Note #3 - Reading Byung-Chul Han

Last weekend, my partner and I visited a second-hand bookstore and I bought two books: How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs. I passed over higher-minded alternatives like Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century; I prefer to read books I buy, and the most similar book I've read to Piketty's Capital, Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has lain half-read in my Calibre library since 2020.

This is a bad habit of mine - buying virtuously weighty academic books which I never touch and then reading P.G. Wodehouse or John le Carre instead. I've become more self-aware about this habit since my early twenties, and have resolved to never buy books which I won't read.

Skipping books I feel I ought to read in favour of books I actually want to read is probably an attitude Alan Jacobs would approve of. His The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction is an excellent short work on the attitudes which people have towards reading and their origins. Jacobs begins by discussing what he calls the 'self-improvement model of reading', which he holds is the most common American approach. In this model, reading (especially so-called great works) is morally and intellectually improving, and so it is the reader's solemn duty to ensure they read a lot of books of the highest quantity possible.

He goes on to discuss the various issues with the 'self-improvement' model of reading, while acknowledging that reading for education or for information makes sense in many contexts. He also presents alternative models of reading. Two of these are interesting to me.

The first is reading 'on whim': i.e. reading whatever brings you pleasure, without regard for its impact on your moral character. I agree with Jacobs that this is preferable to scoring yourself on the virtue of your reading habits; that turns reading into a competition, where those who've read the most widely and deeply (or are the best at lying about it) get to carry conversation at dinner parties. If reading at its best is a sacred act, then reducing it to a vehicle for social capital is heretical.

The second model Jacobs presents is deep reading. This is the type of reading I learned and specialized in at college. It's also necessary for reading poetry, philosophy, and more challenging works of literature. In deep reading, you need to take time over specific passages of a work to grasp them in their entirety, but your reward is greater understanding of and connection to the work. It took Kant ten years to write The Critique of Pure Reason, and to roughly understand it will take a determined reader at least one.

This reminder of the many ways to read a book was invaluable in completing another book which I've worked on for around a month: Byung-Chul Han's The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism.

I've been interested in reading Han's work since Stephen West covered him on Philosophize This. Since I have recently been reading works on Zen, I decided to tackle The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism first: it's a short work and I thought it would be a good way into Han's thought. Not so much.

I should have been warned by Stephen's description of Han's writing process; Han writes brief monographs over long periods of time. The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism is 105 pages of simple language, but cannot be read casually. This is because the work is essentially a literature review which reads numerous (mostly German) Western philosophers' views against Zen works on the same topics.

As such, the actual arguments being presented and compared can be a challenge to follow: on the average page we whip breathlessly from a haiku by Basho to Heidegger's concept of Dasein and back again. The top review on Goodreads says:

Imagine writing a small introduction book on the philosophy of zen buddhism, and making it so that the only people who can understand what you are saying are a) philosophy grad students and b) people who already know quite a bit about zen buddhism.

To be fair, Han never claims he's writing a general introduction to Zen. In the preface he instead writes:

The present study is designed as a 'comparative' one. The philosophies of Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others will be confronted with the insights of Zen Buddhism. The comparative approach is a method for disclosing meaning.

The book is not an introductory text; it's a series of well-argued corrections to misinterpretations of Buddhism by Western philosophy, and clarifications of difference from Western thinkers who are often equated with Buddhist thought (e.g. Schopenhauer, Meister Eckhart). It is structured according to the core concerns of Buddhism rather than European philosophy, and tends to favour the Buddhist perspective over the Western one. Therefore, sections of the book are called Emptiness, No One, Death, and so on.

The real value of this work is in drawing distinctions between concepts that are often equated, which is tough to do in religious philosophy, especially when discussing concepts that are not clearly outlined in philosophical language. This is exactly the kind of succinct text which Jacobs has in mind for close reading and re-reading.

The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism is in some ways a better-argued version of the core thesis of God is Not One by Stephen Prothero, which is that the concept of a monomyth flattens religious diversity. While I think Prothero missed the core point of monomyth theory - that phenomenologically religious experiences resemble each other - Han very successfully argues that European philosophy and Zen Buddhism cannot easily be equated, even on the level of experience.

I probably did not give The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism the space it needs to be fully understood, but at the same time I found it an interesting and useful work. For now, I will move on, but it's a valuable addition to my growing Zen library and I hope to revisit it in the unknowable future:

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.