denied in the
phenomenal world. But it, too, would come in its later, modernist phase
to betray these contradictions in its own body, as an object at once
triumphantly free of heteronomous determination yet plunged for that
very reason into self-consuming doubt.
I have observed already that if we could determine a foundation, then
it would appear that we would need to do so from some point outside it,
thus undercutting its foundational status in the very act of seeking to
establish it. An objectifiable foundation seems no foundation at all,
god, the universe, art, and communism 29

while a nondeterminable one is simply too mercurial and elusive to

accomplish the august tasks it is called on to perform. For some Idealist
thought, this form of slipperiness is known as subjectivity. Subjectivity
would seem in one sense an admirable candidate for an ontological
foundation, even if it thereby threatens to scupper any epistemological
foundation, since there is an evident sense in which we can never nip
behind it. Since anything we might posit as its support must inevitably be
posited from within subjectivity itself, it can only in the last analysis be
standing on itself. This, presumably, is what Schelling has in mind when
he remarks in his System of Transcendental Idealism that self-consciousness
is the source of light for the entire system of knowledge, but that it
shines only forward, not backward. When the subject turns round to
grasp its own origin, it finds only itself, like some dizzying vista stretching
back to infinity.
To think this way is to secure the subject as a transcendent principle or
foundation, even ifsince the subject can never fully objectify itself
without slipping through its own fingersit remains a foundation of a
inevitably fuzzy sort. This is why it proves necessary for some Idealism to
posit the subject as a kind of primordial subject-object, folding the
question of objectification back into its very constitutive structure. The
self is that curious entity which is in no way independent of the act of
knowing it, so that like a work of art it constitutes what it cognizes. Like
the work of art too, its determinate content is inseparable from the
transcendent act of positing it, so that we can find in it a foundation
whose determinateness (which is one thing we require of ultimate
grounds) is in no sense at odds with its incapacity to be determined from
the outside (which is another thing we require of them). And this
inability to be determined from elsewhere, this quicksilver, protean
selfhood which can never be captivated by any one of its objectifications,
is known simply as freedom. To claim that the subject generates itself
from all eternity out of its own sublimely unfathomable depths is
equivalent to claiming that the foundation of the world is liberty. What
is foundational about us is our self-founding.
Why is it, though, that freedom under certain social conditions
inverts itself by some apparently inexorable logic into heteronomous
determination? Why does his self-determination result in my oppres-
sion? The query was waiting to be posed, and it was Marx who finally
posed it. In an audacious move, Marx saw that self-determination had
only to be socialized for the aesthetic to be shifted from the realm of
utopia to the register of actuality. Once men and women could achieve
that collective form of self-determination known as socialist democracy,
they could prize themselves free for the most part from the dead hand of
instrumental reason and produce simply for need, enjoyment, and the
30 new literary history

delight of self-realization rather than for profit. Instrumental reason was

not of course to be airily abandoned, not least when it came to the
question of how to construct this desirable condition in the first place.
And democratic socialist planning would be one manifestation of it. But
this planning would have no telos beyond the well-being of the commu-
nity. If production under capitalism is for its own sake, production
under socialism is for its own sake in a rather different sense of the
phrase. And one must remember here that production for Marx
includes relishing a peach or savoring a symphony as much as stoking a
boiler or attending a handloom. The true criticism of Marxs concept of
production is not that it is too disablingly narrow, but that it is too
capaciously vague.
Marxs political goal was thus, in the broadest sense, an aestheticist or
autotelic one: to construct the material conditions in which the self-
realization of men and women would be no longer primarily instrumen-
tal, but for the sake of their own flourishing and self-delight. Through
communism, history would become for the first time self-grounding.
Antifoundationalism was now a political project to be achieved rather
than a philosophical case to be defended. The torch of autotelism,
which had been first brandished by theology and then slipped somewhat
furtively to aesthetics, was thus finally passed on to politics. History, as
opposed to pre-history, would be inaugurated once production was free
from the goad of necessity, and the realization of human powers and
capacities had become its own foundation, rather than anxiously await-
ing its justification at some higher tribunal of History, Utility, Duty, Geist,
or Reason. Or, to put it another way, once exchange value, which is
ineluctably instrumental, has yielded its abstract sway to the sensuous
particularity of use-value, in which the product can be enjoyed in itself,
for its specific properties. As Marx himself puts it in the Grundrisse: true
wealth involves the absolute working-out of creative potentialities, with
no presupposition other than the previous historical development,
which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all
human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a
predetermined yardstick.3 And to this extent, one might claim, Marxism is
radically antifoundationalist. Once the age of pre-historical class society
is over, grand teleological narratives such as Marxist theory, which have
so far proved regrettably necessary to grasp the dreary continuities of
class history, will give ground to that multiplicity of mini-narratives
flourishing entirely for their own sake which for Marx is the mark of
history proper, and of which he has exceedingly little to say. It is in this
sense that Adorno can deny that a socialist society would form a totality.
But in another sense, just as in the case of theology, Marxs thought is
not antifoundational at all. For one thing, production for its own sake
god, the universe, art, and communism 31

will still of course rest on the foundation of Nature. But emancipated

labor is precisely that form of production which, rather like the work of
art, transforms its material conditions into the grounds of its freedom. It
is thus that the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
speaks of the naturalization of humanity and the humanization of
nature. Freedom, once more, is not a question of being cut mysteriously
adrift from determinations, but of folding them into ones project as the
source of ones self-determining. Freedom lies not in a release from
determinations, but in a peculiar way of being determined. For Marx,
this is in one sense an anthropological fact about humanity; but to
convert that fact into a value is what is known as communism. And this
process, like the grace of theology or the autonomy of the artwork, can
be adequately captured neither by foundational nor antifoundational
models.
But there is another sense in which Marxs proposal escapes this
binary logic. For one can always ask why this condition, in which freely
and reciprocally4 realizing our powers and capacities as historical
subjects becomes an end in itself, should be thought desirable. And here
Marxs answer involves a kind of self-founding foundationalism, which is
to say that the question cannot really be answered. It cannot be
answered because for Marx such self-realization simply belongs to what
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts call our species being or
Gattungswesen. Species being is Marxs just because. Given the kind of
laboring, linguistic, historical creatures we are, our happiness or well-
being requires that we be as far as possible self-determining and self-
realizing. You cannot ask why this is so any more than you can ask why
rain is wet. It is just of its nature to be so. This ontological ground cannot
be epistemologically grounded. And it is in this sense that an appeal to
natures, or essences, is a radical one. Essentialism is the enemy of grand
narratives, since it takes its stand purely on the self-realizing, self-
delighting nature of a thing and refuses to find its raison detre in some
overarching project for which that thing is purely instrumental.
The pointless tautology of a ground which grounds itself, converted
into a positive autotelism, thus provides Marxs anthropologico-political
riposte to Geist, utility, teleology, History, and the tyranny of an exces-
sively instrumentalist reason. Explanations have to come to an end
somewhere. Wittgenstein is right to see that it is what we do which lies at
the bottom of our language games, but he overlooks the fact that for our
behavior to be truly foundational it must become in a certain sense self-
foundational. And that, as Marx recognizes, requires political transfor-
mation. You cannot simply wish away a foundation by philosophical
ukase, as long as your actual history still remains under the sway of
capitalist utility and instrumental rationality. The problem is not, as the
32 new literary history

antifoundationalist tends to suspect, that we are still too enamored of

foundations, but that we are not enamored of them enough. A genuine
foundation would be one raised to the second power, grounding itself in
order to avoid determination from outside; and in the realm of human
history, this self-grounding ground is known as communism.

University of Oxford

NOTES

1 See Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (Oxford, 1993).

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1963), no. 217.
3 Karl Marx, Grundisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus
(New York, 1973), p. 488.
4 Reciprocally is an essential way of avoiding here the perils of a purely naturalistic
ethics, for which any power or capacity we historically enjoyed, including, say, the power to
torture, would be subject to the Romantic-expressivist injunction: Realize thyself! For
Marxs communist ethics, by contrast, only those powers and capacities should be realized
which enhance (or at least do not inhabit) the self-realization of others. I have discussed
this question more fully in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), particularly in
Chapter 8, The Marxist Sublime.