This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Martin Hägglund)
OVERVIEW
I had already purchased both “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” and “This Life: How Mortality Makes Us Free” by Martin Hägglund before I realized they were the same book. GOD DAMN. This book is a monster undertaking, both in length and depth of thought. While “This Life” tackles a huge range of topics, to me the most interesting summary is this: our life as understood through a secular, and therefore mortal, lens, is the only way humans can truly engage questions about meaning, morality, and freedom. Far from the global party line, which is that religious faith has the monopoly on providing meaning, dictating moral norms, and absolving our living, Hägglund argues not that a secular perspective can also contribute to these conversations, but that only a secular perspective makes sense. Astoundingly, he argues most of his secular positions using religious texts.
This book is almost 400 pages. If you read it, I encourage you not to be a clown like me taking 35 pages of Word notes (you can’t judge me more than I judge myself). There’s far too much information to cover in depth, but here’s the high-level summary:
Secular faith –religious immortality vs. secular mortality
Life is finite in two ways: we are finite because we will die, and we are finite because our lives depend on others. This is the secular understanding of life: that it is fragile, that it is characterized by mutual dependence, and that it can be lost. The risk of loss is a central feature of secular life. The religious ideal, in contrast, is to transcend mortality. The mortal world – characterized by vulnerability and suffering – is inferior to a state of eternal being, to an escape from the mortal world. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, your aspiration is to transcend the suffering of mortal existence. Therefore, while the secular commitment is to a finite life that is vulnerable to loss, the religious ambition is to salvation from vulnerability – to be impervious to loss.
Religious faith asks us to fashion our lives around the appeal to eternity – the escape from mortal vulnerability. Secular faith, on the other hand, asks us to commit to each other in our mortality. It’s secular because it’s rooted in the acceptance of finitude and fragility, and it’s **faith because no one can prove through logical deduction or calculation that life is worth living. To believe that life is worth living, and therefore worth protecting, is a secular faith and a secular commitment.
A pause to underscore the importance of this claim because it’s from here that we pivot to the radical assertion that meaning, goodness, freedom, and responsibility are fundamentally secular. What Hägglund argues is that for anything to matter, to be motivated to any form of caring, to commit yourself to any person, project, or principle, you must act from a position of secular faith. Faith in the worth of this life – motivation to sustain what’s important in this life – is necessarily built on the belief that this life is what matters and that this life can be lost.
Without the risk of loss, nothing can matter.
The secular claim to morality
Imagine you send two children into a room with a priceless piece of art (such is the thought experiment presented in Phil Zuckerman’s book “Living the Secular Life” and recounted here by Hägglund). Both children are instructed not to touch the artwork. The first child is given this reason: the piece is valuable and very fragile, the only one in existence, and many people would be sad if it were damaged. The second is told: your principal is watching you from a hole in the ceiling and you will be punished if you damage the piece. Both children go into the room alone and neither damages the artwork, but their motivations are different. The first child is acting morally, but the second child is only acting obediently. Religious morality teaches subservience. Secular morality teaches responsibility.
Here we begin to see the implication of Hägglund’s wider argument. For you to care about someone or something, for you to be motivated to action in its maintenance or defense, requires that that someone or something be recognized as vulnerable. Again, the risk of loss underscores any impetus to care. If the artwork were not fragile, there would be no reason to feel responsibility toward its protection. Anything that you value in life is necessarily tied to the appreciation that it could be lost.
This applies equally to our social commitments. There is no foundation on which to build your moral framework if you do not recognize the worth of people, which is implicitly tied to the potential for irrevocable loss in their finitude and the potential for suffering in their fragility. Hägglund takes this argument all the way up the chain. An eternal God that redeems the loss of death would be fundamentally incapable of care/goodness or commitment. To care about someone is to value them, which is inseparable from the understanding that losing them would be a negative event. Value can only be assigned to something that can be lost, and if death is not the end, then nothing can be lost to God. God “cannot understand what it means to lose someone irrevocably and thus cannot understand what it means to care for someone as irreplaceable.” Commitment is not required unless something is at stake (fragility); care is not required unless there’s vulnerability to loss (finitude). So, for a God who presides over an eternal realm, who is impervious to loss, care and commitment would not be salient concepts. Without fragility and finitude there are no standards for responsibility or caring.
Morality is only for mortals, and moral norms can only be upheld by a secular faith.
“This Life” does not entertain any discussion about how we should construct a moral framework, what we should consider moral or immoral behaviour, only that moral norms can only be understood from a secular perspective. Having illustrated the concept of secular faith using morality as an example, it’s clear why the risk of loss is a necessary condition for anything to matter, and why only a truly secular perspective can motivate us to responsibility.
Spiritual freedom – religious salvation vs. secular responsibility
Secular faith is therefore implicit in our ability to wonder: “what should I do with my limited time?” This question is about what matters to you, and things can only matter if you know your time is limited. With a trillion years you could accomplish everything you ever wanted to do, be anyone you ever wanted to be, and still have time left over to be bored for another trillion. On the question of meaning, nothing means anything without the horizon of death. Without death, we’ve seen, there is no sense of responsibility, but also no sense of urgency. Death (the risk of loss) gives life its precariousness, but it also gives us priorities. Without mortality, nothing could have any significance or importance, because there would be no hierarchy of priorities with a thousand thousand tomorrows.
The ability to ask what we ought to do (which is rooted in secular faith) is what Hägglund defines as spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom is the agency we possess to wonder what we should do and who we should be. What are our most important identities and what are our most important priorities? This brings us to the final call to action: secular responsibility vs. religious salvation. Secular faith and spiritual freedom call us to act, to keep fidelity with each other and to this fragile life we share together. Rather than hope for salvation in eternity, we are instead committed to this life, to this world. The religious aspiration is not to freedom in this life, which requires vulnerability and finitude, but rather to be absolved from vulnerability – to be saved from being alive.
“Religious reconciliation is… always deferred to an unattainable future, when we will be absolved from the finitude of life. A secular reconciliation, by contrast, recognizes that “there is nothing degrading about being alive” (as Hegel puts it in a poignant phrase). Being vulnerable to pain, loss, and death is not a fallen condition but inseparable from being someone for whom something can matter… Only through such an acknowledgement can we understand the urgency of changing our lives. We are reconciled with being alive, but for that very reason we are not reconciled to living unworthy lives. We demand a better society and we know that it depends on us.
In taking action, we are not waiting for a timeless future but grasp in practice that our time is all we have.”
The economy of time
Hägglund devotes the end of “This Life” to exploring what sort of systems and institutions might serve us best in our collective knowledge that our time, and the freedom to choose what to do with it, is the most valuable thing we possess. The second half of “This Life” can be captured this way: the systems that serve us most poorly are those that are commanded rather than cultivated, or: the systems that serve us best are freely chosen in light of secular faith and spiritual freedom. Religion is an antagonist to this endeavour, a dogma that is commanded and that undermines the importance of our finite lives. But our economic system of capitalism is also an antagonist. To wonder what you should prioritize is fundamentally a question of valuing and speaks to the economy of time. Under capitalism, the value of our time is profit – time spent in labour, not freedom. Even technologies that should free up our free time (that automate labour) do not, because the end goal of these technologies is not more freedom, it’s more profit. The way that capitalism calculates value is “inimical to the actualization of freedom.”
Hägglund goes on to make the compelling argument that capitalism will always lead to exploitation, commodification, poverty, inequality, war, and social crises. He also argues that capitalism exists outside democracy because we can’t deliberate on what the goal of capitalism should be, what the goal of our economy should be. In capitalism, the end goal is already decided: the growth of capital. “Accordingly – as long as we accept the capitalist measure of social wealth – the purpose of our economy will remain beyond any possible democratic deliberation.”
In place of capitalism, Hägglund argues for democratic socialism. Not the socialism you know (which centres around the redistribution of wealth, which is still inherently tied to capitalism), but a system that has undergone a revaluation of value. One built to value our socially available free time, not our socially necessary labour time.
Both capitalism and religion force us to disown our lives, rather than to “own the question of what to do with our finite time.” Capitalism and religion both prey on us by preying on our freedom, which is inextricably tied to the finitude of our living. Capitalism preys on our freedom by requiring that we convert our finite time into profit. Religion preys on our freedom by undermining the importance of finitude for freedom, and instead asks us to submit to redemption through eternity.
Under capitalism and religion, we are never truly free.
In sum
Eternal peace is indistinguishable from eternal indifference. Rather than aspirations to immortality, our aspirations should be to each other and the fragile lives we share together. What we really want is more of this life, not to be saved from being alive. A secular reconciliation with mortality acknowledges the importance of vulnerability and that while vulnerability makes life unsecure and precarious, it also makes it matter. Only secular faith provides the foundation for appreciating life as valuable and each of us as irreplaceable, and it’s the form of faith we sustain in caring for that which can be lost.
What we choose to do with our finite time is up to us, but for it to be truly up to us we must consider the systems and institutions that antagonize our spiritual freedom. The economic and religious systems that exist outside our ability to change or question them – that are dogmatic or undemocratic – must be replaced with something that better serves our purposes. Whatever those systems are, we have to create them, and we have to do so in light of the commitment we make to each other in our mortality.
In other words: God can’t save us, we have to save each other.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Like most books of philosophy, the goal of “This Life” is not to lay out a pragmatic plan for how we get from A to B in practice (more how we get from premise A to B in argument); as such, while you’ll find convincing arguments that secular faith and spiritual freedom are important, you won’t find much in the way of “what now?” While I’m not sure what role I could ever play in overhauling an entire economic system (aside from recommending this book until its reading reaches escape velocity?), there are two things I’m taking away as an atheist who blogs about mortality and meaning.
A new way for atheists/non-believers to engage conversations about meaning and morality
Prior to starting the blog, I really did have the sense that religion owned the “meaning in life” conversation and was the only thing that could offer comfort in the face of death. While I have since been divorced of those beliefs, Hägglund perhaps offers the most logical deduction: that mortality is why anything matters at all, that finitude and fragility are fundamental to any conversation about freedom, meaning or responsibility. I’ve heard plenty argue that religion provides a poor moral framework, but never anyone suggest that the religious ideal to eternity is incompatible with morality because it undermines finitude. (A pause here to re-state that the “religious perspective” is any appeal to immortality, eternity, or the escape from the mortal world, and that the secular perspective is necessarily any disbelief/non-belief in that unreality).
I think what Hägglund has done here that’s unique is provide sure footing for any atheist or non-believer who wants to engage the topics of mortality, morality, meaning, and freedom. By demonstrating through logical deduction that these conversations fundamentally require secular understanding and secular commitment, he’s shown us what secular thinking really has to offer.
I do need to emphasize that Hägglund is completely thorough in his avoidance of conflating atheism with secularism. Hägglund’s goal is not to disprove religion or elevate atheism, only to criticize the desirability of religious aspirations to escape mortal living. Hägglund uses examples from religious writing to show how many of our greatest religious thinkers have demonstrated secular commitment and the hope for spiritual freedom when they thought they were appealing to religious faith and divine salvation. Hägglund does not conflate atheism with secularism because atheism is to be “without god” and secularism is to be “of the world.” It’s the secular commitment that commits to this world.
A new way to understand death
Ever since reading Stephen Jenkinson’s “Die Wise” I have been undertaking the task of deciding what death means to me. In “Death and Philosophy” I resonated with the perspective of death as the value-giving border to life; “This Life” takes that premise and fully fleshes it out. I do agree with Hägglund that respecting the necessity of mortality doesn’t mean we should embrace death, but I (obviously) think that it befits us to have a relationship with death that extends beyond anxious terror. Maybe “This Life” lays the foundation for that. We all die someday, and when that someday comes, when death is imminent, if you’d rather meet it openly and without fear, perhaps that could be achieved by reigniting this appreciation for finitude as the feature that gave your whole life meaning. Mortality, and therefore the prospect of death, has been the necessary foundation to every success, every love, and every happy memory you’ve had the good fortune to receive. Death is the life-giving thing both in the natural and practical sense. The deaths of a trillion former organisms created you and the world you live in, and your own mortality in turn imbues your life with meaning and mattering.
Truly, living is created through dying.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? How finitude and fragility create meaning and the opportunity for freedom in our living.
Who should read this book? Those wanting to understand how mortality makes us free.
**Meet religious faith with secular faith?
The mere mention of faith will raise hackles among atheists because we mostly take faith to be believing something without evidence. I wish Hägglund had lingered on his initial introduction of “secular faith,” because nowhere do we otherwise find this concept represented in the wider world.
The sense of finitude – the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about – is at the heart of what I call secular faith. To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down. […] I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time. In accordance with the meaning of the Latin word saecularis, to have secular faith is to be dedicated to persons or projects that are worldy or temporal. Secular faith is the form of faith that we all sustain in caring for someone or something that is vulnerable to loss.
As to why it’s faith (emphasis mine):
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.
I think Hägglund does a good job justifying his use of the word secular, but not so good a job justifying his use of the word “faith.” Unless I missed it, this is the closest we get in “This Life” to a definition of faith: a belief that “cannot be demonstrated through a logical deduction or rational calculation,” and that the belief inspires a devotion or dedication to the object of faith. Given that “faith” is such a loaded religious word, it’s not clear to me why it was chosen over, say, a devoted secular trust or a dedicated secular hope.
Hägglund says the most foundational example of secular faith is the belief that “life is worth living.” But “worth” is subjective. Subjective claims (e.g., value-based claims) that are not claims about objective reality can’t be proven true or false, but does that make them faith? We’d consider it strange for someone to say that “I believe vanilla is the best flavour of ice cream” is a matter of faith. It’s certainly a belief, and it’s certainly unprovable, but it would be weird to attach “faith” to it, to say you have faith that it’s the best flavour, or that you keep faith in choosing to purchase it and not some other flavour. To speak of “worth” in “life is worth living” is to speak of value, which is subjective – it’s not a statement about objective reality, so it can’t be proven/disproven with evidence, but why does that make it faith? (and what about vanilla being the best flavour then isn’t faith?)
It’s impossible that Hägglund is unaware of these potential criticisms. My point is that “This Life” revolves entirely around this new – inescapably contentious – repurposing of the word “faith” for secular ownership. I think at least a few pages dedicated to defending its use were warranted (pages that would tackle how he defines faith, how faith is different than devoted hope or trust, how belief is different than opinion, how value-based claims can be faith claims, what we mean by worth, why the subjective secular values that we devote ourselves to should be called faith, etc.).
Hägglund says the so-called “New Atheists” seek to debunk religious faith with scientific knowledge, but fail to see that the “vast number of religious people do not regard their faith as competing with knowledge” and maintain that faith is essential to the “spiritual shape and profound meaning of life.” He continues: “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.” From this I can understand the impetus to supplant religious faith with secular faith as a way to bridge the gap between believers and non-believers. And while I’m absolutely all for finding common ground, without a thorough analysis of the word “faith” and why it’s suitable to use in a secular context (with the primary example given being a subjective evaluation, “life is worth living”), I think many non-believers will find it specious and potentially write off the rest of the book, which would be a real shame.