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wearyoctopus's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
Alternates between life-changingly clarifying and ponderously dull. Would have been twice as powerful at half the length.
jeddcole's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Finished what I suspect will be but the first of many reads of This Life by Martin Hägglund. This book, holy shit.
Concise, sensitive, and ambitious: an argument for owning our finite lives and recognizing precisely how capitalism must be overcome in order to be free to do so.
Read. this. book.
Concise, sensitive, and ambitious: an argument for owning our finite lives and recognizing precisely how capitalism must be overcome in order to be free to do so.
Read. this. book.
bradach's review
4.0
Good philosophy but didn’t need so many examples to understand the point, especially more prominent in the first half of the book on secular faith. The book picks up steam and is more insightful and less repetitive once it connects this idea of secular faith to spiritual freedom and discusses the importance of Marx, Hegel, MLK in developing that unfulfilled dream of democratic socialism, in the second half of the book. Very great book, if for nothing else it helped me understand Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx and Hegel better than I did.
benplatt's review
4.0
An excellently structured and explained bit of philosophy that never quite justifies the abandonment of all religion that seems to be the logical end of Hagglund's conclusions. Overcoming religious faith, as he advocates in the otherwise excellent conclusion, does not feel as though it follows from the explication of the previous hundreds of pages. His example of MLK Jr. feels like a sticking point for me - how is religious faith not a communally governed set of norms, ala Hegel's God? And for what reason should we abandon that method of deliberation if we can make it democratic? Are "we" (I'm not even sure who I mean by that) able to sustain a world of entirely secular faith with no aspirations for the spiritual eternal? I genuinely don't have answers to these questions, but I'm not quite convinced Hagglund does either. Despite all of that, what he does focus on, the connections between spiritual faith, eternity, and capitalism, are thoroughly compelling.
nferraro90's review
4.0
The argument put forward in this book is that our finitude is what makes life worth living, and that viewing life as a passage to the eternal ultimately would make out earthly existence for naught. The author then ties this into our economic and material conditions, and how those are inseparable from our questions of spiritual freedoms. The author advances Marxist critiques of capitalism, ultimately endorsing a form of social democracy where workers own the means of production, and value is tied to free time created by technological advances, rather than by the never ending growth of capital. At time a bit repetitive, but overall very thought provoking and worth a read
raoul_g's review
5.0
This book by Martin Hägglund is a very ambitious and extensive one. From the introduction alone, which is over 30 pages, one can already understand that what Hägglund sets out to do here is, in a way, to present a theory of the meaning of life. The main structure and the pillars of this theory are already shown in the introduction, but are then elaborated on the over 350 following pages. These pages are dense and full of profound reflections drawing from many different thinkers. His theory itself relies most heavily on the work of Karl Marx and G.W.F. Hegel.
Now to the contents of his theory: One of its major building blocks is the notion of finitude. For Hägglund finitude is a necessary condition for a meaningful life. Only against the background of our impending death can we come to see our time as precious and be motivated to confront the difficult question of what to do with the time of our life. Further on, even our commitment to other people we love can be made sense of only in the light of finitude: "My devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. My time with family and friends is precious because we have to make the most of it. Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile."
Secular Faith
This motivates the first of the two parts of the book ('Secular Faith'), which is basically a critique of religion. Hägglund criticizes religion because, in its essence, it seeks to overcome finitude. The notion of eternity is crucial in all religions, but it is exactly this notion which annihilates any possibility of care and commitment. To argue for this claim Hägglund inspects accounts of religious thinkers such as Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and C.S. Lewis and shows how the values they yearn to preserve are at odds with their professed faith in an eternal fulfillment.
In 'A Grief Observed' for example, Lewis mourns the death of his late wife Joy Davidman. "Lewis here vividly articulates how the attachment to the beloved is expressed through a commitment to living on with her. He cannot come to terms with the death of his wife because he wants their life together to continue, in the temporal rhythm and physical concreteness that gave their relationship its unique quality... he wants them to be in need of each other, vulnerable and open to being transformed by the touch of the other. For the same reason reason, the promise of an eternal state of being cannot deliver what he desires. [...] Lewis thus illuminates my central distinction between living on (prolonging a temporal life) and being eternal (absorbed in a timeless existence). As he makes agonizingly clear, the former cannot be reconciled with the latter. In mourning his wife Lewis loves her as an end in herself... In wanting his beloved to come back, an eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable... As soon as you remove the sense of finitude and vulnerability, you remove the vitality of any possible love relationship."
This commitment to living on with the beloved to which Lewis' grief attests is in fact an unspoken profession of what Hägglund calls 'secular faith'. In its most fundamental form secular faith is the faith that life is worth living despite the suffering it entails. Because this cannot be proven it is a matter of faith. This secular faith is a double-edged sword: On the one hand it is the condition for the possibility of commitment, love and real engagement, but by the same token it leaves us open to the possibility of devastation and grief. The opposite of this would be stoic apathy, or for that matter, an eternal afterlife as promised by many religions.
In another chapter he looks at the account Karl Ove Knausgård gives of his life and about how he consciously embraces a secular faith: "The remarkable thing with Knausgaard's writing is how the experience of mortality is allowed to be the source of both fear and love, terror and beauty. The anxiety before death is not something that can or should be overcome. Rather, it is an expression of love for a life that will cease to be. Likewise being being bound to a mortal body can indeed be a source of terror. You may be crippled by injuries or ravaged by brain chemistry, and in the end all the living spirit you gather will dissipate in dead matter. Yet, being bound to a body that is beyond your control is also the condition for being touched and moved, the chance of being receptive to the vanishing beauty of the world."
The last chapter of the first part is concerned with responsibility and is mainly an analysis of Kierkegaard and his interpretation of the biblical story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in 'Fear and Trembling'. One idea that struck me in this chapter is the following: "In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky famously claimed that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. But Fear and Trembling shows that the truth is the other way around. If there is a God for whom everything is possible, then anything can be permitted, even the killing of your own child for no reason other than God's command. This is the truth that Kierkegaard forces you to confront."
The conclusions about Kierkegaard's God which Hägglund reaches at the end of this chapter are striking: "He is not constrained by anything, but for the same reason he is not committed to anything. Indeed, God is completely irresponsible because he is not bound by anything other than himself. Only someone who is committed - only someone who is bound by something other than herself - can be responsible. Only someone who is committed can care. And only someone who is finite can be committed."
Spiritual Freedom
Now to the second part of the book ('Spiritual Freedom'). This part heavily relies on a potent interpretation of Karl Marx. The first chapter in this part is concerned with the distinction between natural and spiritual freedom. In Hägglund's definition natural freedom is the kind of freedom that all living matter has. What he is talking about here is agency: no one except the seagull itself can determine how long it will fly over the ocean before diving into the ocean to catch a fish. We humans have this natural freedom too. But additionally, Hägglund argues, we have what he calls spiritual freedom. Here he explains the difference between those two: "Natural freedom provides a freedom of self-movement, but only in light of imperatives that are treated as given and ends that cannot be called into question by the agent itself. As distinct from natural freedom, spiritual freedom requires the ability to ask which imperatives to follow in light of our ends, as well as the ability to call into question, challenge, and transform our ends themselves."
Spiritual freedom is thus related to questions such as 'What should I do?', 'Who should I be?', 'Whom should I love' and 'With what should I keep faith?'. These question concern what matters to us, and if our lives would not have been finite there would have been no urgency in grappling with these questions. "The indefinite time of my death is both what gives me the chance to prolong my life - to live on - and what makes it urgent to decide what I should do with my life. My death is therefore the necessary horizon of my life... any possibility of my life - can only be grasped as a possibility against the horizon of my death."
This notion of spiritual freedom is now enriched with the help of Marx in the next chapter. Here things get a bit technical as Hägglund begins to dissect capitalism. Following Marx' line of thinking he seeks to offer an immanent critique of capitalism. This means that his attack on capitalism is not coming from 'outside of capitalism', so to say, but rather is showing an internal chasm between the values capitalism claims to be based on and the way capitalism manifests itself in practice. The procedure of the critique is thus similar to his critique of religion in the first part of the book, which is also an immanent critique.
Capitalism is seen as a historical form of life which was necessary, but can and must be overcome now. The internal conflict from which capitalism suffers is related to its conception of value and its predefined goal of maximizing total capital wealth: "The problem with capitalism is that it distorts the meaning of value and social wealth. The measure of value under capitalism is distorted and self-contradictory, since the means are treated as the end."
Under capitalism the essential measure of value is what Marx calls socially necessary labor time. This socially necessary labor time is basically living labor time, which is the source of surplus value. The surplus value produced by human labor is what can be converted into profit and gives rise to capital growth. Because of this conception of value, advances made through the use of technology, which lead to a decrease in necessary labor time, cannot help us emancipate: "The reduction of the socially necessary labor time could lead to more free time for everyone, but under capitalism that is not possible, since surplus time must be converted into surplus value." Instead the reduction in work time or the increase in unemployment is viewed as a problem under capitalism, because these factors also lower the buying power of the population which is now earning less. A crisis of overproduction is looming when commodities flood the market (because of more efficient production through technology) and the market does not have sufficient means to buy them (because of increasing unemployment). This is the fatal contradiction inherent in capitalism. The way this contraction is solved is deeply unsatisfying: "To stave off the crisis, we must find ways of employing people in wage labor, regardless of whether the work they do is needed and regardless of whether the work is meaningful for those who labor. Moreover, we must get people to consume ever more, regardless of whether consuming the goods is fulfilling for them. We must even produce commodities in view of having them break sooner rather than later, so that consumers are forced to buy the commodity again. Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable."
What Hägglund thus advocates for is a 'revaluation of value'. Value should be understood as socially free time and our aim should not be the growth of capital but the expansion of our realm of freedom. With such an understanding of value, advances in technology, which lead to more efficient production, would not cause crises and more exploitation of human labor as they would under capitalism, but they could produce value (socially available free time) by virtue of their own operations. The point of aiming for an increase of socially available free time is to liberate us by enabling us to own the question of what to do with our lives. Here Hägglund returns to the notion of spiritual freedom that he already elaborated on in the preceding chapters: "The degree of our wealth is the degree to which we have the resources to engage the question of what we ought to do with our lives, which depends on the amount of socially available free time. To be wealthy is to be able to engage the question of what to do on Monday morning, rather than being forced to go to work in order to survive."
The question that arises is the following: What kind of transformations must the state undergo in order to reflect the revaluation of values and our commitment to spiritual freedom? Hägglund seeks to answer this question in the last chapter entitled 'Democratic Socialism'. He underlines that Marx' commitment to democracy is indispensable for his critique of capitalism and that capitalism is incompatible with actual democracy. One example for this is the fact that all our democratic decisions regarding the distribution of wealth are constrained by the need to facilitate continued profiteering. Furthermore the democratic principle of equality is undermined by the fact that under capitalism the interests of capitalists who have the power to generate wealth for society necessarily count for more than the interests of wage laborers. Thus Hägglund concludes that for democracy to be true to its own principles of equality and freedom, capitalism must be overcome.
With 'Democratic Socialism' he presents some core principles of a state committed to democracy and spiritual freedom. These are the three principles which he elaborates more in-depth in this chapter:
1. Measuring our wealth in terms of socially available free time
2. Owning the means of production collectively and not allowing them to be used for the sake of profit
3. Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Hägglund also distinguishes democratic socialism from social democracy. Social democracy, which is what almost all leftist politicians and activists advocate for, hat the goal of achieving social justice through the redistribution of capital wealth. But this aim is inherently contradictory: The more welfare policies and state regulations prevent the exploitation of living labor, the more restricted capitalists are in extracting surplus value which leads to there being less wealth available to be redistributed in society. This also explains why social democratic policies will always be vulnerable to neoliberal critique (that they cause a decrease in economy and eliminate jobs for the people with the greatest need). The fundamental problem is that social democracy remains tightly coupled with the capitalist mode of production. In times of economic crises the welfare state is thus the hostage of capitalist economy. What is missing in the social democratic approach is a grappling with the fundamental question of value in the mode of production. This is what Hägglund's democratic socialism offers.
Final Remarks
This review got way longer than I intended and still I feel like I missed out many important points of the book. As I mentioned in the beginning, I think that this is a very dense and profound book, but one that is still very accessible. It requires close reading, but it also rewards with many insights and perspectives on the fundamental human questions of meaning, freedom and society. Another major contribution of this book was pointed out by another reviewer: It "wrests 'faith' from religion’s grip and builds on its back a fundamentally secular structure of emancipatory politics and social justice." If you are looking for a potent critique of capitalism or a secular theory of the meaning of life and also the principles to transform our society into one in which meaning can be pursued by all, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you.
Now to the contents of his theory: One of its major building blocks is the notion of finitude. For Hägglund finitude is a necessary condition for a meaningful life. Only against the background of our impending death can we come to see our time as precious and be motivated to confront the difficult question of what to do with the time of our life. Further on, even our commitment to other people we love can be made sense of only in the light of finitude: "My devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. My time with family and friends is precious because we have to make the most of it. Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile."
Secular Faith
This motivates the first of the two parts of the book ('Secular Faith'), which is basically a critique of religion. Hägglund criticizes religion because, in its essence, it seeks to overcome finitude. The notion of eternity is crucial in all religions, but it is exactly this notion which annihilates any possibility of care and commitment. To argue for this claim Hägglund inspects accounts of religious thinkers such as Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and C.S. Lewis and shows how the values they yearn to preserve are at odds with their professed faith in an eternal fulfillment.
In 'A Grief Observed' for example, Lewis mourns the death of his late wife Joy Davidman. "Lewis here vividly articulates how the attachment to the beloved is expressed through a commitment to living on with her. He cannot come to terms with the death of his wife because he wants their life together to continue, in the temporal rhythm and physical concreteness that gave their relationship its unique quality... he wants them to be in need of each other, vulnerable and open to being transformed by the touch of the other. For the same reason reason, the promise of an eternal state of being cannot deliver what he desires. [...] Lewis thus illuminates my central distinction between living on (prolonging a temporal life) and being eternal (absorbed in a timeless existence). As he makes agonizingly clear, the former cannot be reconciled with the latter. In mourning his wife Lewis loves her as an end in herself... In wanting his beloved to come back, an eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable... As soon as you remove the sense of finitude and vulnerability, you remove the vitality of any possible love relationship."
This commitment to living on with the beloved to which Lewis' grief attests is in fact an unspoken profession of what Hägglund calls 'secular faith'. In its most fundamental form secular faith is the faith that life is worth living despite the suffering it entails. Because this cannot be proven it is a matter of faith. This secular faith is a double-edged sword: On the one hand it is the condition for the possibility of commitment, love and real engagement, but by the same token it leaves us open to the possibility of devastation and grief. The opposite of this would be stoic apathy, or for that matter, an eternal afterlife as promised by many religions.
In another chapter he looks at the account Karl Ove Knausgård gives of his life and about how he consciously embraces a secular faith: "The remarkable thing with Knausgaard's writing is how the experience of mortality is allowed to be the source of both fear and love, terror and beauty. The anxiety before death is not something that can or should be overcome. Rather, it is an expression of love for a life that will cease to be. Likewise being being bound to a mortal body can indeed be a source of terror. You may be crippled by injuries or ravaged by brain chemistry, and in the end all the living spirit you gather will dissipate in dead matter. Yet, being bound to a body that is beyond your control is also the condition for being touched and moved, the chance of being receptive to the vanishing beauty of the world."
The last chapter of the first part is concerned with responsibility and is mainly an analysis of Kierkegaard and his interpretation of the biblical story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in 'Fear and Trembling'. One idea that struck me in this chapter is the following: "In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky famously claimed that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. But Fear and Trembling shows that the truth is the other way around. If there is a God for whom everything is possible, then anything can be permitted, even the killing of your own child for no reason other than God's command. This is the truth that Kierkegaard forces you to confront."
The conclusions about Kierkegaard's God which Hägglund reaches at the end of this chapter are striking: "He is not constrained by anything, but for the same reason he is not committed to anything. Indeed, God is completely irresponsible because he is not bound by anything other than himself. Only someone who is committed - only someone who is bound by something other than herself - can be responsible. Only someone who is committed can care. And only someone who is finite can be committed."
Spiritual Freedom
Now to the second part of the book ('Spiritual Freedom'). This part heavily relies on a potent interpretation of Karl Marx. The first chapter in this part is concerned with the distinction between natural and spiritual freedom. In Hägglund's definition natural freedom is the kind of freedom that all living matter has. What he is talking about here is agency: no one except the seagull itself can determine how long it will fly over the ocean before diving into the ocean to catch a fish. We humans have this natural freedom too. But additionally, Hägglund argues, we have what he calls spiritual freedom. Here he explains the difference between those two: "Natural freedom provides a freedom of self-movement, but only in light of imperatives that are treated as given and ends that cannot be called into question by the agent itself. As distinct from natural freedom, spiritual freedom requires the ability to ask which imperatives to follow in light of our ends, as well as the ability to call into question, challenge, and transform our ends themselves."
Spiritual freedom is thus related to questions such as 'What should I do?', 'Who should I be?', 'Whom should I love' and 'With what should I keep faith?'. These question concern what matters to us, and if our lives would not have been finite there would have been no urgency in grappling with these questions. "The indefinite time of my death is both what gives me the chance to prolong my life - to live on - and what makes it urgent to decide what I should do with my life. My death is therefore the necessary horizon of my life... any possibility of my life - can only be grasped as a possibility against the horizon of my death."
This notion of spiritual freedom is now enriched with the help of Marx in the next chapter. Here things get a bit technical as Hägglund begins to dissect capitalism. Following Marx' line of thinking he seeks to offer an immanent critique of capitalism. This means that his attack on capitalism is not coming from 'outside of capitalism', so to say, but rather is showing an internal chasm between the values capitalism claims to be based on and the way capitalism manifests itself in practice. The procedure of the critique is thus similar to his critique of religion in the first part of the book, which is also an immanent critique.
Capitalism is seen as a historical form of life which was necessary, but can and must be overcome now. The internal conflict from which capitalism suffers is related to its conception of value and its predefined goal of maximizing total capital wealth: "The problem with capitalism is that it distorts the meaning of value and social wealth. The measure of value under capitalism is distorted and self-contradictory, since the means are treated as the end."
Under capitalism the essential measure of value is what Marx calls socially necessary labor time. This socially necessary labor time is basically living labor time, which is the source of surplus value. The surplus value produced by human labor is what can be converted into profit and gives rise to capital growth. Because of this conception of value, advances made through the use of technology, which lead to a decrease in necessary labor time, cannot help us emancipate: "The reduction of the socially necessary labor time could lead to more free time for everyone, but under capitalism that is not possible, since surplus time must be converted into surplus value." Instead the reduction in work time or the increase in unemployment is viewed as a problem under capitalism, because these factors also lower the buying power of the population which is now earning less. A crisis of overproduction is looming when commodities flood the market (because of more efficient production through technology) and the market does not have sufficient means to buy them (because of increasing unemployment). This is the fatal contradiction inherent in capitalism. The way this contraction is solved is deeply unsatisfying: "To stave off the crisis, we must find ways of employing people in wage labor, regardless of whether the work they do is needed and regardless of whether the work is meaningful for those who labor. Moreover, we must get people to consume ever more, regardless of whether consuming the goods is fulfilling for them. We must even produce commodities in view of having them break sooner rather than later, so that consumers are forced to buy the commodity again. Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable."
What Hägglund thus advocates for is a 'revaluation of value'. Value should be understood as socially free time and our aim should not be the growth of capital but the expansion of our realm of freedom. With such an understanding of value, advances in technology, which lead to more efficient production, would not cause crises and more exploitation of human labor as they would under capitalism, but they could produce value (socially available free time) by virtue of their own operations. The point of aiming for an increase of socially available free time is to liberate us by enabling us to own the question of what to do with our lives. Here Hägglund returns to the notion of spiritual freedom that he already elaborated on in the preceding chapters: "The degree of our wealth is the degree to which we have the resources to engage the question of what we ought to do with our lives, which depends on the amount of socially available free time. To be wealthy is to be able to engage the question of what to do on Monday morning, rather than being forced to go to work in order to survive."
The question that arises is the following: What kind of transformations must the state undergo in order to reflect the revaluation of values and our commitment to spiritual freedom? Hägglund seeks to answer this question in the last chapter entitled 'Democratic Socialism'. He underlines that Marx' commitment to democracy is indispensable for his critique of capitalism and that capitalism is incompatible with actual democracy. One example for this is the fact that all our democratic decisions regarding the distribution of wealth are constrained by the need to facilitate continued profiteering. Furthermore the democratic principle of equality is undermined by the fact that under capitalism the interests of capitalists who have the power to generate wealth for society necessarily count for more than the interests of wage laborers. Thus Hägglund concludes that for democracy to be true to its own principles of equality and freedom, capitalism must be overcome.
With 'Democratic Socialism' he presents some core principles of a state committed to democracy and spiritual freedom. These are the three principles which he elaborates more in-depth in this chapter:
1. Measuring our wealth in terms of socially available free time
2. Owning the means of production collectively and not allowing them to be used for the sake of profit
3. Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Hägglund also distinguishes democratic socialism from social democracy. Social democracy, which is what almost all leftist politicians and activists advocate for, hat the goal of achieving social justice through the redistribution of capital wealth. But this aim is inherently contradictory: The more welfare policies and state regulations prevent the exploitation of living labor, the more restricted capitalists are in extracting surplus value which leads to there being less wealth available to be redistributed in society. This also explains why social democratic policies will always be vulnerable to neoliberal critique (that they cause a decrease in economy and eliminate jobs for the people with the greatest need). The fundamental problem is that social democracy remains tightly coupled with the capitalist mode of production. In times of economic crises the welfare state is thus the hostage of capitalist economy. What is missing in the social democratic approach is a grappling with the fundamental question of value in the mode of production. This is what Hägglund's democratic socialism offers.
Final Remarks
This review got way longer than I intended and still I feel like I missed out many important points of the book. As I mentioned in the beginning, I think that this is a very dense and profound book, but one that is still very accessible. It requires close reading, but it also rewards with many insights and perspectives on the fundamental human questions of meaning, freedom and society. Another major contribution of this book was pointed out by another reviewer: It "wrests 'faith' from religion’s grip and builds on its back a fundamentally secular structure of emancipatory politics and social justice." If you are looking for a potent critique of capitalism or a secular theory of the meaning of life and also the principles to transform our society into one in which meaning can be pursued by all, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you.