The need for such a critical and emancipatory perspective is as pressing as ever. We live in an epoch when social inequality, climate change, and global injustice are intertwined with the resurgence of religious forms of authority that deny the ultimate importance of these matters. A dominant response is to retreat from a secular faith in the possibility of progress, in favor of asserting the necessity of a religious sense of “fullness” to sustain our moral and spiritual lives. This book seeks to combat all such forms of political theology. In contrast, I offer a secular vision of why everything depends on what we do with our time together. The decline of religious faith in eternity is not something to be lamented. Rather, it provides an opportunity to make explicit and strengthen our secular faith in this life as an end in itself.
III
The book is divided into two parts, which are devoted to the two concepts I introduce in my subtitle: secular faith and spiritual freedom.
The first part of the book pursues the stakes of the difference between secular and religious faith. What I call religious faith is any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature. Religious faith is not a system of belief that I am trying to disprove, in the sense of demonstrating the nonexistence of eternity. What I am calling into question is the idea that eternity is desirable. The assumption that eternity is desirable is much more pervasive than any alleged certainty concerning its existence. Theological attempts to prove the existence of God are outdated for many contemporary religious believers, but the idea that eternity is worth being devoted to is indispensable for the defense of religious faith. There is no reason to have faith in eternity unless one believes that it offers a meaningful consolation for, alternative to, or escape from the loss of what we love.
In contrast, I seek to show that an eternal life would not fulfill our desire to live on. The commitment to living on—rather than to eternal life—lies at the heart of secular faith. My account of secular faith does not depend on the contrast to religious faith, since secular faith is intrinsic to any form of care. However, in our historical situation, the understanding of faith is still deeply entangled with religious ways of thinking. In order to transform our received notions of faith, these ways of thinking need to be engaged directly, which is why my arguments in the first half of the book emerge in explicit dialogue with religious writers. To engage their work is an opportunity to develop the understanding of secular faith and to defend it against the most serious objections. Thus, I elaborate my notion of secular faith through readings of both the Bible and Buddhist philosophy, as well as prominent religious writers ranging from Greek and Roman Stoics to Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart, Baruch Spinoza, Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Taylor. Precisely because they aim to transcend secular faith, these religious writers have a sharp eye for the perils of such faith and they describe its dynamic at length.
Chapter 1 develops my account of secular faith as a condition of intelligibility for any form of care. To make vivid the phenomenology of secular faith, I proceed from the most difficult and agonizing event: the death of the beloved. My aim is to show that secular faith lies at the heart of what matters, even for those who claim to have religious faith, such as Martin Luther when mourning the death of his daughter Magdalena and C. S. Lewis when mourning the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Across different historical epochs, their accounts of grief testify to how their faith in God and eternity is incompatible with the secular faith that animates their commitment to the beloved. Only secular faith can do justice to the experience of love as well as mourning. This becomes salient when we are moved to acknowledge our deepest commitments, making explicit what is implicit in our passion and pain.
Chapter 2 elaborates the notion of secular faith through an analysis of time and eternity in Augustine’s Confessions. In addition to being one of the most influential narratives of religious conversion, the Confessions is also recognized as the first major autobiography in the Western tradition and a profound philosophical treatise, especially in the way it addresses the question of time. Augustine here reveals that secular faith is at work in every aspect of our lives. Whether in bliss or in mourning, in joy or in pain, we live on after a past that has ceased to be and before a future that may not come to be. Indeed, all the activities that Augustine describes—from speaking and singing to loving, hoping, and remembering—depend for their meaning on the temporal experience of living on. Inversely, the eternal presence that Augustine holds out as the goal of religious aspiration would put an end to these activities. There cannot be any meaningful activities in eternity, since nothing can live on in a timeless presence and nothing can matter in an everlasting existence.
Thus, Augustine’s own account gives us reasons to keep faith in temporal life and overcome faith in eternity. To pursue this perspective would be to write a secular—rather than a religious—confession. I read such a secular confession in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which can be seen as a contemporary response to Augustine. Knausgaard’s painstaking attention to a secular life places us in the midst of everyday existence. Like Augustine, he explores the care that binds us to others and how the experience of time cuts through every moment. But while Augustine seeks to turn us toward eternity, Knausgaard turns us back toward our finite lives as the heart of everything that matters. The animating principle of his writing is one of attachment to finite life, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. Devoted to secular life, we can be moved both to bliss and devastation, hope and despair, success and failure. Knausgaard, then, makes vivid what it means to keep faith in a life that is bound to die. This secular faith, I argue, opens the possibility for all passion and meaningful engagement.
Chapter 3 proceeds from a question that is bound to arise in response to my first two chapters. Why is secular faith—devoted to this world and invested in finite lives—necessarily at odds with religious faith in eternity? A defender of religious faith may object that the latter can make one more engaged in this life, rather than make one turn away from it. I take on this argument through the thinker who pursues it most profoundly, Søren Kierkegaard, in his classic work Fear and Trembling. For Kierkegaard, religious faith should not lead us out of this world but rather enable a more profound commitment to the life we live. Yet he is well aware of the conflict between the commitment to a temporal, finite being and the commitment to an eternal, infinite being. In Fear and Trembling this conflict is staged most dramatically as the meaning of God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham’s love for Isaac expresses a commitment to living on: he wants Isaac’s life to flourish for its own sake and he also prizes Isaac as the only one who can let his own legacy survive. It is precisely this commitment to a unique life—the life of Isaac—that has to be renounced for the sake of eternity. To love Isaac is to be susceptible to an irreversible loss, since Isaac is a finite being, and therefore he has to be given up in advance, sacrificed for God. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard holds that the highest form of faith is one that can retain all the love for Isaac—all the love for the finite—while at the same time giving him up, trusting that God will restore everything that is lost. Such faith would allow one to be fully committed to the finite world, while at the same time being invulnerable to loss, since one would believe that everything is possible for God.
The effect of Abraham’s religious faith, however, turns out to be an actual indifference to what happens. Abraham is able to kill Isaac because he believes that God will bring him back, so in the end it makes no difference (from the standpoint of his faith) whether Isaac is sacrificed. Likewise, the modern version of Abraham—the knight of faith—is ultimately revealed to be indifferent to the fate of the finite. The knight of faith is presented as someone who is utterly committed to
finite life, but when his hopes in this life are shattered, “curiously enough, he is just the same.” Precisely because his faith makes him immune to the experience of loss, he cannot care about the outcome of what actually happens.
I argue that the above problem is not limited to Kierkegaard’s telling of the story, but reveals why care and responsibility cannot be based on religious faith. If you claim that your responsibility for Isaac is based on God’s command, then you are committed to killing Isaac if that turns out to be the command. If you object that God would never command such a thing, you in fact profess faith in a standard of value independent of God, since you believe that it is wrong to kill Isaac regardless of what God commands. By the same token, you profess faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life. If you believe that this value can be replaced—that Isaac will live on in eternity or be restored on earth—you will be indifferent to his fate in being put to death. Whether he lives or dies will ultimately make no difference to you, since everything that is lost will be returned.
In contrast, the care for Isaac is sustained by secular faith in the value of a life that can be irrevocably lost. Secular faith, I show, is the condition for any life-defining commitment and for anything to matter.
The second part of the book pursues the emancipatory possibilities of secular faith. Here I develop my concept of spiritual freedom, in relation to fundamental questions concerning the constitution of life, time, and value. Moreover, by engaging with Marx’s critique of capitalism and religion in a new way, I draw together the threads of the book as a whole and make explicit their far-reaching implications for how we should lead our lives.
Chapter 4 presents my central philosophical arguments regarding why the finitude of life is a necessary condition for agency and freedom. My starting point is the fundamental activity of all living beings: the activity of self-maintenance. No form of life is intelligible as living unless it is engaged in the activity of keeping itself alive. It follows that all forms of life must be finite and must be dependent on a fragile material body. The activity of self-maintenance—e.g., eating, drinking, sleeping—would have no purpose if the living being were not subject to disintegration. For anything to be at stake in maintaining a life, it must be running the risk of death. Moreover, it is only through the activity of self-maintenance that there can be any time to live in the first place. The self-maintenance of a living being necessarily generates more lifetime than it needs to “spend” on keeping itself alive, which is why there is at least a minimal surplus of time for every living being. Even a simple plant does not have to expend all its time on securing the nourishment required for its survival. This surplus of time is even more evident in the lives of animals that have the capacity to engage in activities of self-enjoyment that are distinct from the activity of self-preservation—e.g., the singing of birds, the purring of cats, the playful interaction of dogs. Through such forms of self-enjoyment, many kinds of animals have a capacity to enjoy their surplus time as a form of “free” time. Yet, insofar as they cannot understand their time as free time—insofar as they cannot ask themselves what they ought to do with their time—even animals with highly refined capacities for self-enjoyment remain within the bounds of what I call “natural” freedom. In contrast, what I call spiritual freedom requires that the agent in question can ask herself how she should spend her time and be responsive to the risk that she is wasting her life. Without the relation to such a risk, we would not be able to lead a spiritual life, since we could never engage the question of what we ought to do with our time and what matters to us.
Chapter 5 turns to Marx in order to show how his critique of capitalism—as well as the possibility of emancipation—hinges on what we do with our surplus of time. The key is to grasp that questions of economy and value are at the heart of our spiritual freedom. How we organize our economy expresses what we take to be worth doing with our time and what we prioritize in our society. Under capitalism our collective priority is profit, since that priority is inscribed in how we measure and produce the capital wealth that sustains our lives. Without the growth of capital, we have no social wealth to distribute across society. For the same reason, we must prioritize doing what is profitable, even at the expense of doing what we actually believe needs to be done and what we actually believe would be meaningful to do. Marx offers a powerful account of the pernicious practical consequences that follow from the priority of profit: the alienation of our labor, the exploitation of our time, the commodification of our lives, the necessity of unemployment, and the inherent tendency toward destructive economic crises. I provide an analytical reconstruction of these arguments and their relevance for understanding the historical conditions under which we still live. Yet, understanding fully why the capitalist measure of value is contradictory—and why the priority of profit alienates us from our spiritual freedom—requires a level of analysis that Marx presupposes but never explicitly elucidates. This level of analysis concerns how any economy of spiritual life is intelligible in the first place: what it means to be someone for whom something can be taken as a cost, as a value, and who can relate to her life as an economy of time that reflects her priorities.
By taking on the deepest level of analysis, I unlock a new understanding of Marx’s notion of value and defend it against the classical objections, as well as against the influential neoclassical revolution in economics. I demonstrate that the reigning theory of supply and demand presupposes the conception of value that is at the center of Marx’s analysis. Most importantly, I disclose the inherent contradiction in capitalism as a historical form of life and why it calls for a revaluation of value.
Chapter 6 elaborates what the revaluation of value demands of us in both theory and practice. For Marx—contrary to a persistent misconception—the overcoming of capitalism is not meant to abolish democracy but to make actual democracy possible. Under capitalism, we cannot actually negotiate the fundamental questions of what we collectively value, since the purpose of our economy is beyond the power of democratic deliberation. We can make decisions regarding the distribution of our social wealth, but the final purpose of the production of our wealth (profit) is already decided. If we are committed to achieving actual democracy, we must therefore be committed not only to the redistribution of wealth but also to the revaluation of the measure of value that shapes our production of wealth. Almost all forms of left-wing politics—from most kinds of Marxism to the social democratic welfare state and advocates for a universal basic income—restrict their critiques of capitalism to the mode of distribution, failing to interrogate the measure of value that informs the mode of production. All redistributive reforms, however, will be caught in contradictions that I explain and exemplify. The point is not that we should abandon redistributive reforms but that our reforms need to be reconceived—both strategically and substantially—as means toward the end of democratic socialism. The latter can be achieved only through a fundamental practical revaluation of the way we lead our lives together.
To present and answer the challenges of democratic socialism, I engage in an immanent critique of leading liberal thinkers of political economy: Mill, Rawls, Keynes, Hayek. The aim of democratic socialism is not to resolve the economic questions of our priorities once and for all, since those questions are intrinsic to our spiritual freedom. Rather, in elaborating the principles of democratic socialism, I give an account of how life under democratic socialism would allow us to “own” the question of what we ought to do with our finite time, both individually and collectively. For the same reason, I take issue with all forms of utopian Marxism that conflate the overcoming of capitalism with the overcoming of finitude. The most sophisticated example is the philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, who has influenced a wide range of Marxism. I bring the chapter to a close by showing how Adorno conflates a secular promise of freedom (the liberation of finite life) with a religious promise of salvation (the liberation from finite
life). In contrast, I develop the stakes of Marx’s critique of religion and explain why we ought to be committed to freedom rather than salvation.
Finally, in my Conclusion to the book, I engage in depth with the political philosophy and political activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Spanning over King’s entire career, I show how his commitment to the actualization of freedom led him to an increasingly radical critique of capitalism. King’s policy proposals center on the redistribution of wealth, but he also senses that there is a deeper problem of value under capitalism. Toward the end of his life he comes close to grasping the need for what I call a revaluation of value, which requires a movement toward democratic socialism. Moreover, by following King’s trajectory, we can see how the stakes of secular faith and spiritual freedom come together in the pursuit of actual emancipation. By attending closely to King’s political speeches and the concrete historical practices in which he participates, I seek to disclose that the faith which animates his political activism is better understood in terms of secular faith than in terms of the religious faith that he officially espouses.
The keys to my secular understanding of King’s work are provided by a philosopher who was of crucial importance for both Marx and King: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy is an implicit presence throughout my entire book and explicitly addressed at length in the Conclusion. For the record, it should be noted that Hegel’s work may be the most difficult to read in the entire history of philosophy and any interpretation of his work is bound to be controversial. The philosopher Michael Thompson has memorably charged Hegel with “a completely indefensible form of expression in writing” and the young Marx in a letter to his father speaks of “the grotesque craggy melody” of Hegel’s texts.18 I would nevertheless testify to the unparalleled logical precision of his thinking and the moments of devastating beauty in his philosophical prose. From Hegel, I have learned the most profound lessons regarding what it means to lead a spiritual life and why our freedom is possible only through our mutual recognition of one another as essentially social, historical, material, and finite living beings.19 The depths of life are not revealed through faith in eternity. Rather, our spiritual commitments proceed from caring for what will be irrevocably lost and remaining faithful to what gives no final guarantee. Secular faith will always be precarious, but in its fragility it opens the possibility of our spiritual freedom.
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