Many thanks. It is truly an honour to be here and to receive this award, whose past recipients include so many writers and thinkers who have inspired my own work. I want to begin my reflections with a quote from Lenin, which was the first thing I thought of when I received the news that I had been awarded the prize. In a famous passage, Lenin emphasizes that it is impossible to understand Marx’s analysis of capitalism without first studying and thoroughly grasping the greatest book by the philosopher Hegel. It is a book entitled Science of Logic and which, according to Lenin, we must understand in its entirety in order to understand Marx.
Lenin himself worked for a time on writing what he called a summary – a conspectus – of Hegel’s Logic. But both his summary of the book and his understanding of dialectical logic remained fragmentary. Within Marxism, in turn, only a few have tried to follow Lenin’s advice concerning the necessity of seriously studying Hegel’s Logic. Instead, Hegel has largely been reduced to an outdated idealist, whom Marx certainly read and appreciated but supposedly left behind when he became a true materialist. Thus, Marxists have generally treated Hegel’s Logic as dispensable reading, which can be skimmed or skipped while going straight to Marx.
For me it was exactly the other way around. Before I even started reading Marx for real – and without being aware of Lenin’s advice – I had already spent several years studying Hegel’s Logic in depth. The Logic is still the only book that I think about every day, and it is always a source of new philosophical insights for me. Indeed, every time I think I have achieved a new philosophical insight, I soon realize that what has actually happened is that I now understand another aspect of Hegel’s logic. It was also from my work with Hegel’s Logic that the decisive insights in This Life emerged.
In an astonishing way, Hegel demonstrates that the ideal and the material, the theoretical and the practical, cannot be separated but are aspects of one another. What I, with Hegel, call our spiritual freedom – our Geist – is therefore not something immaterial or immortal that can be separated from our embodied lives. We are not spiritually free because we have some supernatural power or because we can soar in harmony with the universe. We are spiritually free because we are social, historical beings who can question and change our way of living. This revolutionary ability constitutes our spiritual freedom, which is always dependent on material conditions.
In This Life I seek to pursue the Hegelian insight by showing how existential questions– what we live for, what makes our lives worth living – cannot be separated from economic questions concerning how we organize our society. Our economy is not a separate sphere. Our economy is an expression of what we collectively prioritize and value in our form of life. Existential, spiritual questions – questions of what we value, of what is truly valuable, of what is worth doing with our lives – are therefore inseparable from economic, material questions of how we produce and consume in our society.
Hegel himself paves the way for such an approach, since his idea of freedom articulates the most revolutionary demand one can imagine. No one is free until all are free, as he puts it in his philosophy of history. This idea of freedom is radical, since Hegel emphasizes that it cannot be separated from material and social conditions. His idea of freedom is not abstract but must be embodied in institutional forms that are concrete and rational in the sense that they enable everyone to live self-determining lives as social individuals in mutual recognition of their dependence on one another. Yet Hegel does not follow through on the implications of his own idea of freedom, which can only be fully actualized through the overcoming of capitalism as a form of life. As I show in This Life, our inability to maintain rational, democratic institutions under capitalism is no accident. On the contrary, the fatal deficiency in our democratic institutions is due to what Hegel himself admits is a “deep defect” in the production of wealth under capitalism – a mode of production that is incompatible with the realization of our social freedom. Only the radicalization of Hegel’s idea of freedom through Marx’s critique of capitalism can lead us to the democratic form of socialism that is the prerequisite for a truly free society.
Marx himself expresses it beautifully in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. “The lightning of thought” – which is Marx’s metaphor for Hegel’s thinking – the lightning of thought, says Marx, must strike all the way into the soil of the people for our emancipation to become actual. This means, as Marx underlines, that our emancipation “is only possible in practice if one adopts the point of view of the theory according to which the highest being for human being is human being.” The proletariat must find what Marx calls its “spiritual weapons in philosophy,” while philosophy must find its “material weapons in the proletariat.” “Philosophy,” Marx writes, “is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart. Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy.” This is why the lightning of thought must strike all the way into the soil of the people.
While I was writing This Life, these lines were constantly resonating in me as a call of conscience: how can I, how can little I, contribute to letting the lightning of thought strike the soil of the people? To answer that call of conscience, I adopted the motto of writing with minimal alibis and maximal ambitions. What I meant by the motto was that I sought to write in a way that was as accessible to the reader as possible – without hiding behind academic alibis or academic jargon – while also wanting my book to be as deep, as wide-ranging, and as systematic as possible, as I set out to connect fundamental existential questions of life and death with fundamental political questions.
The response to the book has exceeded anything I ever expected, with everything from in-depth analyses of the book by Hegel and Marx scholars, to concrete engagements by political activists, and a flood of letters from readers with many different backgrounds and from all parts of the world. What has meant the most to me is hearing from readers who have grasped the stakes of the book on both a personal and a political level, such as Lasse Diding and his friend Björn Boring. When Björn summarized my book, he did so with the phrase freedom for real, freedom for all. The more I have learned about Björn and the life he lived, the more I have been gripped by his fate and his commitment. Therefore, I am especially honoured to receive the award this year, when it is awarded in memory of Björn.
During my days here in Varberg, it has also been a privilege to see how Lasse Diding works in practice to create social and material conditions that can allow the lightning of thought to strike the soil of the people. As Engels spent his capital to give Marx the opportunity to write, Lasse draws on his wealth to give persons time to think and write, with a unique understanding of how to build institutional spaces that enable genuine creativity. Hence, I cannot think of a more inspiring environment in which to receive an award. From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank Lasse, thank Björn, thank Anton, thank everyone who are working behind the scenes to make this day possible, and thank all of you who have taken the time to be here today. Your presence gives me strength and courage to keep thinking and writing. Thank you!