Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life
Oxford, 2007

Also from this book: The postmodernist tortoise

Existentialism & Postmodernists

One reason why modernists like Checkhov are so preoccupied with the possibility of meaninglessness is that modernism is old enough to remember a time when there was still meaning in plenty, or at least so the rumour has it. Meaning was around recently enough for Checkhov, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, and their colleagues to feel stunned and dispirited by its draining away. The typical modernist work of art is still haunted by the memory of an orderly universe, and so is nostalgic enough to feel the eclipse of meaning as an anguish, a scandal, an intolerable deprivation. This is why such works so often turn around a central absence, some cryptic gap or silence which marks the spot through which sense-making has leaked away. •

Callow though postmodernist thought is on this question, there is one point on which it is surely suggestive. The nausea of a Jean-Paul Sartre or the tragic defiance of an Albert Camus, when confronted with a supposedly meaningless world, is really part of the problem to which it is a response. You are only likely to feel that the world is sickeningly pointless, as opposed to just plain old pointless, if you had inflated expectations of it in the first place. Camus and Sartre are, so to speak, old enough to recall a time when the world seemed meaningful; but if they believe that this was an illusion even then, what exactly has been lost by its disappearance? • The nihilist is just a disillusioned metaphysician. Angst is just the flip side of faith.

p.100-102

Aristotelian concept of happiness

Happiness is sometimes seen as a state of mind. But this is not how Aristotle regards it. ‘Well-being’, as we usually translate the term for happiness [the specific term Aristotle uses is ‘eudaimonia‘ —F.], is what we might call a state of soul, which for him involves not just an interior condition of being, but a disposition to behave in certain ways. As Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked, the best image of the soul is the body. If you want to observe someone’s ‘spirit’, look at what they do. Happiness for Aristotle is attained by virtue, and virtue is above all a social practice rather than an attitude of mind. Happiness is part of a practical way of life, not some private inner contentment. •

In the case of practical or Aristotelian happiness, however, the dangers of self-deception are … acute. For how are you to know that you are living your life virtously? Perhaps a friend or observer might be a more reliable judge here than you are yourself. In fact, Aristotle might have written his books on ethics partly to put people right about what really counted as happiness. He may have assumed that there was a good deal of false consciousness on the issue. Otherwise it is hard to know why he should recommend a goal which all men and women pursue in any case.

If happiness is a state of mind, then it is arguably dependent on one’s material circumstances. It is possible to claim that you can be happy despite those circumstances, a case not far from that of Spinoza or the ancient Stoics. Yet it is grossly improbable that you could feel content living in an unsanitary, overcrowded refugee camp, having just lost your children in some natural disaster. On an Aristotelian view of happiness, however, this is even more obvious. You cannot be brave, honourable, and generous unless you are a reasonably free agent living in the kind of political conditions which foster these virtues. This is why Aristotle sees ethics and politics as intimately bound together. The good life requires a particular kind of political state —in his view, one well supplied with slaves and subjected women, who do the donkey-work while you yourself sally forth to pursue the life of excellence.

p.141-143 & 150-151

The religious concept of happiness

The frantic jouissance of seizing the day, gathering rosebuds, downing an extra glass, and living like there’s no tomorrow is a desperate strategy for outwitting death, one which seeks pointlessly to cheat it rather than to make something of it. In its frenzied hedonism, it pays homage to death it tries to disavow. For all its bravura, it is a pessimistic view, whereas the acceptance of death is a realistic one.

Besides, to be conscious of our limits, which death throws into unforgiving relief, is also to be conscious of the way we are dependent on and constrained by others. When St. Paul comments that we die eery moment, part of what he has in mind is perhaps the fact that we can only live well by buckling the self to the needs of others, in a kind of little death, or petit mort. In doing so, we rehearse and prefigure that final self-abnegation which is death. In this way, death in the sense of a ceaseless dying to self is the source of the good life. If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is only because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love.

p.158

It is just this kind of bathos that Matthew sets up in his gospel, where he presents the Son of Man returning in glory surrounded by angels for the Last Judgement. Despite this off-the-peg cosmic imagery, salvation turns out to be an embarrasingly prosaic affair —a matter of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the imprisoned. It has no ‘religious’ glamour or aura whatsoever. Anybody can do it. The key to the universe turns out to be not some shattering revelation, but something which a lot of decent people do anyway, with scarcely a thought. Eternity lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love which built the stars. To live in this way is not just to have life, but to have it in abundance.

p.164-165

From an interview with William Faulkner by Jean Stein for the Paris Review
New York, 1956 

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol —cross or crescent or whatever— that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

Writers have always drawn, and always will draw, upon the allegories of moral consciousness, for the reason that the allegories are matchless—the three men in Moby Dick, who represent the trinity of conscience: knowing nothing, knowing but not caring, knowing and caring. The same trinity is represented in A Fable by the young Jewish pilot officer, who said, “This is terrible. I refuse to accept it, even if I must refuse life to do so”; the old French Quartermaster General, who said, “This is terrible, but we can weep and bear it”; and the English battalion runner, who said, “This is terrible, I’m going to do something about it.”

(Source: theparisreview.org)

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies
Yale University Press, 2009

In any event, Copernicus was heir to a long mathematical tradition and—if he cared to make use of it—a tradition of physical theory that had opened the way to new models of the cosmos. And Copernicus’s contribution, to be honest, must be reckoned rather small, in terms at least of scientific progress. Indeed, his treatise was not a work of science, in the modern sense, at all: it proposed nothing that might be tested, it did not prove its case either in terms of observation or theory, and it made few conspicuous advances upon Ptolemy’s calculations. It is true that Copernicus was perhaps the first theorist since Aristarchus of Samos (c. 110–c. 130 b.c.) who had dared so openly to place the sun at the center of the “universe,” but his reasoning was more suppositious than empirical. He also devised a model that dealt somewhat more economically than the Ptolemaic with certain ancient questions, such as why Mercury and Venus remain always near the sun. This very problem had already prompted various reflective souls over the centuries to depart in their cosmological reflections from strict geocentrism: in the fourth century b.c. Heracleides Ponticus apparently claimed that Mercury and Venus revolve not directly around the earth but rather around the sun; the fifth-century encyclopedist Martianus Capella concurred (not on his own authority: he was not a scientist); and, in the ninth century, John Scotus Eriugena seems to have added Mars and Jupiter to the list of planets circling the sun. After Copernicus, in fact, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) devised a system in which all the planets above revolve around the sun, while only the sun revolves directly around the earth; and by the time of Galileo’s trial, many of the greatest astronomers of the time (who were mostly to be found among the Jesuits) had come to conclude that the superterrestrial planets move in heliocentric orbits and had tended to adopt Tycho’s model (though they were willing to consider the Copernican, as an unproven hypothesis). 

Yet, for all the distinction Copernicus may deserve for having ventured a purely heliocentric description of the heavens, one should appreciate why his theory would not have been particularly compelling to all of his contemporaries. For one thing, the physical arguments he made were no great improvement upon those of the scholastics and so did no more than suggest that terrestrial movement is a conceptual possibility; and, for another thing, his mathematical model was wrong. Copernicus did manage to purge his system of equants, which his professors at the University of Krakow had taught him to disdain, but he still assumed, in good classical fashion, that heavenly revolutions must be circular (else they would not be “perfect”) and that the planets were fixed within separate spheres. Thus, in the end, he too was forced to resort to a system of epicycles—nearly fifty, in fact, including nine for the earth—with little appreciable advantage in predictive power over Ptolemy’s system. Tycho’s later model, it is arguable, is preferable as science, inasmuch as it better reconciles theory with the evidence. Tycho undertook (as Copernicus did not) minute investigations of the heavens, including an observation of a comet moving above the moon, where there were supposed to be only changeless planetary spheres. Moreover, one of the oldest objections to the idea of a moving earth was the absence of any observable alteration in the position of stars relative to one another (that is, “parallax” motion). Copernicus guessed that the distance between earth and the “sphere of the fixed stars” was far greater than was commonly assumed, but Tycho’s model offered a seemingly more plausible explanation. None of which detracts from Copernicus’s real achievements, such as they were, any more than it diminishes the far greater achievements of Galileo (1564–1642), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Isaac Newton (1643–1727); but it does mean, certainly, that Copernicus was not some isolated visionary gazing back through the centuries, across a vast chasm of Christian darkness, to the pale flickering flame of a forgotten Hellenistic wisdom.

p. 61-62 

Charles Bukowski, Shakespeare Bunu Asla Yapmazdı
Parantez Yayınları, 1999

Katedrali görmeye gittik, etkilenmediğimi söyleyemeyeceğim, mimari olağanüstüydü. Sonra içeri girdik, yağmur yağıyordu (dışarda) ve içerisi sidik kokuyordu ama dışarısından daha da şaşırtıcıydı, kat kat yükseliyordu ve nerdeyse on yedi minik Tanrılı şahsi koruma sistemimi bir kenara bırakıp Hristiyan Tanrıyı kabul etmek geldi içimden. Çünkü tek ve büyük bir Tanrı acılara, pisliğe, dehşete ve yılgıya daha iyi dayanmamı sağlayabilirdi, tek ve büyük bir Tanrı daha kolay ve makul olurdu, birlikte yaşadığım orospuları ve kadınları, öldürücü işleri, işsizliği, açlık ve delilik gecelerini daha iyi anlamama yardımcı olabilirdi, ve eminim o katedrale giren herkesin aklından bir şekilde Hristiyanlığı kabul etme düşüncesi geçmiştir, ama ben, inanırsam şeytanı alevler içinde tek başına bırakacağımı ve bunun bana yakışmayacağını düşündüm çünkü spor müsabakalarında zayıf olandan yana olmuşumdur hep, ruhani durumlarda da aynı hastalıktan mustariptim, çünkü düşüncelerimle hareket etmem, hislerim yönlendirir beni ve hislerim sakatlara, işkence görenlere, lanetlilere, yitiklere yönelir. Acıma duygusu ile değil ama, kardeşlik duygusu ile çünkü ben de onlardan biriyim; yitik, şaşkın, ahlaksız, önemsiz, korkulu ve ödlek; adaletsiz ve arada sırada müşfik. Hayat tarafından düzülmüştüm ve bunu bilmenin yararı olmuyordu, iyileştirmiyordu, sağlamlaştırıyordu sadece. Büyük Tanrı’nın çok fazla silahı vardı benim için. Fazla haklı ve güçlüydü. Ne bağışlanmak, ne kabul edilmek, ne de bulunmak istiyordum, daha az bir şeydi istediğim, çok fazla olmayan bir şey - ruhen ve bedenen ortalama bir kadın, bir araba, kalabileceğim bir yer, bira, yemek, mümkün olduğunca az diş ağrısı ve patlak lastik, ölene dek uzun hastalıklardan uzak olmak; berbat programlara rağmen bir televizyon bile fena olmazdı, bir köpekse çok hoş, ve birkaç dost, iyi tesisat ve boşlukları doldurmaya yetecek kadar içki ölüm gelene dek, ki (bir korkak için) çok az korkum vardı. Ölüm hiçbir şey ifade etmiyordu benim için. Arka arkaya gelen berbat şakalar dizisinin son şakasıydı. Ölen için sorun değildir ölüm. Bir filmdir, fark etmez. Ölenin yakınları için sorundur ölüm, ve sorunların büyüklüğü ölenin mirası ile doğru orantılıdır. Bir berduş öldüğünde tek sorun cesetten kurtulmaktır. Kimi insan büyük servetlere doğar, ama herkes meteliksiz ayrılır bu dünyadan. Sanatçının durumu farklıdır elbette: kimilerinin ölümsüzlük olarak tanımladığı bir koku kalır onlardan geriye, ve tabii ki sanatında ne kadar iyiyse bıraktığı koku da o denli güçlü olur - renk, ses, yazı, yontu ve diğer biçimlerde. Ama yaşayanların hatasıdır bu ölümsüzlük - sarılırlar bu kokuya, tapınarak. Sanatçının suçu değildir. Ölümsüzlüğe hayata ait olduğundan daha ait olmadığını bilir sanatçı - fırsatını kullanır ve sıranı savarsın, diğerleri denesinler şanslarını. Katedralde sıkılmaya başladığımı söyleyemeyeceğim ama düşüncelerim akmıştı ve akşamdan kalma ve uykuluydum (her zamanki gibi); gözlerimi açık tutmak çok zordur benim için, şikayetçi değilim ama - gerçekten her şeye bakmanın hata olduğunu düşünürüm, insanı kurutur - insan bakacağı şeyleri seçmeli, biraz sindirip kendi haline bırakmalı. İnsanlar temel matematiği anlamadıkları için aynı şeyin üstünde çok fazla durup heyecanlanırlar ve daha sonra o gece sevgililerini düzmeyi reddederler, veya çocuklarını döverler, veya hazımsızlık veya uykusuzluk veya gaz veya ülser çekerler, ekonomiden ve liderlerden ve yollardan nefret ederler - bütün makûl ve yararsız nefretler - ayak parmakları kaşınır, sırtları ağrır ve uykusuzluğun sonunda karabasan gelir. Bütün gün gözlerini açık tutup her şeye baktıkları için olur bütün bunlar. “Siktir olup çıkalım burdan”, dedim yanımdakilere ve çıktık. Köln bitmişti.

s.79-81