Auto-Exploitation, Positive Violence, and the Palliative Society： A Modern Philosopher’s Ideas for Making Sense of the Present Age
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
188.37173
Summary
Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean-German philosopher Byung Chae-Hwan, whose thought-provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:00:11.120
feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life to understand the
00:00:16.020
roots of and solutions to these issues we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary
00:00:20.180
thinkers among the latter is korean german philosopher byong chul han whose thought-provoking
00:00:25.320
analyses are gaining increasing recognition if you're not yet familiar with han's philosophy
00:00:29.600
steven nepper the professor at the virginia military institute and the co-author of a new
00:00:33.780
critical introduction to this modern philosopher's work will take us on a tour of some of han's key
00:00:38.360
ideas in the first part of our conversation steven unpacks han's concept of the burnout society
00:00:43.340
and why so many of us feel tired from participating in what he calls auto exploitation and positive
00:00:48.160
violence we then discuss how our burnout society is also a palliative society that tries to avoid
00:00:52.720
suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of
00:00:56.900
nietzsche's last man we end our discussion with some of han's ideas for resisting the pitfalls
00:01:01.140
of modernity including embracing ritual contemplation and an openness to the mystery of others after the
00:01:07.580
show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash han
00:01:10.280
all right steven nepper welcome to the show thanks for having me it's honored to be here so you co-authored
00:01:30.360
a book about a modern philosopher that i've been seeing more and more of in my my readings this guy
00:01:37.380
named byung choo han he's a german korean philosopher for those who aren't familiar with
00:01:42.580
this guy who is he and why am i seeing him more and more in my philosophical reading yeah he is popping
00:01:48.880
up everywhere today on the internet on social media so byung choo han he is a korean german philosopher as
00:01:56.900
you said he was born in seoul korea he's living i think that's important to point out he's continuing to
00:02:02.920
write all the time so he's very much a thinker on the move he's born in seoul korea as a younger man
00:02:08.420
he studies metallurgy and is really into engineering kind of material science but as a young man studying
00:02:16.300
those he becomes more and more interested in philosophy and philosophical questions in literature
00:02:22.040
so he travels to germany to study abroad and he lets his parents under the impression that he's going
00:02:29.220
to continue his material science studies in germany but he makes this big move into studying
00:02:35.400
theology literature and especially philosophy at the graduate level so i think that's just kind of
00:02:41.260
a fascinating thing in and of itself about 15 years ago now he had this breakthrough book that is really
00:02:49.300
his turn to more topical problems problems of the day and that book was called the burnout society
00:02:55.660
and it was a big hit in germany but it also was you know relatively quickly translated into a whole
00:03:01.680
bunch of other languages and byung choo han some of your listeners may be familiar with matthew crawford
00:03:08.340
who wrote books like shop classes soul craft and they might be familiar with arguments about how more and
00:03:15.140
more we live in a society where there's this war for our attention where our attention is commodified
00:03:21.120
and you'll be in the line at the service station and you get up there to pump your gas and suddenly
00:03:28.120
the gas pump starts talking to you and giving you ads or even above the urinal there might be ads
00:03:32.980
so our attention is getting pulled more and more in by these digital technologies and certainly all of
00:03:40.000
those kind of more real world examples like the gas pump in the urinal pale beside the smartphone which
00:03:45.720
is algorithmically tailored to harvest our attention so han is a really sharp critic of those kind of
00:03:53.360
dynamics and i think that's a big part of the appeal but he really zooms into on the ways in which
00:03:58.420
while acknowledging that all these things are designed to catch us we also kind of catch ourselves
00:04:03.140
we go along with it we are very easily encouraged into binge watching or going deeper into email
00:04:11.420
and he talks about how we auto exploit and i think that's what's really captured people's mind because
00:04:17.240
i think a lot of people can recognize that in themselves i know i can the ways in which we don't
00:04:22.200
have to be checking work email but we do the way in which we have a down moment and we pull out that
00:04:26.760
smartphone i think he's really an astute critic of that okay so i hope we can talk more about these
00:04:33.080
ideas these criticisms he has of modern life in depth and yeah i'm sure our listeners are familiar
00:04:37.920
with matthew crawford we've had on the podcast a few times talk about shop classes soul craft the
00:04:41.920
world beyond your head so i think this will be right up their alley i'm curious you're a professor
00:04:46.900
at the virginia military institute so how did a professor at the virginia military institute where
00:04:53.180
they do drum outs take an interest in this korean german philosopher yeah so i love vmi i love working
00:05:00.940
with cadets as you might expect they're very ethically serious and they're very disciplined and they live
00:05:07.180
in a system that encourages discipline and virtue but cadets are not immune from some of these same
00:05:14.480
dynamics they too struggle with screen addiction they too struggle with being able to focus their
00:05:20.900
attention and you know a subset of cadets come to a place like this because they want that structure
00:05:26.320
they know they need it to succeed so in one ways i think that working at vmi gives me some insight into
00:05:32.720
some of the ways we can deal with these things because vmi for instance during their freshman year
00:05:37.260
what's called the rat year here cadets aren't allowed to use their cell phones but on the flip side
00:05:42.380
i think just like if i were teaching anywhere i can see how my students are struggling with some of these
00:05:47.480
dynamics okay let's dig into han and his philosophy kind of bigger picture how would you describe
00:05:53.020
his approach to philosophy like what school of philosophy would you put him in is he a
00:05:57.300
aristotelian an existentialist what's han's philosophy how would you describe it yeah there's
00:06:03.500
lots of different ways i could answer that question and he draws on some very different
00:06:07.060
sets of philosophical resources including zen buddhism including christian theology at times
00:06:12.900
but i think i would answer that question for right now and the way that i i think really focuses
00:06:18.740
why he resonates so much with people is that he comes out of this tradition especially in german
00:06:23.380
philosophy that's very techno skeptical uh sort of earlier critiques even before the digital age
00:06:29.560
that are concerned about instrumental reason about how we tend to approach the world and other people
00:06:35.000
as things as objects as machines how there's that reductionism involved in that how bureaucracy and
00:06:41.900
this technical reason rationalize our lives and organize it but then also might seem like they're
00:06:46.520
squeezing out room for freedom so some figures here you might think of on the left would be someone
00:06:51.600
like theodore adorno and on the right would be someone like martin heidegger but also german catholic
00:06:56.680
thinkers like romano gordini or joseph peeper and han draws on all these thinkers but more recently
00:07:02.800
you know there's this turn toward thinking especially about technology and how it shapes the world so someone
00:07:10.660
like heidegger is going to talk about how technology inframes the world it determines how we see the world
00:07:17.700
in each other itself there's something about the way the technology restructures our world and that
00:07:22.900
gets taken up in media theory by people like marshall mcluhan outside of germany and a lot of other media
00:07:29.180
theorists that han is in dialogue with who are looking at the ways in which yeah technology isn't just
00:07:36.240
sort of this passive transmitter of information or this tool that we use technology and especially
00:07:43.340
communication technologies shape how we see the world often in ways that we're not aware of
00:07:48.980
and i think we've all seen that with the digital think about how the experience of smartphones has
00:07:55.500
reshaped how we experience the world how we experience time so he's certainly a philosopher that
00:08:02.020
picks up those concerns and takes them in very interesting and precise ways into our digital present day
00:08:11.040
okay so yeah he's kind of taking a turn towards media theory and yeah he does talk about marshall
00:08:15.340
mcluhan i'm sure people have heard that phrase the medium is the message exactly yeah the idea is
00:08:21.140
there that the tools that we use for media consumption or communication it shapes the way we think i did an
00:08:27.900
article about this on our sub stack called dying breed about nietzsche and the typewriter yeah and
00:08:34.120
actually there was a famous german media theorist that wrote about this talking about how you know nietzsche went
00:08:40.540
blind and once he went blind he had to start using a typewriter and this guy talks about how his
00:08:45.860
writing style changed once he went from writing out by hand to writing with the typewriters writing
00:08:52.040
became punchier became more aphoristic more bombastic and so yeah the same sort of thing happens i'm sure
00:08:58.300
people have noticed how their emails have changed since they started communicating primarily via email
00:09:03.880
i remember when i wrote handwritten letters it kind of flowed and was more stream of conscious and it
00:09:09.640
was long sentences and now with email the medium of email it's got to be short punchy into the point
00:09:15.180
because that's how you do email yeah and even text messaging i think has refigured how we do email
00:09:21.380
but you might think too about something like how we've had this move that's ongoing from text to
00:09:27.020
video and then from video to short videos like in google now you can search for short videos
00:09:32.460
and there's lots of research that's emerging about what that's done to our attention span you know
00:09:37.260
how tiktok kind of rewires our brain and i think that's a great example of this dynamic people aren't
00:09:43.420
aware of how this technology is reshaping how they experience the world but it's doing it and
00:09:49.500
han's part of that tradition that's trying to make that explicit for us okay so han he is trying to
00:09:54.680
figure out why modern life can feel just weird overwhelming boring sometimes you just feel like
00:10:01.720
you're in this rat race and you can't get out of it but it feels fast so let's dig into this more
00:10:06.020
because i think everyone's listening to that has probably experienced that let's talk about that
00:10:09.560
book you'd mentioned that was his breakout book the burnout society what is his central diagnosis
00:10:15.820
of modern life in that work yeah so he emphasizes in the burnout society that when it comes to
00:10:25.120
feeling burnout which is this new phenomenon that many many people feel burnout even though if you look
00:10:30.640
at statistics at least in the developed world we have more quote unquote free time than any other
00:10:35.880
generation that came before us but we often have this feeling of being run ragged of being burnt out
00:10:41.020
and he ascribes it to what he calls this achievement culture where we have this sense of un open-ended
00:10:49.120
possibility there are all these things we could do so therefore we try to do as many of them as we can
00:10:55.860
and we get hooked on these little doses of dopamine on these little often quantified metrics of
00:11:04.740
achievement so this might play out in social media where you're looking for a certain number of
00:11:10.120
friends or a certain number of likes you post something and then you wait for the notifications
00:11:14.160
to roll in and you get your little hit but quickly it diminishes and you feel like you need to post
00:11:18.620
something else and it goes on and on and on and before you know it how much time have you spent
00:11:23.540
in that sort of strange little dynamic it might play out in sort of being a workaholic at the office
00:11:31.300
where you're checking your email even when your boss doesn't expect you to you're answering emails
00:11:36.480
you're impatient when other people aren't answering emails outside the usual business hours it could play
00:11:42.380
out even at the gym he says where you become super fixated on numbers and on sort of micromanaging
00:11:49.880
your achievement there so he sees it playing out in all these different areas and i think it's
00:11:56.740
particularly interesting how he talks about how it plays out not just in those meridocratic spaces
00:12:01.320
like being a super high achiever at work but it infiltrates our entertainment so you feel like
00:12:09.000
you're just sitting down to watch a video you know to relax at evening and you end up absolutely
00:12:14.820
vegging out on the couch and autoplay binging half a series in one night this is a pretty common
00:12:20.860
experience now and certainly the technology itself facilitates it with autoplay but he sees it too as
00:12:28.480
as this sense of well i you know we we could watch just this next one it's all there to stream right
00:12:33.460
now and so we end up doing it so there's a way in which in pursuing more and more and more we burn
00:12:39.580
ourselves out and in all this pursuit of more and more and more what's missing is a sense of
00:12:44.560
okay what's a good healthy balanced life looks like what is a good sense of limits when it comes
00:12:50.880
to these things the open-ended injunction to achieve doesn't give us any places to rest doesn't give us a
00:12:58.080
sense of when we've accomplished something doesn't give us this robust telos to pursue and of course who
00:13:04.920
benefits from this well certainly advertisers do right on the internet clicks are money attention
00:13:10.460
is money but he's very astute about how we have this what he calls auto exploitation yeah let's talk
00:13:17.520
about that so auto exploitation or sometimes it's translated self-exploitation yeah then he talks about
00:13:22.820
this idea of positive violence i think they're kind of connected what does he mean by self-exploitation
00:13:28.640
and positive violence and how does that connect with this idea of the achievement society
00:13:32.780
yeah what he means by positive violence and that's a strange little term in some ways
00:13:37.700
so negative violence would be coercion by outside forces right someone forcing you to do something
00:13:42.920
someone threatening you so that you do something check your email at work uh at these hours or you'll
00:13:48.060
be fired right that would be kind of a negative pressure han would say that positive violence is stuff
00:13:54.440
that we do to ourselves so it's when we in the pursuit of achievement we just go and go and go and go and go
00:14:01.280
that's what he means by positive violence and he sees this move happening with kind of the dawn of
00:14:07.400
the digital age from what he calls a disciplinary society that's about rules and injunctions and
00:14:14.560
negative discipline he sees that giving way in a lot of senses to this positive exploitation more and
00:14:22.520
more instead of telling us what not to do powers that be economic powers political powers are going to
00:14:28.940
encourage us to do more and often it's framed as this is good for you why wouldn't you want to do
00:14:35.420
more but of course this just serves some institutions some companies really really well but it can have a
00:14:44.160
big toll on society and on individuals in the society that suffer burnout fragmentation feelings of
00:14:51.300
isolation all these things that can come as negative consequences of the achievement society according to han
00:14:57.400
okay this actually reminds me of this idea of positive violence and self-exploitation and
00:15:03.940
achievement society and how we're doing this to ourselves you know trying to improve ourselves
00:15:08.940
because we feel like we should because we can there's those are potentials that we can pursue
00:15:12.780
but then they can be used by other people or other businesses or you know governments for their own
00:15:20.580
ends we did a podcast a really long time ago about the happiness industry about these consultants that
00:15:26.100
come into companies and say hey we're gonna develop a wellness program for your employees where we're
00:15:31.880
gonna have meditation sessions and you can have a nap room and it sounds like oh it's great it's for
00:15:37.260
the employees it'll improve morale but really it's like well we want to do that so we can get more out
00:15:41.820
of our employees yeah precisely and in the book the critical introduction that i co-authored we talk about
00:15:47.800
office space right and if you remember that movie great movie with with jennifer aniston's character
00:15:52.220
where she works at this restaurant where they have to wear these flare like these buttons all over
00:15:57.140
their uniform and be really bubbly and excited as they go about their job and her manager at one point
00:16:02.980
says to her you know you're only wearing the minimum allowed amount of flare don't you want to wear more
00:16:08.200
don't you want to wear more and it's pitched as you know why wouldn't you want to do this but it's so
00:16:13.380
clearly kind of degrading and coercive underneath the surface so that's maybe an extreme example
00:16:18.940
but i think it's a pretty good example of something that was already going on way back
00:16:23.960
when office space was produced but i think it's become much more prevalent in the time since then
00:16:28.860
yeah because of the digital technologies you see social media influencers like hey i'm living my best
00:16:34.520
life and here's what i do here's the routine i follow to live my best life and you can do this too
00:16:39.720
and it's like man that's a lot to do when i've got a job and kids and other responsibilities but
00:16:47.100
you try to do it because you're living in that achievement society yeah and i think that one
00:16:51.580
thing i would like to specify and i wish that han would do more of this in his own writing but i don't
00:16:56.820
think that the problem at least from my view maybe he would disagree with this i don't think the problem
00:17:01.120
is wanting to have a set of disciplines that pursue a goal you know like fitness working out or trying
00:17:10.560
to learn learn something new i mean all these can be good things but what makes them pernicious
00:17:16.120
in han's view is when you don't have this ideal that you're that you're aiming at which will sort
00:17:21.920
of let you know when you've got there you don't have this sense of direction you don't have this
00:17:26.480
sense that you're aiming at flourishing you are just sort of going from hit to hit to hit on these
00:17:32.280
mini achievement rubrics and you know what gets lost is like this rich notion of flourishing or this
00:17:39.060
balanced life so i mean i think that's what art of manliness is really good about certainly you know
00:17:44.020
you give people fitness tips and you give people time management tips but again and again you come
00:17:49.200
back to this robust notion of what flourishing should look like and i think that if you take
00:17:53.580
that seriously that actually counteracts the achievement society yeah maybe you can put it this
00:17:59.940
way in the achievement society we tend to treat means as ends because we don't have an ultimate end
00:18:06.180
really i think that's a fantastic way of putting it yeah yeah i've seen this in my own life i mean
00:18:12.340
perfect example i've talked about this before on the podcast and in my writing you know i was a
00:18:16.480
power lifter for a while really got into it and i was always chasing the next pr and it was fine for
00:18:23.660
a while but then a couple years ago you know i was getting to the point where in order to increase the
00:18:28.500
weight on the bar i was just having to train harder and harder and it was just you know just causing a
00:18:33.740
lot of stress physical it beat me down and i got to the point like i can't do this anymore this is no
00:18:39.340
longer enjoyable so i still train but i'm not chasing numbers i'm just training so i just feel
00:18:44.820
good and because i enjoy it yeah and one thing that han emphasizes elsewhere in his works i mean so far
00:18:50.740
we've talked about his diagnosis of our society's problems but his books are kind of split between
00:18:56.780
those more diagnostic works and works where he's recommending some practices that will help counter
00:19:04.100
this and he's written a lot about ritual and the importance of ritual ritual trains our attention
00:19:09.440
it allows our attention to be more robust it gives time a shape and you think about how traditional
00:19:14.140
practices of exercise you know we might think about like say martial arts how there's this ritualistic
00:19:20.300
dimension to it and this communal dimension to it and i think that's the antidote right that's not part
00:19:26.360
of the problem but there is this tendency for achievement society if we use han's terms to take even good
00:19:33.660
things and kind of twist them away from substantive ends to means means means means means or many many
00:19:42.780
goals that don't provide sort of lasting satisfaction or a sense of closure or pacing but you just chase
00:19:51.740
one after another after another an example i just thought of as you're mentioning that we where we take
00:19:55.900
something that we maybe enjoyed for the thing itself and then turn it into achievement society thing
00:20:01.580
like a hobby you see this happen all the time where someone has this hobby that they're really
00:20:06.240
passionate about and then they start sharing it on social media because they're just they love it but
00:20:11.680
then it turns into a business for them and then their hobby becomes this means to gain influence and
00:20:20.320
money and it kind of kills the joy of the hobby yeah i think that's spot on and we might think about
00:20:25.660
other things too so han recommends contemplative practices as something that are especially
00:20:31.560
important in our distracted attention divided present day but you know you think about how like a certain
00:20:38.600
practice of something like yoga or or even daily prayer can be just another thing on the to-do list
00:20:44.860
that you're using as like a band-aid to to sort of manage the worst feelings of being burnt out or stressed
00:20:50.900
or to allow you to just squeeze out a little more achievement and that's not sort of the
00:20:55.680
transformative practice that han's recommending to really counteract this achievement society but it
00:21:00.960
can be sort of co-opted as as part of the regimen right something there's this great phrase that han
00:21:06.680
has i think it's in the burnout society he says that people today are tired from not being able to be
00:21:14.720
themselves what does he mean by that how does the achievement society contribute to that tiredness
00:21:20.180
yeah i think that there's many ways you could approach that but i think that han has had this
00:21:26.400
this qualm about present-day society and the achievement society but he also sees some tendencies
00:21:32.080
towards this in western philosophy and western society for a long time he thinks that there's
00:21:36.920
often this unconscious kind of egotism to it where you're focused on being the best you and you know
00:21:44.020
for a lot of people to even question that just sounds insane right this is the mantra by which they live
00:21:49.600
and by which they exhort others but one of the dangers with that is that you you never really know like
00:21:55.440
when you've reached prime you and also often by sort of being so focused on you you don't open
00:22:02.420
yourself up to other people or to the world or to great works of art or literature or ideas you know
00:22:09.080
everything's about self-maximization or it's about that next little bit of achievement and not only is
00:22:17.400
that really bad ethically right because we need to be attentive to others uh han doesn't quote as far
00:22:23.380
as i know iris murdoch the great british novelist and philosopher but he would agree with her that in
00:22:29.700
some ways ethics begins with attention right we got to be able to sort of give people our attention in
00:22:34.580
order to treat them well so there's this ethical downside but there's also this paradox in which the
00:22:39.720
achievement society it seems like you're doing this all for your own benefit but it feels so thin and
00:22:44.460
you feel like you're burning out whereas really if you open yourself up to others and you have
00:22:48.820
substantive relationships with other people or if you pursue kind of a disciplined practice that gives
00:22:54.840
your life shape or you know religious practice those things open up a depth of meaning and a depth of
00:23:02.300
satisfaction but you only can access those if you let go of the ego if you die like the ego if you make
00:23:09.780
yourself receptive to them when you get out of the way then meaning can be discovered yeah when i read
00:23:15.700
that phrase tired from not being able to be themselves made me think of kierkegaard and his
00:23:19.600
notion of despair yeah and he had this idea that we have this idea of ourself as it should be and i think
00:23:27.020
he talks about someone who's really ambitious and it's either you got to be caesar or nothing yeah so
00:23:33.240
it's like if you can't be caesar then it's just you're worthless and i think han would agree with that we
00:23:38.200
have this idea in our modern world like we got to be the absolute best and if we can't do that we're
00:23:43.220
worthless and then we just fall into this funk and we're depressed and yet han i think he argues in the
00:23:48.720
burnout society a lot of the depression that we see in the modern world yes he would agree that maybe
00:23:54.360
there's some biological component some people are just depressed because of something you know
00:23:59.020
biological going on in themselves but he argues that a lot of depression people just feeling down
00:24:04.080
and just in a funk it's because we are striving so hard to be this awesome thing that we think we
00:24:11.220
should be because the achievement society tells us we need to be and we're not reaching that even
00:24:15.660
though we're trying really hard we just get burnt out and we're just like okay i'm just going to give
00:24:18.940
up yeah i think that's exactly right and my co-author rob wiley he's a great kierkegaard scholar and i
00:24:25.620
think part of what drew him to han is that even though han doesn't quote kierkegaard that much
00:24:30.140
there's a lot of shared sensibility and i think one of the things is this notion of perhaps the
00:24:36.000
most dangerous kind of despair is the despair that you're not aware of you're not aware you're in it
00:24:40.520
and i think he sees that as plaguing a lot of us that are caught up in this achievement society
00:24:47.080
so we mentioned that technology plays a major role in han's critique of modern life
00:24:52.080
how does he see digital technology especially smartphones and social media contributing to the
00:24:58.380
burnout society yeah that's a great question and my other co-author ethan stoneman this is really his
00:25:05.100
wheelhouse and one of the things that he points out is that really han doesn't turn to engaging
00:25:11.620
digital technology fully until after the burnout society that's when you see him start referencing
00:25:17.400
thinkers like marshall mccluhan that's when you see him really giving attention to how smartphones
00:25:21.840
have reshaped our experience of the world so i think the burnout society is still a great place to start
00:25:27.100
with han but if you're interested in the technology you want to look at some of those later works where
00:25:31.260
he really goes in depth on how technology is feeding into this achievement society mentality but even in
00:25:38.140
the burnout society he's already talking about how the smartphone can be kind of like a a portable a
00:25:43.320
mobile labor camp where we are just always pulling it out in any down moment and clicking clicking
00:25:50.500
i think too on social media one of the things that he is insightful about is that there's this drive to
00:25:58.160
make yourself transparent on it to sort of share everything about your life everything that's going
00:26:03.260
on and certainly that's really good for marketers because behind the scenes they're creating intricate
00:26:10.100
profiles for each user that they can then sell to other companies but also it accumulatively it creates
00:26:17.300
the sense that humans are really these thin things that an online profile captures who we are as a
00:26:23.440
person and sort of the depth and mystery of the individual gets lost you might think about something
00:26:28.360
like dating apps which you know i know lots of people that have you know met the love of life on
00:26:33.220
these so i'm not trying to sort of just categorically dismiss them but there's this real danger with them
00:26:38.500
that you think that if you match with some preferences online that when you meet the person that you
00:26:44.200
already know them right or that you know there's a compatibility there right you can lose track of
00:26:48.560
that mystery of the other person and of course too you know when we create online personas we can
00:26:54.700
either be consciously or unconsciously performing a persona that's not really us so han worries about
00:27:00.080
how it creates this thinned out version of self and other and you know he's a big proponent of
00:27:06.000
recovering real world relationships real world friendships where you can't just sort of ghost each other
00:27:10.960
if you don't like how the conversation's going or where you might have to dwell in silence for a few
00:27:17.420
moments when you're sitting together at the restaurant and where there might be this real
00:27:22.480
tension right where the other person might call you out or you might sort of need to stick with each
00:27:26.620
other through hard times all of these he thinks awaken us to a richer sense of ourselves and others
00:27:34.340
as having this unfathomable dimension of otherness or mystery he thinks we hunger for that yeah i do
00:27:41.640
too for sure yeah han's critique about transparency i thought was really interesting because yeah you see
00:27:46.920
this ethos particularly online and social media where you got to be transparent so yeah it benefits
00:27:52.340
the social media companies they get more information about you they can sell ads to you but also you see
00:27:57.380
this ethos from the people themselves taking part in social media there's this idea that if you have a
00:28:03.360
following like your followers demand transparency from you you got to let them know everything about
00:28:08.720
you like what are your thoughts about this issue and tell me about your family life and your problems
00:28:13.740
and you get rewarded if you reveal things about yourself oh thanks for being real man you're just so
00:28:19.440
authentic and kicker guard makes this argument too in the present age he makes this comment how people
00:28:27.840
he was writing in the 1800s and he was writing about how people would talk about their personal lives
00:28:33.300
very freely in the public like in newspapers and essays and things like that but then when they were
00:28:39.440
actually with people face to face they wouldn't reveal those things like they would just suddenly
00:28:44.260
become very reticent and they wouldn't talk about those deep personal things but they had no problem
00:28:49.460
sharing it with the mass audience and kicker guard said somehow that that hurts being a self like you can't
00:28:55.480
become a self and an individual unless you have he calls it a sanctum sanctorum like a holy of holies that
00:29:01.880
only you can go into because if you're just living your life out in public you're constantly shaping
00:29:07.740
yourself to fit what the public wants so you can get the followers and the likes etc yeah i think that's
00:29:15.440
spot on so it's it's kind of interesting this might feel like a bit of a digression but uh there's this
00:29:21.140
emily dickinson poem that i teach most semesters it's very short it's called i'm nobody who are you
00:29:25.860
actually it's not the title it's just the the first line that's taken as the title but it goes
00:29:30.340
i'm nobody who are you are you nobody too then there's a pair of us don't tell they'd advertise
00:29:36.420
you know how dreary to be somebody how public like a frog to tell one's name to live long june
00:29:43.040
to an admiring bog it's a great poem right yeah you know especially today students on their own
00:29:49.840
immediately go to social media but you know with that idea of transparency in mind what does the frog
00:29:55.060
do again and again again they say their same name over and over but in this poem dickinson suggests
00:30:00.980
that the nobodies that are behind the scenes that have a sense of of privacy they're the ones that
00:30:07.300
actually have mystery depth something interesting and new to say so i think that that poem like way
00:30:13.500
before we have digital technology is on to something about how always making yourself transparent
00:30:19.520
kind of thins you out and loses something important another thing that han explores is the role of
00:30:27.720
boredom in modern life what role does boredom play in han's critique of modern life and what does he
00:30:32.640
mean by boredom yeah that's a fantastic question because there's a couple different types of boredom at
00:30:37.660
play one type of boredom is this restlessness that we have no patience for whatsoever that so if you're
00:30:45.320
waiting at the bus stop and you have a down moment probably you're going to feel an itch to pull out
00:30:50.760
of your phone if you're like most people so we want to fill up every moment with something and we have
00:30:57.700
no tolerance for that restless boredom but han actually is a big advocate of this deeper sense of
00:31:04.460
boredom profound boredom where you let go of the restlessness and you sink into the moment and you just
00:31:11.100
open yourself up and he thinks that that kind of state is really important today because that's the
00:31:18.420
kind of state where new ideas might come from you or where you might notice stuff around you certainly
00:31:24.460
if you're an artist that's where inspiration might strike so he thinks that this kind of profound
00:31:30.060
boredom that a lot of us that were lucky enough to grow up pre-digital you know as kids i think we reach
00:31:35.680
this state often because you go through the restless boredom like oh man i've got all day i don't know
00:31:39.760
what i'm gonna do i'm tired of all my toys and you know you don't have anything any recourse so over
00:31:46.660
time you know you might come up with like an imaginative game or you might go out on a walk
00:31:51.000
and you sort of sink into this more receptive open state so those are the two states of boredom in han
00:31:57.520
now i'm not sure this is exactly everything that's going on and this this might be only a partial answer
00:32:03.360
to why he's interested in that profound boredom but i think han since he's such a great
00:32:08.040
diagnostician of what's wrong with society one of the things that he's aware of is that okay if
00:32:14.560
we're already feeling really burnt out because it's achievement society what if we just let go
00:32:20.340
of that compulsion to achieve in the midst of the burnout maybe there's not that big of a gap
00:32:26.160
between feeling exhausted and that profound boredom and if we could just allow ourselves to sink into that
00:32:32.220
then maybe the antidote is much closer to our the state of our problem than we think so i think
00:32:39.300
that's maybe part of the reason why he's so interested in profound boredom there's a qualitative
00:32:43.260
leap between the burnout state and profound boredom but maybe the divide in another sense isn't that far
00:32:52.300
apart maybe it's kind of like hair of the dog where you have to kind of lean into it a little bit more to
00:32:57.780
figure out what it is you lack and really need yeah i think so and you you can see him sort of
00:33:03.960
trying out different approaches to our problems so post burnout society he also starts to talk a lot
00:33:09.640
more about openness to the other and eros is this thing that draws us out of ourself towards the other
00:33:15.620
or towards the world so here too i mean i think he thinks that okay we're seeking all this fake
00:33:21.520
community online and you you'll talk about online community is often seeming like you're encountering
00:33:26.620
other people but really because of algorithms and really because you still kind of mediate that
00:33:32.360
encounter he says you're actually trapped in kind of a mirror world you're trapped in what he calls the
00:33:38.120
hell of the same where if you really want to encounter other people you often have to go into the real
00:33:43.820
world where there's a little more risk and uncertainty in the encounter but there's also this sense of depth
00:33:50.540
and a richer possibility of a relationship you know martin buber is another thinker that's important
00:33:57.080
to him and martin buber will say things like when you enter into a real relationship with the other
00:34:03.420
person the relationship itself is bigger than the sum of its parts it's not just you and me there's now a
00:34:10.260
we and han will say similar things but you have to sort of open yourself up to that for that to happen
00:34:16.740
and he thinks a lot of people are seeking that on the internet but it's pretty hard to find on the
00:34:21.080
internet we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
00:34:24.660
and now back to the show okay so we've talked about the burnout society so we're all feeling
00:34:31.920
kind of burnt out according to han because we live in this achievement society that has this
00:34:37.200
we call it ethic of self-exploitation or auto-exploitation where we're pursuing things
00:34:42.560
not because we have to but it's this idea well you could do it so you need to do it and we have
00:34:47.740
these tools that allow us to measure ourselves and make progress but you can never know when you
00:34:55.260
actually reach that best self and so you just get tired and burnt out and it can cause boredom too
00:35:01.080
because some of that stuff that you're constantly doing can just wear you down and it can be boring
00:35:05.600
i want to talk about another book that he wrote it's a short one called the palliative society
00:35:10.980
yeah this is another critique he makes of modern culture what does he mean by the palliative society
00:35:15.700
so in this book his main argument is that there's something seriously out of whack about our
00:35:23.260
relationship to pain as a society he sees our society as not just an achievement society but one
00:35:29.280
that tries to avoid pain and suffering at all costs and of course han thinks that in many cases
00:35:36.060
yeah you know we want to try to reduce pain in disease we want to try to reduce pain in all
00:35:42.080
all kinds of areas of life but one of the dangers here is that to be human means you're going to
00:35:47.760
undergo pain right so if we get to the point where we think pain is always a problem a problem to be
00:35:53.280
be solved with a technical solution then what happens when you run to a situation where the pain
00:35:58.120
can't be solved maybe someone's dying and he thinks we're really bad at accompanying people through
00:36:03.080
painful situations i think that's probably true but then han would also say that many areas of life
00:36:09.720
require pain in order to reach a higher level so you think again about physical fitness right this is
00:36:17.200
one of the few areas in our society where i think that you still see some embrace of pain as a necessary
00:36:25.760
step in order to become a better athlete you got to train hard you got to suffer but han points out too
00:36:31.120
that in education you know he's a philosopher to be a good philosopher he says you've got to confront
00:36:36.740
ideas that challenge your own you've got to wrestle with difficult ideas that make you uncomfortable
00:36:42.520
and it's hard work and it's painful i would say the same is true i'm a words guy i'm an english
00:36:48.720
professor through and through but mathematics you know mathematics at a certain level becomes really
00:36:54.040
tough and in order to get through it you've got to be willing to sort of suffer through
00:36:58.140
the hard work to get there and then maybe most importantly think about relationships think
00:37:04.820
about a good marriage or a good friendship or with kids those relationships there's going to be time
00:37:10.720
when that loved one is suffering and they need you and it's going to be unpleasant to go through that
00:37:15.680
with them so any kind of real love entails suffering and that's ancient wisdom that a lot of people
00:37:23.800
would pay lip service to but actually our vocabulary and our practices for dealing with that have gotten
00:37:30.600
really thinned out and he thinks that we basically live in a society that avoids pain for him the
00:37:35.980
covid pandemic really revealed that because you know after the the opening stages when we got a better
00:37:42.440
sense of what's going on with this disease he saw kind of an overreaction in all kinds of areas you know
00:37:48.880
might think about schools shut down for kids long after we knew that this disease thankfully for the
00:37:55.100
most part wasn't that threatening to children and this strange way in which we couldn't sort of balance
00:38:00.820
that this is a tragic situation that there's going to be negative outcomes no matter which way we go
00:38:06.300
he saw us as kind of failing the test in a pretty profound way and he traces it back at least in part
00:38:14.060
to this inability to deal with suffering and just sort of think about pain in an adjusted way
00:38:21.340
you mentioned that you think our vocabulary around pain and suffering has been thinned out
00:38:26.580
what are some examples of that off the top of your head yeah so i mean i think we see it in all kinds of
00:38:33.340
areas and there have been some some really good contrary trends to this but i think that when you think
00:38:39.580
about parenting and how for a few decades now we've had the phenomenon of like helicopter parents
00:38:46.540
right whenever your kid has problems there's a real not even just temptation but almost expectation
00:38:53.980
from other parents you might think to jump in there and smooth it out for your kid and sometimes that's
00:38:59.540
the right thing to do right sometimes there's situations the kids are in that they can't deal with
00:39:03.580
and they need adults to step in but also there's a way in which if you want your kid to be an
00:39:07.380
adjusted adult they've got to learn how to suffer through some situations they've got to grow in
00:39:13.000
toughness and courage and i think we're pretty poor at that kind of vocabulary i think too you know
00:39:20.880
it's really tough it's tough for me and you know i'm a religious guy from a tradition that keeps some
00:39:26.400
of these things more alive but you know it's really hard to accompany family members that are in deep
00:39:33.480
sickness and on their way to death it's hard to know how to talk to them it's probably always been
00:39:38.000
hard but i think it's become especially hard in our day where we you know tend to close that away in
00:39:44.320
retirement homes and hospitals so you know those are those are some examples yeah another one that
00:39:49.160
came to the top of my head was you saw this a couple years ago i think you're seeing a trend
00:39:53.660
away from it but the idea of trigger warnings in classrooms when you're discussing heavy topics like
00:39:59.420
sexual assault or crime or whatever you know you got to give a trigger warning to people i think that
00:40:05.040
might be another example of like han would say this is an example of the palliative society we want to
00:40:09.200
reduce and eliminate pain as much as possible even though to really understand an experience you have
00:40:15.220
to confront everything even the terrible parts of it yeah and han would say you know life itself is
00:40:20.860
going to throw up these really hard situations so certainly in classrooms you know you shouldn't handle
00:40:26.180
difficult material flippantly or uh you know brusquely you should try to be sort of sensitive
00:40:31.740
about it but one of the ways the reasons to study the humanities is to study the tragic and help you
00:40:38.120
then process it when you have to encounter it in your own life so if you just sort of immediately
00:40:43.040
bracket that off then one of the main reasons that the humanities is important goes away and people end up
00:40:49.780
suffering more as a result for that i'd say yeah i become fragilized we had the guy who wrote the
00:40:54.500
the coddling of the american mind or something like that yeah he writes about that i would like to
00:40:59.180
talk about this and i think it's in the palliative society han has this kind of throwaway line he didn't
00:41:04.420
really explain it or follow and i wish he did because like that's actually really interesting
00:41:08.180
he talks about this idea of the palliative society and wanting to eliminate pain he likens it to the
00:41:15.560
last man from frederick nietzsche's thus spoke zarisutra and he said that the last man is actually
00:41:21.920
obsessed with their health do you know i'm talking about when he wrote this can you flesh
00:41:26.680
that because i think that's really interesting yeah and and you know just a sort of a broader
00:41:31.760
point i think that um one one legit frustration that people can have with han is that since he
00:41:36.780
writes these shorter extended essay like books sometimes there will be these lines that he almost
00:41:43.600
feel like throwaway lines you're like oh i wish he would have just fleshed that out i think that's a
00:41:47.820
pretty common experience his relationship to nietzsche is a really interesting and complex one
00:41:52.700
because you know when there's one way of thinking about nietzsche and there's certainly abundant textual
00:41:57.820
evidence to think about this is as this great philosopher of the will and of action but he brings
00:42:04.100
out a more contemplative side to nietzsche and he pulls out these passages that show him emphasizing
00:42:11.280
the importance of contemplation of being able to have like real repose so that's an interesting
00:42:16.680
thing but yeah i think that he thinks that the last man is obsessed with health and obsessed with
00:42:23.320
their own happiness in such a way that it has that unconscious egotism about it and also becomes very
00:42:30.540
fragile and can't face up to the tragic side of life the suffering of life and the suffering of others
00:42:38.300
yeah when i read that it made me think of you know we live in this world of like wellness culture
00:42:43.380
where we have all these devices and supplements we can take and just talk about we got to you know
00:42:48.700
extend our lifespan and i'm thinking like why like what are we doing with that i mean health is
00:42:56.240
important i'm not trying to dismiss health but it seems like we've made health an end rather than a
00:43:02.080
means to a higher telos i think that's exactly exactly correct and yeah i don't think the problem is that
00:43:09.680
you want to be healthy or that you want to reduce suffering from disease or unjust circumstances
00:43:15.800
or things like that i think that's all to the good and you know important but i do think that uh
00:43:20.220
one danger of sort of fetishizing health too much is that any risk becomes unacceptable or any
00:43:28.340
difficulty becomes something to avoid and that just really thins out life because so many of the things
00:43:33.960
that make life most meaningful and i think too it's important you know to make that distinction
00:43:39.300
between kind of pleasantness and meaning often deep meaning you know you think about like a buddhist monk
00:43:47.040
or a saint you know deeply meaningful life but one that's full of asceticism and you know challenge
00:43:55.180
so we've been talking about some of han's critiques and sort of diagnoses of um modern life and that's what
00:44:01.700
he's most famous for he's a diagnostician but as you said we've been talking about throughout the
00:44:04.640
conversation he does offer some potential antidotes to this feeling of burnout this feeling of boredom
00:44:12.160
this feeling of flatness in modern life and one of those things you mentioned was this idea of eros
00:44:18.300
and that we need to return to this idea of eros i think a lot of people lay people when they hear
00:44:24.000
the word eros they think oh sex but that's not what han means what does han mean by eros and how can
00:44:29.840
that help us out of the burnout society yeah so his his notion of eros goes back to plato but i think
00:44:37.900
he definitely puts his own spin on it but it's this notion of eros is this desire that draws us
00:44:43.000
out of ourself towards some other good so he would distinguish that from the kind of uh lower level
00:44:53.280
base desire gratification that often the internet trades on right you want to get those likes
00:44:59.020
or yeah if we want to talk about sex you know pornography you know literally masturbatory
00:45:06.020
interaction with the internet whereas real eros yeah you're drawn outside of yourself towards the
00:45:11.080
other and when you really encounter another person or encounter the world you realize that it's bigger
00:45:16.920
than your project it doesn't exist just for you you discover this depth and richness and mystery
00:45:23.860
and so yeah when it comes to erotic relationships you know sexual relationships relationships of
00:45:32.000
erotic love he'd say that yeah there's a big difference between that transactional kind of
00:45:39.820
pornographic interaction and one where you're attracted to the other person as a three-dimensional
00:45:45.500
person and as a mystery but you know he would also use eros broadly as well we're you know
00:45:51.380
attracted to the beauties of the world or we're drawn out of ourself into friendship so it's much
00:45:58.120
much bigger than than sex for sure all right so yeah eros takes us out of ourselves so yeah this
00:46:03.520
kind of goes back to matthew crawford's idea of the world beyond your head if you really want to
00:46:06.620
become a self you have to get outside of yourself and for crawford he talks a lot about the you know
00:46:12.900
the role craft can play in drawing you out of yourself kind of get out of this morbid self-consciousness
00:46:18.440
but that can also happen through relationships can come from looking at art can come from spending
00:46:23.860
time in nature and another concept related to eros that i thought was really interesting from han
00:46:29.340
was that if we want to open ourselves to those erotic encounters where we're drawn out of ourselves
00:46:35.120
we have to have this stance of friendliness to the world i really like this idea what does he mean by
00:46:40.280
friendliness yeah so uh this is an idea that runs from his thinking from the very early
00:46:45.900
untranslated works in german right through his most recent work and what he means by friendliness
00:46:51.660
is kind of this intent of openness to the world and to other people so sometimes he'll use this
00:46:58.080
language especially when he's drawing resources from zen buddhism he'll talk about becoming a guest
00:47:03.760
house to the world where you're just kind of open to the world and he sees this as a friendly stance
00:47:10.040
i think he's really good at drawing attention to all these ways that when we're in our phone we're
00:47:14.680
literally closed off from other people in the world or when we're all up in our head again coming
00:47:19.960
back to matthew crawford you know you can be walking down the street and maybe you're not looking at your
00:47:24.500
phone maybe you don't have headphones on but you're you're so wrapped up in your head you're not aware
00:47:28.700
of anything that's going around you or uh aware of anyone around you so to have this friendly
00:47:35.360
disposition towards the world is the stance of openness yeah this made me think of hartmut rosa
00:47:42.720
yeah he's on my mind because we've we've talked about him on the podcast before but i also did an
00:47:47.480
another article for my substack dying breed about his idea of resonance and he had this idea of
00:47:53.580
resonance being like you're open to the world or the outside world talking to you and it kind of
00:48:00.000
transforms you and he makes the case that we have a hard time feeling that that sense of resonance
00:48:06.740
because we see the world as just aggression points right there's things we got to do
00:48:13.040
so the example i gave when i'm in my house i'm constantly looking around like we need to fix that
00:48:18.680
thing this thing needs to be painted we need to declutter that i'm hardly ever just thinking i'm just
00:48:24.280
going to be in my home and just enjoy my home we can even see other people as aggression points things
00:48:30.240
we got to do things with like what can this person do for me or if someone's having a hard time
00:48:35.460
when they open up to you we think like well okay i got a lot to do what what can i do just to get
00:48:41.640
through this as quickly as possible so i can get on with my life so we're like oh they're there okay
00:48:45.740
you'll be all right and we just you know send the person on their way and rosa would say like
00:48:50.220
no you have to actually kind of have a stance where you open to like okay just let this person who's
00:48:54.920
saying they're sad just be there with them you don't have to fix anything just be there and you
00:49:00.940
might have this moment where like both of you feel like you're edified in some way and i think maybe
00:49:05.900
han would agree with that like instead of seeing the world as points of aggression you're just open
00:49:10.120
to the thing or the person as they are yeah i think that's exactly right and rose is a thinker
00:49:17.600
that's become much more important to me too or that i should say that i've just discovered more fully
00:49:22.100
even after writing this book even though rosa you know gets cited in here and i think that as you
00:49:27.820
suggest rosa and han are approaching some similar things from you know somewhat different angles and
00:49:34.520
i think that's useful because you know just like anything if you look at it from one angle and then
00:49:38.620
look at it from another angle you're going to get richer picture but i think rosa he has this great
00:49:43.340
insight that as moderns we really like control we want to eliminate as much contingency
00:49:49.180
or risk from our lives as possible we want more and more things to be under our control
00:49:55.120
and there's something that's you know understandable about that but there's a real danger when it becomes
00:50:00.140
as exaggerated as it has become for us in that to have a really rich relationship with something
00:50:06.200
to have a true relationship that has a back and forth right a resonant relationship as rosa would say
00:50:12.240
then you've got to relinquish control in order to have that sense of a meaningful relationship with a
00:50:17.460
friend you can't be all about controlling everything about the friendship and manipulating it or that's
00:50:22.440
just going to be a disaster in addition to being unethical to the friend but also we have this deep
00:50:27.720
hunger to connect with nature but at the same time we struggle to operate on any level other than
00:50:33.960
yeah controlling it so yeah so rosa thinks that we have to let go of this modern urge for control
00:50:42.200
in order to see problems and fix them in order to open up these richer spaces these resonant spaces
00:50:49.060
in your example of someone that's suffering you don't always need to fix the problem you just need
00:50:53.660
to be with them that's a good example of that does han offer any sort of practical
00:50:59.840
i hear maybe han would be like you can't reduce my philosophy to like a list of things to do because he's
00:51:07.180
like that's that's kind of counter to what i want to say but are there like some practical ways people
00:51:10.660
can start countering this burnout society this feeling of tiredness for just the everyday person
00:51:19.440
we've got jobs families and phones that never stop pinging us yeah i think so and i think there
00:51:25.540
are actually a lot of different practicalities and possibilities that he offers throughout his
00:51:31.060
works i think that he would bristle against the idea that he's you know some kind of high theory
00:51:36.040
self-help in part because he's challenging you to not just sort of make these small adjustments in
00:51:42.220
order to achieve better in the achievement societies calling for these more radical transformations and
00:51:46.640
he thinks that's where you'll find deeper solutions and certainly too he'd like to see some more
00:51:52.080
widespread changes in society to cultivate these things but that said one thing i love about han is
00:51:58.060
that you know he writes like editorials about the problems that teenagers in schools are facing in
00:52:03.000
germany and one of the reasons he writes these short books is that he really does want to speak to
00:52:07.340
non-academics about their their problems and i think that's another reason why he's become so
00:52:12.740
popular so yeah some of these possible remedies to achievement to burnout i think one is just cultivating
00:52:20.220
that sense of openness when you're at the bus stop or you're walking down the street or whatever
00:52:25.180
and you have this urge or there's a lull in the conversation and you have this temptation to pull out the
00:52:30.040
phone don't pull it out and if you really struggle with those things you know han doesn't say this but
00:52:34.940
i think it's a corollary of his positions yeah go with a dumb phone or leave the phone at home i think
00:52:40.960
too you know he has like long sections about how to be a good listener in his book the expulsion of the
00:52:46.820
other i think too you know things like okay maybe you got a friend that's going through a hard hard time
00:52:54.520
put yourself in that situation where you're accompanying them through it so these are all
00:52:59.580
some some things that come through one we haven't touched on much that i'll add is that han talks a
00:53:05.860
lot about ritual and certainly talks about religious ritual and how one of the advantages of that is that
00:53:12.520
it gives time a shape so every day isn't just the same empty box in which you fill it up with
00:53:18.780
achievement but you have things like the sabbath where you have festivals that give time a shape
00:53:25.380
and even if you're not religious you can try to recover a more variegated sense of time so those
00:53:33.900
are are some practical possibilities yeah he talks about meditation could potentially be one but like
00:53:39.300
he said well don't use a meditation app where it tracks your streak of how many days in a row you've
00:53:43.120
meditated you're you're in achievement society mode if you do that but just take a few minutes where you
00:53:47.660
just sit there and contemplate something i think looking at art going to the museum just to stare
00:53:54.180
at something for half an hour that could do it being out in nature can be another another source of that
00:53:59.260
as well learn how to tolerate silence learn how to be alone and not on technology and just be and observe
00:54:07.580
how has engaging with han's work changed the way you live personally yeah so i'm certainly someone
00:54:14.700
that struggles with screens and i have my periods where i do really well with it and others that i
00:54:20.020
don't do so well so yeah i think that studying han is is for me too it's become a way of trying to to
00:54:26.220
get a better grasp of some of these things in my own life and yeah you know i can remember times like uh
00:54:33.220
you know it'll be a beautiful evening and my my kids are in at ballet practice and i'm outside here in
00:54:39.960
blue ridge mountains which are absolutely gorgeous and there's this great sunset and i'm i'm on my
00:54:45.600
phone like doing what that was one of the moments that just got to me and it's like yeah you know
00:54:50.560
this is bad changes need to be made changes need to be made for the sake of other people in my life
00:54:55.660
but also for my own sake and having this richer experience of the world so han's been a really
00:55:01.820
important philosopher to me and i i probably got into him in some ways via matthew crawford i i knew
00:55:07.380
crawford's worked first that really spoke to me and i could see han picking up on some similar themes
00:55:14.240
yeah i think that's interesting han started off in metal work and then he became philosopher and
00:55:19.720
crawford he's like a motorcycle guy motorcycle mechanic and then he went into philosophy so
00:55:24.420
yeah they're similar in that way if someone wanted to dive into han's philosophy for the first time
00:55:28.380
where should they begin yeah so the burnout society still is a pretty good place to begin
00:55:33.300
but i think some of these more recent works are great entry points too i wouldn't be surprised if
00:55:38.620
many art of manliness listeners liked the the palliative society i think that's a good book
00:55:44.140
another recent one called vita contemplativa which focuses on contemplation as an antidote to bird out
00:55:50.820
i think that's another good place to start and certainly you know i'd put in a plug for our
00:55:55.280
critical introduction han's written over 30 books and some of those aren't even translated into english yet
00:56:00.920
so what our critical introduction tries to do is give some through lines across han's body of work
00:56:07.240
situate him in among some other thinkers show how he speaks to contemporary problems both in the ones
00:56:13.300
that he addresses in his book and some others that we identify so it's an academic book but it's one
00:56:18.980
that's definitely pitched at the general reader with with a little bit of background and philosophy
00:56:23.240
should be able to navigate well steven this has been a great conversation besides your book
00:56:28.080
that listeners can find on amazon is there someplace they can go to learn more about your work in general
00:56:32.500
yeah so i'm working on an author website but i don't have that up yet but two places they might
00:56:36.380
go one is i edit this online poetry journal new verse review which has kind of an eclectic focus so
00:56:41.720
it touches on some of these questions about attention and contemplation for sure but then the other place
00:56:46.440
that you might look is i've written a few pieces for the lamp magazine that touches on similar themes
00:56:51.340
including i have an overview of han that i wrote for that magazine so if you go there and
00:56:56.440
just search my pieces that's another i think good place great yeah we'll link to those in the show
00:57:00.920
notes well steven nepper thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you very much it's an honor
00:57:04.560
my guest is steven nepper he's the co-author of a critical introduction of byong chul han it's
00:57:10.100
available on amazon.com you can check out our show notes at awim.is slash han where you find links
00:57:14.460
or resources we delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast
00:57:26.740
make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well
00:57:30.760
as thousands of articles they've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of
00:57:33.900
and make sure to check out our new newsletter it's called dying breed it's for both men and women alike
00:57:38.200
you can sign up at dyingbreed.net it's a great way to support the show directly
00:57:42.160
as always thank you for the continued support until next time's brett mckay
00:57:45.840
reminding you to listen to anyone podcast but put what you've heard into action