Byung-Chul Han: A Philosopher at the Peak of His Influence

Byung-Chul Han (Seoul, 1959) will receive the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities at a unique moment in his intellectual career. With more than two million books sold and some thirty works published in just twelve years, the South Korean-German philosopher has established himself as the most influential contemporary thinker in the critical analysis of neoliberal society, digital hyperconnectivity and what he calls the "society of fatigue".

However, his new essay On God. Thinking with Simone Weil (Paidós, 2025) marks a significant turning point: for the first time, Han openly explores the spiritual and theological dimension of his thought, revealing himself not only as a critical philosopher but as a practicing Catholic and trained theologian.

The proposal: Seven concepts to survive nonsense

The book is structured around seven fundamental concepts drawn from the thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943): attention, uncreation, emptiness, silence, beauty, pain and inactivity. These terms function simultaneously as chapters of the book and as entries in a philosophical-spiritual glossary for our time.

The choice of Weil as interlocutor is not accidental. Han considers her "the most brilliant intellectual figure of the twentieth century" and confesses with remarkable intimacy: "It's been some time since Simone Weil slipped inside me. It settled in my soul. And today it continues to live and speak inside me." This autobiographical statement, unusual in his earlier work, sets the meditative and personal tone of the essay.

The central thesis: Decreation as a response to consumerism

The core concept of the book is uncreation, an original idea of Weil's that Han adopts and reinterprets. Uncreation does not imply destruction, but conscious renunciation of the ego, the self inflated by the will to power and constant performance. As Han explains: "If we, as creatures born of God's love, uncreate ourselves, that is, renounce self and become nothing, we are participating in the absolute power of God."

This proposal acquires its critical dimension when contrasted with the diagnosis of contemporary society: the modern human being appears as a "slave to his own creations", trapped in a cycle of voluntary self-exploitation that the neoliberal system does not impose through repression, but through seduction. Decreation is then presented as a way of radical liberation from consumerism, hyperactivity and digital saturation.

The method: Dialogue or exhibition?

One of the most debated aspects of the book is its methodological nature. The original German title Sprechen über Gott. Ein Dialog mit Simone Weil ("Talking about God. A dialogue with Simone Weil") suggests a dialectical exchange. However, specialized critics have observed that Han operates more as a "no-holds-barred expositor" than as a critical interlocutor.

The essay quotes extensively from Weil's works of Christian spirituality (Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, Notebooks), but rarely disagrees or qualifies. This almost total adherence can be interpreted in two ways: as a methodological limitation or, alternatively, as a declaration of philosophical and spiritual principles that transcends the mere hermeneutical exercise.

Thematic Continuity: Hanian Themes Revisited

Despite the mystical turn, On God maintains a remarkable continuity with the recurring themes in Han's work. Criticisms of the technologized society, hyperconnectivity, consumerism, self-exploitation, forced transparency and existential boredom reappear, but now articulated from a theological and spiritual framework.

The originality lies in the fact that Han finds in Weil's thought an early and surprisingly current critique of the modern world. When Weil, a heterodox Marxist of the mid-twentieth century, describes human beings as "slaves of their own creations," she anticipates with decades of advantage the Hanian diagnosis of digital capitalism and neoliberal self-exploitation.

The style: Brevity, poetry and mysticism

With just 135 pages, the essay responds to Han's characteristic short format, but introduces a significant stylistic novelty: a more poetic, contemplative and, in the words of the critics, "luminous" writing. The intimate and confessional tone contrasts with the more analytical and aphoristic prose of previous works such as La sociedad del fatiga (2010) or Psicopolítica (2014).

This stylistic transformation is not merely formal. It reflects the very content of the book: one cannot write about silence, emptiness and contemplation with the same accelerated prose of social criticism. Language adapts to the object, it becomes meditative.

The Implications: Towards an Ethics of Care

The concept of care occupies a privileged place in Han/Weil's proposal. It is not the dispersed and multitasking attention of the digital age, but a full, contemplative attention, which Weil links directly to prayer and Han reconnects with the possibility of experiencing beauty, perceiving the authentic neighbor (not as a competitor or resource) and resisting capitalist acceleration.

This true attention requires, paradoxically, conscious inactivity, inner emptiness, and silence: precisely what the neoliberal system, with its cult of performance and hyperproductivity, has declared obsolete and unproductive. Han's claim to "the culture of partying and siesta" that persists in Mediterranean countries thus acquires an ethical and almost revolutionary dimension.

The theological dimension: God has not died, but his preachers have

In one particularly significant passage, Han reformulates the famous Nietzschean dictum: God has not disappeared, but the human beings who preached in his name have. This nuanced statement suggests that the contemporary problem is not so much the absence of transcendence as the institutional and cultural inability to articulate it meaningfully.

The "crisis of faith that the world is going through," according to Han, is not a crisis of God but of mediations, of languages, practices and rituals that allow access to the sacred. Weil then offers not only philosophical concepts but also a mystical praxis capable of reconnecting with the transcendent dimension of existence.

The controversies: Between consolation and the "Mr. Wonderful progressive"

The critical reception of Hanian thought has historically been ambivalent. Although he enjoys massive popularity and academic recognition (as evidenced by the Princess of Asturias Award), he has also been the subject of criticism that he is a "progressive Mr. Wonderful": a thinker who offers brilliant diagnoses but vague or naïve solutions, aphorisms that can be quoted but not necessarily transformative.

On God intensifies this controversy. For its defenders, the book offers "a form of consolation that does not avoid pain, but embraces it as a way of elevation", a coherent and necessary philosophical-spiritual proposal. For its detractors, it represents a retreat towards individual mysticism that abdicates structural social transformation, replacing political praxis with private contemplation.

The Aesthetic Wager: Beauty as Ontological Proof

Following Plotinus and Augustine—and, of course, Weil—Han argues that beauty constitutes a "proof" of the existence of the transcendent. In a world saturated with images but devoid of authentic beauty, genuine aesthetic experience becomes subversive: it interrupts the incessant flow of stimuli, demands mindfulness, and opens a window to the sacred.

This vindication of beauty is not escapist aestheticism but political resistance: in the face of the functional ugliness of late capitalism, beauty contemplated with attention becomes an act of ontological rebellion.

The Horizon: Implosion or Transformation?

Han has repeatedly claimed that "capitalism is going to implode" under the weight of its own contradictions: exhaustion, depression, declining birth rates, ecological collapse. On God can be read as a spiritual preparation for that collapse, an existential survival manual that does not offer immediate political answers but does offer tools to maintain human dignity and meaning in the midst of the crisis.

"The future is the birth of a child," Han says with a hope that contrasts with the pessimism of his diagnoses. This hope is not naïve: it is mediated by pain, emptiness and uncreation. It is a hope that passes through the desert, not through the shortcut.

Conclusion: An Essay in Transition and Maturity

About God. Thinking with Simone Weil simultaneously represents a recapitulation and an opening in Byung-Chul Han's intellectual trajectory. It recapitulates because it integrates all its recurring themes in a new theological light; it opens because it reveals hitherto implicit dimensions of his thought and suggests new directions for his cultural critique.

The posthumous collaboration with Simone Weil is fruitful: Weil brings mystical radicalism and ethical commitment; Han brings contemporary diagnosis and cultural translation skills. The result is a short but dense essay, serene but disturbing, which invites not only to think differently but to live in a different way.

In an age of information saturation, media noise and constant acceleration, Han/Weil's proposal of attention, silence and decreation may sound utopian or naïve. But perhaps it is precisely its apparent impossibility that makes it necessary: not as an applicable recipe but as a regulative horizon, as an ethical north in the midst of generalized disorientation.

The most widely read philosopher of our time invites us, paradoxically, to read less and contemplate more, to produce less and be more, to speak less and listen better. It is an uncomfortable, countercultural and, for that very reason, deeply philosophical invitation.

 

Close