Meaning of Life by Eagleton Terry;

Author:Eagleton, Terry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The eclipse of meaning

Consider this brief exchange in Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters:

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?

TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

The snow is not a statement or a symbol. It is not, as far as we can tell, an allegory of the fact that the heavens are grieving. It is not trying to say anything, in the way that Philip Larkin imagines spring to be doing:

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said …

‘The Trees’

Yet to say ‘Look out there, it’s snowing’ already involves quite a few meanings. The snow is ‘meaningful’ in the sense of being part of an intelligible world, one organized and opened up by our language. It is not just some kind of freakish enigma. It would not be all that odd for someone who had never seen snow before to ask ‘What is the meaning of that?’ And though the snow is not a symbol of anything, it might well be seen as a signifier. It signifies, perhaps, that winter is coming on. As such, it belongs to a meteorological system powered by laws we can comprehend. This kind of meaning, we may note, is ‘inherent’ rather than ‘ascribed’: snow means that winter is coming on whatever we may happen to think it means. The fact that it is snowing can also be used as a signifier: in fact, Toozenbach is doing just this, pointing to the snow (ironically enough) as a sign of meaninglessness. Or someone might exclaim ‘Look at the snow – winter’s coming on! We’d better get started for Moscow’, which makes the snow a signifier within a human project, the basis of a message between individuals. In all these senses, snowing is not just snowing.

Perhaps Toozenbach is trying to suggest that the world is absurd. But ‘absurdity’ is a meaning, too. To cry ‘But that’s absurd!’ evokes some possibility of coherent sense-making. Absurdity makes sense only in contrast to such sense-making, rather as doubting makes sense only against a background of certainty. To someone who claims that life is meaningless, we can always retort: ‘What is it that is meaningless?’; and his response to that has to be couched in terms of meanings. People who ask after the meaning of life are usually asking what all its various situations add up to; and since to identify a situation itself involves meaning, they cannot be lamenting that there is no meaning at all. Just as it is an empty gesture to doubt everything, so it is hard to see how life could be absurd all the way through. It might be pointless all the way through, in the sense of lacking a given end or purpose; but it cannot be absurd in the sense of being nonsensical unless there is some logic by which we can measure this fact.

Perhaps, however, life seems absurd in contrast to a meaning which it used to have, or which you believe it used to have.

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