In Praise of the Earth: A Journey into the Garden

by Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer (Translator)

The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.

Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.

Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.

Genres: Philosophy

160 pages, Hardcover

Published November 18, 2025

About the author

Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.

Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy in Korea before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study Philosophy, German Literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. He received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger in 1994.

In 2000, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he completed his Habilitation. In 2010 he became a faculty member at the HfG Karlsruhe, where his areas of interest were philosophy of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, ethics, social philosophy, phenomenology, cultural theory, aesthetics, religion, media theory, and intercultural philosophy. Since 2012 he teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where he directs the newly established Studium Generale general-studies program.

Han is the author of sixteen books, of which the most recent are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness" (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), a "society of transparency" (Transparenzgesellschaft), and on his neologist concept of shanzai, which seeks to identify modes of deconstruction in contemporary practices of Chinese capitalism.

Han's current work focuses on transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust.

Until recently, he refused to give radio and television interviews and rarely divulges any biographical or personal details, including his date of birth, in public.

Han has written on topics such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline, burnout, depression, exhaustion, internet, love, pop culture, power, rationality, religion, social media, subjectivity, tiredness, transparency and violence.

Reviews

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book; I will, in God's time, also take up gardening. This, too, is a spiritual act of worship (Rom 12:1)

[Colleen Abbey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry, politics and prose are intricately woven into his ‘eternal garden’….The inhabitants of which take on humanlike qualities, from endearing to appalling.

[Brage]

Mixed feelings.

The book is basically split into two halves, where the first is Han meditating on his favourite flowers and plants while sprinkling in some philosophical ideas here and there, and the second are his journal entries across a year (from 2016 through 2017) detailing his tending of his garden. This is definitely pretty personal for Han given his reclusive nature - he details among the texts the names he would give his children (if he had any), how his tending of the garden made him a deist, and his visit to Seoul to see his dying father.

I feel like Han is clearly a romantic guy, and there were moments in this book that felt quite charming. But I also can't help but feel that at times the little bits of philosophy and the connections between his garden and the digital life felt impromptu and almost arbitrary. In the end I feel like I did get an experience of sincerity and of something intimate, but at the same time it was not necessarily something that culminated into a main idea.

[Catalin Todea · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Praise of the Earth is one of Han’s most sensitive and personal books. I can sense in it much of the inception of Vita Contemplativa and his later works. The second part—the diary—is a bit repetitive but still enjoyable, and some passages add depth to the first section.
4.5

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like this book bc it was gift . Also there were some beautiful references that I circled in pencil.

[Harry Thorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Han's In Praise of the Earth makes the most sense read in the context of Han's other earlier works, which are sharply critical of "the burnout society" and the digitalization of modern life. Here Han provides an escape route through sustained attention to the natural world. In Han's case this involves spending time in his "secret garden" in Berlin, time that is beautifully described in the diary entries in the second of the book.