For some, he is a lax author. He has been called a bluff and another representative of the consumerism he criticizes in his books. For others, many judging by the sales figures, he is one of the thinkers who best represents today’s society. What is difficult to refute is that Byung-Chul Han (Seoul, 1959) continues to be the fashionable philosopher, a title given to him by the media following the success of “Nothing-things”, published in Spain by the Taurus publishing house in 2021.
This Tuesday his latest essay, “The Spirit of Hope” (Herder), arrives in bookstores, in which he theorizes on the need to “look into the distance, look toward the future” in the almost etymological sense of the concept of waiting, this “hoffen” that Friedrich Kluge defined in his “Etymological Dictionary of the German Language”. Thus, pursuing this same thesis, hope is a way of orienting oneself.
Byung-Chul Han starts from the premise that where fear reigns, freedom is impossible and that therefore the two feelings are incompatible. It serves personal but also collective perception. This would lead us to discuss fear as a regressive element for democracy. Anxiety, adds the author, leads to a feeling of confinement and prevents the future because it closes the doors to the new. He therefore concludes that hope is opposed to fear.
As in his previous essays, he uses references ranging from Plato to Nietzsche, through Spinoza and Heidegger (he dedicated the thesis to him) to dress his theses. From Nietzsche, he recovers a quote in which he explains how despair helps to understand hope. As if the first were inherent in the second. This leads him to affirm that those who have hope do not let themselves be confused by “the hardness of life”. It is a proactive way of approaching the future, far from naive perceptions or those more typical of self-help manuals.
One of the most interesting thoughts highlighted by the South Korean philosopher is that thinking with hope is not the same as being optimistic. And what is the difference? Well, according to Byung-Chul Han, it lies in the fact that optimism is devoid of any negativity and that the person who practices it is as stubborn as the pessimist. “The optimist is convinced that things will turn out well in the end. He lives in a ‘closed’ era. He does not consider the future as an open field of possibilities. Nothing ‘happens’ for him. Nothing surprises him. It seems to him that he has the future entirely at his disposal.” […] “He doesn’t count on the unexpected or the unpredictable.”
This idea helps the author to insist repeatedly that having hope means preparing for what is to come, for what does not yet exist, and to emphasize that one is not anxious about anything in particular, but about the very fact of being in the world. “Anxiety is neither clairvoyant nor visionary. On the other hand, hope opens the doors to the future, to what is to come, to what is not yet born, to what is latent, to what is still developing. “Hope is a messianic state of mind,” he says.
The book is 140 pages long, short but dense, and includes images by the German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, considered one of the most prestigious contemporary artists internationally. Fans of Byung-Chul Han’s more pop version will probably be pleased with the conciseness of the book, even if this time the reflections are perhaps not as seductive as those of ‘The Tired Society’. In any case, it is worth reading if only to make the comparison.
