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Books

The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton

Ernest Dempsey finds out the meaning of life from Terry Eagleton.

Taking up a topic as philosophically huge as ‘the meaning of life’ is a daring task, not only because the question may sound rather pretentious in an age of techno-commercial preoccupation, but also because of the vastness and vagueness of the concepts of both ‘meaning’ and ‘life’. The vagueness makes it hard to know where to start, and the vastness clouds one’s certainty how and where to wrap it up. And yet, not inquiring into the meaning of life at all would feel like an intellectual swindle, with the associated burden of some nameless guilt – much like in Kafka’s The Trial. Taking the question up as a serious philosophical inquiry, one of the world’s leading contemporary academic critics, Terry Eagleton of the University of Lancaster, attempts to ‘pressure’ conventional wisdom on the topic.

Eagleton begins rather carefully (and, for the anxious reader, caringly) by pointing to the general public conception that the meaning-of-life question is entertained either by the crazed or the comic (he wittily hopes he’s reckoned among the former, not the latter).

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