Monday, January 18, 2021

Hägglund is asking what a good human life is

lareviewofbooks
Hard Times: Martin Hägglund's “This Life” and the Pomodoro ...
Nov 21, 2020
Amod Lele

Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, published in 2019, has already become a minor academic sensation – being reviewed in the New Yorker and Guardian as well as being the subject of a day-long conference at Harvard. I recently had a chance to read the book. There is much that I disagree with in it, but I see what all the fuss is about. I think the book is worthy of several posts, and will examine it in detail in the coming weeks.

I will begin with what I appreciate about the book. Above all, I appreciate that Hägglund is a philosopher in the true sense: he is a genuine lover of wisdom, and a seeker of it. Hägglund is asking questions that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle asked, about what a good human life is. I am not sure how much wisdom he has actually found, but just seeking it is rare enough in this age of technical specialization. It is a sad but unsurprising irony that this most deeply philosophical author – like the subjects of Examined Life – teaches in a department of literature and not philosophy. 

Amod Lele

Martin Hägglund develops a neo-Marxist politics that is deeply informed by qualitative individualism – quite appropriately, since qualitative individualist ideas inform Marx himself, especially in the theory of alienation. Hägglund wants to envision what a social world without alienation would look like.

Possibly the core distinction in Hägglund's thought is between a "realm of freedom" and a "realm of necessity" – and he identifies time as central to both of these.

Continue reading "A dream of democratic socialism"

Amod Lele | January 17, 2021

Amod Lele

For the most part, the study of non-Western philosophy has tended to focus on the continent of Asia. There are many good reasons for this. More than half of humanity lives in Asia. And Asia has long, rich traditions of philosophical reflection that have survived and left their works to us – unlike the thought of Mesoamerican traditions, where so much was pillaged and destroyed by the barbarian Spanish invaders. 


20-May-2019 — Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus's “longing, yes, to live,  ...

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom is a book by philosopher Martin Hägglund, which pursues a critique of the religious ideal of eternity and reconceives faith in secular terms as the fundamental form of practical commitment. Through new interpretations of G.W.F. Wikipedia
Originally published: 5 March 2019

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