Having completed the spiritually-corroding action of submitting final grades, I have turned to the uplifting practice of catching up with my reading. Recently I happened upon and quickly read Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019). It was quite different from what I had thought the title promised. Even an initial rapid read-through indicates that it is a work of genius and astonishing originality. I offer a brief summary in hopes that my intellectual and spiritual friends will read it:
Hägglund attempts to renew the project of the young Karl Marx: to submit everything that exists to ruthless criticism in the service of a distinctively modern project of realizing human freedom. Like the young Marx, Hägglund thinks that the project of criticism has two principle targets: religion and politics. Hägglund attempts to show that the modern attempts to actualize the most typical religious and political conceptions--that is, for people to adopt such conceptions as part of their core identities, to embody these conceptions in their institutions, and to live their lives in light of criteria whose home is in these conceptions—are self-undermining. By ‘self-undermining’ Hägglund means that in practice such conceptions are neither stable nor fully intelligible to the people attempting to live their lives in light of these conceptions.
In contrast to these unstable and unintelligible conceptions, Hägglund offers (a) a philosophical anthropology, (b) a conception of ‘spiritual freedom’ that takes as central the main features of the philosophical anthropology, and (c) a conception of ‘democratic socialism’ that overcomes the self-undermining modern notion of a capitalist democracy and replaces its central value, namely that of increasing production, with one appropriate to spiritual freedom, namely increasing ‘socially available free time’.
In developing his alternative conceptions Hägglund ranges widely over nearly 400 pages, with lengthy discussions in particular of Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Buddhism, Augustine, Hegel and Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr. Briefly and summarily put, (a) his philosophical anthropology asserts that we human beings are fundamentally and ineliminably finite beings, which means that we are fragile, caring, and in need of care. Because we are finite, we are valuing beings: things matter to us in varying ways and degrees because we do not have an infinite amount of time to lead our lives. Further and correlatively, the idea that an essential part of ourselves is non-finite or immortal undermines the very possibility of valuing anything, as well as the possibility of our having a practical identity of ourselves. This latter thought is the core of Hägglund’s critique of religious conceptions.
(b) ‘Spiritual freedom’ consists in the active living of one’s practical identities. A practical identity is minimally a social role (e.g.. being a father, a lover, an intellectual) with which one identifies. ‘Active living’ minimally involves being able to appropriate one’s identities, to feel at home in them, and to reflect upon, question, and possibly alter them in the course of living them. ‘Active living’ then is a practical dimension of life which also necessarily involves a proto-theoretical element.
(c) The historically possible form of social and political life that maximizes human beings’ possibilities of living in spiritual freedom is democratic socialism. Rightly understood, Marx claimed that democratic socialism is the political form that arises from the overcoming of capitalism. Hägglund follows the line of thinking about Marx that insists that Marx did not hold the so-called labor theory of value, wherein value arises strictly from the quantity of labor that is put into a product. Rather, (according to Hägglund) Marx held that under the conditions of capitalism value appears to arise in accordance with the mechanism of the labor theory of value. Thus overcoming capitalism fundamentally involves replacing the criterion of value as labor with a criterion appropriate to a post-capitalism democratic socialism. This latter criterion of value would be socially available free time; that is, ‘things’ in the broadest sense would be valuable to the degree that they provide the free time required for the living of a life of spiritual freedom.
I would hope that this summary of Hägglund’s central points indicates something of the enormous interest of his book. All of the points mentioned are developed at considerable length, with nuance and qualification. Another aspect of the book that is of great intellectual interest is Hägglund’s critiques of thinkers from Adorno to Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein as insufficiently radical in their criticisms of capitalism. Particularly with regard to the latter most recent thinkers, Hägglund shows that because they lack a positive conception of (spiritual) freedom and an articulate conception of capitalism, they silently assume the latest form of capitalism, that is to say, neoliberal capitalism, is definitive of capitalism, and so they offer in essence capitalism plus redistribution as the ‘progressive’ alternative to capitalism. But this, Hägglund argues, is self-undermining in part because it fails to see how capitalism so much as produces the value that is then to be re-distributed. I look forward to returning to the book at the end of the summer, as well as to its sequel whose publication is promised for August.