What is amusing about Deep Thought’s ‘42’ is not just the bathos of it

Marxists, for instance, are usually atheists, but they believe that human life, or what they would prefer to call ‘history’, has a meaning in the sense of displaying a significant pattern.

Only the obtusely self-deluded, confronted with the charnel house of history, could imagine otherwise.

Only the selflessness of aesthetic contemplation, along with a kind of Buddhist self-abnegation, can purge us of the astigmatism of wanting, and allow us to see the world for what it is.

the cheerless challenge of a Schopenhauer. His work forces them to struggle hard to make their vision seem anything more than anodyne consolation.

immanence does not necessarily imply transcendence. A meaning to life put there by God, and one conjured up by ourselves, may not be the only possibilities.

Isn’t a genuine meaning one which we feel ourselves running up against, one which can resist or rebuff us, one which bears in on us with a certain ineluctability?

Signifi cantly, it was a Protestant pastor, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who invented the science of hermeneutics, or interpretation.

and adduces Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in its defence

The frantic jouissance of seizing the day, gathering rosebuds, downing an extra glass, and living like there’s no tomorrow is a desperate strategy for outwitting death, one which seeks pointlessly to cheat it rather than to make something of it.