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• Wednesday, June 13, 2007 09:06 PM

  but... but...

  To Eagleton, postmodernism, with its repudiation of inherent or "deep" meanings, is, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, a variation on the same theme. To get back to the question driving his book, the motto "Life is what you make it" may sound banal, but it reeks of a similar hubris. It "reflects an individualist bias common to the modern age" by insisting that we all find our own meaning of life in a personal, private realm. But if meaning has its own roots in language, then claiming this, Eagleton argues, is like claiming that everyone gets to make up their own personal meanings for words.

  But this one is so easy to rebut! Oh dear.

  No one person's life is identical to any other person's life, therefore the word "life" (in the sense in which it's used in the phrase 'meaning of life') by definition means different things when applied to two different lives. This is like saying that two apples can't taste different because both are apples. What is the taste of an apple? Depends on the apple. What is the meaning of life? Depends on the life!

  And then this:

  The need to do these things, to live this life, he says, arises not from God but from the nature of human beings themselves. We can't get away from it; it's our essence. We are social animals who thrive on love; not just love for our kith and kin, but the kind of love, called "agape" -- caring for our fellow man -- that is "a practice or a way of life, not a state of mind." The more this type of love circulates in our community, the more meaning we find in life itself and the happier we become.

  Any first year philosophy student can knock this down in ten minutes. Agape love makes people happy. But why should people be happy? You can't get from "is" to "should be" without some sort of perspective, which brings us right back to postmodernism, which is exactly what he was supposedly arguing against in the first place. Saying, "I am human, therefore I think humans should be happy," would be valid, but in that instance the value judgment is located within the speaker, not the universe itself.

  I'm hoping the review does a poor job of representing the book, because these are high school level arguments.

  —Allie_ Read Allie_'s other letters
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