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Martin Hägglund Quotes

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Famous Martin Hägglund Quotes

“To keep faith in mortal life, then, is to remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master. Mortality is not only intrinsic to what makes life meaningful, but also makes life susceptible to lose meaning and become unbearable. The point is not to overcome this vulnerability but to recognize that it is an essential part of why our lifes matter and why we care. (49)”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“My freedom therefore requires that I can ask myself what I *should* do with my time. Even when I am utterly absorbed in what I do, what I say, and what I love, the possibility of this question must be alive in me. Being engaged in my activities, I must run the risk of being bored--otherwise my engagement would be a matter of compulsive necessity. Being devoted to what I love, I must run the risk of losing it or giving it up--otherwise there would be nothing at stake in maintaining and actively relating to what I love. Most fundamentally, I must live in relation to my irrevocable death--otherwise I would believe that my time is infinite and there would be no urgency in dedicating my life to anything. 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. This is why all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of *unfreedom.*”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“The passion and pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life. The sense of something being unique and irreplaceable is inseparable from the sense that it can be lost. This relation to loss is inscribed in the very form of living on. To live on is never to repose in a timeless or endless presence. Rather, to live on is to remain after a past that has ceased to be and before an unpredictable future that may not come to be. (44)”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“[T]hat we collectively value the 'growth' of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place.”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“If my life were complete, it would not be my life, since it would be over. In leading my life, I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be: to hold together and be responsive to the commitments that define who I take myself to be.”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“The depths of life are not revealed through faith in eternity. Rather, our spiritual commitments proceed from caring for what will be irrevocably lost and remaining faithful to what gives no final guarantee. Secular faith will always be precarious, but in its fragility it opens the possibility of our spiritual freedom. (36)”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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