“The Tonality of Thought” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This short book is a transcription of three lectures Han gave in April of 2023. The series of talks, in Leipzig, Porto, and Lisbon, was rare as Han rarely travels from his home in Berlin. In Leipzig, Han gave a talk interspersed with a pianist playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He began by describing his method of working, “When I am thinking I often feel I am taking off with my wings. I love these flights of speculation that are accompanied by two wings, dos pianos de cola, and their music. Heidegger also experienced thinking as a speculative flight that uses two wings…. Without the beat of a wing, without the wings of Eros, thinking is impossible. Someone who thinks must take off on the wings of Eros onto untrodden paths, onto the not-yet-born, or the coming, even into the new…. Without flowers I am not able to think…. I make great efforts, and I will continue to make great efforts, to make my thinking smell of flowers too. That is where the truth is.” He also defended his oeuvre, “Some people accuse me of too much repetition. But they do not understand that my books are not repetitions, they are variations.”

In Porto, Han critiqued modern society, “If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears…. Are we today still capable of touching – of touching the Other, that is? Physical touch is very important for the cohesion of a community. The hand, the squeeze of the hand, is what creates trust. Despite, or because of, digital interconnectedness and communication there is very little touching in our society.” He discussed depression, “The ego rests isolated in itself, and this poverty in world makes us depressive…. Anyone who has been depressive, who suffered a deep depression, knows that a depressive person loses the world. He is without world.” Han continued reciting the woes of modernity and technology, “So, permanently typing and swiping on the smartphone has an enormous effect on our relation to the world, to the Other. Information that does not interest me is quickly swiped away. Content I like, on the contrary, I zoom closer with my fingers. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world must conform to whatever I want from it. In this way, the smartphone intensifies our self-centredness. Typing around, I subjugate the world to my needs…. The smartphone actually permits us to retreat into a sphere that is protected against the imponderables associated with the Other, into a digital bubble that shields us from the Other…. It turns a You into an It. We should turn the It into a You again. You, that is the Other…. Since the spread of the smartphone we less and less look each other in the eyes. The gaze is lost. But the gaze is the Other…. We exploit ourselves voluntarily and passionately under the illusion that we realize ourselves by doing so. The destructive pressure does not come from the Other but from ourselves. I am not exploited, whipped by the master, I whip myself, I exploit myself. I am master and slave at one and the same time.”

Han discussed the paradox of freedom in the contemporary world, “The self as project, which believes it has liberated itself from external coercion and coercion by others, submits itself to the inner compulsion to achieve and optimize itself. We exploit ourselves believing we realize ourselves…. The freedom of being-able-to creates even more compulsions than the disciplinary you-ought-to which puts forward precepts and prohibitions. The ought has limits. Being-able-to, ability, in contrast, knows no limits…. The neoliberal achievement-subject believes itself to be free but in truth is a slave. It is an absolute slave in the sense that, in the absence of a master, it exploits itself voluntarily…. The disappearance of the Other is a pathological phenomenon of the present. Being connected is not the same as being together. The limitless connectivity actually weakens our ties…. An intensive relation presupposes an Other who is not at my disposal. Only the non-availability of the Other makes closeness possible…. The Other is not an available and consumable object.”

Finally, in Lisbon, Han discussed the lack of transcendence in modernity, “I said that the life of a monk is a very happy life because the ideal monk, a monk, that is, who is not corrupted, lives off transcendence. In our society of consumption and achievement all transcendence is lost. This makes us unreal. Transcendence does not agree with the immanence of consumption or achievement or production. God does not consume. God also does not produce. And God’s creation is not an achievement, it is an act of love. We are currently losing ourselves, we even vegetate in the immanence of production and consumption. Life without transcendence withers and becomes nothing but the satisfaction of needs. This consumerist life, this life without transcendence, is a life without happiness, a poor, miserable, impoverished, atrophied life. This is not a human life, but the life of cattle.”

“The crisis of narration” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han always riffs on similar themes—the end of ritual, the decay of culture, and the effects of modernity. This short treatise revolves around the topic of narration and the purpose of stories in shaping man. Han suggests, “We live in a post-narrative time…. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments…. Without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times—no festive moods with their intensified feeling of being. All that is left are work and free time, production and consumption…. Ultimately, a narrative is an expression of the mood of a time…. Narration is a concluding form. It creates a closed order that founds meaning and identity…. Narratives create a community…. Wisdom is embedded in life as narrative.”

Narrative is an essential component of humanity. It is how we make sense of our world. Han states, “Human beings do not exist from one moment to the next. They are not momentary beings. Their existence comprises the whole temporal range that opens up between birth and death. In the absence of external orientation and a narrative anchoring in being, the energy to contract the time between birth and death into a living unity that encapsulates all events and occurrences must come from the self. The continuity of being is guaranteed by the continuity of the self.” The Self is made up of episodic memories, not an all-encompassing span. “Human memory is selective. This is how it differs from a database. It is narrative…. A narrative depends on a selection and connection of events. It proceeds in a selective fashion…. The narrated or remembered life is necessarily incomplete…. Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories necessarily have gaps…. To be able to narrate or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal.”

This book would not be a Han treatise if he did not explicitly condemn modern life. Han opines, “Life in late modernity is utterly naked. It lacks narrative imagination. Pieces of information cannot be tied together into a narrative…. The coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other…. By establishing strong connections between events, a narrative overcomes the emptiness and fleetingness of time. Narrative time does not pass…. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of life…. The eye of the modern city dweller is overburdened with protective tasks. It unlearns contemplative lingering…. Stories create social cohesion. They offer meaning and bear values that create community…. Myths are ritually staged shared narratives…. Shared action, the we, is based on narrative.”

Han espouses the essentiality of theory to cut through the thickets of modern data. “Correlations are the most primitive form of knowledge. They do not allow us to understand anything…. As a narrative, theory designs an order of things…. It develops conceptual contexts that make things intelligible…. Theory is a form of closure that takes hold of things and thereby makes them graspable…. The end of theory ultimately means the end of concept as spirit [Begriff als Geist]…. Only spirit is capable of a reordering of things, of creating a new narrative…. Data-knowledge marks the degree zero of spirit. In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers…. Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates—even risks to suggest—a new form of life and being…. New narratives allow for new forms of perception…. The world is, so to speak, re-narrated, and as a result we see it with fresh eyes…. Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent…. We lack the courage for philosophy, the courage for theory, that is, the courage to create a narrative. We must always bear in mind that, in the final analysis, thinking is also a narrating that progresses in narrative steps.”

“Vita contemplativa” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This is another of Han’s short treatises, peppered with references to Heidegger, Arendt, and the German Romantics. His theme is, obviously, the life of contemplation. He first promotes inaction, “Life receives its radiance only from inactivity. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity.” He continues with his definition of culture, “Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival.” He brings his theme around to happiness, “We owe true happiness to the useless and purposeless, to what is intentionally convoluted, what is unproductive, indirect, exuberant, superfluous, to beautiful forms and gestures that have no use and serve no purpose…. Ceremonious inactivity means: we do something, but to no end.”

Han describes living a life fully and presently here on earth. “The politics of inactivity liberates the immanence of life from the transcendence that alienates life from itself. Only in inactivity do we become aware of the ground on which we rest, and of the space in which we are…. Immanence as life is living in the mode of contemplation. Life as immanence is a capacity that does not act…. Immanence denotes a life that possesses itself, that suffices itself. This self-sufficiency is bliss.” Han promotes a life of reflection. “We must therefore increase the proportion of action that is contemplative, that is, ensure that action is enriched by reflection…. The compulsion to be active, to produce and to perform, leads to breathlessness. Under the weight of their own doings, humans suffocate…. Forgetfulness of being, resulting from the lack of reflection, takes our breath away. It reduces the human being to an animal laborans.”

Humans are creatures that unite with each other together through the common stories they tell. “The human being is an animal narrans, a narrating animal. But our lives are no longer determined by a reliable and binding narrative that provides meaning and orientation. We are very well informed, yet, in the absence of narrative, we are without orientation…. Truth is narrative. Information, by contrast, is additive…. Symbols create shared things that enable a We: cohesion within society…. In a symbolic void, society is diffracted into a collection of mutually indifferent individuals.” Han brings this back to having the time and space for inactivity, rest, contemplation, and reflection. “The future of humanity depends not on the power of people who act but on the resuscitation of the capacity for contemplation—that is, on the very capacity that does not act. If it does not incorporate the vita contemplativa, the vita activa degenerates into hyperactivity, and culminates in the burnout not only of the psyche but of the whole planet.”

“The Transparency Society” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han often complains about modernity. In this short monograph he takes on the modern pose of transparency. He asserts that the trend towards greater transparency is far from positive. “The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control…. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible…. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.”

For Han, the transparent society is one of enforced intimate relations with strangers. “In modernity, theatrical distance is increasingly abandoned in favor of intimacy…. The world today is no theater where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theater is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition…. Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency…. The tyranny of intimacy psychologizes and personalizes everything…. The public sphere becomes an exhibition space…. As a society of revealing and denuding, the society of transparency works against all forms of the mask…. The mounting deritualization and denarrativization of society also strip it of forms of symbolic appearance and render it naked…. Human beings become sociable when they preserve distance from one another. Intimacy, in contrast, destroys distance…. The society of intimacy is a psychologized, deritualized society. It is a society of confession, laying-bare, and the pornographic lack of distance…. Narcissistic subjects who lack the ability of scenic distantiation populate the society of intimacy…. Experience [Erfahrung] means facing the Other. Experiencing [Erlebnis], in contrast, means encountering oneself everywhere.”

Magic and enchantment are lost in a world of transparency. It only produces a world burdened by facts and data. “The society of transparency is a society without poets, without seduction or metamorphosis. After all, it is the poet who produces scenic illusions, forms of appearance, and ritual and ceremonial signs: he sets artifacts and antifacts against hyperreal, naked evidence…. Today’s society of transparency lacks divine light inhabited by metaphysical tension. Transparency has no transcendence…. The society of transparency not only lacks truth; it also lacks symbolic appearance. Neither truth nor symbolic appearance are see-through. Only emptiness is entirely transparent…. The mass of information and imagery offers fullness in which emptiness is still noticeable…. Transparency also does not entail clairvoyance. The mass of information produces no truth.”

Finally, Han compares the world of transparency to Bentham’s vision of the panopticon. “The digital panopticon of the twenty-first century is aperpectival insofar as it no longer conducts surveillance from a central point, with the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. The distinction between center and periphery, which is fundamental to the Benthamian panopticon, has disappeared entirely…. The inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market…. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the feat of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame…. No community, in the strong sense, can form in the society of transparency. Instead chance gatherings [Ansammlungen] or crowds [Vielheiten] of isolated individuals, or egos, emerge…. Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside.”

“Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

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.”

“Psycho-Politics” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han’s short treatise is a rumination on modernity and the digital age. He covers his usual well-trod themes through the lens of neo-Hegelianism. First, he takes on twenty-first century labor practice. “Today everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself…. Conditions are defined by the solitude of an entrepreneur who is isolated and self-combating and practices auto-exploitation voluntarily…. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself.”

Han is worried about dig data and the end of intimacy, subjectivity, and uniqueness. He is wary of a humanity ruled by averages and correlation without causation. He fears the commoditization of the soul. “Today, we are entering the age of digital psychopolitics. It means passing from passive surveillance to active steering…. Big data is a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication. This knowledge is knowledge for the sake of domination and control (Herrschaftswissen): it facilitates intervention in the psyche and enables influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level…. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states (Sachverhalte). Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered.”

For Han, each individual has become an optimizing machine. “Now productivity is not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance so much as by optimizing psychic or mental processes. Physical discipline has given way to mental optimization…. The neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization — as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self — represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation…. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains…. The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system…. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints —from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”

The idiot stands opposed to psychopolitics. “Every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom, — a new language, a new way of thinking — has necessarily been an idiot. Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other…. The history of philosophy is a history of idiotisms. Socrates knows only that he does not know; he is an idiot. Likewise, Descartes — who casts doubt on everything — is an idiot. Cogito ergo sum is idiotic…. The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider…. Idiotism stands opposed to the neoliberal power of domination: total communication and total surveillance.”

“The Agony of Eros” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

This short book, by Han, is a meditation on the conflict he sees between modernity and eros. Han begins, “The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self…. Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.”

Modernity has become what Han describes as a “burnout culture.” He decries the sterilization, the lack of differentiation, the consumption, and the fetishization of materialism. “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost…. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings…. Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.” Han suggests that modernity lives in a constant present. It is unable to reach back into the past or push forward to a future, because it is stuck in banality. “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself an optimized present that excludes all disaster…. Memory is not an organ of simple restitution, by means of which one makes the past present again. In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process.”

Han discusses how eros necessitates the change of the ego upon first contact with the Other, “According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.” Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.” Han stays on the theme of the transformation of the Self through eros, but with a Hegelian twist, “Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another.”” Han continues, “As an absolute end, love passes through death…. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other…. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.” Han returns to Ficino, “When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) or eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”” Han ends, “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death…. Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.”

Han finishes by returning to the theme of the duality of eros, with a riff on Badiou, “Love is a “Two scene,” a theater meant for a duo, to paraphrase Badiou. Interrupting the isolated perspective of the One, it makes the world arise anew from the vantage point of the Other, or Difference. Love, as an experience and an encounter is marked by the negativity of upheaval: “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ [habiter] my situation.” The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of habiter, the situation at hand. It gives rise to something that circumstances cannot account for. It interrupts the Same in favor of the Other…. This transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros…. Love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. It generates a “rupture,” a “hole” in the order of the Habitual and the Same…. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving.”

“The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han, for once, delves explicitly into eastern thought, though, as usual, comparing and contrasting its tenets with western philosophy, particularly the Greeks and German idealists, along the way. His focus is on Zen, but he also describes Buddhism more generally. Han begins with the concept of nothingness and the lack of an inner subject in Zen. “The Buddhist nothing is opposed to inwardness…. The Buddhist nothing’s lack of ‘exclusive subjectivity’ or ‘conscious will’ is not a ‘deficiency’ but a strength of Buddhism. The absence of ‘will’ or ‘subjectivity’ is precisely what constitutes the peacefulness of Buddhism…. Buddhism’s foundation is an empty centre that does not exclude anything…. The Zen sayings about Buddha being ‘broken tiles and pebbles’ or ‘three pounds of flax’ indicate the orientation towards immanence in the spiritual attitude of Zen Buddhism. They express the ‘everyday mind’ that makes Zen Buddhism a religion of immanence…. The worldview of Zen Buddhism is not directed upwards, nor is it oriented towards a centre. It lacks a ruling centre. One might also say: the centre is everywhere…. In a single plum blossom, the whole universe blooms…. The nothing of Zen Buddhism does not offer anything to hold on to, no solid ‘ground’ that one could be sure of or ascertain, nothing that one could cling to…. The path does not lead into ‘transcendence’. One cannot flee from the world, because there is no other world.”

Having dealt with both a lack of inwardness and of transcendence, Han moves on to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. “Substance (Latin: substantia, Greek: hypostasis, hypokeimenon, ousia) is without a doubt the fundamental concept of occidental thought…. The central Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) is in many respects a counter-concept to substance…. It empties out all being that remains within itself, that insists on itself or closes itself up in itself. Sunyata spills such beings into an openness, into an open, stretched-out distance…. Emptiness, however, is not a principle of creation; it is not a primary ‘cause’ from which all beings, all forms, ‘emerge’…. It does not mark a ‘transcendence’ that precedes the forms as they appear. Form and emptiness are situated on the same level of being…. Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen…. One individual being reflects the whole in itself, and the whole dwells in this one being…. Emptiness thus does not mean the negation of the individual…. The emptiness or the nothing of Zen Buddhism is therefore not a simple negation of beings, not a formula for nihilism or scepticism. Rather, it represents an utmost affirmation of being. What is negated is only the substance-like delimitation that produces tension…. In just one thing, then, the whole world dwells.”

As is his want in almost all of his books, Han brings in Hegel. “Hegel’s notion of spirit, with inwardness being its fundamental trait, is certainly opposed to the Zen Buddhist notion of spirit. Zen Buddhist practice is an attempt at de-internalizing spirit without, however, immersing it in, or turning it into, a pure ‘outside’ and without hollowing it out by reducing it to a ‘vegetative covering’. The aim is to empty out the spirit, to make it awake and collected without inwardness. Satori [understanding] may well refer to that state of the spirit in which spirit flowers, so to speak…. Satori is the other of selfhood, the other of inwardness…. Spirit de-internalizes itself in an indifference, even in friendliness.”

Of course, Han also brings in Heidegger, in opposition to the Zen concept of wandering through life and being at home nowhere. “Dasein perceives the world only with regard to itself, to its own possibilities of being…. The heart that dwells nowhere is opposed to the kind of subject whose fundamental trait is the continual return to itself…. Dwelling nowhere, wandering, presupposes a radical renunciation of possession, of what is mine. Basho walks himself and his possessions away…. The temporality of his hiking is without future…. His wandering is free of any teleological or theological meaning. Basho has always already arrived…. Basho is hiking because he strives to be nowhere…. Dwelling nowhere radically questions the paradigm of identity…. The heart that dwells nowhere, that does not cling on to anything, follows the changing circumstances…. In its detachment, the heart is not tied to anything, and it knows neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. The heart that dwells nowhere is too empty, so to speak, to be capable of love or hate, joy or sorrow…. Emptiness, however, cannot be an object of desire, for it is nothing. It empties out all desire…. Emptiness, however, is not the wholly other of the multiform, manifold world. It is the world…. To dwell nowhere is not to flee from the world. It is not the negation of dwelling in this world.”

Han finishes this short treatise by taking on death and friendship—an odd pairing. “Death does not put an end to what is mine. Instead as my death, it calls forth an intense I am. I am dying therefore means: I am…. In Zen Buddhism, death is not a catastrophe or a scandal, but nor does it set in motion a labour of mourning that works compulsively against finitude…. In the face of death Zen Buddhism cultivates an attitude of letting go [Gelassenheit] that is free of heroism and desire…. Finitude begins to shine, without the brilliance of infinity or the semblance of eternity…. The impermanent world is not transcended towards infinity. You do not move somewhere else. Rather, you immerse yourself in impermanence.” Finally, Han concludes, “Emptiness must be understood as a medium of friendliness. In the field of emptiness, there are no strict demarcations. Nothing remains isolated in itself or within itself. Things nestle up to one another, reflect each other. Emptiness de-internalizes the I into a rei amicae that opens up like a guest house…. Original friendliness is not something that is exchanged between persons; it is not a case of ‘someone’ being friendly towards ‘someone’. Rather, one should say: no one is friendly…. It is a gesture of emptiness.”

“Non-things” by Byun-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This is Han’s latest treatise directed against the age of modernity. The book returns to many of his previous themes—thinking, lingering, ritual, time, community, and technology. Translated from German, it has less of his usual neo-Hegelian influence and more of a Heideggerian flair.

Han begins with his concept of Things and their displacement in modernity, “Things are the calm centres of life. They have now been wholly enveloped by information. Information is anything but a calm centre of life. It is not possible to linger on information. It is relevant only fleetingly. It lives off its capacity to surprise. Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. It constantly attracts our attention. The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system. Information is not a stable, uniform entity. It lacks the solidity of being…. Things are increasingly receding into the background of our attention…. We are obsessed not with things but with information and data. We now consume more information than things. We are literally becoming intoxicated with communication…. The industrial revolution solidified and expanded the sphere of things, distancing us from nature and the crafts. But only digitization puts an end to the paradigm of the thing. It subordinates things to information…. The informatization of the world turns things into infomatons, that is, into information-processing actors.”

Many moderns celebrate the fact that they have become less materialistic. They prefer to live a life of experiences rather than compete with the materialism of their ancestors. Han sees a dark side. “Today, we prefer experiencing to possessing, being to having. Experiencing is a form of being…. We no longer want to be tied to things or people. Ties are untimely. They restrict the space of possible experiences, that is, freedom in the sense of consumption…. We even expect the consumption of things to provide us with experiences. The informational content of things, for instance their brands, is more important than their use value. We perceive things primarily with regard to the information embedded in them…. What determines the value added is the distinguishing information that promises the consumer a special experience — or even the experience of specialness…. The aesthetic-cultural content of a commodity is the actual product. The economy of experiences replaces the economy of things.”

The modern perspective of art has transformed the artistic process. “Artworks are things…. Art that is committed to meaning is hostile to pleasure…. A work of art, being a thing, is not just a bearer of meaning. It does not illustrate anything. The process of expression is directed not by a clear concept but by an indeterminate fever, a delirium, an intensity, an urge or desire that cannot be articulated…. What is problematic about today’s art is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information. Conception precedes execution…. Art is no longer handwork that forms matter, without intention, into a thing, but thought work that communicates a prefabricated idea…. It wants to instruct rather than seduce.”

Han returns to the intimacy of personal ties—between people and objects. “Intense ties are becoming less and less important. First of all, they are unproductive, for consumption and communication can be accelerated only by weak ties. For this reason, capitalism systematically destroys ties. Things that are close to our hearts are also rare today; they are increasingly being replaced by disposable items." Han quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore.” Han concludes, “A re-romanticization of the world would presuppose its re-materialization…. Ecology must be preceded by a new ontology of matter, one that views it as something that lives.”

“The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This essay deals with importance of ritual and its disappearance in the modern world. Han begins, “Rituals serve as a background against which our present times may seem to stand out more clearly…. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based…. Today, the world is symbol poor…. We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.” Han focuses on ritual’s role in lessening the importance of the Self and creating community, “Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symballein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community…. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.” Han also emphasizes the role of the physical, “Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.”

Han contrasts the modern notion of authenticity with the communal notions of ritual. “The society of authenticity is a performance society…. Authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community…. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual person. Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity…. Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself…. Today, the world is not a theatre in which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself…. In the name of authenticity or genuineness, the semblance of beauty, the ritual gesture, is today discarded as something purely external. But this genuineness is, in truth, crudeness and barbarity…. We live in a culture of the affect. Where ritual gestures and manners decay, affect and emotion gain the upper hand.”

All rituals of politeness have been discarded by modernity. “A ritual of politeness is not an expression of subjective feeling; it is an objective act. It resembles a magical invocation that produces a positive mental state…. In a society of authenticity, actions are guided internally, motivated psychologically, whereas in ritual societies actions are determined by externalized forms of interaction. Rituals make the world objective…. Politeness is pure form. Nothing is intended by it. It is empty. As a ritual form, it is devoid of any moral content…. As a form of ritual, politeness is without heart and without desire, without wish. It is more art than morality. It exhausts itself in the pure exchange of ritual gestures…. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer…. The more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is.”

Han also laments the loss of pageantry, play, and festival. Today, all life is mere work. Modernity is the consumption society par excellence. One only stops to rest so that he may work some more. “Rituals and ceremonies are the genuinely human acts which allow life to appear to be an enchanting, celebratory affair…. As forms of play, festivals are self-representations of life. They are characterized by an excess, an expression of an overflowing life that does not aim at a goal…. In the festival, life relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to external purposes…. The time of the festival is time standing still…. It thus makes lingering possible. Time as a sequence of transient, fleeting moments is suspended. There is no goal one walks towards.” To linger and to contemplate has been lost in the hustle and bustle for ever more. “Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion…. Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred…. It transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work…. Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms.” Ritual, even in the everyday, marks the passage of time. “Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure…. Thresholds, as transitions, give rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time…. What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity.”

“Saving Beauty” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This short monograph is a reflection, by Han, on the changing conceptions of beauty. As usual, Han brings to bear historical philosophical interpretations of the beautiful and contrasts them with the ideals of modernity. And again, as usual, he finds today’s digital social milieu lacking. Han asserts, “Today, the experience of beauty is impossible. Where the wish to please, the Like, edges its way to the foreground, experience, which is impossible without negativity, withers…. Smooth visual communication takes place in the form of contagion, without any aesthetic distance…. Communication reaches its maximum speed where like reacts to like…. Today, nothing endures. This impermanence also affects the ego and de-stabilizes it, makes it insecure.” Today, beauty is all about the Self. It only reflects back towards itself, the subject. He continues, “The temporality of digital beauty… is the immediate present without a future, even without history. It simply is present…. In this digital inwardness there can be no sense of wonder. The only thing human beings still like are themselves.”

Han contrasts modernity’s take on the beautiful with that of the sublime. “The aesthetics of beauty is a genuine phenomenon of modern times. Only, in the aesthetics of modern times, the beautiful and the sublime become separated…. The beautiful is juxtaposed to the sublime, which—due to its negativity—does not cause immediate pleasure.” Han begins his dive into the historical. “Plato… does not distinguish between beauty and the sublime. The beautiful is unsurpassable precisely because it is sublime…. The sight of beauty does not cause pleasure, but shocks…. The onlooker becomes ecstatic, is seized by awe and terror (ekplettontai). A ‘madness’ takes hold of him. Plato’s metaphysics of beauty is in sharp contrast to the modern aesthetics of pleasure which confirms the subject in its autonomy and complacency, instead of shocking it.” Han concludes, “Beauty and the sublime have the same origin. Instead of opposing the sublime to the beautiful, one should return to beauty a sublimity that cannot be subjected to inwardness, a de-subjectivizing sublimity, and thus undo the separation of beauty and the sublime.”

Han believes that true beauty must remain hidden behind its veil. It is never exposed and displayed, but remains in mystery. He quotes Walter Benjamin at length, “The task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful…. Never yet has a true work of art been grasped other than where it ineluctably represented itself as a secret.” Han riffs on Barthes’ distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. “The erotic photograph is a picture ‘that has been disturbed, fissured’. The pornographic photograph, by contrast, has neither fractures or fissures. It is smooth. Today all pictures are more or less pornographic. They are transparent.” Again, Barthes, “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Rilke suggests beauty “is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure.” Adorno adds, “The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature.” Han weighs in, “Negativity is the invigorating force of life. It also forms the essence of beauty. Inherent to beauty is a weakness, a fragility, and a brokenness [Gebrochenheit]. To this negativity, beauty owes its power to seduce…. Beauty is illness.” Adorno claims, “Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay.”

In the modern world, beauty has even come to be opposed to that which is sexy. “Consumption and sexiness condition each other. The self that is based on sexual desire is a product of consumer capitalism…. The ideal of beauty evades consumption…. Sexiness is opposed to moral beauty or beauty of character. Morality, virtue and character have a specific temporality. They are based on duration, solidity and permanence…. Consumption and duration exclude each other…. The ideal consumer is a person without character.”

This wouldn’t be a Han book without a deep dive into Hegel. Han posits, “Central to Hegel’s aesthetics is the ‘concept’. It idealizes beauty and confers on it the brilliance of truth. Beauty results from the concept manifesting itself in the sensual, or ‘the Idea as the immediate unity of the Concept with its reality’…. No ‘aggregate’ is beautiful. Concepts take care that wholes do not disintegrate, or dissipate, into ‘heaps’…. The beautiful object is something over against the subject, something with which the subject develops a free relationship…. Only in the aesthetic relation with the object is the subject finally set free…. The beautiful object is an object over against the subject, in which any kind of dependance and compulsion has disappeared.” Hegel claims, “Thus the contemplation of beauty is of a liberal kind; it leaves objects alone as being inherently free and infinite; there is no wish to possess them or take advantage of them as useful for fulfilling finite needs and intentions.” Han continues, “Hegel’s aesthetic of beauty is an aesthetic of truth and freedom, which withdraws beauty from any form of consumption. Neither ‘truth’ nor the ‘concept’ can be consumed. Beauty is an end in itself…. Consumption and beauty are mutually exclusive…. [Beauty] does not tempt you to enjoy or to possess it. Rather, it invites you to linger in contemplation…. Beauty as well as truth is something exclusive. Thus they do not occur often [haufig].”

Han loves to linger. He critiques the modern world as one in which lingering has become verboten. We, moderns, are always in a rush: to do, to work, even to play. “Beauty itself actually invites us to linger; it is the will which stands in the way of contemplative lingering. But at the sight of beauty, willing retreats…. Beauty frees me from myself. The ego immerses itself in beauty. It rids itself of itself in the face of beauty.” Schopenhauer states, “Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.” Proust praises “the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams.” Han concludes, “The experience of beauty as recollection evades consumption.”

“The Expulsion of the Other” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Wieland Hoban)

Han writes about how modern society can never escape the dialectic, in the vein of a true neo-Hegelian. This short book concentrates on the dichotomy between the ego and the Other. Han begins, “The terror of the Same affects all areas of life today. One travels everywhere, yet does not experience anything. One catches sight of everything, yet reaches no insight. One accumulates information and data, yet does not attain knowledge. One lusts after adventures and stimulation, but always remains the same…. True resonance presupposes the proximity of the Other. Today, the proximity of the Other gives way to the gaplessness of the Same…. The abolition of distance does not create more closeness, but rather destroys it…. This tension consists in the fact that things are given life precisely by their opposite, by that which is other than themselves.” Hegel could not have said it better himself.

Han has always been concerned with the propensity of neoliberal society to be consumed by commerce. Life has been commodified. Homo Economicus reigns supreme. “Individuals express their authenticity primarily through consumption. The imperative of authenticity does not lead to the formation of an autonomous, self-possessed individual; rather, it is entirely co-opted by commerce.” Modern man has deluded himself into thinking that he is special, different, and unique. “Diversity only permits differences that conform to the system; it constitutes an otherness that has been made consumable. And it perpetuates the Same more efficiently than uniformity does.” Man has also been deluded by his own freedom. “Today, we live in a post-Marxist age. In the neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes place as alienation and self-derealization, but as freedom, as self-realization and self-optimization. Here there is no Other as an exploiter, forcing me to work and alienating me from myself; rather, I voluntarily exploit myself in the belief that I am realizing myself…. The first stage of a burnout is euphoria: I plunge into work euphorically until I finally collapse. I realize myself to death. I optimize myself to death. Neoliberal domination hides behind the illusion of freedom.”

Finally, Han critiques the mediums of communication and interaction in the digital age. “Today’s hypercommunication suppresses the free spaces of silence and solitude without which it would have been impossible to say things that were truly worth saying…. Today, the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same…. Today, we are increasingly losing the ability to listen. It is hampered most of all by the intensifying focus on the ego, by the narcissization of society. Narcissus does not return the loving voice of the nymph Echo, who would really be the voice of the Other…. Listening is not a passive act. It is distinguished by a special activity: first I must welcome the Other, which means affirming the Other in their otherness. Then I give them an ear…. In a sense, listening precedes speaking; it is only listening that causes the Other to speak…. Digital communication connects me, but simultaneously isolates me…. Without the presence of the Other, communication degenerates into an accelerated exchange of information. It creates no relationship, only connection…. Listening means something entirely different from exchanging information…. Without neighborliness, without listening, no community can form. Community is listenership.”

“The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

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.”