Moreover, without an order of priority among my practical identities, I could have no sense of what matters in my life and when it matters. What it means to be Martin is inseparable from the relative priority of my practical identities. This order of priority is my existential identity. The form of the boat as a whole (my existential identity) establishes the relative importance of the different planks (my practical identities). If a plank that is fundamental to the construction were to break, I would be in crisis. My existential identity does not designate the completion of who I am but the fragile coherence of who I am trying to be. Being Martin is not a final identity but consists in striving to be Martin, striving to maintain or transform the relations of priority among my practical identities in the form of an existential identity. I can be only one person, but what it means to be that person—what it means to be Martin—is never established once and for all. My existential identity is itself at issue in my life. If my being a political activist has priority over my being a father, my existential identity is different than if my priority is the reverse. The order of priority that defines me can change, but without the question of priority being at stake—without my existential identity being at stake—I would not be able to lead a life and experience a conflict among my practical identities in the first place.
The second trait of spiritual freedom is the ability of a person to bear a negative self-relation. The negative self-relation may be expressed as a crisis of existential identity—a conflict or breakdown in the relation among my different practical identities—but it also lives within any given practical identity. Korsgaard suggests that living up to a practical identity is what makes someone “a person at all,” since a person who betrays her own integrity is “for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead.”8 Yet this cannot be right. If I ceased to be a person when I failed to live up to my practical identity, the experience of failure would be unintelligible. The motivational force of the dreaded prospect to which Korsgaard herself calls attention—“I couldn’t live with myself if I did that”9—stems from my anticipation that I will have to live with myself even if I betray my own integrity. Betraying my integrity may in some cases be a fate worse than death, but it is not the same as death. If it were, I would not have to experience the pain of failure, since I would be dead. When I experience the pain of failing to be myself it is rather because I am still alive and trying to lead my life. This is my ability to bear a negative self-relation. Because my identity is practical (a matter of what I do), it can fail or break down. Even the established order of priority among my practical identities—my existential identity—can break down. Planks that hold my boat together can break or fall apart, leaving me shipwrecked. The breakdown of my established integrity, however, is not the end of my life as a person. If I experience the disintegration of the boat, I have not yet drowned and am still trying to hold it together. Being a failed person is still being a person.
The activity of trying to be myself—trying to maintain or rebuild the boat, trying to be answerable for what I do and what I have done—is the minimal form of my personhood. As long as I lead my life in any way at all, I am trying to have integrity, even if I fail. Being a person is not necessarily to succeed in living up to the demands of my practical identities but consists in trying to maintain or to change my practical identities. Likewise, being a person is not necessarily to succeed in sustaining an existential identity but consists in trying to sustain or to transform my existential identity. When I fail to be the person I am trying to be—when I am shipwrecked—I am not simply negated but the subject of the negative experience of failing to be myself. This possibility of failure is a necessary boundary condition for any practical and existential identity. The prospects of failing to be myself—of losing my integrity, losing my boat, losing my life by drowning—remind me why it matters that I have integrity and that I lead my life.
The ability to bear a negative self-relation makes it possible for me to strive to live up to the demands of a practical and existential identity, even at the expense of great personal suffering. I may persist in being a political activist even though I am beaten, persecuted, and risking my life, thereby demonstrating my spiritual commitment to who I take myself to be. The demands of my practical identity, however, do not come to an end when I am apparently safe and fulfilled in my life as a political activist. As long as I am committed to being a political activist, I will have to strive to live up to the demands of that practical identity and the existential identity to which it belongs. Striving to be who I take myself to be is not a task that can be completed or a goal that can be achieved. Rather, striving to be myself is intrinsic to any form of practical and existential identity. I cannot have a practical identity without continuing to try to have a practical identity, and I cannot have an existential identity without continuing to try to have an existential identity. Even in the fullest actuality and flourishing of who I am, I have to strive to be who I take myself to be, since being someone is essentially a temporal activity. The relation to the negative is therefore intrinsic to personhood and part of its positive constitution.
The third trait of spiritual freedom is the ability to ask myself what to do with my time. Like all living beings, I have a surplus of time, but as a spiritual being my relation to the surplus of time is inseparable from the question of how I should spend my time. This is the question that underlies all normative considerations, since what I do with my time is what I do with my life. Every question of what I ought to do—or ought not to do—is ultimately a question of what I ought to do with my time. For any norm to matter to me, it has to matter to me what I do with my time. Furthermore, what I do with my time can matter to me only because I grasp my life as finite. If I believed that I had an infinite time to live, the urgency of doing anything would be unintelligible to me and no normative obligation could have any grip on me.
The philosophical insight here can be elucidated by attending to the colloquial phrase “Life is too short.” When I say, “my life is too short not to pursue my dreams,” or “my time is too precious to waste on this meaningless job,” I make explicit the relation to finitude that is implicit in all my decisions and deliberations. The phrases express an ability to discriminate between what is worth doing and not worth doing. To say that my life is too short is to say not only that I will die but also that I am anxious to lead a flourishing life: to bring my time into focus and respond in practice to the question of what makes my life worth living.
My anxiety is not reducible to a psychological condition that can or should be overcome. Rather, anxiety is a condition of intelligibility for leading a free life and being passionately committed. As long as my life matters to me, I must be animated by the anxiety that my time is finite, since otherwise there would be no urgency in trying to be someone and trying to do something. Even if my project is to lead my life without psychological anxiety before death, that project is intelligible only because I am anxious not to waste my life on being anxious before death. Indeed, it is because I am living with the anxiety that my time is finite that I can reject certain occupations or activities as unworthy of who I take myself to be. Even the sense that something lasts too long—that it takes too much time—is intelligible only because I hold that my life is too short. If the brevity of my lifetime were not an issue for me, the temporal length of an activity could not be experienced as an imposition.
To be clear, no amount of time can make my life long enough. Leading a life is not a project that can be completed but rather a purposive activity that must be sustained. The judgment that my life is too short is constitutive of leading a life, which requires that I postpone the death I bear within myself. The judgment is implicit in taking anything to be urgent (“my life is too short not to pursue X”) and in taking anything to be a waste of time (“my life is too short to waste on Y”). The judgment does not have to be explicit but is at work in all forms of practical engagement.
In being devoted to someone or something—e.g., spending time with a loved one, playing an instrument with great intent, learning a new profession—I express in practice that the activity is a priority and that other claims on my attention would count as a distraction.
To hold that my life is too short is a normative judgment, since it expresses what I take to be worth doing with my time. The judgment is concerned with the quality of my lifetime rather than with the mere quantity of my lifetime. Hence, to judge that my life is too short is not directly correlated with how long I think my life should last in terms of objective time. I may think that I have a long time left to live in an objective sense and still judge that my time has run out in an existential sense, since it is no longer possible to live a life that is worthy of who I take myself to be. For example, if I am severely ill, have lost everyone who matters to me, or suffer from irredeemable boredom, I may choose to end my life even though I have the physical possibility of surviving for years to come.
Far from expressing that I think it is the right time to die, the decision to end my life is tragic. In deciding to end my life, I express a tragic contradiction between the conception of how my life ought to be (how my life would be worth living) and how it is (how it is possible to lead my life). Without such a contradiction, I would not suffer from my situation, since there would be no discrepancy between how my life is and my conception of how it ought to be. My terminal illness, the loss of all my loved ones, or my irredeemable boredom, would not be intelligible as terrible and as a reason to end my life. The decision to end my life does not reflect that my life is complete but that I hold my life to be too short in an existential sense, and indeed so short that there is no time left for me to be who I take myself to be. If my continued life seems too long to bear in an objective sense, it is because I judge that my life is too short to live in an existential sense.
Likewise, if I help someone else to die because her circumstances are unbearable, I do not hold that it is the right time for her to die. Rather, I hold that the objective conditions under which she would survive are unworthy of her dignity and that her life is too short—in an existential sense—to endure senseless suffering. This is a judgment, rather than a neutral observation, since I may be wrong in my assessment of the relation between the objective and the existential conditions. That is why decisions regarding euthanasia and suicide are so difficult and contestable. We may be mistaken in thinking that our lives are no longer worth living and others may help us to see that we are wrong.
My point is not to provide criteria for the difficult decisions regarding life and death, but to elucidate why their difficulty is an essential feature of leading a free, spiritual life. Existential anxiety is at work in every form of spiritual life, since it opens us to the question of what we ought to do with our time. Moreover, the anxious relation to finitude is not even ideally to be overcome. Instead of trying to achieve a final peace of mind, we should own the existential anxiety of our freedom. If we had no anxiety about what to do with our time, we would not be able to discriminate between which activities are worthy and unworthy of who we take ourselves to be. To lead a spiritual life, I have to hold that “my life is too short.” And in caring for the spiritual life of anyone else, I have to hold that “your life is too short.”
For the same reason, any form of spiritual life must be dependent on a fragile material body. For my life to be constitutively too short—and for your life to be constitutively too short—our time must be finite in a way that exceeds any attempt to master how long we will live. We can try to prolong our lives by maintaining our vitality—and as long as we lead our lives we are engaged in that activity of self-maintenance—but our bodies must remain fragile beyond our control. Even if the material we are made of were improved and made more durable, our bodies would still have to run the risk of breaking down and ending our lives. Without such a risk, there would be nothing at stake in leading our lives.
The implications of my argument can be seen in light of what the philosopher Sebastian Rödl has called “true materialism.” As Rödl underlines in his seminal book Self-Consciousness, we cannot understand how we are material beings if we assume a contemplative standpoint. A materialist understanding of ourselves is severely distorting if we reduce it to a set of material properties and functions. This is, for example, the standpoint we take up when we reduce who we are and what we do to material operations in the brain that can be observed from a third-person standpoint. A “true” materialism should instead establish how we have a spontaneous, first-person understanding of ourselves as material beings. The understanding of ourselves as material beings is not something that arises when we take up a second- or third-person standpoint on our own bodies. Rather, the understanding of ourselves as material beings is built into our own first-person standpoint.10
Yet the question is how to account for the understanding of ourselves as material beings from a first-person standpoint. My life does not continue merely by virtue of the objective persistence of my material body, but is inseparable from the subjective activity of sustaining my life. If there is no subjective activity of sustaining my life—e.g., if I am in a coma—my life is not continuing but is at best suspended and at worst already over. My self-consciousness (my first-person standpoint) is inherent in everything I experience and everything I do, rather than something that is added in a second step of reflection. Following Rödl’s important argument, to be self-conscious is not to observe myself as an object. I am not aware of what I believe through a separate mental act of inspecting my beliefs, but by being the believer. Likewise, I am not aware of what I do through a separate mental act of assessing my deeds, but by being the actor. When Rödl specifies the activity of self-consciousness, however, he does not bring into view the finitude that is intrinsic to any form of spiritual self-maintenance. Rödl makes clear that I must hold myself to a standard of integrity, but he does not acknowledge the fragility of the integrity itself. To be self-conscious is always to be engaged in the precarious activity of trying to lead my life and trying to be responsive to what I have done. By the same token, who I am and what I do is always at issue. In taking myself to be doing something and believing something, I am necessarily responsive to being mistaken about my actions and beliefs. In trying to maintain my integrity, I must hold myself open to self-correction, self-transformation, and breakdown.11
Moreover, I must hold myself open not only to the breakdown of a particular self-conception but also to the end of my life. The sense of mortality—which Rödl never addresses—is built into my first-person standpoint and explains how I understand myself as a material being from the beginning. To lead my life—to pursue any form of spiritual self-maintenance—I have to believe that my time is finite. And to believe that my time is finite, I have to take myself to be dependent on a fragile material body, which always runs the risk of disintegration and death. The belief that my time is finite does not have to be explicitly self-conscious; it is rather the practical self-understanding implicit in caring for my own life and the lives of others. In leading my life, I have to hold that my life is too short and needs to be sustained, which is only intelligible because I grasp myself in practice as a finite material being. The conditions of possibility for spiritual life are the conditions of the fragility of spiritual life.
IV
We can here begin to see the link between spiritual freedom and secular faith. The deepest reason I am spiritually free is that I can engage the question of what I should do with my time as a question. If there were a given answer to the question, I would not be spiritually free. Who I ought to be and what I ought to do would already be determined. Neither social norms nor natural instincts, however, can by themselves determine what I do. When I adhere to a norm or follow what I take to be my natural instinct, I am the one adhering to the norm or following the instinct and I can hold myself responsible for doing so. Even kinship relations—in which nat
ural instincts and social norms may seem especially powerful—require that I maintain them. The mere biological or social fact of fatherhood is not sufficient for me to care for my child (as evidenced by the many fathers who abandon their children). Rather, I have to take myself as a father and hold myself to that practical identity. This is a matter of faith for two fundamental reasons. First, being a father is not something that can be accomplished once and for all but a practical identity with which I have to keep faith. Being a father does not depend on my figuring out a fact about myself but on my continued fidelity to the well-being of my child. Second, my commitment to being a father is not reducible to the reasons I have for being a father. On the basis of my commitment I am compelled to give reasons for what I do with my child and understand myself to succeed or fail as a father. Yet the commitment itself cannot be derived or deduced from reason. There is no way I can demonstrate conclusively (to myself or to anyone else) that being a father is the right thing to do with my life. Rather, I find myself already constrained by my existential commitment to being a father. This commitment opens a space of reasons, since it makes me accountable for being a father and for what I do with my child, but the commitment itself is sustained by faith.
Secular faith and secular reason are therefore two sides of the same coin. Secular faith has nothing to do with religious revelation or mystical intuition, but is inherent in the structure of a normative commitment. I must keep faith with my commitment as normative—as something to which I am bound—since it only lives in and through me. I can come to question, transform, or betray my commitment, but only in terms of a different commitment with which I keep faith.
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