Byung-Chul Han on Pain

Byung-Chul Han, "The Ontology of Pain" (Translated by Daniel Steuer)

Pain gives of its healing power where we least expect it.

-Martin Heidegger

 

SINGABLE REMNANT – the outline
of him, who through
the sicklescript broke through unvoiced,
apart, at the snowplace.

- Paul Celan*


In a marginal note to Jünger’s On Pain, Heidegger writes: ‘A treatise “On Pain” which never and nowhere treats of pain itself; does not ask after its essence; never confronts the questionability of the question because it cannot at all be affected by the secret of pain, as a consequence of its decisively reifying attitude towards pain.’1 Jünger takes it for granted that everyone knows what pain is. He is interested above all in our relation to pain: ‘Pain is one of the keys to unlock man’s innermost being as well as the world. Whenever one approaches the points where man proves himself to be equal or superior to pain, one gains access to the sources of his power and the secret hidden behind his dominion. Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!’2 On this, Heidegger remarks: ‘Tell me your relation to being, if you even have an inkling of it, and I will tell you how, and whether, you will “concern” yourself with “pain”, or whether you will be able to pursue it in your thinking.’3

Heidegger’s seemingly ironic reply to Jünger possesses a philosophical core. Heidegger wants to approach the question of pain from the side of being. Only through being can we access the ‘essence’, the ‘secret’, of pain. Heidegger would even say: being is pain. By this, however, he would not mean that human existence is particularly painful. Rather, Heidegger has in mind an ontology of pain. He wants to get to the ‘essence’ of pain by way of being: ‘Immeasurable suffering creeps and rages over the earth. The flood of suffering rises ever higher. But the essence of pain is concealed. . . . Everywhere we are assailed by innumerable and measureless suffering. We, however, are unpained, not brought into the ownership of the essence of pain.’4

Heidegger’s thinking takes as its point of departure the ontological difference between being and beings. Beings owe their manifestness, their comprehensibility, to being. The disclosure of being is necessary for a comprehending comportment towards beings. Before directing my attention at an object, I already find myself in a pre-reflexively disclosed world. Heidegger points out that moods [Stimmungen] possess a world-disclosing power. The world as pre-reflexively disclosed by a mood precedes intentionality, the aiming at an object: ‘The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something.’5 This interest in phenomena such as ‘moods’ reveals that Heidegger’s thinking is concerned with what is non-available . We cannot avail ourselves of the prereflexively disclosed world. We are thrown into it; we are at its mercy and de-termined [be-stimmt] by it.* A mood, after all, is something that comes over us, something we cannot appropriate.

In the later Heidegger, being takes on a mystical meaning as the ‘source’ of beings.6 Being does not create beings, but it lets each become what it is. Humans also owe their existence to being: ‘Humans are at-tuned [gestimmt] to what de-termines [be-stimmt] their essence. In this de-termining, humans are touched and called forth by a voice [Stimme] that peals all the more purely the more it silently reverberates through what speaks.’7 That silent voice which de-termines and suf-fuses [durchstimmt] human Dasein evades any form of availability. It comes from somewhere else, from what is altogether other. Thinking is the pain, the passion for the secret that ‘withdraws, halts in its withdrawal’.8

Heidegger considers language to be a gift. Human beings speak [sprechen] by according with it [ihr entsprechen]. The ontological difference between being and beings also determines language: ‘An “is” arises where the word breaks up. To break up here means that the sounding word returns into soundlessness, back to whence it was granted: into the ringing of stillness. . . .’9 The ‘is’ marks the non-available origin of language, which – as stillness – cannot be captured by the sounding word. Only when the word breaks do we hear the stillness. Only poetry lets us hear that soundless stillness, that remainder that can be sung and that silently breaks through the sounding word. Poetry returns what is readable to the unreadable from where it arose. The seam that ties the readable to what can be sung is painful. Heidegger’s ‘seamstress’10 guards pain. Pain is the tear through which stillness, the non-available outside, breaks into thinking. The remainder that can be sung rhymes with pain.

Pain is the fundamental mood of human finitude. Heidegger thinks pain from the perspective of death: ‘Pain is death on a small scale – death is pain on a large scale.’11 Heidegger’s thinking traces that area of being ‘in which pain and death and love belong together’.12 It is the unavailability of the other, in particular, that keeps love, in the sense of Eros, alive. Eros is the desire for an other who escapes my grasp. Death is not simply the end of life, conceived of as a biological process. Rather, it is a particular way of being. As the ‘mystery of being’, it reaches into life. It is ‘the shrine of the nothing, namely of that which in all respects is never some mere being, but nonetheless essences, even as the mystery of being itself’.13 Death indicates that human beings are related to the non-available, to the altogether other that does not come from death.

Being only becomes perceptible under the condition of the pain of ‘pure nearness that can stand the distance’.14 Pain makes the human being receptive for the non-available, which gives him a hold and refuge. Pain bears human Dasein. This is how it differs from pleasure. It is not a temporary condition that can be removed. Rather, it constitutes the gravity of human Dasein: ‘But the more joyful the joy, the more pure the sadness slumbering within it. The deeper the sadness, the more summoning the joy resting within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which attunes the two by letting the remote be near and the near be remote is pain. This is why both, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful each in its way. But pain so touches the spirit of mortals that the spirit receives its gravity from pain. That gravity keeps mortals with all their wavering at rest in their being. The spirit [muot] which answers to pain, the spirit attuned by pain and to pain, is melancholy [Schwermut].’15

Concealment is the fundamental figure in Heidegger’s thinking. ‘Concealment’ is an essential part of truth, understood as ‘unconcealment’. Being, as ‘clearing’, is surrounded by a dark forest. The earth represents what is ‘essentially self-secluding’ and evades all attempts at grasping it: ‘Earth shatters every attempt to penetrate it. It turns every merely calculational intrusion into an act of destruction. Though such destruction may be accompanied by the appearance of mastery and progress in the form of the technological-scientific objectification of nature, this mastery remains, nonetheless, an impotence of the will. The earth is openly illuminated as itself only where it is apprehended and preserved as the essentially undisclosable, as that which withdraws from every disclosure, in other words, keeps itself constantly closed up. . . . The earth is the essentially self-secluding.’16 If the earth is treated as a resource to be opened up, it is already destroyed, no matter how ‘sustainable’ our approach may be, because as earth it is ‘essentially undisclosable’. Saving the earth presupposes establishing an altogether different relation to it. We need to treat it with care. A crucial part of taking care of it is the experience of unavailability. Such care allows the earth to retain its otherness and strangeness. Treating something with care demands distance.

Today, the terrestrial order, the order of the earth, is coming to an end. It is being succeeded by the digital order. Heidegger was the last thinker of the terrestrial order. Death and pain do not belong to the digital order. They represent disturbances. Mourning and longing are also suspicious. The pain of the nearness of distance is alien to the digital order. Distance is inscribed into nearness. The digital order transforms nearness into the absence of distance, so that it is no longer painful. Under the compulsion of availability, everything is rendered accessible and consumable. The digital habitus is: everything must be available at once. The telos of the digital order is total availability. This order lacks the ‘slowness of the hesitant shyness in the face of what cannot be done’.17

Within the terrestrial order, the mysterious is essential. The watchword of the digital order, by contrast, is transparency. The digital order eliminates anything that could be concealed. The digital order also makes language transparent, that is, available, by reifying it into information. Information has no hidden reverse side. When transformed into data, the world becomes transparent. Algorithms and artificial intelligence also make human behaviour transparent, that is, calculable and controllable. The soul of the digital order is dataism, data totalitarianism. In place of narration, it substitutes addition. ‘Digital’ means numerical. The numerical is more transparent, more available, than the narrative.

Today, non-availability just means a temporary absence of availability. A world consisting exclusively of available things can only be consumed. But the world is more than the sum total of what is available. The available world loses its aura, its scent. It does not permit any lingering. Non-availability also characterizes the otherness of the other, its alterity. It protects the other against its being demeaned by becoming an object of consumption. Without ‘primordial distance’, the other is not a thou.18 He is reified into an it. The other is not appealed to in his otherness, but instead appropriated.*

Pain makes possible another kind of visibility. It is a mode of sensation that we are in the process of losing. The digital order is anaesthetic; it abolishes certain forms of temporality and perception. Heidegger would have said that the digital order leads to the forgetfulness of being. Impatience, the compulsion of immediate access, leads to the disappearance of what is enduring and slow. The enduring and slow is not deprived of anything, because it does not lack anything. It does not indicate a process that can be accelerated. Rather, it possesses its own temporality, its own reality, its own scent. What is available does not have a scent. The enduring and slow hesitates in withdrawing [zögert im Entzug]. It is a laggard [Nachzügler], a lagging light [Nachleuchter]. Lateness is its pace. ‘At once’, by contrast, is the temporality of the digital.

The mental attitude that shows patience and is prepared to wait is eroding. It provides access to a reality which we are losing amid the compulsion of total availability. A waiting which remains patient within the enduring and slow exhibits a specific kind of intentionality. It is an attitude that resigns itself to the non-available. It is not a case of waiting for but of waiting in. It is characterized by an in-sistence. This attitude follows the contours of the non-available. Renunciation is the fundamental trait of intentionless waiting. Renunciation gives. It makes us receptive to the non-available. It is opposed to consumption. The ‘mournful bearing of the need to renounce and to give away’ is, Heidegger says, a ‘receiving’.19 Pain is not a subjective sensation pointing to a lack of something but a reception, even the reception of being. Pain is a gift.

Notes:

1. Martin Heidegger, Zu Ernst Jünger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 90, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004, p. 436.

2. Jünger, On Pain , p. 32.

3. Heidegger, Zu Ernst Jünger, p. 439.

4. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Danger’, in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 44–63; here p. 54.

5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962, p. 176.

6. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, New York: Harper and Row, 1968, p. 11.

7. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 50.

8. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, in On the Way to Language, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 57–108; here p. 66.

9. Ibid., p. 108.

10. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 102.

11. Martin Heidegger, ‘Zum Ereignis-Denken’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 73.1, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2013, p. 735.

12. Martin Heidegger, ‘Why Poets?’, in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 200–41; here p. 205.

13. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, pp. 5–22; here p. 17 (emphasis added, BCH) (transl. amended).

14. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981, p. 146.

15. Martin Heidegger, ‘Words’, in On the Way to Language, pp. 139–56; here p. 153.

16. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 1–56; here p. 25.

17. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 52, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982, p. 128.

18. See Martin Buber, Urdistanz und Beziehung, Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1978.*

19. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 13, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983, p. 94.