A Life Without Ritual is a Death Through Ego-Libido - Ch. 1 from "The Disappearance of Rituals" by Byung-Chul Han

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(1706 Words) 

Please consider leaving a comment below with your thoughts, I would love that. 

This book was recommended to me by a friend and, though, I do not think the author and I share a common faith in Christianity, there are certainly many shared views about the importance of ritual and ceremony between us. If I had to summarize chapter one in a line or two, the basic idea is that rituals act as the mechanism by which human values are made concrete in our lives together and draw us out of ourselves, especially the part of ourselves which is subject to manipulation from a money driven economy which seeks to monetize our most base addictions, but which at the same time end of cannibalizing the human person if we fall into them since social media culture only offers very short-term and ego-driven gratification. 

A concern I had reading through this chapter, though, was that Han very much emphasizes the positives of ritual, in that they draw one out of oneself and into a greater community, and didn't seem to mentioned that this can itself go too far and create a type of pantheism or collectivism in which the individual person is lost. This is what totalitarian states used in justifying the mass cannibalization of their own populations. But he does actually write a line mentioning a warning about this at the end of the chapter. "Hierarchies and power relations are often inscribed in rituals. By means of their aesthetic aspects, rituals can also lend a certain aura to domination." 14

Another part that stuck out to me was that in my book, The Drama of Metaphysics, I wrote about how worldviews simply the world so that we can act in them with a origin, identity, and purpose against the overwhelming complexity of existence. They give us a common story to live within. Han ends the chapter by making the point that rituals act of a shelter for us. They make us a home in what would otherwise be that overwhelming complexity of existence. So there are certainly some overlapping concepts in this first chapter and in my own work. 15

Anyway, below is a summary of chapter one, "The Compulsion of Production". 

Ritual Stabilizes Time and Value 
Han begins chapter one, "The Compulsion of Production," by stating that a ritual is a symbolic action which contains an inherent value and is shared between people who both recognize that value, uniting them in the process. 1 It is this recognition of value and person which we come to know that gives a permanence to reality from the constant flux of things and events. "Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient. Symbolic perception, as recognition, is a perception of the permanent: the world is shorn of its contingency and acquires durability." In today's world there is a lot of data and events which cross our consciousness, but not much symbol or meaning which gives a permanence and intelligibility to our world and makes it home for us. Han makes the point that what things are to space, occupying them and giving a stability, rituals are to time. They give a stability to the passing experience of the year. 2 In a world of constant flux and no ritual, there can also be no home for us in time. 

"Rituals stabilize life. To paraphrase Antione Saint-Exupery, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their 'relative independence from men'. Their 'objectivity lies in the fact that ... men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.'" 

[Just a side note, all of this makes my point about the importance of metaphysical identity, which my PhD thesis is about.] 

The Flux of A Non-Ritual World

This becomes a problem in a world which is so focused on producing and consuming. Those actions only feed transience and an endless loop and do not provide stability to life. 3 An interesting analogy used here by Han is the smartphone. He calls it a "non-thing" in that traditional objects have a sameness to them over time that provides a certain stability to human life. The smartphone is a thing that can be anything. It is a thing that provides constant novelty, and thus is a thing in some new uprooted sense. Things that have a stability to them can be used many a time and provide a richness to life through their getting old. This is different than the modern world of production/consumption where things are produced to be totally consumed and destroyed quickly, thus adding to the transience of life. And in our constant consumption, our own identity is consumed as well, it is lost. "Relentless consumption surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life". How can there be authentic ritual, or a recognition and returning to something that doesn't last? 4 

This becomes even worse when the endless production of things like smartphones are aimed at the consumption of emotion, meaning they are always trying to get us to seek after feelings. So not only is the stability of the object itself undermined with its novelty, but its effect on us is a seeking after something even more fleeting than objects, our emotions. The fluidity of life is taken to another level. "Today, we consume not only things themselves but also the emotions that are bound up with things. You cannot consume things endlessly, but emotions you can. Thus, emotions open up a new field of infinite consumption." 5

Returning back to the first idea mentioned of ritual connecting people through a common recognition of value, it is not just two people that can be connected in this, rather, whole communities are meant to be connected through ritual. When this does not happen (combined with what is mentioned above) you have a society that is not united by anything on human and moral level. It's a retreat into individualism and self-obsession [and yet ironically, this overt individualism is really a type of mass conformity through manipulation.]. Rituals pull the individual out of themselves and their subjectivity. 6 

Symbolic Versus Serial Perception

Han makes a helpful distinction with terms "symbolic perception" and "serial perception". Symbolic perception is the ability to see the inherent spiritual or value connection between things, while serial perception is just to see a continual stream of phenomena. Symbolic perception is intensive and even only one example may be reflected upon, while serial perception is extensive in that it does not require an understanding, just a continual experiencing. And thus there is not a lingering, as Han puts it, on stable elements of our experience, rather a constant consumption of that which is fading and in flux. He uses the example of binge watching or comatose viewing entertainment. 7 "Attention deficit disorder results from a pathological intensification of serial perception. Perception is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger. The cultural technique of deep attention emerged precisely out of ritual and religious practices. It is no accident that 'religion' is derived from relegere: to take note. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul." [Simone Weil also made this point about prayer as well.] 

Again, symbolic perception is a perception that can be returned to without exhausting the richness of it. Thus, ritual is about the returning over and over again to the same things. Serial perception cannot be returned to, but most move on to something novel, because there is no depth to it. In ritual repetition there is a recognition of the symbol from the past, but also a moving forward with it into the future towards a greater understanding. 8 Another aspect of this that because of the depth of symbol and ritual it is not trying to entertain and excite the senses, but rather even in its repetition allows the participant to find depths greater than surface level feeling. "The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there. The meaning, that is, the path, can be repeated. You do not grow tired of the path ..." 9

The Disintegration of the Person Through the Ego-Libido

Otherwise, all we are left with is constant consumption that never fulfills and no meaningful connection to God, our neighbor, or the world around us. 10 This constant consumption is also usually digital in nature, meaning it is a disembodied experience, while ritual always involves the body in some way and involves others in this as well. This can be seen in a collective feeling, for example, the mourning at a funeral in which it's not about how this or that person feels, but about how the group has chosen to express itself. 11 "Symbols stand still. This is not the case with information: information exists by circulating. Stillness only means that communication ceases, stands still. It does not not produce anything. In the post-industrial age, the noise of machines gives way to the noise of communication. More information and more communication holds out the promise of more production. Thus, the compulsion of production expresses itself in the compulsion of communication." 12

In a society that runs on serial gratification, it is the individual themselves which becomes the fuel for the constant influx of new enticement. Han references Freud and uses the term "ego-libido", and expresses how this drive leads to the disintegration and death of the individual. This is because in choosing continual short term gratification that feeds the libido of the ego it ultimately leads to the destruction of the overall person because it is not a long term solution to life's needs. 13

---------------------

1 - Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals. 1

2 - 2

3 - 3

4 - 4

5 - 5

6 - 6

7 - 7

8 - 8

9 - 9

10 - 10

11 - 12

12 - 13

13 - 14

14 - 14

15 - 15