SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “Power and Knowledge in ‘The Lifted Veil.’” Literature and History 9, no. 1 (spring 1983): pp. 52-61.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1980, Eagleton maintains that “The Lifted Veil” explores the limitations and dangers of scientific knowledge.

It is always possible to undermine one kind of claim to ‘disinterested’ knowledge by asking why we should bother to find out anything in the first place. Since not much of our knowledge is directly relevant to physical survival—indeed ‘culture’ may be defined as all that is not—there must be some reasons, other than libidinal ones, for acquiring it. One plausible reason for science in the modern Western sense is that we need it, not so that we shall survive, but so that some shall survive better than others. Materialised in technology, science dominates Nature in such a way as to contribute to the reproduction...