Speaking About God: Simone Weil and Byung-Chul Han

The elusiveness of Byung-Chul Han may contribute to his celebrity. He is difficult to pin down, politically and even religiously. Critical theorists debate whether books like Psychopolitics successfully turn the page from Michel Foucault to offer a new critique of self-exploitation in the digital age that does not require external disciplinary institutions. Then this same critic of neoliberalism laments The Disappearance of Rituals, which can sound nostalgic for practices that sustained communities in the past. Han thinks that our politics lacks compassion and attention to others, but in The Palliative Society he also argues that an extreme aversion to pain causes developed countries to overreact to pandemics like COVID-19.

So which side is he on? In a more philosophical and religious vein, Pope Francis conveys Han’s insistence, drawn from Martin Heidegger, that genuine thinking is always provoked by deep emotions, such as love (Dilexit nos §16). Yet in The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, Han is even more interested in moods like boredom, in which Zen sages find an egolessness that allows them to contemplate the world as it really is without the attunements of desire. Is he a man of the Left or the Right, a Buddhist or a Christian, a nostalgic communitarian or a cosmopolitan? There is, it would seem, a Han for almost everyone. It is possible to doubt that a coherent philosophical vision unites the interventions of this popular essayist and social theorist.

Han’s thirty-second book, Sprechen über Gott: Ein dialog mit Simone Weil [Speaking about God: A Dialogue with Simone Weil], which was published in Germany this April, is remarkable for tying so many loose ends together. Han unabashedly writes short books that are accessible to a general audience, he tells newspapers such as the Korea JoongAng Daily and El País, because he thinks that philosophy ought to give tools for better understanding the world to as many people as possible.[1] His short books address much-discussed crises like the challenge of digital misinformation for democracy (Infocracy), the COVID-19 pandemic (The Palliative Society), and most famously the mental-health crisis (The Burnout Society). In these books, Han is unabashed about offering stark dichotomies (e.g., self-inflicted “positive” violence versus the “negative” violence inflicted by others) that seem to oversimplify complex problems. Yet Han insists that theory simply is “highly selective narration” which tells a story about what is new and different in the course of digital life, modern art, today’s politics, and contemporary religion and spirituality.[2]

And all of these theoretical provocations are made on behalf of Han’s core philosophical concern with the fundamental mood or moods for thinking. He begins with Heidegger’s phenomenological investigation of the basic disposition, or Grundstimmung, that would allow us to perceive the world as it truly is. Like Heidegger, Han worries that some of these basic moods are being extinguished by the cultural, medical, and especially technological conditions of modern life. The danger that solutions to contemporary problems are increasingly becoming unthinkable is Han’s justification for writing highly selective narratives about what is really going on with social media, the pandemic, modern art, politics, and so forth.

If indeed this underlying concern with the mood to think freely is behind all of Han’s social-theory essays, then the deeper tension in his body of work is whether boredom or eros ought to stir philosophy. In other words, does the Buddhist relinquishment of desire or the Christian desire for a transcendent God, the East or the West, best dispose us to see the world as it really is? Han’s early works like Tod und Alterität [Death and Otherness], from 2002, point East to the radical overcoming of Western philosophy altogether, while the highly personal Lob der Erde [Praise the Earth], from 2018, suggests a rehabilitation of the Christian and Romantic priority of care. In an excellent essay from around this time, Scott Beauchamp pushes back against Han’s hard-and-fast distinction between Christianity as a religion of futurity and a heavenly beyond and Zen as an affirmation of the here and now. Now Han comes around to Beauchamp’s point; his discovery of Simone Weil resolves these tensions between Christian longing and Zen emptiness.

In the new book, Han traces the endangerment of thinking to a “crisis of religion,” a spiritual crisis that turns out to equally beleaguer artistic creation, ethics, poetry, reading, and science. “God is not dead,” Han clarifies, “The man to whom God revealed Himself is dead.”[3] We have become visual consumers who are unable to see the world with creative attention. Here, Han turns immediately to Weil’s distinction between seeing and eating, between the love that hesitates and beholds versus the love that pursues and consumes (10).[4] And so his book-length dialogue with this French philosopher, mystic, and political theorist who wrote intensely about religion between 1938 and her death in 1943 begins.

Han agrees with Weil that seeing, or what she calls creative attention, is what allows new ideas to come to composers, mathematicians, poets, and scientists (28). Eve should have simply looked at the apple. “[T]wo birds are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it” is the epigraph to Han’s first chapter (9); Weil reads this image, from the Upanishads, as a teaching about the higher part of our soul, which makes a negative effort to behold beauty, and the lower, which must consume or possess it and make ourselves an end.[5] The loss of contemplative attention is a catastrophe for the higher kind of human knowledge, and it is also an ethical emergency. Here, Han concurs not only with Weil but also Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the relevant kind of attention is a social consciousness with which we can respond to the pleas of other persons (34).

Sprechen über Gott addresses three structural reasons for this alleged crisis of religion: the decline of attention, a culture of self-affirmation, and the “noise” of information (9, 44, 70). We are constantly distracted by information. Han declares, “The soul transforms itself into a search engine” (19). Our intelligences are presented with many problems to solve, but our spirits are not given to linger with enduring truth. Han is after a sense of truth as lasting awareness or vigilance that has nothing to do with our access to knowledge or facts, and which is probably better captured by the German word Wahrheit. “Whoever is unable to engage in contemplative attention, in seeing, has no access to the truth [Wahrheit],” Han writes, “to the true [wahren], enduring [währenden] order of things” (15).

He turns to Weil’s formulation to link attention to the silent presence of God: “God is attention without distraction” (14).[6] If we were capable of the “negative effort” of attention to the highest degree,[7] a pleading desire without any imagined object that expresses itself as prayer, then Weil thinks we would be capable of being as obedient to God as matter (90). Instead of keeping vigil or waiting for the God who is all around us in a kind of unavailable presence, we actively search for God rather than waiting like his future bride (20). In contrast to the “vertical search” for God described in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer,[8] Weil insists that we are “incapable of progressing vertically.”[9] “Nowhere in the Gospel is there a question of a search undertaken by man”; she continues, “The role of the future wife is to wait.”[10] And while the Gospels contain no exhortations to pay attention to the beauty of the world, Weil admits, nevertheless

Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference to future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate and imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and sunlight.[11]

From Weil’s perspective, which Han adopts, the decline of attention by definition marks a crisis of religion. Reading Sprechen über Gott is like reading Jean-Yves Lacoste’s theological engagement with Heidegger, in which he emphasizes how we must keep vigil for the God who appears as pure love in order to be loved, in a more polemical register.[12]

Han lingers with Weil. The book is a true dialogue with Weil, with more than 200 references to her essays, letters, and notebooks, and many paragraphs that end in long quotations from these. (The English-language collections of Weil’s writings are different, so I indicate where readers can find some of those passages that seem most important to Han in the footnotes.) Han occasionally cited Weil in previous books like The Spirit of Hope and Saving Beauty but now offers her a new level of attention. “She has entered into my soul,” Han writes, “Now she lives and speaks in me” (7). Weil’s ruminations on “desire without an object” in Gravity and Grace offer precisely the kinds of formulae that allow Han to reconcile eros with Buddhist self-renunciation (15).[13]

In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Iris Murdoch notes how Weil was attracted to the “imageless austerity” of Zen Buddhism and its “impressive” and “attractive” attempt “to perceive purely” and represent the real world “stripped of the ego.”[14] Obviously, Han does not share Murdoch’s reservations about the extremeness and severity that Weil and the Zen sages have in common; Han himself is more like these self-denying recluses whom we need to remind us that contemplative attention is like a compass for our moral lives as family members and citizens.

Han’s second structural reason for the crisis of religion is the culture of self-affirmation. The booming mindfulness industry makes us into spiritual consumers, he warns, offering techniques of “neoliberal self-management” (38). We tend to reduce not just things and other people to their use-value to us, but even spiritual things. To hear Mass because studies show that regular church-going correlates to lower rates of depression in the long term is in the neighborhood of blasphemy. The spiritual intensity of Weil, who exhausted and perhaps starved herself to death on behalf of her occupied countrymen (the coroner’s report remains very controversial), certainly cuts a clearing of differentiation from modern common sense about the importance of health and wellness.

But Han is not merely giving voice to Weil to present us with a provocative story about how we can live our lives differently; rather, he is philosophically in earnest here, I think. In Weil’s mysticism he finds the concept of decreation, “to make something created pass into the uncreated” (41).[15] If we empty ourselves to the point of the passivity of matter, the creative love of God acts through us. Weil, who is in some ways the most philo-Buddhist of Christian mystics, brings Han’s turn towards Christianity back full circle to his early writings from the 1990s, which reopen the dialogue between Heidegger and Zen and revisit boredom as the fundamental mood for philosophy.

Han’s third structural reason for the crisis of religion is the noise of information. He likens the world to a “noisy marketplace” where goods and services are constantly being hawked (71). Likewise, objects and events are constantly being interpreted for us in digital communication, such as this online review of a book that is currently for sale in Germany and probably awaiting translation into English within the next year or two. Art can redeem the beauty of things that technology destroys (93).

For example, poetry is the opposite of information. Poetry can attend to things in their own beauty, in the silence that surrounds all the noise that surrounds how we use objects or might use commodities that are for sale. This creative attention that allows what is new or unexpected to appear, which we might call poetic insight, is also religiously significant. Han writes, “Only the intense experience of presence as an experience of silence leads us to God” (76). A mystical exclusivism or even spiritual elitism runs through these pages, even if Han is adamant that spirit is opposed to intelligence. Intelligence only “counts” [zählt] but spirit also “recounts” [erzählt] (109). If any of us are to be saved, there must not only be a blueprint behind creation that is the key to using stuff, but a story that shines through for us to see.

Weil shows us how poetry confronted force, that which “thingifies” persons, in the dawn of early Greek thought. In her remarkable essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” Weil is less interested in instructing us about a “moderate use of force” through reason and reflection, since this would require superhuman virtue against the contagious indifference by which prestige is gained in fighting collectivities, and more interested in Homer’s rare and luminous “moments of grace” that endure even in war and point to the possibilities of a higher kind of human life.[16] Han is interested in the same, mutatis mutandis, for the information hunters and search engines of our competitive, digitalized performance society.

For the last thirty years, Han has thought about what there might be other than power, what the world might be other than an immanent plane of forces, and how we could ever be in the mood to pose these questions that have nothing to do with our empowerment. In a sense, these are strange questions for students of the life-securing power that states ought to provide or the purchasing power that markets should augment; in another sense, everyone knows Aristotle’s view that human community must be for the sake of some end beyond the infinite increase of security or wealth.

What is not political economy? This is a good question for those whose worlds have flattened into what is contained in a newspaper. Sometimes Han has emphasized renunciation of the self in the manner of Zen Buddhism; other times he has emphasized the erotic desire for an unpossessable Other. Now he reconciles these two fundamental dispositions with Weil’s “desire without an object,” the desire that things simply remain to be, which allows us to see things as they are rather than to imagine how we might posses them for ourselves (85). Whether this is possible for mystics and artists, much less for ordinary people with professional and familial obligations, is an important question already raised by Murdoch with respect to Weil in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

Another open question along these lines is whether it is possible to re-spiritualize work with computers in the way that Weil called for farm and factory work to be re-spiritualized (115), or indeed what Han means when he writes, “One possibility would be to spiritualize technology itself” (93). Contemplative attention is more like a compass that points to transcendent ends for politics and economics and less like a rule and measure that we are charting an adequate course. Sprechen über Gott does not engage with the Weil who most interests political philosophers with her sharp criticisms of the freedom to express untrue opinions, of the modern-nation state, and of trade unions.[17] So while on a philosophical level Han’s work achieves a new level of coherence, or even a kind of completeness by its turn to Weil, important practical questions remain.