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Terry Eagleton: The Meaning of Life

I’m not a great fan of Terry Eagleton. I think it must have started when I read his Literary Theory: an Introduction back in the mid-1980s - a time when it was more or less a compulsory read for students - and soon got fed up both with literary theory (in those days we didn’t yet call it simply “theory”) and Eagleton’s portentous yet, as it seemed to me, empty political implications. And I’ve not read anything else of his that’s made me want to change my mind although, as my forking out on this book proves, I’m still waiting and willing to be impressed. Still waiting after reading it, too. I’m told, by someone who knows better than me, that his literary criticism, on Shakespeare for example, is seriously worth reading. It must be a lot better than this.

Philosophers have an infuriating habit of analysing questions rather than answering them, and this is how I want to begin.

 

Yes, this is the infuriating way Terry Eagleton begins The Meaning of Life. He quite rightly disowns the title of philosopher (although as the quotation shows, he’s too ready to confuse philosophy itself with the study of philosophy – isn’t it professors and students who tend to analyse, and the likes of Nietzsche, Kant and Plato who attempt answers?) But he does indeed proceed to analyse the question of life’s meaning - at great length, in a flippant and, for the reader at least, unprofitable way - long before belatedly attempting any answer. Am I implying that he puts off the business of the book too long? I am, and he does.

And the waiting is tiresome. Rather than ever sticking to an argument, Eagleton jumps around apparently at random, never really pursuing an argument. Why, for instance, is his brief discussion of tragedy (which is actually quite interesting: he’d have been better off simply continuing with it) followed abruptly by a bit about Heidegger? And even at the level of the sentence, Eagleton’s thoughts seem not to flow in an explicable way. It’s not clear why, for instance, this passage

Heidegger argues in his work Being and Time that human are distinguished from other beings by their capacity to put their own existence into question. They are the creatures for whom existence as such… is problematic…. And this is not least because they are aware… that their existence is finite. Human beings are perhaps the only animals who live in the perpetual shadow of death

is followed by the remark that

All the same, there is something distinctively “modern” about Heidegger’s case.

One thought just doesn’t follow from another. As Eagleton himself puts it later in the book,

I understood his words; but I didn’t understand his words.

He sweeps through history with the broadest brush you could imagine - a sweeping-sized brush in fact rather than any size of paintbrush. And he’s constantly displaying a toe-curlingly ‘playful’ wit. Take this:

We can speak of something called the ‘human condition’, whereas it is unlikely that tortoises brood under the shelter of their shells on the condition of being a tortoise. Tortoises are in this sense remarkably similar to postmodernists, to whom the idea of the human condition is equally alien.

The tone of the whole book is insufferably arch, in fact. But it’s never actually funny:
if that’s what you’re looking for, you’d be better off with Monty Python’s Meaning of Life than Eagleton’s. That way, you’d avoid Eagleton’s cringe-makingly pedestrian explanation of the “42” joke in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The archness, the smug unfunny playfulness, are I regret to say not the only unattractive features here. I don’t like the implied politics of this book, either. There’s an unexplained digression into the subject of terrorism, which begins

It is surely clear that the only ultimate solution to terrorism is political justice.

a statement thick with the implication that IRA and Islamist terrorism (both of which he mentions in terms a few lines later) were responses to injustice, and so in a sense justified. Eagleton skips quickly away from this discussion, but not without leaving the clear implication that British and American sins are the “remediable causes” of terrorism. I think there’s a conscious portmanteau leftism at work here, a desire to be associated with the lowest-common-denominator, reflex beliefs of the broad intellectual left – to be thought of as a “radical” in fact, a word which is used once or twice in the book with the clear implication of virtue and wisdom. When suggesting later on in the book that human situations can have inherent meaning, not merely subjective meaning superimposed on them by observers, the example Eagleton picks is “an instance of racism”:

Seeing meanings such as ‘prejudiced’ and ‘discriminatory’ as ‘inherent’ in the situation is just a pretentious way of saying that the situation really is racist. If we do not see this – if we think, for example, that ‘racism’ is just a set of subjective meanings we impose on the bare facts of what is happening – then we are not seeing the situation for what it is.

I think the example is picked deliberately so that the idea of ‘inherent meaning’ gets a sympathetic hearing in this passage. Why not use as an example “an instance of” terrorism? Might the answer be that the ‘radical’ intellectuals Eagleton is speaking to would find it much harder to accept the idea that something like a suicide bombing in Israel can be spoken of as ‘inherently’ terrorist, rather than being interpreted as such by ‘the West’?

The book is also confused. At times Eagleton seems to assume that questions about the meaning of life relate to the meaning of individual lives, rather than human life in general; at others, he distinguishes clearly between the two and seems to be speaking about the larger question. It’s contradictory, too: at one point he says it’s

conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life is part of the meaning of life, rather as not counting the words I am uttering when I give an after-dinner speech helps me to give an after-dinner speech. Perhaps life is kept going by our ignorance of its fundamental meaning, as capitalism is for Karl Marx.

but only eighteen small pages later he’s saying that

It is not true… that you’re only happy if you don’t know [that you are doing fine]. For this naively Romantic view, self-reflection is always fatally stymieing… But knowing how things stand with you is a necessary condition for knowing whether to try and change them… Knowledge is an aid to happiness rather than its antagonist.

He criticises an argument of Julian Baggini’s, that the existence of self-sacrificing altruism suggests that personal happiness alone is not the ultimate end of life, only to echo it twenty-odd pages later:

Someone who spends their life caring for a severely disabled child sacrifices their happiness to their love...

Eagleton writes annoyingly, too, repeatedly using the pseudish catch-phrase ‘to be sure’, and driving the reader mad with it by the end. And he says that modernism produced

some of the most eminent literary art the West has ever witnessed

a phrase that might have been written by Alan Partridge.

If the occasional writing lapses weren’t bad enough, there are also one or two out-and-out howlers in this book that I can’t resist mentioning, even when my man’s already down. Eagleton seems to think the evolution of humanity was ‘random and accidental’, a pretty rich thing to suggest coming from someone who’s attempted to dismiss Richard Dawkins on the grounds that he doesn’t know enough theology. But he’s far from being alone in that misconception, so I won’t beat him up about it. Nor will I go into the trivial point about the Mary Celeste. But does Eagleton really think Sigmund Freud was German? He says so, at pages 82 and 86. A quite astonishing, gobsmacking mistake, difficult to make really, if you’ve ever read anything about Freud; an academic blunder straight from the pages of a David Lodge novel. But then, in spite of his continual references to continental philosophers, the way he jokes about Schopenhauer’s name does make you wonder if he has much sympathy at all, actually, with human life on the other side of the channel.

One of the hallmarks of the contemporary humanities is the lack of confidence one detects in some writers, teachers and students these days that thinking is in any way useful. They often seem to believe, secretly, that genuine intellectual achievement is impossible, at least outside hard science, so that thinking for most of them is really just an entertainment. There is no wisdom to be discovered, no broader horizon to be glimpsed as a reward for a difficult climb: the laggards remaining in the pub at sea-level see as far as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, up on his romantic perch. I think this book embodies exactly that attitude. Eagleton simply plays with the question of life’s meaning as a jejune sort of intellectual game; he seems too embarrassed or jaded to think of contributing any answers beyond the utterly banal or the ludicrous:

Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly.

It is true, he claims,

that the idea of the philosopher as a guide to the meaning of life is a popular misconception

but is it? Or it is this book that’s misconceived? If a real philosopher had written it – someone more seriously engaged in the subject, I mean, and more interested in possible answers - we might have gained some insight. But what chance have you got if instead, the author is a philosophating English professor, relying on his name alone to knock up an quick potboiler? Not much.