As with all the arguments in this book, I address here both religious and secular audiences. I invite the readers who identify as religious to ask themselves if their care for others is actually motivated by faith in a divine command or divine reward. Moreover, I encourage both religious and secular readers to recognize their commitment to finite life as the condition of responsibility. The Golden Rule does not depend on a religious sense of eternity. On the contrary, it depends on a secular sense of finitude.
To treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated requires that we recognize our shared finitude, since only finite beings can be in need of mutual care. An infinite being is never in need of anything and cannot care about how it is treated. The Golden Rule therefore demands that we recognize one another as finite and keep faith with one another as ends in ourselves. It is because I am finite that I am in need and that it can matter to me how I am treated. Likewise, it is because I recognize you as finite that I can understand that you are in need and that it matters how I treat you. If we do not recognize our shared vulnerability and finitude, the demand for mutuality is not intelligible and we cannot be compelled to care for one another as ends in ourselves.
Hence, I will present a vision of the emancipatory potential of recognizing our secular faith and our essential finitude. The emancipatory potential of secular faith is a possibility and far from being achieved in our current state of secularization, which should not be conflated with an emancipated form of secular life. Moreover, even in being achieved, secular life will always remain fragile, since it is sustained only through our commitments. The recognition of finitude does not provide any guarantee that we will care for one another in the right way. The recognition of our shared finitude is a necessary condition for the demand of mutual care to be intelligible, but this recognition is in no way sufficient for actual mutuality. Rather, our dependence on one another and the fragility of our lives call for us to develop institutions of social justice and material welfare. Our ability to treat others justly depends on how we have been treated and cared for in turn, all the way from our first experiences of parental love to the organization of the society in which we find ourselves. Only a secular perspective allows us to focus on these normative practices—our forms of upbringing, education, labor, political governance, and so on—as essentially matters of what we do, as practices for which we are responsible and that have to be sustained or questioned or revised by us, rather than being given by nature or supernatural decree.
For the same reason, secular faith is the condition of freedom. To be free, I argue, is not to be sovereign or liberated from all constraints. Rather, we are free because we are able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time. All forms of freedom—e.g., the freedom to act, the freedom to speak, the freedom to love—are intelligible as freedom only insofar as we are free to engage the question of what we should do with our time. If it were given what we should do, what we should say, and whom we should love—in short: if it were given what we should do with our time—we would not be free.
The ability to ask this question—the question of what we ought to do with our time—is the basic condition for what I call spiritual freedom. To lead a free, spiritual life (rather than a life determined merely by natural instincts), I must be responsible for what I do. This is not to say that I am free from natural and social constraints. I did not choose to be born with the limitations and abilities I happen to have. Moreover, I had no control over who took care of me, what they did to me and for me. My family—and the larger historical context into which I was born—shaped me before I could do anything about it. Likewise, social norms continue to inform who I can take myself to be and what I can do with my life. Without social norms—norms I did not invent on my own and that shape the world in which I find myself—I can have no understanding of who to be or what to do. Nevertheless, I am responsible for upholding, challenging, or transforming these norms. I am not merely causally determined by nature or norms but act in light of norms that I can challenge and transform.4 This is what it means to have a spiritual life. Even at the price of my biological survival, my material well-being, or my social standing, I can give my life for a principle to which I hold myself or for a cause in which I believe.
My freedom therefore requires that I can ask myself what I should do with my time. Even when I am utterly absorbed in what I do, what I say, and what I love, the possibility of this question must be alive in me. Being engaged in my activities, I must run the risk of being bored—otherwise my engagement would be a matter of compulsive necessity. Being devoted to what I love, I must run the risk of losing it or giving it up—otherwise there would be nothing at stake in maintaining and actively relating to what I love. Most fundamentally, I must live in relation to my irrevocable death—otherwise I would believe that my time is infinite and there would be no urgency in dedicating my life to anything.
The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die—that our lifetime is indefinite but finite—can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities. This is why all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of unfreedom. In the consummation of eternity, there would be no question of what we should do with our lives. We would be absorbed in bliss forever and thereby deprived of any possible agency. Rather than having a free relation to what we do and what we love, we would be compelled by necessity to enjoy it.
II
This Life addresses both religious and secular audiences. I invite the religious (and the religiously inclined) to ask themselves if they actually have faith in eternity and if this faith is compatible with the care that animates their lives. Furthermore, I encourage both religious and secular readers to see why the finitude of our lives should not be regarded as a lack, a restriction, or a fallen condition. Instead of lamenting the absence of eternity, we should acknowledge the commitment to finite life as the condition for anything to be at stake and for anyone to lead a free life.
My critique of religious faith does not primarily appeal to scientific knowledge and my critique of religious values does not primarily appeal to scientific facts. Rather, I provide a new perspective on what we believe and what we value. In caring about anyone or anything, we are already practicing an implicit form of secular faith in what we do, since we are devoted to someone or something that is fragile. My aim is to make our secular faith explicit in our understanding of what we do and thereby open up emancipatory possibilities for transforming our practices of care as well as our communal life.
My argument challenges one of the most widely held assumptions about religion. According to many surveys, more than 50 percent of Americans hold that religious faith is necessary to live a moral, responsible life. The same assumption is part of a more general revival of political theology, among both prominent philosophers and the general public. The intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon has provided the most capacious definition of political theology, while tracing its resurgence in thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and José Casanova. In Gordon’s account, political theology is defined by two theses. The first thesis postulates a normative deficit: secular life suffers from a lack of moral substance and cannot establish a viable ground for our political life together. The second thesis postulates a religious plenitude: to compensate for its normative deficit, secular life must turn to religion as the unique and privileged resource of moral-political instruction without which society cannot cohere. As Gordon shows, these two theses of political theology are remarkably persistent not only in the history of ideas but also in contemporary philosophy and sociology.5
Such political theology contributes to a pervasive negative narrative regarding the possibilities of secular life. In our secular age, faith in eternal life or eternal being is said to have declined. Yet there is a widespread notion
that the lapse in religious faith is a great loss and that the hope for eternity expresses our deepest desire, even if it cannot be fulfilled. Secular life would then be characterized by both a normative and an existential deficit. Owing to secularization, we have supposedly lost both the moral foundation that is required to hold our society together and the redemptive hope that is needed to find meaning in our lives.
The most influential version of such a negative assessment of secular life was formulated by the sociologist Max Weber in the early twentieth century. Weber’s famous claim that secular life suffers from a “disenchantment” of the world continues to serve as an alibi for political theology and to instill the sense that a society without religious faith is hopelessly lacking. According to Weber, disenchantment has three major implications.6 First, disenchantment means that we no longer appeal to any “mysterious incalculable forces”—or any other forms of supernatural explanation—for what happens in the world. Rather, the form of reason becomes an instrumental reason, which assumes that “we can, in principle, control everything by means of calculation.” Second, Weber takes disenchantment to mean that “the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life,” so that we are deprived of any form of “genuine community.” Third, Weber laments that disenchantment entails that death is no longer “a meaningful phenomenon.”
Weber holds that the human beings who lived in an enchanted world (his example is “Abraham, or some peasant of the past”) had a “meaningful” relation to death because they supposedly died “fulfilled by life” and regarded themselves as belonging to an “organic cycle.” When Abraham or the peasant of the past was on the verge of death, he could take himself to have had “enough” of life because it “had given to him what life had to offer” and “for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve.” In contrast, the person whom Weber describes as disenchanted (“civilized man”) cannot ever regard his life as completed, since he is committed to the possibility of progress (“the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems”) in which he wants to participate. Such a person will always be dissatisfied, Weber argues, since his life can never be completed: “what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence.” Rather than being seen as the meaningful conclusion of a life and as the ascent to eternity, death comes to be regarded as the meaningless interruption of a life. This leads Weber to the conclusion that the commitment to earthly progress makes our lives meaningless rather than meaningful: “Because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very progressiveness it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.”
Ever since Weber delivered his diagnosis in the early twentieth century, many thinkers have tried to offer a cure for the disenchantment and sense of meaninglessness that are supposedly inherent in secular life. My argument is, on the contrary, that the diagnosis itself is deeply misleading and should be called into question on every count.
The basic problem is that Weber fails to grasp the commitment to freedom that is a distinct historical achievement of modern, secular life. For Weber, all that remains when we subtract religious norms and values from our lives is an impoverished instrumental reason that disables any “ultimate value” or “genuine community.” Yet the idea of an instrumental reason that operates on its own is unintelligible. We cannot reason instrumentally without a purpose for the sake of which we lead our lives, since nothing can count as a means except in light of a value that we hold to be an end in itself. If we had no defining purposes—if everything were reduced to instrumental means—it would be impossible to understand the point of doing anything. In contrast to religious faith, secular faith recognizes that the defining purposes of our lives depend on our commitments. The authority of our norms cannot be established by divine revelation or natural properties but must be instituted, upheld, and justified by our practices. If we do not appeal to mysterious forces or a supernatural authority, it does not mean (as Weber claims) that we believe everything can be mastered by calculation. On the contrary, to have secular faith is to acknowledge that we are essentially dependent on—and answerable to—other persons who cannot be mastered or controlled, since we are all free, finite beings.
By the same token, the norms in light of which we lead our lives can be called into question, contested, and revised. Far from being an impediment to “genuine community,” the recognition that we are responsible for the form of our shared life is at the heart of the modern, secular commitment to democracy. Like other political theologians, however, Weber has no faith in democracy as an actual power of the people but believes that democracy must be subordinated to a charismatic leader (a Führer, as Weber designated the function fifteen years before Hitler’s ascent to power). Without a leader who occupies the role of a religious authority, democracy supposedly will have no animating “soul,” since for Weber there is no feature of secular life itself that can bind people together in genuine community.7
Hence, while Weber portrays himself as someone who offers a “value-neutral” diagnosis, his negative assessment of the possibilities of secular life betrays his religious presuppositions. By religious presuppositions I do not mean that Weber believes in God or eternity, but that he regards our finitude as a negative restriction and assumes that secular life necessarily suffers from a lack of meaning. Weber prides himself on having the courage to face the “emptiness” of life without religion—contrasting himself to those who “cannot bear the fate of the times” and flee into “the arms of the old churches”8—but his idea of secular life as empty or meaningless is itself a religious notion.
Thus, when Weber claims that the commitment to earthly progress makes our lives meaningless rather than meaningful, the authority to which he appeals is the devoutly religious author Leo Tolstoy. Weber’s entire argument here exhibits a striking inability to understand the dynamic of leading a free, finite life. Weber apparently thinks that a fulfilling life should lead one to a sense of final satisfaction or completion, where one has had “enough” of life and can welcome death itself as “meaningful.” This is a profoundly misguided view of what it means to be a person who is leading her life. Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.
For example, if I take my vocation to be sociology (as Weber did), I understand the significance of my life in light of my commitment to being a sociologist. Being a sociologist is not a project that can be completed but a purpose for the sake of which I lead my life and engage in what I do. If my life as a sociologist is satisfying, it does not mean that I have had enough of being a sociologist. On the contrary, it means that I am committed to sustaining my life as a sociologist. Even if I retire as a sociologist and focus on other activities, I am still committed to being a sociologist insofar as I identify with the work I have done (an identification that can include revising my views or conceding that the work of others has superseded my own). If I were truly done with being a sociologist—if I truly had had “enough”—it would mean that I renounced any form of care for the work I did and who I was as a sociologist. Even if I am done with being a sociologist, however, my life is not complete. As long as I lead my life, I have to be committed to one or several purposes—e.g., being retired, being a grandparent, being a citizen, being a friend—which define who I take myself to be. Leading my life is not a process that can end in final fulfillment, but an activity that I have to sustain for the sake of something that matters to me. Even if a defining purpose of my life breaks down, the breakdown matters to me because I am striving to have a purpose. The activity of leading my life—my striving to have a purpose—cannot even in principle be completed. If my life were complete, it would not be my life, since it would be over. In leading my life, I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be: to hold together and be responsiv
e to the commitments that define who I take myself to be. Leading a satisfying life is not to achieve a state of consummation but to be engaged in what I do and put myself at stake in activities that matter to me.
For the same reason, if I reach a point when I welcome death because I have had enough of myself altogether, it does not mean that my life is fulfilled and reveals its final meaning. On the contrary, if I have had “enough” of my life, it means that I am failing to lead a meaningful life. Death cannot be a meaningful completion of my life, since my life is not something that can “be” complete. My death is not something I can experience as the completion of anything, since it excludes my existence. As long as my life is mine—as long as I lead my life—the book of my life is still open, and it is neither possible nor desirable to be “done” with myself.
Contrary to what Weber holds, there is no correlation between leading a meaningful life and embracing death as the supposed completion of life. As long as our lives matter to us, we are committed to the continuation (rather than the completion) of our lives.
For the same reason, the commitment to the possibility of progress—which entails that what we care about extends beyond and cannot be “completed” in our own lifetime—does not make our lives meaningless. On the contrary, part of the meaning of what we do is that it can have significance for future generations and make their lives better than ours.9
This Life Page 2