What is the meaning of life?

Terry Eagleton, the man who introduced millions to literary theory, tells us why George Bush is the ultimate postmodernist, how torture is wrong, and what "meaning" really means.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Philosophy, Reviews, Book reviews

June 14, 2007 | The British academic Terry Eagleton has the unusual -- possibly unique -- distinction of having written a bestselling book about late-20th-century literary theory. The book, "Literary Theory: An Introduction," is reputed to have sold 1 million copies, chiefly on the strength of Eagleton's extraordinarily lucid prose. He may well be the only writer capable of making some of that stuff comprehensible to the intelligent lay reader, and so the news that he has tackled a bigger problem -- the meaning of life -- in a book of a mere 185 pages shouldn't raise any eyebrows. If anyone can pull it off, it's probably Eagleton.

"The Meaning of Life" is more a long essay than a full-length book, and its publishers probably hope it'll hit the same sweet spot as Harry G. Frankfurt's surprise success, "On Bullshit," another slim volume of intellectual nonfiction. That's unlikely; "The Meaning of Life" intends to challenge its readers -- not, like the Frankfurt, to provide them with the opportunity to sneer at other people (because who reads "On Bullshit" thinking it's about them?). Eagleton, unsurprisingly, has written an elegant, literate, cogent consideration of a maddeningly slippery topic, one whose conclusions run contrary to conventional wisdom, especially in this country. To be sure, "The Meaning of Life" is also occasionally waspish, condescending and even a little unfair, though always enjoyably so. It's saucy too; it takes cheek to suggest that George W. Bush is the ultimate postmodernist.

Two primary tributaries feed into the body of Eagleton's thought: Marxism and the tradition of Catholic intellectualism in which he was educated as a boy. Although no longer a member of the church, Eagleton retains much respect for religious ideals, a respect that lies behind his recent, scalding review of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" in the London Review of Books. These two influences might seem incompatible today, but in the 1970s, when Eagleton was coming up as a working-class boy turned Oxbridge scholar, liberation theology and other exhilarating currents of social change combining faith with socialism were in the air. However much his work may have changed on the surface since then, Eagleton's underlying values remain much the same.

In essence, "The Meaning of Life" is a brief against postmodernism, a movement Eagleton calls "superficially radical" but "secretly in cahoots with a Western ideology for which what matters is the meanings we stamp on the world and others for our own ends." Them's fightin' words in an academic climate where accusing someone of wanting to oppress anyone (let alone the whole world) is the ultimate insult. But before Eagleton delivers this coup de grâce, he takes his readers on a short, illuminating journey through the knottier aspects of the question "What is the meaning of life?"

Being a literary critic, Eagleton must interrogate nearly every word in that question -- beginning with "is," in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Bill Clinton's famous testimony before Ken Starr. A presiding spirit here is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, as Eagleton explains, was highly suspicious of such questions and many other philosophical preoccupations he dismissed as mere "language games." "I am not myself a philosopher," Eagleton remarks on the first page of "The Meaning of Life," "a fact of which I am sure some of my reviewers will point out in any case." Not being a philosopher myself, I won't attempt to evaluate his interpretation of Wittgenstein's ideas -- some of the most difficult and gnomic in an inherently hard-to-crack field. It may not matter much; Wittgenstein mostly just pops in now and then, like the ghosts in "Topper," to offer a few words of advice that might actually be jokes, and vice versa.

The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" used to be fairly clear to most Western thinkers: The meaning of life was God, and his will, and his plan for the human beings who lived the lives he gave to them. Only when the bedrock faith in that particular answer began to erode did the question become a source of anxiety and even torment. The movement called modernism followed from, as Eagleton puts it, "the belief that human existence is contingent -- that it has no ground, goal, direction or necessity, and that our species might quite easily never have emerged on the planet. This possibility then hollows out our actual presence, casting across it the perpetual shadow of loss and death. ... There is no unimpeachable foundation to what we are and what we do."

For those who don't believe in God, or at least in a God with a plan for the human race, the question "What is the meaning of life?" seethes with puzzles. Can existence mean anything at all without someone (i.e., God) to mean it? Those famous 100 monkeys, pounding away on 100 typewriters for eternity, might eventually produce the exact text of "Hamlet," but they won't mean "Hamlet" the way that the man who intentionally wrote it did.

Eagleton brings contemporary linguistics-based theory to bear on the idea of "meaning," pointing out that it takes several forms. I might mean (that is, intend) to say the word "poisson" ("fish") to a French waiter, but I might actually say "poison," which in turn means (that is, signifies) something else entirely. ("Poison" has the same meaning in French, actually, as it has in English.) There's what I intend to signify or communicate when I speak, and then there's what my words mean in a larger system, such as a language. For linguists, the first kind of meaning is an "act" and the second is a "structure."

If this distinction is making your eyes cross or is conjuring up ancient, bleary memories of trying to fathom Ferdinand de Saussure at a 3:30 p.m. study section, take heart. Eagleton has more in mind than just a technical discussion of the workings of language. But language is central to any discussion of the meaning of life, because language is what meaning is made of. Meaning is a human artifact, Eagleton points out; material objects -- a tomato, a hammer, ink on a page in the shape of the letter "I" -- have no meaning in and of themselves, only the meanings we human beings assign to them, and the main tool we use to make those meanings is language.

Next page: Is life what you make it?