Tag: love

Liberating Conversations

Today’s human life is marked by confusion, loneliness, and neglect of deeper meaning, leading to anxiety, depression, stress, and other familiar psychological struggles.

Therefore—if you…

  • feel lost,
  • suffer from anxiety or restlessness,
  • have existential questions or doubts you cannot find answers to,
  • are caught in an addiction and don’t understand what lies beneath it,
  • struggle with insomnia, fear, or experience a certain chaos in your life,
  • carry a diffuse sense of guilt,
  • live in a home with frequent conflicts, 
  • don’t quite know what is happening with you, but feel trapped in dissatisfaction or anger,
  • uncertain about your role or identity, for example, regarding gender or the demands of modern life,
  • feel sad, unmotivated, or emotionally burdened.

In short: if you feel the need to understand or free yourself from something that prevents you from living a life worth living—with a reasonable degree of authenticity and freedom—I am convinced that I can help you. Not as yet another therapist, but as a philosopher with a focus on practical wisdom.

Often, a few liberating conversations are enough. Each 50-minute session is designed to provide clear insights, practical guidance, and a renewed perspective tailored to your unique concerns. The cost is 100 euros per session. I offer online sessions only, which makes it simple and flexible to create a present and safe space—wherever you may be.

If you are ready to take a step toward greater clarity and fulfillment, reach out today. Together, we can schedule your first session and begin your journey toward the life you deserve.

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Byung-Chul Han

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

‘Weapons’ may give us the wrong associations, but what he refers to are concepts that, like a brick, can be used to destroy what is hindering the growth of our lives, and at the same time, help us build or create something sustainable.

The Burnout Society

The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s work can be seen a toolbox aimed at helping us understand our contemporary society, while also presenting us with concrete ideas, thoughts or ‘weapons’ that might help us overcome or resist our own weak desires and vanities.

Han was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959. He studied metallurgy in Korea before moving to Germany in his early twenties to study philosophy, German and theology. Today, Han is a professor at the University der Künste in Berlin. His initial fame sprang up with the publication of his book Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (2010), which, directly translated, means ‘the fatigue society.’ In English, this was cleverly translated to The Burnout Society (2015).

Han’s thesis is that today’s neoliberalism has made politics psychological or mental. The logic of neoliberalism has invaded our minds. It’s our ability to be present in our lives, to think and to love that is threatened by this invasion. Neoliberalism—for many, at least—has become an uninvited guest that refuses to leave our minds.

Han declares, in all of his work, that we have become narcissistic. For this reason, it’s time for citizens to care more about society’s welfare than their own egos. “Responsibility for the community defines citizens. Consumers lack responsibility, above all,” Han writes in his 2018 book, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. The result of this narcissistic development is well-known: stress, burnout and depression. “Depression is a narcissistic malady,” Han states in The Agony of Eros (2017).

Eros or love is the only thing that may conquer our contemporary depression. As Han writes, “Depression represents the impossibility of love.”

Experiencing sublime beauty hurts

Still, it’s difficult to love, because we are not really free. It’s not just that society pressures us to fit in, perform faster and achieve more, but rather that we ourselves want this. We try to appear as positive, smooth and shiny in public as possible, as if our lives are all made up of ‘good vibes.’

In 2017’s Saving beauty, Han writes: “The smooth is the signature of the present time.” This kind of smoothness, he continues, “connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing.”

Today, smoothness and waxed bodies, quite sadly, are seen as the same thing as beauty. The morale behind this is clear: Smooth, smoother, smoothest = good, better, best. All that is strange, secret, or negative—in other words, all that passes through our thoughts—disappears, due to the ongoing repetition of sameness.

We lack a critical yet creative and life-affirming approach to overcoming this confinement. When we avoid the negative, the difficult and the painful, we amputate life. Our lives tend to circle around ourselves, making the circle smaller and smaller as we Google ourselves into unconsciousness.

To contrast this shallow development, Han turns to the writings of Plato, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, in which there is no distinction between beauty and the sublime. Experiencing sublime beauty is not supposed to be pleasurable; rather, it hurts. It makes you fall and stumble. It is similar to falling in love, because you can lose yourself and act rather stupid.

“The sight of beauty does not cause pleasure, but shocks,” Han stresses in Saving beauty. It’s the matter of experiencing our own fragility that contemporary society minimizes. Art can shake us, make us see the world differently and help us perceive our own limitedness and flaws. “The longing for beauty,” Han says, “is ultimately the longing for a different mode of being, for another, altogether non-violent form of life.”

The strength of Han’s analysis lies in how he uses two guiding concepts in all his books: freedom and power. They both encapsulate the problem with contemporary society and can also open us up to alternative ways of living our lives.

Truth is freedom

Freedom is both a problem and a possibility. It is becoming, emphasizing that we become by combining courage to stand up against dominating ideals and norms with the belief that things could be different. Freedom is found in becoming whatever disobeying those ideals enables us to become. Real freedom is socially anchored, and as Han says in Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017): “Freedom is a synonym for the community that succeeds.”

By making freedom social, he tries to relate it with truth. Perhaps this is where Han shows how courageous he is, by reintroducing the problematic concept of truth in philosophy. In Saving beauty, he speaks about the need to save beauty. Why? Because, as he writes: “Beauty promises freedom and reconciliation,” and “truth is freedom.”

In other words, a world of smoothness is false. It’s a world of ‘post-truth.’ For Han, the beautiful is both true and good; it’s almost as though the Korean philosopher is turning Platonic. And he is—at least in the way that the French philosopher Alain Badiou is Platonic.

In both Saving beauty and The Agony of Eros, Han ends up advocating for Badiou’s idea that the task of philosophy is to be loyal or faithful towards whatever binds us together (what is true, in other words). Han distinguishes himself from Badiou when he more practically shows why or how we can show fidelity to what really takes place in our lives.

Fidelity is unconditional in that it presupposes commitment and awareness. That means we should try to become capable of matching all parts of life, instead of just doing so when life is pleasurable and smooth.

“The saving of beauty is the saving of that which commits us.” This loyal commitment or involvement is related to the kind of awareness that mindfulness cultivates, as a non-judgmental and kind approach to what is happening now and here.

Without humour, no freedom. Without freedom, no love.

Han also uses his Eastern roots in his philosophical thinking. Back in 2002, when he was still an unknown, he published a book called The Philosophy of Zen-Buddhism.

In this book, he illustrates that the Buddhist concept of ‘nothingness’—as the absence of an exclusive subjectivity—is what makes Buddhism pacifistic and non-violent, because there is no essence where power can be concentrated. Also, the concept of ‘emptiness’ is the reason why narcissism is something very un-Buddhist. There is no unchangeable ‘me’ in the mirror; rather, I am being formed by life.

The Korean thinker also illustrates that humour is something that links Western and Eastern philosophy. Nietzsche, for example, claimed that laughing was an expression of freedom. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said that “freedom is the element of love,” so it follows that without humour, there’s no freedom, and without freedom, there’s no love. Or to put it differently, it’s difficult to love people who never laugh, or take themselves too seriously.

In Buddhism, Han writes, there is no miracle, only hard daily work: Letting go of the past and not transcending or dreaming of a world beyond this one. He compares Buddhism with walking. Walking has no future, as you’re always in the midst of walking. To die means to walk, he says, emphasizing that we are always dying. Similarly, Michel de Montaigne said that to philosophize is to die.

‘Dying’ means always walking, philosophizing, exploring and experimenting with life, not as a way of meeting a specific objective, but as a way of being grounded in the here and now. Western and Eastern philosophy, I believe, share this humble approach to life. We never philosophize or meditate to conquer the world, but to praise its beauty.

Listening as an art of breathing

Many Eastern ideas are reflected in Han’s suggestions for how to overcome today’s stress, burnout, exhaustion and ever-growing narcissism. For instance, in The Burnout Society, he encourages us to stop, sit down and take a break. Philosophy is here defined as ‘an intervening time,’ ‘a time of ‘non-doing,’ ‘a peace time,’ as he calls it.

The concept of ‘non-doing’ resembles elements of Buddhism and mindfulness in that it stresses that we don’t need to be doing things constantly, Rather, non-doing allows things to unfold at their own pace.

Similarly, in The Transparency Society (2015), Han proposes that although we are forced or coerced into participating in an ongoing style of positive communication—declaring, “I like,” over and over, again and again—we don’t have to like everything. It’s not more communication that is needed, but creative or alternative approaches to living a richer life. To be creative, a person needs to stop and allow themselves to be formed or touched by what is happening as it happens, in the here and now, without judging it according to some predefined ideal.

A last example is provided in Psychopolitics, in which Han he reawakens the ‘philosophical idiot’ as a way out of today’s malady. The idiot doesn’t belong to a specific network or alliances, so he or she is free to choose. The idiot doesn’t communicate; instead, he or she facilitates a space of silence and loneliness, where they only say what deserves to be said. The idiot listens, as a generous way of stepping aside to give room to the others.

“The art of listening takes place as an art of breathing,” Han writes in The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today (2018).

For non-philosophers alike

Han’s work is accessible for non-philosophers, and is a good guide to understanding and navigating oneself through today’s demanding, achievement-based society. He encourages us to Relax. Do nothing. Become no one. See time as something peaceful.

Time passes, whether we want it or not. Then it returns and changes everything. Let go. Listen. Embrace moments of non-communication. And breathe.

In Time, On Time, All the Time

“What’s important in your life, and why is it important?” I said, as
my father folded a pillow on the sofa, laid his head on it and drew his
final breath.

On the Monday morning that my father died, somewhere in Denmark,
I was teaching an online university class, somewhere in Spain. Afterwards,
I lay down on my bed, drained of energy. I closed my eyes and checked
my breathing. It was agitated. My heart was beating too fast. Then it didn’t
beat at all. It was as if my heartbeat depended on my will. On whether I
wanted it to beat. Or not.

Read the rest of the essay in the Wilderness House Literary Review

Love holds the potential for political change

“Loving people is the only thing worth living for.” – Søren Kierkegaard

I believe that all kinds of discrimination, hate and suffering can only be destroyed by love.

In her book All About Love: New Visions, the philosopher Bell Hooks (or, as she prefers, bell hooks) defines love as the will to extend or expand oneself for the purpose of allowing the spiritual self to flourish—including the selves of others. According to the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, love is edifying. Love is a verb; it does something. But that is not all! In a letter to his then-fiancée Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard wrote, “Freedom is the element of love.”

Love requires freedom. Or only free people can love.

I propose an understanding of freedom as being with friends. Freedom is the manifestation of a complete or meaningful relationship. Every relationship always assumes something that is not oneself. Love cannot therefore be reduced to self—love is, rather, an external force that arouses joy.

Seen in this light, I believe that a will to love—fundamentally—tries to overcome the devastating sadness that comes in the face of exploitation, discrimination, abuse of power, violence and death.

Works of Love, Kierkegaard argues that only love is edifying.Not anger. In connection with the religious injunction to love your neighbour as yourself, he emphasizes that the term neighbour does  not refer to your race, your gender or your nation, but all people. Anyone, he writes. All people should be loved as equals (not necessarily loved equally).

That is, treated equally. Treated with the same respect and rights.

With Kierkegaard’s call to love all human beings as equals, he turns love into a political concept that destroys the damning group identity politics of the time. Love possesses such a liberating potential. It confirms the wisdom of Hannah Arendt, when she said that evil is the result of our thoughtlessness, our reluctance to think well and thoroughly.

Mindlessness is associated with a lack of attention, an inability to love.

Love is the vitality with which all critical thinking begins. It’s like a friendly bond that can make you and me wiser. That which is part of life in all its complexity: everything that breathes, shits and dies.

Love can only flourish when we—all of us—recognize that none of us own life, but rather, that it is on loan. It is the manifold powers of life that we cherish, not our ego, race or territory.

Love holds the potential for political change. It happens when all people are loved, as equals.

Living by Courage, Generosity & Wisdom

Finn Janning says empathy and compassion are necessary for our thriving and even our survival.

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.” These are the opening lines from Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger (1942). If these words seem gruesome, it is because the reader has an expectation that a ‘normal’ person simply has to know when his or her mother died. Expect this not, says Camus. Or perhaps he is saying, keep an open relationship with death. The French writer may also be asking: Does it make any difference? Today, or yesterday – my mother is dead!

However, it doesn’t get any better with regard to the reader’s possible expectations when the novel’s protagonist Meursault – the one whose mother is dead – does not seem to grieve at her funeral. On the contrary, he falls in love with a girl during the ceremony. Afterwards they go to the beach, where they bathe, and subsequently make love. The girl wants to marry Meursault, and he tells her that it is of no consequence, but if she really wants to, he will go along with it.

You can read the rest of the essay in Philosophy Now, Issue 148: February/March 2022

“And me?”

Simone de Beauvoir’s novella Inseparable is remarkable in several ways: It was written in 1954 but has remained hidden away among her surviving papers until now. It is an autobiographical text from a prominent writer and philosopher. It is both a beautiful and a sad story about a friendship. It shows how rigid cultural norms and ideals can turn a life into a prison. It indirectly illustrates how one might liberate oneself through authentic love, friendship, and critical thinking.

Inseparable revolves around the meeting between two young girls, Silvie and Andrée, who meet as classmates in a private school in Paris during the First World War. We meet Andrée through the enamored gaze of Silvie, the narrator, who devoutly senses the details of the beloved, as here, where Andrée has hidden in the back garden to play the violin: “Her beautiful black hair was separated by a touching white side parting which one wanted to follow respectfully and tenderly with the finger.” 

Later Silvie acknowledges, “Without Andrée my life is over,” and later, “I had a need to share all with her,” and still later, when Andrée tells about her first love with a boy called Bernard and claims that he was the only one who loved her as she was, Silvie says, “And me?”

Silvie is the smartest in her class; she is a free and critical thinker. For example, one day she is dazed by the obvious truth: “I didn’t believe in God.” Andrée is equally gifted—Silvie fears that she might be smarter—and appears through Silvie’s gaze and fascination to live in her own world. Andrée is more eccentric, unpredictable, and musical than Silvie but also deeply Catholic.

Silvie envies Andrée, especially her independence, until she learns that Andrée lives in a prison where her strict mother watches all the possible exits. Unlike her mother, Andrée believes in the idea of love-marriages. Her mother just wants to marry her daughters off without any concern for love. 

Some might wonder whether the novella is about the friendship or love between the two young girls, later teenagers and young women. Making a distinction between love and friendship may be problematic, since true friendship consists of love—that is, trust, honesty, and equality. For example, Andrée challenges Silvie when she says that wanting to understand everything is haughtiness.

As mentioned, Inseparable is an autobiographical novella, Beauvoir scholars might  debate how accurate Silvie is as an alter ego of Beauvoir—as well as Andrée, who was inspired by the author’s friend Zaza (Elizabeth Lacoin), who died in 1929, when she was only 21 years old. 

Although I look forward to following the debate, the novella can easily stand alone as a sensuous story about friendship, love, freedom, and loss. Still, it may be tempting to tentatively place or interpret the novella through some of Beauvoir’s philosophical concepts. 

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes that authentic love is “founded on mutual recognition of two liberties.” Authentic love is freely chosen or, to put it differently, without freedom, there is no love. Freedom is not only remaining loyal or true to your individuality (whatever that means); rather, freedom is becoming—that is, you are free to become whatever you choose, while you also make sure that the other is equally free. 

The relationship between Silvie and Andrée is authentic. In contrast, an inauthentic love is one in which one party is hindered in experiencing freedom. 

In Inseparable, it is primarily the strong Catholic upbringing and faith that guide Andrée’s family and hinder her free becoming. Her mother makes sure that she has so many tasks to do that Andrée intentionally cuts her foot with an ax just to get some free time. Inauthentic love is based on submission, control, and domination, whether by mothers and priests, as here; or gender, race, or religion in general, to name a few of the most dominant examples. 

The novella might also open up the possibility that Silvie is dominated or restricted by her own ideals. For example, she believes that a woman cannot be free, creative, and innovative if she becomes a mother. Unlike her friend, Silvie doesn’t find the small twins (or babies in general) charming or attractive. Motherhood is apparently a hindrance to free thinking. 

History has, luckily, shown that many women have become philosophers, writers, artists, and much more while being mothers. 

The moral simmering in the novel is that there might not be only one way of being a mother but rather several. Motherhood is a multiplicity. At least, I cannot help but wonder what Andrée, who is capable of cutting her own leg with an ax, would do in a less self-harming way if a potential husband would hinder her playing her violin and writing her stories. Ideally, of course, she wouldn’t have to, if the marriage was one of authentic love. Continuing this line of thought, then no one would have to harm themselves, if they were brought up in a world of love—that is, one of equality and freedom for all.

Furthermore, since we are dealing with a novella inspired by true events, then Andrée was set to marry Pascal, who in real life represented Merleau-Ponty. Could they have matched Beauvoir and Sartre as not only the two dominating existentialists but also another example of aspiring philosophical friendship? 

Returning to The Second Sex, then, one might also describe the relationship between Silvie and Andrée through Beauvoir’s use of the concepts “transcendence” and “immanence.” She writes: “Every subject posits itself as transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no justification for present existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into ‘in-itself’” 

Transcendence is a person’s ability to transcend a given situation, which, in theory, is possible for all human beings but in practice is reserved mainly for men—at least during the time where the novella takes place in France. For instance, Silvie transcends the Catholic faith. In contrast, a woman is traditionally held in immanence, where she is tied by her biological destiny: becoming a mother. A way to transcend this “destiny” is to throw alternative projects into the future. Silvie appears skeptical about whether a woman, whether Andrée can transcend her “immanent” destiny, but Andrée believes that another life is possible: another form of motherhood. Could Andrée (or Zaza) have found independence within dependence?  

If you appreciate an intimate novella about friendship, freedom, and love, then read Inseparable. I truly enjoyed the book and recommend it warmly. 

Finn Janning, PhD, writer and philosopher. 

This review was first published in Metapsychology, Vol. 25, No. 37

To Love Everyone as Equals

Imagine you were Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish existentialist. Then there would be nothing confusing about the remark: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

In a letter to his fiancée, Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard wrote, “Freedom is the element of love.”

Love presupposes freedom.

All those who are free can love.

Freedom is liberation from something that is obstructive: hatred or ignorance.

The rest in Sisyphus Magazine

As equals

Somewhere, I read that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is all about love. I like that. I think it’s true—all kinds of discrimination, hate and suffering can only be destroyed by love.

In her book All About Love: New Visions, the philosopher Bell Hooks (or, as she prefers, bell hooks) defines love as the will to extend or expand oneself for the purpose of allowing the spiritual self to flourish—including the selves of others. According to the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, love is edifying. Love is a verb; it does something. But that is not all! In a letter to his then-fiancée Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard wrote, “Freedom is the element of love.”

Love requires freedom. Or only free people can love.

I propose an understanding of freedom as being with friends. Freedom is the manifestation of a complete or meaningful relationship. Every relationship always assumes something that is not oneself. Love cannot therefore be reduced to self—love is, rather, an external force that arouses joy.

Seen in this light, I believe that the BLM movement shows a will to love, as it tries to overcome the devastating sadness that comes in the face of exploitation, discrimination, abuse of power, violence and death.

Read the rest of the essay here.

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