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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity - even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus-response and need-satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity. In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplative. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Quotes
Views of Inactivity
Notes
A Marginal Note on Zhuangzi
Notes
From Acting to Being
Notes
Absolute Lack of Being
Notes
The Pathos of Action
Notes
The Coming Society
For Novalis on his 250th birthday
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Series Page
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
Pages
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Vita Contemplativa
In Praise of Inactivity
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Vita Contemplativa. Oder von der Untätigkeit © by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2022 by Ullstein Verlag.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Excerpt from Paul Celan’s Selected Poems, tr. Michael Hamburger © Penguin Random House, 1996. Reproduced with permission of Johnson & Alcock Ltd.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5802-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934603
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
You
you teach
you teach your hands
you teach your hands you teach
you teach your hands
to sleep
Paul Celan(‘Matière de Bretagne’, in Selected Poems,London: Penguin, 1996, p. 127)
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare(The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, ll. 156–8New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 107)
I gave up before birth.
Samuel Beckett(Fizzles 4, in The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989,New York: Grove Press, 1995, pp. 234ff)
Views of Inactivity
We increasingly resemble the sort of active people who ‘roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics’.1 Because we look at life exclusively from the perspective of work and performance, we view inactivity as a deficiency that must be overcome as quickly as possible. Human existence is fully absorbed by activity, and thereby becomes exploitable. We are losing a sense for the kind of inactivity that is not an incapability, not a refusal, not just the absence of activity but a capacity in itself. Inactivity has a logic of its own, its own language, temporality, architecture, magnificence – even its own magic. It is not a weakness or defect but rather an intensity, which is, however, neither seen nor acknowledged in our active and performance-driven society. We cannot access the riches of the realm of inactivity. Inactivity is a radiance within human existence. Today, it has paled into an emptiness within activity.
Under capitalist relations of production, inactivity returns in the form of an encapsulated outside. We call it ‘leisure time’. Because it serves the purpose of respite from work, it remains tied to the logic of work. As derivative of work, it represents a functional element of production. What thus disappears is free time that does not belong to the order of work and production. We no longer know the holy, festive calmness ‘that unites intensity of life with contemplation, and is still able to unite them even when intensity of life grows into exuberance’.2 ‘Leisure time’ lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. To oppose the compulsion of work and performance, we must create a politics of inactivity that is able to produce genuinely free time.
Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. Without calm, a new barbarism emerges. Silence deepens conversation. Without stillness, there is no music – just sound and noise. Play is the essence of beauty. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response, need–satisfaction and goal–action, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity.
Action constitutes history, but it is not a force that forms culture. The origin of culture is not war but the festival, not the weapon but the adornment. History and culture are not congruent. Culture is formed by diversion, excess and detour; it is not produced by following the path that leads straight to the goal. The essence at the core of culture is ornamentation. Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival. Life receives its divine radiance from that absolute decoration that does not adorn anything. ‘To point out that the baroque is decorative does not say everything about it. It is decorazione assoluta, as if it had emancipated itself from every purpose, even the theatrical, and developed its own law of form. It ceases to decorate anything and is, on the contrary, nothing but decoration.’3
During the Sabbath, all activity must cease. No business may be pursued. Essential to the Sabbath are inactivity and the suspension of economic life. Capitalism, by contrast, turns even the festival into a commodity. It becomes an event and a spectacle that lacks contemplative calmness. As a form of consumption, it does not found community. In his essay The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord states that contemporary time is one without festivals:
Although the present age presents its time to itself as a series of frequently recurring festivities, it is an age that knows nothing of real festivals. The moments within cyclical time when members of a community joined together in a luxurious expenditure of life are impossible for a society that lacks both community and luxury.4
An epoch without the festival is an epoch without community. Today, people frequently invoke the term ‘community’, but in doing so they refer to a commodified form of society.5 It does not create a we. Unbridled consumption isolates and separates people. Consumers are lonely creatures. Digital communication, too, turns out to be a form of communication without community. Social media accelerates the disintegration of community. Capitalism transforms time itself into a commodity. In this way, time loses its festiveness. Debord remarks on the commercialization of time: ‘The reality of time has been replaced by the publicity of time.’6
Another essential characteristic of the festival is luxury. Luxury suspends economic compulsion. As increased vitality, as an intensity, it is luxation, that is, deviation from the necessities and needs of mere life. Capitalism, by contrast, accords absolute value to survival. When life degenerates into survival, luxury disappears. Even the highest level of performance does not achieve luxury. Work and performance belong to the order of survival. Action does not take the form of luxury because action springs from a lack. In capitalism, even luxury is consumed; it takes on the form of a commodity and loses its festiveness and radiance.
For Theodor W. Adorno, luxury is emblematic of an uncorrupted happiness that is destroyed by the logic of efficiency. Efficiency and functionality are ways of survival. Luxury suspends them:
Rampant technology eliminates luxury … The express train that in three nights and two days hurtles across the continent is a miracle, but travelling in it has nothing of the faded splendour of the train bleu. What made up the voluptuousness of travel, beginning with the goodbye-waving through the open window, the solicitude of amiable accepters of tips, the ceremonial of mealtimes, the constant feeling of receiving favours that take nothing from anyone else, has passed away, together with the elegant people who were wont to promenade along the platforms before the departure, and who will by now be sought in vain even in the foyers of the most prestigious hotels.7
We owe true happiness to the useless and purposeless, to what is intentionally convoluted, what is unproductive, indirect, exuberant, superfluous, to beautiful forms and gestures that have no use and serve no purpose. Unlike walking to a destination, running somewhere or marching, taking a leisurely stroll is a luxury. Ceremonious inactivity means: we do something, but to no end. This ‘to-no-end’, this freedom from purpose and usefulness, is the essential core of inactivity. It is the basic formula for happiness.
Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur is characterized by inactivity: ‘The peculiar irresolution of the flâneur. Just as waiting seems to be the proper state of the impassive thinker, doubt appears to be that of the flâneur. An elegy by Schiller contains the phrase: “the hesitant wing of the butterfly”.’8 Waiting and doubting are forms of inactivity. Without moments of doubt, our walk turns into a march. Like the wing of a butterfly, the human gait owes its grace to moments of hesitation, and resolution or haste deprive it of such grace. A flâneur makes use of the capacity not to act. He does not pursue a goal. Without an aim, he delivers himself to the space that twinkles at him, to ‘the magnetism of the streetcorner, of a distant square in the fog, of the back of a woman walking before him’.9
Festivals are opposed to work insofar as they are altogether liberated from any ‘in-order-to’, from the kinds of purpose or usefulness to which work is subjugated. Freedom from ‘in-order-to’ affords human existence festiveness and radiance. The human gait, for instance, liberated from the ‘in-order-to’, from goal-oriented walking-towards, becomes a dance: ‘but what is dance other than the liberation of the body from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure inoperativity?’10 Likewise, hands, when liberated from the ‘in-order-to’, no longer grasp. They play. Or they form pure gestures that do not indicate anything.
When liberated from its practical uses, fire stimulates our imagination. It becomes a medium of inactivity.
The fire confined to the fireplace was no doubt for man the first object of reverie, the symbol of repose, the invitation to repose…. Thus, in our opinion, to be deprived of a reverie before a burning fire is to lose the first use and the truly human use of fire…. one only receives comfort from the fire when one leans his elbows on his knees and holds his head in his hands. This attitude comes from the distant past. The child by the fire assumes it naturally. Not for nothing is it the attitude of the Thinker. It leads to a very special kind of attention which has nothing in common with the attention involved in watching or observing…. When near the fire, one must be seated; one must rest without sleeping.11
Fire is usually associated with Promethean passion, with deed and action. Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of fire, by contrast, uncovers its contemplative dimension. The posture that human beings, even children, intuitively adopt before a fire illustrates their age-old inclination towards contemplation. Contemplative inactivity is what distinguishes a thinker from a guardian or observer who always pursues a particular goal. A thinker, by contrast, lacks all intention, has no goal in sight.
In Questiones Convivales, Plutarch describes a ritual for exorcizing ravenousness (bulímu exélasis).12 In Agamben’s reading, this ritual serves the purpose of ‘expelling a certain form of eating (devouring or engorging like wild beasts in order to satiate a hunger that is by definition insatiable), and thus clearing a space for another modality of eating, one that is human and festive, one that can begin only once the “hunger of an ox” has been expelled’.13 Festivals are free from the needs of mere life. Eating becomes contemplative: ‘Eating, in this respect, is not a melachah, an activity directed toward an aim, but an inoperativity and menuchah, a Sabbath of nourishment.’14
Ritual practices, in which inactivity plays a major role, elevate us above mere life. Fasting and asceticism explicitly distance themselves from living as survival, from the needs and necessities of mere life. They represent a kind of luxury, and this affords them a festive character. They are characterized by contemplative calmness. For Benjamin, fasting initiates us into the ‘secrets of food’.15 Fasting sharpens the senses, so that they discover secret scents in even the most unexceptional food. When Benjamin involuntarily entered into a state of fasting while in Rome, he felt ‘that here was an unrepeatable opportunity to unleash my senses into the folds and gorges of the most unassuming raw fruit and vegetables, melons, wine, ten varieties of bread or nuts, so as to identify a scent I had never before known’.16 Ritual fasting renews life by enlivening the senses. It gives back to life its vitality, its radiance. Under the imperative of health, however, fasting puts itself in the service of survival. It loses its contemplative, festive dimension, and has to optimize naked life for its better functioning. Even fasting can in this way take on the form of survival.
Inactivity as such is spiritual fasting, and it therefore has a healing effect. The compulsion of production transforms inactivity into a form of activity in order to exploit it. Thus, even sleep is these days regarded as an activity. The so-called ‘power nap’ is an activity of sleep.17 Even dreams are turned into a resource. The technique of ‘lucid dreaming’ is used to optimize physical and mental abilities during sleep. We extend the compulsion of performance and optimization even into our sleep. It is possible that in the future humans will abolish both sleep and dreams on the grounds of inefficiency.
‘For a long time I would go to bed early’ is the famous opening sentence of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. ‘Early’ translates the French expression ‘de bonne heure’: ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.’ Sleep introduces the hour of happiness (bonheur). With sleep begins ‘that more truthful hour when my eyes closed to the things of the outer world’.18 Sleep is a medium of truth. We see the truth only once we enter into inactivity. Sleep reveals a true internal world that lies behind the things of the external world, which are mere semblance. The dreamer delves into the deeper layers of being. Proust believed that the inner life continuously weaves new threads between events, and creates a dense texture of relations in which nothing exists in isolation. Truth is a relational process. Everywhere it creates similarities. Truth takes place the moment a writer ‘takes two different objects, states the connexion between them … truth – and life too – can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time within a metaphor’.19
Sleep and dreams are privileged places for truth. They suspend the separations and delimitations that dominate wakefulness. Things reveal their truth ‘in that thoroughly alive and creative sleep of the unconscious (a sleep in which the things that have barely touched us succeed in carving an impression, in which our sleeping hands take hold of the key that turns the lock, the key for which we have sought in vain)’.20 Activity and action are blind to truth. They touch only the surface of things. Hands that are determined to act will not find the key to the truth. That key falls into the hands of the sleeper.
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one drawn-out dream. The mémoire involontaire is an epiphany, a source of happiness, and as such it is at home in the realm of inactivity. It resembles a door that opens as if by magic. Happiness does not belong to the order of knowledge or causality. It has something of sorcery and magic about it:
But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter – which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years – and it opens of its own accord.21
