The Vita Contemplativa
It all begins with an idea.
The first pages of Byung-chul Han’s 2022 book immediately clarify his “Views of Inactivity”. He sees “Us” as people who have forgotten that inactivity allows humans to live “an intense and radiant form of life”, made up of stillness, silence, play and magic. All this is consistent with his overall critique of modern society. We are so fixated on work and productivity that our very humanity is threatened by loss of appreciation of inactivity. It is mere “leisure time” or “killing time” with associated toxic boredom. I recall from his other books his emphasis on the importance of “lingering”. As many readers of Han experience initially, with so many insights in the first two pages, it’s hard to know what to highlight or not. The flow is there and once in, you are IN.
Having made my way through about half of his books starting with the jaw-dropping 2015 “The BurnOut Society” aka The Fatigue Society (depending on the translation from the original German), these first few pages are not surprising. BCH has a way of writing that truly reflects the best philosophy in the Continental Tradition since Nietzsche. It’s prophetic, insightful, penetrating and occasionally almost wrong….but how can this style of juxtapositional and poetic writing be merely subject to the analytical bivalence of right or wrong? He is writing in a style of social critique that is beyond the duality of right or wrong, true or false, and closer to the an impressionistic yardsticks of “forgettable, memorable or life-changing”. The kind of responses that are more appropriate to have toward a form of art.