"This is a brief, ambitious, and satisfying book.
But is there an answer? And do we even really know what we're asking? Terry Eagleton takes a stimulating and quirky look at this most compelling of questions: at the answers explored in philosophy and literature at the crisis of meaning in modern times and suggests his own solution to how we might rediscover meaning in our lives. We have all wondered about the meaning 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. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living-that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. 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. He suggests, however, that it is only in modern times that the question has become problematic. 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.Įagleton 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.
The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams.
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