Cover of the Portuguese edition
(Relógio D'Água, 2022) [a]
I.
The ethics of inactivity rests, according to Byung-Chul Han, on timidity. For it is timidity which increases our attentiveness (our ability to listen) to others and to the world.
I'm not sure about this, however, and wonder if the German word Scheu might better have been translated as shy. For shyness, it seems to me, is not quite the same as timidity; it lacks the nervousness or fearful aspect of the latter and is more about instinctive reserve [b].
But maybe I'm mistaken: I'll leave it to any passing etymologists to decide the matter ...
II.
"The root of the current crisis is the disintegration of everything that gives life meaning and orientation. Life is no longer borne by anything that supports it, and that we can support." [48]
In other words - words first uttered by a madman 150 years ago - God is dead. One might have hoped that we'd moved on from here and realised that nihilism needn't be dressed in the gloomy dark colours of the late 19th-century. Personally, the last thing I want to do is give life meaning and point it in the right direction.
Nor am I interested in ideas of immortality and the imperishable - when Han uses these words I think of D. H. Lawrence mocking those who desire to witness the unfading flowers of heaven [c].
I'm sorry, but I like the impermanence of things and the fact that all things pass. What Han calls temporal structures - annual rituals and festivals - may provide the passage of time with a certain architecture or narrative, but they don't, thankfully, make time stand still. I'm all for preserving the rhythym of life and allowing being to linger, but that doesn't mean stopping the clocks.
Nor do I want incontrovertible truths - even if they are said to make happy (there's more to life than happiness and there's also more than one type of happiness). And I'm sick of being weighed down by powerful symbols.
The latter may very well influence our behaviour and thinking "at the pre-reflexive, emotional, aesthetic level" [50] - and symbols may be excellent at creating the shared experience that enables the formation of a socially cohesive community - but that doesn't always result in compassion, does it? Just ask those who lived under the swastika, or hammer and sickle.
"A community is a symbolically mediated totality." [51] That's Han. But it could be Heidegger. Or might be Hitler. And if my failure to long for a "wholesome, healing totality" [51] makes me a splinter or fragment lacking in being, that's fine. Liberal society has many downsides - it isolates the individual and forces them to compete - but living in some kind of people's community that promises fullness of being and salvation is not something I desire.
Although, having said that, I do understand the attraction of what Lawrence terms a democracy of touch [d] and I suspect that's the sort of community Han is thinking of when he talks about creating ties between people invested with libidinal energy (though I'm not sure that Eros is the answer to everything).
III.
Having got roughly half way into (and thus also half way out of) Han's book, let us remind ourselves of his central argument: "the highest happiness is owed to contemplation" [53] - not action. It's an argument we can trace all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers.
Ultimately, we act in the world so that we might one day be afforded the time to sit and wonder at the world. Being free to gaze in silence and stillness is the reward for all our efforts. If, as Heidegger says, Denken ist Danken, then to gaze in awe with eyes opened by love is also to express gratitude - and, more, to give praise:
"The ultimate purpose of language is praise. Praise gives language a festive radiance. Praise restores being; it sings about and invokes the fullness of being." [55]
To which we can only add: Hallelujah! - and quickly turn the page ...
What Han basically wants is to have at least one day of holy inactivity per week: to reinstate the idea of the Sabbath in which time is suspended and man is released "from the transient world into the world to come" [60].
I've no objection to that (even if I remember keenly the boredom I felt as a child each and every Sunday). But I do tire of his religious language (as I do when listening to Jordan Peterson, for example).
IV.
Han spends a good deal of time in the chapter entitled 'The Pathos of Action' critiquing Hannah Arendt's political thinking. But that wasn't what interested me. Rather, it was the material on Socrates and his daimon that caught my attention ...
It seems that the latter does not encourage Socrates to speak, rather it prevents him from acting, as he makes clear in this passage from the Apology:
"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people's affairs [...] but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this [...] is that something divine and spiritual comes to me [...] a sort of voice [...] and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward." [e]
This strikes a chord with me because I also have a daimon of non-commitment holding me back in this manner; one who persuades me to turn away from every door that is opened and decline to accept any opportunity offered. People think it's perversity on my part - or a lack of self-confidence combined with a lack of ambition - but it's not; it's this mysterious demon which Han terms the genius of inactivity.
According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben - quoted here by Han - this demon is both what is closest to us and what is most impersonal about us; that which is beyond ego and individual consciousness; that which shatters the conceit that we are fully in control and free-willing; that which "'prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity'" [79][f].
Han follows this up with the following fascinating passage:
"The properties that make us someone are not genialis; that is, they do not accord with the genius. We meet with the genius when we cast off our properties, the mask we wear on the acting stage. The genius reveals the propertyless face that lies behind the mask." [79]
This countenance without properties is what we might also call the faceless face; or perhaps even (borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari) the probe-head [g]. To be inspired, says Han, is to lose face and cease being someone "encapsulated in an ego" [79]; i.e., to be enthused is to become self-detached.
However, as Larry David teaches, it's vital to curb enthusiasm. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, caution is the golden rule when dismantling the face and/or building a body without organs; "you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality" [h].
This, arguably, is the most important - and most often overlooked - point in A Thousand Plateaus.
V.
The crisis of religion, says Han, is a crisis of attention: "It is the soul's hyperactivity that accounts for the demise of religious experience" [86-87] - and, indeed, the destruction of the natural world.
I don't agree with Han that a Romantic [i] and religious understanding of the world is necessary, but it might help to just slow down a bit and appreciate not just one another, not just birds, beasts and flowers, but even inanimate objects (each one of which vibrates and radiates at the centre of its own paradise).
This doesn't mean uniting with the infinity of nature, it means rather living cheerfully in the material realm on a flat ontological surface, or what Lawrence calls (after Whitman) the Open Road. The goal is not a community of the living, but a democracy of objects wherein all things can interact in a vaguely friendly manner but outside of any transcendent system of meaning.
Notes
[a] Although this is the cover of the Portuguese edition - featuring some of Cézanne's nude bathers - please note
that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of
Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled
Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.
[b] I have written in praise of shyness in a post published on 27 May 2014: click here.
[c] Referring to the kingdom of heaven established after the material universe is destroyed, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their new Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness. How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!"
See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.
[d] See Stephen Alexander, 'Towards a Democracy of Touch', chapter 13 of Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 262-275, wherein I examine and develop Lawrence's idea introduced in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). There are also several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that discuss the idea: click here for example.
[e] Plato Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, (The Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 115. Han quotes this section (31 c-d) from a different edition; Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).
[f] Han is quoting Giorgio Agamben writing in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (Zone Books, 2007), p. 12.
[g] According to Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the face "lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of probe-heads [...]"
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 190.
[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160.
[i] Han seems to see himself as a disciple of Novalis, the 18th-century German poet, novelist, philosopher, and mystic. He certainly subscribes to a similar model of Romanticism, writing, for example, that the Romantic idea of freedom is a corrective to our liberal-bourgeois notion of individual freedom, just as the Romantic conception of nature "provides an effective corrective to our instrumental understanding of nature" [92].
He also argues that to Romanticise the world is to give it back "its magic, its mystery, even its dignity" [94] and that it is a mistake to describe "the Romantic longing for a connection with the whole" [96] as reactionary or regressive. It is, rather, a fundamental human longing. Obviously, I don't share Han's Romantic idealism or fervour and don't think I want to live in a promiscuous future world in which things don't only touch but permeate each other and there are no boundaries.
To read part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here.
To read part two of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here.
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