Re: A book for Peter Brooks

Peter H.M. Brooks <Peter.H.M.Brooks@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mar 30, 9:23 pm, pas...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Ashby) wrote:
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,203
0253,00.html>

The Meaning of Life is Happiness.

I'm afraid that I can't see the text using that URL. Could you please
be wicked and paste the content here.

I am grateful for your posting a suggestion for me personally here,
but I don't think that I'm unique. I also don't think that I am a cast-
iron utilitarian.

Though I am certainly by inclintation an anarchist, I think that it
would be more accurate to say that I'm an optimistic epicurean.

Indeed, 'twas your epicurean leanings I was thinking about. Anyway Let
Wickedness Begin:

Happiness and all that jazz


Simon Jenkins is converted by Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life

Saturday March 10, 2007
The Guardian


The Meaning of Life
by Terry Eagleton
200pp, Oxford, £10.99
The fad for pocket wisdom continues. You want Shakespeare in half an
hour? Or a brief history of the planet? Or humanity in a hundred words?
We have it right here. Now along comes Terry Eagleton's answer to the
Bertrand Russell taxi driver question - "Always wanted to ask you, Bert,
what's it all about?" And in just 200 (very small) pages.


So what is it all about? Since I regarded Eagleton as the Dave Spart of
critical gobbledegook, I approached the book with trepidation. All I can
say is that wonders never cease. This is popular philosophy by an
amateur in the best sense of the word, a man who clearly loves the stuff
and writes plain English.
Eagleton sets off at a cracking pace. God is passed at the first bend.
Offering Him up as the meaning of life is either tautological - God is
the meaning of life because the meaning of life is God - or it suggests
an antiquated architect "widely considered to have a somewhat twisted
sense of humour". With that out of the way by page four, we can link
hands with Wittgenstein and approach life as "wonderment". Modern
science can tell us, or hope to tell us, how things work. "What is
mystical," said the great man, "is not how the world is but that it is."
But that, as Eagleton remarks, "is really just a ponderous Teutonic way
of saying, Wow!" It does not constitute a meaning. So on we go.
Space is inevitably given to linguistic analysis, with much
brow-furrowing over the dreaded, "It all depends what you mean by
meaning". Can we, as Nietzsche asked in tackling the question, ever
break free of the cultural shackles of our grammar? Eagleton himself
risks seduction into the professional philosopher's bugbear of
rephrasing the question rather than supplying the answer. At the end of
that road "it is even conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life
is part of the meaning of life".
The search soon moves into the author's favourite territory of
modernism. He points to the damage that science has done to religion's
answer to his question, so that for most people the answer is personal
rather than collective. Until recently, "the idea that there could be
meaning to your life which was peculiar to you, quite different from the
meaning of other people's lives, would not have mustered many votes".
Nowadays we feel the need to "own" the question. Life is our question
and our answer. That is the gulf that divides Odysseus from Hamlet.
Since the great soliloquy, to be or not to be has become my business,
not yours.
At this point Eagleton's argument lurches briefly towards silliness. Ask
most people what life means to them, or perhaps what "gives it meaning",
and the answer will be a melange of family, love, home, sport,
nationalism and, again, religion. Those who once saw their purpose on
Earth as fixed by the sages and myths of tribe and community are today
adrift on a sea of modernist diversity. "A great many educated people,"
writes Eagleton, "believe that life is an accidental evolutionary
phenomenon that has no more intrinsic meaning than a fluctuation in the
breeze or a rumble in the gut ... If our lives have meaning it is
something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which
they come ready equipped."
As a signed-up neo-Darwinian (and as we are already on page 55), I was
inclined to say amen and wonder why we needed any more book. If Eagleton
goes a bundle on Arsenal and I on Welsh mountains, so be it. If one
person votes for family values, another for world democracy and another
for a hundred virgins in heaven, fine. Just keep them apart and pray to
the great god, tolerance. Life is but a walking shadow, but it is my
shadow and the brief hour on stage is mine.
Eagleton is rightly unhappy with this. He returns for another dip into
the meanings of meaning (with help from Macbeth's "brief candle" speech)
and concludes that there are many. He clearly has scores to settle with
a number of "postmodernists" eager to strip meaning of meaning. First
into the lists are such pessimists as Schopenhauer, Freud, Conrad and
Ibsen, writers who view meaning questions as blank canvases on which to
paint their own gloomy view of the world. Any old faith will do to
infuse life with significance, for "on this view the meaning of life is
a question of the style in which you live it, if not of its actual
content".
Schopenhauer viewed "the whole human project as a ghastly mistake that
should have been called off long ago". Yet Eagleton requires the answer
to his question to confront such nihilism. Its "squalid and farcical"
view of human existence forces us "to struggle hard" to make his own
slowly apparent optimism seem anything more than anodyne consolation.
By now I am hanging on by my finger tips. As a cultural historian
Eagleton has made a thing of typologies. He can strut the campus
juggling modernism, postmodernism, neo-structuralism and
pseudo-reductionism until girls swoon and review editors queue for
autographs. Such intellectual "Spanish practices" are what turned me
away from university work. They seemed distinctions without meaning,
created by an intellectual oligarchy to keep the plebs at bay and
obscuring what should be expressed in plain English.
If Eagleton says A is modernist and B a postmodernist it may impress the
higher education funding council, but I suspect it is just a matter of
dates. Hence when I am told, during a search for the meaning of life,
that Samuel Beckett's plays are "stranded somewhere between modernist
and postmodernist cases", I am lost. I am equally lost in such allegedly
post-modern sentences as: "Everything in this post-Auschwitz world is
ambiguous and indeterminate." Surely it is the opposite. Eagleton claims
that the writing of Beckett and his ilk tends to treat all meaning
questions as superfluous. But that requires us to regard Beckett as
philosophically substantial. I do not. I regard him as a brilliant stage
craftsman but no more "meaningful" than the Dadaists. Like Magritte's
This Is Not a Pipe or Sartre's clever contradictions, his works are
wordplays, surrealisms. They do not take our argument forward, any more
than does Conrad's portrayal of life in Lord Jim as "a devastating
practical joke".
Yet this is no more than a passing attack of philosopher-itis. In what
is now becoming a philosophical whodunit, Eagleton is clearly going
somewhere. He points out that while meaning need not imply a supreme
author, it must imply some sort of linguistic constancy. Bluntly, it
must mean something.
"The cosmos may not have been consciously designed and is almost
certainly not struggling to say anything, but it is not just chaotic
either." On the contrary, "its underlying laws reveal a beauty, a
symmetry and economy which are capable of moving scientists to tears."
To Eagleton, just as the meaning in a poem is a conversation between the
words on the page and the mind of the reader, so answers to questions
about life must convey significance beyond the realm of the individual.
The exercise is not solipsistic. The search for meaning is not something
people do in a vacuum, but "in dialogue with a determinate world whose
laws they did not invent ... If their meanings are to be valid, they
must respect this world's grain and texture." Strip down the question as
much as you like, but you must give an answer that signifies to others.
This must be so, and is a forceful answer to all purveyors of
meaninglessness.
Finally Eagleton lines up his candidates, like Alan Sugar in The
Apprentice, to be fired or hired on sight. He firmly rejects liberal
individualism as nihilistic, the mere assertion that the meaning of life
is me. "At the point of its supreme triumph, [individualism] is struck
empty." The liberation of the self from the priesthood of religion or
whatever becomes a black hole into which all meaning is sucked and
destroyed. It will not do to assert that "for me the meaning of my life
lies in asphyxiating dormice". We are now well down the road with EO
Wilson and the cultural geneticists: "The idea that I can determine the
meaning of my own life is an illusion." I am a creature of the species
Homo sapiens and I cannot escape it.
Eagleton finally plumps for happiness, currently enjoying a revival
among economists, philosophers and even politicians. But he points out
with Aristotle that happiness comes in many and devious forms. What of
the happiness of the tyrant? Happiness has long lived in sin with power
and money, on neither of which Eagleton is keen. (His passing putdown of
capitalism is nonsense.) But he is undaunted. Happiness disengaged from
selfishness and allied to the Greek love for humanity (agape) passes
muster, at times almost lyrically so.
The meaning of life is thus not "what you make of it". It is not a
passing pleasure, which humans share with animals. Indeed it is not even
an answer to a question, but rather "a matter of living life in a
certain way". It is an ethical construct and involves treating others as
you want them to treat you, caring for those close to you, helping
strangers, thinking long term.
The meaning of life to Eagleton is like a jazz band, individuals engaged
on a collective endeavour in pursuit of happiness through the mutuality
of love.
I already hear liberals crying that Eagleton's collectivism is ethically
loaded, that he cannot slip so easily from the shackles of the
individual id. But he makes his case well and with a light touch.
Besides, my meaning of life embraces freedom of opinion. I stand
convinced.
· Simon Jenkins's Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts is
published by Allen Lane

/End Wickedness.

Peter
--
Add my middle initial to email me. It has become attached to a country
www.the-brights.net
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Way forward for West is religion of non-religion
    ... a substance as crucial to human life as oxygen ... The bombs were made of meaning. ... > of the West can offer me with its expensive gewgaws, watered-down religions, ... > The bombers are lying to themselves, just as we are, but they are ...
    (soc.culture.iranian)
  • Way forward for West is religion of non-religion
    ... The bombs were made of meaning. ... my life is not futile and my death is not ... of the West can offer me with its expensive gewgaws, watered-down religions, ... The bombers are lying to themselves, just as we are, but they are ...
    (soc.culture.iranian)
  • Re: Feeling Blue
    ... I interpret "meaning of life" so say that life has a reason, as if life must exist for some purpose. ... I read what I read, I apologize if it's not what you intend, or what Palin intends, or what anyone intends. ... I just worry about people who claim they only teach scientific principles and then goes out and surmises 'ala vile commentary' from an acceptance speech that only the derfus tried to pile on with the looney crowd of the neurotic tribe of the lost as their soul mates. ...
    (rec.martial-arts)
  • Re: Excellent article - gameplay vs glitz etc
    ... and Hitler was a christian who ended up torching europe (although ... >It's not a pretty world where meaning is only in the things we can ... temptations put before him in this short miserable life, ... >Emperor Augustine said "Faith does not proceed from ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg)
  • A book for Peter Brooks
    ... The Meaning of Life is Happiness. ... It has become attached to a country ...
    (uk.philosophy.humanism)
Loading