No More Learning

14 Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 236.
15 From this moment on, the metaphysical misinterpretation of slowness, its
consignment to the realm of transcendence, can be abandoned. See Heiner Miihlmann, 'The Economics Machine', in 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times ofTerror, ed. Gerd de Bruyn (Basle, Boston and Berlin: Birkhiiuser, 2006), p. 228. See also Peter Sloterdijk, God's Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 5-7.
16 Concerning the take-off of innovation affirmation in the European Renaissance, see pp. 334£ below.
17 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 181.
18 Nietzsche, Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufman
and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 483.
19 Ibid.
20 Moroccan circus troupes also have a famous pyramid tradition, in which up 460
21
22
23
24 25
26 27 28
29 30
to fifteen artistes form towers of five or six 'storeys'. Catalan artistes are famous for erecting human pyramids with up to eight or nine storeys. The Canadian Cirque du Solei! has even featured tightrope-walking pyramids. The grammatical comparative stands for a logical superlative of the adjec- tive deinon, which was used in rhetoric to refer to the wonderful and alarm- ing (mirabile). Heidegger modernized the translation tradition by giving the word back its meaning with his choice of unheimlich [uncanny] - which permits numerous connections to the discourses of philosophical topology, psychoanalysis, architectural theory and systems irritation theory. Concerning the motif of city-overstepping and over-giftedness, see Peter Sloterdijk, 'Die Stadt und ihr Gegenteil: Apolitologie im Umriss', in Der asthetische Imperativ: Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Peter Weibel (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2007), pp. 221-4.
Scheler's astUte term was later taken over by the speech therapy based on the work of Victor Frankl (Frankl himself used it from 1938 onwards) and twisted into a retort against the methods of Freud et al. - in line with the solid paternal maxim that complicated people should do more and think less; assistance in doing more is here called 'healing', and assistance in thinking less 'de-reflection'.
TN: all biblical quotations are taken from the New International Version. See Thomas Macho, 'Himmlisches Gefliigel - Betrachtungen zu einer Motivgeschichte der Engel', in Engel: Legenden der Gegenwart, ed. Cathrin Pichler (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1997), pp. 83-100.
See Giorgio Agamben, II Regno e la Gloria (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2007). Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 21.
As well as this, Nietzsche coined some twenty other terms with the prefix tiber-.
TN: again, all words with the prefixes 'super-' or 'over-' listed here begin with aber- in German.
Even Martin Luther still saw the Areopagite as his enemy, the trainer of ecclesiastical high acrobatics. In his early writings he sought to co-opt him for his own simplistic mysticism of darkness, inspired by the Theologia Germanica: 'Unde in Dionysio frequens verbum est hyper quia super omnem cogitatum oportet simpliciter in caliginem entrare. ' Later he under- stood that Pseudo-Dionysius was not concerned with a quick entrance into pious darkness, but with a higher-order logic created for virtuosos of reli- gion that bore firm marks of exclusivity. From that point on, Luther had a horror of the founder of negative theology, and viewed him more as a Platonist than a Christian. See Thomas Reinhuber, Studien zu Luthers Bekenntnis am Ende von De Servo Arbitrio (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), p. 102. A word like 'hyper-Marxism', by contrast, which Foucault coined to describe French ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, was always satirically intended.
See Ernst Benz, 'Das Bild des Dbermenschen in der Europaischen Geistesgeschichte', in Der Obermensch: Eine Diskussion, ed. Ernst Benz (Stuttgart: Rhein-Verlag, 1961), pp. 21-161.
This would be no simple task: for antiquity, because we have enough infor- mation about the gymnastic and agonal disciplines to appreciate the immensity of the manifestations of athletism, but too little to put together an authentic picture; and for the Middle Ages, because the history of
31
32
NOTES TO PP. 124-9
461
NOTES TO PP. 129-50
monasticism exceeds the attempt
and its wealth of details.
33 Hugo Ball, Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei
Wacker (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2010), p. 271.
breadth
34 Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
35 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter
Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 83e (translation modified). See Thomas Macho, "'Kultur ist eine Ordensregel": Zur Frage nach der Lesbarkeit von Kulturen als Texten', in Gerhard Neumann and Sigrid Weigel (eds. ), Lesbarkeit der Kultur: Literaturwissenschaft zwischen Kulturteclmik und Ethnographie (Munich: Fink, 2000), pp. 223-44.
36 Eckhard Nordhofen, Der Engel der Bestreittmg: Uber das Verhaltnis von Kunst und negativer Theologie (Wurzburg: Echter, 1993), p. 144.
37 Paul Engelmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefe und Begegnungen (Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970), p. 32.
38 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 84e.
39 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 236 (translation modified).
40 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 10e.
41 Ibid. , p. 33e.
42 Ibid. , pp. 34e-35e.
43 Ibid. , p. 76e.
44 See Macho, 'Kultur ist eine Ordensregel', p. 229.
45 Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, p. 99.
46 Ibid.
47 Karl Kraus, 'Nachts' (1919), in Burkhardt Rukschcio (ed. ), Fur Adolf Laos
(Vienna: Locker, 1986), p. 27.
48 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 27e.
49 Ibid. , p. 12e (translation modified). Concerning the relationship between
Wittgenstein and Socratic teaching, see Agnese Grieco, Die ethische Ubullg: Ethik und Sprachkritik bei Wittgenstein und Sokrates (Berlin: Lukas, 1996).
50 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 56e.
51 Ibid. , p. 77e.
52 See pp. 78f above.
53 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 7e.
54 The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Leonard Joseph Doyle
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), p. 25.
55 See n. 30 above.
56 Michel Foucault, 'The Masked Philosopher', in Politics, Philosophy,
Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D.
Kritzman (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 324.
57 Foucault, 'Dream, Imagination and Existence', in Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence, ed. Keith Hoeller (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 53.
58 Ibid. , p. 54.
59 Ibid. , p. 55.
60 Ibid. , p. 62.
61 Ibid. , p. 69.
462
ed. Bernd
NOTES TO PP, 15
62 The 72: 'Do not go outside. Return within for truth in the interior man. If you find that your interior nature is mutable, then transcend yourself too [transcende et te ipsum]. But remember that when you transcend yourself, you must even transcend yourself as a reasoning self [Sed mernento cum te transcendis, ratiocinantem animam te transcendereJ. '
63 TN: the original phrase for 'going beyond oneself' is uber sich hinausgehen; it thus uses the same word, uber, that elsewhere means 'over'. In this par- ticular paragraph, 'beyond' is used briefly for the sake of congruence.
64 See Jacques Lacarriere, L'envol d'Icare suivi de Traite des Chutes (Paris: Seghers, 1993).
65 Concerning height fantasies in general, see Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith and Frederick FareH (Dallas: Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, 1988).
66 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 173. TN: the second sentence is not included in the English edition, but appears in the German translation cited by Sloterdijk.
67 Ibid. , p. 31.
68 Ibid. , p. 171.
69 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 11.
70 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. ne.
71 Ibid. , p. 56e.
71 Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', interview with Gilles Barbedette
and Andre Scala, in Politics, Philosophy; Culture, p. 249.
73 Foucault, Remarks on Marx, p. 174.
74 See Foucault's allusion to the builder Solness in his introduction to Dream
and Existence (quoted above, p. 150). I do not know whether Foucault had read Binswanger's book Henrik Ibsen und das Problem der Selbstrealisation in der Kunst (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1949).
75 This is a key term in Gaston Bachelard's work Air and Dreams.
76 Ludwig Binswanger, Drei Formen missgluckten Daseins: Verstiegenheit,
Verschrobenheit, Manieriertheit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1956), p. 6.
77 Ibid. , p. 4.
78 Martin Heidegger, 'Letter on Humanism', trans. Frank A. Capuzzi with J. Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 233.
79 Ibid. , p. 234.
80 Admittedly, Heidegger's rendition of daimon in the singular as 'God' is sup-
ported by the synonymy - since Homer - between daimon and theos. In the
present context, however, this translation does not strike me as very plausible.
81 Plato, Republic, trans. John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan
(Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), p. 126.
82 The ontological and theological variations on this political psychology are:
as in being, so in the city, and as in heaven, so on earth.
83 Prophetic divination, divinely inspired healing, the poetic madness (mania) fuelled by the muses, and the love sent by the gods (see Phaedrus i
244a-245b).
463
84
NOTES I
between Diogenes and Alexander is
Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983, at www. lib. berke! ey. edufMRCi foucaultlparrhesia. html, accessed 14 May 2012). See Plutarch, On the Daimonion of Socrates, ed. Heinz-Gunther Nesselrath (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), p.
61, which describes the recycling of the daimones in the beyond.
85 St Augustine, Of True Religion, ed. Louis O. Mink, trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1991), p. 75.
86 Thomas it Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1983), p. 18.
87 Fragment 5.
88 Concerning the suspension of the liaison between thought and waking in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century anaesthetic practice, see pp. 380f below.
89 Oswald Spengler, The Decline o f the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(New York: Knopf, 1939), pp. 4ff.
90 See Pupul Jayakar, J. Krishnamurti: A Biography (London: Arkana, 1986).
91 Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Zeit und Wissen (Munich: Hanser, 1992).
92 Binswanger, Henrik Ibsen, p. 48.
93 Ibid. , p. 50.
94 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 16.
95 See Slavoj Zizek, 1n Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso,
2009), ch. 9, 'Unbehagen in der Natur'.
96 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York:
Meridian, 1957).
97 The significance of habit as a starting point for ever more shifts within the
system of our constituted faculties is highlighted especially by the French philosopher Felix Ravaison. See Ravaisson, O f Habit, trans. and intr. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London and New York: Continuum, 2008).
98 This is precisely what the modern ethics of obligation rejects. The decisive- ness with which Kant shifted from the concern for skill to pure obligation in his ethics is shown, among other things, by his rejection of the idea of a habitus that assists the performance of duty. For then virtue would be 'a mere mechanism of applying power. Rather, virtue is moral strength in adherence to one's duty, which never should become habit but should always emerge entirely new and original from one's way of thinking. ' Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 38. lf man can only be rescued by duty, all help from one's disposition or inclina- tion falls by the wayside.
99 Genet, 'The Funambulists', p. 47: 'It is not you who will dance, but the rope. '
100 See Norbert Bolz, Die Konformisten des Andersseins: Ende der Kritik (Munich: Fink, 1999).
101 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay 011 Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 591.
102 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal o f History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 4.
103 See Manfred Osten, 'Alles veloziferisch' oder Goethes Entdeckung der 464
whose account of
at length by in Six
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
PI'.
This
a second process began in which non-scriptural pacemakers behind the
script-based hurnanitas. Humanists cannot see that the latter, from the per- spective of pre-literate life forms, had itself already constituted a devilish acceleration. See also Peter Sioterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environrnent and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (1), pp. 12-28.
TN: the proximity of passion and suffering is especially close in German, where the word for the former, Leidenschaft, is based on that for the latter, leiden.
See Babette Babich, 'Die Naturgeschichte der griechischen Bronze im Spiegel des Lebens: Betrachtungen uber Heideggers a sthetisehe Phanomenoiogie und Nietzsches agonale Politik', in Internationales Jahrbuch fur Herrneneutik, vol. 7, ed. Gunter Figal (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), pp. 127-90.
Concerning the difference between conversion and opportunistic turna- round, see below, eh. 9, pp. 298f.
See recently Dieter Henrich, Denken und Selbstsein: Vorlesungen uber Subjektivitat (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007).
See the motto of Poetry and Truth: Ho rne dareis anthr6pos ou paideuetai, meaning The man who is not mistreated is not educated. '
See Peter Sloterdijk, 'Der andere Logos oder: Die List der Vernunft. Zur Ideengeschichte des Indirekten', in Achim Hecker, Klaus Kammerer, Bernd Schauenberg and Harro von Senger (eds. ), Regel und Abweichung: Strategie und Stratagerne. Chinesische Listenlehre irn interdisziplinaren Dialog (Munster: LIT, 2008), pp. 87-112.
As well as pedagogical training through enlightened repetitions, a technique that cultures have always also had at their disposal is training via terror, or the imprinting of a norm by branding a sacred scene on the psyche through shock. See Heiner Muhlmann, Jesus uberlistet Darwin (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2007), in which the author shows how the memoactive fitness of a collective can be increased through killing dramas (sacrifices) that are carried out together. In the light of this analysis, the Christian mass appears as a double conditioning form: on the one hand a constantly repeated killing drama, and on the other hand a rehearsing of the blood sacrifice's replacement by the symbolic game.
This is the inversion of Seneca's satirical statement non vitae, sed scholae discirnus [we are learning not for life, but for the school] (Epistolae rnorales ad Lucilium 106, 12), with which he declares that the decadence of the school constitutes the system of learning. The true school programme, the learning of the divine, must therefore be copied onto other media, for example the philosopher's correspondence with a younger friend. It is there- fore likely that Seneca was inverting an older, undocumented saying - which would make the return of the medieval schoolmasters to the version non scholae sed vitae discimus entirely justified.
Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, erito, and Phaedo, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Millis, MA: Agora, 2005), p. 62.
Klaus Berger, Theologiegeschichte des Urchristenturns: Theologie des Neuen Testarnents (Tubingen and Basle: Francke, 1994), p. 661.
111
112
113
465
NOTES TO PP.
Alexander Leben: 350
G eschich ten
115 Tertullian, Disciplinary. Moral and trans. Rudolph
Arbesmann, Sister Emily Joseph Daly and Edwin A. Quain (Washington,
DC; CUA Press, 1959), p. 20. 116 Ibid. , p. 23.
117 118 119 120
1
2 3
4
5 6
7 8 9
10
11
12 13
14 15
16
Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, trans. Peter Holmes (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), p. 12.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Marion von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
See Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post- Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 84e.
/I EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998). For a critical response to this from a student of Arendt, see Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Allen Lane, 2008); see also p. 292 below.
See pp. 163f. above.
Paul Rabbow, Seelenfuhrung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike (Munich: Kosel, 1954), based on Epictetus, The Enchiridion, 3. One finds the same motif in Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, book 11, ch. 34. Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and Its Development, trans. Mrs Charles E. B. Russell (Boston: Beacon, 1960), p. 110.
Patanjaii, Yoga Surra II, 41.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 245.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), p. 124.
See Jiirgen Hasse, Ubersehene Riiume: Zur Kulturgeschichte und Heterotopologie des Parkhauses (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007).
See Peter Sloterdijk, 'Strong Observation: For a Space Station Philosophy', in Native Land, Stop Eject, ed. Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio (ArIes: Actes Sud, 2010), pp. 29-36.
Digha Nikaya 5.
In this context one should recall Petrarch's well-known letter of 26 April 1336, in which he claims to have been reading a pocket edition of Augustine's Confessions at the summit of Mont Ventoux.
See Rabbow, Seelenfuhrung, p. 93.
Epictetus, The Enchiridion, III, 3, 14; quoted in Rabbow, Seelenfuhrung, p. 135.
Augustine, De vera religione, XXXIX, 72.
One possible version of the philosophical counter-movement to the age of objectivism and the illusion of the outside world is presented in my Spheres trilogy (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998-2003). In English so far: Spheres, vol. 1: Bubbles, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011). Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, p. 90.
466
and New
Marcus Aurelius, The lV lt'U H U lt'U I
trans. Iv! . p. 60.
PP.
See p. 266 below.
This is treated in greater detail in ch. 8, pp. 277-84.
Horace, Epistles I, 6, 1.
This could be shown especially clearly using the evolution of Buddhism and the adaptation of the arhat ideal of the Hinayana to the bodhisattva ideal of the Mahayana.
23 On 'riddle language' or 'intentional language' in Tantrism, see Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 249.
24 In the first part of The Vocation of Man (1800), Johann Gottlieb Fichte demonstrated the deterministic-fatalistic position with a perfect simulation in order to evoke the despair that drives us forwards to practical idealism.
25 Quoted in Eliade, Yoga, p. 189.
26 In this respect, Buddha is 'simultaneous' with Greek Sophism, which, in
terms of its overall direction, must be viewed above all as a humanistic exercise programme. It views a helpless letting-oneself-go as the worst form of behaviour and fatalism as an assault on arete, the willingness to self-help.
27 Thomas Macho, 'Mit sich allein: Einsamkeit als Kulturtechnik', in Aleida and Jan Assmann (eds. ), Einsamkeit (Archaologie der literarischen Kommunikation VI) (Munich: Fink, 2000), pp. 27-44.
28 Regula Benedicti 7, 13 and 7, 28.
29 Kierkegaard, A Literary Review, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin,
2001).
30 The Meditations, p. 78.
31 Ibid. , p. 35.
32 Ibid. , p. 103.
33 Eliade, Yoga, p. 296.
34 See Niklas Luhmann, 'Die Autopoiesis
des Bewusstseins', Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Gestandnis, ed.
Alois Hahn and Volker Knapp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 64L
35 Thomas of Celano, First and Second Life of Saint Francis, with Selections from the Treatise 011 the Miracles o f Blessed Francis, trans. Placid Hermann
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1963), p. 84.
36 Critics of the miracle of stigmata have formulated the taboo-breaking ques-
tion of why the wounds in the hands of Francis and his imitators appeared in the palms rather than the historically accurate place, namely the wrist bones. Their reply: because Francis was himself imitating the painted and sculpted crucifixes of his time, in which nails through the palms had long since become the norm. This does not answer the question of whether the wounds came about through pious deception, self-harm, or some physiolog- ically inexplicable autoplastic achievement of the holy body. The first option is espoused with regard to Francis of Assisi by Christoph Tiircke, who con- siders the saint the greatest actor, or most determined faker, of the Middle Ages: see Tiircke, 'Askese und Performance: Franziskus als Regisseur und Hauptdarsteller seiner selbst', Neue Rundschau 4 (2000), pp. 3St By analogy, the Indian mystic Ramakrishna, a worshipper of the Great Mother, claimed that she gave him the gift of menstruation as a sign of grace.
467
I I I
NOTES TO PP. 243-57
37 Regula Benedicti 7, 67.
38 Ibid. , 7, 5.
39 That is why the Regula Benedicti contains such formulations as 'hasten to
the perfection of the monastic ways' (73,2) and 'hurrying forward to your
heavenly fatherland' (ad patriam caelestem festinare) (73, 8).
40 Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 69f.
41 In the later mystical theology of Gregor of Nyssa, this dynamized mimesis
is pushed further to the thesis that Christian desire, because it follows a boundless object, can never rest, only lead into a paradoxical unity of move- ment and standstill.
42 See pp. 272f.
43 Epistolae morales ad Lucilium, 66, 9.