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-Chul Han, whose thought-provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition.
If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work, will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the “burnout society” and why so many of us feel tired from participating in what he calls “auto-exploitation” and “positive violence.” We then discuss how our burnout society is also a “palliative society” that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s “last man.” We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual, contemplation, and an openness to the mystery of others.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Byung-Chul Han’s books, including The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society
- Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford
- New Verse Review
- Steven’s work at The Lamp
- Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
- Dying Breed Article: What Nietzsche’s Typewriter Brain Can Tell Us About Twitter Brain
- Sunday Firesides: Protect the Sanctum Sanctorum of Selfhood
- Sunday Firesides: We Need as Much Meaning Extension as Life Extension
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. 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-Chul Han, whose thought provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition. If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the burnout society and why so many of us feel tired for participating in what he calls Auto-Exploitation and Positive Violence. We then discuss how our burnout society is also a palliative society that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s Last man. We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual contemplation and an openness to the mystery of others. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/han. All right. Steven Knepper, welcome to the show.
Steven Knepper: Thanks for having me. It’s honored to be here.
Brett McKay: So you co-authored a book about a modern philosopher that I’ve been seeing more and more of in my readings. This guy named Byung-Chul Han, he’s a German Korean philosopher. For those who aren’t familiar with this guy, who is he and why am I seeing him more and more in my philosophical reading?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. He is popping up everywhere today on the internet, on social media. So Byung-Chul Han, he is a Korean German philosopher, as you’ve said. He was born in Seoul, Korea. He’s living, I think that’s important to to point out. He’s continuing to write all the time. So, he’s very much a thinker on the move. He’s born in Seoul, Korea. As a younger man he studies metallurgy and is really into engineering, kind of material science. But as a young man studying those, he becomes more and more interested in philosophy and philosophical questions and literature. So he travels to Germany to study abroad and he lets his parents under the impression that he’s gonna continue his material science studies in Germany, but he makes this big move into studying theology, literature, and especially philosophy at the graduate level. So I think that’s just kind of a fascinating thing in and of itself.
About 15 years ago now, he had this breakthrough book that is really his turn to more topical problems, problems of the day. And that book was called “The Burnout Society.” And it was a big hit in Germany but it also was relatively quickly translated into a whole bunch of other languages. And Byung-Chul Han, some of your listeners may be familiar with Matthew Crawford, who wrote books like “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” And they might be familiar with arguments about how more and more we live in a society where there’s this war for our attention, where our attention is commodified. And you’ll be in the line at the service station and you get up there to pump your gas and suddenly the gas pump starts talking to you and giving you ads, or even above the urinal there might be ads. So, our attention’s getting pulled more and more in by these digital technologies and certainly all of those kind of more real world examples like the gas pump and the urinal pale beside the smartphone, which is algorithmically tailored to harvest our attention.
So Han is a really sharp critic of those kind of dynamics, and I think that’s a big part of the appeal. But he really zooms into on the ways in which, while acknowledging that all these things are designed to catch us, we also kind of catch ourselves. We go along with it, we are very easily encouraged into binge watching or going deeper into email. And he talks about how we auto exploit. And I think that’s what’s really captured people’s mind because I think a lot of people can recognize that in themselves. I know I can. The ways in which we don’t have to be checking work email but we do. The way in which we have a down moment and we pull out that smartphone. I think he’s really an astute critic of that.
Brett McKay: Okay. So I hope we can talk more about these ideas, these criticisms he has of modern life in depth. And yeah. I’m sure our listeners are familiar with Matthew Crawford. We’ve had him on the podcast a few times, talking about “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” “The World Beyond Your Head.” So I think this will be right up their alley. I’m curious, you’re a professor at the Virginia Military Institute. So, how did a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, where they do drum outs, take an interest in this Korean-German philosopher?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I love VMI. I love working with cadets. As you might expect, they’re very ethically serious and they’re very disciplined and they live in a system that encourages discipline and virtue. But cadets are not immune from some of these same dynamics. They too struggle with screen addiction. They too struggle with being able to focus their attention. And a subset of cadets come to a place like this because they want that structure. They know they need it to succeed. So, in one ways, I think that working at VMI gives me some insight into some of the ways we can deal with these things because VMI, for instance, during their freshman year, what’s called the rat year here, cadets aren’t allowed to use their cell phones. But on the flip side, I think just like if I were teaching anywhere, I can see how my students are struggling with some of these dynamics.
Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s dig into Han and his philosophy, kind of bigger picture. How would you describe his approach to philosophy? Like what school of philosophy would you put him in? Is he a Aristotelian, an existentialist? What’s Han’s philosophy? How would you describe it?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. There’s lots of different ways I could answer that question. And he draws on some very different sets of philosophical resources, including Zen Buddhism, including Christian theology at times. But I think I would answer that question for right now in the way that I think really focuses, why he resonates so much with people, is that he comes out of this tradition, especially in German philosophy, that’s very techno skeptical. Sort of earlier critiques even before the digital age that are concerned about instrumental reason, about how we tend to approach the world and other people as things, as objects, as machines. How there’s that reductionism involved in that. How bureaucracy and this technical reason rationalize our lives and organize it but then also might seem like they’re squeezing out room for freedom. So, some figures here you might think of on the left would be someone like Theodor Adorno and on the right would be someone like Martin Heidegger but also German Catholic thinkers like Romano Gordini or Josef Pieper, and Han draws on all these thinkers.
But more recently, there’s this turn toward thinking especially about technology and how it shapes the world. So someone like Heidegger is gonna talk about how technology inframes the world, it determines how we see the world in each other itself. There’s something about the way the technology restructures our world and that gets taken up in media theory by people like Marshall Mcluhan outside of Germany and a lot of other media theorists that Han is in dialogue with, who are looking at the ways in which, yeah, technology isn’t just sort of this passive transmitter of information or this tool that we use. Technology and especially communication technologies shape how we see the world often in ways that we’re not aware of and I think we’ve all seen that with the digital. Think about how the experience of smartphones has reshaped how we experience the world, how we experience time. So he’s certainly a philosopher that picks up those concerns and takes them in very interesting and precise ways into our digital present day.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, yeah. He’s kind of taken a turn towards media theory. And yeah, he does talk about Marshall McLuhan. I’m sure people have heard that phrase, “The medium is the message.”
Steven Knepper: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Yeah. The idea is there that the tools that we use for media consumption or communication, it shapes the way we think. I did an article about this on our substack called Dying Breed about Nietzsche and the typewriter.
Steven Knepper: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And actually, there was a famous German media theorist that wrote about this, talking about how Nietzsche went blind. And once he went blind, he had to start using a typewriter. And this guy talks about how his writing style changed once he went from writing out by hand to writing with a typewriter. His writing became punchier, became more aphoristic, more bombastic. And so yeah. The same sort of thing happens. I’m sure people have noticed how their emails have changed since they started communicating primarily via email. I remember when I wrote handwritten letters, it kind of flowed and was more stream of conscious, and it was long sentences, and now with email, the medium of email, it’s gotta be short, punchy, and to the point, because that’s how you do email.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And even text messaging, I think, has refigured how we do email. But you might think too about something like how we’ve had this move that’s ongoing from text to video and then from video to short videos. Like on Google now, you can search for short videos. And there’s lots of research that’s emerging about what that’s done to our attention span, how TikTok kind of rewires our brain. And I think that’s a great example of this dynamic. People aren’t aware of how this technology is reshaping how they experience the world but it’s doing it and Han is part of that tradition that’s trying to make that explicit for us.
Brett McKay: Okay. So Han, he is trying to figure out why modern life can feel just weird, overwhelming, boring. Sometimes you just feel like you’re in this rat race and you can’t get out of it. It feels fast. So let’s dig into this more because I think everyone’s listening to that has probably experienced that. Let’s talk about that book you’d mentioned that was his breakout book, “The Burnout Society.” What is his central diagnosis of modern life in that work?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So he emphasizes in “The Burnout Society” that when it comes to feeling burnout, which is this new phenomenon that many, many people feel burnout, even though if you look at statistics, at least in the developed world, we have more “free time” than any other generation that came before us. But we often have this feeling of being run ragged, of being burnout, and he describes it to what he calls this achievement culture, where we have this sense of an open-ended possibility. There are all these things we could do, so therefore we try to do as many of them as we can. And we get hooked on these little doses of dopamine, on these little often quantified metrics of achievement. So this might play out in social media, where you’re looking for a certain number of friends or a certain number of likes. You post something and then you wait for the notifications to roll in and you get your little hit, but quickly it diminishes and you feel like you need to post something else, and it goes on and on and on and before you know it, how much time have you spent in that sort of strange little dynamic?
It might play out in sort of being a workaholic at the office, where you’re checking your email even when your boss doesn’t expect you to. You’re answering emails, you’re impatient when other people aren’t answering emails outside the usual business hours. It could play out even at the gym, he says, where you become super fixated on numbers and on sort of micromanaging your achievement there. So, he sees it playing out in all these different areas. And I think it’s particularly interesting how he talks about how it plays out not just in those meritocratic spaces like being a super high achiever at work, but it infiltrates our entertainment. So, you feel like you’re just sitting down to watch a video, you know, to relax at evening, and you end up absolutely vegging out on the couch and autoplay binging half a series in one night. This is a pretty common experience now. And certainly the technology itself facilitates it with autoplay but he sees it too as this sense of, well, we could watch just this next one, it’s all there to stream right now. And so we end up doing it. So there’s a way in which, in pursuing more and more and more, we burn ourselves out.
And in all this pursuit of more and more and more, what’s missing is a sense of, okay, what’s a good healthy balanced life looks like? What is a good sense of limits when it comes to these things? The open-ended injunction to achieve doesn’t give us any places to rest, doesn’t give us a sense of when we’ve accomplished something, doesn’t give us this robust telos to pursue. And of course, who benefits from this? Well, certainly advertisers do, on the internet. Clicks are money. Attention is money. But he’s very astute about how we have this, what he calls auto-exploitation.
Brett McKay: Yeah. let’s talk about that. So, auto-exploitation or sometimes it’s translated self-exploitation. And then he talks about this idea of positive violence. I think they’re kind of connected. What does he mean by self-exploitation and positive violence, and how does that connect with this idea of the achievement society?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. What he means by positive violence, and that’s a strange little term in some ways. So negative violence would be coercion by outside forces. Someone forcing you to do something, someone threatening you so that you do something. “Check your email at these hours or you’ll be fired.” That would be kind of a negative pressure. Han would say that positive violence is stuff 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. That’s what he means by positive violence. And he sees this move happening with kind of the dawn of the digital age from what he calls a disciplinary society that’s about rules and injunctions and negative discipline, he sees that giving way in a lot of senses to this positive exploitation. More and more, instead of telling us what not to do, powers that be, economic powers, political powers, are gonna encourage us to do more. And often it’s framed as, this is good for you, why wouldn’t you want to do more? But of course, this just serves some institutions, some companies, really, really well, but it can have a big toll on society and on individuals in the society that suffer burnout, fragmentation, feelings of Isolation, all these things that can come as negative consequences of the achievement society, according to Han.
Brett McKay: Okay. This actually reminds me of this idea of positive violence and self-exploitation in the achievement society and how we’re doing this to ourselves, trying to improve ourselves because we feel like we should because we can. Those are potentials that we can pursue. But then they can be used by other people or other businesses or governments for their own ends. We did a podcast a really long time ago about the happiness industry, about these consultants that come into companies and say, “Hey, we’re gonna develop a wellness program for your employees where we’re gonna have meditation sessions and you can have a nap room.” And it sounds like, “Oh, it’s great. It’s for the employees. It’ll improve morale.” But really,it’s like, well, we want to do that so we can get more out of our employees.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. Precisely. And in the book, The Critical Introduction that I co-authored, we talk about office space. And if you remember that movie, great movie with Jennifer Aniston’s character where she works at this restaurant where they have to wear these flare, like these buttons all over their uniform and be really bubbly and excited as they go about their job. And her manager at one point says to her, “You’re only wearing the minimum allowed amount of flare. Don’t you want to wear more? Don’t you want to wear more?” And it’s pitched as, why wouldn’t you want to do this? But it’s so clearly kind of degrading and coercive underneath the surface. So that’s maybe an extreme example but I think it’s a pretty good example of something that was already going on way back when office space was produced but I think has become much more prevalent in the time since then.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Because of the digital technologies, you see social media influencers like, hey, I’m living my best life and here’s what I do. Here’s the routine I follow to live my best life and you can do this too. And it’s like, man, that’s a lot to do when I’ve got a job and kids and other responsibilities, but you try to do it because you’re living in that achievement society.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And I think that one thing I would like to specify, and I wish that Han would do more of this in his own writing, but I don’t think that the problem, at least from my view, maybe he would disagree with this, but I don’t think the problem is wanting to have a set of disciplines that pursue a goal, like fitness, working out, or trying to learn something new. I mean, all of these can be good things but what makes them pernicious in Han’s view is when you don’t have this ideal that you’re aiming at, which will sort of let you know when you’ve got there. You don’t have this sense of direction. You don’t have this sense that you’re aiming at flourishing. You are just sort of going from hit to hit to hit on these many achievement rubrics. And what gets lost is this rich notion of flourishing or this balanced life. And so, I mean, I think that’s what art of manliness is really good about. Certainly, you give people fitness tips and you give people time management tips. But again and again, you come back to this robust notion of what flourishing should look like. And I think that if you take that seriously, that actually counteracts the achievement society..
Brett McKay: Yeah. Maybe you could put it this way. In the achievement society, we tend to treat means as ends because we don’t have an ultimate end, really.
Steven Knepper: I think that’s a fantastic way of putting it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen this in my own life. I mean, a perfect example, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast and in my writing. You know, I was a power lifter for a while, really got into it. And I was always chasing the next PR. And it was fine for a while but then a couple of years ago, I was getting to the point where in order to increase the weight on the bar, I was just having to train harder and harder and it was just causing a lot of stress, physical. It beat me down. And I got to the point it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. This is no longer enjoyable. So, I still train but I’m not chasing numbers. I’m just training so I just feel good and because I enjoy it.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And one thing that Han emphasizes elsewhere in his works, I mean, so far we’ve talked about his diagnosis of our society’s problems but his books are kind of split between those more diagnostic works and works where he’s recommending some practices that will help counter this. And he’s written a lot about ritual and the importance of ritual. Ritual trains our attention. It allows our attention to be more robust. It gives time a shape. And you think about how traditional practices of exercise, you know, we might think about like, say martial arts, how there’s this ritualistic dimension to it and this communal dimension to it. And I think that’s the antidote, that’s not part of the problem. But there is this tendency for achievement society, if we use Hans terms, to take even good things and kind of twist them away from substantive ends to means, means, means, or many, many goals that don’t provide sort of lasting satisfaction or a sense of closure or pacing but you just chase one after another after another.
Brett McKay: An example I just thought of as you were mentioning that we, where we take something that we maybe enjoyed for the thing itself and then turn it into achievement society thing, like a hobby. You see this happen all the time where someone has this hobby that they’re really passionate about and then they start sharing it on social media because they love it, but then it turns into a business for them and then their hobby becomes this means to gain influence and money and it kind of kills the joy of the hobby.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. And we might think about other things too. So, Han recommends contemplative practices as something that are especially important in our distracted attention divided present day. But you think about how like a certain practice of something like yoga or even daily prayer can be just another thing on the to-do list that you’re using as like a bandaid to sort of manage the worst feelings of being burned out or stressed or to allow you to just squeeze out a little more achievement. And that’s not sort of the transformative practice that Han’s recommending to really counteract this achievement society. But it can be sort of co-opted as part of the regimen.
Brett McKay: There’s this great phrase that Han has, I think it’s in “The Burnout Society.” He says that people today are tired from not being able to be themselves. What does he mean by that? And how does the achievement society contribute to that tiredness?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that there’s many ways you could approach that but I think that Han has had this qualm about present-day society and the achievement society but he also sees some tendencies towards this in Western philosophy and Western society for a long time. He thinks that there’s often this unconscious kind of egotism to it, where you’re focused on being the best you. And for a lot of people to even question that just sounds insane. This is the mantra by which they live and by which they exhort others. But one of the dangers with that is that you never really know when you’ve reached prime you and also, often by sort of being so focused on you, you don’t open yourself up to other people or to the world or to great works of art or literature or ideas. You know, everything’s about self-maximization or it’s about that next little bit of achievement. And not only is that really bad ethically because we need to be attentive to others, Han doesn’t quote, as far as I know, Iris Murdoch, the great British novelist and philosopher, but he would agree with her that in some ways ethics begins with attention. We gotta be able to sort of give people our attention in order to treat them well. So there’s this ethical downside but there’s also this paradox in which the achievement society, it seems like you’re doing this all for your own benefit, but it feels so thin and you feel like you’re burning out. Whereas really, if you open yourself up to others and you have substantive relationships with other people or if you pursue kind of a disciplined practice that gives your life shape or religious practice, those things open up a depth of meaning and a depth of satisfaction but you only can access those if you let go of the ego, if you dialect the ego, if you make yourself receptive to them. When you get out of the way, then meaning can be discovered.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that phrase, tired from not being able to be themselves, it made me think of Kierkegaard and his notion of despair. And he had this idea that we have this idea of ourself as it should be. And I think he talks about someone who’s really ambitious, and it’s either you gotta be Caesar or nothing.
Steven Knepper: Yeah.
Brett McKay: So 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 have this idea in our modern world that we got to be the absolute best and if we can’t do that, we’re worthless and then we just fall into this funk and we’re depressed. And yet Han, I think, he argues in “The Burnout Society” a lot of the depression that we see in the modern world, yes, he would agree that maybe there’s some biological components. Some people are just depressed because of something biological going on in themselves. But he argues that a lot of depression, people just feeling down and just in a funk, it’s because we are striving so hard to be this awesome thing that we think we should be because the achievement society tells us we need to be and we’re not reaching that, even though we’re trying really hard, we just get burned out and we’re just like, “Okay. I’m just gonna give up.”
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And my co-author, Rob Wiley, he’s a great Kierkegaard scholar. And I think part of what drew him to Han is that even though Han doesn’t “Kierkegaard that much” there’s a lot of shared sensibility. And I think one of the things is this notion of perhaps the most dangerous kind of despair is the despair that you’re not aware of. You’re not aware you’re in it. And I think he sees that as plaguing a lot of us that are caught up in this achievement society.
Brett McKay: So we mentioned that technology plays a major role in Han’s critique of modern life. How does he see digital technology, especially smartphones and social media, contributing to the burnout society?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a great question. And my other co-author, Ethan Stoneman, this is really his wheelhouse. And one of the things that he points out is that really Han doesn’t turn to engaging digital technology fully until after the burnout society. That’s when you see him start referencing thinkers like Marshall McLuhan. That’s when you see him really giving attention to how smartphones have reshaped our experience of the world. So, I think the burnout society is still a great place to start with Han. But if you’re interested in the technology, you wanna look at some of those later works where he really goes in-depth on how technology is feeding into this achievement society mentality. But even in “The Burnout Society” he’s already talking about how the smartphone can be kind of like a portable, a mobile labor camp where we are just always pulling it out in any down moment and clicking, clicking, clicking. I think too, on social media, one of the things that he is insightful about is that there’s this drive to make yourself transparent on it, to sort of share everything about your life, everything that’s going on. And certainly, that’s really good for marketers because behind the scenes they’re creating intricate profiles for each user that they can then sell to other companies.
But also cumulatively, it creates the sense that humans are really these thin things, that an online profile captures who we are as a person, and sort of the depth and mystery of the individual gets lost. You might think about something like dating apps, which I know lots of people that have met the love of their life on these, so I’m not trying to sort of just categorically dismiss them but there’s this real danger with them that you think that if you match with some preferences online, that when you meet the person, that you already know them or that you know there’s a compatibility there and you can lose track of that mystery of the other person. And of course, too, when we create online personas, we can either be consciously or unconsciously performing a persona that’s not really us. So, Han worries about how it creates this thinned out version of self and other. And he’s a big proponent of recovering real-world relationships, real-world friendships, where you can’t just sort of ghost each other if you don’t like how the conversation’s going, or where you might have to dwell in silence for a few moments when you’re sitting together at the restaurant, and where there might be this real tension. Where the other person might call you out or you might sort of need to stick with each other through hard times. All of these, he thinks awaken us to a richer sense of ourselves and others as having this unfathomable dimension of otherness or mystery. He thinks we hunger for that. Yeah, I do too.
Brett McKay: For sure. Yeah. Han’s critique about transparency I thought was really interesting because yeah, you see this ethos particularly online and social media, where you got to be transparent. So yeah. It benefits the social media companies. They get more information about you so they can sell ads to you. But also you see this ethos from the people themselves taking part in social media. There’s this idea that if you have a following, like your followers demand transparency from you. You got to let them know everything about you. Like, what are your thoughts about this issue? And tell me about your family life and your problems. And you get rewarded if you reveal things about yourself. Oh, thanks for being real. And you’re just so authentic. And Kierkegaard makes this argument too in the present age. He makes this comment how people, he was writing in the 1800s and he was writing about how people would talk about their personal lives very freely in the public, like in newspapers and essays and things like that but then when they were actually with people face to face, they wouldn’t reveal those things. Like they would just suddenly become very reticent and they wouldn’t talk about those deep personal things, but they had no problem sharing it with the mass audience.
And Kierkegaard said somehow that that hurts being a self. Like you can’t become a self and an individual unless you have, he calls it a sanctum sanctorum, like a holy of holies that only you can go into. Because if you’re just living your life out in public, you’re constantly shaping yourself to fit what the public wants, so you can get the followers and the likes, et cetera
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. So it’s kind of interesting. This might feel like a bit of a digression but there’s this Emily Dickinson poem that I teach most semesters. It’s very short. It’s called, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Actually, it’s not the title. It’s just the first line that’s taken as the title. But it goes, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell, they’d advertise you know. How dreary to be somebody. How public like a frog, to tell one’s name to live long June to an admiring bog.” It’s a great poem, right?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Steven Knepper: You know, especially today, students on their own immediately go to social media. But with that idea of transparency in mind, what does the frog do again and again and again? They say their same name over and over. But in this poem, Dickinson suggests that the nobodies that are behind the scenes that have a sense of privacy, they’re the ones that actually have mystery, depth, something interesting and new to say. So I think that that poem like way before we have digital technology is on to something about how always making yourself transparent kind of thins you out and loses something important.
Brett McKay: Another thing that Han explores is the role of boredom in modern life. What role does boredom play in Han’s critique of modern life and what does he mean by boredom?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a fantastic question because there’s a couple different types of boredom at play. One type of boredom is this restlessness that we have no patience for whatsoever. So, if you’re waiting at the bus stop and you have a down moment, probably you’re gonna feel an itch to pull out your phone if you’re like most people. So, we want to fill up every moment with something and we have no tolerance for that restless boredom. But Han actually is a big advocate of this deeper sense of boredom, profound boredom, where you let go of the restlessness and you sink into the moment and you just open yourself up. And he thinks that that kind of state is really important today because that’s the kind of state where new ideas might come from you or where you might notice stuff around you. Certainly if you’re an artist, that’s where inspiration might strike. So he thinks that this kind of profound boredom, that a lot of us that were lucky enough to grow up pre-digital, you know, as kids I think we reached this state often because you go through the restless boredom like, “Oh man, I’ve got all day, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m tired of all my toys.” And you don’t have anything, any recourse. So over time you might come up with like an imaginative game or you might go out on a walk and you sort of sink into this more receptive open state.
So, those are the two states of boredom in Han. Now I’m not sure this is exactly everything that’s going on and this might be only a partial answer to why he’s interested in that profound boredom. But I think Han, since he’s such a great diagnostician of what’s wrong with society, one of the things that he’s aware of is that, okay, if we’re already feeling really burned out because of this achievement society, what if we just let go of that compulsion to achieve in the midst of the burnout? Maybe there’s not that big of a gap between feeling exhausted and that profound boredom. And if we could just allow ourselves to sink into that, then maybe the antidote is much closer to the state of our problem than we think. So I think that’s maybe part of the reason why he’s so interested in profound boredom. There’s a qualitative leap between the burnout state and profound boredom but maybe the divide in another sense isn’t that far apart.
Brett McKay: Maybe it’s kind of like hair of the dog where you have to kind of lean into it a little bit more to figure out what it is you lack and really need.
Steven Knepper: Yeah, I think so. And you can see him sort of trying out different approaches to our problems. So, post-burnout society, he also starts to talk a lot more about openness to the other, and Eros is this thing that draws us out of ourself towards the other or towards the world. So here too, I mean, I think he thinks that, okay, we’re seeking all this fake community online, and he’ll talk about online community as often seeming like you’re encountering other people but really because of algorithms and really because you still kind of mediate that encounter, he says you’re actually trapped in kind of a mirror world. You’re trapped in what he calls the hell of the same, where if you really want to encounter other people you often have to go into the real world where there’s a little more risk and uncertainty in the encounter but there’s also the sense of depth and a richer possibility of a relationship. Martin Buber is another thinker that’s important to him. And Martin Buber will say things like when you enter into a real relationship with the other person, the relationship itself is bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s not just you and me, there’s now a we. And Han will say similar things. But you have to sort of open yourself up to that for that to happen. And he thinks a lot of people are seeking that on the internet but it’s pretty hard to find on the internet.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So, we’ve talked about “The Burnout Society” so we’re all feeling kind of burned out, according to Han, because we live in this achievement society that has this, we call it ethic of self-exploitation or auto-exploitation, where we’re pursuing things not because we have to but it’s this idea, well, you could do it, so you need to do it, and we have these tools that allow us to measure ourselves and make progress but you can never know when you actually reach that best self. And so you just get tired and burned out and it can cause boredom too because some of that stuff that you’re constantly doing can just wear you down and it can be boring. I want to talk about another book that he wrote, it’s a short one, called “The Palliative Society.” This is another critique he makes on modern culture. What does he mean by the Palliative Society?
Steven Knepper: So, in this book, his main argument is that there’s something seriously out of whack about our relationship to pain as a society. He sees our society as not just an achievement society but one that tries to avoid pain and suffering at all costs. And of course, Han thinks that in many cases, yeah, we want to try to reduce pain and disease, we want to try to reduce pain in all kinds of areas of life, but one of the dangers here is that to be human it means you’re gonna undergo pain. So if we get to the point where we think pain is always a problem, a problem to be solved with a technical solution, then what happens when you run into a situation where the pain can’t be solved? Maybe someone’s dying. And he thinks we’re really bad at accompanying people through painful situations. I think that’s probably true. But then Han would also say that many areas of life require pain in order to reach a higher level. So, you think again about physical fitness. This is one of the few areas in our society where I think that you still see some embrace of pain as a necessary step. In order to become a better athlete, you’ve gotta train hard, you’ve gotta suffer. But Han points out too that in education, you know, he’s a philosopher. To be a good philosopher, he says, you’ve gotta confront ideas that challenge your own. You’ve gotta wrestle with difficult ideas that make you uncomfortable. 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 professor through and through. But mathematics, you know, mathematics at a certain level becomes really tough. And in order to get through it, you’ve gotta be willing to sort of suffer through the hard work to get there. And then maybe most importantly, think about relationships. Think about a good marriage or a good friendship or with kids. Those relationships, there’s gonna be time when that loved one is suffering and they need you and it’s gonna be unpleasant to go through that with them. So any kind of real love entails suffering. And that’s ancient wisdom, that a lot of people would pay lip service to but actually, our vocabulary and our practices for dealing with that have gotten really thinned out. And he thinks that we basically live in a society that avoids pain.
For him, the COVID pandemic really revealed that because after the opening stages, when we got a better sense of what’s going on with this disease, he saw kind of an overreaction in all kinds of areas. We might think about schools shut down for kids long after we knew that this disease, thankfully, for the most part, wasn’t that threatening to children. And this strange way in which we couldn’t sort of balance that this is a tragic situation, that there’s gonna be negative outcomes no matter which way we go. He saw this as kind of failing the test in a pretty profound way. And he traces it back, at least in part, to this inability to deal with suffering and to sort of think about pain in an adjusted way.
Brett McKay: You mentioned that you think our vocabulary around pain and suffering has been thinned out. What are some examples of that off the top of your head?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we see it in all kinds of areas. And there have been some really good contrary trends to this. But I think that when you think about parenting and how for a few decades now we’ve had the phenomenon of helicopter parents. Whenever your kid has problems, there’s a real not even just temptation but almost expectation from other parents, you might think, to jump in there and smooth it out for your kid. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Sometimes there’s situations the kids are in that they can’t deal with and they need adults to step in. But also there’s a way in which if you want your kid to be an adjusted adult, they’ve gotta learn how to suffer through some situations. They’ve gotta grow in toughness and courage. And I think we’re pretty poor at that kind of vocabulary. I think too. It’s really tough. It’s tough for me. And I’m a religious guy from a tradition that keeps some of these things more alive. But it’s really hard to accompany family members that are in deep sickness and on their way to death. It’s hard to know how to talk to them and it’s probably always been hard. But I think it’s become especially hard in our day where we tend to close that away in retirement homes and hospitals. So, those are some examples.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one that came to the top of my head was you saw this a couple years ago. I think you’re seeing a trend away from it. But the idea of trigger warnings in classrooms when you’re discussing heavy topics like sexual assault or crime or whatever, you’ve got to give a trigger warning to people. I think that might be another example of like, Han would say, this is an example of the palliative society and we want to reduce and eliminate pain as much as possible, even though to really understand an experience, you have to confront everything, even the terrible parts of it.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And Han would say, life itself is gonna throw up these really hard situations. So certainly in classrooms, you shouldn’t handle difficult material flippantly or brusquely. You should try to be sort of sensitive about it. But one of the ways, the reasons to study the humanities is to study the tragic and help you then process it when you have to encounter it in your own life. So, if you just sort of immediately bracket that off, then one of the main reasons that the humanities is important goes away. And people end up suffering more as a result for that, I’d say.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You become fragilized. We had the guy who wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind” or something like that. He writes about that. I would like to talk about this. I think it’s in “The Palliative Society.” Han has this kind of throwaway line. He didn’t really explain it or follow it, and I wish he did because that’s actually really interesting. He talks about this idea of the palliative society and wanting to eliminate pain. He likens it to the last man from Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” And he said that the last man is actually obsessed with their health. Do you know what I’m talking about when he wrote this? Can you flesh that out? Because I think that’s really interesting.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. And just a sort of a broader point. I think that one legit frustration that people can have with Han is that since he writes these shorter extended essay-like books, sometimes there will be these lines that almost feel like throwaway lines. You’re like, “Oh, I wish he would have just fleshed that out.” I think that’s a pretty common experience. His relationship to Nietzsche is a really interesting and complex one because one way of thinking about Nietzsche, and there’s certainly abundant textual evidence to think about this, is as this great philosopher of the will and of action. But he brings out a more contemplative side to Nietzsche and he pulls out these passages that show him emphasizing the importance of contemplation, of being able to have real repose. So that’s an interesting thing. But yeah. I think that he thinks that the last man is obsessed with health and obsessed with their own happiness in such a way that it has that unconscious egotism about it and also becomes very fragile and can’t face up to the tragic side of life, the suffering of life, and the suffering of others.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that it made me think of, you know, we live in this world of wellness culture where we have all these devices and supplements we can take and there’s this talk about, we’ve got to extend our lifespan. And I’m thinking, like, why? Like, what are we doing with that? I mean, health is important. I’m not trying to dismiss health but it seems like we’ve made health an end rather than a means to a higher telos.
Steven Knepper: I think that’s exactly correct. And yeah. I don’t think the problem is that you want to be healthy or that you want to reduce suffering from disease or unjust circumstances or things like that. I think that’s all to the good and important. But I do think that one danger of sort of fetishizing health too much is that any risk becomes unacceptable or any difficulty becomes something to avoid. And that just really thins out life because so many of the things that make life most meaningful. And I think too, it’s important to make that distinction between kind of pleasantness and meaning. Often deep meaning, you know, you think about a Buddhist monk or a saint, you know, deeply meaningful life but one that’s full of asceticism and challenge.
Brett McKay: So, we’ve been talking about some of Han’s critiques and sort of diagnoses of modern life, and that’s what he’s most famous for. He’s a diagnostician. But as you said, we’ve been talking about it throughout the conversation, he does offer some potential antidotes to this feeling of burnout, this feeling of boredom, this feeling of flatness in modern life. And one of those things you mentioned was this idea of Eros and that we need to return to this idea of Eros. I think a lot of people, lay people, when they hear the word Eros, they think, oh, sex. But that’s not what Han means. What does Han mean by Eros and how can that help us out of the burnout society?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So his notion of Eros goes back to Plato but I think he definitely puts his own spin on it. But it’s this notion of Eros as this desire that draws us out of ourself towards some other good. So, he would distinguish that from the kind of lower level base desire gratification that often the internet trades on. You want to get those likes or yeah, if we want to talk about sex, pornography, literally masturbatory interaction with the internet. Whereas real Eros, yeah, you’re drawn outside of yourself towards the other and when you really encounter another person or you encounter the world, you realize that it’s bigger than your project. It doesn’t exist just for you. You discover this depth and richness and mystery. And so, yeah. When it comes to erotic relationships, sexual relationships, relationships of erotic love, he’d say that, yeah, there’s a big difference between that transactional kind of pornographic interaction and one where you’re attracted to the other person as a three-dimensional person and as a mystery. But he would also use Eros broadly as, well, we’re attracted to the beauties of the world or we’re drawn out of ourself into friendship. So, it’s much, much bigger than sex for sure.
Brett McKay: All right. So yeah. Eros takes us out of ourselves. So yeah. This kind of goes back to Matthew Crawford’s idea of the world beyond your head. If you really want to become a self, you have to get outside of yourself. And for Crawford, he talks a lot about the role craft can play in drawing you out of yourself, kind of get out of this morbid self-consciousness. But that can also happen through relationships, can come from looking at art, can come from spending time in nature. And another concept related to Eros that I thought was really interesting from Han was that if we want to open ourselves to those erotic encounters where we’re drawn out of ourselves, we have to have this stance of friendliness to the world. I really like this idea. What does he mean by friendliness?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, this is an idea that runs from his thinking from the very early untranslated works in German right through his most recent work. And what he means by friendliness is kind of this intent of openness to the world and to other people. So, sometimes he’ll use this language, especially when he’s drawing resources from Zen Buddhism, he’ll talk about becoming a guest house to the world, where you’re just kind of open to the world. And he sees this as a friendly stance. I think he’s really good at drawing attention to all these ways that when we’re in our phone, we’re literally closed off from other people in the world. Or when we’re all up in our head, again, coming back to Matthew Crawford, you can be walking down the street and maybe you’re not looking at your phone, maybe you don’t have headphones on, but you’re so wrapped up in your head, you’re not aware of anything that’s going around you or aware of anyone around you. So to have this friendly disposition towards the world is the stance of openness.
Brett McKay: Yeah. This made me think of Hartmut Rosa. He’s on my mind because we’ve talked about him on the podcast before but I also did another article from my substack, Dying Breed, about his idea of resonance. And he had this idea of resonance being like, you’re open to the world or the outside world talking to you and it kind of transforms you. And he makes the case that we have a hard time feeling that sense of resonance because we see the world as just aggression points. There’s things we got to do. So, like the example I gave, when I’m in my house, I’m constantly looking around like, all right, we need to fix that thing. This thing needs to be painted. We need to declutter that. I’m hardly ever just thinking, I’m just gonna be in my home and just enjoy my home. We can even see other people as aggression points, things we gotta do things with. Like, what can this person do for me? Or someone’s having a hard time and they open up to you, we think like, well, okay, I got a lot to do, what can I do just to get through this as quickly as possible so I can get on with my life? So we go, they’re there. Okay. You’ll be all right. And we just send the person on their way.
And Rosa would say like, no, you have to actually kind of have a stance where you’re open to like, okay, just let this person who’s saying they’re sad just be there with them. You don’t have to fix anything. Just be there. And you might have this moment where like both of you feel like you’re edified in some way. I think maybe Han would agree with that. Like, instead of seeing the world as points of aggression, you’re just open to the thing or the person as they are.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And Rosa is a thinker that’s become much more important to me too or that I should say that I’ve just discovered more fully, even after writing this book, even though Rosa gets cited in here. And I think that as you suggest, Rosa and Han are approaching some similar things from somewhat different angles. And I think that’s useful because just like anything, if you look at it from one angle and then look at it from another angle, you’re gonna get a richer picture. But I think Rosa, he has this great insight that as moderns, we really like control. We want to eliminate as much contingency or risk from our lives as possible. We want more and more things to be under our control. And there’s something that’s understandable about that but there’s a real danger when it becomes as exaggerated as it has become for us, in that, to have a really rich relationship with something, to have a true relationship that has a back and forth, a resonant relationship as Rosa would say, then you’ve gotta relinquish control in order to have that sense of a meaningful relationship with a friend.
You can’t be all about controlling everything about the friendship and manipulating it, or that’s just gonna be a disaster in addition to being unethical to the friend. But also, we have this deep hunger to connect with nature but at the same time, we struggle to operate on any level other than, yeah, controlling it. So yeah. So Rosa thinks that we have to let go of this modern urge for control in order to see problems and fix them, in order to open up these richer spaces, these resonant spaces. In your example of someone that’s suffering, you don’t always need to fix the problem, you just need to be with them. That’s a good example of that.
Brett McKay: Does Han offer any sort of practical… I mean, Han would be like, “You can’t reduce my philosophy to a list of things to do” because he’s like, that’s kind of counter to what I want to say. But are there like some practical ways people can start countering this burnout society, this feeling of tiredness for just the everyday person? We’ve got jobs, families, and phones that never stop pinging us.
Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think so. And I think there are actually a lot of different practicalities and possibilities that he offers throughout his works. I think that he would bristle against the idea that he’s some kind of high theory self-help, in part because he’s challenging you to not just sort of make these small adjustments in order to achieve better in the achievement society, he’s calling for these more radical transformations and he thinks that’s where you’ll find deeper solutions. And certainly too, he’d like to see some more widespread changes in society to cultivate these things. But that said, one of the things I love about Han is that, he writes like editorials about the problems that teenagers in schools are facing in Germany. And one of the reasons he writes these short books is that he really does want to speak to non-academics about their problems. And I think that’s another reason why he’s become so popular. So yeah. Some of these possible remedies to achievement, to burnout, I think one is just cultivating that sense of openness. When you’re at the bus stop or you’re walking down the street or whatever, and you have this urge or there’s a lull in the conversation, and you have this temptation to pull out the phone, don’t pull it out.
And if you really struggle with those things, Han doesn’t say this, but I think it’s a corollary of his positions. Yeah, go with a dumb phone or leave the phone at home. I think too, he has like long sections about how to be a good listener in his book, “The Expulsion of the Other.” I think too, things like, okay, maybe you’ve got a friend that’s going through a hard time, put yourself in that situation where you’re accompanying them through it. So these are all some things that come through. One we haven’t touched on much that I’ll add is that Han talks a lot about ritual and certainly talks about religious ritual and how one of the advantages of that is that it gives time a shape. So every day isn’t just the same empty box in which you fill it up with achievement but you have things like the Sabbath or you have festivals that give time a shape. And even if you’re not religious, you can try to recover a more variegated sense of time. So those are some practical possibilities.
Brett McKay: Yeah. He talks about meditation could potentially be one but like he said, well, don’t use a meditation app where it tracks your streak of how many days in a row you’ve meditated. You’re in achievement society mode if you do that. But just take a few minutes where you just sit there and contemplate something. I think looking at art, going to a museum just to stare at something for half an hour, that could do it. Being out in nature can be another source of that as well.
Steven Knepper: Learn how to tolerate silence. Learn how to be alone and not on technology and just be an observer.
Brett McKay: How has engaging with Han’s work changed the way you live personally?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m certainly someone that struggles with screens. And I have my periods where I do really well with it and others that I don’t do so well. So yeah. I think that studying Han is for me too, it’s become a way of trying to get a better grasp of some of these things in my own life. And yeah. I can remember times like, you know, it’ll be a beautiful evening and my kids are in a ballet practice and I’m outside here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are absolutely gorgeous. And there’s this great sunset, and I’m on my phone? Like doing what? That was one of the moments that just got to me and it’s like, yeah, this is bad. Changes need to be made. Changes need to be made for the sake of other people in my life but also for my own sake and having this richer experience of the world. So Han’s been a really important philosopher to me. And I probably got into him in some ways via Matthew Crawford. I knew Crawford’s work first. That really spoke to me. And I could see Han picking up on some similar themes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. Han started off in metal work and then he became a philosopher and Crawford, he’s like a motorcycle guy, motorcycle mechanic, and then he went into philosophy. So yeah. They’re similar in that way. If someone wanted to dive into Han’s philosophy for the first time, where should they begin?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, “The Burnout Society” still is a pretty good place to begin but I think some of these more recent works are great entry points too. I wouldn’t be surprised if many Art of Manliness listeners liked “The Palliative Society.” I think that’s a good book. Another recent one called “Vita Contemplativa” which focuses on contemplation as an antidote to burnout. I think that’s another good place to start. And certainly, I’d put in a plug for our critical introduction. Han’s written over 30 books and some of those aren’t even translated into English yet. So, what our critical introduction tries to do is give some through lines across Han’s body of work, situate him in among some other thinkers, show how he speaks to contemporary problems both in the ones that he addresses in his book and some others that we identify. So, it’s an academic book but it’s one that’s definitely pitched at the general reader with a little bit of background in philosophy should be able to navigate.
Brett McKay: Well, Steven, this has been a great conversation. Besides your book that listeners can find on Amazon, is there some place they can go to learn more about your work in general?
Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m working on an author website but I don’t have that up yet. But two places they might go. One is I edit this online poetry journal, “New Verse Review” which has kind of an eclectic focus. So, it touches on some of these questions about attention and contemplation for sure. But then the other place that you might look is, I’ve written a few pieces for The Lamp magazine that touches on similar themes, including I have an overview of Han that I wrote for that magazine. So if you go there and just search my pieces, that’s another, I think, good place. .
Brett McKay: Great. We’ll link to those in the show notes. Well, Steven Knepper, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Steven Knepper: Thank you very much. It’s an honor.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Steven Knepper. He’s the co-author of “A Critical Introduction” of Byung-Chul Han. It’s available on amazon.com. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/han, where you’ll find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for both men and women alike. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.
