Abstract
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han emphasizes the necessity of calm for profound thinking. As a prominent figure in European philosophy, Han’s popularity arises not only from his tranquil approach but also from his prolific publishing that mirrors the societal acceleration he critiques. While he adeptly blends public philosophy with classical social critique, addressing issues like stress, depression, and information overload, Han’s categorization of societal aspects as strictly good or bad may simplify understanding but occasionally weakens his persuasiveness. This essay aims to outline and scrutinize key aspects of Han’s thought.
‘Thinking demands calm. Thinking is an expedition into quietness,’ writes the Korean-born but Germany-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han in The Agony of Eros (2017).
During the last decade, Han–a professor of philosophy and cultural studies at the Universität der Künste in Berlin–has become one of the most read philosophers in Europe. This prominence is not just due to his calm thinking. More importantly, it also stems from his publishing at a frequency that matches the rapid acceleration of the society he criticizes and his writing for the privileged European or Western upper middle class.
Han’s work blends public philosophy with classical social critique. He addresses issues that interest non-academic audiences, such as stress, depression, information overloads, social media, fake news and porn. His critiques, moreover, are innovative yet conventional. For example, his novel labels for society often help readers see problems more clearly. Still, he also takes a traditional approach to categorising everything as either good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Han’s thinking characteristically holds that society never seems good and evil or beautiful and ugly. This either-or approach makes his writing more straightforward to understand. However, it makes Han less convincing at times.
In this essay, I will both outline and problematize elements of Han’s work.
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The main villain in Han’s work is neoliberalism. It has made politics psychological by seeing emotions as a resource to achieve higher production and performance, as he writes in Psychopolitics (2017b). This claim is not new; for example, the literate Michael Hardt addressed a similar issue in his essay entitled ‘Affective Labor’ (1999), where he illustrates how effects have moved from being used in the anticapitalistic project to becoming part of capitalism itself, as when social relations and emotions are being commoditized.
The conclusion is clear: the neoliberal logic has invaded our minds, affecting our ability to be present in our lives, think freely, and love.
Han’s notion of neoliberalism correlates with Hardt’s as well as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s essay entitled ‘Post-Script on Control Societies’ (1995), where he speaks of ‘societies of control,’ which, unlike the disciplinary society of Michel Foucault and their principal techniques of enclosure (e.g., schools, factories, families), play with our mind through the instantaneous communication. According to Deleuze, the best way to resist is not to communicate.
In continuation, in The Transparency Society (2015), Han proposes that, although we (i.e., Western people in general) are forced or coerced into participating in ongoing positive communication, constantly declaring, “I like,” even when we don’t. In a subtle way, many are being seduced, manipulated, and controlled with the result that they suffer—falsely, many believe they have freely chosen to do what they have been tempted to do. They act like a well-dressed narcissist. ‘Depression is a narcissistic malady,’ Han writes in The Agony of Eros. ‘Depression represents the impossibility of love,’ he continued before stating, ‘Love is the only thing that may conquer our contemporary depression’ (Han, 2017).
Han says that love is the answer. I believe he is right. The problem with the narcissist is that the person is not really in love with him, her, or herself; instead, with an idealistic illusion the person has created about themselves. The narcissist’s self-image is typically modulated after what gives status, prestige, money, and power in a neoliberal society.
For this reason, narcissism is exhausting.
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In 2010, Han entered the philosophical scene when he published the book Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. The German word Müdigkeit is closer to fatigue or exhaustion than merely being tired. In the English translation, the title is The Burnout Society (2015).
The etymology is important because Han addresses a society that is not merely tired, as I can be tired after performing physical exercises; somewhat, the exhausted are drained in the sense that the idea of possibility disappears. The future horizons evaporate. The weary are literally done – nothing is possible – whereas a tired person simply needs a rest.
The exhausted cannot fully take part in the critical and attentive work required to turn information into knowledge or develop intimate, friendly, and erotic relationships; instead, the person blindly swallows any kind of news and turns to porn for quick satisfaction. Thus, although such exhausted people are biologically alive, they lack actual existence. In short, exhausted people are not responsible human beings.
According to Han, this exhaustion comes from being irresponsible consumers 24-7 rather than responsible citizens. ‘Responsibility for the community defines citizens. Consumers lack responsibility, above all,’ he writes in In the Swarm (2018).
For the same reason, The Burnout Society describes philosophy as ‘an intervening time,’ a time of ‘non-doing,’ and a peacetime.’ The concept of ‘non-doing’ resembles elements of Buddhism and mindfulness in that not doing anything allows matters to unfold at their own pace. I like this idea – though it’s unclear whether Han is referring to ‘non-doing’ as an absolute choice – a way of being with whatever happens; or whether ‘non-doing’ is understood as a relative choice that makes it closer to traditional self-help literature, for example, where ‘non-doing’ becomes a clear opposition to a complex and accelerating world. I am unsure where to place him, although I lean to the latter in my reading of him.
Han favors stability, solid roots, character conservation, and order. This makes him attractive to the privileged upper Western middle class.
Yet, some questions emerge: How can a person know when to do nothing if the person is not encouraged to engage in introspection? Is the troubled self an essence, as Han appears to believe, or a constant process of becoming another, as in Buddhism?
However, in my observations, I am confident that philosophical self-knowledge has nothing to do with narcissism. On the contrary, it is the best way to overcome the classical narcissistic self-deception by paying attention to how I am affected by the outside and vice versa. For example, asking whether what happens makes me more robust or weaker brings joy or sadness, not according to an objective but as a life force here and now. Furthermore, this relates to how I might become worthy of what takes place, and—most importantly—when what happens challenges my beliefs, assumptions, or habits, how do I respond responsibly. Do I cling to my beliefs and ego, or do I go where the intensities and movements that characterize life bring me?
I prefer philosophical thinking that is calm but unstable, clear but without order, that creates new forms of life instead of building character.
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Han’s style of thinking is simple. It is poetic, at best, but it is also preachy and demagogical. Sometimes, his writing resembles George Orwell’s narrative style in 1984. For example, Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals (2020, 1) that ‘rituals are symbolic acts,’ ‘rituals stabilize life,’ and ‘a smartphone is not a thing.’
More critically, Han’s dualism makes him overlook what is also at stake in our current society. For instance, social media are not just venues for narcissistic behavior but also means to share knowledge or cultivate political movements, like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Although the Internet and social media can distract many from contemplative thought, they can also make people aware of the complexity of a concept such as equality in contemporary politics.
In Works of Love (1847), the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard elaborates on the remark, ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’ He speaks about our duty to do so. He makes love something normative. He claims that far too many people understand the term ‘your neighbor’ as referring to a particular identity such as ‘my people,’ ‘my gender,’ ‘my nation,’ or ‘my faith.’ Yet, for Kierkegaard, ‘your neighbor’ refers to all people: women or men, gender neutrals or transpersons, black or white, and people of all religions. His morale is evident: If we are not free, we cannot love everyone. An unfree person is one fueled by hate or discrimination, for example, when someone thinks that X is better than Y.
Why do I mention Kierkegaard with Han? Because when Kierkegaard claims that ‘love is,’ he makes love ontological. Furthermore, he postulates that love is edifying; it builds. He then proceeds to say that although some people experience more than others, we have all experienced enough to know love’s power—what Kierkegaard refers to as edifying or healing—and once we have enjoyed the fruit of love, it is our duty to share it as much as we can within our limits.
So, yes, the Internet is filled with shallow influencers and candyfloss statements that don’t provoke any thinking, and yet, there is also room for genuine care, compassion, and empathy.
Today, more and more people are spending most of their lives in a virtual world, where they—next to being entertained—occasionally get moved, affected, or pushed into thinking. It seems harsh only to focus on the distractions and lack of serious attention and contemplation, as Han tends to.
Technology is, therefore, neither purely bad nor purely good; it is good and bad, depending on how it’s used, just like everything else. A knife can kill but also pill an apple. Perhaps the real issue is not regarding AI, the Internet, or porn, but that many people are bored due to their comfortable, privileged, and far too predictable lifestyle where you can only dream of getting more affluent, more known, and powerful.
More fundamentally, I disagree with Han on metaphysical grounds. In a metaphysical context (what lies beyond or beside physics), I read Han as continuing Heidegger’s category of ontotheology, which regards metaphysics as both ontology and theology. This perspective perceives the world as ordered by religion or at least some transcend ideal, order, or unchangeable truth. His philosophy tends to become a moral motivation rather than an invitation to think freely and for yourself.
I disagree with this aspect of a metaphysic of being because I believe instead in a metaphysics of change that organizes everything. My metaphysical beliefs, of course, affect how I understand freedom, ethics, and transcendence. For example, life is the process of becoming without any end goal or blueprints, whereas Han seems to assume that life does come with blueprints. This assumption is also what makes Han’s view moralizing.
In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han (2020) writes, ‘Ritual society is a society of rules … rules are not internalized. They are simply obeyed.’ In contrast, I believe that the strength of philosophy is closer to literature, where one has the power to say (and live) everything, to break free of the rules, to challenge and change them, to suspect the traditional differences between nature and culture, to question the idea that there is a universal method, or a fixed foundation or origin.
Deleuze and Felix Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) that Western philosophy has traditionally been’ arborescent’ or tree-like. The traditional idea is that one plants a seed and cultivates it. Han follows this time-honored tradition. For example, when he writes in The Disappearance of Rituals, ‘Culture is a form of closure, and so founds an identity’ (2020, 33). Culture imposes the verb ‘to be,’ according to Han.
In contrast—and here I follow Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic philosophy of becoming—the philosophy I speak in favor of is led by fluctuations; it observes the relations that it will regroup. In short, it connects; it does not separate. It is the constant conjunction, ‘and…and…and’.
For Han, this flow of movements, intensities, and forces of life are ‘ultimately destructive’; as he writes in The Disappearance of Rituals (2020), he claims that such a nomadic philosophy leads to a ‘cancerous proliferation of the same.’ In contrast, this results from his focus on the verb ‘to be,’ the fixation on cultural identity or universal truth. I would even use his books as empirical evidence, where he, with good intentions, sells the same message repeatedly.
Cultural identity is a fiction, Han would disagree, of course.
Instead of using the tree as a symbol or metaphor for knowledge (e.g., the tree of knowledge), Deleuze and Guattari speak about rhizomes—rootstalks. They do not have seeds but create horizontal alliances, connecting and breaking off. They grow again, but always differently. Such interconnective relations are ways of moving from place to place, one way of living to another, and so forth.
Han’s critique becomes too much like that of a hierarchical ivory tower academic. It is as if he lacks the empathy or imagination needed to imagine how life must be for many people living in an opportunistic and competitive society, in which securing food, shelter, or support for your loved ones is so draining that reading Peter Handke is swopped for Netflix, Bach for TikTok and tending your own garden for looking at photos at Instagram.
Instead of the classic question ‘What is truth?’, I recommend examining what it is that makes one experience more—that is, pay attention to what makes life real and intense, trying to become worthy of what happens, without judging beforehand, to evaluate life from what is produced, not whether it makes sense according to a fixed template. The guiding question for a more humble and explorative approach would be: ‘Which life is true?’ or ‘What makes a life true?’
Still, as a critical and sociological thinker, Han is innovative and sharp. Over the last ten years, he has given society many names: exhausted society, burnout society, porn society, psychic society, information society, transparent society, et cetera. In this respect, Han is similar to the sociologist Ulrich Beck. In 1992, Beck coined the term risk society, stressing that modern life entails risks, for example, due to the acceleration of all aspects of life, such as communication, knowledge sharing, career, and love affairs.
Different labels for society work as frames, placing ‘information’ or ‘porn’ under a critical lens to make a problem obvious. In thus using many labels, Han also—perhaps unwillingly—illustrates that society is complex and pluralistic, not simply either-or.
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Han uses his two guiding concepts in most books: freedom and power. They encapsulate the problem in our contemporary society (i.e., the misuse of freedom and power) and what opens up alternative ways of living our lives.
Freedom is the ability to become anything—that is, to disobey any power that tells us to be something specific. Yet absolute freedom, according to Han, is socially anchored. As he says in Psychopolitics (2017), ‘Freedom is a synonym for the community that succeeds.’ Later, in The Disappearance of Rituals (2020), he compares freedom to being with friends. I like to interpret this kind of freedom as feeling comfortable (i.e., being with friends) with being uncomfortable (i.e., being free to become whatever). Yet, by making freedom social, in line with theorists like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Han tries to relate freedom to a given truth or transcendent norms that we, each one of us, not only can but should agree upon.
Still, who decides what is true? For instance, the question of what something is leads to another question that Han does not discuss: Who decides? Yet, my experience is that consensus never guarantees truth. Han’s transcendent viewpoint tends not to grasp the different kinds of reality or ways of living within the reality of thought; he misses, I believe, pluralism, which stresses the importance of life from varying perspectives. In other words, Han is good at judging which lives are not accurate and beautiful according to his principles or some universal truth. Still, he is unconvincing as a compassionate thinker who tries to see beauty in lives that do not fit his moral judgment system. Judging how people live their lives separates because it lacks sensitivity regarding the form of life that a particular thought or feeling implies. I think that a more significant amount of tolerance towards different forms of life could help many to experience how we are all connected, call it a non-judgmental feeling of solidarity, which would illustrate how my well-being depends on another person’s well-being – that is, the wellbeing of all other human beings.
In Saving Beauty (2018), Han writes, ‘The smooth is the signature of the present time.’ It ‘connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing.’ Han speaks about the need to save beauty because he claims in his characteristic preachy and demagogical tone, ‘Beauty promises freedom and reconciliation,’ and ‘truth is freedom’ (2018). This world of smoothness is false; it’s a world of ‘post-truth.’ Ergo, the truth must be unclean, strange, and different. Yet, how do we distinguish between true and false? When is the messy truth and not just dirty? Are all iPhone owners and Brazilian-waxed people fake? Is ugliness always true? Does not such a notion risk romanticizing or idealizing ugliness?
Han only cares about such specific questions. Instead, he says answers can be found in beauty because they are accurate and reasonable. The Korean-born philosopher is turning Platonic—at least in the way that the French philosopher Alain Badiou is platonic. In both Saving Beauty and The Agony of Eros, Han ultimately advocates for Badiou’s idea that philosophy’s task is to be loyal or faithful toward whatever binds us together—truth, beauty, rituals, or things. ‘The saving of beauty is the saving of that which commits us,’ he writes in Saving Beauty (2018).
What about trust? What about the real problem of how we can believe in a world that is also stupid and ugly without simply judging it?
Critical thinkers like me might suggest that the rigid ideas of truth, rituals, and beauty of particular identity groups cause many of today’s conflicts. Many of these groups tend to exaggerate when they put other groups down to elevate their moral status.
Furthermore, some readers might ask whether something is beautiful because it commits us or whether something commits us because we have agreed about its beauty. Or, more polemically: Is what Han says the truth because he says it, or does he say it because it is the truth?
What strikes me as a reader is that even when Han calls for negativity—in contrast to the trend of smiling positivity and ‘Likes’ practiced on social media, business lingo, and self-help literature—by championing the unsmooth, the unclean and the dirty, his work includes no drug addicts, schizophrenics, prostitutes, thieves, internet piracy or even any of the many nationalistic fractions that pop up everywhere. What world does this intellectual live in?
Nevertheless, he insists that beauty will save us. The problem is not what is beautiful but whether people want to be saved by Han’s definition of beauty.
For instance, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write in What is Philosophy? that it is not the truth that motivates philosophy but categories such as the interesting, the remarkable, or the important. Seen in that light, it is not particularly interesting whether people wax or not, watch porn or not. Instead of seeing the truth as something changeless and universal in itself’ (Han, 2018), it could be related to concepts such as intensity and movement. What are specific experiences able to open people up to? How intense are they? Do they move—that is, alter, change, or transform? As Han says, beauty promises freedom and reconciliation, so why can I not befriend the difference? Is there not a beauty in accepting what happens, even something liberating?
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Back in 2015, when Han was still unknown, he published a book called The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. In this book, he shows that the Buddhist concept of nothingness—the absence of exclusive subjectivity—makes Buddhism pacifistic and non-violent because essence is lacking where power can be concentrated. Also, the idea of emptiness makes narcissism very un-Buddhistic. A Buddhist sees no unchangeable self in the mirror; instead, they are formed by life.
However, although Han is deeply inspired by Buddhism, he does not let the human being become anything. Some paths are too dirty, so he serves instead as a moral Hegelian guide towards perfection. His focus is still on the self. Although he is not part of the self-improvement craze guided by neoliberal status, prestige, and power, he still tells what the self ought to do (and not do). Han wants us to tend to our garden, delete our social media accounts, stop watching porn, and incorporate more playfulness and ritual into our lives. He wants us to become good, responsible citizens who consume meaningful art, not the empty calories of Jeff Koons’s balloons. Han wants us to dwell on things—real things—like handmade furniture, not mobile phones or computers. Han is a moral motivator.
In Buddhism, he writes, there are no miracles, only hard daily work. There is letting go of the past, not transcending or dreaming of a world beyond this one. He compares Buddhism with walking. Walking has no future. One is always walking. ‘To die means to walk,’ he says, emphasizing that we are constantly dying, just as Montaigne said that philosophizing is to die.
‘To die means to walk’ is a beautiful sentence, but is it true? Perhaps no more than to die means to sleep, make love, eat, shit … in short: to live. So, to some extent, is a person always walking, philosophizing, exploring, and experimenting with life, not doing something with a specific objective in mind but, instead, as a way of being grounded in the here and now. What then becomes interesting is the quality of our philosophizing, exploring, and experimenting with life, this one and only life.
A significant part of Western and Eastern philosophy shares this humble approach to life. We never philosophize or meditate to conquer the world but, instead, to praise its pluralistic beauty. If I take Han literally, he says experiencing sublime beauty is not supposed to be pleasurable; rather, it should hurt. Then I agree. The sublime makes you fall and stumble. It is similar to falling in love because you can lose yourself and act stupid. ‘The sight of beauty does not cause pleasure, but shocks,’ he stresses in Saving Beauty (2018).
Does it mean that I agree with Han? Does it matter? It doesn’t matter, of course, that Han doesn’t shock me. While he has pleased me by meeting my expectations for discourse that appears to offer a stereotypically likable social critique, I realized that he’s missing one crucial thing: life.
Life is a matter of experiencing our own fragility, which contemporary society minimizes. Although I nod when he says, ‘The longing for beauty is ultimately the longing for a different mode of being, for another, altogether non-violent form of life,’ I don’t necessarily concur with what he believes to be beautiful; I prefer a less longing or utopian philosophy—understand as the good place that does not exist—for one that becomes worthy of what happens, now and here. This is also why I find Han preachy in his refusal to doubt, to be vulnerable, to question his assumptions and beliefs; I see him tedious in his repetition of the same slogans, book after book.
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Despite my critique, I secretly find pleasure in Han—especially in Psychopolitics (2017), in which he re-awakens the philosophical idiot as a solution to today’s malady. The idiot does not belong to a specific network or alliance. He or she is free to choose. The idiot does not communicate; instead, he or she facilitates a space of silence and loneliness where one only says what is worth telling. The idiot listens as a generous way of stepping aside to give room for others.
‘The philosopher,’ writes Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, ‘takes the side of the idiot as though of a man without presuppositions … which allows philosophy to claim to begin, and to begin without presupposition’ (1994, 130). So, why doesn’t Han act like an idiot and abandon his ideals? He opens a door that he does not dare go through himself. He might merely critique for the comfortable and—dare I say?—smooth sake of distancing himself from others. Has Han turned critique into a moralizing status game, the equivalent of tweeting critically about Twitter?
I think so. If the morale is that society is making us sick—stress, burnout, trauma, anxiety—then perhaps it is time to leave behind the passive nihilistic approach, saying that I should change myself instead of society. Yet, if society makes me sick, I could cure myself by trying to improve the world; after all, the world is always in its making. Change how the world has formed me by ensuring that the future generation will not be developed similarly.
For example, when Han writes beautifully in The Expulsion of the Other (2018), ‘The art of listening takes place as an art of breathing,’ I cannot help wondering whether Han really is breathing it all in—all the aspects of life that move between one space and another. Han seems to prefer living in a certain kind of dialectical air that pleases citizens who must tell themselves they are superior because they, at least, are hairy, self-conscious narcissists who love to spend the afternoon in their rose garden or tell other people how morally blind they are.
In continuation, I admit that I am likely nothing but a philosophical idiot. But is it not the best way to resist the oppression of contemporary Western life simply to live as though power does not exist—that is, to deny power’s influence on ourselves?
In short, we human beings are free to become free, and this freedom does not depend on the hairiness of our crotches or specific moral values but on living our lives as if no determining metaphysical principle existed.
A free life is lived as if we were already free to become anything.
About the Author
Finn Janning, PhD, is a writer and a philosopher. His work has been featured in Epiphany, Under the Gum Tree, Philosophy Now, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, among other publications. His most recent book is A Philosophy of Mindfulness. He lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.