If there is a philosopher in fashion today, it is the latest Princess of Asturias Award recipient, Byung-Chul Han, described as the leading media star of philosophy. His work is more accessible than many classics, and his ideas can feel closer to us and more useful, as he tackles highly contemporary topics.
Moreover, his observations do not leave anyone unmoved. They are devastating dissections of digital hyperconnectivity, the self-imposed work we subject ourselves to, or the damage wrought by neoliberalism. His diagnosis is that we live exhausted, always available, and, in his own words, we are “sex organs of capital”.
Perhaps that is why he appeared particularly hurt during his visit to Asturias to collect the prize. The media portrayed him as a wealthy, privileged man. Han refuted this portrayal. He pointed out that a philosopher does not become rich (I can attest after meeting a few), and that what fills him are simple things grounded in manual labour.
“The happiness always comes from working with the hands,” he asserted in an interview with the newspaper El País. He said this when speaking about his two pianos, one of the reasons for the criticism he received. They are not symbols of luxury. They are old, but they give him pleasure.
The Value of Working the Land
Without those hands that bring us close to the tangible, the concrete, there is no happiness, no thought, and no action. This German-born, South Korean philosopher cited the poet Paul Celan. For Celan, good poetry also bore something of manual labour. And he reminded that for his admired philosopher Martin Heidegger, thinking is also a form of manual work.
In other words, for Byung-Chul Han, genuine thinking is not a flow of abstractions in the cloud, but something that simmers slowly, with the body, with gesture, with repetition. It is no surprise that he thinks of hands. His original vocation lay in metallurgy before philosophy called him.
He has developed this idea in several books. The most evident is In Praise of the Earth: A Journey into the Garden, where he presents himself literally as a passionate gardener. For three years he tended his garden “to the physical limit,” counting seasons, tasks, and small transformations of the soil.
To him, gardening is a “silent meditation,” a way to let time slow down, or at least to move at the pace of nature. Digging, pruning, or planting, the body enters a cadence distinct from that of email and notifications. Working with the hands becomes an antidote to the acceleration he denounces. Han defends “the art of knowing how to slow down.”
The Resistance to the Smartphone
He critiques a world full of information but empty of objects with weight and history. In his writings, he argues that material things stabilise life because they provide continuity, whereas the screen yields a constant and light flow, with no rootedness.
What does he propose? His example. Tending a garden, playing a piano, or repairing something with one’s hands would be ways of restoring density to existence. He advocates a bit more contemplative living. This does not mean doing nothing, but engaging in other activities—slow, often manual activities—that allow a different relationship with the world.
In his address when he stepped onto the Princess of Asturias Awards stage, a speech that paradoxically went viral on social media, he argued that we have become slaves to our smartphones, hooked on constant connectivity.
There lies his praise of manual work as a source of happiness. It is not “work” in the sense of precarious employment, but that artisanal dimension where mind and body cooperate on something tangible: cooking, repairing a bicycle, sewing, playing a musical instrument, growing plants.
The Lesson Han Leaves Us With
Han is not alone in this intuition. From other angles, several authors have argued that working with the hands holds something deeply human and joyful. The perspective of American sociologist Richard Sennett is particularly intriguing.
He calls for reviving the figure of the craftsman as a model of a good life. He defines craftsmanship as “the enduring human impulse to do things well simply because they are done well” and contends that “to make is to think”: through practical handiwork one sharpens attention, learns to care for details, and builds a stronger identity than that of the mere office worker.
From psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied the so-called “flow state”: those moments when we are so focused on an activity that time seems to disappear, and we feel a mix of challenge and deep enjoyment. It is no coincidence that many hobbies people describe as therapeutic place hands at the centre.
Translated into everyday life, Han’s idea returns us to a very ancient gesture: getting our hands dirty, rather than chasing happiness in the form of a notification or an online purchase.
