Freedom and Friendliness in Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction

Consider the following sorts of questions: Why does our relationship with technology seem so unhealthy? What is a modern Self, and how did it get this way? Why is it that Consumption seems a more and more risible answer to the problems that plague us? Why is it that “freedom” seems less and less free? And so on. Byung-Chul Han’s thought addresses these sorts of questions, and Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction, by Steven Knepper, Ethan Stoneman, and Robert Wyllie, is an engaging introduction to his particular idiom, which tends to come in the form of periodic long essays. Since the book is itself a critical and useful synopsis of Han’s thought thus far, I don’t want to spend too much time summarizing a summary. Rather, I’d like to address two of Han’s central concerns: How to think about freedom, and his idiosyncratic concept of Friendliness. These themes will, I think, be appealing to FPR readers, and so if you find them interesting, this book and Han’s books more generally should go on your reading list.

One of Han’s basic convictions is that we think “have” Freedom, but the reality is that Freedom “has” us. This is not, of course, an entirely original observation: Man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden has often served to illustrate that “I’ll do it my way” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. However, Han is a compelling guide to how exactly our freedom “has us,” in our specific time and place. In an era characterized by a unique and mystifying combination of misery and righteous self-satisfaction, Han provides important moments of clarity, as when he asks why we seem to talk about Freedom so much and yet experience so little of it (40). Han’s conviction is that the digital age requires “a serious effort to fundamentally rethink what it means to be free” (4). The authors of this introduction to Han’s thought do an admirable job teasing out this thread in his writings. The digital, in their view, so privileges the Present that we’ve managed to lose a narrative sense of the relationship between the past and the present (65), which makes us easy prey for those who would market substitute meanings that, in a shocking coincidence, happen also to be good for the bottom line of the market economy (18-23).

In Burnout Society, Han argues that we’ve moved beyond the repression motif that governs the Foucauldian self, to a new freedom-experiencing “achievement subject,” whose framing motifs are endless positivity, achievement, and “reselving” (18). This is akin to what Rieff meant when he argued that for us, the only possible answer to the question “what for?” is “more.” As the authors of the Critical Introduction, note, Han can sometimes be frustrating in his penchant for the grand generalization that seems to demand more space than his usual long-essay format. Once you start looking at the world through Han’s lens, though, the conclusion that twenty-first-century “Freedom” is a thin gruel seems so obviously true that this criticism seems beside the point. One thinks here (however unwillingly), of porn phenom Lilly Phillips, who recently had sex with 100 men in 14 hours, and whose next planned feat is to have sex with 1000 men in 24 hours. In a not-for-the-faint-of-heart interview—especially if you have daughters, as I do—Ms. Phillips, a quintessentially modern entrepreneur of the self (you’ll note a peculiar use of “we” below) noted that:

the whole reason why we actually did the one-hundred was like a dry run for the thousand...and, you know, after about six, seven months of shooting porn I was a bit, like, it's all same-y, you know? It's not very unique or anything like that and I want to do something exciting for me, because, you know, this is, this is what I love, at the end of the day. I was just like, I want to challenge myself a little bit.... 

Part of me wants (first) to direct readers to the existential freedom argument for suicide in Dostoevskii’s Demons, (second) to assume the silence that is the only appropriate response to deep human suffering, and (third) to end this reflection right here.

Considering Ms. Phillips’ example, however, the wisdom of Stoneman’s chapter title, “The Positivity of the Transparency Society,” is immediately obvious. In that chapter, the author notes that the digital age promotes a “gaplessness” that “abolishes distance,” on the one hand, while at the same time, it “destroys closeness rather than creating intimacy” (73-75). Likewise, Stoneman notes, “In a digitally mediated environment of ersatz resonance and gaplessness—where our household speakers recommend personalized playlists, order takeout pizza, and remind us to refill our anti-anxiety prescriptions—binge-watching comes to describe a new way of being-in-the-world, one that is identical to a way of not-being-with-others” (76). I can think of no better description than this for Ms. Phillips’ peculiar and tragic calisthenics: a new, spastic way of “not-being-with-others.” One prays that the inevitable anti-anxiety medications Stoneman mentions will stave off a Dostoevskiian suicidal ending to this particular tragedy. Or is it farce? I’m uncertain. It is a good thing Lent is upon us; I can find in my battered soul no such sympathy for Ms. Phillips’ parents.

Lest extreme examples get us off the hook too easily, this hyperbolic example of Stoneman’s “positivity of self-exploitation” clearly extends to the “quantified self” movement, with its Fitbits and other “devices that collect the various traces of our being in the world and submit them to the network for inspection and analysis” (Greenfield, quoted in Stoneman’s essay “Towards the Total Control Society,” 111). This doesn’t make us love a repressive Big Brother so much as it makes Big Brother a lovable life coach, in his permissive, remissive, and “friendly” guises (111-117, esp. 113). And what is Han’s cure for this creeping digital totalitarianism that commodifies the erasure of any meaningful distinction between public and private? As the authors note, Han is still a quite active thinker and writer, and so anything one says about cures is necessarily provisional. So far, however, Han hangs quite a lot on a concept he calls “Friendliness.”

What Han seems to mean by this idea is an openness to the Other, in such a way that this Other is not one of our projects or part of some purpose of ours. As the authors observe on more than one occasion, this is clearly part of an attempt to move beyond a Foucauldian tendency to reduce existence to power. Han’s attitude involves a “congenial” “mood of releasement to live with or be with others” (39). Cultivating this, we become more able to live contemplatively with boredom, get off the achievement treadmill, and become more open to letting others be who they are rather than seeing them as loci for our plans.

Wyllie spends a good bit of time dealing with Han’s most important interlocutors in this train of thought: Zen Buddhism and Heidegger. This brings me to what is, at this point, my central question about Han: whether or not he and his sources are up to the task he sets himself. To be clear, I agree that existential boredom is a key problem of our time and place, and I likewise agree that how to be “with” people without seeing them as a means to some extrinsic end is another pressing question. I do question, though, whether Han’s particular version of openness to others is really going to get us out of the relational shallows. Han’s view seems to be that we just take people as they are, without trying to get below the surface. “Hanian friendliness is an attitude of affirmation towards whatever appears to us. The non-insistence of the self, and the relinquishment of concepts to make a space of self in the world, is the epoche or bracketing for a phenomenology of ordinary life” (50). So let’s grant that we’ve now jettisoned our frantic pursuit of achievement; we’ve kicked back a bit, perhaps even on a Front Porch, so that we can achieve a mood for thinking about freedom (44). As Wyllie rightly notes, the “achievement subject” is unable to distinguish between “can” and “should,” and again, this isn’t an original observation. This is exactly what Rieff meant when he argued that modernity subsists on the “primacy of possibility.” Han wants to figure out how to re-envision freedom in this telos-free modernity, in a way that avoids some kind of nihilism (36), so he may simply be trying to see if we can subtract the telos from “freedom for what?” and end up with any kind of plausible remainder. If so, good for him. But we do have to allow, I think, for the possibility that nihilism really is the only alternative to having a given telos. That Han is thinking quite a bit about narrative that connects past and present suggests to me that he’s thinking about this possibility, too. Wyllie quotes Alasdair MacIntyre to this effect, when in After Virtue he writes that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part'” (31). Han himself notes that a narrative defines a “closed order” of being, and this seems in tension with the laid-back open-ness that his “Friendliness” concept includes. I look forward to seeing if Han resolves this tension, in future, or perhaps he’ll persuade me that it isn’t there.

There were multiple occasions, when reading this Critical Introduction, where I found myself thinking about the Desert Fathers. I have lately been reading the Philokalia, a multiple-volume collection of those writings. It was among these monks that the vice of acedia was observed and theorized, and a key part of the cure for acedia is to think about Death every day. (See Jean Charles Nault’s The Noonday Devil, if you’re not up for a thousand pages of the Desert Fathers.) Wyllie notes that “The dizzying freedom to transgress God’s law relies upon a negativity that vanished with churchgoing habits, with the liturgical ‘thanatotechnics’ that could bring death present-to-mind to many people” (43). Certainly contemplating our own death should cause us to question an existence akin to that of the Red Queen, from Alice in Wonderland, or Troy, from Jayber Crow, where we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. So the early Christian ascetics knew well Han’s vita contemplativa. What they had that Han doesn’t, though, was an answer to Wyllie’s question “freedom for what?” So far, Han thinks we should re-think freedom so that we don’t “burn out.” But is that enough? If the best I can do is reach a contemplative state where I am not burnt out, that may be better than the alternative. But I find it hard to believe that most people will regard such a “weak telos” satisfying enough to get off the digital treadmill. Call me a pessimist, but my money would back a future where most people would rather have dopamine-hit punctuated misery with the illusion of telos, than a contemplative lifestyle without even the illusion. Maybe this is just the long way round to an argument that I’d find Han more convincing if he were, like me, an aspiring—as in telos-having—Christian. If so, then I’m probably guilty as charged.

Occasional FPR contributor Josh Pauling notes that Han “drops bombs and leaves much of the shrapnel for readers to sort out.” Criticisms and questions aside, Han’s “bombs” are very much worth our time and consideration, even if he sometimes leaves the reader frustrated. If one can reach similar critiques of our times by reading Heidegger, Zen Buddhists, and the haiku of Bashō, on the one hand, or the Desert Fathers, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Paul II’s phenomenological critique of the tendency to “use” people for our own purposes, on the other, then this should tell us that Han is on to something. Certainly the stakes couldn’t be higher; and this book is a very nice introduction to Han’s diagnoses of the afflictions of our times. I look forward to future Hanian blasts and commend the contributors of this collection of essays for their critical effort to bring Han’s thought to a wider audience.

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