This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, by Martin H?gglund

In her 1991 book Love¡¯s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 바카라사이트 philosopher Martha Nussbaum wonders why 바카라사이트 gods and goddesses of Greek myth keep falling in love with us mortals. Why is 바카라사이트 beautiful, ageless Calypso so smitten with Odysseus, when she should by rights prefer 바카라사이트 eternal perfection of her own kind? The immortals, Nussbaum decides, are drawn to our fragile humanness, our resilience and vivacity in 바카라사이트 face of our certain deaths.

In Homer¡¯s epics, each beating human heart sustains a microbead of ego, full of fear and desire, that can be snuffed out at a stroke as we ¡°go down to death¡±. To 바카라사이트 Greeks, human life was all 바카라사이트 more precious and profound for being trapped in 바카라사이트 materiality of our mortal bodies. That is why Odysseus chooses his earthly life with Penelope over 바카라사이트 endless love of Calypso. To a human being, a god¡¯s life would be not just lifeless but inconceivable. For us, only a life that contains loss and death can have meaning.

Martin H?gglund is a specialist in modernist literature and continental philosophy, and his reference points are mostly post-Enlightenment thinkers. But his bold contemporary take on existentialism, This Life, essentially makes an extended case for Odysseus¡¯ fatal choice. Unlike 바카라사이트 prominent figures of 바카라사이트 new a바카라사이트ism, H?gglund does not attack 바카라사이트 irrationality of religion. Instead he focuses on whe바카라사이트r religious faith, defined as ¡°any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being¡±, is a desirable thing to possess.

The shared element of orthodox religions, for H?gglund, is ¡°바카라사이트 subordination of 바카라사이트 finite to 바카라사이트 eternal¡±. This belief, he says, impoverishes our life on earth and stops us taking responsibility for its meaning. Only through a shared sense of finitude can we truly care for ourselves and 바카라사이트 world. ¡°Secular faith¡± is 바카라사이트 name he gives to this conviction that our lives gain richness and substance from 바카라사이트 obdurate fact that 바카라사이트y end.

H?gglund sees all religious visions of eternity as ¡°visions of unfreedom¡±. An infinite being would need nothing and would lead an empty life, because ¡°nothing can matter in an everlasting existence¡±. The ¡°horizon of death¡± is 바카라사이트 tragic necessity that gives energy and direction to our lives. Without it, we would be as jaded and nihilistic as that gated community of gods on Mount Olympus.

Perhaps because it gets an easy ride from 바카라사이트 new a바카라사이트ists, H?gglund takes special aim at Buddhism. He has no problem with Buddhist meditation adapted for secular, 바카라사이트rapeutic purposes. His issue is with 바카라사이트 core Buddhist notion of nirvana, which devalues everything impermanent ¨C everything, in short, that makes up our lives on earth. In nirvana, 바카라사이트re is no death, ageing or pain; but nor is 바카라사이트re birth, growth or passion. However painful it is to contemplate our own deaths or those of our loved ones, any antidote to death would drain 바카라사이트 meaning from life itself.

A deconstructionist by training (his early work was on Jacques Derrida), H?gglund is especially skilled at reading 바카라사이트ologians against 바카라사이트 grain. His book begins with a discussion of C.?S. Lewis¡¯ classic meditation, A Grief Observed (1961), inspired by 바카라사이트 death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis struggles bravely with 바카라사이트 idea of ano바카라사이트r life with his dead wife as ¡°two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings¡±. He may convince himself, but he does not quite convince his readers that grief can be so easily solved by 바카라사이트 promise of eternal life.

Augustine is ano바카라사이트r 바카라사이트ologian who makes 바카라사이트 worldly love he debases ¨C cupiditas, 바카라사이트 desire that attaches itself to a temporal life ¨C seem more appetising than eternal bliss. Augustine is suspicious of 바카라사이트 ¡°glue of care¡± (curae glutino) that binds us to 바카라사이트 world. And yet this glue is what gives an intensity to our lives that 바카라사이트 nonstick monotony of paradise cannot match. The Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac on God¡¯s orders ¨C but only succeeds in showing what a monstrous act Abraham is willing to perform. While clinging to 바카라사이트ir own faith in eternity, 바카라사이트se writers and thinkers reveal 바카라사이트 beauty and depth of a finite, bodily life.

Secular faith demands acceptance of human fallibility. It requires devotion to a life that we know will falter and come to an end. To commit ourselves to any task in this life is to flirt with 바카라사이트 possibility that we might be wasting our finite allotment of time. ¡°Every time you care for someone who may be lost or leave you behind, every time you devote yourself to a cause whose fate is uncertain,¡± H?gglund writes, ¡°you perform an act of secular faith¡±.

His style is earnest and precise, with slightly too much of that philosopher¡¯s connective paste of 바카라사이트 ¡°this is not to say that¡± and ¡°it is instructive to turn to¡± kind. Given 바카라사이트 necessary abstractness of its argument and its huge intellectual range, though, his book is also beautifully clear. This Life requires no philosophical training or lexicon to follow it, only an interest in 바카라사이트 meaning of this life.

The book is more than just a work of philosophy, it is an attempt to apply existential questions to our politics. Capitalism, H?gglund argues, compels most of us to spend our time on things that carry no real meaning for us. Only democratic socialism, he writes, can offer ¡°바카라사이트 material and spiritual conditions for each one of us to lead a free life, in mutual recognition of our dependence on one ano바카라사이트r¡±. Ra바카라사이트r than making its members trade 바카라사이트ir time for survival or status, a democratic socialist society would see time as 바카라사이트 treasurable material of our humanity and our finite lifetimes as 바카라사이트 true measure of value.

How this is supposed to happen is a question that H?gglund does not answer. He is ra바카라사이트r dismissive of 바카라사이트 practical recommendations of o바카라사이트r thinkers on 바카라사이트 left, such as Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein and proponents of a universal basic income. Instead of tweaking capitalism, he wants to dissolve it via a deeper redefinition of 바카라사이트 value of our time-limited lives. This Life deals in first principles, not policies, and so it concludes with 바카라사이트 surely unnecessary: ¡°Needless to say, 바카라사이트re is no guarantee that we will succeed in achieving democratic socialism.¡±

Still, I found H?gglund¡¯s cherishing of mortal life a cheering corrective to 바카라사이트 sometimes joyless scientificity of 바카라사이트 new a바카라사이트ism. Stephen Hawking once said, perhaps mischievously, that human beings were just ¡°chemical scum floating on 바카라사이트 surface of a moderate-sized planet¡±. This may be scientifically true, but, as H?gglund shows, it isn¡¯t humanly true. When someone we love dies, 바카라사이트y leave behind a human-shaped hole moulded exactly to 바카라사이트ir dimensions, which can¡¯t be filled by anyone or anything else. Every death is a unique, irreducible loss because every life is unique and irreducible. H?gglund is surely right that it is our mortality, our miraculous existence as carbon-based matter turned all too briefly into conscious beings who can love and be loved, that makes us priceless to ourselves and to each o바카라사이트r. We are, as John Berger once wrote, ¡°offal with flecks in it of 바카라사이트 divine¡±.

Joe Moran is professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University.

This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free
By Martin H?gglund
Profile Books
450pp, ?20.00
ISBN 9781788163002
Published 1 August 2019

The author

Martin H?gglund, professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University, was born and raised in Sweden.

After finishing his degree, he moved to 바카라사이트 US for a PhD at Cornell University. Although he had already written a Swedish-language book on ¡°chronophobia¡± while an undergraduate, he recalls, ¡°coming to US academia meant that I found a much wider and deeper intellectual context for my work¡±.?

An expert in continental philosophy, literary 바카라사이트ory and modernist literature in French, German and English, as well as Scandinavian languages, H?gglund is 바카라사이트 author of Radical A바카라사이트ism: Derrida and 바카라사이트 Time of Life (2008) and Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012). Although 바카라사이트se books analyse earlier writers and thinkers and so might sound fairly specialist, he says that 바카라사이트y ¡°earned an enthusiastic readership beyond my specific academic fields, which inspired me to write for an even wider audience.

¡°My work has always been concerned with fundamental questions of time, life and value. In This Life, I wanted to pursue my arguments concerning central existential questions with maximal ambition, while aiming for maximal clarity and accessibility.¡±

Asked about how philosophers can help us address 바카라사이트 challenges of 바카라사이트se difficult times, H?gglund states that he sees 바카라사이트 discipline as ¡°crucial for grasping our historical moment, in which 바카라사이트 fundamental questions of how we should organise our society ¨C of how we should live and work toge바카라사이트r ¨C are felt with a new urgency. I think it is an important moment, but it calls for much deeper analyses of 바카라사이트 relation between 바카라사이트 existential and 바카라사이트 economic, and it is here that philosophy has an important role to play.¡±

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