Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life
Geras, Norman
ATTEMPTING TO answer the question "What is the meaning of life?" over the space of a short essay might be considered an enterprise worth avoiding. The chances of falling flat on your face or...
...a genuine question...
...Eagleton locates this goal in human happiness...
...They may be a possibility of our natures, but they are not a universal necessity of it...
...If the meaning of life is read, consequently, from the nature of our species, equality and world socialism cannot be integral to the meaning of life...
...Think of Shakespeare...
...His books include The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust and Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind...
...Eagleton's derivation of happiness, as a central purpose of human existence, from the nature of the human species is a compelling one...
...Persuasive in itself, it is vitiated by Eagleton's attempt to derive more from his premises than they will yield...
...The meaning of life, accordingly, could be an interpretation of human existence that, cutting across the plurality of cultural or individual meanings by which people try to answer questions about their own lives, is based on something common there, shared by humans as members of the same natural species...
...MY SUMMARY of the argument of The Meaning of Life is now done...
...Even if we leave aside the possibility of a most effective, aesthetically creative and pleasing small collectivity of musicians among whom relations are not fully equal, the band as a whole is a tiny unit...
...He says, similarly, that the superficial radicalism of the constructivist approach "is in fact DISSENT / Fall 2007 103 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...
...Eagleton's conclusion is one he thinks to have derived from universal features of human nature and existence, albeit "lived out very differently by different cultures...
...I have no sympathy for the intellectual tendency Eagleton is criticizing here nor any desire to defend it...
...I will summarize how Eagleton gets to this answer, before saying what I think is right, but also what I think is wrong, with it...
...Happiness, in the sense he intends it, is not reducible merely to subjective inner contentment...
...But in treating happiness more broadly as overall wellbeing, Eagleton sidesteps this danger, embracing a whole ethical conception of a life well lived, one that can combine contentment with fidelity to the virtues, values, and commitments to others that thinking human beings try to respect, for all that these virtues, values, and commitments will be marked by differences of culture and individual preference...
...Same nature...
...But, of course, the most relevant case is not the jazz group but rather communities of living: tribes, neighborhoods, ethnic groups, nations, countries, states...
...The chances of falling flat on your face or coming up emptyhanded, of not having anything either interesting or persuasive to say, must be high...
...His blog is at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog DISSENT / Fall 2007 105...
...However, the main problem with that argument also comes, in its way, from an unwarranted intrusion of the author's politics into the philosophical reasoning on the meaning of life...
...Is "What is the meaning of life...
...The relations between abstract philosophy and good or bad politics may sometimes be drawn as tightly as this, but mostly they can't be...
...for the former springs from "the free flourishing of one's powers and capacities," and love is "the same condition viewed in relational terms...
...Eagleton wraps up this idea, proposed by him for the meaning of life, in the image of a jazz band improvising, with its members expressing themselves at once freely and cooperatively...
...Such evidence shows the existence of enduring human needs and concerns, forms of joy and suffering, satisfactions, miseries, and griefs that people share despite the cultural differences between them...
...He could as well have compared the constructivist cultural critic to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, telling that country, while he could, what it was like...
...Every writer is located within his or her time and bound to be influenced by that location...
...Yet, meanings are not exhausted by those which are intended...
...Does human nature, just in itself, dictate equality and nonexploitative reciprocity among all the jazz bands of the world...
...These two points do not vitiate the book's central argument...
...however, to lumber its adherents so, as being imperialists in thought if not by name, is merely silly...
...But it doesn't require that we live with all the others that there are, a reciprocity on a global scale...
...Although I don't have the space to argue the point here, there is much evidence, historical and sociological, to confound those forms of skepticism, and drive them into absurdity and self-contradiction...
...Whatever is the case within the band, there are thousands of bands...
...Reciprocity within it does not entail any wider reciprocity linking this jazz band to the very many others...
...And to establish their desirability other premises than human nature are required...
...Still, taken broadly, happiness (as well-being) and love may be seen as a single ideal of life...
...They could be excised without any loss to it...
...The pursuit of happiness has proved compatible with a plurality of human communities entertaining, one to another, a great variety of relations, of mutual ignorance, indifference, inequality, antagonism, exploitation even...
...It is hard to see how this can be said to be in violation of human nature when that nature has not been shaped by the global extension of the human species...
...The same goes for relations of equality and inequality...
...Because it was his example, I have suggested, from the case of those improvising jazz musicians, why reciprocity, though found everywhere in the human world, can exist in limited "pockets...
...Happiness, so understood, encompasses love: love of those others whose needs one serves while they serve one's own—even though, understood more narrowly, happiness and love can conflict, as when one person must sacrifice all her time caring for a disabled other or when one person dies for a just cause (a form, Eagleton says, of love...
...There could have been a danger had he construed happiness in the narrow sense he expressly rejects—as merely subjective contentment...
...It is the meaning of life as encapsulated in Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Aristotelian well-being as typified by the Thelonious Monk Quartet (though these examples are mine rather than the author's...
...His analogies strike a posture for the benefit of a leftist readership he expects to be receptive to them...
...I turn to two incidental points of criticism before going on to express the main reservation I have about this conclusion...
...No—meanings in such a case are given by interpretations that are possible: possible not haphazardly or by a perverse act of interpretative will, but rather in the light of structures of meaning existing beyond the individual interpreter and that have been humanly created...
...The Meaning of Life begins with some preliminary philosophical spadework...
...The attempt to give that conception a natural basis is not at all fanciful, other than to those who reject every so-called "foundation" and to the partisans of an extreme culturalism...
...And then there are also meanings, as we can call them, in what has not been humanly created, meanings in the sense of nonrandom, intelligible patterns in things, as, for example, a snowfall or hurricane may be taken to mean something within a meteorological system, or a cardiograph may give us significant information about a person's health...
...necessary nonreciprocity...
...Rejecting—with good reason —a purely "constructivist" approach to problems of meaning, insisting on a real world that imposes limits on the plausibility of the meanings we adopt, Eagleton thinks it worth throwing in (perhaps just for topicality) that in relation to the external world constructivists are "like the Americans in Iraq...
...As Shakespeare's words can carry meanings he did not intend as well as meanings he did, so there may be a meaning behind, or within, the plurality of different life-meanings that people have chosen for themselves, a common goal that captures life's essential significance for humankind...
...If so, is it a question whose answer we can know...
...NORMAN GERAS is professor emeritus in politics at the University of Manchester, U.K...
...And there are also questions for which, even if we do know what would count as an answer, we have no means of discovering what 102 DISSENT / Fall 2007 position in cricket...
...0 N TERRORISM itself—and just in passing —Eagleton has a brief discussion that presumes that terrorism must be caused by political injustice, and arrives at the same time at a conclusion that shows this presumption not to be universally valid...
...It is in our nature as human beings to live with others, and living with others is certainly a precondition of the pursuit of happiness in the broad meaning Eagleton intends...
...How so...
...Because in both cases they "tell it what it is like...
...It is Aristotelian well-being, "a state of the soul" attained by virtue and a practical way of life shared with others and involving reciprocity...
...Each achieves his or her self-realization while aiding the self-realization of the others...
...Every human being belongs to one or some of these, and without them no one—save for the weird exception already mentioned—can have a human existence...
...I say that as someone committed to those same egalitarian values...
...and although it is like asking about the point or the purpose of life, it is not—except for religious believers—the same kind of question as asking about the purpose for which life was intended, since there is no agency that could have intended it for anything...
...He succeeds in his stated aim of handling the question both "lightly and lucidly," the range of philosophical and literary reference he draws on sustains the reader's interest, and the answer he comes around to offering, though put forward only in the modest terms that "one could do worse" than to propose it as the meaning of life, strikes this reviewer as having a lot going for it...
...And this much further, too: the inclusion of love and strong reciprocity cannot be avoided, since a life lived purely as an isolated individual, though it may happen as a weird exception, cannot be generalized across any large population of human beings...
...Via the companion values of happiness and love, linked together in an ideal and practice of reciprocity, he reads as part of the meaning of life universalist egalitarian norms that dictate compassion and rule out selfishness, injustice, exploitation...
...But this does not lead him back to his starting assumption in order to reexamine it...
...Or, instead of a Western ideology, Eagleton could have offered the thinking of the Khmer Rouge, or of today's Islamist terrorists, as exemplifying the idea that "what matters is the meanings we stamp on the world and others for our own ends...
...But in asking about the meaning of life, one is operating at a very high level of generality, and so the intrusion of localized political judgements relating to today and yesterday can seem incongruous...
...no, its absence has become part of the meaning of life, even 104 DISSENT / Fall 2007 though it is a form of injustice that has been part of most known societies...
...There are plainly other things that people value as well as happiness in this sense, among them integrity, identity, love of others, loyalty—for which they will sometimes forgo, for shorter or longer periods, simple contentment, and for which they will brave difficulties, hardships, even severe suffering...
...Once all this is accepted, however, Eagleton's attempt to derive from human-natural premises the egalitarian values of his socialist outlook—this, just to remind readers, under the heading "the meaning of life"—is a step too far...
...Reciprocity, therefore, as part of the meaning of life, yes...
...But between such communities there are many types of relationship and not all of them are of reciprocity, not all of them are of equality, not all of them are compassionate, altruistic, nonexploitative...
...I would suggest, on the contrary, that while the nature of our species, its common needs and purposes, is an indispensable starting point for any systematic ethics, and for any political theory that is to amount to anything, and while one can locate for either the one or the other a broadly shared purpose of well-being, yet to get from that human nature to an egalitarianism of the left such as will universally rule out relations of exploitation and inequality, you need the support of additional moral premises...
...EAGLETON'S CHOSEN image of the jazz band improvising may be used to indicate what is wrong with his argument...
...So far so good for Eagleton's case...
...For, allowing that destructive forces may achieve an autonomy from their putative originating cause, that they may take on "a lethal momentum of their own," Eagleton thereby acknowledges the space for a self-propelled—for instance, doctrinally motivated—terrorist politics...
...This is what Terry Eagleton has undertaken, however, and he has done a pretty good job...
...As a simple thought experiment, imagine another planet out of reach of ours forever, but exactly like Earth in every material respect including being home to a large population of humans, with a nature exactly like ours...
...My difference with Eagleton is not over the values themselves but over whether they can be got from universal traits of human nature—so that, for example, exploitation is not just something that people on the left fight against...
...For there are utterances that have the linguistic form of questions but are really pseudo-questions, since it isn't clear what would meaningfully count as an answer to them...
...it does not have to extend everywhere outward, to come up against no limiting boundaries...
...but they do not illuminate the intellectual tendency he is criticizing or say anything worthwhile about its political character...
...There are relations here, indeed, of mutual ignorance —I mean ignorance by those of one community of the very existence of the other, never mind concern for the other community's needs...
...How," Eagleton asks, "could any poet of such prodigal imaginative fertility keep in mind all the possible connotations" of his own writing...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
