This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

Knausgaard’s writing could here be described as a form of mindfulness, but one must then separate mindfulness from Buddhist meditation, with which it is often associated. According to Buddhism, you should focus your inner gaze and attend to your attachments with the aim of detaching yourself from the struggles they entail. By paying attention to th

The true test of religious faith does not take place when things are going well, but “when the world commences its drastic ordeal, when the storms of life crush youth’s exuberant expectancy, when existence, which seemed so affectionate and gentle, changes into a pitiless proprietor who demands everything back.”23 The task is to confront the worst p

The second trait of spiritual freedom is the ability of a person to bear a negative self-relation.

Capitalism is a historical form of life in which wage labor is the foundation of social wealth. The deepest stakes of Marx’s critique of capitalism reside in his critique of the measure of value that is entailed by the dependence of society on wage labor.

If I am Abraham and maintain my secular faith, I believe that Isaac’s life is priceless—I am devoted to his well-being as an end in itself—but I also believe that his life can be lost. Indeed, it is only by acknowledging and being responsive to Isaac’s finitude that I can care for him.

“The greatness of true art,” he declares, “lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize…this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life.”61

To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our li

Attaining complete peace of mind is for Spinoza the true religious salvation, which makes us accept everything that happens to us as necessary rather than as something that we can change. The problem with such peace of mind, as Hegel points out, is that it is completely empty. The Stoic says that he is committed to “the true,” “the good,” and “the

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.