My argument can helpfully be compared to that of a thinker who is often aligned with Spinoza, but who in fact comes close to grasping the dynamic of secular faith: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s critique of religious faith should not be reduced to his famous saying “God is dead,” meaning that belief in eternal life or eternal being has been discredited. Rather, Nietzsche’s important argument is that the death of God should not be received as bad news. If one laments the absence of eternal life, one is still in the grip of the religious ideal, even though one does not believe that it can be realized. In contrast, Nietzsche pursues a revaluation of the value of an eternal life that would be free from suffering and loss. As Nietzsche emphasizes, it is pernicious to endorse the ideal of eternal life or eternal being, since it leads to a devaluation of the commitment to temporal, finite life. Suffering and loss are not merely necessary steps on the way to bliss or inescapable, unfortunate conditions; they are intrinsic parts of what makes life worth living.13
Yet there is a crucial difference between saying that “suffering is part of the life I desire” and saying that “I desire suffering.” Nietzsche’s deepest insights adhere to the first formulation, but he is continually tempted to embrace the second formulation and thereby loses hold of his own insight. For example, Nietzsche regularly advocates a love of fate (amor fati) that would be so “strong” that one does not resent anything that happens, no matter how much suffering it causes: “One wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”14 By the same token, however, one would no longer suffer, since to suffer is to be at odds with what happens, to struggle against it. Nietzsche’s idealization of a “strength” of life or “embrace” of death leads him to deny the very condition of suffering that he seeks to affirm. Contrary to what Nietzsche tends to claim, affirming mortal life does not entail embracing death. To affirm mortal life is to oppose death, to resist and defer it as best as possible. But since mortal life is essentially linked to death, it is internally bound to what it opposes.
To keep faith in mortal life, then, is to remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master. Mortality is not only intrinsic to what makes life meaningful, but also makes life susceptible to lose meaning and become unbearable. The point is not to overcome this vulnerability but to recognize that it is an essential part of why our lives matter and why we care.
III
Secular faith is a condition of intelligibility for any form of care. For anything to be intelligible as mattering—for anything to be at stake—we have to believe in the irreplaceable value of someone or something that is finite. This secular faith—which the religious aspiration to eternity seeks to leave behind—is expressed by care for anyone or anything living on. Secular faith is a condition of possibility for commitment and engagement, but by the same token secular faith leaves us open to devastation and grief.
The most fundamental form of secular faith is the faith that life is worth living, which is intrinsic to all forms of care. In caring about our own lives and the lives of others, we necessarily believe that life is worth living. This is a matter of faith because we cannot prove that life is worth living despite all the suffering it entails. That life is worth living cannot be demonstrated through a logical deduction or rational calculation. Rather, the faith that life is worth living sustains us even when our lives seem to be unbearable or intolerable. Moreover, it is because we believe that life is worth living that our lives can appear as unbearable or intolerable in the first place. If we did not believe that life is worth living, we could not experience our lives either as fulfilling or as unbearable, since we would be indifferent to the quality of our lives and unmoved by anything that happens.
Even our most elementary ability to care depends on secular faith. Secular faith has three interrelated aspects, which are inseparable in the dynamic of care but can be distinguished analytically.
First, secular faith is an existential commitment. The faith that life is worth living is not caused by some vital force but is constituted by the commitment to a fragile form of life. The form of life to which we are committed is normative, since we lead our lives in light of a conception of who we ought to be and what we ought to do. Our existential commitment to a form of life is not reducible to a drive for self-preservation and is a condition for even the most altruistic deeds. If I give my life for another person, it is because I believe that her life is worth living and am committed to her sustenance. Similarly, if I sacrifice my life for a cause, it is because I believe in its importance and seek to help the cause be carried on in history. The existential commitment to a form of life is a condition for caring at all. If I did not have faith that life is worth living, I would never be compelled to fight for the memory of the past or for a better future.
Second, secular faith is a necessary uncertainty. In being committed to someone or something, I must have faith in the future and in those on whom I depend. I cannot be certain of what others will do, so I have to relate to them on the basis of faith. Faith provides the positive chance of having a relation to others—of trusting them—but it also opens the negative threat of being deceived or betrayed. The same holds for any relation to the future. I cannot be certain of what will happen, so I have to take the future on faith. Secular faith marks the possibility of having a future—of being committed—but for the same reason it entails the peril of having faith in a future that may shatter my hopes and wreck the cause to which I am devoted.
Third, the precariousness of secular faith is a motivational force. In keeping faith with a form of life—whether expressed through the commitment to a person, a project, or a principle—I have to believe that the object of faith is precarious. My commitment to the continued life of someone or something is inseparable from my sense that it cannot be taken for granted. There has to be a prospective risk of loss for anything to be at stake in sustaining a form of life. Without the exposure to loss, there would be no impetus to care for anything, since there would be no risk that could motivate the act of taking care. Part of what compels me to keep faith with a person, a project, or a principle is my apprehension that it can be lost or compromised and thereby requires my fidelity.
Secular faith animates both our relation to what we want to protect and our relation to what we aspire to achieve. In caring, we may be devoted not only to what we have and strive to maintain but also to what we do not have and strive to achieve. Even in the latter case, the threefold dynamic of secular faith is at work. Our faith in the future expresses an existential commitment. We are committed to pursuing one possibility rather than another. This commitment entails the necessary uncertainty of secular faith, since we run the risk of failure or loss in pursuing the possibility to which we are devoted. Furthermore, the risk of failure or loss is intrinsic to the motivational force of the commitment itself. In order to be motivated to act, we have to believe that the possibility is not given once and for all but requires that we sustain it through our engagement.
The risk of loss is thus an essential part of the dynamic of secular faith. Keeping faith with an existential commitment—to a political transformation, a filial relation, an artistic creation, and so on—can always leave us bereaved, since what we believe in may cease to be or never come to be. For this reason, one may think that the most desirable form of commitment would be to have faith in someone or something that will always be, that cannot ever be lost. This ideal of eternity—which can take many different forms—is the common denominator for what I call religious forms of faith.
I emphasize the adjective religious (rather than the noun religion), since the ideal I am targeting is not limited to specific forms of institutionalized religion. Moreover, my critique of religious faith is not restricted to beliefs concerning a supernatural God, a divine creation of the universe, or an otherworldly state of being. At least one of the major world religions (Buddhism) does not promote either a supernatural G
od or a cosmogony that seeks to explain why the universe exists. Furthermore, certain forms of Buddhism emphasize that the highest goal of aspiration—nirvana—is a way of being in the here and now, rather than an otherworldly state of being. In either case, however, to attain nirvana is to be “released” from the time and suffering of finitude. One who has attained nirvana does not suffer from the loss of anything, since he or she is detached from everything that is finite. For this reason, the Buddhist notion of nirvana—whether conceived as an immanent tranquillity of being in the world or as a transcendent peace beyond life—is a clear and consistent version of the religious ideal of eternity. Even according to religious teachings that do not advocate detachment, the commitment to secular projects must be subordinated—or serve as a step on the way—to eternity. “If souls please you, love them in God, because by themselves they are subject to change,” as Augustine underlines in his Confessions. If one loves mortal beings and is committed to secular projects, one should not be attached to them as ends in themselves but rather love the eternal through them.
What I call religious faith, then, is characterized by the attempt to convert us from our secular faith, since this faith makes us vulnerable to irrevocable loss. To have religious faith is to disown our secular faith in a fragile form of life. Religious faith holds that our ultimate aim should be to transcend the finitude we share. As a consequence, this life is devalued and comes to be seen as a transitional state of being from which we ought to be saved. In contrast, I seek to show what it means to own our secular faith and to engage the transformative possibilities that are opened up by acknowledging our commitment to our only life.
IV
The stakes of my arguments can be elucidated in relation to Charles Taylor’s seminal book A Secular Age. Taylor’s philosophical and historical account of the rise of secularity is motivated by a question that is central to my account—namely, what are the conditions for faith today, in the period that Taylor calls a secular age? The established notion of secularity (from which Taylor departs) mainly refers to two phenomena. First, secularity designates the retreat of religion from the public sphere and the public use of reason. For example, deliberations in politics are justified with regard to a conception of the public good that does not depend on religious belief and scientific inquiry is encouraged even if it may threaten religious convictions. Religious dogma is no longer accepted as an authoritative reason in public life and rather becomes a matter of private belief. Second, secularity refers to a decline in religious belief itself, with more and more people living their lives without practicing religion.
One of Taylor’s important contributions is that he articulates a third aspect of secularity. To live in a secular age changes the conditions of faith even for those who hold on to religious belief. As Taylor puts it:
The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives.15
Even though one may question Taylor’s historical narrative (with its postulation of “a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God”), he is making an insightful argument about the increasing pressures on religious belief. In previous historical periods, it was not impossible to be an atheist but it was very difficult to be an atheist publicly and in the United States today it is still difficult, at least if you are running for office. Living in a secular society puts pressure on this hegemony of religious belief, not only because a secular society may lead one to live close to and collaborate with those who do not share one’s beliefs, but also because domains previously claimed by religion are shown to function and flourish without it. In a society where the public good is decided on without reference to the authority of religion—and where natural science provides explanations of the world that contradict religious claims—religious belief can no longer justify itself in the same way.
To be sure, there are many who deny that the conditions of belief have changed and reassert the authority of religion in politics, science, and other domains of public life. Such religious fundamentalism is the main target of the so-called New Atheists, who seek to debunk religious faith with scientific knowledge. Yet, a vast number of religious people do not regard their faith as competing with knowledge. While accepting the freedom of scientific inquiry and democratic pluralism, they hold that religious faith is crucial for the spiritual shape and profound meaning of life. An atheism that does not engage this sense of religion will fail to transform deep-seated notions about faith. Even many people who themselves do not have religious faith believe that it would be great and beneficial to have such faith. The latter attitude is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as believing in belief in God. “Such a person doesn’t believe in God but nevertheless thinks that believing in God would be a wonderful state of mind to be in, if only that could be arranged.”16 This belief in the existential value of religious faith (rather than in the truth of religious claims) is the main line of defense for religion in a secular age, after its authority to organize society or legislate over science has been conceded.
Taylor is an instructive example, since he explicitly defends religion in existential terms. Seeking to create a space of dialogue between atheism and religious faith, Taylor rightly emphasizes that we should not primarily regard the respective positions as “rival theories” about existence, but rather “focus attention on the different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other, on what it’s like to live as a believer or an unbeliever.”17 Taylor’s focal point here is the notion of “fullness” that animates a given life. With this term, he designates the conception of what a life realized to the full would mean. As Taylor explains:
Every person, and every society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: what constitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life really worth living? What would we most admire people for? We can’t help asking these and related questions in our lives. And our struggles to answer them define the view or views that we try to live by.18
Taylor is well aware that there are many conceptions of fullness—many visions of a life worth living—that do not depend on religious faith. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a secular age is that commitments to social justice, the formation of communities, and ideals of a good life, are developed, fought for, and sustained without religious belief. Yet Taylor insists that secular notions of fullness ultimately cannot lead to a fulfilling life. Anyone who defines his or her life without reference to a religious sense of fullness will rather experience that something essential is missing, since human beings (according to Taylor) have “an ineradicable bent to respond to something beyond life,” namely, “an irrepressible need” for an absolute “good beyond life.”19
For Taylor, then, the religious distinguishes itself from other forms of orienting human life by referring to a fullness that is exempt from time and finitude (his main examples are the Christian idea of eternal life and the Buddhist notion of nirvana). From a religious perspective, the highest good is not the flourishing of finite lives. Rather, as Taylor argues, religious notions of the highest good appeal to an absolute fullness—or an absolute emptiness, as in Buddhism—which is held to be “independent of” and “beyond” the flourishing of finite life.20 This is certainly not the only possible definition of a religious perspective on life; there are many others and their respective relevance depends on the context in which one intervenes. I focus on Taylor’s definition because it is indispensable for the idea with which I take issu
e, namely, the idea that there is an essential human need for something called “religion” or “the religious,” which a secular life will try in vain to fulfill. To defend such an idea, one cannot refer solely to the ability of religions to provide a sense of community, organize human life in accordance with a set of traditions, or motivate action based on ethical values. These are features that religious practices share with many other practices. We can build communities, cultivate ethical values, and foster political commitments without appealing to religious faith. There is, however, one thing that a secular form of life never will be able to promise: an eternal life or an eternal state of being. As we will see, the logic of Taylor’s argument thus emerges most clearly when he defines the desire for religious fullness as a “desire for eternity.” If one assumes that we have a fundamental desire for eternal life, then it follows that all secular forms of fullness—which are bound to forms of finite life—will be found lacking and inherently incapable of fulfilling our desire.
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