{"id":13897,"date":"2020-02-18T18:50:40","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T23:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13897"},"modified":"2020-03-01T13:45:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-01T18:45:35","slug":"martin-hagglund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2020\/02\/18\/martin-hagglund\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin H\u00e4gglund"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The James Wood Review in the New Yorker<\/a> on This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn\u2019t exist (H\u00e4gglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But H\u00e4gglund\u2019s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn\u2019t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don\u2019t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last \u201cfor a longer time.\u201d So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but H\u00e4gglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A hundred pages or more on \u201cCapital<\/a>,\u201d \u201cGrundrisse<\/a>,\u201d and the \u201cEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844<\/a>\u201d might at first seem like an extended session of literary-theoretical self-pleasuring. But Marx is at the living center of \u201cThis Life,\u201d not just as the slayer of religious and capitalist illusion but, more important, as the utopian who saw beyond merely negative critique. For it\u2019s not enough to claim that religious values can be subsumed by secular ones. One has to lay out new, better secular values. Otherwise, why would religionists ever want to become secularists? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Savagely compressed, H\u00e4gglund\u2019s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called \u201can economy of time.\u201d Marx is, in this sense, probably the most secular thinker who ever lived, the one most deeply engaged with the question of what we do with our time. He divided life into what he called the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. H\u00e4gglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, H\u00e4gglund says, we should strive to reduce the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom. But capitalism is systemically committed to exploiting most of us, and to steadily increasing the amount of labor at the expense of our freedom. Capitalism treats the means of economic life, labor, as though it were the purpose of life. But, if we are to cherish\u00a0this life<\/em>, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. \u201cThe real measure of value,\u201d H\u00e4gglund says, \u201cis not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than simply replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom\u2014which would be impossible anyway, because there is always tedious and burdensome work to be done\u2014we should be able to better \u201cnegotiate\u201d the relationship between those realms. H\u00e4gglund gives an example of how this might be done when he talks about the way his own work on the book we are reading unites the two realms: writing \u201cThis Life\u201d was labor, of course, but it was pursued as an end in itself, as a matter of intellectual inquiry. In a H\u00e4gglundian utopia, labor would be part of our freedom. Even drudgery\u2014his example is \u201cparticipating in the garbage removal in our neighborhood on a weekly basis\u201d\u2014could be an element of our freedom if we see it as part of a collective understanding that we are acting in order to reduce, in the aggregate, socially necessary labor time and to increase socially available free time. This revolution, he says, will require the \u201crevaluation of value\u201d (in Nietzsche\u2019s phrase); and he criticizes a number of thinkers on the left, such as Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein, for wanting to alter capitalism (via redistribution) rather than effectively abolish it (via a deep redefinition of value). Such people, he says, are stating that capitalism is the problem while also stating that capitalism is the solution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet H\u00e4gglund\u2019s very vulnerability increases my regard for his project. I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right:<\/em> since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge. H\u00e4gglund offers a fulfillment of what Marx meant by \u201cirreligious criticism,\u201d a criticism aimed at both religion and capitalism, because both forms of life obscure what is really going on: that, as H\u00e4gglund puts it, \u201cour own lives<\/em>\u2014our only lives\u2014are taken away from us when our time is taken from us.\u201d We are familiar with the secular charge that religion is \u201clife-denying.\u201d H\u00e4gglund wants to arraign capitalism for a similar asceticism. Religion, you might say, enforces asceticism in the name of the spiritual; capitalism enforces asceticism in the name of the material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I finished \u201cThis Life\u201d in a state of enlightened despair, with \nclearer vision and cloudier purpose\u2014I was convinced, step by step, of \nthe moral rectitude of H\u00e4gglund\u2019s argument even as I struggled to \nimagine the political system that might institute his desired \nrevaluation of value. As if aware of such faintheartedness, he ends the \nbook with a beautiful examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2014in \nparticular the celebrated last speech he gave, in Memphis. H\u00e4gglund \nreminds us that King had studied Marx with care while a student, and \nthat he told the Montgomery Advertiser<\/em>, in 1956, that his \nfavorite philosopher was Hegel. Toward the end of his life, King had \nbegun to insist that society has to \u201cquestion the capitalistic economy.\u201d\n He called for what he described as \u201ca revolution of values.\u201d At a \ntape-recorded staff meeting for the Poor People\u2019s Campaign in January, \n1968, King appears to have asked for the recording to be stopped, so \nthat he could talk candidly about the fact that, in the words of a \nwitness, \u201che didn\u2019t believe capitalism as it was constructed could meet \nthe needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a \nkind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.\u201d King told the \ngroup that if anyone made that information public he would deny it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

H\u00e4gglund\n does his usual deconstructive reversal, and argues that King\u2019s \nreligiosity was really a committed secularism. At this point in the \nbook, this looks less like a hermeneutic move than like an expected \nreality. We read the famous words of King\u2019s last speech with new eyes, \nalert both to his secularism and to a burgeoning critique of capitalism \nthat had to stay clandestine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s all right to talk about \u201cstreets flowing with milk and honey,\u201d but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can\u2019t eat three square meals a day. It\u2019s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God\u2019s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.<\/p>Martin Luther King Jr.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After\n the theory and the academic reversals and the grand proposals, \nH\u00e4gglund\u2019s book ends, stirringly, with a grounded account of a man who \ndied trying to use his precious time to change the precious time of \noppressed people, aware that the full realization of his vision would \nlikely involve a revaluation of value that could not yet be spoken in \nAmerica. We still haven\u2019t seen that system, and it\u2019s hard to imagine it,\n but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised \nland. And that land is in this life, not in another one. \u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The James Wood Review in the New Yorker on This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom The problem with eternity is not that it doesn\u2019t exist (H\u00e4gglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth … Continue reading “Martin H\u00e4gglund”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,144],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-marx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13897"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13905,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13897\/revisions\/13905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}