This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free

by Martin Hagglund

'Any spiritual life must tremble with the anxiety of freedom, even in the most profound fulfillment of our aspirations...'
Would Heaven be boring? Do you want to live forever? If this is all there is, what should we do with it? Join the Swedish philosopher Martin H�gglund on an original inquiry into the deepest questions of existence.
To truly embrace the freedom that life grants us, H�gglund argues, we must rid ourselves of two delusions. On the one hand, all the great religions try to persuade us that immortality is just around the corner. This is a not only a lie: it couldn't help us if it was true. In reality our time in this world is the only thing of value we can ever possess, and its value depends on the fact that we must fight to keep it. Yet capitalism, our other spiritual enemy, constantly beguiles us to steal it. Via profound engagements with some of the greatest philosophers and theologians in history, including Aristotle, St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, H�gglund takes aim at these two great adversaries, religion and capitalism, stripping away their many subtle illusions to return us to life itself in all its fragility.
The final lesson is this: existence is a collective project. Everything is at stake in what we do together, and nothing outside it matters. In illuminating this profound truth, This Life announces itself as the first great work of existentialist philosophy of the 21st century.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Religion, Politics, Spirituality, Psychology, Self Help

464 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2019

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Swedish Mist

I find it odd and oddly annoying that Martin Hägglund should choose to present his otherwise sensible philosophy in terms of faith. He apparently intends to establish philosophical thought as a sound basis for ethics without reference to religion and its supposed revelations of ultimate truth. On the face of it, he would like to replace religious faith with faith of some other sort. My question is ‘Why?’

Although not all religions rely on faith, Christian insistence that faith is equivalent to religion has penetrated global consciousness. But even among Christians, there is no agreement on what constitutes faith except the communal profession of some verbal formula. Since Hagglund does not propose any alternative credal statement to the Christian religion, or any other, it is clear that he is not using the term ‘faith’ in any recognisably religious sense.

Instead Hägglund constructs a straw man. His essential claim is that “the common denominator for what I call religious forms of faith is a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.” This may be. Those religions which emphasise the existence of some other world than the universe we inhabit, in which perfect justice is achieved, human defects are corrected and happiness reigns do implicitly devalue not just human beings but also all that exists.

But not all thought which accepts the possibility of a reality beyond expression, perhaps even beyond perception, insists upon such a position. Yet such thought is religious in the specific sense that our consciousness itself implies an impenetrable mystery about our existence and its place in the cosmos.

Many, for example, myself included, consider literature as a religion. Our liturgy consists principally in our acts of reading and writing. These acts are exploratory but they are never decisive. Language, that which exists within us, and around us, and yet is not part of us, is our God. This is a God which we use mercilessly but which also uses us with the same absence of care.

We may reverence our God, but we do not idolise it. We respect the immense power of language and we continuously try to outwit it. We are bound to fail, not because we are finite but because the God of language, our own creation, is infinite in its potential. We will never exhaust its possibilities, nor be able to control either its use or the way in which it connects to the world of other things.

What we do not have is faith in language. We mistrust it because it lies about the world, which is not constructed according to its principles. We try relentlessly to pin it down by definition and explanation to no avail as we find that words can only be defined by other words. Through language we create law and society and prosperity. We also create hydrogen bombs, and gas chambers, and racist mobs. We may pretend that we are free in our use of language. But the reality is that we are trapped by it and within it. It is the source of our unfreedom, something Hägglund would like, mistakenly, to attribute to religion.

Importantly, there is no creed of the God Language. Language is undoubtedly there, it exists, but equally it is beyond our comprehension in its scope, its future, or even when it first appeared among us. It is eternal, but there is nothing about language which can be distilled into fundamentals of belief. Hagglund would reject this, however: “all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of unfreedom,” he says.

Hägglund doesn’t like the eternal as a fundamental principle, a sort of credal premise of his secular faith: “The problem is not that an eternal activity would be ‘boring’ but that it would not be intelligible as my activity.” In this he is simply too prejudiced by faith to be argued with. Language will never become boring. I challenge Hägglund to even express the feeling of boredom without it! How free would he be without the eternity of language?

So while I agree with Hägglund’s thesis that religious faith is bad for humanity and bad for existence, it is faith not religion which is the issue. There is no need for a secular faith because faith is the problem to be solved not allowed to expand. Faith kills regardless of its content. It kills intellectually by attempting to fix what the world is in language. It’s kills biologically by insisting upon ‘natural’ relations of power which are expressed in terms of language. And it kills spiritually by implying that there is some endpoint at which the exploration of language will reach its goal.

In short, it appears that Hägglund is preaching to a philosophical or religious choir that feels itself deficient without some sort of faith. There is no valid reason to do this. In fact he is implicitly justifying the acts of religious faith as equal competitors to his secular faith. A mis-directed and self-defeating argument therefore. The world needs yet another faith as much as it needs another SUV.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought provoking work. Hägglund's basic thesis, developed out of a close inspection of primarily Marx (but decorated with dozens of writers and thinkers), suggests that both capitalism and religious faith limit our ability to maximize our freedom and our quest for the good.

I'm with him about 4/5 of the way. I wish he had edited the book down a bit (he got a bit repetitive and could have probably said the same thing in 1/2 the words). Like I said, I need a bit more time (my leisure) to really clearly communicate the areas I enjoyed (there were many) and the areas I thought were a bit self-indulgent (also many). I think as I get older I get a bit more suspect of so much certainty, whether religious, economic, or philosophic.

Enough for now. I choose my bed.

[Ryan Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, programmatic, interdisciplinary analysis of our diminished lives under capitalism and religion, and the emancipatory possibilities under democratic socialism.

Possibly the best book I’ve ever read integrating our “spiritual” lives with our political commitments into a coherent humanist call to action. I had an hour long conversation with the author on my podcast, Life After God, covering many of the themes he explores in the book. You can hear the podcast on my website, www.lifeaftergod.org.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being is time and time is finite. The being that we care most about is human being or any being that can take a stand on its own understanding, the most important being in the universe. Hägglund wrote a marvelous book which unpacks that italicized sentence for the reader. I’m going to explain why I thought this was such a marvelous and necessary book for today’s reader, but, I need to mention first that I listened to it on audio and therefore didn’t get the footnotes as I was listening and that led to a disconnect until I glanced at the index on Amazon.

Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ is my favorite book by far and my second favorite book is Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind (Spirit)’. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the author had not mention Heidegger until I looked at the footnotes on Amazon. His footnotes explain a) that he is currently writing a book elaborating on B&T and b) he mentions those two books and Hegel’s ‘Logic’ as three of his most important books.

I love being a human. In particular I love being a secular human. That is a person who thinks life is important because of the meaning I choose to give to it and as an individual within a group who requires another in order to exist as an end for its own end not as a means to an end. That’s close to how the author explains what it means to be a secular human.

I will digress just a little in order to explain what I mean. According to Hägglund, in the sixth volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s ‘My Struggle’ he mentions that in Adolph Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kempf’ (German for ‘My Struggle’) Hitler only speaks of the ‘I’, the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ and never speaks of the ‘you’ (i.e. individuals such as me or you). When he told me that, I realized that Donald Trump does that same thing. That’s why Trump can call people ‘animals’ and ‘varmints’ and such as he did yesterday (4/5/2019). That means for a narcissist like Trump and his enablers they do not need another in order to validate their own existence and ultimately their sense of self is lacking a characteristic of being a human since the others for them will always be ‘an animal’ or ‘varmint’. (This book doesn’t fully take the argument this far, but for those who are interested ‘The Bernstein Tapes’ of the course ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ does and I would recommend anyone listen to those tapes for the best source out there on PoS except for Hegel’s book itself. Btw, and since this is a digression anyways, I started reading ‘My Struggle’ and absolutely love it so far, and as this author will mention Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is foundational for ‘My Struggle’. (This author, Hägglund connects many various pieces in his story telling). Hägglund will say ‘My Struggle’ is all about the ‘you’ of the reader through the ‘I’ of the author and I would add through the life of the everyday where ‘the everyday starts off as the human experience of being-in-the-world proximally and for the most part by understanding itself in terms of its world as the world reveals itself as itself and not as a Self outside itself’ (I cheated, I took a sentence for my review of ‘Critique of Everyday Life’, by Lefebvre, a Marxist, and this author too definitely has a Marxist way of thinking).

When Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ there are three ways one can take that statement: 1) a divine command from God and true since God said it was and Truth, Good and Justice are what God says they are, 2) as a moral truth worthy of consideration since it’s reasonable and possible to defend a variation of it, or 3) just ignore it. For those who accept 1, the religious, they are outsourcing their beliefs outside of themselves and are the most nihilistic ones of all since they have no meaning within themselves or for themselves as an end for an end in themselves and they become to themselves and for themselves only as an means to an end for a promised (or hoped for, or wished for, or some other asserted but not supported by empirical evidence supernatural desire) in an afterlife or karmic resolution. For those who lean towards 2, the secular, they find there meaning through deserving considerations based on a finite world of which they inhabit, and for the third class of people who ignore it, I’ll just ignore them because who cares what they think? (Plato’s Euthyphro gets at this from a slightly different way).

I wanted to mention some cool discussions that the author had on the absolute goal of detachment the Buddhist strive for, and similarly for the stoics with their acceptance of circumstances that leads to a need for no meaning, purpose or freedom for an individual and the author advocates attachment as the more worthy goal. There are also some wonderful summations on various writings by Kierkegaard and how Kierkegaard really does understand the trap that the finite finds themselves in and ultimately how ‘irony (paradox) is jealous of the authentic’ (this author doesn’t use that quote, I did just because it is a quick way to summarize his long discussion on Kierkegaard). Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Adorno (Frankfurt School), Piketty (‘Capital in the 21st Century’, a book for which I loved, but this author doesn’t seem to like him nearly as much as I did) and various other familiar thinkers are all eruditely discussed.

The author will argue that because we are finite we have meaning. If we were infinite (and knew it with certainty) there would be no necessity and hence no freedom. Our freedom to act and choose is what gives us our meaning, purpose and caring. ‘Caring’ is a loaded word and I used it purposely because in ‘B&T’ Heidegger will use it as the foundation for human being (Dasein), and within the word is a tacit acknowledgement of the future as the ontological foundation for our being leading to always becoming until being-unto-death. Shortly after ‘B&T’ Heidegger will pivot to ‘will’ for his ontological foundation, but Heidegger being Heidegger will always act as if that he meant that all along and won’t explicitly acknowledge the change. For a good discussion on this I would recommend Hannah Arendt’s ‘Life of the Mind’ (btw, this author didn’t seem to like Arendt or at least quickly dismissed her at one spot in his book), and for an even better discussion on Heidegger’s change from ‘care’ to ‘will’ I would recommend Fynsk’s ‘Heidegger: Thought and Historicity’.

Marx critiques capitalism and liberalism through an immanent critique, and will show that capitalism and liberalism must be inadequate through their own assumptions according to this author, and for example, value is more than just capitalist surplus value through exploitation and alienation of the labor (workers), but also needs to include our social values and spiritual values. We need a reevaluation of value for today where, for example, unemployment should not be just a way for Capitalist to exploit labor by paying lower wages and exploiting all labor to demand lower wages and so on towards a downward spiral against labor, but we need to value individuals beyond their surplus profit potential. I’ll even say that, if machines and super AI replace the workers by making them redundant the right attitude is that we need to see beyond just making the already insanely rich even richer; we can find a better way by enabling unemployed or underutilized labor to actualize themselves as individuals and as social beings and reevaluate our values by valuing social well being above more unequal distribution of wealth. This author will recommend a Democratic Socialist alternative to capitalism and neo-liberalism as a more viable approach for achieving a more just society.

Hegel always moves in three movements, the thesis, antithesis and the synthesis, for example, stoic, skeptic to unhappy consciousness as a movement. Each of the first two movements are immanently unstable (i.e. they can’t coherently stand by themselves without internal contradiction) and will lead to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ (i.e. Christianity or Religion) which requires the infinite (an outsourcing of meaning therefore the ultimate in nihilism).

Trump and his enablers are not able to transcend the world from which they were thrown into. They do not recognize anyone who is not them and therefore have no way of understanding themselves in order to get beyond their capitalism/liberalism/absolutist mindset. This book is for those who are capable of understanding that the ‘I’ needs a ‘you’ in addition to another (‘them’), and our meaning, purpose, care and freedom require understanding the paradox of outsourcing our beliefs and meaning to the infinite. Actualizing human being requires participating both as an individual and socially, and optimizing our spiritual values beyond just material well being that does not rely on an infinite horizon. To properly actualize our meaning as being one needs to realize that ‘being is time and time is finite’.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to apologize in advance to everyone who actually knows me: all I'm gonna wanna talk about for the next several months (years?) is "This Life" by Martin Hagglund. This is the kind of big effing mindblower that I luck into every once in a while... A game changer for my personal and political identity... A book that I hope (that I'm gonna try to make sure) has as wide a readership as possible. Cuz, hoo wee. This one makes "Capital in the 21st Century" look like the Boxcar Children. (Hagglund even devotes a sub-chapter to a pretty devastating, but also calm and polite, critique of Piketty. Zing!)

What is it about? Man, everything, man. It's both the most convincing and absurdly moving defense of secular identity I've probably ever read, as well as the most convincing and absurdly moving argument for democratic socialism I've definitely ever read. It is, in short, about our commitments. Hagglund asks us to embrace our fragility, our vulnerability, our mortality-- to commit to our transience, to embrace "secular faith" over religion. He claims that most of us already do this, whether we acknowledge it or not: to engage in any project, to attach any meaning to any person or thing, is to implicitly affirm that you have a limited amount of time in this world. Hagglund finds the concept of eternity not just incomprehensible, but undesirable: the things that make life INTERESTING, that make it precious, are the things that we have to risk, the things that can be taken away. In three dense but well-paced chapters, Hagglund defines this notion of "secular faith," employing the words of both great religious thinkers (Zing!) and great unreligious ones (the mini-essay on Karl Ove Knausgaard is worth the price of admission, if yer a fan of "My Struggle).

But that's just the beginning, yo! In the second half of the book, on "Spiritual Freedom," Hagglund claims that an idea of limited time is fundamentally connected to the questions of what we ought to do, as well as if we ought to do what we ought to do (the "double ought"). He insists that the best forms of economy are the forms that maximize our spiritual freedom: the ones that allow us to take ownership of our decision making. In this way, he thinks capitalism is totally flawed to the core, and that it must be overturned and replaced with some sort of democratic socialism. It's the issue of value that matters most to Hagglund, here. In a capitalist system, the thing that's finally valued is profit. No amount of welfare programs will change this fact-- the point of human life, in a capitalist system, is to create surplus value by way of wage labor. In this kind of system, our "free time" is therefore never truly "free": just an excuse for activities that allow us to "replenish" ourselves before we get back to the real, profit-making tasks of our life. What Hagglund proposes is not a single system to replace capitalism, but a truly democratic decision making process, one where we can assess what actually matters to us (what really has "value"). Along the way, he totally resuscitates Karl Marx from totalitarian death-- read "This Life," and suddenly all the criticisms of Marx himself look kind of like criticisms of other things, things that democratic socialism is explicitly opposed to.

This second part of the book is even more jam-packed with ideas that the already pretty heavy first half, but then again, it has to be: Hagglund is facing down millennia of received wisdom about what is natural, about what is functional, about what is supposedly the best way for humankind. I don't know if I "got" all of it, but that I got the thrust of it is a testament to both the writer's clarity and vigor. He's making a serious, moral argument here-- this isn't a "ha ha" New Atheist-style rant-- and I do hope people approach him with moral seriousness. I didn't have to be convinced that there is no God-- this is something I've believed for at least fifteen years-- but to read Hagglund's account of "secular faith," and how it must lead us to making real changes in this world, for the end of each other's lives, and not some hope of eternity, has profoundly altered my understanding of my place on Earth. It's telling that the last philosopher Hagglund talks about in detail is not an avowed atheist, but one of the most legendary Christian leaders of all time: Martin Luther King, Jr, who in his writings and work finally demonstrated a commitment to "this life," a commitment that necessarily involved a new vision for human flourishing.

So get ready, America. Imma put this book in yer hands

[Dan Graser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, perhaps, the most intelligently formed and poetically written argument for secular thought since Bertrand Russell. In this dual critique of religious and economic fundamentalism, Hägglund engages with the most complicated issues and previous works with great authority and erudition.

The dual critique of religion and economic dogmas is one that most will be familiar with since Marx. Hägglund works through the tangled webs spun by the likes of Kierkegaard and Augustine to show the fatuity with they discuss mortality and finitude. In a stunning achievement unto itself, he makes Hegel's philosophy somewhat discernible and also levies great critique on superficial readings of Marx, especially from the likes of Adorno.

He concludes with the side of MLK Jr. that we have decided to forget, for the sake of convenience, the being the economic radical whose racial and social change were but a first step towards a much-needed complete societal overhaul. This is a work with which you will want to take your time as the author has certainly taken great care to form this dual critique in the most urgent yet thorough fashion. This is just a staggering work of intellectual honesty and certainly will not be the last work of his I read.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I: Synopsis

This is a book of incredible ambition. In fact it is two books of incredible ambition, one tacked onto the end of the other. The first, an ethical-axiological tract on the value of mortality. Or, more precisely, on mortality as the condition by which any value whatsoever can be had; mortality as the ur-value (ur-fact?) upon which all other values depend. The second, an economic-political treatise on the principles by which such a value can itself be valued in society: if mortality is the wellspring of value, how best to nourish it? How should we organise society such that mortality itself is valorised, and given the best shot at its flourishing? A two part doorstop then, which, when taken together, offers nothing less than Hagglund's take on freedom: the first personal, the second political, and in tandem, a comprehensive philosophy of what it means to live this life.

Two books, two aims, and with them, two ‘enemies’: religion on the one hand, and capitalism on the other. Religion as that which, valuing eternity over mortality, mistakes the source of value, and thus de-values our temporal lives for the sake of the mirage of the atemporal. Capitalism in turn, as that which, exploiting the finitude of life for purposes other than the flourishing of life, compromises the value of mortality, and with it, everything else that we (can) hold dear. Against these twin spectres, upon which life, constitutively bound by time, is crucified, does Hagglund argue for the unbinding of finitude: of acknowledging and reckoning with life in its ineliminable fragility, a fragility without which life would not be.

In truth, those who have been following Hagglund since his groundbreaking 2008 book on Jacques Derrida, Radical Atheism, will find much that is familiar in Part I, with Hagglund effectively recapitulating those same themes by different means. In place of Derrida however (whose name is surprisingly totally absent here), are here readings of a different set of philosophers and writers: Augustine and Kierkegaard on the side of philosophy, and Karl Ove Knausgård and C.S. Lewis on the side of literature. As with all of Hagglund, his readings and persuasive and incisive, if not a little too repetitive - Part I could have been cut down a great deal without too much loss, with Hagglund belabouring the same point with different examples in a way that gets a bit much at times.

It’s Part II however, on capitalism and Hagglund's proposed overcoming of it - dubbed here as democratic socialism - where the book really takes off. Featuring, as its centerpiece, Hagglund's reading of Marx (along with later commentators like Moishe Postone and Theodor Adorno), Part II calls for a 'revaluation of values', in line with Part I's isolation of 'finitude' as the ur-value to be nurtured. Critiquing those who find fault with capitalism only for its inequitable distribution of goods (Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein are named here), Hagglund argues that taking seriously the question of value entails taking issue too with the very way in which the production of goods takes place under capitalism, and with it, the very form of capitalism itself. Only such a revaluation would allow us to make use of the time given to us, and usher in a society truly worthy of being called 'democratic'.

II: Commentary

At just over 450 pages, this is a book with heft - both physically and intellectually. That said, despite that weight, Hagglund's 'choice' between finitude and eternity feels oddly narrow. While only a gloss of what I mean can be offered here, it strikes me that the question of value has simply never really turned on this axis. Rather the question has always been over the quality of finitude at stake. If Hagglund is right that - and this is key to his argument - even the striving for eternity unknowingly presupposes the value of mortality at its base, then the question of eternity has simply never been one. And thus in dispelling the illusion of the value of eternity, what we are left with is, in fact, everything that matters. But to the degree that Hagglund takes eternity as his sparring partner for most of the book, then most of the book doesn't address, well... all that matters.

In a way, Hagglund might well agree with this. That, in fact, This Life functions as something like a ground-clearing operation, merely opening the way for us to address 'what really matters', as it were. But this means that the book fundamentally doesn't do exactly that. This Life, for all its size, starts and stops at the fact that we value things (as Hagglund himself says, it specifies the necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of valuing). But - one wants to say, all the truly interesting questions begin after that: questions about how, why and what we value, in time. The stakes of This Life, are, to put it dramatically, drawn too tightly: pitched at the Olympian level of eternity against time, under its radar goes all the little every-day battles in which the issue of eternity is simply not at a stake. And if Hagglund is right, it has never been at stake!

This issue reveals itself obliquely in the choice of phenomena that Hagglund writes about to illustrate his point. In his writing about grief, for instance - writing, I must say, that is profoundly moving and deeply affecting - it is grief over death that takes centre-stage. In other words, grief over the highest possible stakes. But taken as a model for grief, and with it, the time of finitude, what gets lost are the little hurts, or even debilitating injury, whose attendant temporalities are simply given no attention. But do they too not attest to finitude? Finitudes within finitude, if you will. In drawing the contours of temporality so starkly by way of the atemporal, time is given shape by an all-too-rough negative relief, defined better by what it is not, than by its textures within. Or, to bring this point to a close, one simply wishes that Hagglund had a richer, less finite conception of the finite itself.

This critique notwithstanding - and there is plenty more to say - This Life is nonetheless a book very much worth the investment of, well, time. For all I've said, it nonetheless covers an enormous span of the human condition, and it does so in a way that invites what can only be productive responses to it. And while I've underplayed the political vision that's set out at the end of the book - there are problems there too, including a very gaping hole of a missing chapter on power and class struggle - the book's concluding chapter, with features a poignant engagement with the life and work of Martin Luther King, is an absolute standout. It's symptomatic of Hagglund's prodigious ability, not only as a writer, but as a reader - his background is in comparative literature, and it shows - and it lends all the more sheen to this considerable achievement of a book.

[Daniel C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about atheism, but it would be wrong to group it with books by Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens. Where popular books on atheism largely focus on ridiculing the irrationality and lack of empirical evidence supporting religious belief, or casting it in the causal role of various atrocities, Hägglund has a more constructive project in mind. As he writes late in the book, echoing Marx: "If we merely criticized religious beliefs as illusions—without being committed to overcoming the forms of social injustice that motivate these illusions—the critique of region would be empty and patronizing. The task is rather to transform our social conditions in such a way that people no longer need to have recourse to the opium of religion and can affirmatively recognize the irreplaceable value of their own lives."

His argument follows in two parts. The first part seeks to invert a the common assertion by the religious that without some higher order or transcendence, there is no basis for a moral or meaningful life. Hägglund argues that the opposite is true: eternity renders our temporary mortal lives inconsequential in comparison. Only in realizing that our lives are impermanent, that wasted time can never be recovered, and that death is a permanent end, does what we do have real stakes. Committing oneself to undertakings and to people bounded by this risk and impermanence is what he defines as "secular faith".

The second part, argues that the implication of this outlook is that our goal should be the expansion of "spiritual freedom": the freedom to ask ourselves not just what we ought to to do with our time, but if we ought to do what we supposedly ought to do. From this perspective, the collective wealth of a society is the degree to which people have the time and ability to do so. This concept of wealth and value is incompatible with capitalism. (My brain being math-addled, I would say that capitalism optimizes the wrong objective function.) Contrary to Keynes' predictions, capitalism will never produce a 15-hour work week, and social-democratic redistributive policies will always be limited by arguments that they diminish the wealth they seek to redistribute. Only under some form of democratic socialism, where true social wealth is strived towards, Hägglund argues, will we get free.

Along the way, we get some deep readings of Kierkegaard, Knausgaard, Hegel, Marx, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others. The book doesn't assume a deep philosophical background, but neither is it a breezy polemic typical of atheist-lit. It demands something of the reader, but it is profound and very moving in parts.

[Lada · Rating 2 out of 5]

More repetitive than even "The High Cost of Free Parking". And although Parking repeats the same (probably) correct logic over and over, this book keeps circling back to "and you can only feel loss, love or commitment because the person's life is finite" and it's like "Wait, what?" That statement that doesn't make sense is not explained in the first ~200 pages, but is repeated over and over. Abraham (and Isaac) are mentioned what must have been 500 times, with very little variation.
There is no attempt to expand the thought experiments to explore just a bit beyond the same tired scenario. For example, immortality did not stand in the way of all sorts of drama between the Greek Gods. Or what if God had asked Abraham to never see or speak to Isaac again, letting them both live on separately in eternity. Would this not be loss?
I gave up right around the time the book started talking about life and maintenance, maybe that direction would have been promising.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real disappointment. I have been a fan of Hagglund's since his early articles and Radical Atheism was a very important book in my young life so I was incredibly excited for this book to arrive.

If this book was framed simply as a positive vision of a life affirming, secular metaphysics it could have been a real achievement. That's what makes this so frustrating; the seeds of a great book are all here, but they've been smothered by several hundred unnecessary pages of Hegel and Hayek. As an attempt to expand Hagglund's work to beyond the *idea* of religion and address the *experience* of living this life to a popular audience, this doorstop of a tome is a painful failure.

The book constantly gets dragged into arguments against religion that make no reference to the actual lived experience of being religious. Even as an agnostic (who was raised an atheist) and has never been religious, the counterarguments seemed obvious and unaddressed. The number of people who actual experience religion has solely or primarily a quest for positive infinity is exceptionally slim. There is a reason that every popular conception of the Christian heaven includes individuals (angels, demons, our ancestors in white robes) looking down, experiencing the cutting of time much like we do. Since the whole book is spent sparring with Kierkegaard and company, it ends up having very little to say about the living this life for most of the billions on this earth.

[Tanja Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The struggle for freedom is an act of secular faith because it is committed to a form of individual and collective life that is essentially finite. This commitment to a free, finite life is implicit in all forms of resistance to exploitation and alienation. The only ability that can be exploited or alienated - and the only one that can be liberated - is our ability to own the question of what to do with our time, since the ability is is presupposed by all forms of freedom. The ability is certainly developmental and in need of cultural formation, but without faith in such an ability the idea of freedom is unintelligible. To be responsive to the exploitation or alienation of someone's life, you have to believe in the fragile possibility and the intrinsic value of her ability to own her time. The same secular faith is exhibited by anyone who takes up the struggle against her own oppression. To understand yourself as being exploited or alienated, you have to believe t hat you have a finite, precious time to live and that your own life is being taken away from you when that time is taken away from you."

There are few books, that when I finish, I think "again, let's read this again". Rarely has there been a book that so succinctly and clearly expresses the philosophy of my own life and my own half-thought thoughts. Martin Hägglund exemplifies his edicts with comparing and contrasting with philosophers of all ages, from Aristotle to Martin Luther King jr.

"Both capitalism and religion prevent us from recognizing in practice that our own lives - our only lives - are taken away from us when our time is taken away from us. While capitalism alienates us from our own time by subordinating it to the purpose of profit, religions offer the consolation that our time ultimately is insignificant and will be redeemed by eternity. While capitalism makes poverty perennial and distorts the meaning of wealth, religions promote poverty as a virtue and as a path to salvation. While capitalism disables our capacity to lead free lives, religion teaches us that submission leads to liberation. In short, both capitalism and religion makes us disown our lives, rather than enabling us to own the question of what we ought to do with our finite time."

"We need help one another to own our only life."

This book is so astonishingly profound, precise and deeply insightful that I cannot even begin to do it justice here. Value as measured by capitalism, distorts what is important to us because only profit is measured. GDP - which isn't discussed as such in the book - for example, does not measure natural destruction. As if that had no value. And because it isn't measured, in effect, it doesn't have any value, even if it poisons the livelihoods of millions.

I have a profession that supports a certain amount of self realization and also a greater purpose, since what the system of which I am a part, reduces environmental foot print. However, it is still capitalistic and I see how damaging the focus on short term profit is for long term development.

I value my time dearly. I buy myself out of chores. I measure things I cannot get out of against hourly pay. Which is intrinsically wrong of course, because the value of things that I want to do - read, embroider, garden, take care of my relationships - cannot really be measured monetarily.

Anyway, never mind me. This book is a shining, guiding light and if you value your life, you should read this. Maybe you will gain some deeper understanding a new perspective, or maybe this author, like for me, puts your half-brewed life philosophy into clear words. I will definitely be re-reading it and I will be throwing copies at my loved ones.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really insightful read that is really broad--perhaps a bit too broad? He covers Kierkegaard, Marx, MLK, CS Lewis and even contemporary philosophers. The thesis is hard to argue with and I think he spends too much time making the point, but his engagement with other thinkers was really enlightening. Basically, life is short YOLO

[Raoul G · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Peggy Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an engaging, intellectually rich, focused book, making the argument that human, lived time is central to human identity and the social world. The positive arguments about the finitude of human life and inevitability and importance of loss, suffering and boredom; about the practical making of projects and practical identities through not only individual commitments and efforts but social norms and institutions; and about the necessity of a radical critique of capitalist value and social transformation were excellent. The explications of texts and important thinkers, including Augustine, Knausgaard, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, MLK, were valuable. His distinction between social democracy, a political economy of redistributive public policy within capitalism, and democratic socialism, a replacement of capitalist political economy by structures and processes that value self-determined life time, is theoretically valuable.

However, the reduction of religion and religious faith to a belief in eternal life is problematic. The text fails to convey how diverse religious practices are, how many religious believers live in the world, why religious practice and secular faith are not exclusive of but may reinforce each other, and how some progressive Christians interpret the Bible as a story of human freedom. The author changes somewhat his presentation of religion in his ending discussion of Martin Luther King and the U.S. civil rights movement. Here he acknowledges that religion is not simply belief in eternity but also practices (in the book generally when it comes to religion, he singles out one key belief; but when he talks about secular commitment and practical identity he talks about practices and even institutions). However, he sticks to his position that when religious believers are advocating political and economic projects and drawing upon the deep relationships and solidarities within communities of believers they are not practicing religion but secular faith.

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been with me through the most difficult and painful period of my life so far, and although I have found myself ardently disagreeing with Hagglund at nearly every stage of the book, it would be disingenuous for me not to recognise this as a work which has been important in my life.

Many of the conclusions Hagglund affirms are at this stage platitudes on the Left, and it is refreshing to see them argued for with such clarity, beginning with what it means to live a good life, and ending with the claim that this depends on a "revaluation of value" that will take us from capitalism and into what Hagglund terms 'democratic socialism'. The basic idea of democratic socialism, although Hagglund never puts it in these terms, is that people shouldn't serve money: money should serve people.

His political account suffers from the fact that he never discusses how we can bring about democratic socialism (although the presence of Martin Luther King Jr. in the closing chapter gives us some indication of where Hagglund's sympathies lie), and his ultimately superficial engagement with economic theory. For example, in his discussion of Rawls, Hayek and Pikkety, he doesn't seem to recognise that Rawls was actually an anti-capitalist (disclosed in his final realisation that capitalism and democracy are incompatible with each other), or engage with the question of why Hayek and Pikkety are wrong - what is lacking in their account which causes them to be mistaken - even though they are.

In the end, this book is likely what Sartre would have written instead of Being and Nothingness had he not been so French. This Life is a work of existentialism or humanist-marxism, starting from an assessment of what it means to have faith in this life and to live well, and ending with the claim that this involves having the existential control over the principles according to which we live our lives which existence under capitalism precludes.

[Justus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite its merits, This Life is poorly argued, repetitive, entirely theoretical and lacking any empirical grounding, and narrow-minded. It is an ambitious book that attempts to set out a rigorous anti-religious and anti-capitalist philosophy of life. It is hard not to applaud the author for his sweeping vision -- he's essentially arguing in favor of a dramatic reshaping of global life -- even if I found his execution tremendously flawed.

Hägglund's biggest strength is his detailed and insightful readings of Augustine, Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hegel, and Marx. On their own, I think they are all interesting and worth reading. But within the context of this book they are part of the book's failure.

Hägglund has two central claims in the book. In the first half of the book he makes a case for what he calls "secular faith" (as opposed to "religious faith"). His argument has some merit but it is also displays all of his flaws. First, what is "religious faith"?

All world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) hold that the highest form of existence or the most desirable form of life is eternal rather than finite.

Despite this claim that he is speaking about "all world religions" Hägglund defines it, basically, as a belief in austerely intellectual heaven as Augustine, Kierkegaard, and C.S. Lewis conceived of it, a heaven where individuals cease to exist in any meaningful sense and spend their eternity contemplating the divinity of god. Theirs is hardly the definitive, universally accepted version of Christianity. To say nothing of all the other religions on the planet.

Buddhism, with its concept of a detached nirvana is close enough that he has a dozen or so references to it. There are a mere four references to Hinduism in the book, none of them detailed. Four to Islam. Three to Judaism. None to Shintoism, Confucianism, or the wide variety of indigenous religions. There is a single Buddhist author investigated (Steven Collins and his book Nirvana). Every other author discussed in the book is Christian. This is what I mean by "narrow-minded".

Slowly, eventually, Hägglund makes that when he talks about "religious faith" he has a very specific meaning in mind that will probably surprise most religious people.

If I am motivated by religious faith, the goal of my striving is to rest in peace.

The common denominator for what I have called “religious” ideals is the goal of being absolved from negativity, absolved from the pain of loss.

The infinite resignation of Religiousness A is thus the common denominator for all forms of religious faith worthy of the name.

(Notice the dismissive language, which we'll come back to in a second.)

While religious faith is exposed to doubt and uncertainty, its goal is to reach a state in which "the element of distance is overcome and with it uncertainty, doubt, courage and risk."

So what is Hägglund's "secular faith" set against this? Simply that we can't really care for something unless it is fragile and at risk of loss. We have to "have faith" that our spouse will love us back. We are in "fear & trembling" that our children will die and be lost to us forever. Hägglund makes the good point (hardly unique to him) that even the amazingly devout -- Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther -- experience grief when a loved one die. Which makes no sense in the context of their faith. They should be happy that their loved one has gone to join God in heaven. Hägglund makes his point using Barack Obama's speech in the wake of a school shooting in America:

Nevertheless, the religious faith that is supposed to provide consolation is predicated on a denial or relativization of the irreplaceable loss. Thus, at a memorial service for the victims in Newtown, President Barack Obama delivered the following sermon: “‘Let the little children come to me,’ Jesus said, ‘and do not hinder them. For such belongs to the kingdom of Heaven.’ God has called them all home.” This religious faith—if one were to believe in it—would fundamentally alter the response to the shootings in Newtown. The children who were killed would not be irreplaceable, but rather transferable to a higher existence. Furthermore, the killings themselves would ultimately not be a tragedy but a transitional stage on the way toward God calling the children “home” to heaven. To be sure, this particular belief—that the slaying of children in the end amounts to God calling them home to heaven—may seem offensive even to many who take themselves to be endorsing religious faith. But one should then bear in mind that a similar relativization of death is entailed by any religious faith in redemption.

But here is where Hägglund has created his own biggest stumbling block. He is essentially arguing that, in reality, virtually everything we do is actually predicated on "secular faith" and not "religious faith".

My aim is to show that secular faith lies at the heart of what matters, even for those who claim to have religious faith, such as Martin Luther when mourning the death of his daughter Magdalena and C. S. Lewis when mourning the death of his wife, Joy Davidman.

Those who claim to be Christian but still care about the fate of their finite lives, Kierkegaard chastises for lacking a living religious faith.

But if we accept this...then what's the point of the entire first half of the book? 99% of the time we are already acting with "secular faith" as our motivation. So he's not trying to "convert" anyone. Is Hägglund just trying to get us to admit that? Why does it matter if we do or don't admit it? Is he trying to get us to move from 99% secular faith to 100% secular faith? Is there some actual, concrete benefit? What are we missing out by keeping that 1% religious faith.

And this is where the lack of any empiricism in the book hurts it because he's unable to point to any real world effects. Like, okay, we all admit we're living based on secular faith and then switch to 100% secular faith. What happens? What's better?

The closest thing to an answer to this is Hägglund's critical analysis of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle which "can be read as a contemporary response to Augustine". But here's where Hägglund's repetitiveness comes in. He spends over 30 pages (97-128) quoting long sections from Knausgaard’s book, all of which amounts to us being told over and over and over again: Look, a guy wrote a book about how the fragility & finitude of something is what gives it beauty and meaning. First I'll quote a passage about his first love. See? Now I'll quote another passage. See? Ready for another?

Ultimately I think that Hägglund does make a good point. Any philosophical or religious conception of eternity seems misguided. By attempting to remove uncertainty and doubt and fear it would remove anything that is recognizable as human. Worse, it devalues all the things we actually care about in our lives. What gives things value is the very fact that they are fragile and can be lost. We worry about the environment because it can be destroyed. 100 years ago when we didn't think it could be lost, we didn't value it.

But that's a point that can be made in 10 or 20 pages...not the 150 Hägglund takes. I think his biggest failing is he goes "deep" instead of "wide". The entire first half of the book is essentially rests on just two things: his reading of Augustine and his reading of Knausgaard. Both are white men from the Western, Christian tradition. If he wants to convince us of the universality of his point, he'd do better to cut down the length discussions of Augustine and Knausgaard and substitute in a plethora of diverse writers.

This review is already lengthy and I've only talked about the first half of the book, where he makes his argument for "secular faith". In the second half of the book he makes his case for throwing out capitalism and building a Marxist economy.

The deepest reason capitalism is a contradictory social form is that it treats the negative measure of value as though it were the positive measure of value and thereby treats the means of economic life as though they were the end of economic life.

In this section Hägglund makes good points that capitalism sets the definition of "wealth" as money rather than free time.

The point of wealth under capitalism is to accumulate more wealth, not to use it as a means for a meaningful end.

Despite the resonance of individual lines like this, most will find his ultimate conclusion hopelessly naive and vague.

The idea, however, is that we will be intrinsically motivated to participate in social labor when we can recognize that the social production is for the sake of the common good and our own freedom to lead a life.

That's right, he's saying that even in a post-capitalist utopia there will (obviously) be drudge work that needs to be done. Someone will need to clean the toilets. And we will be "intrinsically motivated" to help clean the toilets. And the cleaning roster will (somehow) be determined democratically. This is where he really needed to descend from ivory tower theorizing and engage with real empiricism and real psychology of real human beings.

Despite giving this 2-stars I don't regret reading this. Hägglund's book -- more than anything else I've read recently "made me think". And sometimes that's what you want from a book. I didn't always (usually) agree with his conclusions. But he's trying to start a discussion about something meaningful -- not just what the President tweeted last night -- and I appreciated that. I'm not sure I would exactly recommend this to many people. It is only 300 pages but it is dense and not exactly "fun reading". I guess, in the end, I'd leave it as "if you're the kind of person who thinks you would like a book like this...then you might like this book".

[Nick Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I unfortunately had to read this at a bit of a faster pace than I would have preferred, because I got it from the Brooklyn Public Library shortly before moving out of the city. I did finish it on time though!

From the first time I read about TL, I felt a deep-seated need to read it--the integration of reflections on atheism, socialism, and literature sounded really attractive. (Also, it is blurbed by Yanis Varoufakis, which is bizarre but awesome.) I was raised by divorced parents, one of whom was religious and the other of whom was a "reluctant atheist"--someone who doesn't believe in god but kind of wished they did. I guess more of the latter rubbed off on me. Since leaving college, I attended a church for a few years but now consider myself an atheist. I am interested in more than the rejection of religion, though. I've read a lot of Stoic writing and have probably found that to resonate the most of any system of beliefs, so it was interesting for me to read Hagglund, who is fairly critical of Stoic philosophy for similar reasons as he is critical of religion.

MH is a professor of comparative literature and humanities, and the style of this book reminded me a lot of one of my very favorite non-fiction authors, Martha Nussbaum: like MN, he makes extensive reference to both literature and philosophy to make his arguments. (However, I think MN is a better writer in that she is much more concise--this is a long book and I think a better editor could have reduced the length by a couple of hundred pages without losing the core messages--MH repeats himself a lot.) Among other things, reading this book made me interested to read Knausgard's "My Struggle," which I hadn't really felt interested or bothered to learn much about before, based on MH's extensive discussion of it.

The heart of MH's argument is his distinction between "secular faith" and "religious faith." Despite the terms, each can be found in evidence in nominally secular and religious settings alike. To paraphrase, "religious faith" is the belief in, and striving toward, some desired transcendent and permanent/eternal state. This most obviously includes belief in an eternal afterlife, but also includes the Buddhist concept of Nirvana (permanent escape from the cycle of death and rebirth) and even the state of the ideal Stoic "sage," who is impervious to the vicissitudes of the mortal world through perfection of judgment. On the other hand, "secular faith" is the commitment to finite projects in full awareness of their fragility, contingency, and finitude. This includes commitments to political and social causes, committed human relationships, and basically everything that doesn't involve trying to reach a "permanent win condition" (my terminology, not Hagglund's). This category encompasses most activities of "normal life" and, importantly, Hagglund argues that it also encompasses many aspects of religion (feeding the poor, loving your neighbors, etc.), and the book's last section is an extended discussion of MLK through the lens of secular faith.

Hagglund argues that the absence of a "permanent win condition" in the universe (which he takes as given) should not be lamented by the non-religious, but rather, rightly understood, this very lack is the necessary grounds for everything that we intuitively recognize as good--identity, personal growth, and commitments, among other things. He lays out a fairly persuasive argument for this, mainly from the standpoint that an eternal or perfected existence precludes basic building blocks of ourselves, including prioritization and commitment. He illustrates this very touchingly with extended readings of CS Lewis and of Augustine, both of whom struggle with actually subordinating their earthly commitments to their faith (MH would say, wrongly so). I appreciated this part of the argument very much, because I definitely fall into the camp of "atheist who regrets his conclusion." I was glad it was not a facile argument of the "no light without darkness" sort, which I feel like is all I have really seen before. I will have to think about the argument a lot more, but it seemed fairly plausible to me. (I'll note that, throughout this book, I found it fairly easy to nitpick Hagglund's arguments, which are not nearly as airtight as an analytical philosopher's would be. For example, he argues that an eternal being would have no reason to prioritize one activity over another, but what if that being was eternal yet had some time-indexed characteristics? However, in this example and most others, I did not find the nits to undermine the overall argument, which I generally agreed with.)

I also very much appreciated the latter sections of the book, where he turns to the implications of his argument for social, political, and economic organization. My main problem with a lot of non-religious philosophy, definitely including Stoicism, is that it fails to connect its prescriptions for personal conduct with social organization. Again, I felt that I agreed with the broad thrust of Hagglund's argument while finding lots of small things to disagree with. This section mostly focuses on a reading of Marx, and while I have not read Marx extensively, I disagreed with a lot of individual assertions in Hagglund's reading of him. I do agree with the general argument that the measurement of value under capitalism is incomplete, in ways that we are learning are literally catastrophic. I think his re-orientation toward valuing socially available free time is a reasonable one, and I agree with the general prescription for introducing democratically intentional prioritization into more spheres of life is a good one. I do think Hagglund is extremely optimistic about how people's individual values will change under a democratic socialist system, for example in their willingness to do socially necessary but unpleasant work--and this allows him to avoid making any really difficult prescriptions (he basically assumes away the need for any kind of coerced work), but I don't really hold that against him--he is trying to do enough in this book as it is, without expecting him to also fully lay out a working socialist society. (Note also that he correctly argues that laying out a full blueprint in advance would directly contradict the ideals of democratic decision-making that he is holding up.)

It's been really interesting for me to read this close in time to Octavia Butler's "Earthseed" books, as I think Lauren Olamina's Earthseed religion/philosophy is a prime example of secular faith in action. Unlike Hagglund, Butler is under no illusions about the difficulties a community would face in trying to birth such a way of life into our own world.

[David Selsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a game changer. What did I feel while reading it? I felt I was reading the ideas of the smartest person in the metaphorical room. I used to get the same feeling reading David Foster Wallace: this fricking guy is thinking in a way no one else is; this person is expressing himself in a way very few can. I often thought as I read "This Life" about the blurb on the back of "Infinite Jest"--"it's as if Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy; or Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL."

Martin Hagglund's erudition powers this treatise on our finite lives. I had the impression that whatever it is he is "reading," he knows it better than most. What gives his intellect such power and bravura is the offhandedness with which he displays it. He is never dismissive of his interlocutors that have misread Hegel, and especially Marx, but he only demurs that they (the other readers) have drawn very "misleading" conclusions, and those misleading conclusions have led to decades if not centuries of hermeneutical malfeasance.

The first part of the book--"Secular Faith"--is not as galvanizing as the "Spiritual Freedom" sections. Having thoroughly enjoyed Knausgards's first installment, I lost steam as I made my way through the second book. In the last 100 pages, I wondered why I was reading about the mundaneness of his life as opposed to writing in my own journal (about the same types of things). Hagglund's reading of "My Struggle" didn't do a lot for me. I can't remember much of what he (Hagglund) wrote: something to the effect there is profundity in Knausgard's commitment to the caring for and writing about the minutiae of everyday life.

I keep thinking I need to return to Knausgard's volumes, but I really had to struggle to make it through that second one. The audacity of what Knausgard undertook is thrilling, and I applaud his project in "My Struggle." But Hagglund's argument comes alive in my life when I read books (Knausgard's or anyone else's): how do I want to prioritize my life? How do I want to change myself? What is this book doing for my life? What else should I be doing besides reading this? I'm a writer myself, so I'm thinking, Should I be working on my own writing where I detail my existential dilemmas as opposed to reading Knausgard's daily struggles to make sense of the past and present? When I completed Volume 2, I had reached an answer. Maybe if I return to finish subsequent volumes, I will also return to Hagglund's critique of "My Struggle" and find it more rewarding.

The last section of "Secular Faith" hits its stride when Hagglund discusses Abraham and Isaac and God. Gripping stuff. Hagglund takes one of the oldest and most important stories is Western Civilization and makes it new and makes you feel how important this story is in establishing obedience to God and thereby robbing one (in this case Abraham) of the enjoyments and a commitment to his finite life (being asked to kill his beloved son).

All the stuff in the last part of the book about democratic socialism and Marx is spectacular. It's been over a week since I finished the book and already I can't remember all the intricacies of Hagglund's reading of Marx, but that's to be expected. What will stay with me is the humanity of his argument on behalf of democratic socialism. I feel it takes great courage to argue what he argues: that the means of production should be collectively controlled; that having free time to think about, become, work on being the type of person you want to be is of great value; that the quest for profit to the detriment of all other orientations towards this life is gross (my word, not his).

He's brave; he's clear. And again, his readings of Marx and Hegel and others is breathtaking because they're so spry and compelling. During my years in grad school as I struggled through Derrida, Deleuze, Marx, and Lacan, I wondered if it had something to do with reading a work in translation. Hagglund wrote this book in English, so I'm getting his thoughts on philosophy in the language in which he constructed them. It (his clarity and focus) probably also has to do with his being preternaturally intelligent. There are no neologisms, no funky hermetically-sealed terms, in "This Life." He answers the question of whether the ideas expressed in dense, intimidating continental philosophy can be conveyed in words and sentences that the non-philosopher can comprehend. Yes, is the answer.

[Clinton Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling blow your mind and shift your thinking about faith? Does Hegel both inspire and confound you? Do you have a tentative grasp of democratic socialism. Can you just not put your finger on it?

If you appreciate the work of Sam Harris, but prefer something a little more penetrating and scholarly, read this book. This is an essential and masterful critique of religion and capitalism that sets forth and argument of how we can lead better and more enriched lives of spiritual freedom, while staying firmly rooted in an understanding of our own mortality.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that is good enough to be worth reading despite the fact that it is often repetitive and sometimes infuriating. Hägglund should have written two books, the first about religion and the second about socialism. If he had, I'd have given the first one 2 stars, and the second one 4.

I'll start with the second half, which is excellent, and the reason you should read this book. It's a critique of capitalism and a close reading of Marx. It focuses on the problem that capitalism does not place any value on free time. So any increased productivity, automation or efficiency does not reduce time spent working (as is probably obvious from most jobs), but is either converted into profits for capital, or (if large enough) results in unemployment. The gains are never realised in any meaningful sense, because they never result in the time to pursue goals within the realm of what he calls "spiritual freedom." This half of the book is a profound and important analysis.

You should probably stop reading here and read the (second half of the) book instead. But if you want to know what I dislike about his views on religion, here it is:

The first half is a bit of a struggle, particularly if you have any religious/contemplative/meditative practice. In it, Hägglund misunderstands Stoicism, misrepresents Buddhism, and misreads Kierkegaard (whose view of faith is essentially identical with Hägglund's "secular faith," the point of both being that you can't know in advance that your actions won't be harmful/vain).

I agree with his overall argument in this section, which is that life is meaningful only because of its finitude, and that spiritual freedom requires us to commit ourselves to finite things even in full knowledge they won't last, but he spends much of his time pointlessly attacking a straw man version of religion. He believes all religion to be essentially eschatological and seems to know nothing of religious pragmatism, the history of Buddhist thought, or why people practice religions. He should read Tanya Luhrmann's When God Talks Back, which provides a good account of how even (maybe especially) the most extreme esoteric/charismatic/mystical practices have benefits that a materialist like Hägglund ought to be willing to do anything for — including become religious. If he really cares about material well-being, religion has all sorts of benefits. That these might in principle be replicated in secular equivalents is a possibility but not a guarantee.

His readings throughout the book are detailed enough, though, that even when he's completely wrong (which, especially in the first half, he often is) he quotes enough of the source material that you still get wisdom from those thinkers. I am not saying this because I'm religious in the way he imagines; I am as suspicious as Marx was of organised religion, and I have no religious beliefs. I do, however, find practical wisdom, i.e., things that work in practice, in the philosophies and religions which he regards as essentially epistemological targets to be torn down. Of course Skepticism/Stoicism won't hold up against rational attacks; they are not fundamentally about reason, and Skepticism is opposed to knowledge itself. Instead, they are claims about how best to live, and how to live with a mind that is not rational, but thinks that it is.

If you meditate, reading the first half is a bit like being an athlete while Hägglund, who has never left his couch, relentlessly lectures you about the dangers of exercise. He does not seem to understand the goal of insight practices, he only understands straw-man soteriology or empty eschatologies, or random metaphysics made up as a side-aspect of some of these practices, which he mistakes for the real thing. (He is constantly asserting that the monotheistic religions only care about the afterlife, though he ignores Judaism, and that Nirvana is the only point of Buddhism, ignoring the fact that the Bodhisattva ideal explicitly renounces this.) He is fixated on belief, and doesn't seem to realise that belief only matters insofar as it affects behaviour, and he definitely does not prove that there is any link (my view is that rationalisation/belief follow action, not vice versa).

He entirely ignores religious practice, which are the reason these traditions exist and continue to be... well, practiced. In this ignorance he seems to regard nirvana as quite attainable, ataraxia and apatheia goals so closeby that one might arrive at them accidentally, and not the unreachable ideals that they are. He assumes that all religious people think constantly of eschatology, as if their every action is based on their thinking of heaven and hell, and he believes that they don't value their communities or rituals except as instrumental actions towards a deity. Looking at the contradictions which exist in the writing of Augustine, Martin Luther, and Augustine, which Hägglund seems to regard as a good idea because they are so religious, is, on the contrary, a bad idea because they are so religious. Of course they faced serious questions and contradictions that laypeople would never face. It's all quite insulting for both agnostic spiritual practitioners and for the religious alike, showing ignorance of both sides.

I also fundamentally disagree with his belief that there is a clean division between instrumental and ultimate goals. He regards things done "for their own sake" as superior to those done for some other purpose. To me this is a spectrum, and while I agree that capitalism tends to instrumentalise things in a damaging way, I think you should always be skeptical about any reasons you give to yourself or anyone else about why you are doing something. He purports to be doing philosophy for its own sake. I'm sure that is largely true, but if it were truly an end in itself, then he would have given the book away for free at the end (or burned it). I'm not saying he should have done either of these things. I'm just saying that while it's laudable to focus your time on things done "mostly" for their own sake, this is never a pure proposition; motives are always mixed.

At the end he comes back around to Hegel and Martin Luther King, Jr., and reiterates much of the book. I hope I haven't entirely put you off it, because it is a good book. But I just can't see why it's one book and not two.

[Kyle Minton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Life by Martin Hagglund basically argues we're all actually atheists and because of that we should be socialists...it's compelling as hell.

The argument is that we all, at least implicitly, adhere to what Hagglund calls secular faith: "secular faith is a condition of intelligibility for any form of care. For anything to be intelligible as mattering - for anything to be at stake - we have to believe in the irreplaceable value of someone or something that is finite. The secular faith - which the religious aspiration to eternity seeks to leave behind - is expressed by care for anyone or anything living on. Secular faith is a condition of possibility for commitment and engagement, but by the same token secular faith leaves us open to devastation and grief".

The entire first section of This Life trots out really famous and likable religious thinkers and writers like Martin Luther King Jr. or C.S. Lewis to demonstrate their commitment to the finite lives of everyone around them. This, Hagglund argues, is contrary to a religious faith that dictates our only concern should be for an afterlife. If we truly believed everyone in our lives would live forever what purpose would there be in valuing them? In feeling concern for their suffering?

Imagine if your car couldn't be destroyed or damaged in any way, would you still drive it and value it as carefully? A less surface-level example: if we thought that our time with our elderly grandparent was infinite - that we'd just see them in the afterlife - would we really make such an effort to spend time with them before their passing?

Once you've been made to understand that we only have one life, Hagglund hits you with the second part of the book; we need to commit ourselves to the task of democratic socialism. This is what Hagglund defines as spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom is essentially the freedom to pursue what you find most important in life without the constraints of necessary labor. If we only have one life, democratic socialism is the only structural way we can organize society to ensure the most amount of people can live that one life to its fullest.

This section probably won't treat ardent Marxists to anything new (in fact some may disagree with Hagglund's definition of social value), but I've never seen such a severe argument for free time. As someone who lives in and is aware of a society that functions on the miserable toil of unnecessary labor the idea of redefining our understanding of freedom because we're all gonna die is...something. I'm not really sure how to win the world Hagglund is talking about but he certainly does a hell of a job inspiring me to believe in it.

This leads to my only criticism of Hagglund's work. While it's exciting to see an entire chapter dedicated to Democratic Socialism in such a philosophically rigorous book, it's disappointing to find it doesn't mention the concept of class struggle even one time. Hagglund goes on at length about the shortcoming of many liberal thinkers like Rawls and Mills, Marxist critics like Hayek, all the way to contemporary voices on the left like Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty and how they fail to correctly redefine Capitalism's measure of value.

Hagglund isn't wrong to do this, in fact, I think his analysis is spot on, it's just that without mentioning how we struggle to win such a conception of value trivializes the problem to one of mere definitions. I'm not going to go to the UAW picket line and ask that the workers there reconceptualize their views on wage labor. I'm going to stand with them and demand more democratic freedom in the workplace. Do their demands fit into Hagglund's? We'll never know.

But that doesn't really matter, Hagglund's book is an incredibly useful tool in realizing the value of one's life and prioritizing a definition of "freedom" that is actually achievable and that actually means something. While it doesn't offer the best insights on how to get involved in the struggle for such freedom, I still think the argument being made is one that should be shared as widely as possible.

[Jack Waters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book that very nearly defines the way I think about the world. It certainly helps that it is written by a Swedish author, covers democratic socialism, offers a compelling secularism that doesn't flagrantly disregard theists the way 'new atheism' does, modern Kierkegaardian takes on life and faith, a model for how to appreciate the here and now, steady Marxist frameworks, etc.

Can't wait to read it again.

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an incredible book that deepens your thinking on each philosopher he takes up. A fantastic synthesis of the life philosophy and political philosophy I already ascribed to.

[Clelia Albano · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are fragile. We should acknowledge this and accept it.
This is the first thought that sprang to my mind as I read the early pages of This Life. And a sudden emotion has pervaded me. Because it is not merely a philosophical book addressed to thinkers ( the approach is very far from being academic) but it is also an investigation into the meaning of life and death, and a book about how our "lives matter" to rephrase the author himself, addressed to “you”, the reader. Martin Hägglund with a mesmerizing line of reasoning unearths finitude, grief, mourning, anxiety and attachment that religions and capitalism have buried. In fact according to religions our goal is to detach ourselves from the worldly dimension by denying our body since our ultimate end is the eternal life and our material existence is meaningless. Even Buddhism (the religion of the “here and now”) revolves around the goal of detaching ourselves from the temporal dimension by denying our body.
Religions promise consolation for losses, the overcoming of grief, forgiveness and justification if one acted contrary to what is ethical for the sake of God. Capitalism on the other hand abducts us from reality by making our material life a means for the sake of money. Both religions and capitalism devalue our lives. Hägglund argues that for a deep understanding of the worth of our time and our lives we need a secular faith. It is a faith that requires the acceptance of precariousness, of finitude, of risks.
It requires to believe in the others whatever it happens. Secular faith is a matter of belief, a practical belief. Thus we must relying on uncertainty.
The author argues:

“secular faith is a necessary uncertainty” (p.50)

To clarify what he postulates the philosopher points out how some christian figures and intellectuals who were believers did show a strong sense of the finitude and secular faith such as Luther, C.S. Lewis, Saint Augustine. The reader used to a traditional approach to these figures will be caught by surprise. Hägglund is not an ordinary philosopher. He has a special talent in analysing philosophical speculations, theories and systems. In the Chapter 2, LOVE, Martin Hägglund draws an unusual portrait of Saint Augustine. With regard to the Saint from Tagaste the “experience of time” is intertwined with the experience of love. When Augustine was devastated by the death of his beloved friend as he recounts in the Confessions, he showed his secular faith and attachment to his friend. He couldn't find any consolation in God since what he missed was the finite time he had spent together with his friend i.e. the temporal dimension he shared with him. The idea of an eternal dimension can't fill the physical absence of the beloved one passed away. Augustine revealed his frailty, his “vulnerability” and his “uncertainty”. The saint and thinker conceived time in a non linear way according to the ancient conception of time. It has recalled to my mind the idea of “duration” of Bergson.
Hagglünd argues (p.87):

"As Augustine reminds us, all the moments of our lives “pass away and no one can follow them with his bodily senses. Nor can anyone grasp them tight even when they are present.”

The same feelings mark the experience of loss of Luther and C. S. Lewis in the Chapter 1, which is about FAITH. Neither Luther, facing the death of his daughter Magdalena, nor Lewis, facing the death of his beloved wife, found relief in the perspective of the afterlife. For they were attached to their beloved ones and this entails that the acceptance of a timeless existence would have meant the denial of their death and thus the indifference towards their absence.
Of the Part II the first thing that struck me has been a seagull the author takes as an example to delineate the difference between the natural being and the spiritual being. I have felt the vastness of the Nordic seascape Hägglund describes and the weightless flight of the seagull that in my imaginary has became also a poetic symbol. The language of This Life differs, in my opinion, from other books of philosophy for expressing the emotional involvement of the author himself inside every line. You can feel the authenticity of his commitment, you can perceive he cares for the words he chooses to such an extent that you have no doubt when he argues over "caring" and "to be committed to". Hägglund in the chapters The Value of Our Finite Time and Democratic Socialism provides an insightful interpretation of what Marx failed to grasp about the intelligibility of value. Marx provides three levels of analysis of economy: the level of appearance; the level of measure of value; the level of transhistorical
conditions for any economy. Martin Hägglund formulates a fourth level of analysis by which he answers the question of "what makes life intelligible as an economy of time". "Only a spiritual free being" - the philosopher argues- " can treat her life as a matter of what she values".
Beside the thinkers and intellectuals I have mentioned there are many others such as Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Karl Ove Knausgård whose main work My Struggle Hägglund employs, among the other things, for an understanding of the anti-democratic use of the "I", "we" and "they" in Hitler's Mein Kampf while in My Struggle the "I" and the "you" express the acknowledgement of "your own dependence and the dependence of others".
The Conclusion is touching. M.L.King stands out for his dignity. I can't believe he was dismissed as “outdated” by the Black Power and the New Left. But this is not the point. The point is King's knowledge of Marx and Hegel. Particularly the latter is central to the exegesis of King's God and Hegel's norms. The struggle for human rights, civil norms, equality that were essential to build up the new Memphis are interchangeable with the religious symbols of King's public speeches. The democratic socialism of which he dreamt of is still not realized. The reason why this goal is still unachievable is the asymmetry between capitalism and poverty. And the more capitalism grows the more grows inequality. The climate change, strictly related to capitalism, is another issue that requires a paradigm shift.
Mutual recognition, finitude, frailty, vulnerability, free time, secular faith and spiritual freedom are the keys to reach the goal of a new society. Martin Hagglünd with this book is a beacon of light in giving back the true meaning of being human and of spiritual freedom.

[Cool_guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's start at the end. There's plenty to agree with here. In This Life, Martin Hagglund outlines a vision of communism - he calls it democratic socialism - which measures value in "socially available free time". When we own the means of production, we'll largely be liberated from what Marxists call the "realm of necessity". Basically, chores and the work needed to keep the means of production moving. Today, capitalists take that time for themselves and transform it into surplus value for them, and alienated labor for us. Tomorrow, it'll be ours to do as we please. Alienated labor will disappear. Instead, it'll create socially available free time, the basis for our collective freedom.

Hagglund believes freedom is more than leisure time. Freedom is the chance to use our time to commit, as a society and as individuals, to the projects and people in which we find meaning. Hagglund goes on to argue that these things are meaningful because they are finite, and thus entail risk- everything dies or drifts from our control. Only when we can commit ourselves to what we believe we ought to do with our lives, even if that commitment can fail, are we free.

That all sounds great. Here's where Hagglund loses me. It's not just that our finite time is valuable because it's finite. Our time is finite because God, or religion, or whatever, doesn't exist. There's no heaven, or Nirvana, no spiritual salvation. While Hagglund doesn't view religion with contempt, he understands it in much the same way that the New Atheists do - there's no sky creature coming to save you etc etc. Hagglund's understanding of religion seems to come from how religious texts confront the problem of death and what comes after. In his world, people are religious because it helps them face death. Good deeds ensure a good afterlife.

I know plenty of religious people, or at least spiritual people. I live in America, and the Midwest at that. Religion, especially in the year of our Lord 2023, is mostly a subjective, idiosyncratic experience. For better or worse, for many, religion is a guide to day to day life. This takes many forms, some of which, I'll admit, are stupid. I once had a neighbor yell at me because I walked on her lawn. I shouldn't do that, she told me, because she's a Christian. I also know that there are Christians, like the mainstream Lutheran church, that preach that if hell exists, it's empty. We do good in the world because we're compelled to, and we're compelled to, they'd say, because we're children of God.

The best example of this in action is the man with whom Hagglund concludes This Life - Martin Luther King. Yes, MLK used his finite time on earth to fight injustice. He didn't do this because he saw this, on some level - as Hagglund seems to imply - as a meal ticket to Heaven, or because he was socialized that way. No. MLK used religion make sense of the secular struggle. It's not only disrespectful to imply otherwise. It proves that Hagglund doesn't really understand Martin Luther King's motivations , or the purpose that religion serves for many.

Religion is essentially a way to make sense of something that's already there - love or the sense of being part of something larger than ourselves; or the unfortunate opposite - the compulsion to dominate and destroy.

I couldn't tell you where that comes from. It's very likely a quirk of our biology, of being human. Maybe it's not. I don't think that when I die, I'll have to answer Anubis or something. All I'm saying is that, whatever it is, supernatural or not, the world is enchanted. Religion exists for many to make sense of that.

Despite all that, it's very much worth reading. Hagglund's definition of value is incredibly clarifying.

[Suzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an early birthday present from my son who rightly surmised the topic of this book to be in my wheelhouse. However: One, it's awfully big to lug on the Metro, which is where I mostly read. But seriously: Martin Hagglund is very serious. I have not read anything in this style since my days as a philosophy student: Very dense, distant academic writing. So, what's funny is, most readers of this sort of book are going to be highly educated and/or very intelligent; otherwise, they would throw in the towel (which is unfortunate, as it would be good for a wider audience to contemplate his ideas about religion vs. secularism). So why does MN repeat everything over and over as if he is writing for someone who won't get it the first time? We get it! (In fact, I highly suspected that I had "gotten it" after reading his long forward, and, though there were some additional valuable parts, I was pretty much spot on.) This book could have stood some heavier-handed editing. Still, it was a birthday present from an esteemed relation, so I read on. I'm pretty much in MH's corner: Secular, not religious. But, two of his central claims--that eternal life would suck every motivation out of us, and that having oodles of down time (if capitalism could be converted to a system that benefited spiritual development) would be wonderful, as it would allow us to pursue our interests, both individual and common--just didn't seem true to me. Maybe it's because I live in a huge, dense capitalist bubble, but imagining myself learning that henceforth we would be living eternally didn't make me feel that I'd be any less interested in doing many of the things I already do; in fact, it seemed that it would be great to have endless time to have and develop those experiences. As for the second notion, I feel that ennui would set in pretty rapidly if I had lots of time to poke about pursuing this and that interest and (if that life were anything like this one) learning that I'm not really particularly good at anything. I guess I kind of like having somewhat scripted roles to choose from and then doing my best to fill them, whilst experimenting with my freedom around the edges. Again, I realize this could well be bc I am steeped in the way things are, but there you have it.
A particularly good part of the book was the discussion of communism--as it should be construed, by MH's lights--and the history of Marx (I was spurred to spend some time reading more about him afterward). MH's indictment of capitalism per se was pretty convincing, and I have to say that I see a lot of news, marketing and such through his lens now. My very favorite part of the book was a long portion devoted to--and exalting--Martin Luther King Jr. I though it was really quite moving, and, as with Marx, i learned a thing or two. I finished the book feeling "How could such a societal transformation ever possibly take place?" A team of five people at my work place can not even agree on values when we work on a project, let alone an entire county or world full of people from a multitude of cultures and a variety of different minds. Greed, competition and mental illness, just to mention a few obstacles, would seem to make MH's utopian ideal pretty unlikely to eventuate. Of course, we live in despondent times, which color my take.

[Nic S · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Life is probably one of the most important books I’ve read this year. Maybe in the last few years. Look out for a review in the coming week as I try to synthesize my reading notes.

[Shane Killion · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of the book constantly reminds you of your death and the second half makes you welcome it with open arms.

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is singularly the most ambitious book I’ve ever read. In the first part, Hägglund targets religious faith; in the second, he targets capitalism. Per Hägglund, the most important thing we have is our time, our finite lives. The most important question of anyone’s life therefore is this: “What do I do with my (finite) time here on earth?” Both religion and capitalism rob us of this time - and thus the opportunity to carefully contemplate this question. Religion does this by either asserting the meaninglessness of our corporeal earthly existence, and therefore by entreating us to live for an eternal afterlife (a la Christianity and Islam). Or it does this by asking us to reject/overcome the conditions of our fragile finiteness (a la Buddhist Nirvana or even Stoicism). Capitalism achieves this aim by robbing us of our finite time, our freedom, by exploiting us under wage labour.

Hägglund broadly defines religion. It is, for him, “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature”. This is to say, it is any belief system that maintains that our lives here on earth are at best a precursor to whatever is to come once we are “freed” from this life by death. Hägglund does not indulge in the tired debate of the truth value of religion; a desire to call out the beliefs of religious people as not amenable to “logic” or “reason” - a la the New Atheism of Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens etc. His argument is a simpler yet more trenchant one: that what religion promises - an eternal (after)life- is an undesirable state.

The intelligibility of a life, Haegglund maintains, is a function of its finiteness. We are only able to love people, to demonstrate care, to keep faith with practical projects, because we know that death looms in the horizon. As such, the more common desire we have, thinks Haegglund, is the desire for what he terms “living on”. We want our lives to be extended - but not indefinitely. We want to have more time with those we care about, more time with our projects, but we don't want this time to be eternal. When we mourn the loss of a life, what we are doing, according to Haegglund, therefore, is expressing our sadness for the termination of the conditions of this life. We are sad that that person isn’t living on, but we are not pining for eternity. If eternity were at all an intelligible proposition, then mourning would not make sense: our loved ones would simply have gone on to something better. We could not intelligibly conceive of their deaths as loss.

Here, Haegglund engages in detailed deconstructivist readings of the works of various thinkers. On the one hand, religious thinkers: from St. Augustine, who mourned the loss of an intimate friend (perhaps even a lover, we don’t know), and who even while reckoning with his sense of corporeal earthly loss, felt guilty at his feelings of loss, for they contradicted the notions of eternity his christianity compelled him to cleave to. To Martin Luther, who, at the death of his daughter Magdalena, wailed at his sense of deep loss, and had trouble acknowledging the notion of eternal life for Magdalena as providing any consolation. To Søren Kierkegaard, who, in “Fear and Trembling”, extolled Abraham’s deep religious faith which led him to decide to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. To C.S. Lewis, who wept for the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and who even as he felt a profound sense of loss, attempted to hold on to religious faith.

On the other hand, Hägglund engages deeply with "secular" thinkers. Karl Ove Knausgaard (Min Kampf) and Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past), to a name some. These thinkers showcase a commitment to secular faith. They struggle to make sense of and to liberate this life, not to be liberated from it, as Hägglund asserts religious faith calls for.

The second part of the book sees Hägglund engaging with non-religious thinkers who wrote about freedom and capitalism. Or, rather, with thinkers whose works were not necessarily religious. First, Kant and Hegel who lay the groundwork for Marx. Then Marx himself - and here Hägglund provides what is easily the most spirited defense and enlightening reading of Marx’s labour theory of value. Then on to Neoclassical thinkers who attempt to repudiate Marx - Mill,Hayek, Keynes etc. And finally to those thinkers who attempt to arrive at social democracy - Rawls, Thomas Piketty.

Hägglund’s conclusion? Marx was right. Mill, Hayek, Keynes, Rawls, Piketty et al are wrong: they either misread Marx, or they fail to acknowledge some things immanent within capitalism that make it’s reform a contradictory notion.

The Ancient Greeks (primarily Athens here) conceived of two realms of activity within the state: 1. The oikos (household), which was the realm of production- poiesis, of necessary labour. This was the domain of the slave 2. The polis, which was the domain of action, of politics, of free labour . In the polis, citizens were to pursue eudaimonia - the thriving of the state, which necessarily included the thriving of all within it.

But as Hegel later came to argue, and as is obviously clear to us now, this ancient Greek society was by no means a free society. “The institutional rationality of a free society”, said Hegel, “requires that the production of wealth is not an end in itself but for the sake of the well-being of each citizen”. "Each" was for Hegel the operative word here. The Greeks, on the other hand, took "citizen" to be the key word, hence slavery was justified by the fact that only foreigners, barbarians, were enslaved.

This was where Marx came in. Capitalism is grounded on the notion that the measure of wealth is in terms of what Marx called “socially necessary labour time”. The argument here derives from the thought that we all produce a surplus of time. This is to say, that not all our time is spent sustaining life, but that we have a surplus of time once we have eaten, gone to the bathroom, and performed all the other necessary things we need to do to stay alive. What is left after we have performed these life sustaining activities, is disposable time. We could think of this left-over time as “free time”, time to pursue our practical identities, the projects we have and desire to pursue; time to play with our kids, practice the violin, build a road, write a book etc. Marx called this “socially available free time”.

In a society where we were free to ask ourselves the question of what we freely wanted to do with our time, we would seek to reduce as much as possible our socially necessary labour time. Similarly, we would seek to maximise as much as possible our socially available free time. Thus all our production would be geared towards consumption. The concept of "surplus value" - from which the idea of profit derives- would thus not have much meaning in such a society. Any surplus value, then, since it wouldn't at all be necessary, could only be extracted from infringing into socially available free time by making it socially necessary labour time. This is what capitalism does.

Capitalism’s main imperative is not the satisfaction of material needs, but rather the accruing of profit. To do so, capitalists need to continuously extract more relative surplus value from living labour - i.e. people. But since we would have no reason to abide by this extractive system unless we are coerced, within capitalist structures, our capacities to sustain our lives are tied to wage labour. This means that we are only able to live as long as we work and generate profits for capital. Even when dead labour i.e. machines and robots- perform most of the socially necessary labour, we are still screwed: since our value under capitalism is primarily our labour, what results from machines performing labour is not that we now have more socially available free time to pursue our practical identities, but that we now suffer from unemployment, hence cannot sustain our lives.

Because he recognises how imperative production is within these structures, Hägglund rails against reformists of capitalism who seek to have a broader welfare state, e.g. social democrats like Thomas Piketty, Rawls etc. He also strongly argues against utopian socialists who simply seek to redistribute available wealth through programs such as Universal Basic Income. Such ideas -social democracy and utopian socialism - Hägglund insists, by concentrating only on distribution and not attending to matters of production, overlook a fundamental contradiction: that since the measure of our value under capitalism is our socially necessary labour time, “the more we devote our lives to the public goods of the welfare state or to non-profit projects supported by a UBI—the less wealth there is to finance the welfare state and the universal basic income… The more we emancipate ourselves from the exploitation of living labor time, the less wealth we have to support our state of freedom.”

This leads to Hägglund suggesting that once we have undergone a reevaluation of value; once we've recognized our socially available free time as the measure of our value, then we ought to have Democratic Socialism be the mode of political economy under which our lives are organised. “Democratic” because “freedom requires the ability”, for every citizen, “to participate in decisions regarding the form of life we are leading”. “Socialism” because only in collective ownership of the means of production, can we truly engage with that question - what are we to do with our finite time? For only then can we decide “how and what we produce, based on which abilities we seek to cultivate and which needs we have to satisfy.”

And here, Hägglund’s argument begins to show some cracks - Kumbaya ideas that may evade practicality. For one, he argues that under democratic socialism, no one would be compelled to do something that, though necessary for the thriving of the basic society, they didn’t want to do. One question comes to mind here: If this society is one where compulsion truly does not exist, how are we to deal with those members of our society who refuse to perform their share of socially necessary labour, perhaps seeing that if they do not have to perform this necessary labour, then they will have more time to perform the free labour they desire?

Hägglund’s answer to this objection is this: that a lot of necessary labour can be done within the realm of freedom. I.e. that if cleaning houses is socially necessary labour, but for some reason some people truly enjoy cleaning houses (in which case, this then becomes the realm of freedom for them), then the task, house cleaning, can still get done, without requiring socially necessary labour time. But this answer still begs the question: for, what if we have socially necessary labour that does not exist within anyone’s realm of freedom? Say, none of us particularly enjoys building roads or processing sewage. What’s our democratic socialist society to do about sewage and roads?

To be fair, Hägglund does observe that for democratic socialism to exist and thrive, the “social role of citizen” must count as a practical identity to us. In this sense, my duty as a citizen ought be one that I attend to in the same manner that I would attend to my duty as say, a father or a friend. Yet this still seems to be without teeth. Institutions under liberal capitalism work partially because they have eminent domain -and because of the incentive structures of private property. Liberal capitalism produces individual spheres of influence which, by maintaining a right to exclude, incentivises people to perform certain actions with the knowledge that they will benefit from them. Sometimes these self-serving projects help everyone else - like when I build a road to get my goods to the market. It is unclear, from Haegglund’s work, how democratic socialism would replicate this, allowing the undertaking of such necessary work without providing similar incentives nor having domain. The whole idea of “committed citizenship” doesn’t quite cut it. Though a warm thought, it places too much hope on wishy-washy feelings of communal belonging at the cost of actual consequences.

Hägglund’s book ends with a deconstruction of the thought of Martin Luther King Jr. It discusses how, even though King’s rhetoric was a particularly religious one (located, as it was, in the tradition of liberation theology, and influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr), his practical undertakings, both regarding black oppression under American racism, and worker oppression under capitalism, betrayed a commitment to secular faith. What King's practical work shows, argues Hägglund, is a belief that the amelioration of this life is what is important. Not, even for King, the Southern Baptist preacher, whatever is promised in the next.

This has truly been a remarkable read. BIG RECOMMEND.

[Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is so weird because it basically does the exact opposite of strawmanning in its attempt to discredit so-called “Religious Faith.” Hägglund defines Christianity and then uses said definition as an object for its refutation. And yet, he gives an account of Christianity that is, in my mind, more accurate than what probably 95% of “Christians” would give. Funnily enough, this account would probably be found objectionable by most nominal “Christians,” which I suspect is his point.

I love that he points out the contradictions in the systems of thought/action of Lewis and MLK by turning to Kierkegaard whose Fear and Trembling is used foundationally for defining what capital-F Faith (whether “Religious” or “Secular”) is.

Still, Hägglund fails to consider what role obedience plays in Religious Faith and deeply and rudimentarily misapprehends what “eternal life” might mean.

The sections on Marx and Democratic Socialism are engaging even if repetitive (although, the whole book is rather repetitive – I think Häglund is insecure about his reader’s ability to comprehend and follow his argument), and (these sections) help highlight a serious issue with capitalism (which is not at all exclusive to capitalism) which I think true Religious Faith offers a solution to: systems of value (i.e., how we assign value and what we assign value to).