‘How come Being?’ is a supreme example of a pseudo-question [...] For them, it is really just a ponderous Teutonic way of saying ‘Wow!’

Nietzsche, however, believed neither in mega-entities nor in everyday ones. He thought the very idea of there being distinct objects, such as God or gooseberries, was just a reifying effect of language.

The philosopher must simply wage a ceaseless, Canute-like war against them – a battle which Wittgenstein sees as a kind of linguistic therapy, and which Derrida terms ‘deconstruction’.

‘ontological anxiety’: namely, the feeling (sometimes accompanied by a particularly intense hangover) that one is a pointless, superfluous being

In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it.

For St Augustine, to attend to objects in themselves reflects a carnal, fallen mode of existence; instead, we must read them semiotically, as pointing beyond themselves to the divine text which is the universe

By the early decades of the twentieth century, this culture, with its attendant ontological anxieties, had taken the form of modernism.

Yet this was true only of the work of art’s form. Since its content inevitably reflected the reified world around it, it could provide no lasting source of redemption.

Michael Palin as an unctuous Anglican vicar in the Monty Python film, ‘The Meaning of Life’.

Like a bombastic speech, life appears to be meaningful but is actually vapid.