Customer Reviews

The Meaning of Life

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3 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

"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, Eagleton argues, we construct meaning for ourselves and meaning has appropriated multifarious dimensions: sport, religion, entertainment, etc. We essentially have grabbed on to anything we can get our hands on.

Chapter Two, "The Problem of Meaning," looks at the challenges to "meaning" beginning with a dizzyingly recursive discussion of the meaning of "meaning." Hint: it's a difficult word to nail down. Moving through Kantian "purposiveness without purpose" to "unintended meanings" Eagleton lands within the dank optimist-shattering brain of Arthur Schopenhauer. His conception of the selfish but pointless "Will" could wilt a field of happy flowers. To emphasize the point, the book includes a ghoulish portrait of the man himself. Sometimes appearances aren't deceptive.

"The Eclipse of Meaning," Chapter Three, talks about a time when meaning pervaded everyday life. Early moderns could remember such a time, so the gradual disintegration of it seemed like a horrific crisis. Eagleton uses Samuel Beckett and his play "Waiting for Godot" as exemplary modern with a dash of postmodernity. By chapter's end the distinction between "inherent" and "ascribed" meanings becomes clear, as well as the notion that we can't completely make ourselves since we are, fundamentally, wild animals with certain determining characteristics.

The discussion transitions to "life" in Chapter Four, "Is Life What you Make it?" So what could serve as a baseline for "meaning?" With a little help from his friends Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Freud, Eagleton arrives at a notion of meaning that includes the enabling of unselfish human flourishing. Eagleton eschews purely individualist characterizations, such as Julian Baggini's and John Cottinghams's. He instead derives a more social meaning akin to a jazz band. Here everyone has individual free expression within a totality that determines the structure of the piece. Throw in a touch of compassion (akin to agape) and Eagleton creates a life philosophy that seems meaningful, beautiful, realistic, but nonetheless Utopian. At the very least it can provide an inspiring signpost or goal. In the end, Eagleton argues that humans thrive together. We're free within physically determined bounds and we can decide what happens within those bounds.

This tiny book packs quite a discussion. Though under 200 pages it nonetheless feels exhaustive. It takes the view that life is an accidental, not a planned or intentional, phenomenon. "God" comes up, but only in historical or analytical contexts. Thus, God does not live at the center of meaning in this book. Consider it a fully modern non-theistic approach to the question. Those open to such interpretations will find much to ruminate on and possibly some solace in the face of what seems like modern meaninglessness. Along the way Eagleton makes numerous comments about capitalism, fundamentalism, current politics, and mass culture. "The Meaning of Life" is no sterile work of formalism detached and disinterested from what most of us know as "life." Though by no means definitive, it will provide much food for thought about our strange and prickly material predicament. And yes, he does mention Monty Python.

This book has many virtues:

1. It is short. It has 175 pages of text on small pages, and can be read in a long evening.
2. It addresses a central issue in a real world way: what benefit for our daily lives can we gain from a consideration of what life means?
3. The book considers a wide variety of perspectives, including philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, writers such as Beckett and Shakespeare, and comedians such as Doug Adams and Monty Python.
4. The book comes up with what I at least consider a decent answer: Following Aristotle, the book suggests that we consider the meaning of life to be happiness, but happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure, but as a state of our being that maximizes our use of our full human capacities. However, Eagleton argues that we should go beyond Aristotle in emphasizing that one of the key human capacities that must be developed is the capacity for love and compassion for others. The metaphor is that the well-lived life is like participating in a well-functioning jazz band, that balances individuality and cooperation.
5. The book has some interesting sidepoints. For example, he argues at one point that at least some religious fundamentalism is the flip side of nihilism, in that both viewpoints seem to hold that life and the universe has no inherent meaning, but only whatever meaning God chooses to give it. Eagleton instead proposes that human life can have the inherent meaning of happiness as he defines that term.

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.

[...]

Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton: these six words, which immediately sound more like Meaning of Life by Terry Gilliam, seem quite enough to make world-wide reviewers step into their cynical modes and ooze superiority. This is exactly what happened. Most reviews I have read infallibly begin with more or less moderate dozes of skepticism they felt before even reading this little black book of/on/about meaning. Although they mostly change their minds and give Eagleton a high grade, on my view, this instinctive cynicism betrays, as Jacob Golomb explains in In Search for Authenticity, pending existential Angst. A colleague of mine, a materialist critic, scoffed at the idea that a leftist like Eagleton would even consider writing such a ridiculous book. He said to me, "Some people seem to have a lot of free time." I interpret this as suggesting there is nothing valuable or practical about Eagleton's book, and this was said even before he even glanced at one single page of it. I cannot but feel this attitude resembles the attitude of Rushdie's judges who claimed they did not need to read his work before they sentenced him to death. Anticipating reader response, Eagleton does not fail to bask in self-irony, apologetically calling his own project ridiculous, but yet as something he felt like doing.

One thing is clear, despite the modest scope and popular scientific format, Eagleton has done his research. The book is nicely structured and funny, yet very serious as well. Eagleton gives us a short history of meaning, which somehow does not seem much shorter than a short history of the universe. It is as if the beginning of the universe is the incipient point of the concern with meaning, because meaning (or purpose) is the answer to famous Heideggerian question: Why is there anything instead of nothing?

On my view, Eagleton's passion is quite understandable. We can grow as cynical as we can stand, and refute meaning of life as the old ideological concern, yet at the end of the day (or should I say close to the end of one's life, if not before) the question of meaning is unavoidable, as Rushdie says in The Ground Beneath Her Feet: "there's no escape from the war of meaning." Eagleton points out to the current historical circumstances, the rise of fundamentalism, neo-ideological conflicts, reshaping of global economy and what not.

If we have not quit the concern with meaning, considering it a meaningless endeavor, there is another heritage that Eagleton refers to, criticizes, and finally partly endorses: the heritage of existentialism. After taking up and dismissing famous contenders for the meaning of life, such as God and love, Eagleton suggests quite along existentialist lines that there is no one meaning of life, but rather meanings of life/lives. Refraining from modern individualism, Eagleton further proposes that meaning of life might be happiness and all that jazz. In fact, he suggests that meaning of life, as happy existence, is much like a jazz band, a community of free/authentic individuals. In other words, meaning of life (as happiness) is found in the existentialist notion of authenticity. This authenticity is far from absolutely individualistic. Authenticity, as one finds in works by Heidegger and Sartre (whom Eagleton mentions), is found in community, maybe what Jean-Luc Nancy called "inoperable community", which is very much like Eagleton's jazz band. To further tie Eagleton's final idea about happiness-as-meaning to existentialism, I will mention Sartre's idea that being authentic is to create the meaning of one's life like "a saxophone note" (Nausea). This idea is furthermore rather close to the Nietzschean notion of an individual being as an artist of his/her life and at the same time being his/her work of art, perhaps a musical piece produced with respect to other members of a community, other players so to speak.

Reading this book is like listening to a genius who produces a steady stream of insights (sometimes quite profound), but who's unwilling or unable to organize them in a systematic way. This presents a challenge for the reader. In my case, after carefully reading the book (while highlighting), I went right back to the beginning and read it all over again (while taking notes), which is something I've never done before. After my second reading, and a lot of follow-up effort to organize my notes, I feel that I was able to get a handle on the book, and I'll try to summarize my findings in this review.

It seems to me that everything hinges on what we mean by "meaning." Eagleton correctly describes how our unique language ability is what enables us to explore such an abstract question as the meaning of life in the first place, but we have to be careful that we're not misusing language and thereby confusing ourselves. He describes how "meaning" may refer to intention, signifying, or intention to signify. These are useful distinctions, but I don't think they quite hit the nail on the head. Rather, when we say that we want our lives to have meaning, I think that either (a) we want our lives, or elements of our lives, to have importance in an objective and ultimate sense (ie, THE meaning OF life), or (b) we want the personal experience which constitutes our lives, including the structure of that experience as it unfolds across time, to be subjectively satisfying, if not optimal (meaning IN life).

These are two very different things. In the former, we're looking for some sort of ultimate foundation that serves as a source of importance for what we do. Here are some of Eagleton's insights which are relevant to this:

- Maybe parts of lives have ultimate importance, but not our lives as a whole. Or, just the opposite, maybe no parts of our lives can have ultimate importance except in the context of our whole lives, or maybe even some larger context.

- Our biological and sociocultural context may have something to do with what gives our lives ultimate importance.

- Whatever gives our lives ultimate importance may require our active participation in order to be realized.

- There may be something which gives our lives ultimate importance, but maybe few or no people have ever known what it is, or maybe no one will ever know. And maybe our not knowing is even necessary in some way.

- We may already be living our lives in accordance with what gives them ultimate importance without even knowing it.

- Our lives may simply have no ultimate importance. However, as long as we don't know for sure, we can't deny the possibility and there remains hope.

The bottom line is that we don't know what could give our lives ultimate importance, and we can't even imagine anything that would do so, but we can't rule out the possibility. The contemporary scientific picture offers nothing which would do that job, and of course some scientists claim that science actually argues against the possibility of our lives having ultimate importance. And if you survey the thought of the world's religions and philosophies, both past and present, you'll find that they offer a variety of metaphysical pictures and give direction on how to live for the sake of instrumental goals like connecting with God, receiving God's help in this life, going to heaven (and avoiding hell), escaping from the cycle of reincarnation, avoiding suffering, etc., but none of these instrumental goals relates to anything which is ultimately and objectively important either.

Rather, these instrumental goals relate to the second aspect of meaning I described above, which is to improve the subjective experience of our lives, either in this life, a future life (or lives), or both, so it's hard to avoid the unpleasant conclusion that the motive is ultimately selfish. Eagleton offers many useful insights here as well:

- In the pre-modern world, largely unquestioned social norms defined how life was to be lived. Deviance could lead to being ostracized, banished, or executed, so adherence to social norms improved one's life experience, or at least avoided worsening it.

- In the modern world, with the (sometimes disillusioning) breakdown of social norms and increase in relativism, many people have concluded that they are themselves responsible for choosing thoughts and actions which improve the quality of their life experience. The choices made can vary widely from one person to another, and can range from thinking small (postmodernism) to thinking big (ideologies and grand narratives). Some people will find the plurality of potential choices disorienting and undesirable, whereas others will relish such pluralism.

- We often can't predict the effect of our choices of thoughts and actions, so there can be unintended positive and negative effects of those choices with respect to our life experience.

- Somewhat reflexively, the experience of reflecting on how to improve one's life experience can itself be a positive life experience (this is related to the paradoxical idea that the meaning of life is to search for the meaning of life), but such reflection can also go too far and thus be counterproductive.

- We can view our mortality as enhancing our life experience because it makes the time we have more precious, but we're also justified in lamenting what our mortality takes away from us.

- Happiness relates to the quality of our lives over an extended timeframe (possibly our entire lives), whereas pleasure relates to more fleeting moments of quality of life.

- Since capital is only a means to an end, endless accumulation of capital isn't a good formula to improve the quality of one's life experience. At some point, enough is enough.

- One formula to improve the quality of one's life is to be virtuous and creatively realize one's particular faculties in a social context. This gives love a central role.

- The quality of our life experience may not satisfy us, even if we try our best to improve it. Circumstances and luck play a role here.

Overall, I benefitted greatly from this book, but that's partly because of the considerable effort I had to make to grapple with the book. So I can recommend this book, but be prepared to do some grappling yourself.

Simply Splendid. Still digesting this in an Aquinan sort of way. I haven't laughed at a book like this since G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Which I may say has some unseen connection to this book for me.

I recall in one of the Star Trek films that Kirk and Bones were singing the song, `Row, Row, Row Your Boat.' Spock was puzzled at the idea presented in the simple song. He concluded, quite logically, that the song was wrong - life is not a dream. But then, what is life? What is the meaning of life? Eagleton's small text doesn't purport to give a once-and-for-all definitive answer to this question (for the shortest answer to this, perhaps one must go to `The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe' or one-syllable meditative objects of some Eastern practices). This book is part of the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press, but the copy of the book that I possess is actually under a different cover (the internal text is the same).

Eagleton begins with a preface that starts, `Anyone rash enough to write a book with a title like this had better brace themselves for a postbag crammed with letters in erratic handwriting enclosing complex symbolic diagrams.' One of the difficulties, of course, is that this is an area where philosophers and theologians overlap with every armchair (and pub stool) analyst. And there may be as much validity in the workings of the later as in the former. One of the advantages that the philosopher might have over the less academic is that the structure of the questions that follow from this are perhaps more apropos. The meaning of life proceeds quickly to the question of why there is anything at all, and this gets into the realm of understanding being vs. nothingness, but then it also gets into the linguistic areas that the twentieth century in particular is noted for - Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, and others whose thinking has had profound effect on the twentieth century (even if they themselves were not twentieth century figures) are discussed. Eagleton freely allows that `philosophers seem to have been reduced to no more than white-coated technicians of language.' Of course, language is how we make meaning and interpret meaning even a la many non-verbal communicative forms, but we then get into a chicken-and-egg dance about which comes first.

Eagleton states that we often have recourse to the question of the meaning of life when things that we take for granted break down - it has been common through history that in times of crisis, religious sentiment and practice increases, as people look for something stable. And yet our very way of trying to make meaning in the modern to postmodern world is unstable. Looking at works like those of Samuel Beckett, Eagleton describes `the evaporation of stable meaning', but then goes on to look at literature, art, music, and other aspects of culture as well as philosophy to try to construct something back into existence. Love and Happiness, in the end, are key components to Eagleton's prescription for making an answer to the question of the meaning of life, and this is something that is done both individually and communally, in tension with each other.

This book is a short one - the pages are small format (large index-card sized) and there are fewer than 200 pages at that, and thus the book could be read in one or two sittings quite easily. However, this is just to take in the text; for real analysis of the questions, one will want to ponder it for a longer time. Eagleton comments in a footnote that he saw a film entitled `The Meaning of Life' (not the Monty Python one; however, he did see that one, too) at Salt Lake City, as a production by the Mormon Church, but noted that he only really remembered that the duration of the film was a mere four minutes long. In the world of philosophy texts, Eagleton's brief text might be the literary equivalent of such a brief encounter with the question, and yet if one takes the time to ponder the question, one can realise that this is but one step along the way toward understanding life in the deepest way.

This book will not have all the answers, but it can help one to formulate the questions.

The "Meaning of Life" is one of those age-old questions that people of all walks of life have been pondering for at least as long as we know that people have been pondering anything. There have been many approaches to this question, and the three most prominent ones have come from philosophy, theology/religion, and literature. In this very short introduction Terry Eagelton sets out to explore all those approaches to this perennial big question. Even thought his approach is not strictly speaking philosophical, the preponderance of ideas about the meaning of life have been taken from various philosophers. Eagelton is very good at problematizing the whole "What is the meaning of life?" question. At the surface it appears like any other question to which we can give an objective answer (like "How far is Bloomington from Indianapolis?"), but at closer inspection almost every single word in that question can be very ambiguous. Eagleton's approach is to explore those ambiguities, and show how they had been addressed by other thinkers and writers. The book has a feel and style of a very long polemical essay, and an overall a very enjoyable one at that. My only big objection to it is that no attempts have been made to incorporate any of the ideas about the meaning of life, human happiness and personal integrity that have come out of the modern Psychological research. It has been known for quite a while that creating a coherent narrative of one's life is an essential part of the psychological theories of self. Other than that, the book is extremely well written and despite some grim ideas and passages an overall enjoyable and worthwhile read.

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.

Other reviewers have made excellent presentations of the book's main theses, so I won't elaborate on this. I'll just digress a bit.

Eagleton's mind is virtually saturated with literary culture (understandably so) & Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy. Also, not infrequently, he makes funny and common- sense remarks. So, I wonder how he missed a rather banal "solution"- one among many- that "meaning" is a state of being, not a proposition, sentence or a carefully crafted argument. Along some verses from Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"- not an exact quote- "Energy is the only life and is from the Body/ Energy is Eternal Delight". When you're overflowing with vitality, focused or not- who cares about "meaning" ? Fullness of being is realization & all ratiocinations just fall off, unimportant, superfluous, boring ... In short, interpretation of "meaning" is intimately connected to physiology (or suprasensory realization of Self, if you happen to be a mystic or gnostic or something like this).

It is noticeable that the author is rather innocent re sciences, so his analysis of Post-modernism, while valuable, is something a scientist with philosophical bend would dismiss as a storm in a teacup. Reality IS. It's not just a projection of relativism-prone minds of neurotic litterati. If you work in the fields of astrophysics, particle physics, genetic decoding, neuroscience ... you know that some processes, ideas, notions,... ARE and some- ARE NOT. No amount of verbiage collected from Schopenhauer or Freud can change this. You hypothesize, but the world "out there" will confirm or refute you. In extreme instances, Reality will squash you to the ground. Don't mess with it. This is not meant to be a critique of Eagleton's presentation of Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre or Schopenhauer, but an observation that these philosophers are in many ways obsolete, at least in areas of reflection that have in past hundred or so years come within the dominion of exact sciences. This leads to the third objection- why dissect more secular or "quirky" metaphysicians (Freud is a metaphysician, if anything) & leave overtly religious ones (all traditional speculative religious philosophers like Plato, Erigena, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Chuang Zi, Confucius, Abhinavagupta, ..) or modern mythographers and historians of religious ideas (Miguel Unamuno, William James, Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Moshe Idel, Joseph Campbell, ..). If Aristotle- why not Plato ? If Freud- why not Jung ? Anyway, both are as "unscientific" as possible. So, why insist that Marx, Freud or Wittgenstein are more relevant than, say, Jaspers, Jung or Rene Girard ?

The fourth objection boils down to my uneasiness with author's inconsistency. While dispensing with "grand narratives", he ends with a toned down & diluted version of the grandest. Aristotle is just a cover (and not a very persuasive one) for affirmation of old, grand Christian injunctions: "God is Love" & "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (Aristotle, ecology, utilitarianism, ..are nothing more than tactical diversions).

At the end, a down to earth & innocent question on my part: why not stress that various people have differing capacities for "meaning-of-life" questions ? Pascal was terrified by a vast and Godless universe; other scientists are just curious about its workings & don't give a hoot about anything associated with "meaning". Some people cannot live without transcendence (Dostoevsky, Whitman); others are perfectly satisfied with introspective, but essentially secular & this-worldly existence in our spatio-temporal world (Montaigne). The great insights from Parmenides and Plato are that we live an illusory existence; others, mostly of rationalist non- metaphysical cast of mind have relegated these assertions to mystical lunacy. Eagleton could have done his job better had he not spent a vast amount of energy on a few, selected but dated 19th & early 20th century philosophers- but have given an overview of various, non-overlapping "meaning-of-life" "answers". And yes, Wittgenstein was essentially wrong. Metaphysics is not a disease of language, but the evidence that man is the animal with in-built striving for transcendence.

Still, this book was a fun to read & I recommend it.