Beyond Human Nature

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 coming up empty-handed, of not having anything either interesting or persuasive to say, must be high. This is what Terry Eagleton has undertaken, however, and he has done a pretty good job. 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.

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. Persuasive in itself, it is vitiated by Eagleton’s attempt to derive more from his premises than they will yield.

The Meaning of Life begins with some preliminary philosophical spadework. Is “What is the meaning of life?” a genuine question? If so, is it a question whose answer we can know? For there are utte...