Heewon Seo

Based on Levinas’ insight, I explore the paradox of materiality that enables the beginning of freedom for the existent but at the same time ensnares individuals in the contingency and temporality of materiality. In the digital era, humans, seemingly liberated from their accidental and temporal bodies through virtual reality or the attempt to become cyborgs, continue to grapple with profound solitude. In their attempts to avoid the inevitable return of solitude, individuals tend to adopt various avatars in virtual realms, inadvertently finding themselves even more solitary. This pursuit leads to a sense of nihilism, ultimately resulting in a loss of meaning. Drawing on Levinas’s understanding of solitude and openness to the unknown, Nietzsche’s concept of active nihilism, and Haraway’s cyborg fictional imagination, I argue that education should not only guide individuals back to their own bodies with attentiveness but also help them embrace their inescapable solitude by cultivating negative capability.

This article questions the meaning of Eros in sexual desire and education by comparing the Greek mythological figure Butes—who, enchanted by the Sirens’ song, throws himself into the sea despite the risk of death—with today’s narcissistic ‘digital players’, who, through dating apps, AI, or virtual reality, exchange only pleasure while avoiding negativity. First, it examines Pascal Quignard’s Boutès (2008), contrasting Butes with both Orpheus, who neutralizes the Sirens’ song with his own music, and Odysseus, who is bound to the mast to resist the Sirens’ seduction. Through Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (1986), the article also emphasizes the paradoxical nature of Eros, which inherently involves madness and suffering: it critiques today’s tendency towards convenient love that seeks only controlled, safe thrills with risk-free desire. Furthermore, drawing on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, this article develops Carson’s idea of Eros as the ‘desire to know the unknown’, highlighting the similarities between Eros and knowing, the lover and the thinker. It argues that when the narcissistic self opens itself to the longing for love and wisdom, it paradoxically gains a deeper understanding of itself, in an ongoing process of learning. In this sense, the article advocates philosophy that encourages individuals to grow by moving beyond the comfort of pleasure-satisfaction, embracing negativity, and casting themselves into desire for the unknown.

This paper explores the meaning of authenticity by comparing Sartre’s (1989) de- piction of “hell” in No Exit with Byung-Chul Han concept of social media as a “digital panopticon,” using the framework I shall dub “No Break, No Outside, No Mirror, No Torturer.” It investigates the paradox of authenticity, where the im- perative to “be authentic” paradoxically renders authenticity increasingly elusive, particularly in today’s social media-driven environment. In a world where both the power to see and the power to be seen have been made available to all individuals in less than two decades, social media has satisfied people’s natural desire to see and be seen. At the same time, however, it compels people to voluntarily expose themselves, fostering dependence on the gaze, amplifying narcissism and bad faith, and ultimately reinforcing conformity. As Han (2018) observes, authenticity serves as a selling point, turning the self into an implicit form of self-exploitation and con- formity by emphasizing system-compatible difference and uniqueness. To counter this performative authenticity, this paper draws on Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy (1990) to propose a new direction for authenticity—one that questions personal freedom and connects it to ethical responsibility toward the Other. Lastly, the paper explores the potential of social media as a space for offering the self as a gift to others and society, and for encountering and responding to the suffering of others in solidarity. This possibility begins with a “pedagogy of seeing and being seen,” which shifts the gaze from judgment to responsibility, and develops into a “peda- gogy of the invisible,” emphasizing the transcendence of the Other and fostering ethical responsibility while promoting critical awareness of invisible systems and totality. It ultimately suggests an understanding of authenticity that is linked not only to individual freedom but also to the freedom of others and society. The per- sistent effort to transform the closed room of egoism—a Sartrean hell—into a space of solidarity, where the self is offered as a gift to the Other and society, does not promise a perfect utopia. Instead, it opens us to lives that are, if only slightly, less egoistic and a little more free from bad faith.

The myth of Gyges reveals the human fantasy of personal freedom, away from responsibility and the gaze of others, through a ring that makes the wearer invisible. Today, the digital self not only can make themselves invisible through the ring called the Internet and social media but also can control their ‘visibility’ so that they can ,be seen by others as they want. Levinas argues that Gyges’ ring is a symbol of separation, which is a prerequisite for freedom: it sep-arates individuals from the whole and guarantees interiority. However, today’s digital self uses its invisibility to become a voyeur of the lives of others and, simultaneously, has constant opportuni-ties for self-exhibition through which to attract the gaze of others; this results in its being totalized by the world without keeping its interiority. This paper analyses the pathological aspects of the dig- ital self, which fails to protect its interiority: it examines its para-doxical characteristics of voyeurism and exhibitionism, and criticizes the larger systems and social structures that create and promote these forms of behaviour through the power of the gaze. Ultimately, it proposes how education can construct interiority, passivity, and criticism as ethical prerequisites that can resist the totalizing system of digital visibility within the framework of Levinasian ethics. Through this, the paper explores the possibility of an education reorients the digital self—from voyeurism and exhibitionism toward .learning from the Other and sharing oneself as a gift, grounded in openness.

In an era dominated by algorithmic reason and emotional sanitization, The Beast (2023) reimagines Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle within a futuristic vision where human interior becomes a target of technological cure. This paper argues that the “beast” is not an external threat but the existential essence of humanity—fear and anxiety before an uncontrollable future. Drawing on Sartre’s concepts of bad faith and faith, and Derrida’s paradox of belief, it explores how belief, inherently impossible, enables a leap toward the Other, impossibility, and the future. Central is the notion that —stupidity—opens the infinite, and paradoxically enables human intelligence. Thus, what distinguishes humans from AI is not intelligence but stupidity: the capacity to believe in the impossible. Ultimately, this paper contends that belief, inherently bound to failure, is learned through such failure—and that this very failure makes possible the leap: toward opening the door—to the Other, the impossible. Even if it fails again.

This paper exposes how excessive reliance on either “efficiency-based algorithms,” which aim at rapid and accurate problem-solving, or highly addictive “randomized engagement- oriented algorithms,” which continuously distract individuals from being immersed in the present, induces a high level of conformity and thereby renders genuine wandering impos- sible, hindering human maturation. This paper names the current tendency that eliminates negativity—such as failure, pain, the capacity to resist uncertainty and stimulation—and enforces only positivity—such as achievement, pleasure, stability, and the immediate sat- isfaction of stimulation—as “achievement perfectionism.” On the basis of Byung-Chul Han’s critique, who diagnoses such a society as The Palliative Society, this paper reveals that wandering accompanied by negativity and resistance to conformity is indispensable for human maturation. As a counter-concept to The Palliative Society and “achievement perfectionism,” the paper turns to Stanley Cavell’s (Cities of words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2004) notion of “moral perfectionism,” which leads to “an unattained but attainable self” who can embrace negativity and explore the “rejected and underval- ued” paths with conformity’s aversion and openness. Finally, this paper, on the basis of Jan Masschelein’s (2010) poor pedagogy, focuses on the “attentive wandering” in which “moral perfectionism” can be educationally realized. Furthermore, this paper proposes an “educating of the gaze” through which individuals in the digital age, as “digital flaneurs,” can internalize the practice of genuine wandering that pays attention—thinking about what to see and how to respond to it—not only through the experience of bodily wandering by walking, but also by breaking away from the “pseudo-wandering” within algorithms.

Building on Hannah Arendt’s insights, storytelling is presented not merely as a literary form, but as a fundamental mode of human existence and meaning-making. However, as Yuval Harari and Byung-Chul Han suggest, contemporary digital culture has led to a crisis of narration through de-narrativization (the fragmentation of narratives into algorithmic data) and story-selling (the commodification of personal narratives). In response to this crisis, this paper proposes the concept of Self-Narrative Resistance, which examines how individuals actively challenge and reshape their own narratives against imposed structures. Rather than passively conforming to algorithm-driven representation and performative self-branding, individuals navigate and reconfigure their self-narratives as a mode of resistance. Finally, the paper turns to Donna Haraway’s fictional imagination as a way to transcend traditional master plots and rethink self-narration. Speculative modes of identity construction are further explored through fictional imagination, hybrid media, and AI-based reflective interaction—enabling forms of self-narrative that move beyond normative narrative frames, toward figures such as the chimera and the cyborg. By positioning Self-Narrative Resistance as an existential-phenomenological practice, the paper proposes a renewed understand- ing of self-narration—as a fundamental mode through which human beings critically engage with the world, move beyond internalized narrative structures, and create new meaning in life. In this light, self-narration becomes not only a gesture of surviving the digital present, but also a way of imagining the otherwise.