Elements of Byung-Chul Han’s work for ethical training in the performance society

Abstract

The starting point of this research focuses on the study of the crisis of humanities in a hegemonic market economy driven by profit and exploitation. In the project from which this article is derived and which has hermeneutic phenomenology as a methodological approach, as presented by Max van Manen (2016), the scope and contribution of contemporary ethics is shown in the face of these two movements and, likewise, from a critical reading of the whole, the variants of ethical training in the face of the current crisis in the humanities in which the person is reduced to a subject of performance. The article is structured in four parts: first, the research and the publication itself are contextualized; second, the methodological process is detailed; third, the state of the question is briefly shown; and fourth, the theoretical sediment is specified and the variants that make up the answer to the problem question of the project are presented, that is: to base the importance of attending to temporality as a substantive ethical problem; the need to deconstruct freedom as a neoliberal control strategy; the sense of deinstrumentalizing emotions; and the need to cultivate the capacity to be indignant and to promote a contemplative life as experiential practices of the world of life.