#1309 Espen Hammer: Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Espen Hammer. He's professor of philosophy at Temple University, and today we're going to talk about his book After the Death of God Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kent to Nietzsche. So Dr. Hammer, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone.

00:27 Espen Hammer: Thanks a lot for having me, Ricardo. So,

00:31 Ricardo Lopes: um, before we get into the sort of, uh, philo philosophical history that you explore in the book in terms of how particularly in the modern Western tradition, uh, philosophers Have explored religious, religion and secularization. Um, LET'S start perhaps with the definition here. So what is secularization and what is the secularization thesis?

01:03 Espen Hammer: Yeah, that's a good question to start with. The book is called After the Death of God, which sounds very dramatic, but it is the short version of what secularization actually is, secularization in the shortest. Formulation possible is simply that God dies away and becomes an incredible, uh, view. We no longer believe in God and God doesn't play any role in human life any longer. Um, I, uh, distinguish between secularism and secularization.

01:42 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, so tell us then about that distinction.

01:47 Espen Hammer: Yeah, secularism is a normative view, a form of critique of religion which has its roots in the Enlightenment. It's quite focused on belief and on trying to undermine the credibility of belief in the divine and the super sensible. And, uh, it's more or less militant depending on the kinds of groups and individuals you are looking at. Um. Then you have a wide conception of secularization, which is usually taken to be a sociological or historical term, and that is the term that I am primarily interested in in this book as a kind of framework for what I do. I'm not personally a sociologist myself, although I have studied sociology and history, but, uh, I am a philosopher, but I am interested in. Secularization as a framework for thinking about the philosophy of religion in the post-Kantian tradition. Because I think if you don't have this context, this sociological and historical context of secularization. Then the philosophy of religion in this tradition becomes More difficult to truly understand. So The classics of sociology almost always talked about secularization. People like Comte, Weber, Durham. Uh, AND in the 20th century, people like Berger, for example, uh, were interested in secularization as an aspect of modernization, modernization being perhaps the most important theme in classical sociology. What is it about modernity that sets it apart from pre-modern social arrangements, right? And the classics argued that religion and the loss of religion or the weakening of religion. AKA secularization is absolutely central to modernization. Um, SO, in some cases people even almost equate modernization with secularization. So it's a very, very important term in Max Weber, for example, the most famous one. Who of these classics in sociology who deal with sectarization. Disenchantment is the term for secularization. Disenchantment is a process whereby the world becomes more rationally masterable, you know, the spirits, the Super sensible life that. Purportedly existed, especially in the medieval mind, are dying away and uh Weber says that with the rise of science and technology, you see a new way of looking at the world. It becomes rationally masterable. Technology becomes the expression of this sense of the world as being rationally masterable, and that means that the religious worldview becomes weakened. Then you have people like Durkin, for example, who see religion as losing its role socially. Over time. Starting out from a mechanical form of solidarity in which people are very, uh, beholden to some kind of unified expression of authority. Which is given a kind of, uh, well, in these traditional societies is given a religious religious interpretation. Two modern societies that are solidarity that whose solidarity is based more on formal relations between people, laws, you know, contracts, all these kinds of things that kind of unite people in more formal ways in modernity and, uh, in these kinds of societies, the traditional. Religious solidarity is then being weakened. So Um, secularization is often presented as a form of subtract subtraction. You start with a religious worldview and then you kind of subtract from that in a more or less linear fashion. Um, They're often. Considered to be three fundamental dimensions of secularization. Decline in belief, so people just simply fewer and fewer people subscribe to religious tenets and beliefs. Um, THAT'S what people often associate exclusively with secularization, that people just stop believing. Mhm. In sociology in the 20th century, it's more common to think of secularization in terms of differentiation. And that means that religious authority is Declining in ever more spheres of society as society disengaged with religion, so politics, you know, with the rise of liberalism or with Marxism and so on and so forth just becomes less and less religiously informed. Uh, SCIENCE, of course, in modernity becomes less and less, and then of course with the in the 17th and 18th century science becomes completely disconnected to religion. Uh, ART and aesthetics becomes less and less beholden to. Religion religion and so on and so forth. So there's a differentiation and re religion is left to its own sphere as it were. This is a very common sociological view of secularization. And then finally, you have privatization of religion, that religion. Becomes more and more confined to people's private lives. And phase becomes more and more personal and to some extent a kind of lifestyle choice that people adopt in. Certain cases and for reasons that may seem flimsy and not very authoritative, just like, you know, you decide to wear Levi's jeans, um, it doesn't really, you know, it's not because you, it's just because you happen to like them and some friends of yours and wear them and so on and so forth, it becomes a lifestyle choice. That's the extreme version of privatization, but the privatization was there already, I think from the get-go in Protestantism with the, of course, with the. Loss of the church's authority in Northern Europe. And then you have uh questions of the drivers of secularization and typically science. Industrialization, urbanization. Capitalism is often considered to be a very important driver of secularization because capitalism forces us to see ourselves as Engaged in rational self-interest and rational self-interest is not what certainly what Christianity has traditionally been encouraging people to become an attitude that Christianity has been encouraging people to take up. Um So religion is still strong in various places, um, but in general I think people see. Secularization as having made strong inroads, certainly in European and also in American culture. Although there are new forms of spirituality that may may to some extent be difficult to Get hold of and fully see because we may not have the right definitions to understand what we're dealing with. So I think there are many compensatory versions of uh religion, but in general, I think especially in Northern Europe. Um, ETHNIC secularization is very palpable and very real. Mhm.

10:16 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I, I mean, what would you say are the main critiques that secularists and modernists over these past few centuries, particularly the past couple of centuries, have put forth, er, against religion?

10:36 Espen Hammer: Yeah, I think now you're addressing more of the business about secular secularism as a kind of, you know, set of belief, a set of attitudes to religion, and, um, I think one important, uh, negative attitude to religion has been that religion poses as a false authority. It sometimes takes on very authoritarian dimensions. And um people who are critical of religion often tend to focus on the way in which it has had too much power, perhaps on a basis which is not really justifiable in areas such as politics. Art pedagogy, for example. Um, AND that, that has led In many cases to an oppressive type of practice. And I think this brings us to the second set of critiques that have been launched against religion in the name of secularism, and that is that religion actually can be quite morally problematic, that it can be oppressive, it can be at odds with modern desires for freedom and self-actualization, especially in late capitalist consumerist societies. In which people certainly don't want to be told what to consume, how to consume things, what to do with their lives, in which there's a very strong demand for radical consumerist freedom, which is then radically at odds with, uh, much religious doctrine. Certainly in the Judeo-Christian West, but also very strongly in the Middle East and. Also in Eastern societies, um. And then the kind of critique that I think most people associate with um. Secularism in the critical religion, which is that it is really truly at odds with the modern. Worldview, the, the scientific worldview. Mhm, um, THAT. A religion is metaphysically unjustifiable. Because Rationally. Binding evidence has to be ultimately the kinds of evidence that we can have in science. And any appeal to the super sensible is just not going to be a reliable. Authority for belief, um, so faith. In some super sensible divine form of life or authority or agency is just epistemically unrespectable. This is the kind of critique you find in the so-called new atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, for example, who has made this very famous. Who started out like launching a very, very direct critique of religion some 1520 years ago, uh, became Had a lot of influence for quite some time. Um, BUT I think gradually some people have come to see that this form of criticism may have some weaknesses, that religious faith was never trying to compete with science. The belief formation in religion just isn't. Analogous to belief formation in science, that there's something deeply problematic to set science and religion on a par like that and just. You know, compare belief formation in science to belief formation in. In religion, people that wanted to defend religion have said, well, belief formation in religion is much more like belief formation in For example, You know, Personal relations. I love relations in which someone falls in love and um what kind of evidence do you have in this, in this regard? I mean, uh, falling in love and being in love uh it involves uncertainty. It involves sometimes agonizing doubt, you know, does the other really reciprocate. Um, Is my love worth it? Um, IS it worth my time and emotional investment and so on and so forth? Um, BELIEVING in God, I think you can see in the church fathers and you can see in the, certainly in the Christian tradition. Involves agonizing, involves a lot of doubt. It's not aimed at epistemic certainty except with some. Exceptions like rationalist philosophy like eququinas, for example. If you really try to establish some sort of proof of the existence of God, then you lend yourself to criticism because you lay the bar very highly of epistemic certainty. You say, I can actually prove this with certainty. Um, BUT I think most people who are religious don't really pay attention to these kinds of religious. Uh, PROOFS very much, and they're not very important in religious life for most people.

16:28 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, and I mean, I, I am a, I'm personally an atheist, but I'm not anti-theist. I'm I'm not anti-religion in any way. I'm not a militant atheist, and I, when it comes to, for example, the new atheists, the, the two that are still alive, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins particularly. I mean, I don't, I, I've never thought that they really had a very strong case, er, I mean in terms of their, even their claims that can be tested and have been tested by scientists of religion, anthropologists and others. I mean they are very weak scientific claims scientifically. And also I mean when it comes to, for example, criticizing religion in terms of assuming that it is especially inducive to immoral behaviors, for example, I mean, I also don't think that religion is especially Prone to that, I think there are, there are other domains of human life, of human life like politics, for example, that can also drive people toward immoral behaviors very easily. So, uh, I, I mean, I never took the new atheist movement too seriously, uh, scientifically, philosophically, and so on. Um, I mean, but, but, uh, this, this is a, a question that I think is very, uh, interesting to explore and also very provocative, especially for, uh, atheist people like myself. So,

18:16 Espen Hammer: uh, does

18:16 Ricardo Lopes: secularism actually

18:19 Espen Hammer: have

18:19 Ricardo Lopes: a theological origins?

18:24 Espen Hammer: Well, that is a very interesting question. It has been debated, um, a lot and debates surrounding secularization and secularism, whether these theological origins have reemerged in much contemporary debate. Also in philosophy, which is interesting for me since I am a philosopher and I'm interested in, in these kinds of questions from, from not just a historical point of view but also from a philosophical point of view, understanding the genealogy of central. Uh, TERMS that philosophers are used to studying. Um, You have, there is a tradition of holding that secularism and secularization have theological origins that Goes way back, but. In modernity, I think we often associate this with people like Nietzsche, Carl Schmidt. Uh, Lowitz, German thinker, Hans Blumenberg. Um, AND certainly most recently, Habermass, uh, who passed away just a couple of weeks ago, but who in his very late years, uh, wrote. A 2000 page. History of philosophy and religion and trying to show the interconnection between philosophy and religion or between faith, between um knowledge and and faith, um, and I think it is quite commonly accepted that our Western moral system has grown out of Christianity. Like concepts like equality. Dignity. Uh, PERSONAL freedom. Moral responsibility, they all seem in different ways to stem from the idea that we are all God's children in a certain way that we are. We have come to this world as Equally dignified in the eyes of God. Um, Levitt is interesting because he argues that our, our, much of our understanding of history is very shaped by ideas of Providence, ideas of eschatology. Uh, THE idea that history has some kind of direction. That it is to some degree structured teleology that you can see ends. Being operative in history, that history has some sort of end state, which became very important of course in certain versions of Marxism. Um, YES, although these versions of Marxism have been criticized, I think rightly so, um, for being too metaphysical, but I think they certainly can be shown to have some kind of origin in eschatological thinking, you know, the idea that God has some sort of plan for human history and that human history is playing itself out according to this plan. Even though the plan may be rough and allow for a lot of mishaps and evil, unfortunate events. There is some sort of deep meaning behind history, and many people have read Hegel in this way that Hegel is precisely the major modern philosopher of precisely this view of history that history is. Divine in some sense. You have, uh, Hans Blumenberg, who was an interesting philosopher and intellectual historian in Germany and, uh, in the second half of the 20th century. He doesn't believe in translation. He doesn't believe that secular concepts have been translated from religious concepts. The way People like Schmidt and Levitt believe, but he does believe that the modern worldview came into being as a result of a certain kind of crisis. In the medieval religious Christian worldview. Uh, HE argued that. Um, The classical medieval worldview saw God as. Expressing himself. In the order that we're able to find in the world, in the universals, as these universals. Dictate how everything in the universe. Is supposed to develop and interconnect with all the processes in the universe. There's a deep fundamental order to the universe and God is in the universe working his way through creation. This is basically the Aristotelian, uh, Christianity that you see in people like Aquinas, for example. Yeah, um, but. In the late medieval period, you saw people worried that this is going to limit God, this is going to constrain God too much because he's going to constrain by, going to be constrained by the order that he has created. He's going to be stuck in this order. So how can we argue for the Absolute power of God on this view, he seems to be constrained by his own order. So the novelist said, well, actually he's, God is not limited by this order. Uh, FOR God to be absolutely powerful, he has to in a sense be outside this order. He may have created it, but the world is playing itself out independently of God's. Connection to the world, and this created a lot of anxiety, the world suddenly started to seem less guaranteed by some sort of divine uh presence. Um, THE world started to look contingent. It seems to open up for possibilities that it could go in all sorts of directions. The world could end tomorrow. What do I know? Um, SO human beings would have to step in and create order. In other words, threatening and chaotic universe. This was the universe's view of modernity that. Human beings step in and fill this emptiness. That was left after God, so to speak, pulled out of this order and this made Scientific curiosity possible and ideas of human constitutional order as you find in Kant, for example, and the whole idealist tradition that somehow human beings constitute order in the world. Um, THIS is also a way of thinking of secularization and secularism as having theological origins. Even though there's no translation from directly from the. RELIGIOUS order to the Christian order. It's more a kind of leap into. A form of emptiness that occurred as God in a sense vacated creation in order to secure his own. Infinite power. So these are fascinating ways to see secularization as going way back in time as having its origin deeply embedded in the Christian and religious systems that. Preceded secularization. Right.

26:20 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I wanted to ask you, uh, why is it that you decided to focus in your book on 19th century German philosophy specifically? I mean, is it, uh, because, as a philosopher, you are more familiar or you focus most of your work on Philosophers from that tradition specifically, is it because you think that the philosophers whose work we're going to explore here are the ones with the critiques that are most relevant to the topic you explore in your book, or was it for some other reason?

27:08 Espen Hammer: Well, uh, it is certainly a tradition that I feel reasonably familiar with, but I don't think that was the main reason why I focused on Kant and the aftermath of Kant's revolution in philosophy in order to understand how philosophers responded to secularization. It was mainly because These 19th century philosophers, as is the case with many intellectuals in the 19th century and many artists. Uh, ARE in a sense children of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment. I see the Enlightenment as engaged in a lot of very epistemically oriented critiques of religion, you know, people like Hume and people like Diderot and so on, um. Criticized The idea that we can have any kind of rational belief in religion. That's very, very pronounced in Hume, for example. Um So This is a form of rational critique, and you may as a religious person feel um. That that kind of critique is not really hitting so hard because you weren't so interested in some sort of rational critique in the first rational view of religion in the first place, as we talked about earlier, maybe your whole uh understanding of religion is much more emotional. So When I say that the 19th century intellectuals and artists and philosophers are children of the Enlightenment, I mean children of the Enlightenment in a very broad sense, not just epistemically, but there's a strong sense in 19th century culture and certainly European culture that Well, That religion is in a crisis. Um, You see this very strongly in the romanticism, which is a very, very. Very, very clearly a 19th century, um. Uh, MOVEMENT in, um. Both in philosophy and in the arts, especially strong in poetry, of course. A sense of a crisis of meaning, a crisis of orientation. Um, YOU see this new bourgeoisie emerging in Europe, which on the one hand is very, um, kind of weathered to Techno scientific views of um. Of progress and the like, but leaving on the other hand, as a sense of emptiness, people just feel that this new kind of life form just doesn't offer the kind of meaning that the older religious communities were able to, um, to offer. So, I'm kind of thinking that many of these 19th century intellectuals are starting to feel the crisis of religion. Um, PERHAPS more emotionally and not just intellectually, they're feeling this more as a crisis of meaning than as a crisis of justification perhaps. Um, SO what I do see in the Kantian post-Kantian tradition. Is an interest both in critic criticizing religion because these are, I mean they are after all philosophers, they are interested in the rational claims of religion and the extent to which religion can be seen rationally and the ways in which religion may be seen to fail, um. Being fully. Rational, but on the other hand, they're also interested in rescuing certain dimensions of religion, and that's why secularization in its social garb is very important to me. I try to understand secularization strongly in terms of how religion has filled a specific kind of social role, has given a people a sense of. Meaningful participation and solidarity. And that with secularization that gradually becomes lost. You see this very strongly, as I said with the 19th century bourgeoisie that sees itself in much more individualistic terms than Previously And um this generates a kind of crisis. Um, Which is different from the merely um rational crisis, a crisis, as I said, of meaning of social, social solidarity, and also a crisis with regard to um what you might call. Um, ASPIRATIONS to happiness. You know, what kind of happiness is left for us as we keep using all religious ways of thinking about fulfillment. Um, IS happiness. Left to be just something like pleasure, does it only have some sort of consumerist meaning? And if so, is that very limited? Is it very um. Contingent as it lacked the kind of deep meaning that religion was offering in terms of its understandings of salvation and bliss and so on, uh, associated with happiness and of course. Faith itself was always understood to offer a kind of fulfillment that 1 may see is in a crisis in the 19th century. So all these things I think are playing in the 19th century intellectual responses to secularization. There is a genuine sense of a more widespread type of crisis than just the rational crisis that you see in the Enlightenment.

33:16 Ricardo Lopes: Right, and so when thinking about the role of religion, do you focus then mostly on its social role? Is that it? Or do you also consider perhaps some more effects that it has on individuals like. For example, related to meaning related to, for example, morality, related to, uh, even individual motivation, I guess. Uh, I mean, how do you approach, uh, how do you look at the role or roles that religion plays?

33:58 Espen Hammer: And that's a, that's a very central question I think to the project that I was embarking on this, uh, in this book, um. I think one thing that you see as religion is dying out. In the ways that we have been talking about, you see a certain kind of fragmentation. It's very hard to see any kind of deeper unity. Um, THIS unity may be the unity that you're feeling in yourself, a kind of unity between your mind and your, your body. But also a form of unity between or between the rational and the emotional parts of yourself. Uh, WITH secularization, the rational part of yourself may seem to come apart and, um, you may start to feel that the ends you are able to set rationally. Um, MAY not speak to you as an emotional being. This is quite central to both Kant and Hegel that. There's a kind of emotional deficit as society is expecting us to behave more and more rationally. In order to be a fully operative member of a rational kind of techno-scientific society, we feel that we become more and more split beings. Um, WE feel that our whole emotional life becomes left out and you see a kind of crisis in that culminating for, for example in. The need for psychoanalysis, for example, which kind of starts to address this lost dimension of human life, the feelings, the desires, and so on and so forth. We also a form of fragmentation to do with, um, the, the relationship between individuals and society, or the relationship between individuals and nature in general, um, privatization, this new bourgeoisie feels, um. Disconnected from uh. You know, communities in some kind of deeper and more involving sense. It's about you and your success or your failure, and, uh, you have to deal with risk in a new way in this new bourgeois capitalist society. Risk is individualized. It's, it's more like, how do you cope with the demands on you in terms of securing a good education. Doing well on the market, getting the right job and so on and so forth. In pre-modern societies, risk was very often very collective. It had to do with the whole community and the whole community represented risk in terms of the community. So if someone fell ill, it was sort of a threat to the community and the community took responsibility. Whereas in modernity, we're very, very individualized in terms of our understanding of risk. And that also relates to secularization because of course, in a more religious worldview, risk is a more communal type of commitment and experience. Um, So, um. I I see in 19th century intellectual life a yearning for more meaningful frameworks that can unite people. With themselves. To become more fully united beings, but also beings who can unite meaningfully with the community and with, with nature, um, this also translates into ethics and moral philosophy and being able to act morally in a meaningful way, to be able to set oneself goals as I was touching on that. Express my sense of solidarity with older people. Not just acting rationally on my own imperatives, but acting morally such as to feel at home with my community. To act such as to receive recognition from all the people. In the pre-modern religious society, there were ways to act. Morally right that. We obviously receiving recognition from the community. You know, there were staked out paths that the religious community had for you, and education was very tailored to understanding what the right path of life was for you. Ultimately, right, that right path of for the individual was the path of God's will for the individual, and God's will was never to isolate the individual from the community. But to see yourself as acting meaningfully within God's own community. So all this has kind of like deep implications both for your self-understanding. Um, As more than just irrational, self-interested, um. Maximizer of goods and also for your sense of connection and meaning. There is a deep sense of nihilism in 19th century intellectual life, a sense of, well, I mean, what are actually the deepest values of life. Perhaps with the death of God we feel a real sense of confusion. This becomes very dramatically expressed in Nietzsche, of course, he says, you know. In the 125th aphorism of the gay science, you have. You have this crazy man who runs into the um. Village and cries, you know, God is dead, uh, we are now faced with absolute confusion. Absolute confusion about what really counts in life, what really matters in life, and what are the Highest values as Nietzsche expresses it.

40:22 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, SO do you think that there's good enough evidence, and of course all of the studies related to this have some limitations to them, but do you think that there's, uh, good enough evidence that religion, uh, across the globe is on the decline or could even go extinct, at some point in the future?

40:49 Espen Hammer: Yeah, I mean, I think for this question we have to distinguish between sociological predictions, which are always extremely unreliable, and, uh, secularism as a more normative orientation. I mean, I think sociologists today don't really think that it's likely that religion will more or less go away. It was predicted that the secularization thesis predicted that it would go away, that modernization would just continue to just. Conducted on felt on religion leading up to some point in the more or less near future, many people believed in the mid or early 20th century in which religion would just disappear. Um, THAT has not been the case. Religion has taken new forms, it has become much more individualistic. Um, THERE'S fragmentation and so on and so forth, but what deserves to be called religion is certainly not disappearing, and in fact, I think you see today. Many people and groups are looking for uh, a kind of return to religion. You see this in the right-wing movements in Europe and in the United States, for example, you know, a new interest in um more authoritarian forms of religion. It's interesting here in the United States, young men are, are keen to get involved with Russian Orthodox Church. Which is quite unbelievable. I mean, very few sociologists would have predicted anything like this 2030 years ago. But then on the other hand, you have, you know, more overt secularists like Dawkins that we mentioned and you have people like Richard Rorty, for example, who said, you know, in the 80s that I think there's a good reason. To see people coming to understand that we should get rid of religion. That we ought to get rid of it just as we ought to become adults. It was about maturity for Rory to become a mature human being, so you just have to leave this behind. I think that that view is um probably less. Often expressed today, that people have more respect for religion and they just don't see religion as Childish in the way that people tended to see maybe 30, 40 years ago, this kind of very robust secularism, I think. Is weaker today than it has been. Right.

43:27 Ricardo Lopes: Um, SO this is something that you've already touched on a bit earlier, but do you think that the conflict that, uh, certain people say is inevitable between religion and secularism more if we want to just reduce it to the epistemology between science and religion? Do you think that that is really inevitable?

43:54 Espen Hammer: I think it's inevitable if you take the Dawkins view and you construe religion as some sort of epistemic pursuit of truth. For certainty, if you do that, which I think is a complete misunderstanding of religion, I mean I think so many people have shown very successfully that this is not what religion is all about, but if that's your understanding of religion, um, then I think that the conflict between religion and secularism is always going to be inevitable because, uh, Uh, Then they seem to be competing over the good of truth, the good of central, important truth. For example, on that view, there will always be these competitions over, Um, the emergence of humankind, for example, on the, on the one hand you have secularists who believe in Darwin and Um, And biological, um, development and on the other hand, you have religious people who are going to believe, you know, that human beings were just created at some point, you know, whether it's 6000 years ago or 600,000 years ago, um, but they wouldn't believe in natural selection. But this is a marginal view, and I don't think it's a very common view. So if you take a more a more reasonable view and you say, well, they're actually not really in competition, and I don't see the conflict as being so inevitable. I think it's always going to be, there's always going to be conflicts between different types of morality and different kinds of moral systems that spring from. Secularism and religion, right, but I think, um, there are ways of conducting dialogue, and many philosophers nowadays are interested in how to conduct this dialogue. Even the Pope or the recent popes have been interested in these kinds of dialogues. They've been interested in ways to translate religion into more secular terms for use, for example, in politics. This is central to both Charles Taylor and. Especially Jurgen Harbor Mass, I think there are problems with the idea of translation. Uh, I mean, if you are religion, religious, and you're asked to completely translate your terms into a secular register in order to use it, for example, in parliament, then, well, what's left of your religion? I think there's all clear limits to translation, but I nevertheless think that translation is. Necessary. You see this for example in debates over abortion. I mean, uh, religious people are going to, to some extent, uh, translate their, uh, terms to make their views justifiable within the, the secular, uh, uh, settings of, uh. Modern politics, for example, although they may have a principle which is religious, uh, they are going to have to, uh, add other arguments and other terms to this fundamental religious principle that they're using.

47:06 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so we're about to start talking about how each of the philosophers whose work you explore in your book approached religion and what they tried to do with it, but what do you think that philosophers from Kent to Nietzsche tried to do with. RELIGION more generally, I mean, I know that earlier you mentioned that they have, or at least most of them have criticisms of religion, particularly from a more rationalist perspective, but you also said that it seems that they were trying to rescue. Some aspects of religion that manifest socially to apply them to a more secular context. I mean, were those the main things they were trying to do with religion, or are there also some other common themes that run from Kent to Nietzsche?

48:10 Espen Hammer: Yeah, I think um the way people have traditionally approached the philosophy of religion in the post-Kantian tradition. Has been to say, well, look here, we have some interesting um attempts to understand religion and we have some interesting attempts to Criticize religion, of course it's very famously in the Critique of Pure Reason in which there's a whole chapter devoted to a critique of, uh, the proofs of the existence of God, um, but I add, uh, a dimension to this, and this is the dimension of rescue. I'm not saying that these philosophers necessarily try to Kind of rescue religion in its totality or rescue Christianity in its totality, but I'm saying that they're trying to rescue certain dimensions of religion, and this dimension I've already touched upon, I mean they have to do with um, Uh, questions of meaning, um. Uh, HOW to stave off different nihilistic forms of skepticism against conceptions of value or conceptions of moral bindingness, um. There are some really, I mean, Hegel is the one who gets closest to actually trying, at least nominally to rescue Christianity. But we can get back to Hegel in a, in a little bit, but um the old philosophers are much more skeptical of religion and only want. To rescue something which is. For them expressible in more, well, in more secular terms. I mean Hegel also expresses religion in secular terms, but he believes he can kind of hold on to Christianity by reinterpreting Christianity in philosophical terms. Right. So it's critique and rescue, which are the kind of like the dual focus. That I have on these philosophers.

50:18 Ricardo Lopes: So let's start with Kent then, which is actually the origin of all of this. I mean, the, the others that come after him are post-Kantian German philosophers. So, uh what did he actually have to say about religion?

50:39 Espen Hammer: Yeah, it's uh comes as a very interesting figure and it's kind of a paradigmatic figure for me in terms of this critique and rescue. Strategy, um. He came quite late to religion. He published a book called Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason when he was very, very old, um, so it's a difficult book to read. It, it has, there are marks in this book of, uh, high age. I think many people would say, uh, some complicated passages and sometimes obscure passages. He had a religious upbringing and people are experts on um. Point to that, um, some people say, well, he actually was a very secular philosopher. Other people say, well, actually the religious impulse was alive in him throughout. And of course he says in the introduction to critical purism that he wants to save religion from freethinking as he calls it. And he thinks that his transcendental idealism can give him a path by means of which he can do that. By distinguishing between the world of um the natural necessity and natural order and the world of freedom which escapes this. World of mechanical necessary order, but in any event, um, Kant in his moral philosophy, you know, he's very focused on duty and the moral law, but he's also interested in happiness and he has a conception of the highest good. The summum bonum. Many people who only read his uh groundwork don't really get to the summum bonum because uh he doesn't, he hardly refers to the summum bonum in the groundwork, and most students of his moral philosophy only read the groundwork and not the critique of practical reasoning which the summum bonum becomes very central. But the simum bonum or the highest good is happiness insofar as or to the extent that it is morally deserved. Some thinks that happiness, if it's not morally deserved, can never be an unconditional good. I mean you can be, you can have happy devils. Um, IT cannot be unconditionally good that they're happy. It has to be morally deserved. And he thinks that ultimately we have a kind of duty to promote this kind of happiness, and there's a hope that comes with this kind of happiness. That this kind of happiness is possible for us, especially if we think of ourselves as morally deserving, then we have a kind of rational reason to hope that this happiness will be. For us And he even toys with the idea that motivation in morality does require a sense of This happiness as being possible if we were to think that. Moral behavior just. Tended or very often. Tended to just lead to happiness to people who actually act on duty, unhappiness, then it would be very hard to motivate ourselves to act morally. And in a world that seems very dark for morality, in a world that makes Horrible man-created events like Auschwitz possible. Happiness seems to be dealt a blow. Why even act morally in such an evil world? What's the point of acting morally? So context that is kind of like hope for happiness is actually quite central to moral life, we have to have that hope. And he believes that for that hope to really have any kind of real meaning, we have to believe in some kind of just moral order, a moral order in which there's a point in acting morally, in which acting morally leads to good consequences. And for that to make sense, he thinks that we have to postulate as a pure practical postulate of reason that there's a God that guarantees that vouchers for this. Moral order. And he even thinks that we have to postulate immortality. As moral agents, immortality as the infinite possibility of moral striving to perfect itself and to reach some sort of deserved bliss. Um, OR salvation. So that's a, that's an extremely, um, one-sided view of. Christianity. Kant thinks that this is what Christianity was all about in the first place. Most readers of Kant will say, well, this is a moralization of religion, which is very one-sided, but it is a way for Kant to rescue religion. To show that religion is possible insofar as we postulate freedom, the possibility of acting morally, um, thanks to transcendental idealism. We're able to hold each other responsible in the moral sense and hence these postulates of God and immortality follow from that postulation of ourselves as the moral agents. So he criticizes. The idea that we can have any knowledge of of God, but he thinks that with morality we have to postulate the idea of God, so he rescues this idea as a postulate. It's, it's interesting because um. It's so different from Hume, for example, who really deals Christianity, uh, blow after blow with his criticism of Christianity as a set of epistemic beliefs. Yeah,

57:02 Ricardo Lopes: I remember reading about those ideas from Kent when I read the Critique of Practical Reason, because it's interesting that some of the what he calls the anti-gomeies that he presents in the Critique of Pure Reason, like for example, not being able to Know whether God exists or not or whether there's life after death or immortal life. I mean, actually, uh, he vouches for the necessity of both of those things from a moral perspective as he does in the critical practical reason and other works. So, uh, what was the Kantian compromise?

57:51 Espen Hammer: Well, just to pick up one thing that you were saying right now, I mean, Kant goes very far in arguing that even religious authority flows from human moral authority. So he says at one place, even in the groundwork, he says, you know, why should we see uh Christ as a moral, uh, authority? Why is he setting an example for humankind and why should we try to imitate some of his, I mean, we can never be Christ, but you know, it's a long tradition of trying to imitate Christ. Why would we even do that? And he says it's not because Christ is himself. A moral authority. It is because we No, we have the standard in ourselves in the form of the moral law, and when we apply the moral law to Christ, we see that he is perfection, we see that he is moral perfection, and this has led people to say, well, actually, This is Kant's atheism. He thinks that we have to come on stage in order to make Christ a moral authority. Uh, WHICH is fascinating. It shows how far he goes in making religion a human, a kind of addendum to the human interest in morality. I don't think it makes him uh into an atheist, but I think he pushes religious religion as far as he can in order to set it on a completely new foundation. And he does this precisely through this, as you mentioned, the Kantian Compromise that he draws, using his doctrine of transcendental idealism. He feels entitled to be able to draw a distinction between the world of science and you know, technology, the world that we know from, from and understand via Newtonian science, a world of necessary causal relations, set that apart from a world in which we are able to be moral agents, in which we can attribute. Consistently freedom to each other. We don't know that this world of freedom exists, but. We can postulate freedom because We see ourselves as moral agents, and we have the. Good reason as these moral agents that we are to postulate freedom as the condition. Of acting morally. And hence, uh, the idea of God follows ultimately from seeing ourselves as moral agents in this way.

1:00:35 Ricardo Lopes: So moving on to Hegel then, you mentioned earlier that at least in your view among all of the philosophers and intellectuals that whose work we're going to explore here when it comes to the topic of religion. Uh, YOU mentioned that, uh, in your view, he was probably the only one who actually tried to rescue Christianity itself. So, uh, tell us more about that and what kind of approach did he have to religion more generally.

1:01:14 Espen Hammer: Yeah, I mean you have the young Hegel, um, who, um, is quite nostalgic, who seems to mourn the loss of religion, and he seems to express this mournfulness in a kind of nostalgia for Greek classical religion to a large extent. Of course he was a Christian, but many of these Christian friends of his, people like Hilderin for example, and Schelling and so on, even though they were Christian, they were also interested in the Greek pantheon. And Hegel in particularly was interested in this, and he felt that this was a much more social form of religion that we had lost in modernity, that is glue that religion was for the classical ancient Greeks, um, this element of social solidarity had been lost. So he's, he was interested in trying to think about ways to kind of resuscitate that in modernity. He thought for a little while as a very young man that if we could could transpose the French Revolution to Germany. And do the French Revolution in a way, in a kind of republican way that could reconstitute communities in a kind of very free. Manner Then perhaps we could restore some of the sense of community and solidarity that had been lost. But gradually around the turn of the century, around 1800, roughly, he basically gave up that and started to think that. This kind of nostalgia doesn't make sense. We have to think. From the vantage point of modernity, and the vantage point of modernity is certainly not one in which we can rescue ancient Greek. Uh, RELIGIOUS life. We have Christianity, but Christianity is a dying breath. It has become subjectivized for Hegel. It has become. Uh, ALMOST, as I mentioned earlier, you know, a kind of lifestyle, uh, style of expression in people like Yakubi, who he sees as a kind of strange Christian nihilist. Who thinks that Faith is just this completely subjective, uh, uh. Involvement, you know, having no attachment to any external form of expression. Mhm. Um, AND he saw that as really too weak to in any way to, to rescue anything like Christianity. He continued to be a Christian. But he started to believe that Christianity could be, could be given a kind of religious, uh, I'm sorry, a, a kind of Uh, philosophical expression and that's what happens in the phenomenology of spirit in 1807 and then gradually in the whole system that he starts to develop a little later and that is expressed in this encyclopedia of the philosophical Sciences that he writes, you know, in the, in 18. 1314, 15, this vast encyclopedic system. And there he thinks that Christianity can um Yes, can be given a kind of full, um. Philosophical articulation that can rescue all the important elements of Christianity while disposing of the more mythological, uh, what he thinks of as representational, not fully conceptual elements, you know, so he thinks that religion is typically kind of expressed in images. In various forms of representations that are just authoritatively handed over to individuals by, you know, by scripture and by priests and so on and so forth. What we need in modernity and modernity requires it is rational justification, and he actually believes that his system can give a kind of rational justification of it. And he toys with the idea that the monarch state. In a sense, it's an expression of what religion. Is fully rationally articulated.

1:05:47 Ricardo Lopes: So, and then later, later on with philosophers like Feuerbeck and Marx, compared to Hegel, and of course we have to say here that Marx was very, uh, Marx himself at least was very much influenced by Hegel and in his younger years, uh, as a young man, he was a Hegelian and there's some Aspects of Marxism that where we can actually see some Hegelian elements there, but compared to Marx, how did Feuerbach's and Marx's approach to religion differ from his? I mean, what was their social critique of religion?

1:06:37 Espen Hammer: Well, I think they, they, they clearly, they, they clearly continue the Hegelian project of, in a sense to try to. Translate religion and kind of pull religion down from its metaphysical pinnacle. Hegel already starts to see religion in fairly prosaic terms. He believes that religion will continue in churches and so on and so forth, but it's not going to have much of an authority. The authority of religion will be for the philosophers to really understand in purely conceptual terms. Um, Feibach holds what I call a projection view. It's affiliated with Hegel's view. In that he wants to conduct a kind of dialectical critique of religion. He's, he wants to show that Religion sets up. Oppositions that are ultimately false oppositions between human life and divine life oppositions between Human love and divine love and so on and so forth, we project our ideals, ideals that are actually fully human, onto some imagined super sensible realm. So we have a certain conception of what love is. Um We think then of love in terms of some sort of perfection. We have some sort of view of what would count as love in its fully actualized state. And then we associate that with something that exceeds humanity and exceeds full human grasp that we can only hope for and that only a god in a sense could ultimately vouch for. Same with justice, for example, we think of justice and we think of human justice, but then we also think that there must be ultimately some sort of divine justice that always exceeds what humans can bring about in terms of justice. You know, we can only have, we can only bring about limited justice, but never absolute justice. Uh, WE can never fully pay back, you know. The people, the innocents who are, are dead, for example, who are killed, we can never get them back unless there's an absolute justice that can bring them back to us. So hence we have this belief in some absolute justice. We keep on projecting these ideals onto uh. The super sensible, we say they cannot be sensible, so they have to be super sensible, that's fundamentally Feibach's view. And Feib's strategy is, I mean it's a well-known strategy, he says, well, actually the genealogy of these ideals are human, we can trace them back to humanity. It's we who have had interest in the absolute actualization of these ideals, and now it's time to see that they are human, all too human to use, uh, Nietzsche's, uh, expression. Uh, EVERYTHING in Feuerbach is human. He is this radical humanist. So We should try to create society in the name of these ideals that have been falsely projected into the beyond. The projection, projection has been a form of um alienation. So religion is all about alienation for for and uh overcoming alienation is something that we can do. It is something that requires um thinking and reflection. But it also requires a certain kind of shift of social norms and maybe an overcoming of the kind of society in which these norms, uh, and these, uh, demands for actualization are prevalent. If we can create a society in which there's more solidarity, then the demand for, uh, divine love becomes less pressing, press, pressing. If we can create a society in which there's more justice, then the demand for absolute justice may, uh, recede. Uh, AT least to some extent. This was Frebach's, um, kind of measured optimism. But Marx criticizes for about for not really having a very sophisticated view of how social change can bring this about and even to really fully understand how these ideals and why they're projected beyond. Have happened. Marx thinks that this is fundamentally to do with the way society itself operates. It's not. Mostly to do with self misunderstandings, that's worry about things. It's to do with society, so. Whereas Feibach believes in projection as the kind of explanatory um dimension of religion. Marx sees religion as ideology and famously says, you know, that um religion is a form of opium. Yeah, it's an ideology. It's an opium for the masses, he says in his most famous, uh, statement about religion. Religion makes us feel good even though we shouldn't feel good. It creates a kind of conciliatory glow that's cast upon society that makes us forget injustice. Because we believe that there is justice in store for us in the beyond in heaven. So we start to accept what shouldn't be accepted. That's the ideological function in Marx and Marxists this as A social function. And since it is a social function. Ideology that is, it can also be overcome socially and therefore the critique of religion should be a social critique and not just merely um you know, a critique of self-reflection. Or or a form of self-reflection, I mean. Mhm

1:13:09 Ricardo Lopes: So, er, when it comes to Nietzsche, how did he approach religion, and I mean, one very interesting thing about N Nietzsche is that he. I mean, in a sense, didn't spare anyone from criticism because he had harsh criticism or harsh critics of religion, but he also criticized at least some aspects of the Enlightenment and associated, for example, also the ascetic ideal with what scientists do and, um, I mean, searching for or looking for truth with a capital T. I mean that's. Uh, ALSO a form of. Religious kind of or or religious like thinking. So, uh, I mean, uh what, what do you have to say about Nietzsche in terms of how he approached religion approached religion, but also in terms of his views of uh secularism.

1:14:15 Espen Hammer: It's a big topic because Nietzsche was obsessed with religion, uh, from the get-go. I mean, he had a very religious upbringing. He had plans to become a minister. Um, I see him as both criticizing religion and to a greater extent than all the other philosophers in this tradition I'm looking at. Trying actually to restore some genuine religious religious sentiments, um. With regard to the Enlightenment, I mean, he adopts some forms of Enlightenment critique of religion. He's quite interested in the ways in which religion can be oppressive, lead people to lead stultified, uh, lives. Um, HE criticized the Enlightenment for. Um, Not being able to really generate new values. Um, BUT he does see the Enlightenment as successfully criticizing certain aspects of religion construed in epistemic terms. So for example, some of the criticism of religion like For instance, he, he criticizes people who. ARGUES, for example, that if God is good, then the world must be ordered and then they. CONDUCT a logical fallacy, they say, well, the, the world does seem order. There does seem to be a lot of order in the universe, hence there must be a, a good, good God that stands behind it. That's a social fallacy. Um There may be other reasons why it's ordered. You cannot, uh, even though you believe in the implication that a good God creates an ordered universe that doesn't entitle you to infer from the order of the universe to the good God. It may just simply be that the universe is, is ordered because of scientific. Realities. Uh, SO he, he, he does embark on some of these kinds of enlightenment criticisms of religion. Yes, the criticisms of the shortcomings of faith construed epistemologically. Um But more interestingly, he criticizes Christianity itself. He thinks that Christianity itself harbors a kind of latent nihilism. And that is interesting and very original. Christianity, um, brings about its own ending. And its own ending is for everyone to see, he thinks. Why? Well, Christianity is incapable of creating. Values, it has had values and these values have been central and centrally organizing for Western culture. But these values are undermining, they're undercutting meaningful human life. Because these values have to do with self-abnegation, they have to do with um. Boeing before some sort of absolute authority and undermining. Natural human vitality and life and creativity and self-overcoming. Mhm. In Christianity, we seek to Make ourselves as little as possible. We seek to emphasize our lack of power, our lack of glory, um, we see ourselves as, as limited as possible, um. As, as the merely human beings that we are, and we stake our hopes only in salvation. And that's very, very self-undermining according to Nietzsche. So he's interested in a form of religiosity which can restore this kind of natural creativity and self-overcoming and he heroism and social solidarity and beauty. And that is the Dionysian. Kind of take he has on the Um, Ancient Greek religion. It's interesting that he stands in this tradition of being interested, going back to the romantics, and like we talked about how even Hegel was interested in this in his youth. This Interested in interest in ancient. Greek Religiosity, but. Nietzsche's Approach is different from each other's in that he's so focused on Dionysus as a figure. I mean Dionysus is a demigod. He's, he's not a really a full god. I mean he's the. He's the child of the tryst. Between Seus and Sema. Semila, of course, was a. Human being Mhm. Um, SO Dionysus is half human being, but he has his followers, his mainance, these women. And the following of Dionysis is truly transgressive. It's socially transgressive, and Nietzsche thinks that they are in a sense. Restoring a kind of sociality in which. Well, I mean Bourgeois individuality is certainly fully overcome in a in a kind of ecstatic, playful. Uh, FORM of self overcoming, and that's what he in a sense is toying with, you know. Can we restore any of this kind of musical self-transgression in modernity? He has some kind of wild idea that Wagner's operas can do this. But he becomes disenchanted with Wagnerian operas and gradually starts to believe that that is not the truly dynasty and form of religio religiosity that he was hoping for. He sees sees too much of traditional religiosity and Christianity surviving in. In Wagner. I was in New York a couple of days ago to see Tristan and Isolde, and I certainly felt that, yes, in that play, the religiosity is certainly very um Obvious and the Schopenhauerian dimension, the. Quest for. Redemption of all human life. The overcoming of human life is very strong. The libers taught in, uh, Tristan is very, very central in this, uh, opera. The. Uh Idea that in order to receive or attain full bliss, we have to overcome human life and its limitations. Death in a sense is the solution to the problem of life. That's not Nietzsche's view, nature's view is life is the solution to life. We have to find ways to live life. Better and more to the full than we do in rational modernity, and that seems to be his kind of take on religion. Mhm.

1:22:10 Ricardo Lopes: So since Nietzsche, how have philosophers and other thinkers approached religion?

1:22:22 Espen Hammer: Well, um, the interest in religious, religious has certainly continued. Throughout the 20th century in philosophy, although, I would say that with the strong impact of um, Pragmatism, naturalism, certain forms of very anti-metaphysical naturalist, uh, sorry, analytic philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. These schools of philosophy have taken very little interest in religion. Uh, AND see religion as best as an object of mere critique and been not very interested in, in rescuing any dimensions of relig religiosity. I think really. It's at the end of the 20th century in which you see a real recurrence, and a reorientation in philosophy, especially in German philosophy, but also in some French philosophy. In which philosophers, philosophers have started to return to religion and started to Take an interest in how religion has actually shaped both philosophy and modern culture and have started to do some of the things that I'm doing in this book, namely precisely to think about religion in somewhat more positive terms, not just as an optical critique. But as a. Source. For thinking about morality, thinking about human life, thinking about the overcoming of nihilism. Thinking about given solidarity and thinking about meaning in ways that are more productive than what we often. See in the more straightforward, rational and rationalist forms of uh um. Uh, uh, PHILOSOPHICAL thinking. Mhm.

1:24:16 Ricardo Lopes: So I have one last question then, and earlier when I asked you whether religion is actually on the decline, you mentioned, for example, the fact that er in Europe, at least it seems that many young men particularly are turning toward more authoritarian. In forms of politics and religion, and we also see that for example among the so-called mega movement in the US with figures like Trump and other people from his administration and also his links to evangelical Christianism, I mean, There are, uh, there's that link between conservatism or conservative forms of religion and politics, but do you think that even with those more recent developments, religion has become more progressive over time?

1:25:22 Espen Hammer: Yeah, I think it's a mixed picture. I think, uh, it certainly has become more progressive in many different ways. It has the sort of if you look for example at the Northern European Protestant churches, I mean they have to such a large extent basically endorsed modern culture. They don't even discuss abortion any longer. They don't have worries about multiculturalism. They don't have worries about people expressing their sexual identities in ways that are non-binary, for example, any longer. There are women priests, uh, in most of these, uh. Uh, uh. Protestants, um. Churches and so on. But on the other hand, I think nowadays, as you rightly point out, I think there is a strong, more reactionary trend, uh, um, strangely, perhaps. Among young people and young men are interested, you see in parts of the so-called manosphere, you see many young people being interested in religion, and sometimes this interest in is expressed in purely identitarian terms. These are people who are quite desperately interested in being able to express some form of identity that they see as more binding and more traditional. And more significant than Let's say consumerist forms of identity, you know, they want something which has more oomph than, than that. It's not enough to just buy a pair of Levi's or have a pair of ski or do skiing in the Alps or something. It's about tying up with some deep identity. So it's not that these men necessarily believe in some sort of supernatural, super sensible God or some kind of divine, but they feel very strongly that there's something here that they ought to. Connected. And um if I were to speculate, I think that this trend may just probably just continue, especially under the influence of AI that makes people perhaps Well, could lead to an even stronger. Uh Even backlash, I mean a kind of desperate need to express identity. I mean, there's AI really is. Going to take over more and more people's. Self-reflection, more and more of their formation of a sense of identity, if you keep asking AI or more and more often for, Moral advice or lifestyle advice or advice about. Existential types of belief. Well, I think you may reach a point in which you're feeling quite lost in this process and you feel the need to connect to something which is outside of these forms of information gathering and information imposing. And um What kinds of political forms this will take, I think it's for the future to see, but right now I think We're certainly seeing a lot of reactionary politics coming out of this. Just as this craving for religion saw reactionary forms of politics coming out of it in the 1930s, for example, you know, in which totalitarian politics took on quite quasi-religious forms. Both in, you know, more extreme forms of Marxism, but also of course in fascism that took on clear religious hues and forms in various ways, ways, and which was clearly exploited politically along these terms. You know, in the Nuremberg rallies, for example, that clearly used religious, uh, uh, forms of, uh, expression in order to gather people's, uh, gather momentum politically and Make people subscribe and identify with this movement. So it's dangerous to want to rescue dimensions of religion in my view. But I also see that it may be um worthwhile and interesting and useful in if done in ways. That are morally acceptable and that can align better with what we can recognize as In my view, more liberal orientations in politics. And that's also one reason why I'm returning to this kind of post-content tradition because I think They offer ways of returning to religion and rescuing elements of religion that Do not. Just. Crash into this. Difficult. I think deeply problematic form of political reaction that we often see. Kant and Hegel and Marx and even Nietzsche at his best, I think, are trying to steer a different course, a course. Which hopefully can be more compatible with modernity and not as reactionary.

1:31:02 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so, um, the book is again after the Death of God, Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kent to Nietzsche. I will be leaving a link to it in the description of the interview, and Dr. Hammer, uh, just before we go apart from the book, are there any places on the internet where people can find you and your work?

1:31:29 Espen Hammer: Um. I do have a website. They may just search for my website. Uh, I do have a temple. Uh, UNIVERSITY website as well, um, where they can search for, um, my personal website. Um, SO yeah, I mean, if people want to look up a little bit more and get some more information about the kind of work I do, then, uh, yes, that's where they may want to look.

1:31:59 Ricardo Lopes: OK, uh, we'll include that in the description of the interview and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a fascinating conversation.

1:32:10 Espen Hammer: Thanks a lot, Ricardo. It's been an honor to be with you.

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