“Saving Beauty“ (“Die Errettung des Schönen“) by Byung-Chul Han:
As the last book of a colorful variety of 58 books I read this year, which all were novels, this one is not. It is a collection of 14 short essays of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, a cultural theorist and lecturer at the University of the Arts, Berlin.
In them Han deals, in short sentences and a precise, concise prose, passionate and engaging with the concept of beauty in today’s consumer culture. Han paints a dystopian picture of our society and how it lost track of beauty.
Han argues that beauty has lost its edge and has been turned into something merely smooth and pleasing, like the impeccable smooth surface of a smartphone, Brazilian Waxing or the sculptures of Jeff Koons. The smooth has become the signature of the present. Anything that is not positive has fallen victim to the need for a fast, unobstructed flow of information and capital. Han paints beauty as having declined from being inextricably linked with the sublime, to the empty, self-centred notion it has now become.
Why do we find smooth things beautiful today? The smooth does not hurt. It does offer no resistance but produces instant Like and gives immediate pleasure. Beauty in its smoothness has become central to the subject, in an almost autoerotic way. It embodies today's positive society. Because of this smoothness the encounter with true beauty fails, the charm of beauty is lost. True beauty, being strange and different, being something of the other, always must contain something negative and obscure. In place of the beautiful steps the pleasing. The alterity or negativity of the other and the alien is eliminated altogether. But negativity, being an invigorating force of life, is also an integral part of true beauty.
Only what is not smooth can free the self from its narcissistic cocoon, from permanent self-affirmation and narcissistic mirroring. Without negativity, without the injury it inflicts, there can be neither poetry nor art. Thinking only is provoked as a result of the experience of the negativity of the injury. True beaúty also has to inflict pain.The kind of beauty which is a consequence of aesthetic distance is lost in a culture dependent on images of rapid effects and affects. For Byung Chul-Han beauty is not a momentary glow, but a silent afterglow. The refinement consists in the reluctance.
Han ultimately separates the fundamentally different forms of the beautiful based on the attitude we adopt towards it: there is something beautiful that is easy to have and smooth and that confirms our auto-eroticism. And there is something beautiful that only cautiously reveals itself to the viewer.
The crisis of beauty today consists in the fact that beauty is reduced to its givenness, to its use or consumer value. In order to make it more readily and easily consumable it has to be smooth and without friction and negativity.
In order to save beauty, Han argues, we have to reunite it with the sublime and return to it the negativity of the other. The saving of beauty is the seeing and thus the saving of the other. We affirm the differences, the alienness of the other and thus save beauty. And we are saving ourselves from the grip of consumerism. Beauty needs the difference of the other, and a ‘contemplative distance’ that allows us to linger, to plunge into and thereby, to lose ourselves and experience the sense of our own finitness.
This collection is not a structured, congruent or consistent look on beauty and its role in our contemporary society. Han does not present a closed theory of beauty, rather he strings together interesting, insightful, surprising fragments and leaves it to the reader to piece them together.
-Byung-Chul Han (b. 1956) studied metallurgy in Korea, then philosophy, German philology and catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich. He is a lecturer and teacher of cultural theory at the University of Arts in Berlin. -
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