This Life (Condensed)
I first read This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund during the summer of 2019, and I found it profoundly transformative for the way I understand our existence and shared societal values under capitalism — so much so that I would regard it as the most important book I have ever read. I often recommend the book to others, but I recognize that some of the subject matter might be too academic for most casual readers — it can be dense at times. Yet, I believe that the premise of the book is so powerful that I wanted to do my best to distill the key messages in the hopes that his ideas might be easier to digest through my writing.
Martin begins the book with an argument against religious faith — primarily against the idea of eternity, since any concept of an infinite life would render everything meaningless. If I were to live forever, then I would not be able to make a distinction between sooner or later in my life, and any commitments of my time would be meaningless. With infinite time, I would never need to prioritize anything, and therefore nothing could be valued more than anything else. My own life, or the lives of others, couldn’t be recognized as precious if there was no sense of impending loss or death. In the absence of religious eternity, I only have one life to live, and because my life is finite, I am able to ask myself the question: what I should do with my time? What should I do with the limited time I have been granted to exist? This leads Martin to argue that we should focus on what he calls Secular Faith in contrast to religious faith.
Martin describes Secular Faith as a commitment to something — to anything, whether it’s a project, a loved one, a family member, etc. Secular faith is anything we attach meaning to (i.e., anything that we value), and our finite existence means that our dedication of time towards these commitments actually gives them meaning. Everything that I am doing, I am doing with my life — with the finite time that I have been given. The finitude of our lives renders any commitment meaningful, because something cannot be a priority without there being a limited amount of time to dedicate between competing interests. These commitments need to be maintained, and there needs to exist the possibility of loss or failure, since without the risk of failure there would be nothing at stake in being committed. For example, if I wanted to commit my life to being a writer, that commitment needs to be sustained through the dedication of a portion of my finite time, and there needs to be a risk of failure — if I stop writing then I am no longer a writer. By attempting to be a writer, I am expressing my personal priorities for my life — I am expressing my existential identity. I find the act of writing to be worth doing, so I am willing to commit my finite time to this practice because I find it valuable. The act of writing is an end in itself.
Martin then ties his ideas of Secular Faith to Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism by advocating that for our society to truly embrace our finite existence, we need to shift our collective value away from labour time and profit growth (i.e., capitalism) towards free time to pursue meaningful commitments — through democratic socialism (i.e., emancipation). Under capitalism, we cannot separate our existential questions from our economic questions because our existence serves only to generate profits — whether for ourselves as the owners of capital, or for others as members of the working class. Under capitalism, we are not truly free, and we do not control the purpose of our lives, because we do not get to own the question: what should I do with my time? We exist only for the sake of generating profit. And because we spend the majority of our lives labouring, we have very little free time to pursue the commitments that we find meaningful as ends in themselves. Even when we develop new technologies that could drastically reduce our workload, we are still required to work the same number of hours because this generates more profit for the owners of capital. The only way to truly reclaim our freedom is to overcome capitalism.
Under democratic socialism, we could minimize our socially necessary labour time (i.e., the realm of necessity) and increase our socially available free time (i.e., the realm of freedom). This free time isn’t the freedom from work as a whole, because there will always be socially necessary tasks to maintain ourselves and our society, but it is the freedom to commit ourselves to the things that we value outside of the realm of necessity. By overcoming capitalism, we are no longer forced to labour more than is necessary to reproduce ourselves and our society because our time would no longer be focused on profit generation. Under capitalism, we only produce what is profitable for the owners of capital, whereas under democratic socialism we would be able to produce whatever will satisfy the needs of our society in a responsible, sustainable manner, enabling ourselves to flourish as social-individuals, and truly reclaim agency over our finite existence.
