ALSO BY MARTIN HÄGGLUND
Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov
Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet
Copyright © 2019 by Martin Hägglund
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
A portion of chapter 2 first appeared, in slightly different form, as “Knausgaard’s Secular Confession” in boundary 2 (www.boundary2.org) on August 23, 2017.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Hägglund, Martin, author.
Title: This life : secular faith and spiritual freedom / Martin Hägglund.
Description: New York : Pantheon Books, 2019. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029429. ISBN 9781101870402 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9781101870419 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Finite, The. Meaning (Philosophy). Secularism.
Classification: LCC BD411 .H34 2019 | DDC 110—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2018029429
Ebook ISBN 9781101870419
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover image: Margate, from the Sea (detail) by Joseph Mallord William Turner. Photo © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, N.Y.
Cover design by Kelly Blair
v5.4
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For my friend
Niklas Brismar Pålsson
with whom all time is free time
If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable….I dreamt, once, that I was there….Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.
—EMILY BRONTË, Wuthering Heights
Contents
Cover
Also by Martin Hägglund
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I: Secular Faith
Chapter 1: Faith
Chapter 2: Love
Chapter 3: Responsibility
Part II: Spiritual Freedom
Chapter 4: Natural and Spiritual Freedom
Chapter 5: The Value of Our Finite Time
Chapter 6: Democratic Socialism
Conclusion: Our Only Life
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Introduction
I
My family comes from northern Sweden. The house where my mother was born, and where I have spent every summer of my life, is on the Baltic Sea. The dramatic landscape—with its sweeping forests, ragged mountains, and tall cliff formations looming over the sea—is carved out by the descent of the ice from the last glacial period, twelve thousand years ago. The land is still rising, the retreat of the glaciers allowing further parts of the landscape to emerge. What used to be the sandy bottom of the sea when my mother was a child is now part of our garden. The rocks under my feet are a reminder of the geological time in which we are but a speck. Being there, the brevity of my life is made salient by the forms of time to which I am recalled. As I step into the house where my grandmother lives, I can see our family tree on the wall—fragile lines of farmers and rural workers reaching back into the sixteenth century. As I climb the mountains that rise out of the ocean, I can see the scale of glacial time, still forming the landscape in which we find ourselves.
To return to my family house is to be reminded of how my life is dependent on history: both the natural history of evolution and the social history of those who came before me. Who I can be and what I can do is not generated solely by me. My life is dependent on previous generations and on those who took care of me, with all of us in turn dependent on a history of the Earth that so easily could have been different and that might never have brought any of us into being.
Moreover, my life is historical in the sense that it is oriented toward a future that is not given. The worlds of which I am a part, the projects I sustain and that sustain me, can flourish and change in a dynamic way, but they can also break apart, atrophy, and die. The worlds that open up through my family and friends, the projects that shape my work and political commitments, carry the promise of my life but also the risk that my life will be shattered or fail to make sense. In a word, both my life and the projects in which I am engaged are finite.
To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. I am finite because I cannot maintain my life on my own and because I will die. Likewise, the projects to which I am devoted are finite because they live only through the efforts of those who are committed to them and will cease to be if they are abandoned.
The thought of my own death, and the death of everything I love, is utterly painful. I do not want to die, since I want to sustain my life and the life of what I love. At the same time, I do not want my life to be eternal. An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life. This problem can be traced even within religious traditions that espouse faith in eternal life. An article in U.S. Catholic asks: “Heaven: Will It be Boring?” The article answers no, for in heaven souls are called “not to eternal rest but to eternal activity—eternal social concern.”1 Yet this answer only underlines the problem, since there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven. Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care. An eternal activity—just as much as an eternal rest—is of concern to no one, since it cannot be stopped and does not have to be maintained by anyone. The problem is not that an eternal activity would be “boring” but that it would not be intelligible as my activity. Any activity of mine (including a boring activity) requires that I sustain it. In an eternal activity, there cannot be a person who is bored—or involved in any other way—since an eternal activity does not depend on being sustained by anyone.
Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. The understanding of myself as mortal does not have to be explicit and theoretical but is implicit in all my practical commitments and priorities. The question of what I ought to do with my life—a question that is at issue in everything I do—presupposes that I understand my time to be finite. For the question of how I should lead my life to be intelligible as a question, I have to believe that I will die. If I believed that my life would last forever, I could never take my life to be at stake and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time. I would not even be able to understand what it means to do something sooner rather than later in my life, since I would have no sense of a finite lifetime that gives urgency to any project or activity.
The sense of my own irreplaceable life, then, is inseparable from my sense that it will end. When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. My time with family and friends is precious
because we have to make the most of it. Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile.
The sense of finitude—the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about—is at the heart of what I call secular faith. To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down. Ranging from the concrete (how we approach funerals) to the general (what makes a life worth living), I will show how secular faith expresses itself in the ways we mourn our loved ones, make commitments, and care about a sustainable world. I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time. In accordance with the meaning of the Latin word saecularis, to have secular faith is to be dedicated to persons or projects that are worldly and temporal. Secular faith is the form of faith that we all sustain in caring for someone or something that is vulnerable to loss. We all care—for ourselves, for others, for the world in which we find ourselves—and care is inseparable from the risk of loss.
In contrast, the common denominator for what I call religious forms of faith is a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being. All world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) hold that the highest form of existence or the most desirable form of life is eternal rather than finite. To be religious—or to adopt a religious perspective on life—is to regard our finitude as a lack, an illusion, or a fallen state of being. Moreover, such a religious perspective on life is not limited to institutionalized religion or to actual believers. Even many people who do not have religious faith still subscribe to the idea that our finitude is a restriction and that we suffer from a lack of eternal life.
From a religious perspective, our finitude is seen as a lamentable condition that ideally should be overcome. This is the premise with which I take issue. I seek to show that any life worth living must be finite and requires secular faith.
Secular faith is committed to persons and projects that may be lost: to make them live on for the future. Far from being resigned to death, a secular faith seeks to postpone death and improve the conditions of life. As we will see, living on should not be conflated with eternity. The commitment to living on does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and to live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of a form of life.
The commitment to living on bears the sense of finitude within itself. However long the movement of living on may last—and however much the quality of living on may be improved—it can always end. Even when we fight for an ideal that extends far beyond our own lives—a political vision for the future, a sustainable legacy for generations to come—we are devoted to a form of life that may cease to be or never come to be. This sense of finitude is intrinsic to why it matters that anyone or anything lives on. If we seek to engender, prolong, or enhance the existence of something—to make it live on in a better way—we are animated by the sense that it may be lost if we fail to act. Without this risk of loss, our efforts and our fidelity to the project would not be required.
To have secular faith is to acknowledge that the object of our faith is dependent on the practice of faith. I call it secular faith, since the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity. The object of secular faith—e.g., the life we are trying to lead, the institutions we are trying to build, the community we are trying to achieve—is inseparable from what we do and how we do it. Through the practice of secular faith, we bind ourselves to a normative ideal (a conception of who we ought to be as individuals and as a community). The ideal itself, however, depends on how we keep faith with our commitment and remains open to being challenged, transformed, or overturned. The object of religious faith, by contrast, is taken to be independent of the fidelity of finite beings. The object of religious faith—whether God or any other form of infinite being—is ultimately regarded as separable from the practice of faith, since it does not depend on any form of finite life.
The most fundamental example of finitude in our historical moment is the prospect that the Earth itself will be destroyed. If the Earth were destroyed, all life forms that matter to us would be extinguished. No one would live on and no aspect of our lives would be remembered.
Yet, from the standpoint of religious faith, such an end of life is only apparent. Even if all forms of living on are terminated, nothing essential is lost, since the essential is eternal rather than finite. As William James observes in the conclusion to his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience, the subordination of the finite to the eternal is the common denominator both for orthodox religions and for all forms of religious mysticism. “This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up or freeze,” James writes, but for those with religious faith “God’s existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved.”2 Accordingly, from a religious point of view, the end of the world is ultimately not a tragedy. On the contrary, many religious doctrines and religious visions look forward to the end of the world as the moment of salvation. This moment can either be imagined as the collective end of humankind when damnation and salvation are decided (as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) or as the end of an individual through absorption into a timeless state of being (as in Hinduism and Buddhism). In either case, our lives as finite beings are not seen as ends in themselves but rather as a means to reach the end of human history.
For the same reason, climate change and the possible destruction of the Earth cannot be seen as an existential threat from the standpoint of religious faith. To grasp the existential threat to yourself and to future generations, you have to believe not only that life is finite but also that everything valuable—everything that matters—depends on finite life. This is exactly what religious faith denies. If you have religious faith, you believe that all finite life can be terminated and yet what is truly valuable will still remain.
The Dalai Lama summed it up perfectly when asked how a Buddhist—for whom the finite world is an illusion and who seeks to be detached from everything that passes away—can be worried about our current ecological crisis. “A Buddhist would say it doesn’t matter,” the Dalai Lama replied.3 This may seem surprising, since Buddhist ethics famously advocates a peaceful relation to nature and all living beings. Yet Buddhist ethics is not motivated by a concern for nature or living beings as ends in themselves. Rather, the motivation is to be released from karma, with the aim of being released from life altogether and helping others to reach the same end. The goal of Buddhism is not for anyone to live on—or for the Earth itself to live on—but to attain the state of nirvana, where nothing matters.
The Buddhist perspective is not an exception, but makes explicit what is implicit in any religious commitment to eternity. If you are aiming for eternal life, finite life does not matter for its own sake but serves as a vehicle to attain salvation.
Of course, even if you identify as religious you can still care intensely for the fate of our life on Earth. My point, however, is that if you care for our form of life as an end in itself, you are acting on the basis of secular faith, even if you claim to be religious. Religious faith can entail obedience to moral norms, but it cannot recognize that the ultimate purpose of what we do—the ultimate reason it matters how we treat one another and the Earth—is our fragile life together. From a religious perspective, the ultimate purpose of what we do is to serve God or attain salvation, rather than to care for our shared lives and the future generations for which we are responsible. As soon as we acknowledge that our finite lives—and the generations that may carry on our finite legacy—are ends in themselves, we make explicit that our faith is secular rather than religious.
Hence, our ecological crisis can be taken seriously only from the standpoint of secular faith. Only a secul
ar faith can be committed to the flourishing of finite life—sustainable forms of life on Earth—as an end in itself. If the Earth itself is an object of care in our time of ecological crisis, it is because we have come to believe that it is a resource that can be exhausted, an ecosystem that can be damaged and destroyed. Whether we care about the Earth for its own sake or for the sake of species that depend on it, the awareness of its precarious existence is an intrinsic part of why we care about it. This is not to say that we care about the Earth only because it can be lost. If we care about the Earth it is rather because of the positive qualities we ascribe to it. However, an intrinsic part of why we care about the positive qualities of the Earth is that we believe they can be lost, either for us or in themselves.
The same holds for the ways in which we care about our own lives, the lives of those we love, or those for whom we are responsible. Caring about someone or something requires that we believe in its value, but it also requires that we believe that what is valued can cease to be. In order to care, we have to believe in the future not only as a chance but also as a risk. Only in the light of risk—only in the light of possible failure or loss—can we be committed to sustaining the life of what we value. Secular faith is not in itself sufficient to lead a responsible life—and it does not automatically make one improve the conditions of the world—but it is necessary for motivating ethical, political, and filial commitments.
Accordingly, I will seek to show that secular faith lies at the heart of the sense of responsibility. Let me take a basic example: the Golden Rule. To treat others as you would like to be treated is a fundamental principle in both secular and religious moral teachings. The Golden Rule, however, does not require any form of religious faith. On the contrary, a genuine care for others must be based on secular faith. If you follow the Golden Rule because you believe it is a divine command, you are motivated by obedience to God rather than by care for another person. Likewise, if you follow the Golden Rule because you believe it will yield a divine reward (e.g., the release from karma), you are acting not out of concern for the well-being of others but rather out of concern for your own salvation. If your care for another person is based on religious faith, you will cease to care about her if you lose your religious faith and thereby reveal that you never cared about her as an end in herself.
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