What a difference a week makes!
This crazy semester & This Life (U@d): LISTEN...
This Life (TL) Intro, 1-2: LISTEN... (Scroll down for *Th 26)
1. Any life worth living, writes Hagglund, requires what? Why does he call it that? And how does that contrast with his conception of what it is to be religious? 6
2. According to many surveys, how many Americans believe religion is required for morality? 14
3. What does Hagglund mean by religious faith, and what about it does he mean to call into question? 28
4. What central distinction does C.S. Lewis illuminate for Hagglund? 42
5. The most fundamental form of secular faith is what, the absence of which would make me indifferent to past and future? 49-50
6. What is Charles Taylor's specious distinction? 57
7. What kind of faith did Augustine say is necessarily attached to living in this world? 72
8. What kinds of things does Knausgaard try to capture in My Struggle, and why? 95
DQ
- Do you agree with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights narrator ("in heaven I should be extremely miserable")? Why or why not? (Include your thoughts about "The Good Place," if you wish.)
- What are your thoughts on being dependent on natural and social history, and on the radical contingency of your existence (if you in fact don't believe that your existence was mandated by divinity)?
- Do you agree that having religious faith means believing that "what is truly valuable" can survive the destruction of earth and everything finite? 8
- Can the climate crisis be taken seriously only from the standpoint of secular faith?
- Can a religious person person secular faith?
- Does the Golden Rule require no religious faith? 10
- Would we be unfree if we were told what to do with our time? 12
- If you've had enough of life, are you failing to lead a meaningful one? 18
- Do you relate the meaning of your life to future generations? Should you? 19
- Would nothing matter to you if you achieved eternal life? 44
- Do you agree with Nietzsche's critique of the idea of eternity? 48
- Do you agree that grief for a lost loved one necessarily commits you to secular faith?
If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything
Martin Hägglund argues that rigorous secularism leads to socialism.
By James Wood
May 13, 2019
By James Wood
May 13, 2019
At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinsonconfessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.”
She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion.
No doubt much will depend on our definitions of “atheist” and “good.” But, if Pliny is too antique for Robinson, listen to Montaigne: the Montaigne who professed a nominal Christianity but proceeded as if his formal belief were essentially irrelevant to his daily existence, and perhaps even at odds with it; the Montaigne whose wanton pagan invocation of “fortune” in his essays provoked Vatican censors. Or attend to the work and life of Chekhov, the good nonbelieving doctor who asserted that his “holy of holies” was the human body, the writer whose adulterous characters in “The Lady with the Little Dog” stop to look at the sea near Yalta and are reminded that their small drama is nothing alongside the water’s timeless indifference:
And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.
Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”
Or Louise Glück’s extraordinary poem “Field Flowers,” narrated from the perspective of a flower, which chides its human visitors for thinking about eternal life instead of looking more closely at the flowers. In that poem, humans become spectral, and the natural world has the real, everlasting solidity:
. . . Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change. Better than earth? How
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?
Finally, Robinson could look at her own first novel, “Housekeeping,” which is essentially about people in rural Idaho constructing a usable creed out of the near at hand: scraps of the Bible, bits and pieces of culture and folklore, fantasies of resurrection, and a great deal of the natural world, thrillingly described. In that book, Robinson’s lovely phrase “the resurrection of the ordinary” means springtime, which unfailingly occurs every year, not the resurrection of human beings, which seems much more doubtful.
These are visions of the secular. A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence andoffer it to thirsty young atheists.
His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever.
His notion of religion seems to be northern-European Christian first and foremost; he is quiet about Judaism, whose practices are sensibly grounded in the here and now, and which lacks the intense emphasis on the afterlife characteristic of Islam and Christianity. (And he has very little to say about, for example, Hinduism.) Yet he wields a definition of religious faith wide enough for his purposes: “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.” That should cover most contenders. Elsewhere, Hägglund defines “the religious aspiration to eternity” as part of any ideal that promises us that we will be “absolved from the pain of loss.” Defining the religious ideal in this way enables him to characterize, however unfairly, Stoicism, Buddhism’s Nirvana (a detachment from everything that is finite), and even Spinoza’s “pure contemplation as the highest good” as essentially religious.
The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund 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. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:
When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . 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.
Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”
A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t 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’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” 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. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire.
Hägglund is a deconstructionist; his second book, “Radical Atheism” (2008), was about the work of Jacques Derrida. Put simply, deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that often betrays them: they may say one thing, but they act as if they believe another thing entirely. Their own figures of speech are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. “This Life” is a work of profound deconstruction. If the religious believer often behaves like an unconscious secularist, then one can assume that some of the great canonical religious texts will do something similar, revealing their actual procedures to a skeptic who is willing to read them against the grain.
Hägglund examines writing by C. S. Lewis, Augustine, and Kierkegaard with a generous captiousness, fair but firmly forensic. He begins with Lewis’s memoir of mourning, “A Grief Observed,” which the Christian writer and apologist wrote after the death of his wife of four years, Joy Davidman. It was a late and unexpected love affair; the book is notable for Lewis’s frank admission of his inconsolable grief, in the course of which he seems to grant that God’s eternal consolation could not be adequate to the loss of this particular worldly loved one. Lewis concedes, remarkably, that a religious mother who has lost her son might receive comfort at the level of “the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her,” but not in her earthly and all-consuming role as a mother. “The specifically maternal happiness must be written off,” Lewis allows. “Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”
She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion.
No doubt much will depend on our definitions of “atheist” and “good.” But, if Pliny is too antique for Robinson, listen to Montaigne: the Montaigne who professed a nominal Christianity but proceeded as if his formal belief were essentially irrelevant to his daily existence, and perhaps even at odds with it; the Montaigne whose wanton pagan invocation of “fortune” in his essays provoked Vatican censors. Or attend to the work and life of Chekhov, the good nonbelieving doctor who asserted that his “holy of holies” was the human body, the writer whose adulterous characters in “The Lady with the Little Dog” stop to look at the sea near Yalta and are reminded that their small drama is nothing alongside the water’s timeless indifference:
And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.
Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”
Or Louise Glück’s extraordinary poem “Field Flowers,” narrated from the perspective of a flower, which chides its human visitors for thinking about eternal life instead of looking more closely at the flowers. In that poem, humans become spectral, and the natural world has the real, everlasting solidity:
. . . Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change. Better than earth? How
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?
Finally, Robinson could look at her own first novel, “Housekeeping,” which is essentially about people in rural Idaho constructing a usable creed out of the near at hand: scraps of the Bible, bits and pieces of culture and folklore, fantasies of resurrection, and a great deal of the natural world, thrillingly described. In that book, Robinson’s lovely phrase “the resurrection of the ordinary” means springtime, which unfailingly occurs every year, not the resurrection of human beings, which seems much more doubtful.
These are visions of the secular. A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence andoffer it to thirsty young atheists.
His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever.
His notion of religion seems to be northern-European Christian first and foremost; he is quiet about Judaism, whose practices are sensibly grounded in the here and now, and which lacks the intense emphasis on the afterlife characteristic of Islam and Christianity. (And he has very little to say about, for example, Hinduism.) Yet he wields a definition of religious faith wide enough for his purposes: “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.” That should cover most contenders. Elsewhere, Hägglund defines “the religious aspiration to eternity” as part of any ideal that promises us that we will be “absolved from the pain of loss.” Defining the religious ideal in this way enables him to characterize, however unfairly, Stoicism, Buddhism’s Nirvana (a detachment from everything that is finite), and even Spinoza’s “pure contemplation as the highest good” as essentially religious.
The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund 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. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:
When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . 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.
Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”
A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t 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’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” 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. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire.
Hägglund is a deconstructionist; his second book, “Radical Atheism” (2008), was about the work of Jacques Derrida. Put simply, deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that often betrays them: they may say one thing, but they act as if they believe another thing entirely. Their own figures of speech are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. “This Life” is a work of profound deconstruction. If the religious believer often behaves like an unconscious secularist, then one can assume that some of the great canonical religious texts will do something similar, revealing their actual procedures to a skeptic who is willing to read them against the grain.
Hägglund examines writing by C. S. Lewis, Augustine, and Kierkegaard with a generous captiousness, fair but firmly forensic. He begins with Lewis’s memoir of mourning, “A Grief Observed,” which the Christian writer and apologist wrote after the death of his wife of four years, Joy Davidman. It was a late and unexpected love affair; the book is notable for Lewis’s frank admission of his inconsolable grief, in the course of which he seems to grant that God’s eternal consolation could not be adequate to the loss of this particular worldly loved one. Lewis concedes, remarkably, that a religious mother who has lost her son might receive comfort at the level of “the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her,” but not in her earthly and all-consuming role as a mother. “The specifically maternal happiness must be written off,” Lewis allows. “Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”
New Yorker
==
==
Considering the Afterlife
Reading James Wood’s review of “This Life,” by Martin Hägglund, I was mystified by his argument that the main consideration in defining personal morality is whether one views existence as finite or eternal (Books, May 20th). As a lifelong atheist, I’ve never considered the principal difference between my value system and that of religious people to be my belief that existence ends with death. The critical distinction, rather, is that, whereas the believer submits to a moral framework received from a supposedly divine source, the atheist constructs his or her own. Contrary to Wood’s argument, time is not all that we atheists have if there is no God. We have one another, and that fact should be the cornerstone on which we build our moral foundation.
Derek Prater
Overland Park, Kans.
Wood’s description of Nirvana as “a detachment from everything that is finite” is not the best way to define the term. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has explained that the root meaning of Nirvana is “extinction.” As such, the word can be understood as the state in which all erroneous perceptions, which cause suffering, are extinguished. Finding Nirvana may require detaching not from everything finite but, rather, from false viewpoints.
Ben Howard
Professor Emeritus of English
Alfred University
Alfred, N.Y.
Avoid confusing teachings of eternal significance with those which are of only temporary significance. (TTP) pic.twitter.com/DAaovGjEIp— Spinoza Quotes (@BenedictSpinoza) March 24, 2020
*Th 26
TL 3 - LISTEN... Opening Day! (sorta) with Spinoza and Kierkegaard
1. Why, according to Kierkegaard, can life only be "understood backwards"? 129
2. To test your religious faith you need what? 140
3. If you claim to be Christian but still care about the fate of your finite human life, Kierkegaard says what to you? 160
4. If you think god would never command you to kill your own child, your faith is what? 170
DQ
- Can we really understand nothing about the future?
- What do you think of the idea that our life is a test of our faithfulness? Would a humane god subject his fallible creatures to such a test?
- If you don't care about your own fate as a human being, should you care about that of others whom you love (spouses, siblings, children...)?
- If you seemed to perceive a voice in your mind instructing you to perform an act you considered wrong, what would you think? What would you do?
- "Religious faith thus requires a double movement, whereby you renounce trust in the world in favor of trust in God... you renounce all forms of hope that depend on a finite world." 141 What then becomes of trust in one another, and in what David Brooks calls the social fabric? What becomes of trust between children and parents?
- COMMENT: "Having religious faith means not being responsive to anything that calls your faith into question, even if it is the cry of your child as you are taking his life." 161
- COMMENT: (How much detachment is healthy, how much is too much?) "To achieve absolution you cannot love finite beings--including your own children--as ends in themselves, since all such love makes you vulnerable to loss. This is why Buddhists and Stoics, as well as religious mystics across many different traditions, preach detachment as the path to salvation." 161
If you like to listen...
My old grad school classmate George Connell is channeled by Charlton Heston in this audio recording, available at audible.com. (Several of my old classmates & teachers are in this series, in fact, including the installments on the Stoics & Epicureans, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Sartre, de Beauvoir...)
Soren Kierkegaard
(The Giants of Philosopy)
by
ONE IN A SERIES OF AUDIOBOOKS EXPLAINING THE INSIGHTS OF GREAT PHILOSOPHERS. PRESENTED BY KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS AND NARRATED BY CHARLTON HESTON. A 2-AUDIOTAPE CASSETTE AUDIOBOOK. APPROX. 3 HOURS TIME.
Vanderbilt's David Wood (who has an artist's retreat in nearby Woodbury) delivered a Lyceum lecture at MTSU five years ago. He had interesting thoughts on why we still read Kierkegaard (and Nietzsche):
2019-05-04 | The afterlives of philosophers. Nietzsche’s reputation fell almost immediately into disrepute; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, became an inspiration for “mindfulness.” Why? more » ...More Kierkegaard at aldaily...
Kierkegaard on Time, the Fullness of the Moment, and How to Bridge the Ephemeral with the Eternal
“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.” ...More Kierkegaard at brainpickings...
Kierkegaard's world, part 3: The story of Abraham and Isaac by Clare Carlisle
Abraham believes that the God who commands him to do what is most terrible and painful is also the God who loves him - Guardian
I'm not a fan of Kierkegaardian irrationalism ("I believe because it is absurd" etc.) but he had one redeeming quality:
Discussion Question: Can the climate crisis be taken seriously only from the standpoint of secular faith?
ReplyDeleteI believed we discussed this earlier, but it’s worth repeating. I have never understood how Christians cannot advocate for protecting God’s creation from harm by His children. And yet we have people like Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe who says that only God can change climate: “My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.” How in God’s name can any rational person believe that? Jamil, is the idea that God gave man dominion over all the earth, so we can do with it what we will? Or could it be said that God gave man dominion over the earth so we should care for it? This is a great example of superstition defeating reason to our detriment.
Are you familiar with E.O. Wilson's "The Creation," in which he -- an atheist -- addresses fundamentalists and beseeches them (and us all) to rise above our secular vs. religious differences and work together to heal "the creation"? It won't reach the Inhofes of the world, but I'd like to believe it's the sort of appeal that might actually strike a responsive chord with many religionists... but is it too late?
DeleteReading the comments regarding Kierkegaard about nominal Christian faith (TL 126), I was reminded of my first questioning of faith as a teenager. My whole life, when discussing my Christianity, I have said that I could not understand why, if God was as significant as I was told, why did people’s behavior not reflect the existence of this awesome being? Why was our entire existence not transformed? I suspect that this is observation is the most common beginning of doubt. If I’d known about Nietzsche 60 years ago, I could have understood what he meant in saying that God was dead, and that we had killed him. He wasn’t dead on the 5th row of First Presbyterian church where my grandparents sat, but he certainly was on the back row where my mother and her friends were sharing peppermint candy and gossip (bless their hearts). How about you; does the distinction between a dead faith and a living faith resonate with you?
ReplyDeleteInteresting how Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Christian and atheist, converge on this point: merely going through the motions of religious observance (while sharing candy and gossip in the pews, e.g.) is a sure sign that "Christendom" is complicit in the death of god.
DeleteSo, if godless folk find something in the concept of a living faith to value, they'll want to be sure the object of their faith is credible and worthy. If they don't embrace Nietzsche's Ubermensch as that object, perhaps Hagglund's secular faith in meaningful finitude is something they should consider.
Good lesson, professor.
DeleteQQ: What are the three aspects of secular faith? (129)
ReplyDeleteI want to highlight how Woods explicates Hagglund's understanding of why socialism rather than capitalism best serves us as finite beings, people with very limited time on our hands.
ReplyDelete"Savagely compressed, Hägglund’s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called “an economy of time.” 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. Hägglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, Hägglund 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 this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. “The real measure of value,” Hägglund says, “is 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).”
Dr. Oliver, you'll have to help me with this, but this sounds a lot like another philosopher who insisted on the importance of free time or leisure, especially for the sake of meaningful reflection. And I'm in agreement. If our time does not extend beyond our mortal existence, then that places a real premium on the extent to which we're able to cultivate our humanity, no small part of this being our thinking or--and this might be going beyond the original philosopher I'm thinking about--our relationships with others, our friends. Friendships, particularly the deeper virtue friendships of Aristotle's description, take time. Thinking takes time. Time, time, time--exactly what we don't have endless amounts off and for which we too often compete with capitalistically-driven employers!
Dr. Oliver's reply:
". . . I'm with you: time is our most precious commodity, "the days are gods" (or can be), as Emerson said. "And the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." That's Thoreau, not Marx. But Marx (at least pre-Soviet Marx) would not disagree.
Everything we care about or possibly CAN care about (Hagglund is saying) takes time. It's finite, just like us. Alas."
But, what DID Thoreau mean when he said "time is but the stream I go fishing in?"
DeleteDiscussion Question: Do you agree that having religious faith means believing that "what is truly valuable" can survive the destruction of earth and everything finite?
ReplyDeleteHmm. I wonder if religious faiths universally put a premium on the eternal. That does seem to be a trend. Interestingly, it's not just religious folks who have this kind of faith. Wasn't Plato all about the abstract Ideas that existed somewhere out there in the ether--and, importantly, in our minds? He seemed to think that contemplation of these things, particularly the Good, was to be cherished above the world of forms precisely because they were timeless, eternal, unchanging. Are we willing to admit that even values and notions are, like mortal selves, just as finite--in principle, at least, although ideas may long outlive us? I think many secularists are okay with giving up an eternal soul, but wouldn't dare surrender an eternal Good!