This Life
Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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Narrated by:
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Kirby Heyborne
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By:
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Martin Hägglund
About this listen
Winner of the René Wellek Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald
A profound, original, and accessible book that offers a new secular vision of how we can lead our lives. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism.
In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time together.
Hägglund develops new existential and political principles while transforming our understanding of spiritual life. His critique of religion takes us to the heart of what it means to mourn our loved ones, be committed, and care about a sustainable world. His critique of capitalism demonstrates that we fail to sustain our democratic values because our lives depend on wage labor. In clear and pathbreaking terms, Hägglund explains why capitalism is inimical to our freedom, and why we should instead pursue a novel form of democratic socialism.
In developing his vision of an emancipated secular life, Hägglund engages with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr. This Life gives us new access to our past - for the sake of a different future.
©2019 Martin Hägglund (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Gives fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question... Much in the book will resonate with a democratic left that has gained strength in the seven-plus years since Occupy - in Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, in the vision of the Green New Deal, in the Fight for $15 and in North Carolina’s Moral Mondays. This Life attempts to deepen the philosophical dimension of this left and to anchor its commitments in a larger inquiry: What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have?... This Life presents a vital alternative.” (Jedediah Britton-Purdy, The New Republic)
"An important new book.... Always lucid.... Beautifully liberating...I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge...I finished This Life in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose - I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hägglund’s argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value." (James Wood, The New Yorker)
“This is a rare piece of work, the product of great intellectual strength and moral fortitude. The writing shows extraordinary range and possesses an honesty and fervor which is entirely without cynicism. Beneath Hägglund’s affirmation of secular faith and a life-defining commitment is a compelling reworking of the early Heidegger’s existential analytic, especially his understanding of finitude and ecstatic temporality. With the great difference that this is a distinctly leftist project, where secular faith leads to spiritual freedom which is understood as a Hegelian-Marxist affirmation of democratic socialism. Hägglund is a genuine moralist for our times, possessed of an undaunted resoluteness and a fierce commitment to intellectual probity. Maybe he’s the philosophical analogue to Karl Ove Knausgaard.” (Simon Critchley, curator for The New York Times' The Stone and author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us)
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Beyond brilliant
- By R. Aiken on 10-29-03
By: Ayn Rand
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Philosophy
- Who Needs It
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Who needs philosophy? Ayn Rand's answer: Everyone. This collection of essays was the last work planned by Ayn Rand before her death in 1982. In it, she summarizes her view of philosophy and deals with a broad spectrum of topics. According to Ayn Rand, the choice we make is not whether to have a philosophy, but which one to have: a rational, conscious, and therefore practical one, or a contradictory, unidentified, and ultimately lethal one.
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Deep and provocative
- By Sierra Bravo on 05-21-09
By: Ayn Rand
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What Are We Doing Here?
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
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Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
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The Year of Our Lord 1943
- Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
- By: Alan Jacobs
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. These Christian intellectuals - Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others - sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.
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The Audible is a Train Wreck
- By John on 09-04-18
By: Alan Jacobs
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Knowing Christ Today
- Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge
- By: Dallas Willard
- Narrated by: David Cochran Heath
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when popular atheism books are talking about the irrationality of believing in God, Willard makes a rigorous intellectual case for why it makes sense to believe in God and in Jesus, the Son.
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Logical to a fault
- By cynthia on 05-13-10
By: Dallas Willard
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Last Call for Liberty
- How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat
- By: Os Guinness
- Narrated by: Os Guinness
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel.
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Thought Provoking Work On Liberty In America
- By Ezekiel on 05-28-19
By: Os Guinness
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Between Past and Future
- Eight Exercises in Political Thought
- By: Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Hannah Arendt's insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future, Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future.
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Just stunning
- By Peter Stephens on 02-26-18
By: Hannah Arendt
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The Irony of American History
- By: Reinhold Niebuhr
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr's masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue.
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Superlative Book
- By Amazon Customer on 01-29-10
By: Reinhold Niebuhr
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The Givenness of Things
- Essays
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope.
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Mostly thoughts on religious things
- By Adam Shields on 01-26-16
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The Monk and the Philosopher
- A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life
- By: Jean-Francois Revel
- Narrated by: David Shaw-Parker
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism - not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this project was born, and Richard met with his father, Jean-Francois Revel - a French philosopher who became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. At an inn, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history.
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The dialogues themselves proved tranquility is attainable.
- By Mingster on 05-16-19
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The Ascent of Humanity
- Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
- By: Charles Eisenstein
- Narrated by: Steve Wojtas
- Length: 27 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.
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I love this author!
- By Tamara Smith on 12-03-17
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The End of History and the Last Man
- By: Francis Fukuyama
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
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An important discussion expertly narrated
- By Kevin Teeple on 06-27-19
By: Francis Fukuyama
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Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo
- By: Sigmund Freud
- Narrated by: Martyn Swain
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is one of his key works, written three decades after his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams. In it he considers the conflict between the needs of the individual acting both egotistically and altruistically in the pursuit of happiness and the myriad demands of civilised society and the ensuing tensions this clash of needs and demands generates.
By: Sigmund Freud
What listeners say about This Life
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- Tom
- 11-17-20
A Comprehensive Critique of Society and Belief
I chose to read this book in the hope of reading an argument for a Secular Worldview on which to base a Life. What Hägglund has given us is a Critique that takes the reader to a World beyond both Religion and Capitalism.
Using the writings of Aristotle, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx and Martin Luther King, he builds a case for a Society based not on Capitalist Theology but on a Secular Faith requiring recognition and appreciation of our finitude and dependence on each other, essentially a Marxist Democratic Socialist Society.
His argument is deeply rooted in the works of these and other writers and ultimately quite attractive. I like his rejection of Eternal Life as the ultimate goal of our days on Earth and of our dependence on profit driven exploitation of wage labor as motivation for getting out of bed each morning. My own politics leans toward this Democratic Socialist model though I’m not sure 21st Century America leans with me.
Whether his vision may ever come into fruition, I think he gives the Progressive Reader some basis for hope. It’s not an easy book, but one definitely worth arguing over. Four stars.
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- NAME_NOT_FOUND
- 11-04-23
Great first half, unproven second half
The author does a great job explaining life from a secular perspective and is pretty based. He makes an excellent point that because time is finite, that makes it valuable. That because our actions have consequences, they are worth thinking about seriously. There are many great ideas and observations in the first half of this book.
However, he then goes into his own theory on how to go about restructuring society in a way that would value collective decision making and give everyone the opportunity to have the time for the spiritual and philosophical development one needs to decide on what they really want to do with their life.
While his criticisms of capitalism are valid, that does not make his proposed solutions better. Changing the fabric of society is not something to take lightly. He calls for a massive restructuring of society, just so that we can attempt a different outcome. He neglects the possibility of corruption and collapse that has plagued socialism in its past. He offers no safeguards, protections, or acknowledgement of this level of risk.
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- Jeffrey D
- 10-12-19
The book needs some attention to basic facts
In this time of economic and ecological fear, the more ideas the better. Therefore Hagglund's latest book is worth reading. There have been many admiring reviews. But almost every one of them criticizes an argument that is foundational to the book. Hagglund's argument is as follows. A) Religion (and there are almost no distinctions made among religions or religious practices or religious people) values eternity, rather than finite, worldly life. B) However, says Hagglund, it is finitude that gives human life value. Most reviewers think that A is empirically wrong. Many reviewers also have grave doubts about B. I agree with these reviewers. With respect to A, all Hagglund would have had to do would be to walk a little way on Yale's campus until he came to a department of religious studies or anthropology, and ask somebody there if he has it right. Or he could have interviewed some actual religious people -- Jews, let's say, as remarked by Peter Gordon in a review in The Nation.
Then Hagglund gives his exemplar of the secular, non-religious life, and it is a sort of Marxism. His explication is most interesting and appealing. But he calls the kind of secular life he values "spiritual," and "secular faith," and his language and tone is nothing if not religious (with a touch of self-help), as though he were sermonizing. Apparently what he is trying to do is to demolish what he calls religion, and then, in a philosophical twist that is best called "immanent critique," to argue that Christian concepts, once shorn of their religious context, are miraculously descriptive of the Marx-inspired society that is to follow capitalism. We will become altruistic, loving our neighbors as ourselves, once freed from the exigencies of capitalism.
Aside from philosophical sleight-of-hand, I see little reason to share Hagglund's secular faith, appealing as it is. Marxism scares some people, not so much because of the megadeaths it has produced (so have many other ideologies), but because, as here, when theory does not agree with the facts, so much the worse for the facts. Orwell had a few things to say about this in 1984. Sometimes the rarified heights of philosophy need to be brought down to earth, by facts such as the difficulty the Soviet Union had in producing and distributing toilet paper.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Greg H.
- 01-03-23
Superb first half; skip the second half.
If I could give a 2.5, I would--this book splits right down the middle. The first half is five stars but the second, barely a one. The first half is inspiring and insightful. Hagglund’s coloring of how we should consider time and how we should value time is amazing. His reading of Proust and Knausgaard are beautifully elucidating. Whether it is carpe diem or Mick Jagger’s “hours are like diamonds”, he makes the point: we have only so many hours on this earth, we should make the best of it for ourselves, and importantly, for others as well. His demonstration of how religious beliefs regarding the everlasting diminish life’s meaning is amazing, well-constructed, and inspiring. Although superficially paradoxical, it is our finitude that ultimately underpins meaning and transcendence.
Alas, in the second half of the book he stumbles badly. His thesis is essentially the following. Since I have demonstrated the value of time to individuals and humanity, now I will proceed to describe the optimal social structure for maximizing this time value, democratic socialism, and along the way, I will attempt to completely dismantle capitalism. To me, he does not seem to really understand capitalism and his critiques are weak. There is a huge literature critiquing capitalism, however Hagglund not only does not add to this body of work, but he also presents arguments and assertions that are easily falsifiable and weak. He also fails to present a persuasive case that his democratic socialism would achieve the outcomes he articulates in the first half.
In conclusion, I will never get back the roughly seven hours invested in the second half of this book. If you can get it on a two-for-one offer, do it and just listen or read the first half
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- MIKEMACK
- 06-29-24
Marxist tear down of religion
very informative and heavy in sources. However, this is not the book I was looking for. The foreword before made it very clear the sickening Marxist mindset of the author. The whole book is more of a Marxist critique of all religions with a focus on Christianity and old Christian writers. when I sought out this book, it was for the power faith has on life. I'm not religious and have no faith in a higher power nor entity, so of course I would be drawn to secular faith. The author's main arguments seem to be arguing that religious people say that life is meaningless without faith, but he's saying it's just the opposite, because we make connections in our finite life.
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- Jan Goericke
- 06-30-21
Secular spiritual freedom and capitalism
This book is very insightful. The author systematically develops the knowledge on the basic terms and proposed solution while righting some misconceptions on writings of Marx, Hayek and others. The author proposes a change of value proposition of social wealth namely to change from 'capital growth' to 'individual, available free time.' We often take capitalism was 'God-given' the author makes a good case this is not only false, but ultimately not sustainable or desirable. Great read, great production!
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- Haley
- 02-14-23
Incredible
Such an amazing introduction into democratic socialism and the current (but hidden) issues within our capitalist society. By engaging the reader with the idea of the brevity of life, Hagglund achieves a quest in sharing crucial knowledge.
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- Jack Waters
- 03-02-20
A modern must-read.
Hägglund has done an incredible job distilling a wondrous take on secularism without the jarring displeasures seen from many anti-theists. The long chapter on Democratic Socialism alone is worth it. I have a physical copy and an Audible copy and will read and listen to this multiple times. The narrator Kirby Heybourne did a fantastic job with the material.
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- Darwin8u
- 12-25-20
Almost there for me
A thought provoking work. Hägglund's basic thesis, developed out of a close inspection of primarily Marx (but decorated with dozens of writers and thinkers), suggests that both capitalism and religious faith limit our ability to maximize our freedom and our quest for the good.
I'm with him about 4/5 of the way. I wish he had edited the book down a bit (he got a bit repetitive and could have probably said the same thing in 1/2 the words). Like I said, I need a bit more time (my leisure) to really clearly communicate the areas I enjoyed (there were many) and the areas I thought were a bit self-indulgent (also many). I think as I get older I get a bit more suspect of so much certainty, whether religious, economic, or philosophic.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Bostrom Home Renovation
- 01-08-20
Truly remarkable!
This is the most satisfying book I have ever experienced. A tour de force of the human experience.
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3 people found this helpful