Yesterday, I had another book review published at Law and Liberty, this one reviewing four books by Byung-Chul Han. If you haven’t read Han’s work, I highly recommend it—in my opinion, he’s one of the most interesting and enigmatic philosophers and cultural critics writing today. Han’s critique of the Information Age is bitter and incisive; his diagnosis of what it’s like to live in a world shaped by social media and smartphones and the internet is spot on. (Yes, I’m aware of—and troubled by—the irony of writing about this on the internet.) But he’s even better when painting a picture of the good life—a life of contemplation, attentive to beauty, friendliness, the solidity of material things, the importance of ritual, narrative, and community. All of these are, of course, the usual things we anti-reductionists like, but Han presents them with a fresh and revelatory charm. Here’s an excerpt from my review:
Han’s solution to these perceived problems is to engage in contemplation. This is his focus especially in his recent Vita contemplativa. Han’s critique of modernity primarily consists of helping the reader feel how we exist in the information age, and also feel what is missing in that world from a flourishing human life. Han’s proposals for solving these problems also are aimed at helping us feel the desire for contemplation—that is, focused attention on what is other than us. Some of what Han says about contemplation is redolent of the famous work of Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. Like Han, Pieper understands a major part of the problem with the contemporary world to be a focus on productivity, on justifying actions entirely through their utility. Leisure activities are done entirely for their own sake; they bring us to flourishing by themselves, without needing to attend to their results. Like Pieper, Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to produce one’s own identity that plagues us today.
But as the story about the jukebox indicates, Han’s emphasis is not so much on Pieper-style leisurely activities, as much as it is on inactivity. If we’re going to compare Han to a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher, he is more like Elizabeth Anscombe, who, when asked to state her recreation activities for Who’s Who, wrote “sitting around.” For Han too, the world would be a far better place if we all just spent time sitting around. A haiku that he quotes sums up his vision:
Sitting peacefully doing nothing
Springtime is coming
and the grass grows all by itself.
Read the rest of the review here.