Yale Humanities Program: “This Life By Martin Hagglund”

Event time: 
Friday, March 29, 2019 - 9:30am to 6:00pm
Location: 
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 102 See map
63 High Street
New Haven, CT 06520
Event description: 

The Yale Humanities Program presents a day long conference:

This Life By Martin Hagglund.

The conference will discuss Martin Hägglund’s new publication This Life - Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.

Hägglund is a philosopher, literary theorist, and a scholar of modernist literature at Yale.

In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life, and what we do with our time together.

Hägglund develops new existential and political principles while transforming our understanding of spiritual life. His critique of religion takes us to the heart of what it means to mourn our loved ones, be committed, and care about a sustainable world. His critique of capitalism demonstrates that we fail to sustain our democratic values because our lives depend on wage labor. In clear and pathbreaking terms, Hägglund explains why capitalism is inimical to our freedom, and why we should instead pursue a novel form of democratic socialism.

In developing his vision of an emancipated secular life, Hägglund engages with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr. This Life gives us new access to our past—for the sake of a different future.

More information can be found at https://humanities.yale.edu/life-secular-faith-and-spiritual-freedom.

We would also appreciate it if you could register on eventbrite (it’s free and takes just a few seconds) so we can get a sense of how many people are coming: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/this-life-secular-faith-and-spiritual-freedom-registration-58440386770?aff=affiliate1

Admission: 
Free but register in advance
Open to: 
General Public