In Praise of Daydreams

It’s (still) the end of the world as we know it, and Byung-Chul Han feels … hopeful. Hope, in his case, comes both despite and because of the many crises that the world is facing. Most readers discover Han through very short books that philosophize about these crises: The Burnout Society, for example, his fifty-one-page international bestseller about the mental health crisis; or The Palliative Society, a sixty-page reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic. But Han is not an optimist all of a sudden; he remains a thinker who broods over crisis and malaise. He is not lately convinced that AI will solve all our problems, as techno-optimists like Marc Andreessen are, nor has he come to appreciate some rosier big picture, like the overall decline in violent deaths that inspires Steven Pinker’s meliorism. Han’s hope has nothing to do with this kind of optimism.

Rather than explore one particular crisis, The Spirit of Hope considers all of them at once. Polycrisis is what the World Economic Forum calls this spiral of related emergencies – climate crisis, debt crisis, democracy crisis, demographic crisis, inequality crisis, mental health crisis, Gaza crisis, Ukraine crisis, etc. In his Tanner Lectures, historian Adam Tooze describes the polycrisis as a global collective experience of multiple shocks. A world order, once taken for granted, comes undone from several loose ends. Daniel Steuer, the translator of The Spirit of Hope, misses the opportunity to translate eine Multikrise with polycrisis, opting instead for “multiple crises.” Han, however, is echoing Tooze. We are experiencing one seemingly interminable crisis sequence. Indeed, after three generations of concern about environmental catastrophe and nuclear war, polycrisis fatigue sets in.

Modernity-as-polycrisis is, by now, an inherited ambience of fear and anxiety. In our leisure time, we read Don DeLillo, binge The Last of Us, and play Fallout. But if we listen closely to the music, there is end-times fatigue. We hear this from the elegiac folk-rock band Dawes on their new record, Oh Brother, which name-checks the “airborne toxic event” of DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Frontman Taylor Goldsmith refuses to be titillated by the same-old crisis: “I’d prefer leaving tomorrow sitting firmly in the dark,” he sings on “Front Row Seat,” “instead of facing one more tired vision of the end.” DeLillo’s newest apocalyptic novel, The Silence, is mentioned on the first page of The Spirit of Hope.

Han insists that hope only comes to those who face despair. This is why hope comes despite and because of the polycrisis. In her concession speech, Kamala Harris reassured her supporters with an adage from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” Han quotes another of King’s metaphors about hope, from “I Have a Dream”: there is a “stone of hope” that faith must “hew out of the mountain of despair.” Only in dark and heavy times can there be hope against hope, as when the aged Abraham hoped against hope for many descendants (Rom. 4:18). Optimists and pessimists content themselves with this-worldly warrants; for them, Han writes, time is closed. He turns instead to an emphatically transcendent, markedly Christian sense of hope. In addition to King and Saint Paul, he cites the recently deceased German theologian Jürgen Moltmann to describe Christian hope as a yearning for what is ever new, a spirit that always invigorates revolutionary action, and even a leap of faith that makes action possible in the most frightful times.

This is something new for Han. While it is well known that he studied theology at Freiburg in the 1990s, it is only with The Spirit of Hope – his thirty-first book – that he proposes Christian hope as a “fundamental mood” for thinking and acting. This concept is clarified in the last chapter. It goes back to Martin Heidegger, who recognizes moods as prior to intention and thought. Dilexit nos (October 2024) also takes interest in Heidegger’s fundamental mood, characterizing it as the listening power of the heart that precedes all thought. Pope Francis cites Han’s 1996 book Heideggers Herz (Heidegger’s heart), which presents boredom as the vaunted fundamental mood. Profound boredom releases us from the urge to insist that we are distinct from the scattering of phenomena around us. Boredom releases the Zen sage to think about self without attempting to be a self. Thirty years ago, Han criticized Heidegger for underappreciating boredom, for digging his heels into an all-too-Western heroic confrontation with death, for remaining too captive to fear and anxiety. Now he criticizes him for lacking hope.

Hope only comes to those who face despair.

A philosophical ambiguity has plagued Han’s writings on fundamental moods in the past decade or so. Erotic dispositions to care for beauty, the beloved, and the earth – at any rate for some particular Other – have become more prominent than boredom. Romantic poets have gradually replaced Zen sages in the embroidery of Han’s arguments. Dilexit nos also cites Han’s The Agony of Eros (2012), where this shift is well underway. I draw attention to the tension between these two books in my contribution to Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction. Boredom and love underwrite different attitudes to death, to the history of philosophy, to others, and to the world. Is Han inconsistent? Is he fundamentally a pluralist? Are boredom and love different remedies that correspond to different crises of modernity? The Spirit of Hope does not so much resolve this tension as develop beyond it; hope is the fundamental mood that addresses the polycrisis comprehensively.

In addition to resolving philosophical questions about Han’s basic commitments, including the relationship between Christian theology and his thinking, The Spirit of Hope will satisfy longtime readers by clarifying the political dimensions of his thought. A certain political ambiguity may have served Han’s popularity well. Readers on the Left appreciate his critique of digital surveillance capitalism, Psychopolitics (distributed by left-wing publisher Verso), while his elegy for liturgies in The Disappearance of Rituals has resonated with readers on the Right. Politically, Han has been hard to pin down. His interventions seem more therapeutic than political – Eva Horn’s blurb on our critical introduction calls them “philosophy as therapy to survive neoliberal modernity.” It was never entirely clear how boredom, contemplation, or what Han has called “a politics of inactivity” would amount to a blueprint for collective action. Boredom doesn’t seem up to the task of inviting a collective “we” into existence.

Hope is this kind of inviting mood; now, Han writes in praise of daydreams. Who we are, what we can do, these are the daydreams that arise from hope. Daydreams actively propose new narratives. They inspire stories about how the world can be renewed. In addition to King and Moltmann, Han points to an interview where Václav Havel calls hope an orientation of the spirit that transcends experience and invites others to dream of a distant, better future. Hope contemplates action. As Havel shows, one does not need to be a faithful Christian to appreciate the political value of this kind of hope. One must only need such hope. Han contrasts this transcendent hope with the militant optimism of Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, author of the three-volume The Principle of Hope (1959). Han argues that hope is no mere affect but a fundamental mood that discloses the word, and as such, hope cannot be wrested from despair or taught, only received with gratitude. This substantially clarifies his relationship to the classic political thought of the Left.

Han asks much of hope in this forthright book that answers a number of philosophical and political questions about his work. Certainly he exalts hope in a way that resembles Christian theologians more than classic left-wing political theorists. A hopeful heart sets us off thinking about what we might be, if we ever make it through the polycrisis. Hopeful thinking is the beginning of political philosophy. Yet Han insists this is not wishful thinking, but a graceful mood we never wished for in the first place.