There are philosophy books that are not easily understood, like those of Hegel, and philosophy books that are perfectly digestible and that also allow you to understand Hegel, like This life (Captain Swing, 2022) by Martin Hägglund. This essay, according to the subtitle, tries to explain to us why religion and capitalism do not make us free. Said like this, it may seem like just another Marxist book. No way. Hägglund is also not a new atheist or anything like that. He proposes a philosophy of finitude, thinking of mortality rather than eternity and enjoying life not as a gift from Heaven, but as an activity where we establish social bonds that give meaning to our existence. This secular faith does not require any prayer or liturgy.
His book develops the idea of a secular faith versus religious faith. Why do you use the term faith, when we have other expressions such as belief, trust, reasoning, logos or critical thinking?
I wanted to deconstruct the term because it is best understood in a secular sense. Faith not as something supernatural, but as an effort to keep hope in something or make commitments to something. Understanding faith as something temporary, finite, is a much more dynamic and practical way of analyzing reality.
In addition to the word faith, I use many other terms throughout the book, but there is an immanent criticism of religion, from its own uses, and not so much from outside. The same goes for spirituality.
There was a debate between Pope Ratzinger and the philosopher Habermas about spirituality. For them, spirituality is the true social glue of different cultures and nations. Do you not see the need for that spiritual substratum?
I’m glad you bring up that debate because I spend many pages on the idea of modern life as a kind of deficit (the disenchantment of the world, in Max Weber’s terms): we would have lost part of our solidarity, of the idea of community . Modernity has often been explained through this loss of religiosity. I argue that modern religions are unsatisfactory not because of that spiritual loss, but because we have not yet achieved social freedom. We need that social glue, but we have to understand life together and mutual recognition as our highest goal. Religion poses a vertical relationship for us, since everything emanates from a superior instance, while I try to locate the meaning between us, that is, through our relationships.
Bearing in mind that much of philosophy is theology, I don’t know if there are many philosophers who fulfill his vision of life…
The great heroes of my conception of finitude would be Hegel and Marx, although both have been misunderstood on numerous occasions. I am interested in Hegel because he saw religion not as a source of external authority, but as a historical manifestation consubstantial to the human being. On the other hand, a thinker like Derrida wrote about living conditions and not only about language, so we can also find some interesting ideas in the French philosopher. In any case, my arguments do not depend on the reading of Hegel nor am I too interested in mentioning specific thinkers because what is involved is elucidating the fundamental principles about life and death, that is, about human fragility.
It does not belong to the new atheism because they recover the old conflict between reason and faith, right?
The new atheism approaches the religious phenomenon from the empirical: the gods are not real, they are mere fantasies. The essential idea of my book is not that eternity is false, but that, even if it were true, it would not be desirable. The new atheists try to prove the non-existence of God. That is not important in my work.
His political proposal is democratic socialism. That idea reminds us of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Yes, but I have to say that social democracy and democratic socialism are not the same thing. Social democracy refers to almost any kind of leftist politics. The ideas of redistribution of wealth are social democratic. The production of value is not questioned; it is distributed more equally and that is enough. Democratic socialism criticizes the way we are producing and the contradictions in the system that prevent us from achieving freedom and equality.
We are at a time where there are fundamental questions on the table, such as the number of hours of the working day. Although proposals such as the four-day workday are important, the notion of free time to not work remains an alienating relationship with work. Free time has to be valuable and meaningful in itself and is an opportunity to exercise our freedom. In short, the problem is not the work itself or creating more empty hours. Time must be created for activities that can reaffirm what is valuable to us.
He has been given the prestigious René Wellek Award for his work.
I was pleasantly surprised because it is a comparative literature prize. The humanities are understood very broadly and philosophy and other disciplines have a place, as long as they help to rethink fundamental questions about the human being.
I imagine This life is not his last word on the idea of mortality.
Now I am spending my time thinking about the mortality of the soul. I am interested in developing a materialist notion of the soul that goes from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx. Once again, it is about approaching the encourages as if it were an activity or process, similar to the relationship between the eye and the activity of seeing; you cannot separate the soul from the body any more than you can separate the vision from the eye. The idea is the same: the risk of fragility and loss, and of course the presence of death, is an experience that can scare us, but it also constitutes the meaning of existence and we can face it together.
Finally, it is always said that an American president can be black or a woman, but not an atheist. Is it really so?
MH: Yes, I think that’s true. The United States still seems to need religion as a final moral authority (the idea that Ratzinger defends), which shows how much work remains to be done in order to articulate a secular world and assume the responsibilities of our lives.