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The Revival of Hegelian Marxism on Martin Hägglund’S This Life Nathan Brown

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The Revival of Hegelian Marxism on Martin Hägglund’S This Life Nathan Brown The revival of Hegelian Marxism On Martin Hägglund’s This Life Nathan Brown When a notable philosopher, having established a reputa- been able to carry out this project with such accessible tion for rigorous argumentation and scholarship, directs clarity is so unusual as to be disorienting. a major new book toward a popular audience, a certain Hägglund’s book unfolds in two parts: the first ar- skepticism may be forgiven among those familiar with ticulating a concept of ‘secular faith’ as a condition of the earlier work. However welcome an accessible style intelligibility for any form of care; the second articulat- may be, popular address too often gives way to the pop- ing a concept of ‘spiritual freedom’ that demands for its ularisation of philosophical concepts and problems with actualisation the overcoming of capitalism and the de- results that are seldom adequate to the complexity of termination of value in terms of socially available free their history and significance. The general reader re- time. The critique of religion in the first half of the ceives a bowdlerisation of conceptual difficulties, while book will be broadly familiar to readers of Hägglund’s the price of public reception is inconsequence at the level Radical Atheism (2008): across three chapters engaging of philosophical intervention, and the demands of legib- most substantially with C.S. Lewis, Charles Taylor, Sören ility offer an excuse for setting aside abstruse debates Kierkegaard, Saint Augustine and Karl Ove Knausgaard, and technical details. Hägglund argues that the religious orientation of desire Martin Hägglund’s third book, This Life: Secular toward eternal life – in itself incompatible with care for Faith and Spiritual Freedom, may be met with varieties of this life – in fact obscures an implicit commitment to such skepticism among seasoned readers of Marx, Hegel, a secular form of faith grounding any and all commit- Heidegger – and of the traditions from which their work ments to the projects of finite existence. Defining as emerges and to which it gives rise. But in fact This Life is religious ‘any ideal of being absolved from the pain of a rare example philosophical writing that achieves con- loss’ (47) (here briefly engaging such philosophical ideals ceptual rigour in the medium of a style open to anyone, as Spinoza’s beatitudo and Nietzsche’s amor fati), Häg- regardless of academic training or theoretical persuasion, glund seeks to show that the condition of intelligibility who wants to think about how life ought to be lived and for the forms of finite care these frameworks also avow about what we must do, collectively, to make it livable in is a commitment to the fragility of mortal life incompat- common.* First and foremost, this is a book that revives ible with the religious logic of eternity and dependent and reconfigures an argument for the unity of Karl Marx’s upon the ineliminable finitude of time. He thus offers thought across the early and late phases of his career. an immanent critique of religious appeals to the primacy Hägglund’s arguments force a reconsideration of how of eternal life as grounded upon and inextricable from a concepts of freedom and equality traverse and ground more fundamental logic of constitutively finite time, a Marx’s entire oeuvre, as well as a reconsideration of how logic such appeals both disavow and rely upon for their the critique of both religion and capitalism co-determine ethics of care. I will return briefly to Hägglund’s cri- Marx’s theoretical accomplishment. That Hägglund has tique of religion toward the conclusion of this review – * Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019). 464pp., $29.95 hb., 978 1 10187 040 2. Subsequent references are given in the text. 34 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.06 / Winter 2019 to its relation to Hägglund’s thinking of value and its con- freedom that opens the second half of This Life. Here sequences for his understanding of the unity of Marx’s Hägglund develops a distinction between human beings work. For the most part, however, I will leave readers to and other animals that, he notes, is neither biological their own appraisal of this aspect of the book, focusing nor anthropological. Rather, his account is grounded my own attention upon its second half, which I view as in the intelligibility of our specific relation to normat- more theoretically and practically consequential. ive commitments. All animals are possessed of ‘natural Here, Hägglund applies his refined grasp of the exist- freedom’ insofar as they are capable of self-movement ential stakes of temporal finitude to a breathtaking recon- and self-determination, and they are agents for which struction of Marx as a thinker of freedom, re-grounding ‘things appear as nourishing or damaging, appealing or the conceptual priority of time and value within his threatening’ (174). We could say that animals not only critique of political economy. Indeed, the reading of relate to an event in itself, as something that happens, Marx pursued in the second half of This Life may be the but also for themselves, as something that matters to a liv- most important revival of Hegelian Marxism since Louis ing being in light of its own ends. Indeed, other animals Althusser’s critique of that orientation in the 1950s and are capable of norm-governed behaviour, insofar as they ’60s. In this respect, the book’s importance lies in Häg- may acquire learned behaviours that are not instinctu- glund’s engagement with American readings of Hegel ally innate. Thus, for Hägglund, what distinguishes the that have transformed the reception of his philosophy ‘spiritual freedom’ of human beings from the ‘natural since the 1980s, especially those by Robert Pippin and freedom’ of other animals is not simply the distinction Robert Brandom, which foreground Hegel’s thinking of between norms and instincts, but rather our capacity to conditions of conceptual intelligibility, discursive norm- question, challenge and transform the norms to which ativity and social recognition. However one views these we hold ourselves accountable (176). We are intelligible readings of Hegel, it has become necessary to take a pos- as spiritually free beings – it makes sense to understand ition on their intervention. This Life is the first book to ourselves in such terms – insofar as the validity of norms produce a major reading of Marx from a perspective sys- is always implicitly and potentially at issue for us, insofar tematically informed by this work, and to show how our as who we should be and what we should do can always be understanding of both Marx and Hegel might be trans- questioned and contested in a manner inseparable from formed by such an encounter. But to grasp the stakes of our social practices and institutions. this move, we have to further complicate its framework Now this is already a theory of spiritual freedom that by recognising that Hägglund’s contemporary Hegelian fuses Hegelian and Heideggerian concerns. We find in Marxism is also saturated by his engagement with Heide- normative/pragmatic readings of Hegel an account of gger’s existential analytic. Geist conceiving of self-consciousness, sociality and col- lective reason in terms of conceptual, discursive and in- Spiritual and natural freedom tersubjective commitments that depend upon structures of mutual recognition for their actuality. Moreover, these For the most part this engagement with Heidegger is im- readings of Hegel emphasise his understanding of mod- plicit. Heidegger’s name appears only twice in the book’s ernity as that epoch in which the intersubjective recog- endnotes, but the existential analytic is inextricable from nition of normative commitments, and the institutions Hägglund’s understanding of finitude, and it is thus es- in which they are actualised, become in principle open sential to his reading of Marx as a thinker of the relation to a ‘space of reasons’ unbounded by the absolutism of between freedom and finite time. We must consider how divine law or sovereign authority. Hägglund builds upon Hägglund’s Hegelian reading of Marx is transformed by this approach to Hegel through a theory of ‘secular faith’ the passage of Hegel through Heidegger that he performs. as commitment to normative ideals that are ungroun- We can then consider what sort of historical materialism ded by any appeal to absolute authority, and of ‘spiritual that transformation produces. freedom’ as commitment to the unbounded contingency We see an implicit synthesis of these philosophical of such norms, insofar as they must in principle remain resources in the distinction between natural and spiritual open to questioning, contention, transformation. Spir- 35 itual freedom is distinct from natural freedom insofar temporal existence is a condition of intelligibility for any as ‘there is no natural way for us to be and no species form of care, for any establishment of an order of prior- requirements that can exhaustively determine the prin- ities, any urgency of our actions, any effort to bring our ciples in light of which we act’ (177). Thus commitments projects to fruition or make our commitments matter. must be sustained insofar as they are never finally and Hägglund’s understanding of the relation between care fully achieved but rather finite and fragile; they must be and finite time is routed through Christine Korsgaard’s held in the face of doubt, uncertainty and ineliminable theory of practical identities (188) and through Sebastian anxiety. Rödl’s work on self-consciousness and first-person per- It is this essential finitude of spiritual freedom – of the spective (194), but more fundamentally it is grounded in structures of collective recognition and existential com- Heidegger’s understanding of temporality as the mean- mitment it entails – that renders Hägglund’s account so ing of care and in Heidegger’s profound analysis of tem- powerfully consonant with Heidegger’s existential ana- poral structures such as historicity, thrownness, anticip- lytic.
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