Han was raised in South Korea, currently teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Arts in Berlin, and writes his published works in German. This book is a study on the nature of time and how its conception has changed over the ages. He begins, “This regime change from God to human is not without its consequences. It de-stabilizes time because God is the authority which confers finality and the seal of eternal truth upon the prevailing order. God stands for a lasting present. With the regime change, time loses this hold…. Historical time can rush ahead because it does not rest in itself, because its centre of gravity is not in the present…. Time is meaningful insofar as it moves towards a goal…. Mythical time is restful, like a picture. Historical time, by contrast, has the form of a line which runs or rushes towards a goal. If this line loses its narrative or teleological tension, it disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction. The end of history atomizes time into point-time. Myth once gave way to history: the static picture turned into a progressive line. Now, history gives way to information. The latter does not possess any narrative width or breadth. It is neither centred, nor does it have a direction. Information falls down on us, so to speak…. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety.” From a static sense of ever-lasting religion to the Whig Theory of history marching ever forward to secular points floating about randomly in the universe, humanity’s relationship to the movement of time has defined our conscious embodiment of ourselves in space.
Han suggests that our perception of time’s progress has accelerated in modernity. “The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences…. Nothing carries weight.” The dots no longer connect into a meaningful whole. Han starts by riffing on Heidegger, “Modernity is a time of de-factualization and freedom. It frees itself from the throwness whose thrower or projector is called God. De-factualization and secularization rest on the same premises. The human being elevates itself to become the subject of history, confronted by the world as an object that can be produced.” The arrow of time is a modern construct. Time used to move in a cyclical pattern, revolving with the seasons. “In pre-modern times… the human being followed a pre-given path, which, like orbits of the heavenly bodies, repeated itself eternally. The pre-modern human found things which he or she accepted or suffered, into which he or she was thrown: a human being characterized by facticity and repetition.… Modernity remains a narrative age, where the narrative is one of history as progress and development. This age, with its gaze turned towards the immanent world, expects a salvation that lies in the future.” Because God has been replaced with scientific progress, modern man is always in a rush to get where he is going. We cannot accelerate fast enough because the future is bound to be better than the past (and even the present age).
We are no longer content to linger in our experiences, but rush on to the next one. “The impression that time moves considerably faster than before also has its origin in the fact that today we are unable to linger, that the experience of duration has become so rare.” For Han, this is a tragedy. “Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately die faster. It is not the total number of events, but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfillment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be.” One sensation that slows you down is your sense of smell. “Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.” The joy of lingering has that same effect on the mind. “Contemplative lingering presupposes things which last. It is not possible to linger for long on events or images which quickly succeed one another.”
Modern man is dissatisfied because he is atomized. He is unconnected and unmoored. He is bored with his life because he is always acting, always working, and never at rest. He is always rushing about. He never pauses to reflect and absorb. “In the end, the responsibility for profound boredom lies with a life that is fully dominated by the determination to act. Profound boredom is the flip side of excessive activity, of a vita activa that lacks any form of contemplation. A compulsive activism keeps boredom alive.” Modern man has become infected by Weber’s Protestant ethic. He lives for work and does not know what to do without it. When not at work, he wants to be distracted, amused, and entertained. His leisure is mindless. Han contrasts the model of Aristotle where work “takes away freedom, because it is subject to the coercive force exerted by the necessities of life. As opposed to leisure, it does not rest in itself, because it must produce what is useful and necessary…. Aristotle also situated the beautiful and noble outside of what is useful and necessary, that is, outside of work. Only need forces work upon us…. The nature of human existence is not care, but leisure. Contemplative rest enjoys absolute priority…. Aristotle distinguishes three forms of life (bioi) of the free man: the life of striving for pleasure (hedone), that of producing the beautiful and noble deeds in the polis (bios politikos), and that which is dedicated to the contemplation of truth (bios theoretikos). All three of them form the needs and compulsions of life. The life dedicated to making money is set aside on account of its compulsive character. The bios politikos is not dedicated to the organization of communal life, because this would involve man in necessary and useful things. Rather, it strives for honour and virtue…. The highest form of happiness has its source in the contemplative lingering on beauty, the activity that used to be called theoria. Its temporal dimension is duration. It turns towards things that are imperishable and unchanging, the things that rest entirely in themselves. Only the contemplative devotion to truth, not virtue and not prudence, brings man close to the gods…. Thinking, as theorein, as the contemplative consideration of truth, is based on leisure.”
It is activity which holds man’s ambitions back. He is cut off from beauty because he never stops to pause and admire life. What he thinks of as leisure is mere recreation. What he thinks of as work is rushing towards death. Han concludes by contrasting two types of life—the life of the slave and the life of the freeman. “Life dominated by work is a vita activa which is entirely cut off from the vita contemplativa. If the human being loses all capacity for contemplation, it degenerates into an animal laborans.” Modern man has lost sight of the goal. He has become enchanted by consumption, by amassing the devil’s trinkets. “Consumption and duration contradict each other. Consumer goods do not last. They are marked by decay as their constitutive element…. The compulsion to consume is immanent to the system of production…. In the consumer society, one forgets to linger…. What lasts and is slow, however, evades being used up and consumed. It founds a duration. The vita contemplativa is a practice of duration.”
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