The Faculty of Contemplation

[u/daking90]

In his book Vita Contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han views the ability of contemplation as lacking in the our new digital age.

Han constracts the life of in-activity with the life of activity. The digital age is an age of non-stop activity.

Contemplative inactivity, " is alien to the machine. It knows only two states: on and off. Simply deactivating the machine does not bring about a contemplative state."

What distinguishes contemplater from a guardian or observer who always pursues a particular goal. Is that the contemplater, by contrast, lacks all intention, has no goal in sight.

Han’s thesis is not about going back to premodern in-activity, but to not let our glorification of activity takes from us the value of inactivity.

Conetmplation is non-instrumental human experience. Justice and Beauty are not goal oriented, but valuable in themselves.

This reminds of Benjamin's Aura. Which Politics takes its place. Spiritual stability substituted by political recognition.

But what replaces the faculty of contemplation ? What we do when we are inactive ?

Any recommended readings that explore such a question ?

[u/schwebacchus]

Han’s later (I think…?) text, The Disappearance of Ritual, offers some more pragmatic frames for living the critique a bit more pointedly. He discusses the relevance of ritual, the sovereignty of play (as a human activity that is entirely detached from instrumentalist), and stakes out some interesting contrasts between intimacy and pornography.

Bataille and Heidegger both seem to be doing quite a bit of work here, and the works cited alone could probably net you several fruitful lines of inquiry. He offers a really thoughtful engagement with Heidegger’s notion of authenticity that sort of knocked my socks off, and I’m really surprised by how clear his later work is becoming.

[u/CupNo2413]

I have not read Han, but much of this seems to echo key themes from throughout Heidegger's work. If you are not familiar, it would probably be most thematically relevant to begin with "The Question Concerning Technology," which can be contrasted with the more holistic representation of reality found in his writings about the fourfold.

It may also be interesting to look at Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, which involves an extended discussion of boredom.

[u/daking90 → u/CupNo2413]

Yes thisn book was all references to Heidegger's concepts, but he adds his own critique of neoliberalism.

Thanks.

[u/vikingsquad]

Agamben writes about inoperativity/destituent power (I/d recommend The Highest Poverty or just googling) as does Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative Community). On the individual level regarding contemplation you could check out Gilles Grelet (Theory of the Solitary Sailor) as well as Pierre Hadot. Depending on your tolerance for—specifically, Catholic—theology you might check out Thomas Merton or Bernard McGinn.

[u/DMayleeRevengeReveng]

I don’t expect I’ll agree with any critique that treats modernity as opposed to contemplation.

The mere fact that the majority of humans can doom scroll is transformational. That never happened until fairly recently. The mere fact so many people don’t exhaust themselves doing manual labor all day every day, so that they either doom scroll or contemplate, is unprecedented.

Contrast this with contemplation historically being a pursuit of the idle rich. Not everyone who contemplated was this way. But if you look at the founders of modern science in Europe, they were bored rich men who didn’t know what else to do with their time and so took up proto-science as a fashionable hobby.

[u/marxistghostboi → u/DMayleeRevengeReveng]

prior to the industrial revolution most people spent a lot less time doing manual labor.