The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for
satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited
Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious
if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising
answer.
Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx
and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to
the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only
in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of
tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of
meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from
football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or
fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people
believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic
meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage
to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton
probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and
concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning
of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a
certain way. It is not
metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but
what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance
and intensity of life.
Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a
leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but
with a very serious end in mind.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and
style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of
life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer,
they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central
problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud,
quantum theory to Islam.
