No More Learning

From now on, onwards and upwards mean the same thing. One can say that encompassing practice histories are not only teleologically directed; they also show a latently eschatological structure. In this field, imaginary goals and last things show a tendency to merge. As soon as the practising person is concerned not simply with the learn- ing of an art or craft as a process that can be concluded with the attainment of mastery, but rather with the existential art in which life as a whole strives for elevation and transfiguration, death and perfection inevitably come into contact. This trait is shared by paths of spiritual practice in the most diverse cultures; what sets them apart from one another are the codings of the highest and last, the modes of approach, the number of steps to complete, and the shaping of the different degrees of harshness against which the advanced must fight. The being-unto-death that the young Heidegger sought to attribute purely to the thrown Dasein's awareness of finitude had been known to apprentices of withdrawal since time immemorial - though they admittedly understood it as a being-to-completion. Consistently, their existential was not thrownness; that, as we know, is only true of those who cling to the world. Their existence was entirely centred on being drawn to the highest.
Paul's call for the Corinthians to be his imitators, just as he imitated Christ, makes it clear how the formation of stages is controlled from the middle. The middle is what lies below the perfect and ahead of the beginnings. Unlike in the Indian world, however, where the licence to teach is made dependent on the master's own complete realization, Stoicism and Christianity know the phenomenon of the imperfect teacher, who overrides his weaknesses by incorporating them into his teachings. To the extent that Paul felt able to teach virtues he himself did not possess, he could only present himself to fellow believers as a role model in the sense of a particular committed 'runner'. This indi- cates less, as is sometimes claimed, a proximity to the thought forms of Greek sports - something that he, as an educated zealot, must have loathed - than his talent for transforming himself into his addressees when writing. So here, speaking to Greeks, he experimentally became a Greek, just as he became a Roman when he needed to speak to Romans. It was, furthermore, quite clear to him that the perfection
247
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
vital for goal magnetism could not come from his own person, only from the great model he himself was emulating - which is why he carried out his magisterium as a stand-in, in the name of the one who would really have been authorized to teach, had he still been willing and able to act in praesentia after the resurrection. Paul was painfully aware of his lack of personal charisma, and he was always aware that his slight appearance made little impression on others. Logically enough, he therefore shifted his claim to authority to hysterical apos- tolic speech acts from afar. He was able to incorporate such addresses uncontradicted into his letters of instruction, which are dated to th. e years between AD 48 and 60.
In analogous fashion, Seneca discovered the position of the advanced adept as a literarily fruitful starting point for a philosophical lecture- ship, and likewise distinguished himself from AD 62 onwards as a writer of instructive epistles. Formally, these were addressed to a certain Lucilius, a younger man of uncertain personal profile who had resolved to devote his life to philosophical exercises, but they were aimed beyond him at a larger audience from the start. In formal terms, Seneca approached his own role as an apostolic orator by speaking up as the intermediary of a doctrine of completion; he too drew on halfway experiences to initiate the beginner into the exerci- tationes spirituales of the school and attract a wider audience at the same time. He knew that he was still on the way to perfection, with a substantial distance still ahead. Nonetheless, his advanced degree of maturity allowed him to speak with authority about the highest good, which lay beyond his present status. Thus he asked, 'What can augment the complete? ', directly giving the answer himself: 'Nothing - unless that which it augmented was not perfect. ' 'The ability to improve is a sign of something imperfect. '43 If growth suggests imper- fection, then reduction does so all the more.
Death Exam: Wisdom Teaching as Training for the Theatre of Cruelty
Seneca's concept of wisdom as a goal of perfection is infused in its every fibre with the Roman principle of reality, which understands the reality of the real as the harshness of life. Thus education to reality always meant preparation for an examination in tolerating cruelties. While Roman power is exerted as a collaboration with fate, Roman wisdom can only be proved as an unwavering resistance to the power
248
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
that people through No culture was so skilled at turning terror into theatre and placing the taking of life at the centre of public rituals. Where else could one observe such a unity of enter-
tainment and massacre?
Where one conceives the world after the image of a theatre of
cruelty, the wise man can only be presented on such a stage as an actor. No simulations are permitted on this stage, as the games appear realer than life itself. While life is only cruel on occasion, the Roman arena elevates cruelty to a central principle and a routine, extending to the actual butchery in the sand and the genuine tortures at the ramp. On a world stage of this type, there is only one difference that makes a difference: that between the standing, who will still be upright at the end, and the falling, who stay fallen. 44 Consequently, wisdom can only be invoked here with the image of standing upright - if there was ever a substance prior to Hegel that needed to be devel- oped as a subject, it is the one that presented itself in the figure of the Stoic seer. This is why Seneca says that it is not surprising if someone who is not tested goes about their life quietly; what is amazing is when 'someone stands up (extolli) while everyone allows themselves to be kept down (deprimuntur), and stays standing while everyone is lying on the ground: ibi stare ubi omnes iacent'. 45 The only risk posed by torture is that it could break the organ of upright stance, namely the spirit. The completely wise man, however, is the epitome of intransigence: 'He stands there upright under any given load. Nothing makes him smaller, nothing that has to be carried displeases him [. . . ] he knows that he lives to carry a burden. '46
Like Paul, Seneca requires a solid embodiment of perfection in an exemplary individual for the credibility of his message, even though he cannot point - like the apostle - to a master of constancy whose stabilitas extended beyond death. Thus the author contents himself with invoking the ideal, which would still be equally binding for us if there had never been a perfect sage. The Stoics' victories over death require the participation of the practising person in a different mode of perfection: they aim for a non-Christian savoir mourir. Their appeal is directed at a summum bonum that resides in the developed human mind (mens). As long as this mind has not worked its way to complete self-confidence, it continues to know uncertainty and fleet- ingness (volutatio). If it is perfect, it enters a lasting state of immobile solidity (immota stabilitas)47 - and in the Roman context, as noted above, stabilitas always means resistance to torture in the death exam. In this criterion alone lies the difference between a completely
249
EXAGGERA TION l'ROCEDURES
an
BU. ""'-"" one itwas
look back on decades of serious philosophical practice. Even after so long a time, however, he was forced to admit that he had so far only been able to talk himself (suadere) into believing what was best for him; in all those years, he did not manage to achieve a complete per- suasion (persuasio). And even successful self-persuasion would still, as he knew, not have brought him to his goal, for this would only be achieved when his wisdom teaching had become completely ingrained in him and available (parata) in any situation, even the most adverse. It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.
Seneca's testimony not only offers an insight into the endo- rhetorical procedures of Latin Stoicism; it also shows an incipient theory of stages, with the typical three-stage structure comprising the beginners, the advanced and the perfect - though the peak of the final stage is hidden by clouds. As usual, the operative essential is in the middle, for only here can work on the assimilation of the improbable take place.
Seneca the teacher is charming enough to take his own imperfec- tion together with that of his student. Hence the admonition to both: 'More than we have overcome so far still lies before us, but the most important factor in advancing is the will to advance. ' The way is long, for what we want to win are not victories in the Persian Wars, but vic- tories over the forces that have defeated the greatest peoples: greed, ambition and fear of death. 48
Elsewhere (especially in letters 72 and 75), Seneca develops the outline for a five-stage pyramid by dividing the advanced adepts in the middle zone (medii) into three groups and levels (gradus): those who are finding their feet like convalescents; those who have already made significant progress (profectus), though there is still a long way to the highest level (multum desit a summa); and the third kind (tertium genus), for whose members complete wisdom is already within reach (in ictu) - 'they are not yet on dry ground, but have reached the harbour' (nondum in sicco, iam in portu). With each level of ascent, the practising person comes closer to the summum bonum, of which it is said that our desire inevitably pauses before it, 'for there is no other place above the highest' (quia ultra summum non est 10cus),49 The higher the ascent to perfection, the more stable one's anchoring in a final immunity.
In its doctrine of the final goals of life, Stoic theology adopts ele- 250
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOM1'LETE
ments in
in the noetic sphere, take part in
practice purely concerns the task of turning listless sharing into clear co-ownership and minimizing the proportion of the corruptible in relation to the non-corruptible. The chance for humans is the trans- formation of an unstable methexis (share) into a stable hexis (pos- session, habit). They are meant not only to touch the higher sphere occasionally, but to settle there firmly and irreversibly. How this can be achieved is explained through the conventional circle of perfection: we could never perfect ourselves without already having a share in perfection; indeed, we could not even want to approach the summum bonum were it not already within us as a target image, albeit only darkened and broken. The purpose of all practice is to break this breaking, to clear the darkening, and to correct the deviation of the perfect into the imperfect that has been imposed by fate.
Curriculum Vitae a Priori
The wise man, then, is not an artist with visions of something new, but rather a conservator in search of the original state. The restora- tion of a concealed archetype is his passion. Whether the conserva- tion succeeds is another matter, as Western apprentices of the cura sui have only a fraction of the resources known in the Orient at their disposal - they must seek redemption primarily in the automatiza- tion ensured by countless repetitions that are meant to ingrain the improbable habitus of inner peace in the bodily memory. Whether this meets the requirements of an ars moriendi worthy of the name remains uncertain - in extremis, it is the psychophysical constitution that is most decisive, while the lifelong habit of suppressing the fear of death and preventing our fantasies from making things even worse than they already are only plays a collaborative part.
The simple three-stage schemata already show how the lives of the practising are integrated into plans for ascent. Recessively excluded subjectivity can no longer participate in the conventional lives of the worldlings, and must therefore rely on special curricular paths. As the fates of the external human are to become indifferent, while inner development demands full attention, it is not surprising if the practising being-in-the-world consistently takes the form of an ascent on a spiritual or anthropotechnic ladder - and the advances in the field of subtle physiology, especially in Indian practice forms, must also always be taken into account. Regardless of whether one looks
251
indestructibility. work
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
at Eastern or however, it is
the act of withdrawal as such only marks the very beginning a career. The real difficulties of existence on the shore of observation reveal themselves in the working-out of curricular steps. These ensure the division of the practising life into meaningfully experienceable sequences and the structuring of the journey towards the high goal in stretches that are congruent with the aspirant's self-experience. The chapters of this curriculum vitae correspond to the intermediate rounds and daily legs of lived life (and in bio-mimetic sports events such as tournaments and major bicycle races).
As soon as the motif of being-unto-completion takes hold of exist- ence, it causes the projection of the vertical ladder schema onto the time axis. That is why ascent can be understood as progress, and movement on the scala as the course of life. Being-unto-completion thus becomes the most powerful 'biography generator' - to adopt a technical term from recent literary criticism. 5o It causes curricular effects not only in the sense that occasionally, ascetic projects indeed produce careers that seem worth recounting in retrospect; rather, the generative energy of perfection-driven life projects already refers to future life stories, as if these had already been recounted in advance. The practising person would then only need to enter their personal or spiritual name and the local particularities of their practice life in the biographical form. The schematization of existence in the step-based systems of practice paths extends so far that a person could only give their story an individual touch through an admission of failure, or by a description of how they fell short of the requirements for asceticism. The 'path' they have taken, furthermore, seems like a curriculum vitae a priori. AU it needs in order to match its factual content with the schema is actually to be lived.
Needless to say, the dominance of the schema over lived life is by no means specific to spiritual lives; it appears equally often in the biog- raphies of the other 'classes'. For as long as humans can remember, societies layered in classes have understood the fulfilment of the type as the fulfilment of the individual. Only where new fate-generators such as greater vertical mobility, differentiated educational paths, social unrest and epidemic neuroticism (with its side effect, the com- pulsion to compensatory self-invention) ensure greater variation on the side of lived life can recounted life increasingly deviate from the schematicism of advance biographies. This shift of emphasis mani- fested itself in late medieval Europe in the emancipation of the novella from the legend. It was above all the modern novel that articulated the needs of individuals for non-schematic biographies between the
252
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
seventeenth and twentieth centuries - not without creating schemata for deviating life stories, which in turn provoked new distinctions.
Wherever individuals submit to the call of being-unto-completion, the absolute imperative 'You must change your life! ' is concretized into the ascetic or perfectionist imperative: 'Always behave in such a way that the account of your development could serve as the schema for a generalizable history of completion! ' This call to an exemplary life takes its addressees out of the natural and people's histories once and for all, placing them instead under the star of completion. This may have been called the star of redemption in some spiritual com- munities - it is the same heavenly body, and approaching it follows the same law of existence in the vertical. Hence approaching a star - and only this! - is the primary motto of existence in the time of com- pletion. Heidegger, however - to whom we owe this turn of phrase- concealed this star behind a seemingly impenetrable cloud cover in his early work and camouflaged the indirect approaching thereof under the pseudo-fatalistic formula 'being-unto-death'. In reality, even the young Heidegger had not entirely lost sight of the noble death that faces the individual as a death of completion, and the only substantial concession to modernity'S breakdowns of meaning that he was pre- pared to make in the shadow of the World War consisted in showing the impenetrable facticity of the end as emphatically as that of the beginning: where there are thrown people, there are also fallen ones. Consequently he ascribed a certain purpose of completion to prema- ture and externalized death, so that every death implicitly revealed an element of complete incompletion or incomplete completion. 51
In the older traditions, approaching the star of completion (or the ascent to the summit of perfection - ad celsitudinem perfectionis52) took place under a protocol documented as much by the manifold monastic rules and books of exercises in the Christian hemisphere as the incomprehensibly multi-variant spiritual curricula of the Indian world, regardless of whether they belong to the Yogic, Tantric or Vedantic schools. In both universes, the practising life per se takes the form of a grand narrative. The concern is the same in both cases: the assimilation of the split-off individual to the absolute.
Benedict's Ladder of Humility
Such similarities come about in two forms of asymptotic move- ment: on the one hand along the via perfectionis, through a constant
253
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
increase in the powers that make us resemble the summum bonum or final life monad, and on the other hand along the via humilitatis, where the adept discards their self on the assumption that the old ego will sooner or later be replaced by the absolute self or nothingness. The first movement is translated into a novel of achievement with a markedly forward-striving finality - I attempted earlier on to show elements of this in the two great death scenes of Old Europe, the death of Socrates and the crucifixion of Christ in John's account; by contrast, the second movement must, in a sort of backward motion, be recounted as the history of a progressive self-evacuation. While the first form is intended to 'realize' the hidden God-man beneath the mask of trivial humaneness, the second depends on taking the sensory or empirical human to the point where their 'own' entirely disappears and is replaced by the Great Other, or great not-self.
I would like to show with an example from the early days of Western monasticism how the exchange of the profane subject for the higher self was envisaged in the Christian tradition. In the decisive seventh chapter of his Regula, 'On Humility', Benedict of Nursia outlines a twelve-step de-selfing course that he presents as a monastic analogy to the ladder that appeared to Jacob in a dream. This exer- cise in humility is described as a paradoxical ladder which the monk ascends to the extent that he learns to denigrate himself - or rather the natural human within him. While both ascending and descending angels can be seen on Jacob's Ladder, in keeping with the different angelic functions, Benedict rather wilfully equates the descending angels with hubristic souls - of which, following the oldest spiritual suggestion, one can then say that their downward motion is the just punishment for superbia - with no further thought for the possibility that descending angels could be selfless messengers in field service. The only true verticality is that which allows the practising to ascend self-humbling (humilitate ascendere). 53
On the first step - in fear and trembling - the pact with the observer beyond is sealed and the decision to renounce personal will is reso- lutely made. On the second, the abandonment of one's own will (propria voluntas) is put into action. On the third, the inner submis- sion of the adept to the higher authority is completed - comparable to a first instalment of the imitatio Christi. The fourth step serves to heighten obedience, not least in situations where the natural self tends to rebel against unjust treatment. On the fifth, all evil and base stir- rings of the heart are confessed to the abbot: the beginning of sacred psychoanalysis. On the sixth, the monk reaches the moment when
254
AND THE INCOMPLETE
IS thought
With a light insight, he now
'1 have become nothing and know nothing' (Ad nihilum redactus sum et nescivi). The seventh step sees the monacus entirely infused with the truth to which his lips testified on the sixth. He now says openly: 'I am a worm and not a man' (sum vermis et non homo). On the eighth step, the monk has learned to be no more than an organ of monastic life: he does only what the rule demands - not in the mode of service according to regulations, but rather in the spirit of highly motivated availability. On the ninth, tenth and eleventh steps
- described by Benedict with conspicuous haste, and written after one another without any real sense of progression (presumably because he took these passages, like some of the preceding ones, somewhat mechanically from the analogous sections of Cassian's Regula) - it is emphasized how important it is to reinforce silence and suppress unruly laughter. This means that whoever values the imitatio Christi must reduce their words until nothing issues from their mouth except what is exemplary and necessary for salvation.
Finally arriving at the goal, the twelfth step, the monk who has emerged from the Benedictine mould has become the perfect image of monasticism, his gaze ever lowered to the ground, a sinner and accused at every moment, bent and humbled, incurvatus et humil- iatus. 54 And yet, by the end of the course, love is supposed to have driven out fear; the lightness of the detached would have replaced constant effort. This lightness is the signature of spiritual success: where there was fear and trembling, there shall now be effortlessness. Instead of fearing hell, one is now a friend of the Lord.
At this point - to label the culmination - we encounter the central anthropotechnic principle of bona consuetudo: good habit. Tellingiy, the ending of this treatise on perfection contains not a word about illumination, completion or transfiguration. The description 'perfect' can no longer be applied to the human carrier, only to their most important quality, the love of God (caritas dei), of which it is said that because it is perfect (perfecta), it wards off all fear. The word timor stands for the sum of pathological affects by which the beginner felt possessed; one who has reached the goal will no longer discover any trace of them in himself. He has ceased to be the psychopath of God, and is now himself godlike through the easiest availability, pure kindness and collected spontaneity - though the creative, expressive dimension is excluded by the unflinching precept of taciturnitas. 55 If he has come to resemble the Highest, it is not on the side of the father but of the son, obedient to the end. The transformation of the monk
255
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
into statue to highest gradus on without any danger pride. This is the level at which the impossible has become easy, the wondrous has become habit, and detachment has become everyday: velut natural-
iter, the monk is already living here as if he were yonder.
Scala Paradis;: Anachoretic Psychoanalysis
Perhaps too little attention has been paid to how far the Benedictine Rule fostered an implantation of the Orient into the path of the West. The immeasurable successes of this monastic rule led to that transla- tion of the desert without which the older European culture of subjec- tivity would be inconceivable. It was only with Luther's Reformation that the Orient was driven out of newer Christianity - and along with it the priority of monastic strivings for salvation over lay spirituality. The anachoresis of the patriarch Antonius was certainly Eastern, for he transformed the desert into a spiritual palaestra, a training hall for demonic agons; the gymnosophk and semi-Yogic excesses of the Syrian pillar saints, whose reputation extended to Britain and India, was Eastern; the transformation of hermitdom in the rigid monastic barracks system of the early cenobites (from koinos bios, 'shared life'), which provided the matrix for obedient communism, was Eastern;56 the idea of unconditional obedience, which followed from the transformation of the spiritual teacher into the dominus, the sole ruler of the soul, was Eastern; and, not least, the over-enthusiastic idea of forcing salvation during one's lifetime, as evident in the crypto-angelistic concepts typical of the time, which stated that it was possible to exchange the profane ego for a holy selfness at the end of laborious asceticisms, was Eastern.
The master of early Catholic orientalism was undoubtedly St John Climacus (c. 525-605), abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai from around 580 onwards, author of the pldkes pneumatikai - 'spiritual tablets' - whose first scribes gave the name klimax, 'the ladder', which in Latin became the scala, that is to say the Scala Paradisi. The work stands out from the flood of monastic literature not only through the power of its language and its conceptual confidence, but even more through its masterful overview of monastic psychagogics. It offers no less than a sum of the anachoretic psychoanalyses that had developed in the Christian East in the wake of Athanasius' Life of Anthony, in a learning process that spanned several centuries. In the psychagogic analyses, everything revolves around uncovering and heightening the
256
AND THE INCOMPLETE
awareness struggling resistance
depression and (gastrimargia, gula), as as healing the soul through the complete elimination of pathological Here too, the fact that completion is described with the term apatheia, or transquillitas animi, testifies to the continuities that tie the monastic practice system back to the ascetic arts of pre-Christian practical philosophy and metaphorized athletism. In both cases, the life of the complete remains an anabasis unto death. 57
This text shows as scarcely any other document does that Christian Methodism comes from the desert, unlike the Greek, which was at home in the palaestra, the stadium and the schools of the rhetoricians; and unlike the Roman, which never denied its origins in the Field of Mars - it is no coincidence that Cicero, among others, had already pointed to the connection between the name of the army (exercitus) and its specific training, the drill (exercitatio). And naturally the con- nection to Jacob's dream image in Bethel cannot be omitted. In the Spiritual Tablets, the monastic mystical narrative of the long migra- tion of the soul also appears, beginning with the obligatory exodus from Egypt - and Egypt is to be found wherever there is a conceptu- ally, morally and emotionally alienated 'outside world' - ending with 'the resurrection of the soul before the general resurrection'58 and its retreat to the heaven of apathy, in the closest possible similarity to the image of God (homoiosis theou, similitudo Dei).
The thirty logoi or chapters of the scala were already equated early on with the steps (gradus) of the heavenly ladder, even though the order of chapters does not always form a systematically developing curriculum - otherwise it would scarcely be imaginable that the prayer on which John writes such exalted words is only mentioned on the third-last step. As in the chapter on humility in the Benedictine Rule, the scala of the Sinaite monks constitutes a ladder of humbling whose first rungs consist in the renunciation of worldly life, the discarding of social cares and the embarking on a pilgrimage - the peregrinatio is here simply equated with flight from the times (fuga saeculi) and the entrance into 'religious life'. 59 This, furthermore, makes it clear once again that when earlier authors use the epithet religiosus they are referring exclusively to the monastic and ascetic modus vivendi, with the modern scarecrow 'religion' far in the distance. Even as late as Diderot, the nun was simply called La reiigieuse, which meant a person who has chosen world renunciation as their profession - with tragic consequences in this particular case. If there is anything that must be completely frowned upon at this stage of incipient detach- ment from the trivial world, it is any hint of homesickness for Egypt.
257
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
If someone wants to become a stranger (xenos) to the world, they will regard the whole of it as a strange land. Whoever turns around will be turned into a statue, like Lot's wife. 60
While the three introductory logoi dealt with the curative secession from the outside world, the fourth chapter sees the author summon- ing his readers to God's training camp: this cannot occur under any other heading than 'blessed obedience' (de beata obedientia). These expositions are not so much a step in a curriculum as the platform for the entire existence of these 'fist-fighters and athletes of Christ', whose aim is 'to shatter the iron breastplate of habit'. 61 This demonstrates that flight from the world remains insufficient if not assisted by self- flight. Obedience is the monastic code word for those techniques that are suitable for renouncing the old human self by every trick in the book. The collection of examples provided by John in this chapter, by far the longest of all, testifies to the procedural awareness of the old abbots who were entrusted with supervising the monastic meta- morphoses. Here one sees how far the old self-experiential knowledge is cumulative in its constitution: after two hundred and fifty years of psychagogic experiments in the desert, the treasury of monastic empiricism was full to the brim. Those responsible for maintaining this knowledge knew clearly that all further ascents among their adepts would depend on the instruction they received in the first term of heavenly studies - hence their strictness, inconceivable by today's standards, in which the inhuman and the superhuman came into contact.
If there is a mandatory progression at any point on John's ladder, it is at the transition from the fourth step to the fifth, which concerns penitence and detention. Contemporary readers cannot help finding analogies between the description of penitential exercises and the harsher forms of modern group therapy, while the pathos of the sec- tions on the prison room is closest to modern regression methods such as primal therapy, rebirthing and the like - though in both cases, the possibility of breaking the patients mentally through excessive tests is accepted with pious or pseudo-salvatory ruthlessness. The old and modern cathartists are also surprisingly close together in how they view the meaning of tears; the Desert Fathers had already celebrated the gift of tears as a redemptive dowry. 62 Sin, we are told, is not a single isolated fact; the entire old human being must be called thus. 63 In what follows, we consistently re-encounter the concepts of askesis and p6nos familiar from athletic and philosophical contexts. 64 Even the Stoic concern only for one's own things (sua tantum curare) receives a suitable place in the monastic code; it ensures that whoever
258
THE COi'vlPLET£ AND THE INCOMPLETE
Theomimetic Radiance
I would like to dispense with a full description of the scala (which, in its further course too, remains more of a handbook of monastic psy- chology than a plausible novel on a journey of the soul) and content myself with a brief glance at the final steps. On the twenty-seventh step of ascent one reads of holy calmness (peri hieras hesychias), which is meant to be achieved after shedding profane selfdom. This is the state alluded to by the expression 'walking in the Spirit'. Nonetheless, one must still be wakeful; justified fear of relapse is found even in the cells of the most advanced practising, This is followed by remarks on prayer that are notable not only for their heightened tone, but above all for their late appearance, as if adepts were only permitted to receive this powerful instrument at the last minute - and yet the monks practise it from the very first day. The twenty-ninth step sees the triumph of the central term of monastic anthropotechnics: perfec- tion (teJei6tetes, perfectio). No other word can contribute more to the definition of this anthropotechnics than the 'theomimetic apathy' already mentioned in the title of this gradus - the calmness that imi- tates God. It is only with reference to this state that John can resort to so conventional and effusive a phrase as God's 'inhabitation' in the mortal human vessel,65 though not without reassuring himself with the Pauline formula for the integral change of subject: '1 no longer live, but Christ lives in me. '66 Apathy leads to detachment not only from human matters of every kind, but even from the memory of these. In perfect Platonic fashion, it grants the gift of seeing immortal- ity in beauty,67
A meditation on the three evangelical virtues of faith, hope and love is reserved for the thirtieth and final step. Here, the human body is transformed into a living monstrance: 'For where the heart is joyful, the face blossoms. '68 Some monks forget to eat and drink on this
259
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
are
surrounded
a bright glow. Now one can even use the phrase status angelicus, which puts Christian supremacism in a nutshell- and simultaneously explains how aspects of the highest can be present in the non-highest. Because the ontological difference between God and humans remains in force to the end, an intermediate element is required to ensure the participation of the lower in the higher. Assuming that angels are closer to God than to the human world, the angelization of a human being is synonymous with removing them from the human condi- tion and transferring them to the trans-human register of being. At the same time, angelic individuation - if the spiritual authors have their way - is no more than the return of humans to what they would always have been and remained if the corruption of their nature through the imitatio diaboli had not interfered.
Perfectionism and Historicism
After these overly hasty remarks on various manifestations of 'occi- dental teleology',69 one thing is plain: in the early days of the perfec- tion motif, the focus on perfection exclusively concerned the lives of the wise men and saints'? o The question of how the perfection- ist tendency was extended to the 'people' and the human race as a whole, occasionally even to the universe, is something that should be addressed in the necessary detail elsewhere. At present, what is missing is a critical account of the shared history of perfection- ism and universalism. Hints in this direction have been circulating for two hundred years under such broad terms as 'Enlightenment' or 'evolution', and in the corresponding grand narratives. Scarcely anyone would suspect in these the continued effects of anonymous ideas of perfection, hatched in the Christianized desert under strictly individual auspices and concerning the individual soul. It was only because the soul had gained a history there that the church, the ferry to the beyond, could conquer an analogous historicity. As church history could not keep its secret of perfection to itself, it was dis- closed to world history and published by philosophy. ? l 'Let us hasten to make philosophy popular' - Diderot's slogan would become the password of the anonymous perfectionists who, calling themselves Enlightenment thinkers, continued an old narrative form.
What we call historicism would then only superficially be the observation of all things from the perspective of becoming; in its
260
COMPLETE THE INCOMPLETE
same as
units - to
existing maximum, whether one it a people, humanity or the uni- verse. As the curriculum leading to perfection consists of a sequence of purifying ordeals, the extension of the idea of perfection from the individual to the church community, and from the community to the species, amounts to a constant increase in the format of the collective that is to be cathartically tested. It was initially the hermits who dis- covered the desert as the stage for the individual purgatory; they were followed by the cenobites as the inventors of the group purgatory, known first as the asketer{a, then later the monasterium and cloister - the first training camp for group perfection and centre of religious communism. The high Middle Ages then popularized the notion of a 'third place' (as Luther called it) in the beyond, which was now officially dubbed 'purgatory' and in which - an early manifestation of democracy - the Christian majorities received follow-up treatment. 72 Here we see a transcendent transitional society taking on its first contours. The Enlightenment, finally, invented progressive 'history' as an inner-worldly purgatory in order to develop the conditions of possibility of a perfected 'society'. This provided the required setting for the aggressive social theology of the Modern Age to drive out the political theology of the imperial eras. What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering - mathein pathein - into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things?
Our experiences with 'history' and its goddess 'society' offer so little encouragement, however, that one can find the anti-teleological reaction pervading the postmodern (or post-perfectionist) zeitgeist understandable in every sense, including its exaggeration as the intox- ication of aimless drift. Against the background of this disenchant- ment we can appreciate Chateaubriand's profound observeration: 'Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not. '73 In the eyes of the Romantic, the future means the dimension in which the poetry of imperfection unfolds. This can be shared in by those who resist the temptation of both perfection and inertia - the hellish parody of arrival. Need we still say that Nietzsche was the last true historicist? It was he who, in a century of shallow general education, guarded the eremitic secret of individual purgatory, which produces the greater human being.
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
Indian Teleology
I would like to conclude with an overview of the elementary forms of Indian perfectionism and its relationship to the temporal structures of the practising existence. If there has ever been a form of thought that left even the escalations of the occidental being-unto-the-goal behind, it is the Eastern teleology that developed on the Indian subcontinent. It is a truism that the magnetism of perfection has had more power- ful effects in ancient and modern India than in any other civilization. Indian spirituality is the planetary granary of narcissism - assuming one can free up this term, coined by psychoanalysis but no longer monopolized, for a new description of spiritual self-relationships in general
While Narcissus, the egotechnically unenlightened youth, leans over the water's edge and seeks to embrace his delightful mirror image - causing him to lose his balance, topple forwards and drown - the Indian contemplator bends over their inner self and begins to ascend. They waste little time with the reflections looking back at them, rather being careful to open their field of consciousness for the presence of the transcendent witness, though here too, it is initially and mostly amalgamated with the figure of the Great Other. In a culture where the number of gods exceeded that of humans, spir- itual life inevitably became an endless tournament of Great Others - the pre-Socratic dictum that everything is full of gods applies far more to Indian than Greek conditions. 74 The consequence of divine overpopulations is that elements of imagining thought are superim- posed on the pure expectation of the witness self. The theological phantasm involuntarily steps in front of the imageless presence of the all-encompassing soul in the individual soul. Removing such super- impositions and burning up the residues of pathological individual- ity from earlier life and current childhood in the 'flame of attention' is the declared purpose of all the spiritual techniques developed on Indian soil; gaining an adequate sense of their wealth of forms, peaks and nuances in extenso is an almost equally futile undertaking for Indians and non-Indians alike.
The beginnings of Indian anthropotechnics refer back to an archaic mental and psychagogic process that can be traced to the pre- Aryan period. It is no coincidence that one of the oldest names for the ascetic is shramana, 'the toiler' - a word that directly recalls the Greek ponos and the athletes who prided themselves on their philoponia. Supposedly the word ashramas, which is traced to the
262
THE COMPLETE AND
INCOMPLETE
to
forest hermits; this also seems to be the origin of the term 'ashram',
which originally denoted a hermitage, an ascetic's place of practice, before branching out to all manner of venues for meditative retreat, including the monastery-like settlements in the vicinity of a spiritual teacher. The parallels with the phenomenon of Christian eremitism are plain to see - and the affinity between athletic-somatic practice and Yogic and spiritual self-concern is obvious. The reverence shown towards silence both in India (where the holy man is known as the muni, meaning 'silent man') and in the Egyptian deserts points in the same direction. In both centres of asceticism, people had understood that any form of ordinary speech amounted to a profanation that entangled the soul once more in the very thing from which their with- drawal was meant to free them.
A brief glance at the vocabulary with which those contemplators had articulated their spiritual goals since ancient times already shows how radically Indian spirituality is based on the elaboration of seces- sion motifs. The four basic terms of spiritual life - mok~a, apavarga, nirvrtti and nivrtti - all belong to the verbal field of withdrawal, turning away, disappearance, desisting and expiry, each with an extensive apparatus of anthropotechnic procedures responsible for the assimilation of recessive qualities. Without further commentary, I shall follow Heinrich Zimmer's overview of the semantic fields of the highest goal-related words:
Moksa, from the root muc, 'to loose, set free, let go, release, liberate, deliver; to leave, abandon, quit', means 'liberation, escape, freedom, release; rescue, deliverance; final emancipation of the soul'. Apavarga, from the verb apavrj, 'to avert, destroy, dissipate; tear off, pull out, take out', means 'throwing, discharging (a missile), abandonment; comple- tion, end; and the fulfilment, or accomplishment of an action'. Nirvrtti is 'disappearance, destruction, rest, tranquillity, completion, accom- plishment, liberation from worldly existence, satisfaction, happiness, bliss'; and nivrtti: 'cessation, termination, disappearance; abstinence from activity or work; leaving off, desisting from, resignation; discon- tinuance of worldly acts or emotions; quietism, separation from the world; rest, repose, felicity'. 76
If one wishes to follow the development of Indian practice cultures from the perspective of high abstractions, one should ask here too in what mode the original ascetic secession and the development of cultures of recessive subjectification took place. The fates of Indian anthropotechnics only differ very fundamentally from their Western
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
is more or as a family
and therefore does not initially need to acquired through an indi- vidualized reaction to the absolute imperative. The answer to the call 'You must change your life! ' is inherent in the Brahmanic life as such, which in its sum represents nothing other than a collective secession. In essence, it is the implantation of a caste of god-men, or rather man-gods, amidst and above the non-Brahmanic populations. From this point of view, the oldest Brahmanic existence promises a quiet growth into a firmly established structure of hereditary superhuman- ity. Just as one could define the ordinary Westerner as 'so politic a state of evil',77 to use a Shakespearean phrase, which does not permit the influx of a single virtue, then the modus vivendi of the Brahmanic man-god could be described as a stable republic of unaugmentable merits.
The Secret of the Second Secession: Karma-Darkening and Striving for liberation
Even in such a culture, however, the question of the personal appro- priation of the legacy arises - especially in the time of social change, when the first individualization began in the early cities. Just as being born into a priestly house did not automatically solve the spiritual problems experienced by the sons of Protestant vicars, descent from a Brahman family could not remove all the uncertainties of life that might accompany the existence of a Brahman's progeny. The indi- vidualization of a sense of class superiority demanded by this can, according to the logic of the matter, only be achieved through an addi- tional secession of the single member from the seceded group. This necessity of a second secession was the evolutionary motor of ancient Indian culture. Its initial paradox was that it alleged a seemingly unsurpassable peak as the starting point for further differentiations. Consequently, the only dimension of Brahmanic existence suitable for heightening and surpassing was the area of negative statements on life and the world. Certainly the earliest Brahmans were already familiar with a degree of world-distance; this came from the emphasis on the ecstatic departure from the world of senses - praised since time immemorial as the royal road to experiencing the final reality - but the priestly and familial ties affecting the heads of Brahmanic house- holds, together with their divine self-assurance, set palpable limits to an actually realized flight from the world. If members of the younger
264
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
generations aspired to a deeper appropriation of the ecstatic legacy, they were directed almost automatically towards the radicalization of withdrawal - not only in the second half of life, after fulfilling one's Brahmanic procreative duties and passing on the divine secret to one's descendants, but in the first, discarding the procreative urge and ignoring the previously unassailable passing on of the holy fire from father to son. It is above all through this - more than through the oppressive real plight that had always affected India - that the pessimistic blurring of judgement concerning the totality of existence was able to gain the upper hand.
Only in this context can one make sense of the otherwise barely explicable opening of Indian culture to the wheel of rebirths, an image still unknown to the Vedic singers. The mysterious success of the doctrine of rebirth can only be appreciated if one views it as the means chosen by the ascetics to advance the necessary darkening of the worldview in the spirit of the second secession. It provides the ontological foundation for the asceticism of the early leavers; only this asceticism could have an interest in describing the universe as a trap for the soul, a penal and illusionistic institution in which those who are conceived and born are all reconceived and reborn beings who move forward from one imprisonment to the next. From this perspective, the doctrine of rebirths not only articulates a sublime metaphysics of self-propagating guilt - in this sense the functional equivalent of the Egyptian-Christian judgement myths, and hence to an extent a vehicle for metaphysicized ressentiment - but is also the conditio sine qua non for the secession of a class of young profes- sional ascetics. These rebels adopted the chronic resistance to the curse of procreation once it occurred to them to understand it directly as the procreation of the curse. From that point on, the reality of the real could not be defined alone by the misery that humans synchroni- cally inflict upon one another; it equally asserted itself diachronically as a proliferation of stored guilt. Henceforth, the great watchword 'liberation' (mok~a) referred less to the possibility of following on from the original ecstasy; instead, it changed into the password for the flight from impure and hopeless being.
One can see how liberation had to mutate into a phenomenon of longue duree under such conditions. As such, it was not yet suitable to be heightened into an existential project - for 'existential' is always synonymous with 'manageable in this life'. As long as individuals wander on the long tracks of karmic time, the pilgrimage to liberation is dominated by inert rhythms. Although, after the infiltration by the doctrine of rebirth, all substantial time was recognized as a time of
265
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
of individual - it was of
Buddha that sought to exceed the limits of the inert karmic machine and ensure its standstill in this life. What is decisive, however, is that Indian asceticism, like that of the Christian desert, ultimately knows only individual-purgatorial tests and individual-eschatological salva- tions. If it were capable of conceiving something resembling a world salvation time, it would perhaps be most feasible under the image of a thick rope of countless karmic threads with varying length, colour and purity. India's immunity to temptation by the idea of a history common to all stems from the fact that its culture of meditation had already dissolved the phantom of a universally shared world time into millions of invidualized salvation histories early on - an opera- tion that would only present itself to the socia-holistically enchanted Europeans, mutatis mutandis, through the post-Enlightenment of the twentieth century. Though it was deeply perfectionist, and in this sense historicist, it never occurred to Indian culture to acknowledge collective perfections as serious options. Its indifference to the ideas of progressive salvation politics was repaid by Western ideologues with the label 'ahistorical',
Against this background, one can understand the mounting nega- tivism that took over Indian spirituality from the days of the early Vedic man-gods onwards, finally maturing into the complete systems of mutually reflected world- and life-denial during the generation of Buddha and Mahavira (in the fourth century Be, according to recent dating). At the time of these great teachers, the impulse of ascetic secession had long spread to the other castes and infected them with the spirit of radical negation - certainly always against the back- ground of the old, generally Indian concern for purifying sequences of acts and touches. Naturally such evaluations are always based on an element of authentic existential disposition. One does not need to deny the distress of the young Siddhartha upon his first departures from his father'S palace, when he first saw the ills of the world in the shape of the sick, the old and the dead with his own eyes, nor his fasci- nation with the ascetic, whom he supposedly met last when he left the palace by the north gate, and whose sight pulled Siddhartha onto the path of redemption. We must be allowed to surmise, however, that he saw the ascetic first, and that this encounter indicated to him the necessity of liberating oneself from sickness, age and death. No prince outside of legend would ever think of relating the sight of poor or sick people to himself. Only someone whose interest in asceticism had
266
THE COMPLETE THE INCOMPLETE
1S
in favour, would in a way. A
son does not ask for vaccines against the ills of existence; he is inter- ested in a fight where victory seems nobler than a royal inheritance. The great systems of pessimism are less concerned with idiosyncratic tendencies coming from the existential disposition of the protagonists than with the laws of second-degree ethical secession, or the break with worldly life from the non-Brahmanic position. For ascetics who had chosen this gesture, the path to the negativization of existence was the only one still open.
These circumstances are expressed in all varieties of Indian perfec- tion projects in post-Vedic periods. The highest goal- the unification with absolute reality, whether this was taken as the final self or not-self (in a systemically defamiliarized version: the striving for total immu- nity in being or nothingness) - is fixed a priori, and it is correspond- ingly stereotypical to state that people should go to whatever lengths necessary to attain it. It is therefore more than justified to speak of 'Eastern teleology'. Where such a high level of goal-awareness, even supremacist frenzy, belongs to the basic characteristics of a practice culture, it is inevitable that there will be greatly differing notions of these goals.
The Slow and Fast Paths
The fundamental division of Indian thought in terms of the concep- tion of final goals was summed up most plainly by Mysore Hiriyanna: 'So far as the nature of the goal of life is concerned, the Indian systems may be divided into two classes - those which conceive of it merely as one of absolute freedom from misery and those which take it as one of bliss also. '78 (The author makes no mention of the altruistic turn in Mahayana Buddhism, presumably because he views the elevation of sympathy to one of the highest goals in life as an element that is foreign to the basic Indian tendency. ) In general, one can probably say that the more developed the motifs of world-denial and release from the compulsion to be are in a practice system, the more decisively it espouses the former option (which corresponds typologically to Stoic apatheia), while the world- and life-affirming movements naturally tend more towards a culmination of asceti- cism in a divine, even supra-divine rapture. Similarly, the affinity of negatively redemptive systems with a quick solution that can still be attained in this life is just as plausible as the compatibility between
267
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
of progress in rooms of reincarnation.
With regard to the temporal profiles of practising life, no other system displays such extreme variations as Buddhism: wherever it mingles with traditions of archaic shamanic magic, as in Tibet, it reaches excesses of ascetic negativity that are unmatched in the world - here the salvific impatience of early Buddhism lost virtually all influence, while the fatalism of rebirth triumphantly returned, infused with the darkest manifestations of a life-swallowing sacrifi- cial mentality. Even the most extreme contemplators, including those entombed alive and other athletes of self-elimination, are here faced with the prospect of numerous returns. Even with the harshest of asceticism, then, progress can only take place in small steps. At the other end of the scale are the reflections, typical of Zen Buddhism, on the question of whether enlightenment comes suddenly and soon, or gradually and late. Concerning this, the Chinese master Huineng (638-713) tells us in the Platform Sutra: 'Good friends, in the Dharma there is no sudden or gradual, but among people some are keen and others dull. '79 The question left unanswered by this remark, however, is whether the detachment takes place in minutes or decades. But regardless of whether a school of Zen Buddhism favours the sudden or the gradual line, the movement as a whole, due to its basic thera- peutic and atheoretical attitude, proves sufficiently impatient to be attractive for the spiritual aspirations of Western people, who only know life as a finale.
It would be futile to examine the procedural details of Indian self-technologies in the present context - firstly, because this subject would open up an ocean of differentiations whose exploration would require more time and energy than any interested mortal has at their disposal, and secondly, because almost every technical term in this field poses virtually insurmountable semantic difficulties for Western observers. What nonetheless seems familiar about the Indian practice doctrines is the fact that they too, like their Western counterparts, are almost universally arranged in step-based systems. Among these, the eight angas or 'limbs' from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, to name only one example, have acquired a particular reputation: (1) the tamings (yama), (2). the disciplines (niyama), (3). the body positions (asana), (4) breath control (pranayama), (5) the withdrawal of the senses from objects (pratyahara), (6) concentration (dharana), (7) medita- tion (dhyana), (8) enstatic trance (samadhi}. 80 As in all systems of progressive habitualization, the dispositions acquired in the earlier steps - especially the first two, which amount to a moral propae-
268
THE COMPLETE AND THE lNCOMPLETE
an course in
the higher-level exercises, providing the base that can, and should, remain athematic in actu.
Analogous ascents are known from Buddhist self-technology as expounded in the Potthapada Sutta. 81 This nine-step itinerary of the spirit into Nirvana leads via the four elementary jhana or medita- tions (purification, concentration, emptying, purity), as well as the four higher samapatti or 'attainings', up to the final state, which is described as stasis in absolutely empty enstasy. 82 Naturally the law of escalation is visible in Indian step systems, which are prone to exag- geration at any time; according to this law, any formulation of a final step, however high, can be taken further through additional ordeals, iterations and increases in abstraction without anyone being able to say by some criteria - perhaps not verifiable, but at least utterable ones - whether any concrete content can be assigned to the addition- ally invented degrees of height. In Mongolian Lamaism, samadhi, which admittedly only nominally recalls the legendary final stage of Indian immersion exercises, is divided into 116 steps - an employment programme for numerous very full reincarnations. 83 One is inclined to suspect that some of the perfect grew too bored of perfection to put their hands in their lap after attaining it. Just as the Western world knows the horror of unemployment (the sociological name for depression), the Eastern knows that of an absence of practice. So what could be more natural than to raise the level of transfiguration? Nothing seems simpler than to 'reach' a Nirvana-and-a-half after Nirvana. Another motive for the inflation of perfections is undoubt- edly to be found in the psychodynamic instability of the final states; Western monastic literature also had a few things to say about this in the categories of 'temptation', 'testing' and 'relapse'.
As far as the semantic side of Indian practice terminology is con- cerned, its complications go far beyond the familiar discrepancy between perception and communication. The world of meditation- induced states is a broad country, or rather a galaxy with unsecured routes and uncertain borders. Whoever travels through it can never be sure whether other travellers have seen or visited the same stars in the same Milky Ways. Though the masters insist that they have reliable maps for the expanses of the meditative space, only con- tradictory things have been heard about their art of map-reading. We would be falling prey to mystification if we assumed that the routes to completion allIed to the same goal. In fact, meditation - in a comparable way to dreams - opens up a sphere of unobservable
269
- are to
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
as
tion, one dependent on secondary reports
modifications after the fact. In addition, it is characteristic of mystical states that their carriers privilege silence as a form of communication. It would certainly be a mistake to conclude that silence indicates illu- mination. In terms of sheer non-communicability, any dim-wittedness can compete with an ascent to the third heaven.
Perhaps the misfortune of Indian spirituality was that it detached the culture of inner states too early and too willingly from the sphere of expression - this suggests that it was overcome by the immunitary imperative, vulgo by 'religion', which, as we have seen, one encoun- ters wherever the interest in final insurance sabotages the affective and aesthetic charging of penultimate things. One can imagine how the alternative to this might have been when listening to classical Indian music: here one finds the most suggestive analogy to the chro- matics of illuminations, in that it develops entirely from a dynamic of moods, swellings, cataracts and calmings. Though there are no concrete notations for the artificially produced inner states of ascet- ics, it seems clear that they contain manifold endospheres that remain as inaccessible for us as the dreams of strangers. We would know absolutely nothing about them if we were not ourselves capable of dreaming and gliding between the musical keys of mental life.
270
-8 MASTER GAMES
Trainers as Guarantors o f the A r t o f Exaggeration
Cura and Cu/tura
In its least muddled definition, the term 'culture' refers to groom- ing systems for the transmission of regionally essential cognitive and moral principles to subsequent generations. Because this transmission is always the source of serious intelligence work, all actually successful cultures sufficiently capable of reproduction develop a form of central ontological organ that passes judgement on the vital or non-vital status of 'things' - six thousand feet beyond the philosophical distinction between the substantial and the accidental. Thus 'things' are always already matters for negotiation in the forum of survival intelligence - in a related sense, Bruno Latour presented a groundbreaking refor- mulation of the 'thing' concept for the agenda of a world of plural parliaments. 84 In this organ, which in earlier times was consistently administered presbyterocratically - in councils of elders - and in more recent times with democratic tendencies - that is, drawing on a mixture of institutional intelligence, expert opinion and popular opinion - resides an unspecialized 'totipotente' power of judgement that attends to its duties long before the separation of reality fields into ethical, polit- ical and aesthetic. For the sake of calibration with reality, it presides over the two most important categories of practical reason: the judge- ments of emergency and priority. That is to say, it recognizes states of emergency and decides on the order in which the most important things should be taken care of. The fact that fallibility is one of its working conditions in no way devalues the activity of this power of judgement.
The 'cultivation' dimension of cultura here refers to the concern for the eternal return of the similar in subsequent generations. Where
271
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
cura concern appear, serve the purpose of similarity. Similarity demands that the members a population always behave in such a way that the sum of acts in the group can produce a sufficient number of similar juniors. Whoever behaves in an unconcerned or non-cultivating fashion here permits uncontrolled growth that will more often seem decadent than origi- naL In this context, we should once again recall the basic neophobic mentality of older cultures. 85 The wonder of later, liberally opened civilizations can be expressly defined against this background: it is the possibility for a given population to have become sufficiently sure of its reproductive capability, its didactic techniques and the attractive- ness of its mode of life to be able to afford to dispense with the long- standing suppression of unwelcome variation and instead embrace the new, hazardous habitus of a broad tolerance for variation. This leads to the typical late cultural problems that occupy us daily today - they grow from the non-peaceable coexistence of variation-hostile and variation-friendly groups within a civilizatorily asynchronous state population.
Stabilized Improbability: The Erection of Models
Against this background, the appearance of early advanced civiliza- tions seems all the more amazing. To define them, I shall fall back on my reflections on the stabilization of high vertical tensions in seces- sionarily isolated groups. On the basis of these, advanced civilization means nothing other than a system for the reproduction of hyperbolic or acrobatic functions in spaces of retreat for elites - whose general form appears in an ethics of stabilized improbability. Hence the acrobat, both in the literal and in the figurative sense of the word, takes centre stage as the carrier of a long-term near-impossibility - at the expense, incidentally, of the conventional equation of aristoc- racy and elite. It was Nietzsche who first noted that true aristocracy reveals itself in the way that, in the spiritual leader, the 'tremendous impossibility' of the task is translated into a refined bodily posture. 86
We know, admittedly, that the stabilization of extreme improb- abilities can generally only take place via the erection of models. Understandably, these are not only intra-familially transferable, but must be passed on via the collective imaginary, that is to say through the mental practice and ranking systems of a culture (short cuts only exist in milieus where family and advanced civilization coincide: among Brahmans and rabbis, and in Protestant vicarages). When
272
types of and sporting agon -
heroes of the battlefield, the god-men in the forests and the reddish dust of field tracks, the saints of the desert and the monastery, and the athletes in the palaestra, the stadium and the arena. They all still have some of the aura of their predecessors, the miracle men of archaic times, the wizards and magical diplomats who negotiated with the powers and the demons: they had been the first to captivate those around them as rebels against the block of reality. It was only much later that artists were added to this list, each one of them a miracle maker in their own genre, and thus a blasphemer against the principle of impossibility.
With these figures, the roles and spaces of stabilized improbability in advanced civilization are sketched out sufficiently clearly. Once they are established, it is necessary to explain the modes in which the translation of the improbable and unrepeatable into the prob- able and repeatable - and thus the setting-up of the original field of tuition - can take place in each individual area. Initially, only one thing is certain here: what would be called 'school' in later times was at first less of a pedagogical than a thaumaturgical phenomenon. First the miracle, then education; hence the close link between ethics and artistry. When Plato and Aristotle assure us that philosophy begins with amazement (thaumazein), they are just managing to grasp the very end of an order in which all higher achievements were measured in relation to the unbelievable; it was only much later that half-price trivializations and imitations would be able to dictate the agenda. At first, certainly, the introduction to the improbable has nothing to do with guiding children; it is directed at adults who realize halfway through their lives that ordinary human existence is no longer enough. The beginning was not education but seduction by the amazing. The effects that move humans to secede come purely from the school of wonder.
Paradoxes and Passions: The Genesis of the Inner World through Chronic Overstraining
Advanced civilization, then, is by no means what Oswald Spengler claimed, namely the result from the encounter between a landscape and a group soul- or the amalgam of a climate and its trauma. Nor, however, is it simply 'richness in problems', to quote Egon Friedell's witty definition of culture in the sense of education. Rather, each
273
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
is rooted in its ownership a made capable of transmission. It stems from
naivete with which the basal paradox embodies itself in its early stages. The naivete of early advanced civilizations is cruel to the extent that it enforces its demand for the enabling of the impossi- ble against its adepts. Only once such hard starting paradoxes have relaxed to form problems can they be enjoyed like riches and col- lected like educational objects. In their early states, paradoxes are suffered as passions rather than experienced as treasures.
Let us say clearly where the basic paradox of all advanced civi- lization lies: it follows from its orientation towards hyperbolic or acrobatic excesses, which are always viewed on the assumption that they are only suitable for imitation or normalization. By elevat- ing exceptional achievements to conventions, advanced civilizations create a pathogenic tension, a form of chronic altitude sickness to which sufficiently intelligent participants in the paradoxical game can only respond with the development of an internal space of evasion and simulation, and thus a 'soul', a ba, a psyche, an atman - or, more generally speaking, an inner world that is permanently reflexively unsettled.
The soul emerges as the entity in which the impossible must be called to mind like a possibility that constantly has to be considered. 'Soul', in the sense of a microcosmic or inner-world organ for doubling the existent as a whole, is by no means a timeless entity in which the being-for-oneself of humans from all times and peoples manifests itself. It only comes about as the symptom of an over-stimulation by an inescapable paradox - a demand that can neither be met nor ignored. The 'human interior' then ceases to be merely the transit space for 'upsurging' affects, something one can still observe clearly in the Homeric view of thym6s, for example;87 nor is it any longer simply the reception hall for the visits of demons, dreams and 'ideas'. It is more like a chronic inflammation of the self-perception, provoked by the imposition that the desire of the individual should align itself with examples that cannot possibly be imitated. The paradoxical inflammation and the stabilized for-oneself are the same age. Conversely, advanced-civilized ethics only becomes attractive by learning to advertise itself with the highest fascinations, with the physically and morally wonderful. The wonderful is the smile of the impossible.
It is only through the transformation of the unbelievable into the exemplary that the working climate of advanced civilization can
274
MASTER GAMES
it
become for precisely through inimitable achievements. As soon as the akro bainein, the gaze-commanding walk on the rope over the abyss, moves from the physical field to the moral, the paradox comes into play: vertical ten- sions of the most exuberant kind come about through the elevation of
the inimitable to the status of the exemplary.
Twilight of the Trainers
Against this background, the figure of the trainer can be explained as the one who leads the way into improbability. In systemic terms, they have the task of making invisible the paradox of advanced civiliza- tion, where precisely that which is impossible to imitate is employed as an incentive to the most intense imitation. Here the strategy pre- sented by Edgar Allan Poe in 'The Purloined Letter', where the most visible surface provides the best hiding-place, proves effective. It is characteristic of the heroic-holy-athletic complex that it conceals its seduction to the impossible under an elaborate legendary noise: first and foremost, this purely serves the purpose of making the contradic- tory nature of its message - which is immediately noticeable to the calm observer - invisible and inaudible through overexposure and overemphasis. Its second function is to mobilize the mimetic instincts, which cannot tolerate praise for virtues in others that are suppos- edly lacking in one's own existence. Aretological propaganda fulfils its purpose if, when faced with the question: 'What does the other person have that I supposedly do not? ', it provokes the answer: 'We will see! ' Admiration is the great vehicle of jealousy, which tolerates no absolute preferential treatment - and if there is one thing that goes profoundly against its nature, it is the private ownership of triumphs over impossibility accumulated by a supposedly inimitable other. The early attempts to scale the heights of improbability, therefore, are by no means psychodynamically helpless. All explicit advanced civiliza- tions fuel themselves with a mimetic mobilization whose intention is no less than the dispossession of the model. Here too, silence is the first working condition: just as undisturbed 'cultural activity' pre- cludes any exposure of its basal paradox, the driving forces of emula- tion also remain unconfessable.
Only on these premises can one consider the performances of the first trainers with the necessary scenographic attentiveness. Initially, the
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EXAGGE~! \TION PROCEDURES
are self-mirabilization,
tion into the actually existing monstrosity. They radiate numinous aura that surrounds the highest magisteria. Because the teaching itself is embodied by teachers in their mirabilic otherness at this stage, they display a new form of authority - it is no longer the gravity of the elders, but rather the luminosity of the pure exception that seduces as soon as it is seen and felt. This results in the new, distinguished pedagogical tone: 'I am the way and the truth and the life';88 'I and the Father are one';89 '1 am I, but also the other. [. . . ] I am devoid of honour and dishonour, I am without attributes, I am Shiva, I am free from duality and non-duality, I am free from the pairs (of opposites). I am he. '90 A corona of pupils soon gathers around the firstborn of the unheard-of, seeking to embody the privilege of emanating directly from the exception.
The first round of the transference experiment had already seen the appearance of a phenomenon that accompanies all foundings of schools as an almost tragic shadow: the separation of the suitable from the unsuitable. The efficient spiritual trainer not only develops the prudence of the ancient doctor, who stays away from incurable cases; they also develop the specific perception unique to the fisher of men, who senses those with a natural affinity with the spirit of the teaching among the merely interested. In scholastic times they would be called talented, in the bourgeois era gifted - and, for understand- able reasons, the abstractly universalistic ressentiment would one day be up in arms about the concept of 'talent' as SUCh. 91 It is not only old Manto who loves those who desire the impossible;92 everyone who embodies advanced-civilized elan does so. What is more important than loving the one who desires the absurd, however, is picking them out from the countless cases in which it would be a waste of effort to attempt a nurturing of the eros of the impossible within an individual. Like Charon, the ferryman of the underworld who conveys a Faust lusting after Helena, all the great trainers accompany those students who will not cease desiring on their way 'across'.
Ten Types of Teacher
In the following, I shall sketch five types of spiritual trainer of which each, in their own way, fulfils the task of giving exaggerations that are prima vista unliveable and aim to give the supra-real the semblance of feasibility and liveability. First comes the guru of the
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MASTER GAMES
master
the apostle or abbot as imitatores next
philosopher as a witness to the search for truth, and finally the sophist as a polytechnician of the ars vivendi. It should scarcely be necessary to explain why each of these types embodies a variety of teaching licence at the enthusiastic faculty of our anthropological polytechnic. Going through these even more quickly, I shall assign to these figures an analogous five-member set of pragmatic or artistic trainers - the athletic trainer, the master of a craft or virtuosic artistic feat, the academic professor, the mundane teacher and the Enlightenment author. It is clear enough why one should expect shallower and more anonymous forms of vertical tension from the start among this group of certified teachers: they are all involved in the popularization and standardization of mirabile effects and, in one way or other, already on the way to what modernity - after the triumphant initial suc- cesses of general alphabetization - would later make its cause under the catchword of 'general education'. Nonetheless, these teachers also purvey a notion of peak performance, albeit one that requires increasing justification: democracy, they implicitly state, is not as such a valid reason to do away with all forms of vertical tension. They remain in effect, though in an altered mode - even if only for the power-ecological reason that even in a world with a strictly egalitar- ian constitution, not everyone will be able to do everything, let alone do everything equally well.
The Guru
The first in this list is the figure of the Indian guru - a name that is rarely used without irony in the contemporary Western context, as if one wanted to denote a person who gives their followers opportunity to overestimate them, and presumably not without succumbing to self-overestimation first. Naturally this habitual irony tells us abso- lutely nothing about Indian conditions, but a great deal about the anti-authoritarian change of mentality among Westerners in general, and about the decline in the standing of their teaching professions in particular. It reveals the scepticism that has been epidemic in the Old World for some time towards the notion that any mortal could have more insight than another into the basic conditions of the world and life - not merely in the sense of a coincidentally greater knowledge based on longer experience, but thanks to a deeper penetration of the concealed structures of existence. Just as the concept of the master is
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EXAGGERA TION
PROCEDURES
maestro
- so any higher
practically lost all credit. When Martin Heidegger occasionally used the expression 'master of reading and living' to describe Meister Eckhart, the archaic tone was already unmistakable at the time.