John Seargeant, 61 Fordington Rd, London N6 4TH When someone asked ‘why is life so hard?’ Groucho Marx replied, ‘compared to what?’ So questions about the meaning of life can appear to be meaningless, like lines from Monty Python which are so fanciful that they are funny. But not to Terry Eagleton. He made his name during the Sixties as an interpreter of Marx – Karl, not Groucho – and although he abandoned the Catholic faith of his early years he still takes religion and the questions it raises seriously.
Terry has been something of a rebel all his life. In the aftermath of the Ecumenical Council of Vatican II (196265) he edited a radical magazine, Slant, as a 24 year-old Fellow of Jesus College Oxford. A book, The New Left Church in 1967, proposed that Christian faith involved commitment to imaginative culture and the political left.
By the early 1970s, however, it became clear that the reforms proposed by Vatican II were far too widereaching. The Church authorities, notably the Roman Curia, went into reverse gear when they saw that political and critical thinking must eventually lead to conclusions more radical than they could reasonably be expected to countenance. Soon most of the initiatives (and the opportunities) were lost. It is clear, though, that in The Meaning of Life Terry Eagleton has returned to many of the major themes he had developed in the 1960s (minus the notion of a sacramental community presented as a model for the Kingdom of God). This does raise the question of what Terry was meaning to achieve by reworking his ideas into a small book in the Very Short Introduction series. He himself confesses that he offered the title to OUP when they asked for a contribution and ‘there was a very long silence while they wondered whether I was serious’.
Yet on the way to taking stock of what life could mean, Terry suggests that the question has become much more pressing with the decline of religion and the dawn of the modern age. The book is also, I think, an attempt to move cultural theory into a close engagement with modern society at a time when there is an overabundance of New Age guides and Louise B. Hay-style manuals of affirmation of the self at all costs. This last is itself part of a process that Terry traces as a product of modernity where ‘books with titles like Metaphysics for Merchant Bankers were eagerly devoured’. The only question here might be whether the intellectual desert that produces this meaning-of-life industry would actually smother books of the Very Short Introduction genre: philosophy without much seriousness or commitment to thinking.
On the other hand, although Terry denies on page one that he is a philosopher, his speedy journey through literature and philosophy does take up all the usual suspects – including difficult characters like Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Derrida – and is able to sum up their ideas succinctly. He explains that because of language, we humans are capable of objectifying our lives in a way that other animals cannot. So language has become both intensely problematic for us and the source of a lot of questions that have to be tidied up.
Later in the journey, Terry also examines and discards a number of candidates for the meaning of life: power, wealth and desire. He prefers happiness, only a more virtuous form than just pleasure, and love which is the means to make other people happy. And this, as the Marxist in him points out, re-introduces a political dimension. The good life is one established in the dialectic between the individual and society. The allegory that he offers is that of a jazz session wherein each member of the band improvises but does so with a sensitivity to the other members so as to produce a complex harmony.
Similarly, the task of politics would be to create this sort of spontaneous community on a wider scale.
Of course, practical politics famously will have little to do with philosophy of any sort. Bryan Magee found this out during the 1960s when he encountered the ‘football fan’ attitude to party affiliation and the fact that politicians are not really interested in reflective ideology.
In a similar fashion, we could also say that questions about ‘meaning’ in life only ever seem to occur to intellectuals.
But the book has an inalienable quality of humour, wit and an engaging style that always makes Terry Eagleton so easy to read. His political ideas, too, although they may now seem to have been superseded by global capitalism may even become a shelter, a place of refuge in the storm of contemporary history. To this end, Terry has always moved and he has contributed more than most to its fulfilment. Read this intelligent book and you will see why.
Michael Morton is the Catholic parish priest of StWinefrides Presbytery in Sandbach,Cheshire and a former SoF trustee.