This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

The apparent paradox of nirvana haunts all religious conceptions of eternity. Absolute fullness is inseparable from absolute emptiness and absolute presence is inseparable from absolute absence. My argument is that we should reject the idea that such a state of being is a goal worth striving for.

The revaluation of value can be achieved only through a political transformation of the economy, which would allow us to recognize socially available free time as an end in itself. Such a transformation of the economy is at the center of what I am calling democratic socialism.

By demonstrating that we can dramatically reduce socially necessary labor time, the technological advances achieved under capitalism could contribute to an expansion of “the true realm of freedom, the development of human abilities as an end in itself.”41 Nevertheless, under capitalism we cannot directly devote ourselves to an expansion of the real

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

The dynamic of secular faith thus accounts for the possibility of ongoing commitments—whether to individual aspirations, love relations, or collective endeavors. These are secular forms of faith because they are devoted to projects that are bound by time.

Under democratic socialism, we are committed to sharing the socially necessary labor time, but also to reducing it as much as possible through technological innovation. Based on our different abilities, we participate in the social labor that we recognize as necessary for the common good (food production, construction, health care, childcare, educa

A religious faith in eternity cannot add anything to the dignity and pathos of mourning; it can only subtract from the mourning by diminishing the sense of loss. This is not to say that avowedly religious people do not mourn. But insofar as they do mourn, their mourning is animated by a secular faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life rath

The second principle of democratic socialism is that the means of production are collectively owned and cannot be used for the sake of profit.

Even though he is fully invested in the prospect of eating the delicious meal, it makes no difference to him if it does not appear.