Robert Wyllie on Understanding Byung-Chul Han

Welcome back to the new Thinkery. If you're hearing my voice, you know what that means. David Barr is not here. Why is he not here, Greg?

Well, he told me that he has been reading a lot of Hemingway lately, and so he wanted to go run with the bulls, something about bulls in Spain. He also mentioned something about buying a shotgun from an evercoming fitch I don't know what that was about. So, we'll be back soon. I'm sure.

I don't follow this joke at all. He's not here with us today. He will be. Yeah, he will.

You know, I remember I read the old man in the sea in like middle school or whatever it is. And then they showed us a movie version. And you know, this is like the 90s, right? So special effects were pretty weak in any case.

And they weren't really dishing out the dollars for old man in the sea adaptations. So it was just like paper mache Marlin, Bob. Yeah. And before the teacher went, he's like, it's going to look fake.

Just try to go with it. Don't make a big deal out of it. And then the same game on it's not going to all boys. So, it's like, that's so fake.

Well, I'm the teacher. I like live it with us. Right. Good teaching, however, isn't body by good.

Did you win a teaching award? I have won a teaching award. Yeah. Very good.

Rob. I have not won a yet. He did win an award. He won an award.

Sorry. Did you have a best hairstyle? Well, weird. Balda.

It's good luck. I see. Well, it's about a three-cap year. Actually, Rob is being a little bit humble, which is his usual mode humility.

He actually won the 2324 academic mentor recipient award. And Casey, a senior philosophy student, so I guess he wasn't good enough to convince her to major in our major. But otherwise, he was very good. She had the following say, not only as Dr.

Wiley, but as a source of encouragement throughout college. And I've also been an example of the kind of person I want to be. So, that's a kind of award. That's a pretty high phrase from a former student.

She wants to be bold. Something like that. So, why don't you introduce our guest professor, Rob Willy? Rob Wiley.

He's a colleague of mine. That's Willy. Let's be honest. Rob, you've changed the pronunciation, or somebody in your background.

That can't be Wiley. As far as I know, it's Wiley. Alright. Well, introduce Professor Wiley.

I think he's actually related to the Coyote. Wiley is a professor of political economy here at the Ashland University, where I teach. He's actually recording in his office right across the hall from me. His area is political economy.

He's the director of our program in political economy. He's written extensively on Spinoza. And didn't you do some Kierkegaard stuff too back in the day? Is that the thing that you did?

Yes, he's nodding. Yes. Yes, Spinoza Kierkegaard central figures in political economy. Right.

You kind of beat and switched to topo. Well, I told him I was into weird stuff. Or Greg asked me rather if I was into weird stuff. That's not what he meant.

Not at all. He had me at the interview when he said his favorite work was a Confederacy of Bonsal. He's alright. That's a great work mostly about onanism for the folks at home.

Rob did his bachelor's degree at University of Virginia. And he did his PhD at the University of Notre Dame. And now he's here. As I mentioned, he wrote on the things Spinoza, but actually he's here to talk about a new book that he's co-authored with a friend of his, Stephen Knapper.

Another guy, Ethan Stone. I don't know. Ethan, maybe you can explain who your co-workers here are. They have a book called Young Chul Han, a critical introduction published with polity.

It just comes out actually. Actually, it's not even out yet. Today is August the 5th by the time the folks at home are listening to it. It will be available.

It's available for pre-order now on Amazon. Alex and I read at least parts of it. And we're here to talk with Rob about young Chul Han. I'll get that right one way.

I'll do that Rob. Young Chul Han. I think Greg's pronunciation is beautiful really. Well, I did spend several years studying Korean.

So in the war. So how did you get interested? We posted about this on Twitter. I've never heard of Han.

But he seems to have some kind of following or there's people who have some kind of interest. How did you get interested in what's his sort of? So I was the last guy of our trio to get into him. Ethan is a media studies guy at Hillsdale into a bunch of contemporary tech-critical philosophy.

Has some stuff up to Steve Nipper. And then Steve to me. The first book I read of his was a crazy title, The Sense of Time. Secure guard, I really love.

One of my favorite books is concept anxiety. And the way Kierkegaard relates freedom to our time consciousness. And how time consciousness changes in different evics. That's something that I've always thought was pretty e-trivial and cool.

Han in The Sense of Time thinks that we increasingly live in a world of discreticity. We engage in our own prop. We don't sort of mark time in common. We just do our own thing.

Maybe we pick up religion. Maybe we slough it off. Maybe we pick up a new project. Maybe we slough it off.

But our lives just sort of whizzed by because we've lost ways of sort of marking time together. So yeah, it takes a lot of that I think from the late Heidegger. So yeah, I was sort of interested in that. And then he's got like 30 books and more than 30 books.

So some of them are pretty easy to dismiss. Like a kind of very interventionist pop philosophy stuff. So as the years went by and I read more, I kind of thought, Hey, maybe there could be a critical introduction where you point out some threads and continuities. Maybe also some problems.

So if there's more academic uptake, at least in English of Han's work, for whatever reason, it seems like there's a ton of uptake in Portuguese, Turkish, Spanish. If there's more uptake, you know, people kind of a sense of all the connections within the whole body of work. So yeah, that's why we ended up doing it, I guess, with three of us. Some of this stuff is super media.

So that's Ethan's sort of line of things. He writes a lot on aesthetics and on contemplation, which Steve super into. And so just given the range of his work, it seemed like it also made sense to do something interdisciplinary as far as, you know, like Michael authors are not history political philosophy guys or political theory guys like me. So that's how that all kind of came about.

I have two follow up questions before we get anything meeting number one. Did you just tell the folks at home who this guy is, where he's from when he lived or lives. And what are some of his main books that you would point someone to who is interested in? Obviously, after yours, obviously the key introduction, but then what are some of his more famous books that you point folks to?

Sure. So he was born in 1957. He was originally going to be a material science study metallurgy. He goes to Germany to study that as graduate work, or at least he tells his parents that in reality, he might have some secret designs to study some philosophy.

And then he does without telling him that he finishes eventually at Freidwork where Heidegger taught, of course, and has a dissertation on the late Heidegger. Oh, it's the dissertations. A Heidegger dissertation is first book is not translated, but it's Martin Heidegger introduction. Some of his earlier books are much, much media engagements with the German philosophical tradition in Heidegger, but the thing that made him famous around the world in the limited philosophy phenomenon fame that one gets I suppose is his book, the burnout society, or the tiredness society.

And his argument in that book is that power in the in the usual sense where people are trying to oppress you is everywhere disappearing. It's actually not necessary in market societies, in fact, he thinks, instead of being repressed, we're always being stimulated, and that we put all of the pressure on ourselves to succeed. And then when we burnout, we're very self-reproachful. So one of his thoughts is that modern depression is unlike melancholy or what melancholy used to be.

So we pick around projects, we motivate ourselves. It's all it's quite profitable to do it this way for everyone, different companies and even politicians just say they'll facilitate whatever we like to do. But we have some limited capacity for that and eventually, eventually we kind of burnout. In the book, I think I compare this to Rousseau.

I think it's quite similar to Rousseau's concern with Hobbesian freedom, the desire of the desire, the desire of the seas, only in death. But for Han, it's his end thing, right? It's get beyond your desires. So he goes from Korea, he goes to Germany, he's taking some of that Zen, some of that Eastern stuff with him.

And then this book burnout society sort of smash it. Then he has a ton of topical intervention books. He's got a book on the pandemic. He's got books on technology.

He's got books on surveillance capitalism. And these books are about 90 pages. They're slightly longer than essays, but to call them books is they sell for the price of books. So I think that would make publishers and him happy, but they're quite short often.

And that's why I mentioned earlier, it can be difficult, I think, to take him seriously or see how much there is underneath or how much there is in his mind. If you just picked up one of those books at random. And another problem is that he says that he thinks we live in a world of so much bigger data where there's so much information out there that all of a sudden we can. Build our own worlds of facts and not even live in the same world as other people.

And this is that all sorts of things from conspiracy theories or the belief that people that disagree with you, that there are no value disagreements. In fact, they just, they know the facts and they're just gaslighting you or something. And Han says in such a, he gives himself like theoretical license to oversimplify the way the poet might give himself poetic license to exaggerate. And he says theory just needs to cut a clearing of differentiation.

And so some of these books are super overstated burnout society, for example, this idea. The world of Foucault and discipline is over. There's no more repression politics isn't about power, you just inflict burnout on yourself. It's a really stark claim it's a really dialectical claim.

It's a it's a rank oversimplification turned out that COVID came and the Russians came into Ukraine and enemies and diseases weren't totally replaced by a world of depression and achievement. But he's trying to think just simulate thinking and gives himself this sort of license to oversimplify. I think in the background is this this idea in concern that that thinking is is endangered and even becoming impossible. They give some sort of license to do that, I suppose in this mind.

Say for our students, you know, they're super interested in the social media, mental health connection between those two things. They like they think a lot about trauma or they think a lot about their own mental health problems where their friends mental health problems they look talking about that. They obviously love talking about the impact of social media on their lives and Honda's too. So I've often found in seminars my contemporary political thoughts.

I'm an art author burnout society and it just gets a list of response from the students that seems very fresh and you can use it to go back into this sort of more historical thinkers he's he's dealing with. But I find that he's he teaches really well if you're trying to get students excited about the history of local philosophy. Yeah, I mean, the connection to so I noticed quite a bit in reviewing, you know, some of your writings on this Rob. It seems like, you know, so if you think about these projects that make us weary, right, or or.

Exhaust it or burnt out. And we should clear it's not burned out in the sense of like a stoner walking around, you know, bookler Colorado. But, you know, you have these projects you're concerned for them out of some kind of recognition of achievement and there's this kind of strange moral component that, you know, he's pushing back against very similar to Rousseau being concerned with your vanity and sort of trying to present yourself and do things such that others will sort of think highly of you being concerned with your reputation more than your own unhappiness and then, you know, on the other side of that the flip side of that is this kind of identity thing from which is not, I don't want to identify, but it's not dissimilar from the sentiment of your own existence, just being in the present and not necessarily being future or to know that's we still problematizes this whole sentiment of existence that becomes much more complicated, but you could almost think of this boredom that he's describing this this mood of boredom as a kind of to use a hydrogen to tune into the world as the feeling you get when you're attached to your projects or your project mentality, but you're not presently engaged in one and you get this anxious kind of attempt to go find something to do and instead this kind of boredom sets any he's trying to tell you to embrace that because on the other side of it and you had this quote from the novelist, what's his name again, the American novelist, a posthumous work you did, forget your question. Yeah, that Wallace quote where he talks about how if you can just get on the other side of this or somehow embrace it, there's like this whole new world.

So I was kind of I wanted to hear from you a bit more about that transition from like anxious project orientation towards Zen and this kind of transition to the mood of boredom and whether boredom actually gets set aside along with awareness as a kind of negatively determined mood and brings you to some some of the same. What's going on there? Do you have any thoughts on that? So first of all, you're exactly right to flag some weird normative component going on and maybe you're as you're flagging it, you're suggesting it has something to do with anxiety, namely, because I can do things, I ought to do them because I have all sorts of opportunities that in my case, my parents didn't have I ought to take advantage of them.

That's kind of question begging. It doesn't mean that you actually have these obligations, but there's a sort of anxiety that just because you have these things is something odd when you read on this incredulous what what could be wrong with giving people opportunities and encouraging them to do the best they can with their opportunities. And Hans answer to that is, well, if that's all you have in your life and basically everything because you'll just you'll just choose a hamster wheel and go and you'll have nothing else you'll have no world of others. You'll have you'll have no love.

You'll have no unexpected future you're looking forward to. But he begins with saying you'll have no boredom. And there's there's something good about boredom. Now, I think somewhere between anxiety and boredom, you have where Han begins in philosophy, which is to criticize Heidegger's analysis of boredom and to say that Heidegger remains for all the talk of a so called turning or care in Heidegger's thought.

Heidegger always keeps this anxiety about death or this anxiety in his thought. And he can't just chill out and be Zen. And Han thinks that's even true in his book. This is his first book is Heidegger's Howtidegger's Heart.

It's not translated, but this is where he begins to depart from Heidegger to say that actually in boredom, boredom is from all of your intentionality. So when you're he's thinking about a profound boredom or a deep tiredness. And he often quotes the 2019 Nobel laureate and Austrian novelist Peter Hanka, his essay on tiredness. It's like being dog tired after doing manual labor, where you just feel like you melt into your seat and you're not you feel like kind of at one with your collaborators.

When you're when you're that tired and you don't you don't even care about anything anymore. You're so tired. Han thinks that Han thinks there's a great gift in that. This is this releases you from the from things that you otherwise, you know, we just sort of keep driving yourself with to the point of exhaustion.

He doesn't think that he that's not burnout. So deep. So our problem is when we get very tired, we can binge watch. We can infinitely scroll.

We can we can keep engaging in activities and we can keep this working out and burning out and working out and burning out constantly. One of the things often in in in a flight club in in in the purge. There's some idea that this workaholic culture. It's there's a taking time bomb underneath and we're we're we're we're pressing all of our I don't know violent energies or something like that as we work and work and work and we're heading to some kind of reckoning.

J. G. Ballard has this kind of stuff in his books. Something's got to give.

We hate this meaningless world of work and we're about to explode. But Han thinks that's really not true. We can go on burning ourselves out forever and living a kind of a zombie like existence. So there's certainly and you said this Alex I want to just make that distinction.

He really thinks that we have a hard time embracing boredom. As soon as you're bored. What do you do you go on your phone? I don't know if you take your your phone to take it up.

You know what you've got to do number two you take your phone and you keep scrolling and there's just no time for the releasement from you know whatever it is our projects are and Han thinks that that's tremendously self destructive because we only have so much capacity to to to feel sort of energized and then we just we lose it but we can we can go on scrolling forever. Rob when you were talking about this I was struck by on page 41 you say the question of the mood or moods proper to philosophy is a very old one. He's had wonder arrows are doubt and then the idea if I understand your account of contract Lee is that boredom can be this mood that spurs us to philosophize. So number questions what is philosophy for Han but second is I'll just try to press back here because boredom seems like a distinctly modern phenomenon, at least judging by the analogy of the word and use the word so is it the only spurred philosophy or are there others or it just strikes me.

I don't I have a hard time seeing me checking board for example or Plato or whoever so can you flesh out a little bit for me that the how that I'm totally bought into the idea that I think you're actually right that people constantly track themselves and for most people all there is is work and play. You're either busy busy busy working or you know work hard play hard right the American motto but and maybe there's a sense in which we need to be learned to be alone with our thoughts. I don't know I'm struck by the mother on Matt man always says what only boring people get bored or something like this. So I don't know.

Yeah so there's there's a lot there. Let me try to do some unpacking first of all I think it depends what we mean by boredom. So there is what Han would call profound boredom a profound tiredness which you're so bored you you don't even experience being yourself. You're you're you're pooped you're whipped you're just dog tired and nothing matters which she actually finds something restorative in that there's another kind of boredom where you're antsy or fidgety or agitated by the fact that you're doing nothing because you think you ought to be doing something that strikes me as a different kind of boredom.

What about the mood for philosophy so. I think that's an old question in the theta as Socrates talks to the geometers he speaks about wonder as the beginning of philosophy Aristotle something similar in the metaphysics of course but usually Plato Socrates speaks about arrows. Or desire as the as the origin of philosophy maybe the origin of philosophy is curiosity of course for. Heidegger it's it's anxiety and anxiety about your death which is your your own most.

So, so even if boredom is an ancient possibility which I think it is an ancient possibility you see in Zen which Han thinks about as an embrace of boredom the Heidegger just comes up to. Heidegger very much if you read sort of Strauss and studies on platonic political philosophy. Strauss thinks that Heidegger the late Heidegger at the end of his life is trying to return of the gods and bring bring Easton West together in a new religion to sort of oppose technology or something like that. I'm not sure that's Hans reading of Heidegger but where Heidegger fails is he just can't embrace boredom in Hans mind that's why he's ultimately not as perhaps as Zen as he as he thought he was.

Now when you think about Zen sages it's not clear to me that that is philosophy or something that we would recognize as philosophy since they seem to lack. What is questions altogether they don't pose questions in the order of what is this or what is that. They're very happy to live in a world where one thing becomes another. They're a world of impermanent scattering they loosen the clamps on the self they think of the self as constituted by the world in the world as constant and it seems to be the sort of riddling paradoxical being at ease with not knowing.

Which might be a wise way of life but doesn't seem like doesn't seem like a philosophical way of life at least in the Western project of philosophy. But if that's fundamentally doomed by technology maybe so part of this is when Hans that talks about philosophy he defines it as thinking about thinking. And so like Heidegger especially the late Heidegger as long as you're. As long as you're username as long as you're a sort of just general operator of a world of uses and you're trying to do things you're not thinking about thinking.

You're operating or you're working on the world so there's nothing sort of reflexive about that boredom clearly for home is part of this it's when you're really bored then you think. You know who am I and why am I doing this and that's going to be what he calls a friendly mood. He thinks that the central concept of his thought so he says is friendless kite or friendliness and this seems to be an aspect of all sorts of moods that let you get outside of your head. And and and get beyond your own projects and what you're trying to do.

I think all of those can be philosophical moods for him not just boredom but if boredom is the philosophical mood then all of a sudden you're thinking about zan as a philosophical way. And just read a little bit this is from your book this is page 48 this is chapter even called world friendliness maybe. Yeah it's because friendless kite is very difficult word to translate it's not just friendliness it's like yeah world friendly being friendly to everything. In the world.

That's how I describe you generally to all my friends I'm like Rob Wiley is he's just in the constant state of friendliness of the world. I'm just an floating around here friendly the world. Rob Wiley like he's Korean. I was just trying to help him sell more books.

Yeah, but fortunately he's an won't be offended. There's nothing wrong with it. This is 48 you're talking about on his reflection on goosebumps in his lectures on the whole Drelins hydrally and the Rhine. Heidier describes a shivering mood that transports our design into the mooded relation to the gods and they're being so and so.

Here he's quoting it in Hijger's heart goosebumps shivers and shutters remind us that the world is more than the totality of our consciousness. There's something outside that heidier calls the divine religiosity for hon is friendliness it's the mood that accepts the divine without attempting to discover master or order its appearance. Zen Buddhism is especially faithful to the essence of religion as friendliness he argues since it teaches us to empty ourselves into no one in the gesture of friendliness to the scattered phenomena of the ephemeral world. That's where I took the to be the wrong you should correct me but this is what I thought you I took you to saying Han thinks that something like philosophy is it's the Zen state toward the world it's a mood it seems to me no okay.

No, no, I think that's right. Sorry. I'm bobbing my head and enlightenment here. Oh, I see good.

I mean, what I was struck by was the experiential component of this and so as you already mentioned sort of touched with not in line with what I think to be the history of Western thought which is discovering mastering and ordering the world it's not that that's emphatically what it's not. So, let me, there's a book Han is an early book from around 99 or maybe just after the year 2000 called death and otherness it's not translated to an alternative and he thinks Western philosophy since Socrates in that book he writes it's marked by a dramatic encounter with death. And that Socrates death and the fact that we're all going to die the fact that having our mortality in front of us makes us think who we are ourselves. And even if that gets us beyond making and ordering.

Ultimately he thinks that it doesn't allow us to to see the world in a friendly way because it builds up this and to and he will trace a line from that to a high diggers fate where who we are has to be the fate of the gods is revealed to the poets to some potential fighting collectivity. So not not friendly stuff right not not Karl Popper's line from Plato to Nazis but but nonetheless a kind of a lot and this is someone that's really sympathetic to Heidegger and inspired by Heidegger but still has that view at least early on about Western philosophy I'm not sure he still has that view. But I've never read anything where he's where he's sort of changed it. I'm not sure what to do with something like Zen okay and I'm not sure what I want to do with something like Zen.

Because my notion of what philosophy is is so profoundly shaped by Leo Strauss's and the question in my mind is always well is philosophy philosophy is a way of life that can be chosen rationally if it has a chance to disprove revelation if it's if it's at least equal to revelation and has some some sort of fighting chance. But then what about Zen so in natural right in history you have you have fate and you have radical historicism and the answer to that is to go back to nature right. But what is is Zen is Zen a way of going back to nature certainly Zen isn't I think any kind of radical historicism because there's no fate fate and anxiety are exactly the things that Han is trying to avoid he's trying to say just be happy with boredom. Live in the scattering of things you he's reading Heidegger but he's a graduate student from Korea asking questions like can you be happy living anywhere do you need to be rooted.

Can I just be bored and friendly to these people around and sort of you know meld into a friendly German society and become a German without any without losing something of what I am. And you know when you read when you read Strauss's lectures from the 60s his lecture on natural rights are on monoskew or on hagels philosophy Zen is there because this is the you know you're heading towards the Vietnam War he's always mentioning that a ton of American students. He's he's remarking on the fact that Zen Buddhism is attracting them. It's it's they are almost kind of in the background and he seems to think about it well monoskew rejects it right out of hand it's the climate of India that makes them prefer nothingness.

But Strauss doesn't go along with that and sort of endorse monoskew's view he says maybe we have reasons to reject it but he never really lays out what those are and then certainly his reading of Heidegger by the end of his life is a heightened studies in platonic philosophy is a high degree that's trying to unite east and west. I had a proper full story about Heidegger reading D. T. Suzuki or someone saying this is what I've been trying to say my whole life you know the 50s heidegger sort of reads a ton of Zen stuff.

And he said okay maybe in China we can find in Zen or in boredom the thing that's going to release us a new religion that will release us from technological modernity sometime. This in other words is the thing that I think Strauss is arguing against. I mean in so far as the late Heidegger I think is sort of haunting him even you know natural right in history already. But for the thing that haunts him Strauss doesn't really go at it directly.

And so I'm fascinated by it but I don't know what you know is then between nature and history what what is it is it refusal to do philosophy what is it. The sense that the Zen sort of disposition if you want to look at it from a Heideggerian perspective is something like. It's something like the Heideggerian position but without resoluteness this came up a couple of times but you're kind of aware that things come in history things come in destiny. And you're not anxiously trying to fulfill it in the most authentic way or trying to come up with a new determination of being but you're just living in the midst of it and you're not really investigating it and I'm thinking now of that paragraph in chapter one of natural right in history.

Strauss describes the final position of the radical historicists as saying the whole is constantly subject to change and it's always changing can't be predicted. And this always strikes me as a kind of secular version of the biblical God I will be what I will be right. But without resoluteness and conversely from the perspective of Jerusalem without anything like divine law or any kind of what's the word I'm thinking of when God makes the agreement with Noah what's the word. Yes, there's no covenant or agreement involved and that's kind of close to it.

I mean, I think the response to that then becomes something like this isn't all of Potonic political philosophy something like a meditation on the human moods and which one is actually best right when you're trying to select a mood in the way. So you point this out that he's not just like kind of Han is not just kind of chilling out he's not living Zen right he's actually engaged in these kind of arguments so he's doing something like philosophy and I think there's something true about that in so far is what he's doing is saying what are the various moods this doesn't seem to worry anxiety doesn't work right. Let's settle aside what could we do could be wonder could be he's a well you know you look in Plato and you see a very sort of anxious characters you see fearful characters like I am just as attracted to the arts to commerce to kind of austerity and to kind of empire there's obviously modern corollaries to that kind of fearful anxious position that he's in and you know heres in the symposium reminds you a lot of Agathon you can kind of start looking at it through that lens and exam and so on and so forth there's indignation and etc. And you might want to say that you know the Zen position however it emerges from this kind of analysis is it just another claimant is there an ancient character who seems especially Zen there is a Philebus who kind of pulls back he's not that but he's like I don't want to argue about this I'm a little life of sort of pleasure it's a little too hedonistic I think maybe to be Zen but I don't know maybe like a radical fluxes gets kind of close but I noticed you wanted to push back from that but way I think you could start thinking about this yeah I think you can ask this question is Zen Athens of Jerusalem I mean which is it or what is it and certainly Heidegger is going to see some affinities between the pre-socratic poets and the Zen sages as far as I know Han is never going to write on the pre-socratic in that kind of way in natural right in history stress thinks about state and the horizons that thought that is committed or historical he writes it's only to thought that is committedly historical that historical thought and commitment reveals it so you have to accept or choose fate to become a radical historicist and the thing that on doesn't like about Heidegger is this presence of a fate you have to choose and I think on his pushing back and say no you don't have to choose having a fate you don't have to think about the identity that's most authentic to you you can be whoever you want you can be a Korean German and only Mexican food you can doesn't matter and the conditions of modernity are such that you can you can live in a hyperculture this is his 2005 book where you're just taking things from and there's no unlike the post glenioists there's no oppressor culture or oppressed culture he says East Asians are beyond that you know we and judging by the way many of them play classical music classical Western orchestral music it arguably there are things that come from Western souls that serve Eastern souls pick up and and run with very beautifully and become part of their souls in Zen there's just this boredom later on there's a lot of romanticism in Hans thought and so coming up realizing that the search for self knowledge might be within the horizons of what he calls Eros which is a desire for the other as another where yourself knowledge is coming to realize who you are as a gift from the other when I finally understand who I am I realized that who I am has been given me by by the beloved that seems a little more like revelation I suppose that seems a little more like there's something almost like fate there's there's something out there there's some privileged experience that's not just Zen and be okay you know I don't think the Zen sages had lovers to whom they were attached and so there are these tensions in Hans thought right like where does he come down is he's an or is he romantic or is he and you begin to wonder whether he thinks that this problem of technology maybe the one that the very one that Heidegger begins you know what is there a political response I don't know I'm not sure it's democracy the famous D.S.P.

interview that the Han is all here's another way seems resilient the Han is like here's a romantic way beyond this you could fall in love here's a Zen way beyond this you could fall in love here's a way beyond this you can embrace boredom here's a here's a way through beauty for example that there's in the same way that in Rousseau you get you get education you get contemplation and the reveries maybe you get a political project in the social contract depending on whether you think he's different ways to combat these problems and and Han I think although he starts with Zen and he starts with boredom there's also this sort of romantic there's this turn towards arrows which in his mind is always not our own desire but desire for another that remains other they be someone like Levinos against Hitever sort of more like that right and so there just and then why do we get 30 books on all sorts of different topics and these interventionist things well actually I think because he's a very strange philosopher that cares about ordinary people and he's trying to you know whatever will work for you I'll try to hit you with this book or that book and get you beyond these projects that seem meaningless or unfiltered to you this is related to this is yeah that's that's great Rob I was struck by what I find appealing in Han at least as you've sort of laid them out for us is that he does address these kinds of problems that you're saying that ordinary people face and it seemed real and I have a quote from you on page 43 and then I'll sort of ask my question you say Hans interested in the question technology among other things and you say indeed the question seems more pressing than ever for Han in our digital age the in framing of the world by hydroelectric dams and factories that Heidegger describes seems quaint in comparison to the way in which the smart phone orders our intellectual hyper reality of images so as to become quote a mobile labor camp and quote I guess my I'll try to turn this into a question it does strike me that if Hijers write the technology sort of shaping us and changing us in serious ways that seems to be done to the nth degree in 2024 even then just a hundred years ago and so I guess one would ask this is I'm gonna connect this to a question we have in the wrong shows run of shows with me is this why you turn to Han because he can help us to read to understand problems that maybe older writers weren't able to address or let me try this a different way can reading Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas get us to understand a smart phone or do we need to read more widely and read contemporary thinkers to understand these things so I certainly came to Han through through the burnout society through his books on tech. I think it is when you say the nth degree it's actually qualitatively different I think the way that we live in a world of information rather than things. Han describes the world that's increasingly smooth or frictionless to our desires we can facilitate our desires for all sorts of things for example thanks to the internet I can talk to other people that at least because they're friendly good chaps pretend to be interested in on but sometimes I can even talk to people that are really interested in Han you know and I can facilitate all of these things you know if you have students that are super interested in Japanese anime and they will look at that. You can develop any interests you can and many people so so the internet seems to smooth things out for your desire so Han writes a lot of porn which makes all of your you can facilitate a saving beauty unfortunately I like you know I'm porn he's always criticizing a yeah it's very it's disappointing to the pictures either Alex so just chill out okay.

He says you're trying to make the body totally transparent and accessible to all of your desires right so there's no otherness in porn that challenges you it's you don't look at the porno I mean I don't anyway but I don't look at porno like I look at the Mona Lisa you know and just contemplate it right that's no it's just everything smooth desires so. I got into an argument with this like Danish like I lived in Berlin was this like Danish girl first of all she was like six or so I called her a great day but she was really like into like far out stuff she would go like sex classes like. It was pretty wild and she talked about how she thought porno was an art I was like listen you do want to be seen what you do with the porno you're going to get kicked out pretty fast there's a clear difference in the desires involved. Han thinks it's just part of transparency it's part of you know tweeting every thought you have but it just you know renders the bodily desires totally transparent and others bodies is consumable.

Which is the way that I think he thinks about the pornographic versus the erotic on things porn is not erotic because there is no sort of otherness in there. It was a different thing entirely say so he anyway he and again but have an argument about that if you know philosophy porn is the sort of thing that you really need in your life. That's next week's episode on the new thing right. So we're just doing straight up point.

I definitely look I definitely came to Han because I'm worried about these you know I'm worried about our students and their mental health I'm worried about what it's like to live a life that's totally mediated. I do think that our this world where so many more of our desires are being facilitated. We're more dangerous than ever. Han loves this billboard from the eighties that Jenny Holzer puts in Times Square protect me from what I want and we need to be more protected from our desires now there's one way to teach it right where you you teach classical political rationalism you teach moderation is the essence of virtue and you go right at that with you you really need some moderation and you should take the more life seriously here is the neck of ethics.

Okay, you know we can I do that you know to do that in our department because we have we have Greg to do that and I'm sure he does that better the model of moderation that I am yes the great model of moderation that you are and there are books about the moderation by ultra marathoners I gather. So you can go back to play to kind of go right after it. I think this is this is different you know Han is a way to have these conversations in unexpected ways if you want to talk about religion or if you want to talk about philosophy or if you want to talk about morality with students then beginning with. A guy with a Korean name talking about the Internet you know all of a sudden you surprise him in a way so that's just a sort of.

Pedagogically utilitarian reason that that I enjoy teaching him but I definitely came to through that and then came to realize right then I started reading the untranslated stuff and said okay here's the big picture but I hear the board of stuff we've been talking about okay there's something on offer here not sure I agree with it but here's a serious. Intellect behind it with a with a a strange way of reading the history of philosophy but an interesting way of reading the history of last. Behind it so it's not just pop philosophy self help you know one ninety page book after another and writing the book that's been one of my you know one of our all my co authors and I make that case that there's a lot more here to deal with. So we're like 45 minutes I feel like so I want to I want to ask I don't know if Greg is more this is kind of like my my sort of last question I had and this is in the one to show you something about Nietzsche but I think something like what the hell.

Is with his hands and turn but let me try to bring in each other way maybe you can get into the oddities you see through this one way to think about. We're in a surmuda kai is through Nietzsche where he talks about how cultures in sort of their late stages will grow kind of weary and their vitalism is lost and so one one perspective to look at is well your attraction to we're in a is just you in the final throws of dying. Right and perhaps Asian culture has been a more abundant culture basically did culture for however long you know you know I don't know what Nietzsche would say about about. Korea but this idea that that there's a kind of vitality human beings have when they exist sort of within their conventions are within their sort of.

The sort of historical situation they have as a result of their sort of physiological psychology however Nietzsche would put it why why doesn't our affinity for born up culminates in a yearning for a lost vitality. Now I don't want to say authenticity in the Haidagarian sense I want to say something more than that in the Nietzsche sense which I think is superior to Eidegger's view but a kind of a kind of makeup where you're not looking to philosophies or justifications for one's mood but you just live one's mood and the opinions that come from it and all kind of works and it leads to a kind of poetic creation that's world affirming in that way it has the world affirming quality but it's not resigned or weary but but actually quite vital alive and creative right it's doing right. So I think one concern of Hans is that the desire for lost vitality is not going to be world affirming but will instead be a collective destiny of people that share a language will look quite militaristic that it'll be the stuff of fascism. And it's not just Nietzsche it's Leo Strauss says that this kind of existentialism even Haidarian existentialism is comes out of dying culture so he's he's not totally above historicizing not all the time.

Han is a very odd reader of Nietzsche and one way that you pick this up is that Han is a very often a very brusque reader of his contemporaries where he really bright lines differences he is not a very charitable reader and he's kind of arch and dismiss it this is one of the things that I think has probably slowed his academic uptake he's quite prickly one figure I have never seen him criticizes Nietzsche. Now that's crazy because Nietzsche doesn't seem always rattle into a friendliness as a matter of fact when Han thinks about friendliness or friendless kind it means the opposite of power like when you're not concerned at all with power. Is there something in the world beyond power many you know I was a scholar and so thinking about the world as an assemblage of measurable forces is sort of the way I think about world if it didn't have the power to continue into existence it wouldn't be so yes the world is power without remainder but Han is wondering if there is something in our worlds and you know phenomenologically like are there others is there and is there something beyond power and that's what the Zen say just discover somehow in just being friendly to the scattering of things that's what romantic lovers do. Han also thinks that Nietzsche discovers this which is a very odd thing to say about the philosopher of the world power so the end of his book.

He's reading Nietzsche's not class he's reading Nietzsche's journals and at the end of his book what is power he writes and each of this unusual philosopher of the will to power deserves to be listened to very carefully when he invokes the other of power and the will. And this is Nietzsche writing outside the windows there lies the autumn full of thoughts in a clear and mild sunlight the autumn of the north which I love as much as my very best friends because it is so mature and unconsciously without a wish a fruit falls off a tree without help from the wind in perfect silence and happy it falls down it does not desire anything for itself and gives everything of itself. The book is going to end a paragraph later this is the very last page of the second last page of the book he also quotes our sister give yourself away give yourself away is the last line of the book. So when there's no criticism of Nietzsche the Nietzsche that we know the Nietzsche of genealogy of morals the nature of will to power the nature of you know.

Yeah claim vitalism yeah we're exhausted so let's let's recharge when he turns to Nietzsche he turns to a very strange Zen like Nietzsche and I think cons argument there's not an argument here so I think cons sense is that what we need is. Somehow Zen because any attempt to reestablish some sort of vitalism will simply be re inscribed into the logic of of achievement trying to empower ourselves and restore our vitalism is just going to lead us back into that achievement loop and it will be one more thing to burn us out I think he does think that all of us are vital but for you know it's going to the gym and for you it's writing a book and for you it's and that just burns you out so you need to sort of clear the deck somehow either by falling in love with the other board or you're going to be stuck in that in that loop. But yeah that's why I said as a reader of Nietzsche I don't mean and he's not. Han is not a particularly charitable reader but for some reason Nietzsche is put on a pedestal as the opposite of who you would expect Nietzsche to be and it's always intriguing to me but I am kind of baffling.

That's you know that's what you just said is kind of interesting because you said oh Nietzsche's not really a good example of foreign this guy right but then it looks like Han isn't either at least it is I mean he's got to clear things away. I don't know. I think you should really separate the philosophical work and the theoretical works I think that's one way to resolve the tension. So when his philosophical works Han is always thinking about.

He's always thinking about how can we be friendly to the world and then in his theoretical works he's trying to you know that sort of clear cutting he's trying to say well we live in a world of this kind of power. There's no more negativity no one's trying to oppress you and there's only positive violence because you're the only one pressing yourself your freedom is only a ticket to self exploitation. And then he says that's absolutely true right no nuance saying no get out of the way now what he's trying to do I think is come back and make you take that claim seriously enough that you will appreciate what he's saying about for English type but it's not very friendly on the way. And this gets into the deeper tension about whether for English kite is a mood for philosophy because it doesn't seem like a mood for making distinctions at all maybe something we need right I'm not even if you live a philosophical life perhaps you shouldn't be trying to do philosophy all the time.

What attracts one to philosophy as a way of life versus what attracts one to what philosophy can know seems to be a separate question right. But so maybe there is something here but when Han is sort of clearing ground for thinking about thinking which he calls philosophies thinking about thinking he's really trying to be very provocative maybe to make that possible once again but yeah that he's not particularly friendly in his what's called the theoretical books. He makes that claim in the agony of arrows he says that that's the task of theory to make someone see something you have to die electrical oversimplification deal with it. Speaking of moods and friendliness what got you into the mood to study and philosophy there Professor I usually ask this question of older guests and you're about a wee lad in your career but young man young man you're appropriately sized for a man I mean apply you're not.

What turned you on to studying these things boredom anxiety coming to terms of your mortality wonder. There's an easy answer that which is something like almost by accident you know did I encounter good teachers and perhaps only by encountering bad teachers first. Right there's a story of a life study political science because I wanted to be a diplomat I want to study international relations and then I had the credits so then I took some political theory classes and then I found some views that I found absolutely repellent shouted at me by people I found absolutely a barber but then I started teaching and that you know high school and that was an accident and then I said well if I want to do something else oh I could. And you know just one thing led to another and I was interested in this question I think I had a good teacher I had a he was a French priest he's a phenomenologist by the name of Johnny's luck us.

And he taught a class on Kierkegaard and I just thought it was amazing and it opened up all sorts of questions I hadn't thought about before so in my case I think it was just curiosity and part of it was the aura of the man I was just curious about who this guy was he's a priest I never saw me claricles I never saw him preach a mass he fell asleep in church he was very slovenly he wore these huge high waters he was a hygarian of some kind. What was that what did that mean right so it was just sort of baffling and kind of cool and so I don't know I always try to remember that I don't know what I don't know and I might be interested in all sorts of things and so I tried to be a. You know gameful good sport to look into stuff and that's probably why I ended up writing a book on a on a Korean German media theorist kind of philosopher guy way outside of my usual zone but yeah I would just say curiosity. Well what maybe there's something out there to know that I should know that you know I'm no we're even close to to sort of coming to so that that's sort of sporting attitude I suppose.

But again that's not philosophy that's just being a scholar and saying here's philosophy here's philosophy now how do I how do I understand what this is versus that is right how do I adjudicate what philosophy might be so it's just the sort of scholarly curiosity. You know when one one blushes a bit when one says why you dressed in philosophy philosopher no probably not. Yeah, he's on a sausage sound delicious right now that's a really quick lunch. So you already mentioned the one teacher the French priest and the other teachers that have been influential to you or stand out.

Yeah absolutely I mean Notre Dame was an absolute wealth of great teachers many of whom I end up citing in this book. So Catherine Michael Zukert their work on Strauss Catherine Zukert and her work on. Her work on Heidegger in particular comes up Dana Villa and his work on our art comes up quite a bit in this book Ruth Abby and her work on Charles Taylor comes up quite a bit and so I had so many wonderful teachers. Sue Collins I think taught the best class I've ever been in on on Thucydides Mary Gies a ton of wonderful teachers there.

I was a noted him in a good time to where there were you know serious political philosophy folks in the Strausian mold and others that aren't in the Strausian mold and sometimes they would go teach with one another and. And it was just sort of like a very wide open fearless great place to be a curious student. And you know with almost no exceptions I can think of very generous you know very generous teachers there that I had so that sounds great. You look into it how do you know you're going to get that on the other side.

And who's your favorite colleague who's your favorite colleague. Who's the worst colleague I want to go ahead. My favorite colleague here. Oh probably Chris Burkett.

He's great. He's a show. He's a good a funkyler figure you know sort of you know when Greg has been bullying me mercilessly. And I'm crying in my office you know he'll always come over and put his arm around me.

But no this is another this actually been a place speaking about looking into places where you have generous colleagues and friends. You know yeah I was telling another step in a charmed life. No I've been telling Greg that you guys do a great job of hiring like I mean just case in point. You're like we need to hire a political economist those guys ruin every party and then you find a guy who doesn't ruin the party is a little bit damn it but you know at least he does Kierkegaard.

And Spinozy does important things so as a good sense. I mean that's if you can pull that off time again that's the kind of thing that pays dividends for generations of students so that's often. Don't forget Han. Very strange and great capitalism.

But with the political economy side of fun he could simply agree with Hayek in every respect. Simply say yeah this is the world. It's a spontaneous order. It's everyone doing what they want.

That's what a market is. And also that's why everyone's miserable. So because we're not very good at free. And so the idea that the urgency of this seems to me to be I am one of these people that think we live in a very free society quite free in comparison to societies in the past.

But I do not think that necessarily makes us happy people. And nor do I think that the architects of the free society thought it would make us happy people. And so you have to learn how to be free right and you have to learn how to enjoy living in a free society and being good at being a free person. And I take Han as one of those kind of figures in a long tradition of kind of sympathetic critics.

And that's kind of what we want to give our students right. I mean I'm not signing the Declaration of Independence or certainly I'm not liberating anyone. But I think the thing we want to do is teach our students how to not only appreciate the fact that they live in the free world and not everyone is that fortunate. But also that not everything about living in a free world is a matter of good fortune.

There are some challenges you have to learn how to use your freedom wisely etc. And you look at so many people that I mean how sad is it that they have the whole world in front of them. They can do anything they want and they're going to have to struggle with depression or anxiety or they just can't get outside of their own heads. And they live in a society where all these free people are medicated.

You know this has been an exciting engaging episode. It's about to end. You're going to find yourself listeners in a mood of boredom and anxiety. Well I got just the thing you can do.

You can like, rate, review, subscribe, donate, right. And then afterwards go read some Han and get into a real bored attitude. You know it would be nice if Han just wrote the most tedious boring books. He's like I'm just doing my part.

What is the name of the book? It's Beyond Cho Han a critical introduction key contemporary thinkers by Polypress. Our guest Rob Wiley and my colleague is co-author that book with his buddies Steven Knepper and Ethan Stoneman. You should run out and buy it wherever your bookmongers hang out, which is I assume on some corner, mongering their books.

I'm sure you can get it for a reasonable price. I was good at you on the show. We should consider doing something maybe short piece by Han at some point. But Alex already said don't forget to like, green, subscribe so I don't even know what I'm supposed to do.

How do I take this out now? I'm kind of bored. You're just blathering on man. Take care of folks.

Thanks Rob. See you next week.