In these cases ‘What is the meaning of it all?’ is not a question but a cry of despair from those who feel washed up personally, socially, historically or politically.ĭespite Eagleton’s metaphysical pretensions and meanderings, which constitute the greater part of his book, Raising questions about ‘The Meaning of Life’ outside of metaphysics is usually an expression of that moment when an individual finds their life so messed up they wonder if it has any meaning.

That said, it is hard not to see this book as a sophistical device to do the opposite of what we normally expect from Eagleton, namely, to provide a vehicle for the intrusion of a political perspective into a seemingly philosophical enquiry. When you have been such a wide-ranging writer and have, at the end of your formal academic career, written a particular account of the story and meaning of a life, your own, perhaps there is nothing is left to produce except a more abstract study of the meaning of all lives.

He even wrote a lively and entertaining autobiography, The Gatekeeper.(2) His great strength was his ability to see in the academic and intellectual world the hidden hand of politics. The metaphor acutely points to the fact that Eagleton has lost his political way.Ī prolific author, Eagleton has written original and seminal works on literature, ideology, and postmodernism. But it is our own inability to envision more than this spontaneous self-expression that explains its appeal. There is something charming in this metaphor of working creatively with others especially as it is something done entirely for its own sake. When there is no collective political action it is still possible for individuals to make music together. This form of ‘collectivity’ is both a replacement for lost forms of radical social and political tradition and an offer of something seemingly positive in our atomised and individualised society a metaphor that has an ironic echo of Marx’s vision of a future communist society as ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. We discover at the end of this short book that the ‘meaning of life’, for Eagleton, can be expressed in the metaphor of a jamming jazz band. Posted on ‘The Meaning of Life’ by Terry Eagleton Oxford University Press, 2007.

The meaning of life by terry eagleton