![Preview of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41CqXtT5SYL.jpg)
updated 9d ago
updated 9d ago
the bond between love and grief is what I am asking us to see.
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
... See moreThe political project of democratic socialism requires secular faith.
Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.
No form of universal basic income can free us from capitalist exploitation, since only wage labor in the service of profit can generate the wealth that is distributed in the form of a UBI.
salvation is achieved by letting go of your passions and seeing yourself as part of what he calls God or Nature. The two terms are interchangeable for Spinoza, since both designate the eternal, immanent substance of everything that exists,
The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die—that our lifetime is indefinite but finite—can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities.
The ability to ask this question—the question of what we ought to do with our time—is the basic condition for what I call spiritual freedom.
Because it is not given what we should do or who we should be, there is always a question of with whom and with what we should keep faith.
There is, however, one thing that a secular form of life never will be able to promise: an eternal life or an eternal state of being.