Last Saturday I went from the sublime to the absurd, and was left wondering which I prefer. The sublime was the meaning of life, as discussed by the eminent intellectual Terry Eagleton at the Aye Write! Glasgow book festival. I chaired his session straight after presenting my own, a roller-coaster ride through the philosophy of Monty Python. You might think these were two very different events but, in fact, they dovetailed neatly together.

I argued that there is a coherent intellectual world-view in the films of Monty Python. Like postmodernists, the Pythons think the age of "grand narratives" is over. For centuries, human beings have made sense of their lives by constructing over-arching stories which explain why we are here and why we are important. We talked of God's design, fall and salvation, finding our true purpose and so on. But we can't believe this any more. As Jean-Francois Lyotard put it: "The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal."

All three of the Pythons' films take traditional grand narratives and show them to be ridiculous. In The Holy Grail, medieval heroes and adventures come up against the modern mind and look silly. So when, for instance, Arthur explains to the peasants that he is king because the lady of the lake brought forth Excalibur from the bosom of the waters, they reply: "You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you."

But if we can't make sense of life in these grand terms any more, what is left? At the end of The Meaning of Life, Michael Palin (in drag, of course) reveals the answer to the film's title: "Well, it's nothing very special. Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

That the meaning of life is "nothing very special" is a metaphysical disappointment many find hard to accept. French existentialists such as Sartre and Camus thought our cosmic insignificance should provoke anguish, despair and even thoughts of suicide. But the Pythons think we should just laugh at it. "Always look on the bright side of life," they sang as dozens died on crosses at the end of Life of Brian; and also at the memorial service for Graham Chapman, who died aged just 48 of a rare spine cancer. When they said life is a joke, they were very serious indeed.

Terry Eagleton has also given up on the grand narratives and any religious answer to life's meaning, but seems to find this disappointing in a way the Pythons do not. He was reluctant to accept that life has no one meaning, only various meanings we choose to give it. He saw this as the vapid, liberal orthodoxy, dismissing it as a "pick and mix" approach.

Eagleton wanted something a bit meatier, and suggested that the meaningful life is analogous to a jazz band: we each improvise in our own way, but within the constraints of the group. This is a neat way of trying to allow for a certain amount of individualism while allowing for the importance of our nature as social animals.

However, to extend the analogy, what about those who prefer to play in an orchestra, or solo? His preference for existential jazz is just that - a preference. It seems implausible to me to think there is only one way of reconciling our desires for individuality and belonging: some lean towards the group, others towards isolation. Eagleton made the common mistake of projecting his own preferences and quirks on to what he saw as the wider truth of the world. Pick and mix may seem too vague, but one size fits all is worse. Nor is accepting a plurality of meanings of life the same as saying any old meaning will do: there may be no single right answer, but there are plenty of wrong ones.

Eagleton is a smart guy, but I think the Pythons were smarter. They saw any attempt to capture something as grand as the meaning of life in one idea as an absurd manifestation of humanity's pretensions. This makes their outlook more modest, but also wiser, than almost any so-called "proper philosophy".

In Python we see that the sublime and the absurd are not two separate things at all, but are two sides of one and the same coin.

  • Julian Baggini is the author of What's It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (Granta, £7.99).