Byung Chul Han: Vita Contemplativa

Vita Contemplativa, or the Contemplative Life, by Byung Chul Han (2024), is his argument for choosing a life of reflection, intuition and inactivity, of ‘not doing anything’ in particular. He contrasts the lifestyle offered by Neoliberalism as a life of constant busyness, even when we are supposed to be resting or sleeping, with a contemplative lifestyle of rest, attention to the present moment, attunement to others and to nature. What he argues for is not a vegetative state; rather a kind of activity that is not purposeful, not geared toward career or achievement of any kind, and not a mere distraction. He proposes that celebration and festival can involve the kind of inactivity that he is talking about, because it activity that is beyond work, in excess of what is necessary for survival. For example, the tradition of celebrating birthdays. There is no point to it but to celebrate the fact that “you exist.” 

This will resonate immediately with Buddhists who are already living the vita contemplativa on many levels, so this is not anything new for you. What will be new for you, perhaps, is the way he presents his argument as a philosopher. If you read it (100 pages), you will be presented with quotes from Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, as well as contrasting arguments from Hannah Arendt, to name a few. This is not going to be a feel-good pillow book on meditation, mindfulness and attaining inner peace. It is going to challenge your mind and your assumptions about your place in the world. Zhuangzi’s ‘parable of the cook’ is the rare presentation of an Asian sage on the topic, and it’s only two and a half pages. The rest is Greek philosophy from Socrates and Plato, quotes from the poet Rilke and the painter Cézanne, and the social theory of western philosophers such as Guy Debord and Roland Barthes. The benefit of this kind of presentation is that Han is able to connect his ideas about the vita contemplativa with Western philosophy and culture.

Unlike most feel-good self-help meditation books, I found this book hard to get into at first, and I’ve read several books by Han already. In the first chapter, ‘Views of Inactivity’, Han presents several forms of what he calls ‘inactivity’. It’s clear that he doesn’t mean doing absolutely nothing (although sometimes he does), but he presents several ‘moments’ when stillness, rest and reflection become possible and invite us into a contemplative state of mind and body. 

From ‘Acting to Being’ is Han’s critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is all over Han’s philosophy books; if not explicitly stated, it is always hovering in the background like a ghost. He critiques Heidegger’s resolution of the existential crisis of beings caught in time with a ‘will to act’, to ‘make good’ on the little time we have, rather than to accept the emptiness that is being-ness. He notes that after Being and Time, Heidegger began to shift toward being rather than doing. It was in this chapter that I began to realize that the most urgent existential crisis was not the finality of death, as one would suppose by reading certain existentialists, but the existential crisis of the present moment. We are in a state of existential crisis simply because we are alive now, and that now is fraught with all sorts of difficulties and uncertainties. So in our meditation, we focus on the now because that is the knot of the problem.

The next chapter, ‘Absolute Lack of Being’, is Han’s contrast between the ‘striving for immortality’ that Hannah Arendt advocates, by a life of heroic action (largely political), and the forms of inactivity that he first described and now embellishes. Han claims that this constant striving for achievement contributes to a ‘loss of being’, or a lack. I found his argument that excess activity leads to a loss of being a bit incredulous, as he seems to overstate the case. But it seems to centre around the idea that constant doing does not allow us to fully experience being; it fragments our sense of being with ourselves and with others so that we constantly feel a lack that we try to fill by ever more and constant doing. Han connects this loss of being to our engulfment in an information society: “Being has a temporal aspect. It grows slowly and gradually. Today’s short-termism dismantles being. Being forms only under conditions of lingering. Information represents the highest point of being’s atrophy. Niklas Luhmann said of information: Its cosmology is a cosmology not of being but of contingency.” (Luhmann in Han, p. 50).

In ‘The Pathos of Action’, Han makes his strongest argument against Hannah Arendt’s utopian vision of a perfect political state, a polis, one which requires heroic action to bring about truth and justice, a political arena that inaugurates a territory of freedom. In the arena of the polis, the individual distinguishes himself from the masses as the heroic actor; thus the polis is an arena of individual freedom. “The expansion of inalienable rights to all humankind is not revolutionary. It means freedom from unjustified constraints and as such represents only a negative freedom, that is, a liberation.” (Han, pp. 66-67.)It is not however, a place of joy or the nourishment of ‘being’; rather, one must accept constant dissatisfaction as one continuously strives to ‘win’ and maintain this freedom. To achieve this, one must forsake the desire to be happy for the heroic performance of exercising one’s “rights” and “freedoms.” 

Han’s final chapter, ‘The Coming Society’, puts together his argument for the vita contemplativa with political action that is concerned with enabling a deeper quality of being, i.e., a liberation from constant work, want and worry, the existential fear that one’s life will be suddenly swallowed up by mere chance. Finally here, and in several other places in this book, Han argues that a vita contemplativa, a politics of being, is essential to undoing the harm that humans have done to the biosphere and climate, that threatens us and all other species with extinction. A politics of being allows us to come into a contemplative relationship with Nature that restores our collective capacity to be.

As Kalle Lasen says in a recent issue of Adbusters, we must go deep in our political thinking and action. Instead of automatically going further left or right, instead, we go deep into a contemplative and collective politics of being.