“The brevity of my life is made salient by the forms of time to which I am recalled.”
“What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal.”
“The sense of finitude—the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about—is at heart of what I call secular faith.”
“I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time.”
“I seek to show that any life worth living must be finite and requires secular faith.”
The “idea of secular life as empty or meaningless is itself a religious notion.”
The central thesis of Martin Hägglund’s This Life is summarised in his introduction. His book then labours to go beyond critical philosophy, developing his arguments through readings of the Bible, Buddhist philosophy, Greek and Roman Stoics, and writers like Augustine, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Augustine, C. S. Lewis and Charles Taylor. In the most rewarding chapter, he reads a secular confession in Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Finally, he turns to Marx’s argument that renders spiritual freedom the essential attribute of human labour.
The book seems unnecessarily verbose, not to disguise weak reasoning, but an excessive use of circumlocution. I was also surprised that Feuerbach is missing from Hägglund’s pantheon of writers, as from what little I understand of this undervalued thinker, his is a highly elegant argument that dissolves religious essence into human existence, without finding, it necessary (a strength of Hägglund’s) for an aggressive tearing-down.
That said, Hägglund’s thesis is substantive and thought provoking. It succeeds in moving Knausgaard forward in my reading plans, and reminds me to reread Feuerbach, a thinker I read with great enjoyment in my twenties.
Here is a proper review of Hägglund’s book.
Time's Flow Stemmed 