This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

As King avows in one of his religious sermons, “I do not pretend to understand all of the ways of God or his particular timetable for grappling with evil. Perhaps if God dealt with evil in the overbearing way that we wish, he would defeat his ultimate purpose.”84 Given this acquiescence of religious faith, the very idea of an “ultimate purpose” (a

To engage their implications, we must here make explicit the final aspect of secular faith. The object of secular faith is always a spiritual cause, which moves us to act and determines what is important to us.81 Spiritual causes are those for the sake of which we lead our lives and try to respond to the demands of our practical identities. For exa

Hence, let me rehearse what I demonstrated in systematic detail in chapter 5: there is only one fundamental definition of capitalism. Capitalism is a historical form of life in which wage labor is the foundation of social wealth. We live in a global capitalist world because all of us depend for our survival on the social wealth generated by wage la

The causes can vary, but any form of spiritual life has a spiritual cause. The question of who we are and what we do—as well as the question of whether we are succeeding or failing in our efforts—is inseparable from the spiritual causes for the sake of which we act. These are spiritual causes—as distinct from natural causes—since their efficacy is

The point is not that we should embrace pain, loss, and death. The idea of such an embrace is just another version of the religious ideal of being absolved from vulnerability. If we embraced pain we would not suffer, if we embraced loss we would not mourn, and if we embraced death we would not be anxious about our lives. Far from advocating such in

This is why visions of eternal peace are indistinguishable from eternal indifference and why Adorno’s notion of utopian “life” makes no sense. Pure being is nothing.

To lead a spiritual life is always to live in relation to the possibility of devastation and death. We can become ill or disabled. Our loved ones may leave us or be taken away from us. Projects to which we devote our lives can fail, and we ourselves may break the integrity to which we hold ourselves. Moreover, the standard of integrity to which we

Only someone who is finite can be free, since only someone who is finite can engage the question of what is worth doing with her time and grasp her own life as being at stake in how she leads her life. An infinite being could never lead a free life, since her own life could never be at stake in her activities. Indeed, an infinite being would have n

This is the radical implication of Hegel’s notion of Entäusserung. There is not first an inner Idea that is then subjected to an external fate in the world, and there is not first an inner self that is then dependent on the recognition of others. Rather, any Idea and any sense of self must from the beginning be externalized in the material practice