This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund


Swedish Mist

I find it both odd and annoying that Martin Hägglund should choose to present his otherwise sensible philosophy in terms of faith. He apparently intends to establish philosophical thought as a sound basis for ethics without reference to religion. On the face of it, he would like to replace religious faith with faith of some other sort. My question is ‘Why?’

Although not all religions rely on faith, Christian insistence that faith is equivalent to religion has penetrated global consciousness. But even among Christians, there is no agreement on what constitutes faith except the communal profession of some verbal formula. Since Hagglund does not propose any alternative credal statement to the Christian religion, or any other, it is clear that he is not using the term ‘faith’ in any recognisably religious sense.

Instead Hägglund constructs a straw man. His essential claim is that “the common denominator for what I call religious forms of faith is a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.” This may be. Those religions which emphasise the existence of some other world than the universe we inhabit, in which perfect justice is achieved, human defects are corrected and happiness reigns do implicitly devalue not just human beings but also all that exists.

But not all thought which accepts the possibility of a reality beyond expression, perhaps even beyond perception, insists upon such a position. Yet such thought is religious in the specific sense that our consciousness itself implies an impenetrable mystery about our existence and its place in the cosmos.

Many, for example, myself included, consider literature as a religion. Our liturgy consists principally in our acts of reading and writing. These acts are exploratory but they are never decisive. Language, that which exists within us, and around us, and yet is not part of us, is our God. This is a God which we use mercilessly but which also uses us with the same absence of care.

We may reverence our God, but we do not idolise it. We respect the immense power of language and we continuously try to outwit it. We are bound to fail, not because we are finite but because the God of language, our own creation, is infinite in its potential. We will never exhaust its possibilities, nor be able to control either its use or the way in which it connects to the world of other things.

What we do not have is faith in language. We mistrust it because it lies about the world, which is not constructed according to its principles. We try relentlessly to pin it down by definition and explanation to no avail as we find that words can only be defined by other words. Through language we create law and society and prosperity. We also create hydrogen bombs, and gas chambers, and racist mobs. We may pretend that we are free in our use of language. But the reality is that we are trapped by it and within it. It is the source of our unfreedom, something Hagglund would like, mistakenly, to attribute to religion.

Importantly, there is no creed of the God Language. Language is undoubtedly there, it exists, but equally it is beyond our comprehension in its scope, its future, or even when it first appeared among us. It is eternal, but there is nothing about language which can be distilled into fundamentals of belief. Hagglund would reject this, however: “all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of unfreedom,” he says.

Hägglund doesn’t like the eternal as a fundamental principle, a sort of credal premise of his secular faith: “The problem is not that an eternal activity would be ‘boring’ but that it would not be intelligible as my activity.” In this he is simply too prejudiced by faith to be argued with. Language will never become boring. I challenge Hägglund to even express the feeling of boredom without it! How free would he be without the eternity of language?

So while I agree with Hägglund’s thesis that religious faith is bad for humanity and bad for existence, it is faith not religion which is the issue. There is no need for a secular faith because faith is the problem to be solved not allowed to expand. Faith kills regardless of its content. It kills intellectually by attempting to fix what the world is in language. It’s kills biologically by insisting upon ‘natural’ relations of power which are expressed in terms of language. And it kills spiritually by implying that there is some endpoint at which the exploration of language will reach its goal.

In short, it appears that Hägglund is preaching to a philosophical or religious choir that feels itself deficient without some sort of faith. There is no valid reason to do this. In fact he is implicitly justifying the acts of religious faith as equal competitors to his secular faith. A mis-directed and self-defeating argument therefore. The world needs yet another faith as much as it needs another SUV.

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