This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

"This is a massive book by a Yale University philosopher, but it’s surprisingly readable. In contrast to the David Zahl book, it makes the case for what Hägglund calls ‘secular faith.’ He argues that it is the finitude of life – the fact that we’re only here briefly and all our relationships are therefore only here briefly – is precisely what gives them their value. One main way of interpreting the religious idea of eternal life is that what really matters in life is what’s eternal, what can’t ever perish. Hägglund wants to say, not only is that not the case, but if it was, life would become meaningless because you could never really meaningfully face the question of how to use your precious, finite time. Because it wouldn’t be precious. He pitches this mainly as a response to religion, but I don’t think religious people are the only ones to find themselves in this mindset of valuing the eternal over the transient. One other way in which it manifests itself is in all this stuff coming out of Silicon Valley about living forever – people who think they’re about to crack the secret of living for thousands of years, and apparently believing that this will be highly desirable. And yet I think most of us who aren’t religious, unless you’ve really been through a lot of up-close confrontation with death , which I have not, do still think of ourselves, in the back of our minds, in some unarticulated way, as being immortal. You would never admit to it, if asked – but even so I’m not sure that most of us really live our lives as if our time were brief and finite. So the case Hägglund makes is powerful even if you don’t explicitly believe in the afterlife. It’s a wake-up call: not only have you only got so much time, but you should fully face up to that fact, rather than avoiding it, because ultimately you wouldn’t want it to be otherwise. Then, the second half of this book goes off into politics. Hägglund seeks to show why it follows from all this that democratic socialism is the best way to organize society. Which is very interesting, but probably more outside the scope of what we’re talking about here. I think it would be a very good one. The simplest way of thinking about it is, I suppose, is just that it’s helpful to think about living a meaningful life rather than a happy one; and I do think there has been a cultural shift from a focus on happiness to a focus on meaning. It can be difficult to define what a ‘meaningful life’ is, except to say that you know it when you encounter it, and that it does seem more worth seeking than any specific emotion, even the very positive ones. There’s a writer called James Hollis , whose work I really like, who says that sometimes the right question to ask yourself – about a major life-choice for example – is not: ‘Will this choice make me happy or sad?’ but: ‘Will it enlarge me or diminish me?’ I’ve often found that when you phrase the question this way, you do know the answer. You can’t actually know whether choices relating to relationships or careers are ultimately going to ‘cash out’ in success or happiness. But I think we do have a good instinct as to whether a given option is the growth-oriented choice or not. “The right question to ask yourself is not: ‘Will this choice make me happy or sad?’ but: ‘Will it enlarge me or diminish me?’” To go back to Lori Gottlieb, that’s another thing she seems very good at: helping her clients and the reader navigate that question. You realize that at certain junctions in life, the thing that would actually make you happiest is the opposite of the thing that would lead to some kind of growth. Sorry, I’ve drifted away from the question. But I think it’s a theme that does come out in all the books I’ve mentioned. Is that because there’s been a change in the world, or is it just that I’m changing as I move through my forties? You can never tell. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I started off being someone who was getting comedy value out of mocking self-help, and I’m still happy to do that from time to time. But I think that for people of a certain demographic – that I suspect you and I and many of the readers of Five Books fit into, broadly speaking – sometimes the real challenge is not to remember to be sceptical, to remember to reject all the bullshit, but on the contrary, to allow the possibility that a book with a slightly embarrassing title, or that seems too earnest, or that you wouldn’t necessarily want people to see you reading on the Tube, might nonetheless contain some real value. To push the point further: maybe your embarrassment about it itself is an indication that a given book or way of seeing things has value – that a sensitive spot is being touched, because it needs to be."