The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) | 
| Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 44442
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.4
ISBN: 0199532176
Dewey Decimal Number: 128
EAN: 9780199532179
ASIN: 0199532176
Publication Date: June 30, 2008
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Eagleton's populism July 13, 2008
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
Do not wate your time; Eagleton is the most simplistic thinker, if you can call him a "thinker." The book has nothing serious; all one-line arguments meant to please a public audience. A code word for wanting to make money, which serious academics cannot and should not do; If you want to think hard about life, read Being and Time by Heidegger. Eagleton will never even come close to a thinker like that. But of course Heidegger will require some work, unlike Eagleton'e work, which is superficial.
 Succinct and stimulating book December 18, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Vintage Eagleton October 9, 2007
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
Way more than bovine contentment... September 30, 2007
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
"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.
Eagleton's Witty Examination on the Most Over Asked Question in Freshman Philosophy Courses June 19, 2007
15 out of 23 found this review helpful
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 basic elements of the need to define the life worth living-- the rise of the need for metaphysical certainity as expressed in religion, philosophy and political thought, and the latter day "eclipse of meaning" as modernism and postmodernism seem to fragment phenomena into a incoherent multi-verse that could be be authoritatively unified under banner of general noble purpose. The thrust of the book, we find, is that seeking the answer to what The Meaning of Life is is less an attempt to find that patch of wise and fertile soil on which one may advance their lives with a given purpose, but that that it is a way of life. Far from being static, the genuine quest for coherence, meaning, a means by which to measure one's best intentions and making them effectively congruent with their actions, is in itself the purpose of being alive and productive, above and beyond the biological imperative. The species is quite capable of much nastiness and unmistakeable evil, but we are likewise capable of great works of art , compassion, charity. That capacity, after the psuedo systems of philosophical side streets have been blocked off, the sweetness of new age thought turns into a fouling stench, and the apocalyptic ravings of religious extremes reveal themselves as useless to the question to what one does in this life that's useful, Eagleton considers the open mind interested in the ongoing need for the good to be the thing which we must prize over all.
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