Byung Chul Han: A Noble Culture

In Byung Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, two chapters stand out as exemplary insights into our current social conditions and a cultural alternative that could transform it: “Profound Boredom” (ch. 3) and “A Pedagogy of Seeing” (ch. 5).

“Profound Boredom” begins with the clearest explanation I have found of what Han often refers to as “positivity”. Han’s use of ‘positivity’ and ‘negativity’ are often confusing because he does not mean them in the conventional sense (good/bad, right/wrong). His definitions are based in part on Hegel’s thesis of the ‘negativity’ of the world which does not affirm us, and positivity as “sameness’ with self. But I think it’s better to read Han’s ‘positivity’ as “excess”, as an excess of production, consumption and experience that leads to overwhelm:

Excessive positivity also expresses itself as an excess of stimuli, information and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered. Moreover, the mounting burden of work, makes it necessary to adopt particular dispositions toward time and attention; this in turn affects the structure of attention and cognition. The attitude toward time and environment known as “multitasking” does not represent civilizational progress. Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression.” * (p. 12)

Multitasking, as a combination of focus on one task while using peripheral vision and hearing to monitor environmental conditions, is a cognitive process that humans (as well as animals*) have always engaged in. The difference today is the degree to which we must focus our primary attention on so many different tasks at once, often to the exclusion of peripheral monitoring of the environment. The kind of multitasking we engage in today is qualitatively different, leads to overwhelm, exhaustion, withdrawal and burnout.

Han contrasts these social conditions with what he calls “a noble culture.” (p. 21). 

We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it also does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. (p. 13)

Han relates this lack of capacity for deep attention to our inability to really listen to each other:

As tranquility vanishes, the “gift of listening” goes missing, as does the community of listeners. Our community of activity stands diametrically opposed to such rest. The “gift of listening” is based on the ability to grant deep, contemplative attention—which remains inaccessible to the hyperactive ego. (p. 13)

Han offers the vita contemplativa as an alternative culture that encourages deep listening and insight:

The term vita contemplativa is not meant to invoke, nostalgically, a world where existence** originally felt at home. Rather it connects the experience of being in which what is beautiful and perfect does not change or pass—a state that eludes all human intervention. The basic mood that distinguishes it is marveling at the way things are which has nothing to do with practicality or processuality…Yet the capacity for contemplation need not be bound to imperishable Being. Especially whatever is floating, inconspicuous, or fleeting reveals itself only to deep, contemplative attention. (p. 14)

We have the capacity to create the conditions of a noble culture—a culture that permits and encourages deep contemplative observation and listening to the world around us, to nature, to each other, by resting and settling into a contemplative posture toward the world, where the little-noticed becomes discernible and appreciated for its fleeting beauty. 

Han continues this theme of ‘the noble culture’ in “The Pedagogy of Seeing.” He draws this notion, surprisingly, not from Buddhist philosophy, but from Nietzsche: 

The vita contemplativa presupposes instruction in a particular way of seeing. In Twighlight of the Idol, Nietzsche formulates three tasks for which pedagogues are necessary. One needs to learn to see, to think, and to speak and write. The goal of education, according to Nietzsche, is “noble culture.” Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you.”—that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze. Such learning-to-see represents the “first preliminary schooling for spirituality.” [Nietsche]. One must learn “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead of take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts. (p. 21)

Han relates this socially conditioned tendency toward hyperactivity to a cultural flaw that prohibits spiritual development and leads to burnout:

Reacting immediately, yielding to every impulse, already amounts to illness and represents a symptom of exhaustion… The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrender the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. 

The passive attention to an excess of stimuli leads not to empowerment, but a loss of selective attention, even immobility “…hyperactive intensification leads to an abrupt switch into hyperpassivity; now one obeys every impulse or stimulus without resistance. Instead of freedom, it produces new constraints. It is an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer.” (p. 22)

(Han expands on this theme of the ‘positive [un]freedom’ of hyperactivity in both Psychopolitics and Vita Contemplativa.)

Han continues by relating the ‘pause’ of contemplation to the ‘interruption’ of the Other: “…a real turn to the Other presupposes the negativity of an interruption.” Here, ‘negativity’ is meant in the Hegelian sense as phenomena which is different from the Self, or from what one expects. “Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-times” are lacking. (p. 22). 

Furthermore, he notes increasing speed of the present and the foreshortening of the future in our cybernetic era: 

The future shortens into a protracted present…The computer calculates more quickly than the human brain and takes on inordinate quantities of data without difficulty because it is free of all Otherness. It is a machine of positivity [excess]…The positivization [excess] of human beings and society are transforming into autistic performance-machines… One might say that overexcited efforts to maximize performance are abolishing negativity because it slows down the process of acceleration. (pp. 22-24)

Finally, Han contrasts his notion of excess and hyperactivity to the kind of culture generated by Zen meditation:

The negativity of not to also provides an essential trait of contemplation. In Zen meditation, for example, one attempts to achieve the pure negativity of not-to—that is, the void—by freeing oneself from rushing, intrusive Something. Such meditation is an extremely active process; that is, it represents anything but passivity. The exercise seeks to attain a point of sovereignty within oneself, to be the middle. If one worked with positive potency, one would stand at the mercy of the object and be completely passive. Paradoxically, hyperactivity represents an extremely passive form of doing, which bars the possibility of free action. (p. 24).

For Han, the noble culture is one that permits and enables deep contemplation, a capacity to confront the negation of Reality, an ability to see and hear the Other which does not reflect the Self, a deep appreciation of the beauty of an impermanent world, freedom from compulsive activity, and the freedom to truly ‘be’. 

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*Han follows this statement with a regrettable assertion that ‘animals also engage in multitasking as a means of survival’. I think this is a moot point for two reasons: 1) he has no known expertise in zoology to support this statement; and 2) just because animals exhibit a particular behavior does not make it “regressive” or inferior, by implication. 

**i.e. being, Heidegger’s dasein.