Terry Eagleton - The Meaning of Life

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (Oxford)

I've been re-reading this in the absence of more recent matter as I await the outcome of the more pressing conundrums of the Cheltenham Festival of horse racing. It was published in 2007 and I was quick to snap it up as the follow-up to Prof. Eagleton's masterpiece, the fall-about hilarious The Gatekeeper, which I am still tempted to nominate as the best book I ever read.

Even though it is very short, I don't think I finished it in 2007. Either I tired of it or other things came along and overtook it in priority. I am similarly still halfway through a biography of Walter Sickert that is forever being outstripped by more crucial reading, but I'll find my way through the detail eventually.

I don't know why this was abandoned, though. It might not have the knockabout, music hall entertainment value of The Gatekeeper but it approaches its very ultimate question with all necessary methodology intact and provides a sort of beginner's guide to philosophy, taking apart every angle of the question, bringing in the biggest names, like Wittgenstein, Berkeley, Marx, Schopenhauer, Hegel et al, and shows that there might not have been any more profound answer to the question than what one had thought already. But it provides the comfort of knowing that even the cleverset people in the history of thought didn't know either and that football, fundamentalism, religious sects, and perhaps even God himself haven't provided satisfactory answers either.

Prof. Eagleton is exceptionally good at showing how language, which is the vehicle of philosophy, sets up so many of the traps that thought falls into. It is as if you chose a mode of transport, like a car or a horse, but it refuses to take you anywhere because it insists on being the subject of the journey rather than its conveyance. But he also cajoles the mulish conveyance by subtle circumvention.

Philosophy is either thrilling or pointless, and so, much like football, horse racing or poetry. In Terry Eagleton, it has an admirably accessible and entertaining apologist. I don't think I know the outcome of the book because I don't remember finishing it five years ago but I suspect I will finish it this time, be none the wiser as to the answer, but feel fulfilled in as far as I think I knew all of it but never had it quite so well explained to me before.