When Silence Becomes Resistance: Byung-Chul Han and Thomas Merton in Conversation
Using the See-Judge-Act Method
There is something uncomfortable about reading Byung-Chul Han and Thomas Merton side by side when using the Cardijn method of See-Judge-Act. Maybe this is why many Catholics find Catholic Social Teachings uncomfortable. One is a contemporary Korean-German philosopher writing about burnout and digital fatigue; the other was a Trappist monk who died in 1968, before the internet existed. And yet they keep saying the same thing: modern life fractures the interior life, and both diagnose that fracture from different sides of the same wall.
That wound is the loss of the interior life. What is it about the culture that drives us to be more like Ayn Rand than a disciple of Christ?
SEE: What Is Actually Happening to Us?
Look around honestly. We live in what Han calls the “achievement society” — a world that no longer coerces us with commands from the outside but compels us from within. We scroll, produce, optimize, perform. We are not just busy; we are constitutionally busy, unable to stop without feeling guilt or anxiety. Burnout is not an accident of this system. It is its logical endpoint.
Merton saw a version of this long before the smartphone existed. Writing from the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he watched a world growing louder, faster, and more fragmented, and he named what it was producing: the false self — an identity stitched together from the ex’s expectations, from roles, from the compulsive need to appear rather than to be. This false self, he insisted, is not just a private spiritual problem. It is a social wound. Cultural systems shape inward division, and inward division spills outward — into hostility, conformity, and violence.
Han gives us updated language for exactly what Merton was describing. Transparency, acceleration, compulsive self-production: these are the contemporary mechanisms by which the false self is manufactured and maintained. Both men, in different registers, point to the same catastrophe: a life turned outward and emptied inward.
JUDGE: What Does This Mean, and Where Does It Lead?
Reading Han and Merton together reveals that Merton is far more radical than he is usually given credit for. His call to silence is not a devotional nicety for monastics. It is a form of protest — a refusal of the systems that deform attention, desire, and identity, and a direct challenge to the forces that erode interior life.
Here the two thinkers converge most powerfully, and here they also begin to diverge in ways that matter.
Where they agree: Both distrust a culture that substitutes productivity and performance for genuine interior life. Both treat contemplation not as escape but as a way of becoming more fully human. And both understand that the person who has lost inwardness is more vulnerable — more easily captured by conformity, consumerism, or the crowd.
Where they part ways: Han is a diagnostician. He is extraordinarily precise about what is wrong with late modern life, and his concept of “radical negativity”— the idea that silence, emptiness, and withdrawal are acts of resistance—is genuinely illuminating. But his void remains philosophically ambiguous. It tells us what we need to stop doing, without fully naming what we are being emptied toward.
Merton’s apophatic theology fills that gap exactly. For Merton, the darkness of contemplation is not an end in itself ~ it is a threshold. The silence is not mere absence; it is a spiritually generative emptying ordered toward communion with God. His “darkness” is disciplined by revelation, prayer, Prayere Christian tradition (think Patristics here), especially the conviction that God is known by unknowing without being reduced to silence. Where Han’s void exposes what modern life cannot tolerate, Merton’s void is a doorway into what human life most deeply needs.
In concise terms, Han diagnoses the sickness of accelerated modern life, while Merton names the cure ~ a contemplative return to the true self in God.
This difference also shapes how each thinker handles religious tradition. Merton engaged deeply and carefully with Buddhism and other traditions, always insisting on genuine dialogue without flattening real differences. Han tends to move more abstractly across traditions, drawing on Eastern thought without anchoring himself in any single one. That is a limitation worth naming, especially for readers approaching these questions from within a faith community.
ACT: What Are We Going to Do About It?
The point of this conversation is not merely academic. If Han and Merton are right — and together they make a compelling case — then one conclusion follows: silence, contemplation, and resistance to performative life are not optional extras, but necessary responses.
Recover contemplative practice as a form of resistance, not retreat. Silence, prayer, and prayerlessness are not luxuries for the spiritually advanced. They are, as both men argue, acts of counter-cultural resistance in an age that profits from our distraction and exhaustion.
Take the false self seriously as a social, not merely a spiritual, problem. The pressure to manufacture an identity for public consumption is not a personal weakness. It is a structural feature of digital capitalism. Naming that honestly — in our communities, our schools, our parishes — is the first step toward freedom. Why is this so difficult in the US?
Let Han make Merton legible, but let Merton deepen Han. For anyone using these thinkers in Christian education or spiritual formation, this pairing is particularly valuable. Han provides contemporary language for pressures that Merton identified in spiritual terms. But Merton supplies what Han often leaves implicit: a theological center, a horizon of transformation, and the insistence that silence is ordered not to emptiness but to love. Together, they clarify not only what is wrong, but what we are invited toward.
Questions for You To Ponder
Where in your own life do you feel the pressure to perform, produce, or be perpetually available? What would it cost you — concretely — to resist that pressure for a single day?
Han argues that burnout is not a personal failure but a systemic one. Does that reframe how you think about your own exhaustion, or that of people around you?
Merton distinguished between the false self (constructed for others) and the true self (found before God). Which of the two feels more familiar to you on an ordinary Tuesday?
Both Han and Merton insist that contemplation is not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it. Do you believe that? What would it look like in your own life or community?
Merton’s apophatic tradition holds that we approach God by letting go of our images and certainties about God. Does that feel liberating or unsettling — and what might that response reveal?
If silence is a form of resistance, what are you resisting when you choose it — and what are you protecting?
A Reading Guide: Merton and Han in Conversation
Thomas Merton — Where to Begin and Where to Go Deeper
Merton wrote prolifically, and not everything is equally relevant to the themes in the blog post. Here is a sequenced path.
Start here:
New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) is the essential Merton — the one book to read if you read only one. It is where his thinking about the true and false self is most fully developed, written in a lyrical voice without sentimentality. It directly addresses the kind of identity fragmentation Han diagnoses in secular terms.
The Seven Story Mountain (1948) is his autobiography and remains the most widely read entry point, though it is more narrative than theological. Read it to understand the man before reading him as a thinker.
Go deeper with these:
Contemplative Prayer (Prayer is compact and serious — Merton at his most apophatic, engaging darkness, dread, and the stripping away of consolations. This is where he sounds most like Han’s philosophical void, except that his void has a destination.
No Man Is an Island (1955) develops the social and ethical dimensions of contemplation. This is the book that shows why interior division spills outward into violence and conformity — the argument that resonates most directly with Han’s social critique.
Raids on the Unspeakable (1966) is prophetic and strange, a collection of essays and prose poems written in direct protest against the dehumanizing forces of modernity. Merton is a social critic, not just a spiritual guide—extraordinarily relevant today.
The Wisdom of the Desert (1960) — Merton’s translation and commentary on the Desert Fathers — provides the deep roots of the contemplative tradition he is drawing on. Brief, beautiful, and surprisingly readable.
For the interreligious dimension:
The Asian Journal (1973, posthumous) and Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) show Merton in genuine dialogue with Buddhism — careful, attentive, never collapsing real differences. This is where his approach contrasts most sharply with Han’s more abstract use of Eastern thought.
Byung-Chul Han — The New Book and the Essential Background
The Tonality of Thought (2025, translated by Daniel Steuer) is Han’s most personally revealing work. Based on lectures he gave in 2023, it is built around a striking self-description: his books, he says, are not repetitions but variations on themes — like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, though articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. His thinking, he explains, is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit, then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”
His central summary of his entire philosophical project appears here: “If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears.” The more we immerse ourselves in digital communication, the more we lose the sense of touch and the physical presence of the Other. That theme — the disappearance of genuine otherness, of friction, of the encounter with what resists us — runs through everything he has written and connects directly to Merton’s concern about the false self, which is ultimately a self sealed off from real encounter with God or neighbor.
The essential Han reading list, in order of relevance to the Merton conversation:
The Burnout Society (2015) — short, dense, and the best starting point for Han generally. The core diagnosis of the achievement society is why it produces exhaustion rather than flourishing.
Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023) — Han’s most direct engagement with contemplation, leisure, and the value of doing nothing. The most obvious companion to Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.
The Scent of Time (2017) — on the loss of temporal depth, ritual, and the kind of time that allows genuine experience. Connects to Merton’s understanding of liturgical and contemplative time.
The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) argues that modernity has gutted the symbolic practices that once gave life coherence and meaning. Deeply relevant to Merton’s monastic framework.
In the Swarm (2017) and Infocracy (2022), Han discusses digital life, transparency, and the erosion of public discourse. More political, but useful for understanding the social consequences of the internal collapse, both men describe.
A Suggested Reading Sequence for the Two Together
If you want to read them in genuine dialogue, rather than one after the other, this sequence works well, at least it did for me, just saying:
Han, The Burnout Society — establish the diagnosis.
Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation — encounter the spiritual response
Han, Vita Contemplativa — see Han reaching toward what Merton already inhabits
Merton, Contemplative Prayer — the apophatic depth Han approaches but does not enter
Han, The Tonality of Thought — Han on his own roots and preoccupations
Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable — Merton as prophet and social critic
Merton, No Man Is an Island — the social ethics of the interior life.
By the end of that sequence, you will have a very clear sense of where the two men illuminate each other and where they genuinely diverge — and why that divergence matters.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for a most insightful article. I needed to hear this today. Warmest wishes, Rob.