Letters to the Editor
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Yin AND Yang
Of the possible answers tendered so far to "What is the meaning of life?", the Golden Rule is closest to the correct one. It misses the essence, too, however - not because the GR is not good and true and useful, but because it isn't an answer to life, but rather a strategy for living.
I clicked through to Eagleton's review of Dawkins' screed on religion. His critique of Dawkins' arguments could be applied just as well to Eagleton's own. Both authors have feet of clay and choose to wrestle with opponents of straw. The context for the meaning of life is surely much broader than just the meaning of human life. Dawkins knows this when not jousting with windmills, but Eagleton appears not to. Perhaps to be an apologist for Marx requires first being an apologist for humanity.
The best answer to the narrowness of Dawkins' caricature of religion is to be found in Dawkins' transcendent "Ancestor's Tale". And the best rejoinder to Eagleton's circumscribed purlieu might be found in his own "How to Read a Poem" - for instance in his analysis of Auden's poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts", beginning:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;Meaning arises not in semantics, but in the synthesis of a personal worldview from disparate, often conflicting, facts and conjecture. This synthesis is aided by casting our nets widely and by reading not just deeply, but broadly. Science AND poetry AND philosophy.
The meaning of life is in the apposite opposite. The tautology of an oxymoron.