Byung Chul Han is a South Korean born philosopher and he’s currently professor at the  Berlin University of Arts in Germany. He’s written over twenty books on a variety of topics. He’s a unique and striking writer as not only are his books very short but he writes in an aphoristic or haiku style. Today, we’re not going to focus on one of his works in particular, but we’ll draw from a variety of them. All right, so let’s get started then!  

So one thing that Han talks quite a bit about are some of the problems with our phones and social media, more specifically the negative effects these things have on us.  

One problem in particular he talks about with living on and through our  smartphones is that in a sense we’re losing our bodies. Or we’re becoming less embodied. By things like texting and living on and through social media, we avoid direct contact with others and we strip communication of its physicality and its touch. As Han says, what this technology does, is it dismantles the real! 

Even our relationship with our hands change, he says. And actually before I touch on that, I should mention that this is something Heidegger warned us about quite a while back, at the time of the introduction of word processing in fact. You see, and I’ve mentioned this before in a previous episode, but part of Heidegger’s concern with type writing or word processing, compared to simple handwriting, is that it removes the work of our hands. Now that might seem silly, but actually for Heidegger our hands are very important. And that’s because they’re the conduit to our world. They connect us to the earth! They’re who we are, what makes us human. Ok well, Han says something similar. What he says is that digital technology is making our hands waste  away. What’s happening today, he says, is that we’re fingering things not handling them. Our hands have been reduced to a finger just tapping and swiping, tapping and swiping something that is itself in the cloud and non-terrestrial. And there’s no resistance, and no labor in any of this. As Han says, this fingering has nothing to do anymore with the hands formed of the clash of shovel with earth. Our hands have become obsolete. No, the digital human, he says, just fingers the world! 

Ok well that doesn’t seem very good, does it! But Han’s not done. No, there’s a lot more that’s problematic with our phones and social media. Let me just focus on one. Ok, so what our phones do is they create for us an imaginary and narcissistic world, one in which we can enclose and cover ourselves, like a warm blanket. In this way, we eliminate all traces of what Han calls the Other. As he says, the other does not speak via the smartphone. But what does he mean by the Other? Well, the Other is pain, the Other is hell, the Other is strange, the Other is different, the Other is, at the end of the day, not-me! Well, what communicating through, and living inside of, our smartphones does, is it serves to avoid the unfamiliar and instead safeguards a space for the same and the like-minded. It’s a place where we can adapt the world to our needs. It becomes our echo chamber. A place of narcissification of Self!

Actually, you know what, speaking of narcissism and echo chambers, this makes me think of the actual mythological story of Narcissus and Echo by the Roman poet Ovid. So if you don’t know it, basically Narcissus was this beautiful young man who was desired by anyone who saw him. And there was one young woman in particular, Echo, who really loved him. She had a bit of a problem though, she was limited in her speech to repeating what others said. So not only was it not possible for her to speak first, but when Narcissus finally gave her the time of day and spoke to her, all she could do in response was to echo back his phrases to him. Well so what’s the moral of the story here? 

Well, it’s that like the self-absorbed Narcissus, who only gets back from Echo what he himself has already said, so too in real life the narcissistic person doesn’t fully hear what others have to say, but only what they want to hear. 

Well, this sounds a bit like the echo chamber many of us inhabit now doesn’t it. As Han himself says, our smartphones and social media draw us into an endless ego loop, where we hear what we want to and where we eventually indoctrinate ourselves with our own ideas. 

Now we should remember something pretty important about the mythological story. What happened is that Narcissus eventually withered away and died because he couldn’t draw himself away from his own reflection in the water. Now this is the fate of self-love and comfort isn’t it, namely, the world shrinks considerably and the bounty of life gets passed over. Well, so too with us and our smartphones and social media, says Han, our horizon of experience and understanding becomes narrower and narrower, until what remains of us is a shell of our former selves!  

Ok but I want to briefly get back to this idea of the Other again, but in a slightly different context. Because for Han, it’s actually a theme that permeates all his work. So this idea of the erosion of the Other or the elimination of the different and disturbing, is not just something that applies to our world of smartphones and social media, it also applies to our thinking in general. You see, for Han, our thinking is becoming increasingly calculative, practical and informational or data-driven. But, here’s the thing,  mere massive information or what we might call ‘google knowledge’, doesn’t transform us, it doesn’t rise to the level of genuine insight, says Han. So what’s the solution to this? Well, we need to bring back the Other into our thinking. But what does this mean exactly? 

Well, ok so in order to begin to answer this let’s talk about someone we’ve all heard of, Socrates. And be patient, I promise I’ll make this relate! So Socrates is of course known to most of us simply as this famous philosopher, right? But, here’s the thing, there were a couple of things that were even more important and more fundamental about him that we need to know, namely, he was strange and he was a lover. And as we’ll see, these two things are deeply connected, and they underlie his philosophy. 

Ok so let’s take this idea of his strangeness first. So as a matter of fact Socrates was considered so unique that his friends and disciples referred to him as an atopos, a word of Greek origin. Now what does that mean? Well, what it literally translates as is, out of place. That’s what Socrates was. He was unplaceable, off the map, unclassifiable and even disconcerting! He was just foreign to the world of most humans. And by extension, so was his thinking. That’s to say, instead of legitimizing and conforming to what was already known, he showed how it was possible to question and think completely differently. As Socrates says himself in Plato’s Apology, “I care nothing for what most people care about.”This is part of the atopia of Socrates. Or to put it another way, here, Socrates exemplifies the Other that Han talks about and that he thinks is missing from our thinking today. 

Ok but like I said Socrates wasn’t just considered strange in this way, he was also a lover, or under the patronage of the god Eros, and that’s really significant. Actually, in one of Plato’s dialogues, the Symposium, Plato seems to suggest that Socrates as philosopher just is Eros personified. Ok but what do I mean by all this and why is it important? 

Well for starters it means that there’s something divine-like in Socrates, and so something out of this world. That’s another aspect of his atopia or strangeness or Otherness. But it’s not just. It’s the way he talks to people and the words he weaves, it’s the intoxicating and transformative effect his arguments and speeches have on others, it’s all charismatic, and magnetic! Now this is the consequence of love or eros. What Socrates is doing is he’s breathing life into words, into philosophy, through eros. In other words, and as Han says, what Socrates understands is that, logos or strict philosophy, is powerless without the force of eros behind it. This is what made a thinker like Socrates so powerful, and why it is what he said moved and unsettled people, it’s because love and seduction animated his thinking, it’s because logos and eros were intimately related. Eros then, when paired with thinking, makes thinking something altogether different, it gives thinking wings and causes it to deviate from the norm, to venture on to untrodden paths, as Heidegger says. 

Ok, well, what Socrates here does is he stands for the Other that Han thinks is missing from our thinking today. We need to bring Socrates’s strangeness back into our world of the same and the calculative and the algorithmic and the predictable. We need to bring some critical questioning back into our thinking, some resistance, some disquiet, some uncanniness, some flights of fancy and spirit moved by the beating wings of eros, we need the kind of thinking that makes the world appear in a whole different light! 

Couldn’t we all use a bit more of that?