In the last year’s time I’ve done a lot of all-day-long exegetical marathons with Nance—we read a book all day and talk about it. Yesterday was the first public one where others were welcome to join. We had an amazing lineup, including
and more!What follows is what I wrote the morning before we started the stream. I’m just going to publish it as is. You can watch all 9.5 hours here:
Timenergy theory is for THIS life
Life is beautiful. Not in a white-washed suburbanite “live, laugh, love” kind of way that would balk at the horror that is also life. Life is beautiful in the sweet, achingingly absurd, remorse-full and gut-wrenching kind of sublime way.
Sometimes, for some people, maybe life can be “boring.” But their experience is an exception to the general rule of a life lived striving for survival, fulfillment, and flourishing. Most of us care, most of the time, and when we don’t, that’s merely a deficient mode of caring (as Heidegger would put it).
At bottom, all is care. Why? Because life is finite.
My nihilist friends will have already rolled their eyes a couple of times. Life is neither beautiful nor ugly, but if we were to do some sober accounting, “the pain of the gazelle outweighs the pleasure of the lion,” to paraphrase Schopenhauer, “ergo, life = bad.”
What I’m calling the sublimity of life encapsulates both moments though. The lion may also, at points in its life, experience misery. But that’s what gives life its stakes. A world without stakes would be like video games are to me: boring.
Of course, video games are not boring to a ton of people—mostly guys. They are quite entertaining. The best video games simulate stakes that are analogous to what we refer to as “real life” (IRL). IRL stakes are, therefore, the condition of possibility for your otherwise boring video games to be so entertaining.
It’s not just the pain of the gazelle and the pleasure of the lion (or Nietzsche’s salmon and eagles), but the universal experience of loss that haunts our daily absorption in the activities of life. Whether you are a billionaire or are just scraping by, something that is likely to pull you out of everything is the depth of loss made actual by the death of a loved one.
Life is not just finite. It is fragile.
Both the finitude and fragility of life are based in the inescapable possibility of no more possibilities that casts a shadow alongside everything we do. Society today would have us forget about this shadow. Sure, it wants us to think about death through entertainment or shocking videos. But the last thing our society wants us to do is to spend time with the dying.
Death and birth are hidden and taboo. Ours is a society that abhors basic discomfort so much that these unpleasant experiences are shunned, to our own detriment.
One way of framing life is to say that from the moment you are born you are, in a sense, already dying. From the individualistic level, maybe, sorta. But from the point of view of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, death sets the horizon against which the Other stands out as futural. The Other will outlive me.
The fecundity of the feminine is the promise of the future. This is, of course, literal, but it is also figurative. That’s why the muses are feminine and the words we write when inspired make a bid to be remembered after we are gone. In this sense, every book is a child being shot out ahead of us. May they live long and prosper!
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I felt all of these things long before I ever read Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. This work helped me find a way to articulate these feelings without all the Heideggerian and Levinasian jargon. This Life is a popular work, what we call, at TU, a “doxalogical artifact.”
That means it’s not a rigorous academic work of theory. It’s a love letter to the world at the same time that it is an argument against religions of eternity. We are told that life without belief in eternity is miserable, but Hägglund argues this is quite the opposite of the case.
Secular faith in this life being the only one is the basis upon which everyone, including the religious, are able to find meaning in this life. Spiritual freedom is, for Hägglund, basically the politics of time. That’s why it relates so heavily to timenergy theory. Without finitude and fragility, we would not treasure our timenergy, nor would we rely on others to free it.
Because we are fragile creatures, we do rely on one another to work together in these things called civilizations so that we can be freed from the unnecessary (though natural) impediments to our freedom, such as tooth aches and spending way too much time fending for ourselves.
The division of labor and the near universalization of certain goods and services has achieved wonders in the last couple of hundred years. Yet there is a great case to be made that all of this “progress” is hardly so progressive, considering the drudgery and precarity most of the working and unable to work masses are subjected to.
Martin Hägglund and I both think people realizing they cannot bank on some afterlife to make up for their miserable existences in this world, then we might be galvanized towards some kind of action. This can be done despite differences such as liberal and conservative, if we come to respect the finitude and fragility we all share as a base line.
That doesn’t mean that religious people need to lose their faith in an afterlife, but it very well might require understanding where secular people are coming from, and even relating to the unavoidable fact that we might be finite. If that wasn’t a strong possibility in this life, then why would afterlife believers require faith?
Mutual recognition of the stakes in this life, the realization that this is not a solo player video game, but that we’re all, in a very real sense, in this together, is the basis for the kind of action that will prioritize freeing our timenergy.
This is, I believe, the starting point for where timenergy theory comes into conversation with theology. Or, put another way, the theology of timenergy.