Accordingly, we will be able to own and actively transform our ceremonies of communal recognition, which previously have been alienated in the form of religious rituals. Under democratic socialism, we will not be baptized in the name of God, but it will make sense to have ceremonies that acknowledge and celebrate the newborn as unique, fragile individuals to whose well-being we are committed: from each according to her ability, to each according to her need. Likewise, the institution of marriage will no longer be mediated by religious faith or capitalist property rights, and there will be multiple forms of institutionalizing partnerships. For these very reasons, however, the partnerships in question will be explicitly recognized as ends in themselves. Thus, it will make all the more sense to have ceremonies that acknowledge and celebrate those who are willing to take the risk of making a life-defining commitment to another person. Finally—recalling the issue I pursued in chapter 1—our funeral ceremonies will be able to honor and avow the devastating loss of an irreplaceable person. Rather than disown our mourning through the supposed consolation of eternal life, we will be able to own our pain as something that we ought to feel in the face of death. Moreover, we will be able to affirm expressions of mourning as a practical avowal of our shared commitment to the members of our community, on whom we bestow dignity in recognition of their finitude and for whom we take responsibility even when they no longer exist.
Such secular ceremonies are not “substitutes” or “replacements” for their religious analogues. On the contrary, only from the standpoint of secular faith can we understand the actual significance of baptisms, marriages, and funerals, as expressions of historical commitments that matter because we have to sustain them. The Hegelian insight regarding religious practices—that “God” is a name for the communal norms that we have legislated to ourselves—is therefore necessary but not sufficient. To complete our emancipation, we ought to remove all remaining forms of political theology by removing any appeal to “God” in favor of the explicit democratic recognition that what ultimately matters is our relations to one another.
The basic premise of political theology has always been that we the people cannot ultimately own the responsibility for our life together. At the end of the day all forms of political theology are antidemocratic, since they assume that we must defer to a higher authority than we the people in order to hold together as a community. The movement toward democratic socialism is thus inseparable from the overcoming of political theology and the withering away of religious faith. We will recognize that our finitude is inseparable from our dignity and our care for one another. We will acknowledge that everything depends on we the people.
Needless to say, there is no guarantee that we will succeed in achieving democratic socialism. Even if we do succeed, it may take more generations than we would like to imagine. What I have sought to show is that we can get there—that we can recognize the principles of democratic socialism as our own commitments, that we can make sense of life beyond capitalism—and that there is never time to wait. To make our emancipation actual will require both our political mobilizations and our rational arguments; it will require our general strikes and our systematic reflections, our labor and our love, our anxiety and our passion. We only have a chance to achieve democratic socialism if we grasp that everything is at stake in what we do with our finite time together. We only have a chance to make it a reality if we help one another to own our only life. This is how we overcome and how we move forward—not toward the new Jerusalem but toward the new Memphis, the new Los Angeles, the new Chicago, the new New Haven, and the new New York.
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. I quote the article from Steven Collins, Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative, p. 21. In chapter 4, I engage with Collins’s analysis of different religious conceptions of eternal life.
2. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 517.
3. Dalai Lama, “Samtal med Dalai Lama” [“Conversation with the Dalai Lama”], interview by Peter Berglund, Swedish Television (SVT), April 10, 1989.
4. I owe the notion of acting “in light of” norms to the seminal work on freedom by the philosopher Robert Pippin. As Pippin rightly emphasizes, we can never act automatically or purely passively in conformity with given norms; following norms is always something that we must actively do and sustain, however constrained and minimal the activity in question may be. See, for example, chapter 15 in Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, as well as Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.
5. See Peter E. Gordon, “Critical Theory Between the Sacred and the Profane.” See also Gordon’s insightful review essay, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.”
6. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” pp. 12–13, 30.
7. For Weber’s claim that democracy entails the “de-souling” (Entseelung) and “spiritual proletarianization” (geistige Proletarisierung) of society, as well his claim that we need a Führer to lead us, see, for example, Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften, p. 544.
8. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 30.
9. For a pathbreaking account of how the prospect of future generations is a condition of possibility for the value and meaning of many of our own present activities, see Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife. Scheffler’s notion of “the afterlife” is secular in my sense of the term, since it seeks to capture our commitment to future generations of human, temporal life, rather than an eternal afterlife in any religious sense.
10. Bruce Robbins, “Enchantment? No, Thank You!,” p. 81.
11. Ibid., p. 90.
12. Ibid., p. 81.
13. Quoted from Nina Björk, Drömmen om det röda: Rosa Luxemburg, socialism, språk och kärlek, p. 23. I am indebted to Björk’s deeply insightful book on Rosa Luxemburg and the socialist-labor movements in which she participated. See also the important reflections on the relation between freedom and lifetime in Björk’s incisive book Lyckliga i alla sina dagar.
14. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, p. 222.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 221.
17. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 86.
18. Thompson, Life and Action, p. 12; Marx, “Discovering Hegel,” p. 7.
19. The most important sources for my thinking regarding freedom, finitude, and temporality are Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (as well as his Science of Logic) and Heidegger’s Being and Time—in my view the three most insightful works in the entire history of philosophy. I hold that if we pursue the core insights of Hegel and Heidegger in the right way, we will grasp why their notions of freedom are mutually required. Moreover, such a perspective makes it possible to develop a new conception of personhood and agency, which is elaborated in my book in progress, Being a Person: The Fundamental Ontology of Time and Agency, where I engage in depth with Heidegger’s Being and Time.
1. FAITH
1. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 36.
2. Ibid., p. 56.
3. Ibid., p. 26.
4. Ibid., p. 66.
5. Ibid., pp. 26–27.
6. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
7. Ibid., p. 68.
8. See Miroslav Volf, “Time, Eternity, and the Prospects for Care.” Volf’s essay focuses on the arguments regarding time and eternity that I have articulated in my previous work and especially in my book Dying for Time. The arguments in question are deepened, improved upon, and further developed in the present work.
9. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1382b31–32. The Greek verb that I translate as “to believe” (oiomenoi) has a very rich and instructive range of meanings: “to think,” “to suppose,” “to expect,” “to credit,” and so on.
10. See, for example, Epict
etus, The Discourses; Seneca, Dialogues and Essays; and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. For an important and profound study of the Stoics on passion, commitment, and belief, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, in particular her incisive analysis of Chrysippus’s notion of judgment in chapter 10.
11. See Spinoza, The Ethics, book 5, pp. 244–265.
12. Spinoza, “A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Man,” pp. 4–5.
13. For an insightful analysis of Nietzsche’s revaluation of values, see Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life.
14. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 258. See also Nietzsche’s claim further on in Ecce Homo: “I myself have never suffered from all this; what is necessary does not hurt me; amor fati is my inmost nature” (p. 324). Thus Nietzsche falls back into the Stoic denial of suffering that he elsewhere subjects to critique. Nietzsche comes closest to the right form of critique of Stoicism in The Gay Science, when he argues against the Stoic detachment from suffering on the grounds that the capacity for suffering is inseparable from the capacity for joy. As Nietzsche puts it: “Pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wants to learn how to ‘jubilate up to the heavens’ must also be prepared for ‘grief unto death’ ” (p. 38). As a consequence, “If you want to decrease and diminish people’s susceptibility to pain, you also have to decrease and diminish their capacity for joy” (p. 38). As Nietzsche points out, the constitutive interrelation of joy and pain is evident from the reasoning of the Stoics themselves: “The Stoics believed that this is how things are and they were consistent when they also desired as little pleasure as possible in order to derive as little pain as possible from life” (ibid.). In Nietzsche’s diagnosis, Stoic detachment is nihilistic, since it seeks to withdraw from life in favor of apathy. As Nietzsche wittily makes the point farther on in The Gay Science: “Is our life really so painful and burdensome that it would be advantageous for us to trade it for a fossilized Stoic way of life? Things are not bad enough for us that they have to be bad for us in the Stoic style!” (p. 182). Nietzsche’s critique of Stoicism, however, remains limited to psychological categories and quantitative relations of pleasure/pain, rather than addressing the conditions of intelligibility for leading a life. Hegel’s critique of Stoicism in the Phenomenology of Spirit—a critique that I develop in the conclusion to this book—is much more powerful, since it seeks to demonstrate the fundamental incoherence of Stoicism, not merely in terms of psychology but in terms of the conditions of intelligibility for being a person at all. Unlike Nietzsche, Hegel also seeks to understand the temptation of Stoicism not in terms of the failure of individual character but in terms of oppressive social and historical conditions. As Hegel puts it, Stoicism as an authoritative spiritual ideal “can only come on the scene during a time of universal fear and servitude” (Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 118–119). That various forms of Stoicism continue to enjoy the status of supposed spiritual “wisdom” in our own historical epoch (in everything from advanced philosophy to self-help books) should remind us of how far we are from having achieved an emancipated society.
15. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 3.
16. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 221.
17. Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 4–5.
18. Ibid., p. 16.
19. Ibid., pp. 638, 639.
20. See Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 16–17.
21. Ibid., pp. 720–721.
22. Ibid., p. 723.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 720.
25. Ibid., p. 57.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Taylor seeks to justify his analogy between our “gathering” of time and the eternity of God by appealing to Augustine’s phenomenology of time in book 11 of the Confessions. According to Taylor, Augustine’s notion of the distension of time (distentio) designates how we are “cut off from our past and out of touch with our future” (A Secular Age, p. 57, cf. p. 56). Taylor contrasts the distentio of time to Augustine’s account of how we “gather” time when we sing a melody and retain the notes we have sung while anticipating the ones that will follow. Contrary to Taylor’s claim, however, there is no contrast between the distentio of time and the gathering of time in Augustine’s melody example. Augustine’s example is explicitly meant to show that the distentio of time is the form of any experience of time, which requires that we hold on to the past and project ourselves into the future. The form of distentio is not something that befalls us when we are psychologically cut off from our past and our future. Rather, the distentio of time is the only form in which anyone can be related to her past and her future. Thus, Augustine underlines the disanalogy between the way we retain our past in relation to the future and the way God reposes in his eternal presence: “A person singing or listening to a song he knows well suffers a distension in feeling and in sense-perception from the expectation of future sounds and the memory of past sound. With you [God] it is otherwise. You are unchangeably eternal….Just as you knew heaven and earth in the beginning without that bringing any variation into your knowing, so you made heaven and earth in the beginning without that meaning a tension between past and future in your activity” (Augustine, Confessions, Book 11, chapter 31). In retaining the past and projecting into the future, we do not overcome the loss of the past and our vulnerability before the future. On the contrary, to gather time is to bear witness to the irreducible divergence between past and future, which is a condition of intelligibility for any experience of time. Inversely, the divergence between past and future is unintelligible in the eternal presence of God. I analyze Augustine’s phenomenology of time—and its potentially secular implications—in chapter 2.
29. Ibid., p. 720.
30. Ibid., p. 721.
31. Ibid., pp. 721–722.
32. Quoted from Stork, The Life of Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany, p. 80.
33. Luther spoke these words next to Magdalena’s coffin; see ibid.
34. Luther in a letter to Jonas dated September 23, 1542; see The Letters of Martin Luther, p. 238.
35. Luther in a letter to Osiander dated June 3, 1545; see ibid., p. 456.
36. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, pp. 69–70.
37. Ibid., p. 75.
38. Ibid., p. 61.
39. Ibid., p. 76.
40. Dante, The Divine Comedy, Canto 33, p. 481.
41. For a reading of the end of The Divine Comedy that reaches a similar conclusion, see the perceptive analysis in Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining, pp. 131–132.
42. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 15.
2. LOVE
1. Augustine, Confessions, 11:15. All citations of the Confessions are given by book and chapter number respectively.
2. Ibid., 11:14.
3. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 121.6. I quote the English translation by Andrea Nightingale in her excellent book Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body, p. 59.
4. Augustine, In Ioannis Evangelicum tractatus, 38.10, English translation by Nightingale in Once Out of Nature, pp. 86–87.
5. Augustine, Eighty-three Different Questions, p. 62.
6. Augustine, On Faith in Things Unseen, p. 453.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., pp. 454–456.
9. See Augustine, Eighty-three Different Questions, p. 83.
10. See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, pp. 71–73.
11. Ibid., p. 120.
12. Ibid., p. 130. See also Tillich’s claim that “the human heart seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest. In the infinite it sees its own fulfillment” (p. 15). This assertion—that we essentially long to overcome our finitude in favor of infinite rest—is repeated by Tillich throughout Dynamics of Faith.
> 13. For a good discussion of this aspect of Augustine’s logic of faith, see Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 32.
14. See, for example, Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, 1:4.
15. For Augustine’s critique of the Stoics, see, for example, The City of God, book 14. For an insightful analysis of the difference between Augustine and the Stoics, see Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 527–556.
16. Augustine, Commentaries on the Psalms 90, 1:8. English translation in Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 17.
17. For a lucid reading of Augustine’s distinction between frui and uti love, as well as his distinction between cupiditas and caritas, see Anders Nygren’s seminal book, Agape and Eros.
18. Augustine, Confessions, 1:1.
19. For a study of the Buddhist notion of nirvana that is both systematic and grounded in careful textual analyses, see Collins, Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative.
20. Augustine, Confessions, 4:4.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 4:8.
23. Ibid., 4:4.
24. Ibid., 1:20.
25. Ibid., 4:10.
26. Ibid., 10:34.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 4:10.
29. Ibid., 4:11.
30. Ibid., 10:13.
31. Ibid., 4:11.
32. Augustine, Sermones, no. 163, 28–30. English translation by Nightingale in Once Out of Nature, p. 51.
33. Augustine, Confessions, 4:10.
34. Ibid., 10:16.
35. Ibid., 10:13.
36. See ibid.
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