In the first part of this discussion about the meaning of life I suggested that the recent absence of reflection on this question was due in large part to a general acceptance by European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries of “the secularisation thesis”. Writings taking up themes related to the significance of our lives were framed by an assumption that the historical movement of modernity was forging a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science. Classic questions concerning the meaning of life seemed to be wrapped up with ideas of providence that had no place in a rational and scientific age.

My central claim was that the historical narrative embedded in the secularisation thesis is both factually unconvincing and conceptually inadequate. Religion has simply not gone away and there are no signs of it doing so any time soon. Moreover, the movement of secularisation should be understood within rather than against a religiously – and specifically Christian – understanding of the world and the significance of our lives. It belongs to the Christianisation of the world.

How, then, might we begin to think about the question of the meaning of life if we forgo the secularisation thesis? First, we no longer need to regard the becoming-secular of the world as a radical loss of religious meaning, or as a movement into nihilism. On the other hand, in an age not given to mysticism or metaphysics, and in the light, I would add, of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, it is clearly no longer so credible to conceive our lives in terms of some other grand historical narrative either. The (“cognitivist”) idea that the world or history or humanity has “an intrinsic meaning” (a logos of some kind) that is on the way to realisation is not, in my view, the lens through which the meaning of life should be assessed.

In this part of my discussion, I want to recommend that we make a change in the vocabulary of this debate, and propose rethinking questions concerning the meaning of life in terms of the idea of a life worth living or living a worthwhile life. This, I want to say, is not something that can be assessed except from the inside, and from the inside not just anything will count as living such a life, though nor will only one kind of life be regarded as such either. It is not, I want to suggest, a matter of finally knowing how to live but of creating a life that can be experienced as worthwhile.

This may be regarded as yet another secularisation of a religiously significant construal. However, I do not want to think of this in terms of that kind of contrast. One of the things I want to affirm is that a non-believer can accept that a religiously-informed attempt to understand the significance of our lives does not need to be regarded as something that prevents us making a step forward in that ambition. Someone who has no or little instinct for religiosity – like me – need no longer think, as the modern secularisation theorist still must, that he or she is, at bottom, an enemy of religion.

On the other hand, I am suggesting that someone today who is still interested in forming, say, a correct conception of spiritual advance, is going to have to do so without the old idea that what makes a life worth living is its alignment with a logos that precedes us and to which our thinking is answerable. We have to accept that the kinds of things that people say give their life meaning are not “discoveries about the moral universe” but belong to an effort to create a life worth living. I am, I hope, aware of the extent to which we have failed to achieve that.

However, given that we are no longer to be “cognitivists” about this, can we, today, give an account that would really allow us to make sense of this as a failure? To do so would seem to presupposes a standard against which to compare our life, a standard which could be regarded as capturing what is genuinely proper for human existence: an idea of the good life. In the first part of this discussion we saw that David Wiggins identifies one conspicuously objective conception of what is proper to the good life as no longer available to most of us: no longer available ‘unless we are Marxists’. He means, of course, unless we think of ourselves as committed Marxists. ‘Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit.’ The worry is, however, that unless we are Marxists – or at least unless we can frame an objective non-religious conception of what is proper to the good life – we have no basis on which to assess whether we are moving towards or away from the attainment of the good life. Any continued interest in emancipation and progress would be strictly nonsensical. Wiggins claims that our increased resistance to historico-messianic narratives does not imply that we have lost interest in ‘emancipation or progress themselves’. But can we retain that interest – and not be Marxist? We probably can’t.

This is not to invite yet another Marxist “revival”. Rather it is to acknowledge that we belong to societies with a history whose self-understanding cannot be radically dissociated from a Marxist heritage. As Derrida notes, ‘whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism.’ There is a complication to every discourse that would say that our interest in emancipation or progress could be radically non-Marxist or can simply do without Marx. Especially if we think we are not Marxist. Here is Derrida again:

A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.

Unless we are going to be naively unwitting Marxists, we had better attend to this inheritance. We need to attend to the spectres of Marx and Marxism. Especially today, when it is so often announced that Marxism is dead.I will come back to this, but first we need to acknowledge that Wiggins’ political naivety is coupled with a historical insight. It is, I think, plainly true that ‘we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit.’ It is as one of the last great attempts to elaborate a grand historico-messianic narrative of emancipation and progress of this cognitivist kind that Marxism has its place in Wiggins’ account. If I was a Marxist, or a Marxist through and through, I would have an understanding of the significance of our lives which showed our present condition as alienated and which pointed towards a historical movement of de-alienation – a historical movement in which it will all come right in the end, if we can only get our collective act together and build that revolution.

Would I be taking unjustified advantage of the “we” if I were to say we don’t believe that, we can’t fall back on a philosophy of the history of the alienation and de-alienation of man like that? I don’t think so. In our time, we need to shift decisively from thinking in (classical messianic) terms of a world with a coming end, to (but holding on to something of that messianism) making sense of the coming of a world without end. I mean the crucial questions for us today are about creating the conditions for long-term sustainability – not finality or eschatology.

But even if that is the long term ambition – the realisation of a sustainable society, one that can keep going and will not crash around our ears – still sustainability is not the goal at any price: we are aiming at realising conditions in which people (one can hope more and more people) can lead lives that are worth living. And my question is whether, if we are not Marxists, we can even make good sense of the idea that not every way of living a life will be a life worth living. I believe we can.

To explain why, I want to return once more to Wiggins’ discussion of the meaning of life, and to an example he gives of a contrast between two lives. It is a discussion in which he invites you as a reader to acknowledge that only one of these people is actually living a worthwhile life. For our purposes, the significant point is that this is something you are able to do (that is to say, you as someone who belongs to a particular society with a continuing history) without appealing to or claiming to possess a fundamental “truth of man” which devolves into a conception of a final “end of man”  His example is this:

There is a difference, which we as participants insist upon, between the life of a man who contributes something to society with a continuing history and a life lived on a plan of a southern pig-breeder who (in the economics textbooks, if not in real life) buys more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs, to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs… The practical concerns of this man are regressive and circular. And we are keenly interested, on the inner view, in the difference between these concerns and non-circular practical reasoning or life plans.

The latter (a life lived on the basis of non-circular life plans), Wiggins suggests, “fans out into a whole arborescence of concerns”. This kind of image is important to us in considering our own lives and the lives of those with whom we live. If we live in a society in which, by our lights, such a life is increasingly unavailable to most of us, then we will have failed to create conditions in which we can think we are living a worthwhile life – and hence singularly failed to create the conditions of actually living such a life.

Within the limits in which any such judgement is possible, the lives that are most worth living will belong to those who do most, here and now, to “insist upon [this difference]”, those who keep it alive. That is to say, it will belong to those participants for whom the idea of finally having done with it is experienced most intensely or most keenly as something to resist.

What are we to resist, then? First and foremost: the rule of every doxa of messianic arrival. For example, the rule of any religious orthodoxy. The virtues of secularity, the virtues of a public space emancipated from domination by religious authority, do not fall with the collapse of the secularisation thesis. On the other hand, I also want to resist that secular variation which claims with equal evangelical fervour to possess the truth of man and which thus promises that we can learn, finally, how to live in a proper end of man. I mean Marxism.

In our time we certainly need to preserve – and preserve without naivety from Marxism – something of the classic interest in emancipation and progress. However, this inheritance can no longer be classical through and through. In particular it will have to do without the cognitivist idea of a final end of man, and everything associated with it. And that is a considerable qualification. As Derrida acknowledged in his summary of what he does not want to inherit from Marxism, what must be left behind is (his words): ‘almost everything.’

In Europe and America today, thinking on political questions is still surprisingly freighted by the spectre of extreme-left-wing politics. Whenever there is a call for the politicisation or re-politicisation of issues and questions, wherever, by our lights, there needs to be concerted political action, governmental or not, national or not, there is a sense of continuity (whether welcomed or opposed) with the radical political traditions of the past. And in virtue of its historic centrality to the struggles for equality this is an experience run through with a certain identitarian pathos for those who situate themselves on the left in politics. Those struggles really have changed the lives of many for the better and the landscape of thinking for all. The fight for women’s rights, for example, has fundamentally and I would think irreversibly challenged the classical conception in which the proper sphere of activity and devotion for women was almost exclusively domestic. Such struggles are clearly not over, and are sustained today, at least in part, by the memory of classic forms and formations of political agency (the party, the strike, the organisation of militant activists).

And yet it is far less clear (though I confess I feel at the limits of my already limited competence in pronouncing on this) whether the continuation of such struggles for emancipation and progress requires a repoliticisation of society, a “return of the political”, in the Marxist and neo-Marxist tradition. Indeed, in view of the historical legacy of Marxism, and in particularly the terrifying nightmare of Soviet Marxism, certain political struggles today might also take politically unusual or unexpected forms with respect to a tendency internal to that tradition. For example, they may include efforts to forge a limit to the extension of the political, not only in private life, but also in society more generally. There is a general right one might call for not to be monitored, and not to have informers, whether technological or human, everywhere. As Derrida noted in “The History of the Lie” with an obvious allusion to Hannah Arendt, the idea here concerns ‘the limits of the political’. What is called for is a right to resistance to the order of the political, resisting the limitless extension of political reason to the whole of life.

I put this emphasis on a right to limit the extension of the region of the political in sympathy with a central claim in Geoffrey Hawthorn’s early work on the history of Enlightenment social theory up to and including Marxism; the claim that such theories have been premised on what has turned out to have been the radically misguided idea that it is through the politicisation of every problem that we can make the kinds of changes to society that will forge a passage towards an ideally just social and individual condition. On this conception the task of politics will be to give the last word concerning the realisation of a good life. Today we understand better than before that we need to resist social power being dominated by this kind of classical political desire. Or again, the power of any political regime should always be limited since there just is, as Levinas said, no ‘regime without evil’. We know now that any political regime that thinks it canworst.

This is very difficult for us to come to terms with because we are strongly inclined to interpret resistance to the kind of economic neo-liberalism that dominates today – resistance, that is, to the kind of regime that seeks the limitless extension of economic reason to the whole of life – as the expression of a desire to see a return or revival as a force in power of what one might call the politicalforce that can bring changes in society – which we do not believe can be fulfilled by economic neo-liberalism. As Klein puts it, there is an encouraging sense that the election of Obama expresses ‘a longing in people for something more than shopping’. But this does not mean that there is a longing in people for a revival of the idea of mass active political participation in the classical sense either. For example, the idea that the election of Obama has shown there is a taste for the idea of participating in an active way in an ‘independent social movement’ which ‘build[s] the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites’ is not obviously right at all. If fingers are in the air, one could equally well argue that the election of Obama – electoral approval of his taking the highest political office in America – shows that there remains a stubborn hope among the electorate there that their electorally approved political elites will attempt to bring about, by the power they wield or by the force at their disposal, the changes they say they want to make, or the strengthening of fragile achievements already won, and that the political elite will do so in a way that enables the electorate to avoid having to get so personally involved themselves. neo-liberalism of Marxism. For example, sticking her finger in the air, writer Naomi Klein suggests that the election of Barack Obama ‘proved decisively’, among other things, ‘that many, many people’ very much ‘want to be part of a political project larger than themselves’. What is right here is that the resistance to economic neo-liberalism has expectations regarding the proper disposal of power – the proper deployment of

The ‘political project’ is already, quite obviously, ‘larger than themselves’ even when it does not call on them to become more publicly demonstrative. Some think that this is more or less the last word on participation: political activism has been outsourced. That is not a view I would like to endorse. Becoming more publicly demonstrative oneself may well be what is necessary if or when political elites do not deliver change you believe in or, when you are seized with an interest or concern off the current political agenda and attempt to politicise it. But this is not Klein’s view, and she admits that her conception is built on a significant ‘nostalgia’. My worry is that it is also built on a profound amnesia. The political project is not over. But like the religious neo-liberalism that preceded it and the economic neo-liberalism that has succeeded it, the effective power of political neo-liberalism should be limited.

Copyright © 2010 Simon Glendinning