I have read a few books by Rorty, Davidson, and watched the movie on Derrida and I can't help but think that Ms. Miller and probably Mr. Eagleton are constructing a straw postmodernist. The stereotype is that in postmodernism things are "all relative dude" and so that "anything goes dude". But I see it more a matter of Kant's principle that you can't really know things-in-themselves. To me, the essence of postmodern investigation can be expressed in a famous line from the movie M*A*S*H in which Radar O'Reilly says to Colonel Blake “General Hammond, sir, has just been informed about the identity of Captain Jones. His ringer’s recognized our ringer.”

I have read several of Eagleton's articles on literature and find them quite illuminating and worthwhile, but I don't think he really proves anything here, at least on the basis of what Ms. Miller reports. I wonder what they would think of George Lakoff. Say what you want, but it takes a certain amount of cajones to assert that mathematics is derived from the basic metaphors we use as human beings. ( I probably am not representing him well, I haven’t read

"Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being", but know of it.)

This is a meaningless question, so it's also a meaningless answer. It seems from this review that Eagleton basically rails against uselessly abstruse philosophy and then creates some more.

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.

It seems to me that Mr Map has managed to completely misread both Eagleton and Laura Miller on the issue of "absolute" meaning. The point is emphatically not that Eagleton feels that something cannot have meaning (that, for instance, torture cannot be wrong) absent some divine will or dictum. Rather, what he is saying--and Miller makes this quite clear--is that the post-modernist impulse to relativize absolutely everything is, ironically, born of the same conviction which drives certain religious fundamentalists to assert that the meaning of a thing depends on perspective which is not of this world.

To put it another way: If I am the sort of person who feels that all is relative and up for grabs because nothing can finally be founded upon the will or intention of some celestial authority, and you are the sort of person who believes that everything which is right or wrong is so because of the will or intention of some celestial authority, then the two of us have more in common than we might like to think. Ivan and Alyosha were both brothers Karamazov, in other words.

The middle ground which Eagleton seems to want to occupy looks something like this: While "The" meaning of life might vary to some extent from place to place and from time to time, what is inescapable and constant is the simple fact that people everywhere and always will be concerned about life's meaning. Mr Map's letter is actually pretty good evidence of this. He begins with a mini-rant about how only biological imperatives "really" matter, and yet somehow still finishes up with several assertions about morality which have little to do with simple biology and a lot to do with the "golden rule," which--as he correctly points out--is not the sole property of any one religious tradition.

If I might recommend a bit of further reading: Anybody interested in this kind of thing might also want to have a look at the excellent After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre, another Marxist with a background in theology.

... is to end. Good-bye, Mr. Anderson.

Sorry, couldn't resist throwing in a little Matrix Revolutions. :)

What a load of baloney.

Life has no "meaning". Life only has 'purpose'. And the purpose of life is for gametes to use zygotes to create more gametes. If you insist that life must have meaning you are more than welcome to ascribe any meaning to it you like. Suck it up and be a Bokononist about it.

Tiger got to hunt.
Bird got to fly.
Man got to sit and wonder 'why why why?'

Tiger got to sleep.
Bird got to land.
Man got to tell himself he understand.

Eagleton's religious immorality is extremely dangerous. If one supposes that there is no natural morality and that morality only comes from "God" - or, more correctly, one's interpretation of "God's will", which has been used to "justify" the most heinous crimes imaginable. Which amounts to no morality at all.

It is easily shown that religion has only a tangential relationship to morality anyway. Keep in mind that Jesus preferred the kindly unbelieving Samaritan to the selfish self-righteous 'believer', and that his pet peeve was the religious hypocrite. Got plenty of those. But very few actual 'Christians'. So much for any religious basis to morality.

The only true morality is that Do Unto Others thing that Jesus paraphrased from the Pentateuch, whose authors got it from the Zoroastrians, but is really a feature of nearly all religions, including those which do not actually profess any belief in deities. Therefore, that morality does not necessarily have anything to do with "God".

If you are a truly moral person you do the Right Thing

because it is the right thing to do - not because some invisible man in the sky tells you to do it. How 'moral' can you be if your morality requires that your actions be micromanaged by mythical supernatural beings? Are you really so lame that you're incapable of being moral unless some Santa Claus (he knows when you've been bad or good) has you under constant surveillance?

Whatever. You can always prefer to just Do What You Wish, as mandated by Auryn. Just remember the consequences, and recall that Bastian almost didn't make it back.