Today, Martin Hägglund is awarded Jan Myrdal’s Big Prize – the Lenin Award, for his prophetic seriousness and his supreme philosophical overview in his monumental work This Life – Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.
The foundation of Hägglund’s philosophy is the idea that we humans are the only creatures who lack a given, predetermined path in life. Whether we want it or not, we are constantly faced with the question of how we should live our lives and what makes them worth living. But with the opportunity, and the challenge, that it means to be able to ask this question also comes both freedom and responsibility; we must create meaning not only for ourselves, but also in relation to others.
This idea is the core of what Hägglund calls secular faith – a belief, not in the supernatural or eternal, but in our own lives and the ability to engage in both the world and the community, and to cherish and care for the fragile life that we know is finite.
By linking to a long tradition of writers such as Dante, Proust and Karl Ove Knausgård, Hägglund anchors his ideas in the history of literature, with the help of thinkers such as Saint Augustine, Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard, thereby creating a system of thought that unites philosophical depth with literary sensitivity.
In this way, with This Life, Hägglund builds a bridge between traditions and opens new paths for us readers to understand what it means to live a finite and meaningful life. With secular faith, he shows how we can not only understand life backwards but also find its meaning by focusing on the finite moments that make up our lives here and now.
But for Hägglund, secular faith is not just a matter of personal meaning, but a fundamental starting point for his critique of capitalism and his vision for a society built on democratic socialism. Hägglund shows how our current economic system distorts our view of freedom by subordinating it to consumption and constant economic growth. For as long as society’s overarching goal is to maximize profit, we can never create the conditions required for true freedom.
On the contrary, Hägglund argues, a democratic socialist society must encourage the possibility of meaningful lives together. This requires that we be given space for what he calls free time – the time that goes beyond recovery from work and instead gives us the opportunity to devote ourselves to what we find valuable and which Hägglund calls ends in themselves.
In Hägglund’s philosophy, democratic socialism and free time therefore become a concrete expression of secular faith, since they both actualize the question of how we should live our lives and what makes them worth living, while at the same time engaging us in the world in a way that reflects our common values and our finitude.
With This Life, Martin Hägglund has not only written a philosophical and political text, but also a literary study that offers a new way for us to understand and reconsider our most fundamental values. In his thinking, he takes us on a journey through both the history of literature and philosophy and, with the great thinkers and writers as company, builds a cathedral of thought where the values of freedom and justice are united.
It is a work that invites us to linger, to reflect, and to grieve – about what it means to be human, to live in a human world, and to feel the vertigo that only the finitude of life can evoke.