Finitude, Eternity, Love, the Good, and Martin Hägglund’s This Life

July 2024

Finitude, Eternity, Love, the Good, and Martin Hägglund’s This Life

Martin Hägglund’s This Life is an important treatise on metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and political philosophy. It is also a critique of religious orientations to the world. In this paper, I reflect on Hägglund’s account of value and our finitude, and on his criticism of Martin Luther King, Jr’s political theology. According to Hägglund, King’s appeal to God when calling for justice should be replaced by an appeal to our communal norms. To defer to God is at best a colourful way of depicting our own commitments. At worst, it has no determinate content, and it threatens to absolve us of making justice here and now.

I will show that while Hägglund’s account is a salutary corrective to a pervasive kind of bad faith, this criticism misses its target. Any identification of God’s justice with our communal norms is to mischaracterise concepts like these. They are ideals that direct our attention outside ourselves, in the same way that love orients us toward an other. Hägglund’s account points us to the crucial concept of dependence, and that once we understand this better, we will see that a religious orientation toward the infinite and secular faith are compatible.

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