The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction

This is vintage Eagleton! Witty, ironic, honest, and fiercely yet realistically hopeful. Happiness and love may be eminently elusive phenomena, maybe even improbable in a context of global capital, but they are possibilities that lurk in our abiding reciprocal dependence on each other. If you are looking for ideological certitudes - whether new-age idealism or postmodern pessimistic `realism' - this is not the book for you.

"What's the meaning of life?" has become a sort of in-joke amongst academic philosophers. Particularly in the analytic west, supersaturated with logic and science, questions concerning "grand narratives," of which "life" could be one, have gone the way of Hegelian dialectics and causa sui. In the early twentieth century, positivists and "the linguistic turn" ground such bugbears into impotent stumps. A few brave professional philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, have attempted to weave the question into their work, but overall the field retains an icy silence towards the ultimate question. Regardless of this mass abandonment within universities, the question just won't go away. To survive, it has gone underground, whining like a lost puppy, and seethes beneath nearly everything we do. Ignoring it won't make it go away, so the question has found new pioneers to obsess. It found a happy medium in Terry Eagleton, whose work balances philosophy, literary and cultural theory, and history. Though a professional academic, Eagleton is not a philosopher. He thus brings a daisy fresh perspective to the question often associated with "philosophy" itself. The query of course doesn't have an answer, but most "meaning of life" books usually have a go at it regardless. At least, that seems one of the expectations, realistic or unrealistic, behind flapping the pages of a book with such an ominous title. An honest book would comprise of one page embossed with a question mark. Amusing, but not marketable. Regardless of the challenge, Eagleton does give a sort of an answer; as much an answer as anyone can give. And, though disputable, it does makes sense. Before giving his "answer," Eagleton, in the spirit of linguistic philosophy, rips and tears at the ligaments of the question itself and then pulls it apart to examine the bits. Chapter one, "Questions and Answers," provides a vast desultory survey of reactions to the grammar and form of the inquiry itself. For example, is "what is the meaning of life?" similar to "What is the capital of Albania" or to "what is the taste of geometry?" Does the form of the question itself deceive us (or "bewitch" us, as Wittgenstein would say) into thinking that it has a definite answer? Is the question valid? Eagleton compares it to another stultifying interrogative: "why are there beings rather than nothing?" Maybe that translates simply as "wow!" Numerous options get examined, such as "maybe we're not supposed to know the meaning of life" or "maybe we'll never know it even though there is an answer." The chapter then transitions, via similar unanswerable moral and political questions, into a survey of modernity and culture. People in the 12th century would not flick a lash at the question. They would answer "God." In a similar fashion, postmodernists would unflinchingly answer "culture." By contrast, many people in the 21st century, those not of the postmodern bend, have come to accept that human existence is contingent. So, E

Terry Eagleton , a long time literary critic of Marxist training (Marxist Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Illusions of Post Moderism) and Catholic church moral rigor and one of the best explicators of the dually condensed and convoluted intersections of literature, philosophy and political action, has give us all a small, witty, tersely choice gift with his new book, more correctly an essay, called The Meaning of Life. Eagleton's intent, despite what one might assume, isn't to cast a disparaging glare at what has to be simultaneously the most over- asked and least answerable question issued forth, continually, but the swelling ranks of the Middle Brow readership. Eagleton is one of the few truly fine stylists in Leftist literary criticism, an intellectual who is able to translate the most involuted and deferring theoretical quagmires in elegant, comprehensible english, and who is likewise able, and blessedly inclined to make the murky suppositions of other academics sweat by insisting that notions of reading deal , finally, with a book's perceptable idea, and that analysis of the workings have something to do with a reader's experience of the text they've finished and seek to fruitfully ponder. He steers clear of the stalling abstractions of Frederick Jameson, and more clearly addresses the same idea advanced by the increasingly oracular Harold Bloom--the investigation into how Literature helps us think about ourselves and our deeds in the world. The author does not sneer, deride, nor deride the question, although more than a little of his prickly wit bubbles up from under the surface of his elegantly poised writing. It's a question he takes seriously--it must be important,since queries into grander, greater (or lesser) significance in our existence have been debated for as long as humans could write and record their knowledge and history-- but he is one who is rather tired of the various sophistries that have absorbed the question and tried to force it into submission. He is short fused with the New Agers, who's dreamy capitulation of personal responsibility to whispering drives are useless to most of us who find ourselves denied celestial epiphanies in ruthless material plain, and Eagleton is equally contemptuous of post-modernist theorizers who would argue, abstrusely, thickly, blockheadly, that the Meaning of Life is a merely a social construction and that one is finely better off, by implication, attempting nothing to change one's state and purpose and instead enjoy the spectacle of observing the culture collapse upon itself. An attractive aspect of Eagleton's progressive dissections of concepts and the language that gives them form is a tangible humanity; he refuses to slide into pessimism with the false assurance that the population is too stupid or deluded to do better by themselves and their fellows, or that the quest for meaning of our deeds is delusional. There is a series of skewerings , interrogations and elucidations of the ba

Indeed as the previous reviewer said, the book is witty. And, despite all the bad news this book recognizes Life is a miracle and a comedy. One has to know a bit about philosophy to understand it, but, just as I did when I read Professor Eagleton's memoir "The Gatekeep", this was about the joy of life and the possibiity of goodness even with all the very obvious suffering, pain and injustice. A very hopeful book. Debunks a lot of heavy lifting.