Next he met a hippy wearing a ‘Don’t worry, Be happy’ T-shirt – it was Jeremy Bentham, of course. We’ve got a programme of a thousand years of linguistic analysis before we can get round to that sort of question.” “The meaning of life ? You must be joking, we can’t even agree on the meaning of the word ‘meaning’. So he visited Wittgenstein, who was in deep and abstruse conversation with Bertrand Russell about language. “If Nietzsche upsets my liberal sentiments”, mused Arthur, “maybe I should turn to modern philosophy for the answer”.

So it was rather a pity that the only sound which in fact came from his mouth was a sheep-like “Baaa”. Rise above the herd, unless you are a sheep!” Outraged, refutations of stunning wit and logic citing the essential equality of man before God started to form in Arthur’s mind. But, before he had time to decide, a thickly-moustached man wearing a superman outfit, with a huge letter ‘N’ emblazoned on it, shouted out “The only aim of life is be to be a superman. “Who shall I visit first – maybe Socrates or Plato, maybe Descartes, or how about Bertrand Russell?”. “Here, at last, I shall finally get the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything” thought Arthur. SUBSCRIBE NOW Short Story The Meaning of Life: A tribute to the late Douglas Adams Did you feel a tiny bit frustrated when Douglas Adams told us in The Hitchhikers’ Guide To the Galaxy that the meaning of life was 42? Tim LeBon did and wondered what interplanetary wanderer Arthur Dent might have concluded if he’d met some real philosophers.įive seconds after flicking the Infinite Improbability Drive to ‘Maximum Wisdom’, Arthur was amazed to find himself in Philos, the mythical planet where all the great philosophers of the past lived in eternal contemplation.

Douglas adams life