Han has recently been focusing on Asian culture and philosophy. In his monographs he uses his neo-Hegelian framework as a jumping off point to contrast Western thinkers, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, with those from the East, especially Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, and the Buddha. This short book is on the Eastern concept of absence and, particularly, the lack of an individual essence embedded within objects, as well as the impermeability of things. Han begins, “Desire, appetition, is what makes you a someone. A someone in the strong sense has no access to wandering. A someone dwells. Only someone who empties himself and becomes a no one is able to wander. A wanderer is without an I, without a self, without a name. He forgets himself. He does not desire anything and does not hold on to anything. He therefore does not leave a trace. Traces, the imprints left by holding on and desiring, form only in being. The wise man, however, does not touch being.”
A rarity in Han’s older works, here he directly focuses on Eastern philosophy. “Both Daoist and Buddhist thought distrust any substantive closedness that subsists, closes itself off and perseveres. With regard to absencing, understood in an active sense, the Buddhist teaching of kong is certainly related to Daoist emptiness, xu. Both bring about an absencing heart, empty the self into a non-self, into a no one, into someone ‘nameless’…. Zhuangzi therefore teaches that one should associate oneself with the whole world, even to be as large as the world, to elevate oneself to a wide world, instead of clinging on to a small narrative, a small distinction.” Zhuangzi, himself, posits, “But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.” Han suggests, “Buddhism is ultimately a religion of absence, of fading out and blowing away, a religion of ‘dwelling nowhere’…. Absencing does not empty love and friendship and make them irrelevant. It turns them into bound-less friendliness.”
Han contrasts the Eastern and Western aesthetic, first within the concept of space. “Essences block transitions. Absencing is in-difference…. One rarely finds flowing transitions in the West…. An absencing gaze has an emptying effect, flowing transitions create places of absencing and emptiness…. It widens space. A space makes space for another space.” He continues on beauty, “In the sensibility of the Far East, neither permanence of being [Standigkeit] nor stability [Bestandigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness…. What is beautiful is not full presence but a ‘there’ that is coated with an absence, that is made lighter or less by emptiness. What is beautiful is not what is clear or transparent but what is not clearly delineated…. In-difference does not lack anything.” Finally, Han discusses Eastern cuisine, “Rice, without a doubt the centre of Far Eastern cooking, appears empty because it lacks colour. The centre is empty. The bland taste of rice also pervades it with emptiness and absence. Zhuangzi would say that rice is able to cling to any dish, any taste, because it does not have a taste of its own. Rice appears as empty as the white ground of Far Eastern ink drawings…. In the Far East, eating is not a matter of cutting something up with knife and fork but a matter of putting something together with chopsticks.”
Throughout this work, Han insists that absence is not a lacking. “As opposed to the idea of freedom, which is ultimately based on a world-less subject, effortlessness is the result of an in-difference between consciousness and world, between inside and outside.” Zhuangzi suggests, “To forget all things and to forget heaven, that is called being oblivious of self. But whoever is oblivious of self reaches heaven for that very reason.”
Han spends a fair amount of time contrasting the Eastern and Western concepts of the sea and of water. In the East, “the sea symbolizes the world’s immanent space of in-difference, out of which contours of things emerge and into which they flow back again…. ‘Longing’ is alien to the Far East, which does not know of a radical somewhere else for which one could set sail…. Water does not dwell.” In contrast, “Hegel’s perception of water and the sea is everywhere guided by a compulsive desire for solidity…. Western thinking has its source in a desire for a solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat…. If ‘reason’, as the ‘ultimate touchstone of truth’, sets sail for the beyond of objective intuition, it ends up in a dark space…. Chinese wisdom, by contrast, does not hide. It does not withdraw and is not shrouded in mystery. Instead, it is placed under the light of a particular kind of evidence, of the obviousness of being-so, of a bright being-present.” Han continues, “The world is a verb, or, to be more precise, an infinitive, a happening that is in many respects infinite, that is, undetermined. In positive terms, it points to an endless process of transformation.”
Finally, Han discusses the concept of nobility in Eastern thought. “For what is noble is to hold oneself back, to disappear and to step back behind what is happening without anyone’s intention or intervention, without a will being involved and without emphasis on an act. What is noble is absencing…. One might also say: the subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master. What would be noble would be, also from a Buddhist perspective, to escape this delusion of subjectivity. Absencing is a Buddhist ideal, a formula for deliverance. Escaping is deliverance. Doing and clinging on is suffering. Deliverance means escaping from karma, which literally means ‘doing’ or ‘acting’…. Buddhist emptiness (kong) empties essence into absencing…. Essences are distinguishing; they create differences. Absencing, which must be understood as something active, turns difference into in-difference…. I am you because there is no identity, no compulsion towards essence, that distinguishes the I from the you.”
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