The South Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han publishes a plea in favor of the contemplative life versus the lively life “Today we exploit ourselves of our personal free will and with the idea that we’re fulfilling ourselves,” he warns The true essence of being “grows all through and slowly, it solely condenses within the pause”
“Life solely will get its glow in inactivity,” says Byung-Chul Han, the well-known South Korean thinker. He doesn’t lead by instance: at 64 he has written 17 books. But that is not why we will take away credit score. Also Bertrand Russell or Robert Louis Stevenson had been prolific and wrote praises about idleness. The Contemplative Life of Han (an essay not too long ago printed in Taurus, with a translation by Miguel Alberti) has the reward of alternative: it arrives in full bloom of an info overdose.
What does Han say? Let’s put the brake on. (True, the mantra sounds outdated, however he, not like half-baked coaches and gurus, is extra convincing.) First the prognosis: who extra who much less all of us qualify inactivity as a deficit. You have to repair it. I eat? You need to do issues, it’s important to produce. Attention to Han’s phrase: “Today we exploit ourselves of our personal free will and with the idea that we’re fulfilling ourselves.” You do, one thing will occur. It is the recipe of many. But we wait and nothing occurs. And some die like that, ready.
Han advises: cease, do nothing, pay attention, what’s extra, “do not anticipate something”. You will see that one thing occurs: you’ll begin to do issues, however for enjoyable, with none use, “for nothing”. “Only inactivity initiates us into the thriller of life”, we learn in Contemplative Life. After all, remembers Han, God solely rested on the seventh day of Creation. That day he was blissful. In the identical approach blissful males now not aspire to something. You need to resign, says Han. “Resignation doesn’t take away. The resignation offers”.
That’s the important thing: as Russell and Stevenson have already warned, whenever you do nothing you turn out to be inventive. Nietzsche writes: “Inventive males reside in a very totally different approach from lively ones: they want time for his or her exercise to unfold with out predetermined ends or guidelines (…) they transfer way more gropingly than those that comply with recognized paths, those that act For instance, for utility.
Byung Chul Han Taurus
Han responds to Hannah Arendt’s Active Life. Action, she explains, makes us blind. It doesn’t allow us to see those which are closest to us. And what’s that? Socrates known as it his daimon; for the Romans they had been the geniuses of him. Protective spirits. We can name it “our hunches”. They are considerably “pre-reflexive”. They surpass us: “they overtake us”. But all of us have them.
In these omens there isn’t a purpose, solely “temper”. And that mind-set “reveals our essence.” You have to contemplate this. Not doing it’s absurd. Without a mind-set, pondering “has no path”. (This is why Artificial Intelligence, Han ventures, can by no means “assume” as a result of it has no mind-set.)
Thinking merely means “opening our ears.” Nothing extra. We uncover the festive, the posh. But what’s luxurious? Theodor Adorno discovered an excellent instance: the quick prepare has nothing to do with “the extinct prepare bleu splendor”. Luxury is accent, nugatory, ineffective. But it reveals what is worth it in life. (Subsection: on class I like to recommend studying A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles)
Here is the recommendation of Henry Miller: “Develop curiosity in life as you’re seeing it (…) Forget your self”. In that “state of enthusiasm we let go of ourselves”, Han provides. And we take heed to our genius. We get well the essence of being. It is simple? Of course not, says the thinker. Today nothing and no one lets us cease: we’re subjected to an intense bombardment of data. And the being goes one other rhythm. “It grows lengthy and slowly. He simply condenses into the pause.”
Conclusion: the disaster of the current is absolutely the lack of being.