In defence of the desire for everlasting life: why secular faith cannot ground human meaning and solidarity - Part 1
Recently the Heythrop Journal has published a philosophical article of mine called In defence of the desire for everlasting life: why secular faith cannot ground human meaning and solidarity, I will post the article in 3 sections, starting with the abstract and introduction:
In this article, I argue that human meaning and value are grounded in an infinite horizon as opposed to the finite horizon of the building of a life. This infinite grounding of human meaning and value makes sense of and justifies the desire for everlasting life. I also argue that this infinite horizon can motivate an ethic of social justice better than the necessity of building a life within a finite timeframe could. In this article I take Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom as representative of the position that meaning and value can only be made sense of in light of the horizon of death; and I draw on phenomenologist Michel Henry’s concept of Life and Jean- Luc Marion’s concept of the saturated phenomenon to argue against that position. I then draw on Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and David Graeber to argue that social justice cannot be grounded in secular faith of temporal finitude but is rather best made sense of in view of an everlasting hope and a move to the infinite.
In this article, I would like to address the claim by Martin Hägglund in his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom that, as individuals, the coherency of our lives and what we value in life depends on the horizon of death; and that this fact can and should ground a moral imperative for a ‘democratic socialist’ society.
I will first present a summary of Hägglund’s framework for making sense of human life,[1] and how this framework grounds a moral imperative for a democratic socialist society. I will then present an alternative ‘theological framework’ that I claim makes better sense of the coherency of human life as oriented towards eternity, rather than depending on the horizon of death. Following this I will argue that my alternative theological framework better grounds a moral imperative for an ethic of solidarity.
Hägglund claims that understanding yourself as being a person is to understand yourself as having a life. This requires a spatial horizon in which you have a beginning and end; a horizon of a future inevitable death at some unknown time that delimits your life temporally and thus makes it a life that you can live, and makes you a person who can live that life.[2] Being a person means making choices: morally and ‘spiritually’ significant choices, choices about what you value, what you find valuable, what is worthwhile to do. This is what Hägglund calls ‘spiritual freedom’.[3] Valuation, Hägglund claims, depends on prioritisation, and prioritisation depends on ‘sooner rather than later’ can have meaning.[4] For Hägglund, the reason anything we do matters is the risk of death. We sacrifice our finite time for what we believe is valuable; this includes the phenomenon of love: devoting yourself to the care of the other, whose time is also finite but whose life you want to flourish.[5] Hägglund claims that an endless life without the risk of death would eliminate any sense of urgency, or the idea that anything was a stake in one’s love for the other, and thus there would be no reason, no motivation to make an effort for the shared love. There would be no preciousness to the moments of intimacy, and thus the love would lack all vitality. All choices in one’s life—to love, to act in any way, to refrain from acting, to engage in a project—have their meaning in the risk of their failure and the fact that one’s choices and actions irreversibly define the finite horizon of one’s life.[6]
According to Hägglund, the meaning of romantic love is given in my defining my finite life, and what matters for me, by my love for my beloved. This action risks my life, and the value of this action is precisely the closing down of other possible futures, which are finite because I only have this life. I am risking this life to make a commitment to my beloved for an uncertain future. It is because they will one day die that lovers are compelled to struggle to remain faithful to that commitment and keep that love flourishing.[7]
In short, without death, nothing matters, nothing is urgent, there can be no normative obligation since nothing is at risk, there can be no ‘spiritual freedom’, no valuation of what is ‘worth doing’ since there is endless time and nothing is lost in any choice, nor is anything really gained. There is no reason to maintain myself, to build myself, to become a person, to dedicate myself to anything. Therefore, everlasting life is not even desirable, since it would erase everything that makes life meaningful and that makes life a life that can be your life, and thus erases what it means to be a person.
Given this view of life and death, Hägglund claims that the horizon of death both can and should ground a moral imperative for a democratic socialist society. Hägglund defines ‘democratic socialism’ from Marx’s definition of communism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.[8] He argues that such a principle allows us to maximise our spiritual freedom: our ability to question, challenge, and transform our ends, and decide what ends we deem valuable and ought to pursue.[9] This is because, given democratic socialism, the socially necessary labour time needed to sustain our lives is both shared and minimised. We recognise the value of sustaining our lives, and thus the value of providing what is necessary for the sustenance of the members of our society. Hägglund claims that there is an intrinsic motivation to participate in that sustaining labour since it is necessary for the common good and thus for our own ‘spiritual freedom’. This is opposed to capitalism, which does not subject labour to the maximisation of spiritual freedom by sharing and reducing socially necessary labour time, but rather maximises profit for its own sake.[10] Our freedom depends on the freedom of others. Any projects we undertake, any choices we make, will largely get their meaning from the recognition of others and the effect our projects and choices have on their lives. Therefore, since democratic socialism enhances the spiritual freedom of all in a society, that spiritual freedom of others enhances our own spiritual freedom.[11]
Hägglund claims, however, that religious faith subjects our lives to a transcendent principle (analogous to how capitalism subjects our life to profit), and thus hinders ‘spiritual freedom’, which is the freedom to determine our own lives and our own meaning.[12] Hägglund claims that the pursuit of social justice through democratic socialism must be motivated by an acknowledgement of the horizon of death, of our temporal finitude, since that acknowledgement will press on us the urgency of securing spiritual freedom now, for the only life that is. Because death is the end, our spiritual freedom can only be secured now, and since social justice is the best way to secure spiritual freedom, and democratic socialism the best way to secure social justice, we must fight to secure such a just social order in the here and now.[13]
The force of these arguments does not lie in challenging the plausibility of everlasting life, but rather in the claim that the Christian hope for everlasting life does not coincide with our experience of human life and fails to motivate a socially just morality. If Hägglund’s analysis of human life coincides with an individual’s experience of human life, that would provide a reason for this individual to believe that any hope for everlasting life would be misplaced, incompatible with actual human life and morality, and even a threat to it; and thus, such a hope ought to be abandoned.
In addressing these arguments, I will not so much be arguing against Hägglund’s claims directly, but rather claiming that the force of these arguments can be significantly undermined by showing how Hägglund’s claims depend on a framework that is flawed in fundamental ways, and by presenting an alternative theological framework that is not flawed in the same way. This theological framework will be largely sourced from works by Michel Henry and Jean-L uc Marion;[14] but I will also make use of other thinkers, both from the Christian tradition and from outside of it. What these thinkers have in common, and what I will be making use of, is that they ground fundamental aspects of human life in a prior, infinite God and/or an infinite horizon. I will also argue that Hägglund’s framework cannot, in fact, ground an ethic of social justice, whereas the theological framework can.
Because these fundamental aspects of human life involve what are typically thought of as subjective phenomena, which can only be verified through introspection and reporting, whether this theological framework succeeds in grounding human life will depend very much on what is sometimes called ‘intersubjective corroboration’: does the description of human value, meaning, and community coincide with how one experiences it, and how it is experienced by others?[15]
A note on the infinite
In this essay I will be making use of the concept of the infinite. The sense in which I use this term is the theological concept as developed by thinkers such as Gregory of Nyssa, whose concept of the infinite was that which is unbounded and without limit;[16] John Duns Scotus, who thought of the infinite as a mode of being that does not terminate in a distinct and proper concept;[17] and G.W.F. Hegel, whose idea of infinity included the negative infinity (which is the negation of the finite, the continual movement of the finite) and the true infinity (which sublates all finitude and contains it).[18] The main concept here is that of unboundedness. In the theological tradition this is often applied to the infinity of God, nevertheless the concept can be applied elsewhere. For example, Gregory of Nyssa applies it to the unbounded movement of the finite creature towards God,[19] and Maurice Blondel conceives of human action as beginning with an infinite freedom—an infinite ‘willing will’—and as having an infinite final cause, which is the fulfilling of that infinite will.[20] Of course, the concept of infinity as applied to aspects of creaturely existence will differ depending on what aspect is under discussion (for example the infinite potency of freedom compared to the boundless movement towards God), and especially when compared to divine infinity.[21] However, for the sake of this article, the use of the concept of the infinite will remain broad, and refer to that which is unbounded and without limit.
[1] 1By ‘human life’ I mean the value one places on one’s own being alive, and how one experiences that value in living. This can include purposes one has, enjoyment of life, community, and so on and so forth.
[2] Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 204.
[3] 3Hägglund, This Life, 12–13
[4] Hägglund, This Life, 198–204.
[5] Hägglund, This Life, 168.
[6] Hägglund, This Life, 43–44.
[7] Hägglund, This Life, 131–132.
[8] Hägglund, This Life, 307.
[9] Hägglund, This Life, 175–176.
[10] Hägglund, This Life, 307–309.
[11] Hägglund, This Life, 321–322.
[12] Hägglund, This Life, 331. 13Hägglund, This Life, 369.
[13] Hägglund, This Life, 369.
[14] Both Michel Henry and Jean- Luc Marion (who will be appealed to later) are part of what Dominique Janicaud has called the ‘theological turn of French phenomenology’. This turn to theology undertaken by many within phenomenology has not been without critique. Janicaud believed that phenomenology cannot engage in theological or metaphysical speculation without betraying the methodological rigour of phenomenology. Although this is an important debate with regards to phenomenology as a methodology, I will, for the sake of this article, not enter into that debate, since my use of the insights of Henry and Marion is primarily to present a plausible alternative framework for understanding human life, not so much to claim that these insights can be said to be legitimately derived from phenomenology as a philosophical method. For an overview of the debate around the theological turn in phenomenology, see Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
[15] Shaun Gallagher & Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28.
[16] Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, ed. Richard J. Payne (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 115–116; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, trans. Catherine P. Roth (Yonkers, St. Vladimir’s Press, 1993), 81.
[17] Mary Beth Ingham, and Mechthild Deyer, The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 37.
[18] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline: Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. Klaus Brinkmann & Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), §§94- 95.
[19] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, 87–88; Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 113–117.
[20] Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, translated by Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 124–125, 312–313.
[21] For an extensive overview of the concept of divine infinity, see Benedikt Paul Göcke and Christian Tapp (ed.), The Infinity of God: New Perspectives in Theology and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019).