This Life

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by Martin Hägglund


  Far from being innocent doctrines that should be respected out of empathy for their adherents, religious ideals of eternal salvation have pernicious practical consequences. Buddhism is once again an instructive example. Buddhism is a doctrinal system that denigrates our embodiment and our aspirations to lead a free, finite life. The body is regarded with contempt because it is subject to decay and personal agency is held to be an illusion that should ultimately be overcome. These are not merely theoretical ideas but enacted in practice. In his study of Buddhist monastic life, Collins recounts how “the ascetic effort to subdue bodily desires is not merely expressed in the fact of celibacy; all sexual thoughts, even in dreams, are for monks forms of bad karma.”19 Thus, in meditating on the body, the monk should begin by reciting textual lists of bodily parts (there are thirty-two) to apprehend that they are foul and repulsive. As Collins explains: “The body is mentally analyzed into its constituent parts, all of which are described as impure and repulsive, largely but not only because they are subject to decay and death.”20 Indeed, because salvation “is conceived as a spiritual state manifested in both mind and body,” it requires “the attempt wholly to inhibit all sexual drives and thoughts, and not merely to avoid overt sexual activity.”21 Through such meditation, “the desexualized, and thus in one sense desocialized individual can embody in imagination the immateriality posited in the doctrines of Buddhism.”22

  The ideal of a desexualized, desocialized, and immaterial individual, however, is self-undermining. Even the most advanced Buddhist monk must in practice understand himself as an agent and exercise his spiritual freedom in order to submit to rigorous meditation. Yet the supposed goal of his purposive activity is to be released from all sense of agency and purpose. His life project is to let go of all projects in favor of an empty tranquillity.

  My argument is that such an ideal is indeed empty and not worth striving for. Any spiritual life must tremble with the anxiety of freedom, even in the most profound fulfillment of our aspirations. The attempt to eradicate all forms of anxiety—all forms of attachments that expose us to suffering and make us run the risk of bereavement—is thoroughly misguided, since it seeks to eradicate the condition of spiritual life itself. From this perspective, it is no accident that many monks do not actually devote themselves to the aim of eternal salvation but find ways of pursuing a passionate life even within the walls of the monastery. Such behavior is symptomatic of a social institution that is based on a self-contradictory ideal. Of course, a conscientious Buddhist monk may object and assert that he really does want to abolish his own agency and repose in timeless peace. My argument leaves him free to make that choice, but invites him to ask himself if the eternal salvation of nirvana actually is an end with which he identifies, and if it is worthy of the sacrifices he makes. While my invitation may be declined, it recalls and opens up the possibility of owning the pursuit of a free life, rather than aiming for the desexualized, desocialized, and immaterial existence posited as an ideal by the doctrines of Buddhism.

  To be clear, Buddhist meditation practices can certainly be employed to great effect for secular ends. In particular, there has been success in adapting various forms of meditation techniques for cognitive therapy as well as for practical forms of compassion training.23 If you learn Buddhist meditation techniques for such therapeutic purposes—or simply for the sake of having more strength and energy—then you are adapting the techniques for a secular project. You engage in meditational practices as a means for the secular end of deepening your ability to care for others and improving the quality of your life. The religious aim of Buddhism, however, is to release you from finite life itself. According to Buddhism, you should ultimately treat your agency as a means toward the end of relinquishing the attachment to your life. This is the difference between a religious commitment to salvation as an end in itself and a secular commitment to freedom as an end in itself. The ultimate purpose of a religious practice is the liberation from finite life, whereas the ultimate purpose of a secular practice is the liberation of finite life.

  A religious ideal of salvation is therefore incompatible with a secular ideal of freedom. This is equally clear when we turn to the question of morality. One of the most persistent arguments for our supposed need of religion is that moral responsibility requires religious faith. As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, more than 50 percent of Americans hold that morality depends on religion. The idea is that moral norms can be binding for us only if we believe that the norms are based on a divine command and/or that there will be a divine reward for good behavior. This religious model of morality denigrates our freedom, since it articulates a coercive structure of command and reward. Genuine moral responsibility, on the contrary, requires a secular sense of freedom.

  An illuminating example is offered by Phil Zuckerman, who is a leading sociologist of secular life. Zuckerman elucidates the difference between a secular and a religious form of morality with the thought experiment of two children who are both entrusted with looking at an artwork in a room all by themselves.24 The first child is told that the artwork is deeply valuable and very fragile. The work of art is unique—the only one in existence—but it may easily break and be irreparably damaged. The first child is therefore instructed not to touch the artwork, but she is not threatened with punishment or promised a reward for her behavior. Rather, it is explained to her that she should be careful with the artwork because it deserves to be respected in its fragility and because many people would be sad if it were damaged. The second child is also told that the artwork is deeply valuable and very fragile. However, she is told that she should not touch the artwork because the principal of the school will watch her from a small hole in the ceiling. If she touches the artwork the principal will punish her, whereas she will be rewarded if she refrains from touching the artwork.

  Both of the children go into the room alone, look at the artwork, and do not touch it. They perform the same action, but their motivations are radically different. The first child chooses to respect the artwork because she understands that something valuable is fragile and depends on her care. This is a secular model of morality, where the child is taught responsibility on the basis of her own freedom and sense of finitude. In contrast, the second child refrains from touching the artwork because she fears punishment and hopes for a reward. This is a religious model of morality, where the child is taught responsibility on the basis of coercion.

  The problem with the latter—religious—model of morality is at least threefold. First, if the child is doing the right thing because she believes that a divine authority is keeping score, she is not acting morally but merely obediently and out of fear of punishment. The child who is taught to act morally because she is being watched from above does not learn to do the right thing for its own sake but rather on the basis of subservience to God. This model of morality fails to establish a sense of responsibility in her own self-relation and makes moral behavior contingent on religious faith. If the child were to lose her faith in God, she would have no resources to make sense of moral obligations but would rather believe that everything is permitted. Second, if the child is taught to believe that moral norms are commanded by God, she is deprived of a perspective that enables her to interrogate and transform the norms themselves. She may do what her religion says that she ought to do, but she will be discouraged from asking herself if she ought to do what she supposedly ought to do. Her spiritual freedom—and especially her ability progressively to change the norms of her community—will be compromised rather than cultivated. Third, if the child is taught to act morally out of concern for a reward (salvation), her commitment to justice becomes instrumental rather than an end in itself. She will not do the right thing because she is committed to justice but because she wants to be saved. Both her sense of freedom and her sense of justice are at odds with the religious teaching of salvation as the ultimate end.

  These problems plagu
e all attempts to ground moral responsibility in religious faith. Once again Buddhism is the most honest religion when it comes to acknowledging the consequences. Buddhism does not posit a God who keeps watch over us, but rather the absolute monitoring system of karma. The impersonal calculation of karma is able to evaluate exactly the moral worth of every deed and enact the precise retribution that is deserved. By virtue of karma, all the injustice in the world is only apparent and actually justified. As Collins explains, in Buddhism all forms of suffering are understood by means of “the ultimate explanatory schema of karma, action and its effects, which operates automatically and impersonally in the universe of conditioning, samsara, both within a particular lifetime and across a series of rebirths. In this scheme, there is no injustice, no accident: all distress is in some sense merited, as a form of retribution for previous misdeeds.”25 Buddhist metaphysics thereby eliminates the question of justice in favor of an absolute principle of cause and effect. There is no injustice (since all forms of suffering are adequate forms of retribution for previous misdeeds), so there can be no question of justice. For the same reason, moral action is not motivated by a concern for justice but serves as a vehicle to achieve good karma and ideally attain salvation by being liberated from karma altogether. The ultimate aim is not to act on behalf of justice and lead a free life, but to be released from anything that can cause suffering.

  The Buddhist standpoint reveals the implication of all religious ideals of salvation. Even in a religion like Christianity, which places great emphasis on individual freedom, leading a free life is not an end in itself. Rather, our freedom is a means toward the end of serving and being saved by God. The service to God may take the form of caring for the poor and destitute (as in many forms of Christianity), but the goal is not to emancipate the poor so that they can flourish on the basis of their own evolving commitments and lead their free, finite lives as ends in themselves. The goal of religious salvation is not to emancipate our finite lives but to save us from the finitude that is the condition of our freedom. As soon as emancipation becomes the goal, we have moved from a religious to a secular practice of care, in which our aim is freedom and not salvation. We do not seek liberation from finite life, but rather the liberation of finite life.

  The Value of Our Finite Time

  I

  The greatest resources for developing a secular notion of freedom can be found in the writings of Karl Marx. This may be surprising, since Marxism is notorious for having given rise to totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Yet, as I will seek to show, there is no support in Marx’s thinking for any form of totalitarian state. On the contrary, the premise for all of his work is “the existence of living human individuals”1 as ends in themselves. This commitment to individual freedom—what Marx describes as “the free development of individualities”2—is the foundation for his critique of capitalism and his critique of religion.

  The starting point for Marx is what it means that we are living beings. The young Marx pursued this question by analyzing both what we have in common with other animals and how we are different from them. As we saw in chapter 4, all living beings are defined by their purposive activity. Like other animals, we always have to do something (breathe, eat, metabolize) to stay alive. The need to consume—and therefore to produce means of subsistence—belongs to the realm of necessity. No living being can sustain itself without some process of production and consumption. This realm of necessity in turn provides the condition of possibility for freedom, since the self-maintenance of living beings generates a surplus of time. What Marx calls the realm of freedom is opened up by the capacity of living beings to generate more lifetime than is required to secure the means of survival. The seagull, for example, does not have to spend all its time hunting for food but has a surplus of disposable time that it may use to fly around, linger in the air, or play with other seagulls.

  As Marx emphasizes, however, human beings are the only animals who can relate to their activity as a free activity. Other animals are identical with their life-activity, in the sense that they cannot call into question the purpose of what they are doing. Human beings, on the contrary, can transform the purpose of their life-activity. Rather than treat our own survival and the survival of our species as the given end (as the ultimate purpose of our life-activity), we can treat survival as a means toward the end of leading a free, spiritual life. For the same reason, the question of what should count as a satisfying, successful form of life is never finally settled for us. Like other animals we have to satisfy our needs and reproduce our life form, but how and why we should satisfy our needs and reproduce our life form is always at least implicitly at issue. We are not simply consigned to reproduce a given form of life but capable of calling into question and changing our way of living. This is why our life-activity fundamentally is a free activity.

  The ability to engage our life-activity as a free activity is what the young Marx calls the “species-being” (Gattungswesen) of human beings.3 The notion of species-being has often been dismissed as a naive appeal to a supposed human nature or human essence, but such a critique is misleading. The species-being of the human is precisely that we have no given nature or essence. To be sure, Marx holds that labor is a necessary feature of human beings, but for Marx labor does not specify any essential content that would define us once and for all. Rather, “labor” is his term for all forms of purposive activity. Ranging from the most instrumental action to the most elevated spiritual pursuits, labor can be individual and collective, artisanal and artistic, political and philosophical. Labor may be driven by physical need, but it can also be motivated by creative aspirations and communal commitments. While Marx is highly critical of all forms of coerced labor—whether slavery, serfdom, or wage labor—emancipation is a matter of not only being free from work but also of being free to work in light of the ends that matter to us.

  In an emancipated society, we would be able to work on the basis of our commitments rather than due to coercion. We would thereby engage in what Marx calls “actual free labor” (wirklich freie Arbeiten).4 He glosses actual free labor in terms of the activity of composing (komponieren), which does not refer exclusively to creating music but to any form of purposive activity with which you identify and to which you are freely committed. The activity of composition can express itself in any number of projects—e.g., building a house, taking care of children, producing social goods, putting together and sustaining a study group—but it requires that you treat the activity as an end in itself. The actual free labor of composing is “the most damned seriousness” (verdammtester Ernst) and “the most intense effort” (intensivste Anstrengung)5 because you are at stake in what you do. That we are essentially defined by labor, then, does not mean that it is given who we are or what we should do. On the contrary, it means that we are essentially dependent on historical and social practices that can change. Who we are is inseparable from what we do and how we do it.

  Accordingly, I will show that there is no opposition between the appeal to “species-being” in the young Marx and the method of historical materialism in his mature work, which seeks to analyze historically specific conditions of social-economic life. These two strands of his thinking are systematically linked, as indicated by the fact that the notions of life and living individuals remain central in all his writings. The key is to grasp that neither life nor species-being should primarily be understood in biological or anthropological terms. Marx himself tends to invite such a reading, but we can deepen his concepts of life and species-being by grounding them in the distinction between natural and spiritual life that I developed in the previous chapter.

  The first thing we need to remember is that life is essentially a self-maintaining form. Anything that is intelligible as living must exhibit a self-maintaining form. Even when we dream of forms of life that do not have the biological basis of our lives, these forms must be self-maintaining to be intelligible a
s dreams of life. To be alive is to be engaged in the activity of maintaining a life; otherwise living would have no purpose. By the same token, all dreams of life are dreams of finite life. To be self-maintaining is not to be self-sufficient but to pursue an activity that is inherently fragile. The activity of self-maintenance makes sense only because your life depends on it. If your life were not fragile—if you could not disintegrate and die—the activity of self-maintenance would make no sense and your life would not be intelligible as a life. This is why any living being depends on a body that can die.

  The dependence of life on a fragile material body is not a contingent biological fact about life, but a condition for any possible life. As I have argued, even the most elevated form of spiritual life must reckon with its own finitude. To lead a spiritual life, you have to be the subject of what you do—rather than merely subjected to what you do—which requires that you actively sustain your existential identity. This activity matters because your life is at stake in it. To sustain your existential identity is to lead your life in light of what you value, which is only possible because you understand yourself as finite. Only a finite being can lead a spiritual life, since only for a finite being can it be urgent to do anything and prioritize anything, which is a condition for valuing anything. This link between the sense of finitude and the sense of value should not be understood as a mere anthropological fact about how our lives happen to matter to us. On the contrary, finitude is a minimal condition for anyone to lead a spiritual life and for anything to be intelligible as a value. An infinite being like God cannot value anything and cannot lead a spiritual life, since nothing is urgent and nothing is at stake for an infinite being. For the same reason, there cannot be any form of economy for an infinite being, since an economy is intelligible only for someone who is dependent on others and who is valuing something that he or she can lose.

 

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