The Tonality of Thought |
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11 May 2026 - Erlenbach
The Tonality of Thought is based on translations of transcripts of three lectures philosopher Byung-Chul Han gave in 2023. Interestingly, Han is a Korean who studied ands teaches in Deutschland and so speaks that language, but is most popular in Spain and Latin America. I first of learned of Han throught Stephen West's Philosophize This! podcast. Han sums up his philosophical thoughts as "the Other disappears", and takes a fairly distopian view of modern society. What surprised me most about the book is the treatment of Han like a rock star, with many pictures of him during the lectures even as the book provides QR code links to the lectures themselves.
Han's first lecture lends its title to the book and was interlaced with piano accompaniment.
The next, On Eros, gets much deeper into Han's ideas regarding the disappearance of Other.
In the third an final lecture he discusses his thoughts on hope.
In the end he makes some decent points, but seems to just be too much of a primadonna to take seriousy. Perhaps the medium of a lecture transferred to text and then trandslated is at fault. But I have also learned to digest things which irritate me further.
