Eagleton om transcendensens materiella bas

"If you are to be free to turn your thoughts to higher, purer things, you need to be excessively well-heeled. To be free demands leisure, which in turn requires material resources – and if everyone is to be free, material resources beyond the wildest dreams of the most avaricious banker. In classical Marxist terms, the material base needs to be developed to the point where it can simply negate itself. At a certain point of superabundance, the material transcends itself.

The dialectical Marxist twist is that only materiality will release you from the dull compulsion of the material. Freedom does not mean being free of determinations, but being determined in such a way as to sit transformatively loose to one’s determinants; and communism, which would allow you do precisely this in material terms, is in this sense the acme of human freedom. That only the material will emancipate you from the material: this, surely, is the true riposte to the various varieties of idealism, not the claim that we must at all costs stay tenaciously loyal to how things are, or respect the density and objectivity of the material world."

- Terry Eagleton, Communism: Lear or Gonzalo?, Costas Douzinas & Slavoj Žižek (red.), The Idea Of Communism, s. 102, Verso, London, 2010.