Barcelona Metropolis

All the books by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han call for a return of negativity: instead of excessive transparency, secrecy; instead of an aesthetic of smoothness, roughness; instead of digitalisation, material things. And instead of active life, contemplative life, which must not be mistaken for leisure time. This is the subject matter in Vita Contemplativa. In Praise of Inactivity, the latest of his publications.

When it comes to establishing a hierarchy among the things one can do in this life, philosophers have always put philosophy at the top. It is a time-honoured tradition that begins with Plato and Aristotle, from whom we have inherited the distinction between an active life and a contemplative life, saving the best words for the latter. But modernity put an end to all this: critical theory, which today has replaced philosophy, rejects transcendent ideals and the estranged souls who should spend the day contemplating them, and calls for bodies involved in political activism and revolution. “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx said. “The point, however, is to change it.” He would be pleased to see the extent to which it is repeated today that politics is “transformative”.

All the books by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han call for a return of negativity: instead of excessive transparency, secrecy; instead of an aesthetic of smoothness, roughness; instead of digitalisation, material things. And instead of active life, contemplative life, which is the subject matter in Vita Contemplativa. In Praise of Inactivity, the latest of his publications. “Since we only perceive life in terms of work and performance, we interpret idleness as a shortcoming that needs to be remedied as soon as possible. Human existence as a whole is absorbed by activity. Consequently, it can be exploited.” After years of criticising how we have become self-made entrepreneurs, doing unpaid overtime, Han suggests that the answer had been there all along: namely, an age-old contemplative life.

Recovering the religious connection with the world

What is important is not to confuse contemplative life with “free time”, which, according to Han, “does not have as much vital intensity as contemplation. It is a time that we kill to prevent boredom from emerging. It is not really free, living time, but dead time”. Taking religious festivals as an example, Han proposes a kind of idleness that cannot be co-opted as an optimisation of the self. Contemplative life is not a ten-session mindfulness programme for growth, but a de-emphasis on the personal. Han seeks to recover the religious connection with the world to put a stop to the modern tendency to instrumentalise everything.

This brings us headlong into the proposal’s political ambiguity. Han, who writes very well in dialogue with the great thinkers of the Western tradition, dedicates the book’s most tense chapter to Hannah Arendt, who he strongly disagrees with. For Arendt, who took the debates in the Greek agora as an ideal, politics is the space of freedom in which human activity is separated from all social need to make something new emerge, and the consummation of political freedom is revolution. As a process with no beginning and no end, the duty of politics would be to maintain an open space at the heart of society so that a revolution can save the world whenever the freedom won by past revolutions falters.

They hasten to point out that in the Greek polis, apart from the agora, there were spaces reserved for sacred and religious contemplation: “Contrary to Arendt’s conviction, the future of humanity does not rest on the power of people who act, but on the revival of contemplative capacity, that is, the capacity that does not act.” Unlike the active revolution, such as the Russian or French revolutions, which for Arendt are the model, Han dreams of a passive revolution inspired by a parable by Walter Benjamin: “There is a Hasidic proverb about the future world that says that everything will be set up there just as it is here. The way our room is now, so will it be in the world to come; where our child sleeps now, here too they will sleep in the world to come. Everything will be the same as it is here, just a little different.”