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
