The Meaning of Life
200pp, Oxford, £10.99
The fad for pocket wisdom continues. You want Shakespeare in half an hour? Or a brief history of the planet? Or humanity in a hundred words? We have it right here. Now along comes Terry Eagleton's answer to the Bertrand Russell taxi driver question - "Always wanted to ask you, Bert, what's it all about?" And in just 200 (very small) pages.
So what is it all about? Since I regarded Eagleton as the Dave Spart of critical gobbledegook, I approached the book with trepidation. All I can say is that wonders never cease. This is popular philosophy by an amateur in the best sense of the word, a man who clearly loves the stuff and writes plain English.
Eagleton sets off at a cracking pace. God is passed at the first bend. Offering Him up as the meaning of life is either tautological - God is the meaning of life because the meaning of life is God - or it suggests an antiquated architect "widely considered to have a somewhat twisted sense of humour". With that out of the way by page four, we can link hands with Wittgenstein and approach life as "wonderment". Modern science can tell us, or hope to tell us, how things work. "What is mystical," said the great man, "is not how the world is but that it is." But that, as Eagleton remarks, "is really just a ponderous Teutonic way of saying, Wow!" It does not constitute a meaning. So on we go.
Space is inevitably given to linguistic analysis, with much brow-furrowing over the dreaded, "It all depends what you mean by meaning". Can we, as Nietzsche asked in tackling the question, ever break free of the cultural shackles of our grammar? Eagleton himself risks seduction into the professional philosopher's bugbear of rephrasing the question rather than supplying the answer. At the end of that road "it is even conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life is part of the meaning of life".
The search soon moves into the author's favourite territory of modernism. He points to the damage that science has done to religion's answer to his question, so that for most people the answer is personal rather than collective. Until recently, "the idea that there could be meaning to your life which was peculiar to you, quite different from the meaning of other people's lives, would not have mustered many votes". Nowadays we feel the need to "own" the question. Life is our question and our answer. That is the gulf that divides Odysseus from Hamlet. Since the great soliloquy, to be or not to be has become my business, not yours.
At this point Eagleton's argument lurches briefly towards silliness. Ask most people what life means to them, or perhaps what "gives it meaning", and the answer will be a melange of family, love, home, sport, nationalism and, again, religion. Those who once saw their purpose on Earth as fixed by the sages and myths of tribe and community are today adrift on a sea of modernist diversity. "A great many educated people," writes Eagleton, "believe that life is an accidental evolutionary phenomenon that has no more intrinsic meaning than a fluctuation in the breeze or a rumble in the gut ... If our lives have meaning it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready equipped."
As a signed-up neo-Darwinian (and as we are already on page 55), I was inclined to say amen and wonder why we needed any more book. If Eagleton goes a bundle on Arsenal and I on Welsh mountains, so be it. If one person votes for family values, another for world democracy and another for a hundred virgins in heaven, fine. Just keep them apart and pray to the great god, tolerance. Life is but a walking shadow, but it is my shadow and the brief hour on stage is mine.
Eagleton is rightly unhappy with this. He returns for another dip into the meanings of meaning (with help from Macbeth's "brief candle" speech) and concludes that there are many. He clearly has scores to settle with a number of "postmodernists" eager to strip meaning of meaning. First into the lists are such pessimists as Schopenhauer, Freud, Conrad and Ibsen, writers who view meaning questions as blank canvases on which to paint their own gloomy view of the world. Any old faith will do to infuse life with significance, for "on this view the meaning of life is a question of the style in which you live it, if not of its actual content".
Schopenhauer viewed "the whole human project as a ghastly mistake that should have been called off long ago". Yet Eagleton requires the answer to his question to confront such nihilism. Its "squalid and farcical" view of human existence forces us "to struggle hard" to make his own slowly apparent optimism seem anything more than anodyne consolation.
By now I am hanging on by my finger tips. As a cultural historian Eagleton has made a thing of typologies. He can strut the campus juggling modernism, postmodernism, neo-structuralism and pseudo-reductionism until girls swoon and review editors queue for autographs. Such intellectual "Spanish practices" are what turned me away from university work. They seemed distinctions without meaning, created by an intellectual oligarchy to keep the plebs at bay and obscuring what should be expressed in plain English.
If Eagleton says A is modernist and B a postmodernist it may impress the higher education funding council, but I suspect it is just a matter of dates. Hence when I am told, during a search for the meaning of life, that Samuel Beckett's plays are "stranded somewhere between modernist and postmodernist cases", I am lost. I am equally lost in such allegedly post-modern sentences as: "Everything in this post-Auschwitz world is ambiguous and indeterminate." Surely it is the opposite. Eagleton claims that the writing of Beckett and his ilk tends to treat all meaning questions as superfluous. But that requires us to regard Beckett as philosophically substantial. I do not. I regard him as a brilliant stage craftsman but no more "meaningful" than the Dadaists. Like Magritte's This Is Not a Pipe or Sartre's clever contradictions, his works are wordplays, surrealisms. They do not take our argument forward, any more than does Conrad's portrayal of life in Lord Jim as "a devastating practical joke".
Yet this is no more than a passing attack of philosopher-itis. In what is now becoming a philosophical whodunit, Eagleton is clearly going somewhere. He points out that while meaning need not imply a supreme author, it must imply some sort of linguistic constancy. Bluntly, it must mean something.
"The cosmos may not have been consciously designed and is almost certainly not struggling to say anything, but it is not just chaotic either." On the contrary, "its underlying laws reveal a beauty, a symmetry and economy which are capable of moving scientists to tears."
To Eagleton, just as the meaning in a poem is a conversation between the words on the page and the mind of the reader, so answers to questions about life must convey significance beyond the realm of the individual. The exercise is not solipsistic. The search for meaning is not something people do in a vacuum, but "in dialogue with a determinate world whose laws they did not invent ... If their meanings are to be valid, they must respect this world's grain and texture." Strip down the question as much as you like, but you must give an answer that signifies to others. This must be so, and is a forceful answer to all purveyors of meaninglessness.
Finally Eagleton lines up his candidates, like Alan Sugar in The Apprentice, to be fired or hired on sight. He firmly rejects liberal individualism as nihilistic, the mere assertion that the meaning of life is me. "At the point of its supreme triumph, [individualism] is struck empty." The liberation of the self from the priesthood of religion or whatever becomes a black hole into which all meaning is sucked and destroyed. It will not do to assert that "for me the meaning of my life lies in asphyxiating dormice". We are now well down the road with EO Wilson and the cultural geneticists: "The idea that I can determine the meaning of my own life is an illusion." I am a creature of the species Homo sapiens and I cannot escape it.
Eagleton finally plumps for happiness, currently enjoying a revival among economists, philosophers and even politicians. But he points out with Aristotle that happiness comes in many and devious forms. What of the happiness of the tyrant? Happiness has long lived in sin with power and money, on neither of which Eagleton is keen. (His passing putdown of capitalism is nonsense.) But he is undaunted. Happiness disengaged from selfishness and allied to the Greek love for humanity (agape) passes muster, at times almost lyrically so.
The meaning of life is thus not "what you make of it". It is not a passing pleasure, which humans share with animals. Indeed it is not even an answer to a question, but rather "a matter of living life in a certain way". It is an ethical construct and involves treating others as you want them to treat you, caring for those close to you, helping strangers, thinking long term.
The meaning of life to Eagleton is like a jazz band, individuals engaged on a collective endeavour in pursuit of happiness through the mutuality of love.
I already hear liberals crying that Eagleton's collectivism is ethically loaded, that he cannot slip so easily from the shackles of the individual id. But he makes his case well and with a light touch. Besides, my meaning of life embraces freedom of opinion. I stand convinced.
· Simon Jenkins's Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts is published by Allen Lane