No More Learning

This process forces the excesses into the arts, as well as the adjustment that Gotthard Gunther terms the transition 'from the truth of thought to the prag- matics of action'. 169 In this sense, modernity constitutes a strong substitute programme for the ethical secession. Its precondition is the demonstration that on the five fronts of the old need, one can still win by other means than those used in battle by the practice heroes of earlier times. This was precisely the motto proclaimed by the pan- sophists of the Renaissance and the pioneers of explorative thought: humans can do anything of their own accord as soon as they want to. They opened the door to the post-miserablist age - which, for the same reason, is also a post-metaphysical one, as it reacts to existential
it is
421
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
answers.
metaphysically means getting the burdens of old
condition with the aid of technology and without extreme ascetic pro- grammes. The only modern-day ascetics whose victories one wishes to be authentic are athletes - whereas the spiritual victors over the old human condition have been stripped of their authority through the culture of suspicion. Anyone who heard a voice from a burning thorn bush after forty days in the desert would be taken for a victim of a psychedelic episode. Anyone who claimed to transcend sexuality without ever having known it could be sure of being diagnosed neu- rotic. And modern observers of religion consider Buddha Amida, who reveals himself to Japanese monks after one hundred nights of sleep deprivation, a local psychosemantic effect.
Because of its egalitarian design, modernity feels compelled to reformulate all truths that were previously accessible only to the few into truths for the many - and neglect whatever is lost in translation. This eliminates the foundation of practical ascetic extremism, but affirms its tendencies in all aspects: it is indeed necessary to set up a strong antithesis to the misery-based definition of reality in the agro- imperial age - if this can now also be articulated by non-metaphysical and non-heroic means, then all the better. Everyone of these transla- tions ensued after the technical caesura of the Modern Age. The prin- ciple of their success is displayed by the fact that during the last three hundred years, an unprecedented civilizatory learning cycle has been active that fundamentally changed the laws of existence from the Iron Age - and continues to change them. At times, this cycle has helped the dream of a return to a Golden Age or a restoration of Paradise to political power, and even if the dream was never going to come true, the dream tendency as such already tells us something about the prevailing mood of the newer era. It was based on the intuition that the principle of reality had become a malleable plasma. Communist maximalism, which would accept nothing short of total renewal, has lost its psychological plausibility; it only lives on indirectly in the weary hatred which ex-radicals and their imitators in the third and fourth generation show towards our more moderate conditions. Nonetheless, the idea of returning to the second best still has great practical charm.
In fact, Europeans and Americans, to use Hesiod's terms, cata- pulted themselves into a renewed Silver Age in the second half of the twentieth century. Within the 'Crystal Palace', they created conditions for the majority that differed not gradually but epochally, or rather aeonically, from everything that had been the case a few centuries
422
EXERCISES AND
US once 1846 ~ epochal date in the history pain. 170 We also emphasize de-agrarianization of economic life, and thus the end of the 'idiocy of rural life'. 171 To the historian, it is beyond doubt that virtually all inhabitants of the Crystal Palace profit, at least in material and infrastructure terms, from unprecedented improvements in living conditions172 - a fact that is augmented and confirmed by the equally unprecedented blossoming of a culture of additional demands. The spiral of resignation from the Iron Age has been reversed and turned into an upward spiral of desire. In this situation, philosophy loses its mandate to rise beyond the static world of need that, as the theoreti- cal wing of the ethical distinction, it administered for two thousand years. It changes into a consultant to assist in explaining the advan- tage of no longer living in the Iron Age. It becomes a translation agency for transforming heroic knowledge into civil knowledge. It stands surety for the esoteric remainder with its own assets.
In Defence of the Second Silver Age
It was Richard Rorty who promoted this translation work most coherently and appealingly in the last decades - appealingly prima- rily because, despite his Dewey-inspired advocacy for the priority of democracy over philosophy, he made no secret of his sympathy for the exaggerations of heroic thought (which he also called roman- tic or inspiring thought). What places the American Rorty in the better traditions of European Baroque philosophy and the British- French-German Enlightenment is his unshakeable fidelity to the idea of world improvement, a fidelity that finds its most old-fashioned and stimulating manifestation in his book on the improvement of America. 173 Rorty was, next to Hans Jonas, the only thinker of the last half-century from whom one could learn why a philosopher with an understanding of the times must have the courage to strive for simplicity: only in a jargon-free language can one discuss with one's contemporaries why we, as members of modern civilization, may not have entered a Golden Age, but should not still view ourselves as citi- zens of the Iron Age either. When discussing this subject, philosophy and non-philosophy become one, and historico-philosophical theo- ries and everyday intuitions merge into one another. The grandilo- quent conservatives, who continue to cultivate the idiom of the Iron Age as if nothing had happened, must be challenged in a language of the middle. 174 The same tone must be used to counter the far left
423
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
ideologies still virulent at a local level, which, out of disappointment at the failed return to the Golden Age, do everything in their power to smear the Silver Age as a farce. Only in such a conversation could the reasonable element in the claims of the 'end of history' after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which are presented somewhat exagger- atedly and rejected even more exaggeratedly, be reiterated. 175 The end of history is a metaphor for the disablement of the dominant reality principle of the Iron Age following non-heroic measures against the five needs. These include the industrial-political switch from scarcity to oversupply; the division of labour between the top achievers and the moderately working in business and sport; the general deregula- tion of sexuality; the transition to a mass culture without masters and a politics of co-operation without enemies; and attempts towards a post-heroic thanatology.
None of these measures are flawless; not one of them can move entirely beyond the level of lesser evils, and in some aspects they are even perceived as greater evils of a new type. That is why countless inhabitants of the second Silver Age, which does not understand itself, tend towards a defamation of this new state. What we call post- modernity is largely no more than the medial exploitation of unease at the second best - including all the risks that go with luxury pes- simisms. The fateful question is whether one succeeds in stabilizing the standards of the episodically materialized Silver Age, or whether a regression is imminent to an Iron Age of whose currentness both old and new realists are convinced -- not least considering the fact that over two thirds of the human race have never left it. Such a regression would not be fate, but rather a consequence of wilful reactions to the paradoxes of existence in the subpar.
The decision about the further course of events depends on whether the learning context of modernity can get through all technical, political, economic, cultural, epistemological and sanitary crises and be expanded into a sufficiently stable continuum of improvement knowledge and optimization ability. How little this continuum can
be taken for granted is evident in the fact that the history of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced an endless series of rebellions initiated by hostility to civilization and anti-technical ressentiment, regardless of whether these came about in the name of faith, the soul, life, art, national character, cultural identity or diver- sity of species. These outbursts constituted terminations of training that did grave damage to modernity fitness - and the danger of new terminations has not passed, as the omnipresence of far left, far right, conservative and ecological fundamentalisms proves. The 'discourse
424
EXERCISES MISEXERCISES
not one - a con- stant its agenda and against wrong cur- ricula. Every generation must choose between escapisms and forms capable of becoming traditions. To ensure even the possibility of an effective learning continuum, an intensive filtering of contemporary idea production is indispensable - a task once entrusted to 'critique', which has been entirely gutted in the meantime. Critique is replaced by an affirmative theory of civilization, supported by a General
Immunology. 176
Canon-Work in Modernity
More than any form of civilization before it, modernity relies on sorting out what deserves to be passed on and foreshortening mala- daptive developments - even if the necessary warnings are perceived by the protagonists of a current generation that basks in expressive malformations as oppressive infringements. Being allowed to bask in short-lived maladaptations, incidentally, is a significant factor in the appeal of modern life forms. It defines their aroma of freedom and lack of consequences; it liberates the present from the burden of creat- ing role models - it is no coincidence that modernity is the Eldorado of youth movements. Its greatest temptation is to abolish the future on the pretext of being the future. Whoever restricts themselves to 'single-age' ways of life does not have to worry about conveying role models in multi-age processes. 177 As self-evidently maladaptive forms also tend towards reproduction under liberal conditions, and go on to haunt subsequent generations, it is important for the civilizatory process to musealize such variants as soon as possible - at the latest, one generation after the resignation of the protagonists. 178
In truth, one of the most important functions of the modern cul- tural archive is to render superfluous the index of forbidden books and works of art, which has meanwhile become counterproductive. The archive reverently preserves all important and interesting errors, all projects with no future and all unrepeatable departures forever. 179 Its collections are recruited from strictly outside of the canon in which the real generational process continues to work. Otherwise, preser- vation in museums runs the risk of being confused with setting an example for successors - which is, incidentally, the favourite mistake of contemporary artists: following the end of the museoclastic move- ments, they view the public museum as a collection of normative works and fail to recognize its new function as the final destination
425
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
is to say as a depository up nor repeated. They
the function of private collections, which is ultimately merely to withdraw pseudo-transcendent works from circulation. In addition, the paralysis afflicting the humanities today stems from the fact that its protagonists have, for the most part, settled into the archive as free-floating observers - Rorty slightly contemptuously calls them 'detached cosmopolitan spectators' - and left all programmatic work on the crafting of a civilizatory code with a future to chance and fanaticism.
Malign Repetitions I: The Culture of Camps
Following on from these observations, I shall point out a few mala- daptation phenomena that shaped the civilizatory process of the twentieth century. From today's perspective, they should be read as symptoms of the triumph of malign repetition in recent sequences of traditions, and therefore constitute emergencies for an intervening science of 'culture'. I shall begin - continuing from the reflections of the previous section - with the culture of political murder in the pseudo-metanoetic politics of the twentieth century; then deal with the weakening of the imitative factor in contemporary pedagogy; and finally address the illusory rejection of imitation in modern aesthetics.
As far as the externalization of metanoia in the revolutionary politics of the twentieth century goes, there is little to add to the earlier deliberations on the biopolitics of Bolshevism. The attempt to force, by political-technical measures for large collectives, what could previously barely be achieved even through extreme ascetic exercises by highly motivated individuals inevitably led to a politics of absolute means. Because the elimination of sluggish fellow humans seemed a logical choice as the means of all means for projects with this level of ambition, the first half of the twentieth century saw the birth of the most historically unheard-of form of a maladaptive culture: the culture of camps. 180 It served repression on the pretext of re-education, extermination on the pretext of work, and finally eradi- cation without any pretext. One initially hesitates to apply the term
'culture' to such phenomena. If one considers the scale of the camp worlds, however, their ideological premises, the logistical efforts they demanded, their personnel requirements, their moral implications, their habitus-forming effects and their mental side effects among those running the camps,181 the word 'culture' cannot be avoided,
426
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
even
ties. Although one tends, initially, to assume
prospects of transmission for camp norms must have been poor, it is undisputed that during most of the twentieth century, there was an entrepreneurial culture of internment, selection and elimination that survived for longer than one would ever have believed possible, either on moral or on culture-theoretical premises. Crime organized by the revolutionary party state reached the Weberian stage in the Soviet Union and China - in the sense of a transition from a state of emergency to bureaucratization. A maladaptive reversal with such long-term effects can also be observed in the life forms of the Parisian miracle courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those counter-worlds of thieves, beggars and gypsies immortalized in novels of the nineteenth century - above all Victor Hugo's The Hunchback ofNotre-Dame. In these too, something resembling a stable-perverse counter-culture had come into being with unduly high chances of continuance. It constituted a parallel culture of the metropolitan poor that had been born out of need. The long-term camp culture of the twentieth century, on the other hand, was exclusively the work of pseudo-metanoetic states that invoked the French Revolution and took over the Jacobin sanctification of terror.
The birth date of modern exterminism as an entrepreneurial form and an institution can be precisely determined: 5 September 1918, when Lenin's decrees on Red Terror stated expressly that one must incarcerate the enemies of the Soviet system in concentration camps and eliminate them step by step. This approach, intended as provi- sional in the first years, was maintained on a massive scale well into the 1950s, and in smaller forms until the 1980s - finally in collabora- tion with Soviet psychiatry, which was based on the axiom that dis- satisfaction with the life forms of actual socialism was a symptom of severe mental illness.
The facts speak a clear language: the world of Nazi camps lasted for just under twelve years, those of the Soviet Union almost seventy years, and those of Maoism at least forty years - with a protracted aftermath in the prison system under the authoritarian capitalism of present-day China. This means that Soviet exterminism could spread its copies as far as a third generation, and in the case of Maoism a second, whose effects are still felt today: the system of laogai - literally 'reform through labour' - affected over fifty million people and wiped out over a third of these. We owe a debt of gratitude to anti-fascism of all stripes for the insistence with which it denounced the hyper-maladaptive atrocities of the Nazi state - the Holocaust,
427
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
that German synthesis of amok and routine. What remains notable is the asymmetry of 'coming to terms with' the past: 'anti-fascists' of Soviet and Maoist dispositions have always evaded the question of why they showed so much more discretion when it came to the excesses in their own history, which were quantitatively even greater. To this day, knowledge of its true proportions is anything but widespread - despite Solzhenitsyn, despite Jung Chang, and despite The Black Book of Communism. While the denial of Nazi crimes is rightly treated as a punishable crime in some countries, the atrocities of the Marxist archipelago are still considered peccadilloes of history in some circles.
We learn from this that lies do not always have short legs. If mal- adaptation forms on such a scale are able to develop a second and third generation, their legs are rather longer than those of ordinary lies; it is worth pondering what enabled them to become so long. This concerns not only the autonomous creation of laws in dictato- rial state formations, which tend to become retreats into abnormal- ity, but also the foundations of modernism: with its advent, the gulf between demoralizing success and legitimate exemplariness known from older cultural stages opened up with unprecedented virulence. If a thinker of Sartre's calibre resolved to keep silent about the facts of the Soviet camp world well into the 1950s despite knowing of its origins, its dimensions and its consequences, and even went so far as denouncing Western critics of the camps - including Albert Camus- as mendacious lackeys of the bourgeoisie, it is evident that the great- est maladaptive anomaly in the political history of humanity cast its shadow on the power of judgement of eminent intellectuals. The most culture-theoretically relevant information lies in the dates: Sartre's vow of silence accompanied the transition of Soviet camp culture to the third generation. He supported the perverse change of a 'measure' into an institution. If one acknowledges this irrefutable meaning or secondary meaning in Sartre's reference to his 'companionship' with socialism, it is undeniable that in his person, which seemed to embody the moral oracle of his generation, the archetype of the false teacher had entered the stage - though cultivators of the critical memory prefer to discuss it with reference to the person of Heidegger. Heidegger may have been a false teacher against modernity in some respects; the later Sartre was in all respects the false teacher in favour of modernity. 182 Only in the context of a strict musealization can one refer to authors of this calibre to distinguish between greatness and exemplarity.
428
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
Malign Repetitions School
As far as the decline practice culture and awareness of pUnes in the pedagogy of the second half of the twentieth century are concerned, this forms the most recent chapter in the long history of antagonistic co-operation between the modern state and the modern school. I have shown how the liaison and the contradiction between state semantics and school semantics in Europe from the seventeenth century on, if not earlier, inevitably led to chronic tensions between the internally differentiated 'subsystems'. If the state's traditional request to the school to produce usable citizens is translated by the latter into an order to develop autonomous personalities, constant friction is preordained - as creative dysfunction on the one hand, and as a source of chronic disappointment on the other. Generally speak- ing, one can say that bourgeois advanced civilization emerged from the surpluses of school humanism via the state education mission. 183 One can virtually speak of a felix culpa on the part of the older bourgeois education system: it gave its more talented pupils infinitely more cultural motifs than they would ever be able to use in their civil functions. In this context, it may be productive to note that some of the greatest phenomena of spiritual surplus in recent intellectual history - Johann Gottlieb Fichte as the reinventor of the theory of alienation and Friedrich Nietzsche as the modernizer of the Christian superhuman idea - passed through the same school, the Thuringian Pforta near Naumburg, which was known in its time as one of the strictest secondary schools in Germany: Fichte from 1774 to 1780184 and Nietzsche from 1856 to 1864. It is hardly necessary to explain how the Tubingen seminary over-fulfilled its training mission with the pupils H6lderlin, Hegel and Schelling. The question of what the pupil Karl Marx, who graduated in 1835, owed to his formative years at the gymnasium in Trier, the former Jesuit Trinity College, has been answered with rather modest information by revolutionary historiography. 185
In the most recent phase of school history, the creative malad- aptation of the classical school has been perverted into a malign maladaptation that can be called modern in so far as it resulted from an epoch-typical disturbance of role model functions and the accom- panying decline in practice consciousness. In the wake of this, school approaches a point of twofold implosion at which it produces neither citizens nor personalities. It heads towards a state beyond conformi- zation and production of surpluses that bypasses all aspects of direct usefulness and indirect creation of consequences. Year after year,
429
THE EXERCiSES OF THE MODERNS
to got out is increasingly evident, without any blame whatsoever being attached to individual teachers or students. The two are joined in an ecumene of disorienta- tion scarcely paralleled in history - unless one wishes to point to the long night of education between the collapse of the Roman school system in the fifth century and the rebirth of a Christian-humanist school culture in the wake of the Alcuinic-Carolingian reforms during
the eighth century.
To diagnose the malaise, one would have to show in detail how
the current school takes part in the process that Niklas Luhmann calls the differentiation of subsystems. Differentiation means the establishment of strictly self-referentially organized structures within a subsystem or 'praxis field' - in evolution-theoretical terms, the institutionalization of selfishness. Luhmann's ingenious impulse was to show how growth in the performance capacity of subystems in modern 'society' - whether in politics, business, law, science, art, the church, sport, pedagogy or the health system - depends on a constant increase in its self-referentiality, to the point of its transition into a state of complete self-referential closure. In moral-theoretical terms, this implies the remoulding of selfishness at the subsystemic level into a regional virtue. For 'social' critique, this means that helpless protest against the cynicism of power is replaced by system enlightenment - that is to say, a clarification of enlightenment.
The systemically conditioned revaluation of values presupposes the de-demonization of self-preference that one can observe in the texts of the European moralists between the seventeenth and nine- teenth centuries. 186 It is hardly surprising, then, that one encounters a neutralized perversion at the centre of every subsystem. It is not only the offensive deviation of the 'blasphemer' from the moral norm that appears perverse, but far more the openness of the admis- sion that the subordinated system is ultimately only concerned with itself, not its possible mandates in a larger framework. 187 Thus there is a close connection between cynicism and perversion - cynicism, after all, as enlightened false consciousness, speaks the truth about the false, provided that it helps immorality to become blatant. This
breakthrough to blatancy - the aletheia of systems - first occurred in the field of politics, when Machiavelli disclosed the autonomous laws of political action and recommended its emancipation - long considered scandalous - from general morality. This was followed by economic theory after the advent of mechanical production in the late eighteenth century. Early liberals like Mandeville and Adam
430
EXERCISES MISEXERCISES
comes
"'H'~"'Y' openly recognized that was to
profits for its managers so that they could service their loans, make new investments and cover salary costs. In short: within the system, 'social' factors can only be taken into account via calculations of side effects. The argument that business is of most use to the social envi- ronment when it concentrates on what it does best, namely generat- ing profits, is correct across the board - and yet it does not manage to acquire more than a vague plausibility, for the evident success of the one side is accompanied by growing evidence to the contrary: the selfishness of the economic system ignores too many other interests, whether one describes these as the interests of the whole or not.
The remaining subsystems are naturally forced far more strongly to hide their selfishness and justify themselves with the aid of vague holistic rhetoric. I8s This does not alter their factual development into 'selfish systems'. Each of them produces so-called experts who explain to the rest why things have to go the known way They have to make it clear to the sceptical audience why the all-tao-visible self- interest of the subsystem is outweighed by its usefulness for all. But one can still not imagine a health system openly stating that it pri- marily serves its own self-reproduction. Nor has one heard any utter- ances from churches to the effect that their only goal is to preserve the churches, even though open speech is considered a virtue among the clergy. There is even less reason to expect the school system's one day becoming sufficiently perverse to declare that its only task is to keep itself running somehow, in order to ensure that its profiteers - teachers and administrative employees - have secure positions and solid privileges.
Where one cannot expect confessions, one must rely on diagnoses. Diagnoses remould perversions into structural problems. It is obvious that the problem of today's school system is not only that it is no longer able to fulfil the state mission to breed citizens because the definition of the goal has become too blurred amid the demands of the current professional world; it is even clearer in the abandonment of its humanistic and artistic surplus in favour of devoting itself to a more or less de-spirited industry of pseudo-scientifically founded didactic routines. Because, in recent decades, it has no longer sum- moned the courage for dysfunctionality it had persistently shown since the seventeenth century, it changed into an empty selfish system. It produces teachers that only remind one of teachers, school subjects that only remind one of school subjects, and pupils that only remind one of pupils. In this process, school becomes 'anti-authoritarian' in
431
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to
imitation cannot be disabled, the
risks becoming exemplary for the next generation in its own reluc- tance to represent exemplarity. This means that the second and third generations will be populated almost entirely by teachers who no longer do any more than celebrate the self-referentiality of the tuition. The tuition taking place is self-referential because it is in the nature of the system for it to take place. The internal differentiation of the school system brings about a situation in which there is only a single main subject left in school: that of 'school'. Accordingly, there is only one external goal to tuition: graduation with the corresponding quali- fication. Whoever completes a career at such a school has spent up to thirteen years learning not to take the teachers as examples. Through adaptation to the system, they have learned a form of learning that dispenses with the internalization of the material; they have virtually irreversibly rehearsed working through it without any acquisitive practice. They have learned the habitus of a pretend learning that defensively makes various objects its own in the system-immanently correct belief that the ability to adapt to the given forms of tuition is, for the time being, the aim of all pedagogy.
In the light of these phenomena, radical school thinkers have called for a dissolution of the entire system - whether, as with Ivan Illich, in the postulation of a 'de-schooling of society' or, as among current reform educators, through the suggestion of abolishing the whole established system of subjects and turning school during the forma- tive years into an open training camp for the polyvalent intelligence of young people. Such demands are in keeping with the great shift from book culture to network culture that has taken place over the last two decades. Its practical application would lead to something resembling a reintroduction of intelligence into the wild that could be described as a controlled jungle pedagogy. In this context, there are notable findings indicating that young people who spend a great deal of time with computer games and junk communication show consid- erable training effects in dealing intelligently with data clutter. Steven Johnson has summarized these developments under a title that should catch the attention of parents and systems theorists: Everything Bad Is Good for YOU. 189 It presents the thesis that almost any form of strong inculturation is better than going along with a maladaptive selfish system that can only offer parodies of the previous education. The problem of the false teacher, which I illustrated in the philosophi- cal context using the example of Sartre, returns at the systemic level as the problem of the false school.
432
AND
Malign Repetitions Ill: The Self~Referential Art System Modernity
Observations of this type and this tendency are pushed yet further as soon as one turns to the art system of modernity. It is clear to anyone who examines the history of art from 1910 to the present day that the catastrophe of the visual arts took place during this time - both in the process-theoretical and in the colloquial sense of the word. The three decisive generations of artists in the visual arts - from 1910 to 1945, 1945 to 1980, and 1980 to 2015 - expanded the field of their profession in a dizzyingly rapid advance towards new procedures. In the process, however, they forgot how to follow on from the highest artistic standards of the previous generation. The vast majority of them gave up the continuation of the golden chain of thematic, tech- nical and formal imitations at the level of modernly unrestricted art experiments.
The catastrophe of art transpires as the catastrophe of imitative behaviour and the training consciousness associated with it, which had spanned the previous three thousand years of 'art history' as a proliferation, however fragmented, of masteries and trade secrets. After a sequence of some eighty to a hundred generations of imitatio- based copying processes in premodern art, the imitation of content and technique was almost entirely stripped of its function as a sub- stantial cultural replicator within a mere two changes of generation. As imitation constitutes the decisive tradition-forming mechanism, however, even in a culture that disavows imitation in favour of a sug- gestive and dubious ideology of creativity, the imitation carried out by the moderns concerns the only aspect of art still suited to imitation without the imitators having to notice, let alone cultivate, the ten- dency of the imitation themselves. This aspect consists in the fact that works of art are not only produced, but also exhibited. 190 The shift from art as a power of production (along with the 'baggage' of the old masters) to art as a power of exhibition (along with its freedom of effects) gives pre-eminence to a form of imitation that turns its back on the workshop and puts the place of presentation at the centre of events. In this way, an uncontrollably exaggerated element of selfish- ness enters not only the art world, but also the works themselves. From each decade to the next, one can see more clearly that they are ever less interested in their production character and ever more inter- ested in their exhibition character.
In his essay Countdown: 3 Kunstgenerationen, Heiner Miihlmann uses evolution-theoretical arguments to reconstruct the free fall of
433
THE EXERCISES Of THE . MODERNS
a state
evolution from 1910 to , it U '-'\'. V H . ''"
the systematic misjudgement of imitation and the train- ing element leads to paradoxical imitations and perverse forms of training. Paradoxical imitations and perverse training forms are ones in which malign qualities - which one would have termed 'vices' in earlier times - reproduce most successfully. In the imitation-blind subculture of modern visual art, on the thresholds between genera- tions, works and artists established themselves in which one could observe the next highest level of self-referentiality; yet contemporary observers proved unable to conclude from this that a self-referential work is simultaneously one that denies its own existence. Rather, the consummate malignity of the modern art scene is evident precisely in the fact that even the most shrilly self-referential cynicism can be taken as proof of the transcendent nature of art.
The art system has meanwhile taken over the best place in the sun of selfishness unchallenged. Although Martin Heidegger had taught that the work of art establishes a world - at the very time when art began its descent into pure self-referentiality. In reality, the work of art in the selfish system of postmodernized art has no intention of estab- lishing a world. Rather, it presents itself as a sign that it is showing something which does not refer to any world: its own exhibited state. The work of art in the third generation of blind selfishness-imitation has anything but an explicit world-relation. What it establishes is its manifest remoteness from everything outside its own sphere. The only thing it knows about the world is that it contains people who are full of longing for experiences of meaningfulness and transcend- ence. It relies on the fact that many of them are prepared to gratify their yearning in the empty hermeticism of self-referential works, in the tautology of self-referential exhibitions, and in the triumphalism
of self-referential museum buildings. Like all pseudo-religions, it aims for transcendence without for a second taking its eyes off its mundane interests.
When it comes to exhibiting its lack of concern for external ref- erences, the art system has even surpassed the financial one. It has already achieved what the economic system can only dream of: it has sacralized its selfishness, and now displays it like a seal of election. Hence the irresistible temptation emanating from the art system for the financial system and all other domains of self-referential activ- ity. The curators, who organize self-referential exhibitions, and the artists, who act as self-curators and self-collectors,191 are the only ones from whom the protagonists of speculative business can learn
434
AND MISEXERCISES
one can never
as is to react to art as if it were a
ration of transcendence - and how else should it react in a time when any added meaning is dressed up as a religious experience?
Everything suggests that the same audience will also react to extreme wealth as if it were transcendence. The future of the art system is thus easy to predict: it lies in its fusion with the system of the largest fortunes. It promises an illustrious exhibitionistic future for the latter and a transition to the princely dimension for itself. After the emer- gence of the artistic power of production in the Renaissance, which made the artist great as the master of the landscape, the portrait and the apocalypse, and after the emergence of the power of exhibition in early modernity, which began with the exhibition of a urinal and cul- minated in the self-exhibiting museum, we are currently experiencing the emergence of art market power, which places all the power in the hands of the collectors. The path of art follows the law of externaliza- don, which proves the power of imitation precisely where imitation is most vehemently denied: it leads from the artists, who imitate artists, via the exhibitors, who imitate exhibitors, to the buyers, who imitate buyers. Before our eyes, the motto [>art pour l'art has turned into 'the art system for the art system'. From this position, the art system develops into the paradigm for all successful maladaptations - indeed the source of malign copying processes of all kinds. The problem of the false school returns as the problem of seduction through the rewards provided by the art system for examples of pseudo-culture. 192 The conclusion is an obvious one: in future, there will hardly be any perversion that does not take the current art system as an example. Derivative trading was long established there before the financial world began doing the same. Like the doping-corrupted sport system, the art system is at a crossroads: either it goes all the way on the path of corruption through imitation of the extra-artistic effect in the world of exhibitions and collections, exposing art once and for all as the playground of the last human, or it remembers the necessity of bringing creative imitation back to the workshops and re-addressing the question of how one should distinguish between what is worthy and what is unworthy of repetition.
435
RETROSPECTIVE
From the Re-Embedding of the Subject to the Relapse into Total Care
If one looks back from these current, all too current perceptions to the long way travelled by modern forms of subject-forming practice from their beginnings in urban mysticism, the workshops of artistes and craftsmen, the studios of scholars and the offices of the early Renaissance to the educational institutions, art galleries, fitness centres and genetic laboratories of the present, we arrive - beyond the unsummarizable wealth of divergent lines of development - at a problematic overall finding. Certainly the Modern Age fulfilled one of its promises: for the escapist ethicists populating the millennia between Heraclitus and Blaise Pascal, between Gautama Buddha and Tota Puri, it opened up the possibility of a new existence as world- lings. In keeping this promise, however, it simultaneously took away from humans what many had considered most valuable: the possible of distinguishing oneself radically from the world.
One cannot deny that modernity ended the alienation between the enclaves of the secessionists193 and the wasteland of externalities, and provided a new description of the discrepancy between humans and being in partly pathological, partly political and partly aesthetic terms. It offered therapies on the first track, social reforms on the second, and emergences into creativity on the third. Do we still need to point out that these main directions of world improvement and self-improvement are simultaneously the modes that helped us to resolve most of the misunderstandings concentrated in the concept of 'religion'? When it comes to correcting the disproportion between humans and the world, the most powerful mediators are medicine, the arts and democracy (better described as the politics of friendship). And when the concern is to redirect the forces of escapism towards a
436
RETROSPECTIVE
on beyond.
But regardless of whether modernity sought to adapt humans to the demands of the conditions or vice versa, its aim was always to bring back those who had voluntarily become estranged from the world in their secession from the 'country home of the self' to 'reality'. Its ambition was to imprint on them a single citizenship that gives and takes everything: being-in-the-world. It binds us to a communal life that knows no more emigration. Since living there we all have the same passport, issued by the United States of Ordinariness.
We are guaranteed all human rights - except for the right to exit from factic- ity. Hence the meditative enclaves gradually become invisible, and the residential communities of unworldliness disband. The beneficial deserts are abandoned, the monasteries empty out, holidaymakers replace monks and holidays replace escapism. The demi-mondes of relaxation give both heaven and Nirvana an empirical meaning.
The re-secularization of the ascetically withdrawn subject (which is erroneously elevated to a substance) is undoubtedly one of the ten- dencies in modernity that merits close philosophical attention. In fact, it initiated a change that can be followed with sympathy, as it held out the prospect of nothing less than a reconciliation of humans and the world after an era of radical alienation. The 'age of balance' made the negation of ancient oppositions its mission - the spirit and life wanted to come together again, while ethics and the everyday wanted to form a new alliance. Millennia had passed in which the individuals resolved to embark on secession split the totality of the world into inner and outer, own and non-own parts; now they would be re- embedded in the milieu of a multi-dimensional whole, each one in its place and grasping itself as the 'worldling in the middle', to draw once again on Goethe's cheerful self-description. When the Enlightenment drove forward the disenchantment of metaphysics, it did so not least with the aim of freeing those indoctrinated with notions of the beyond from their extravagant immersion in worldless fictions. What made the critics of the religious illusion so sure of their cause was the conviction that the alienated human race could only achieve eman- cipation and true happiness by renouncing all imaginary happiness.
Taken together, these efforts form the complex of forms of the practising life I have outlined here under the classification 'exercises of the moderns'. Their key figures were the technical, artistic and discur- sive virtuosos who, in extensive practice cycles, managed to produce
437
THE EXERCISES OF THE l\10DERNS
ro(:os:m:>. as -pe,rS()fl<UltleS aocUlnentt~d individuals sure of experiencing the wide world inside their own person. All of them still profited from a metaphysical reinsurance that made the turn to worldliness appear as a gain on the account of the heightened and spared ego. For them, experience was synonymous with development. They could still enjoy the glowing isolation that guaranteed the sepa- rated subject a seemingly inalienable right of domicile in the realms of the soul and the mind; from there, they organized their journeys into the open - conquistadors and beautiful souls in one. It was at them that Goethe directed his pronouncement: 'No time there is, no power,
can decompose I The minted form that lives and living growS. '194
The rest is quickly told, for it is untellable: the radicalized enlighten- ment of the twentieth century broke open the enclosures of 'person- alities' immunized as figures or with reference to the beyond. Along with the soul that it posited for itself, it simultaneously drove out its daimon, the eerie companion from which Goethe borrowed the confidence that every individual life follows its inner primal form, in accordance with 'the law presiding at your birth'. 195 This expul- sion too initially occurred for the sake of inner-worldly bliss, which was entitled to demand the sacrifice of various illusions. A particular concern was to end the priority of the soul, which had become a prison for the body. 196
The true price of the epochal operation is revealed by the aberrances of the last century. If one were to compress this era into a film script, its title would have to be 'The Secularization of the Inner World', or 'The Revenge of the World on Those Who Thought that They Could Remain Untouched by It'. It would demonstrate that humans are destined for mass consumption as soon as one views them as a mere factor in the game of world improvement. The plot would be centred on the symmetrically interrelated primary ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which advanced the re-translation of humans from world-flight into world-belonging: naturalism and socialism - one could, because of their close kinship, also say social natural- ism and natural socialism. Both systems strove to reclaim humans, along with their physical foundations, entirely for the 'ensemble of social relations' and to prevent their flight into supposed inner worlds or counter-worlds - to say nothing of religious backworlds. Both approaches are inseparable from an elemental pragmatism which states that a thing is only real if it can be treated in social actions
438
RETR0 SPECTIVE
It is
indeed an towards moral-demonic excess: if humans can
no longer succeed in distancing themselves spiritually from worldly conditions, then countless people at least do everything they deem necessary so that, under the given conditions, they can count them- selves among the good, the morally superior.
The decisive blow to the mere possibility of an existence capable of world-flight did not come from the pragmatic side, however, but from the renewed 'revolution in the way of thinking' in the early twentieth century associated with the young Heidegger. He turned the clock of philosophical reflection back more than two and a half millennia when he decided, in his principal work Being and Time (1927), to let philosophical thought begin anew in the situation of Dasein as being- in-the-world. He thus reversed the step into the aloof realm of theory, and with it the securing of the self in a distant observing position, the step that - reusing Heraclitean images - I described as stepping out of the river of life and conquering the shore. 197 On the shore, we saw the appearance of the observer whose gaze transformed the world into a spectacle - an undignified one, of course, from which the ethically motivated intelligence must turn away.
Through this new approach in the midst of the comprehensive situation that is being-in-the-world, the greenhouses of the inner- world illusion were shattered and the lodges of pure observation sank in the flood. The separated subject found itself demoted to Dasein and stripped of its theoretical privilege, namely its similar- ity to the observer gods. It was immersed anew in the sea of moods that open up and colour pre-logically the whole in which we reside. This brought to light once more how far the human being, as an 'organ' of existence, is disposed towards being-outside-oneself. Its mode of being is self-forfeiting, as it always already occurs as being- among-things and being-with others. In its spontaneous quality, the human being is a marionette of the collective and a hostage of situations. Only at the 'second reading', after the event and excep- tionally, does Dasein return to itself and its possible mandate of self-being, and all attempts to elevate this later discovery to a first substance, a primal form, a world axis rising from the ego, show traces of subtle forgeries. Just as Proudhon declared, 'Whoever says "God" seeks to deceive', we can conclude from Heidegger: 'Whoever says "I" seeks to deceive themselves. ' Through their symptomatic prematurity, these over-elevations of the self betray an interest in rescue from the torrential flow of time. Is it necessary to emphasize
439
THE EXERCISES niE MODERNS rescue not in prove
The consequences of the shift are as unforeseeable as the conditions of the coming age, which, whatever else it might be, can only be referred to as the age 'after' this one. One observation, at least, does suggest itself: the re-secularization of the withdrawn subject did not fulfil the expectation that abstaining from imagined bliss directly contributes to physical or actual happiness. The reason for this can be found in Heidegger's description of the Dasein re-embedded in the worldly situation. The price for the new beginning of a thinking orientation from the position of being-in-the-world is inevitably a loss of distance, whose main symptom is the handing over of humans to concern and their immersion in the lived situation. Whoever turns the 'subject' back into 'Dasein' replaces the withdrawn with the included, the collected with the scattered, the immortalized with the de-immortalized,198 the redeemed with the un-saved. What Heidegger calls concern {Sorge] is the concession of humans to the world that they cannot seal themselves off against its infiltration. The shore on which the observer wanted to establish themselves is not a genuine rescue. Factical existing is 'always also absorbed in the world of its concern'. 199 However it might attempt to protect and isolate itself - as atman, as the noetic psyche, as Homo interior, as an inhabitant of the inner citadel, as a soul spark, as an underlying subject, as a present ego, as a personality, as an intersection of archetypes, as a floating point of irony, as a critic of the context of delusion and as an observer of observers - its constitutive being-outside-itself in fact means that it is always already in the grip of concern; only the gods, and fools with them, are without concern in themselves. Dasein is colonized by
worldlinesses from the start. Because it is always already absorbed in concern, it must draw up lists of priorities and work through them as if this were its innermost aim. Attempts to gain distance can never be more than secondary modifications of a self-delivering that anticipates everything else. The externalities Marcus Aurelius claimed stand outside our doors have, in reality, occupied the house. Its sup- posed master is possessed by the guests, and he can count himself lucky if they allow him a corner to which he can retreat.
Thus everything suggests that after three millennia of spiritual eva- sions, human existence has been taken back to the point where the secessions began, and is little the wiser for it - or at least, barely faces less difficulty. This impression is simultaneously correct and incor- rect: correct in so far as the exuberance of surreal ascents, hungry for
rescue?
440
RETROSPECTIVE
a world beyond, has neither stood the test of time nor stood up to analysis; and incorrect because the treasuries of practice knowledge are overflowing, despite being rarely frequented in recent times.
Now it is time to call to mind anew all those forms of the practising life that continue to release salutogenic energies, even where the over- elevations to metaphysical revolutions in which they were initially bound up have crumbled. Old forms must be tested for reusability and new forms invented. Another cycle of secessions may begin in order to lead humans out once again - if not out of the world, then at least out of dullness, dejection and obsession, but above all out of banality, which Isaac Babel termed the counter-revolution.
441
OUTLOOK
The Absolute Imperative
See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand! Galatians 6:11
Who Is Allowed to Say It?
'You must change your life! ' The voice Rilke heard speaking to him at the Louvre has meanwhile left its point of origin. Within a century, it has become part of the general zeitgeist - in fact, it has become the last content of all the communications whirring around the globe. At present, there is no information in the world ether that cannot be connected to this absolute imperative in its deep structure. It is the call that can never be neutralized into a mere statement of fact; it is the imperative whose effects are unhindered by any indicatives. It articulates the motto that arranges the innumerable chaotic particles of information into a concise moral form. It expresses concern for the whole. It cannot be denied: the only fact of universal ethical signifi- cance in the current world is the diffusely and ubiquitously growing realization that things cannot continue in this way.
Once again, we have reason to recall Nietzsche. It was he who first understood in which mode the ethical imperative must be conveyed in modern times: it speaks to us in the form of a command that sets up an unconditional overtaxing. In so doing, he opposed the pragmatic consensus that one can only demand of people what they are capable of achieving in the status quo. Nietzsche set the original axiom of the practising life against it in the form established since the irruption of ethical difference into conventional life forms: humans can only advance as long as they follow the impossible. The moderate decrees,
442
OUTLOOK
m cases, their fulfilment presupposes a that stems from an unrealizable and inescapable demand. What is the human being if not an animal of which too much is demanded? Only those who set up the first commandment can subsequently present Ten Commandments In the first, the impossible itself speaks to me: thou shalt have no other standards next to me. Whoever has not been seized by the oversized does not belong to the species of Homo sapiens. The first hunter in the savannah was already a member; he raised his head and under- stood that the horizon is not a protective boundary, but rather the
gate for the gods and the dangers to enter.
In order to articulate the current overtaxing in keeping with the
state of the world, Nietzsche took the risk of presenting the public with 'a book for everyone and nobody' - a prophetic eruption, six thousand feet beyond mankind and time, spoken with no considera- tion for any listeners, and yet allied in an invasive fashion with each individual's knowledge of his intimate design for the not-yet. One cannot simply let the Obermensch programme rest if one knows that it stands for vertical tension in general. Its proclamation became necessary once there was no longer sufficient faith in the hypothesis of God to guarantee the anchoring of upwards-pulling tension in a transcendent pole. But even without God or the Obermensch, it is sufficient to note that every individual, even the most successful, the most creative and the most generous, must, if they examine them- selves in earnest, admit that they have become less than their poten- tiality of being would have required - except for those moments in which they could say that they fulfilled their duty to be a good animal. As average Ober-animals, tickled by ambitions and haunted by exces- sive symbols, humans fall short of what is demanded of them, even when they wear the winner's jersey or the cardinal's robe.
The statement 'You must change your life! ' provides the basic form for the call to everyone and nobody. Although it is unmistakably directed at a particular addressee, it speaks to all others too. Whoever hears the call without defences will experience the sublime in a per- sonally addressed form. The sublime is that which, by calling to mind the overwhelming, shows the observer the possibility of their engulf- ment by the oversized - which, however, is suspended until further notice. The sublime whose tip points to me is as personal as death and as unfathomable as the world. For Rilke, it was the Dionysian dimen- sion of art that spoke to him from the disfigured statue of Apollo and gave him the feeling of encountering something infinitely superior.
443
THE EXERCISES OF THE
in art. Nor the or councils possess any commanding authority, let alone the councils wise men, assuming one can still use this phrase without irony.
The only authority that is still in a position to say 'You must change your life! ' is the global crisis, which, as everyone has been noticing for some time, has begun to send out its apostles. Its authority is real because it is based on something unimaginable of which it is the har- binger: the global catastrophe. One need not be religiously musical to understand why the Great Catastrophe had to become the goddess of the century. As it possesses the aura of the monstrous, it bears the primary traits that were previously ascribed to the transcend- ent powers: it remains concealed, but makes itself known in signs; it is on the way, yet already authentically present in its portents; it reveals itself to individual intelligences in penetrating visions, yet also surpasses human understanding; it takes certain individuals into its service and makes prophets of them; its delegates turn to the people around them in its name, but are fended off as nuisances by most. On the whole, its fate is much like that of the God of monotheism when He entered the stage scarcely three thousand years ago: His mere message was already too great for the world, and only the few were prepared to begin a different life for His sake. In both cases, however, the refusal of the many increases the tension affecting the human col- lective. Since the global catastrophe began its partial unveiling, a new manifestation of the absolute imperative has come into the world, one that directs itself at everyone and nobody in the form of a sharp
admonition: 'Change your life! Otherwise its complete disclosure will demonstrate to you, sooner or later, what you failed to do during the time of portents! '
Against this background, we can explain the origin of the unease in today's ethical debate, both in its academic and in its publicistic vari- eties. It stems from the discrepancy between the monstrosities that have been in the air since the Cold War era after 1945 and the para- lysing harmlessness of all current discourses, whether their arguments draw on the ethics of attitude, responsibility, discourse or situations - to say nothing of the helpless reanimation of doctrines of value and virtue. Nor is the oft-cited return of 'religion' much more than the symptom of an unease that awaits its resolution in a lucid formula- tion. In reality, ethics can only be based on the experience of the sublime, today as much as since the beginning of the developments that led to the first ethical secessions. Driven by its call, the human
444
OUTLOOK
setting up the to head for impossible. What people called 'religion' was only ever significant as a vehicle of the absolute imperative in its different place- and time-based versions. The rest is the chatter of which Wittgenstein
rightly said that it should be brought to an end.
For the theologically interested, this means that the one God and the catastrophe have more in common than was previously registered - not least their trouble with humans, who cannot rouse themselves to believe in either. There is not only what Coleridge called the 'willing suspension of disbelief' in the fiction whose absence would render aes- thetic behaviour impossible. An even more effective approach is the willing suspension of belief in the real whose absence would prevent any practical accommodation with the given situation. Individuals barely ever cope with reality without an additional element of de- realization. Incredulous de-realization, furthermore, makes little dis- tinction between the past and the future: whether the catastrophe is a past one from which one should have learned or an imminent one that could be averted by the right measures, the reluctance to believe always knows how to arrange things in such a way as to achieve the desired degree of de-realization.
Who Can Hear It?
When it comes to man-made catastrophes, the twentieth century was the most instructive period in world history. It demonstrated: the greatest disaster complexes came about in the form of projects that were meant to gain control of the course of history from a single centre of action. They were the most advanced manifestations of what philosophers, following Aristotle and Marx, called 'praxis'. In contemporary pronouncements, the great projects were described as manifestations of the final battle for world domination. Nothing happened to the humans of the age of praxis except what they or their fellow humans had instigated. Hence one could say: there is nothing in hell that has not previously appeared in programmes. The sorcerer's apprentices of planetary design were forced to learn that the unpredictable is an entire dimension ahead of any strategic calculus. Small wonder, then, if those good intentions did not rec- ognize themselves in the bad results. The rest was in line with psy- chological probability: the militant world-improvers withdrew from
445
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
them to fate. The most convincing
behavioural pattern was penned by a sceptical philosopher: after fatal undertakings, the failed protagonists indulge in 'the art of not having been the one'.
Analogous patterns are at work in the run-up to the announced catastrophe: before fatal developments, the actors on the political stage demonstrate the art of not having understood the signs of the times. Western people have long been well rehearsed in this behaviour - one could call it universal procrastination - through deep-seated cultural practices: ever since the Enlightenment demoted God to a moral background radiation in the cosmos, or declared Him an out- right fiction, the moderns have shifted the experience of the sublime from ethics to aesthetics. In accordance with the rules of the mass culture existing since the early nineteenth century, they internal- ized the belief that one survives merely imagined horrors completely
unharmed. In their eyes, shipwrecks only ever occur for the viewers, and disasters only so that they can enjoy the pleasant feeling of having escaped. They conclude from this that all threats are simply part of the entertainment, and warnings an element of the show.
The return of the sublime in the shape of an ethical imperative that is not to be taken lightly catches the Western world - to leave aside all others - unawares. Its citizens have become accustomed to viewing all indications of imminent disaster presented in the tone of reality as a form of documentary horror genre, and its intellectuals are doing justice to their reputation as 'detached cosmopolitan spectators' by deconstructing even the most serious warnings as a discursive genre and portraying their authors as busybodies. But even if it were not an aesthetic genre, they would remain pragmatic in the belief that they could take their time taking the information seriously. Furthermore, surely someone who wished to take the signs on the horizon person- ally would immediately collapse under such worries?
Nonetheless, these contemporaries will ascertain sooner or later that there is no human right to non-overtaxing - any more than there is a right to encounter only such problems as one can overcome with on-board resources. It is a misunderstanding of the nature of the problematic if one only puts such matters in that category as have a prospect of being solved during the current term of office. And it shows an even greater misjudgement of the nature of vertical tensions in human existence if one assumes a symmetry between challenge and response. Overtaxing on one side, surpluses on the other - and no guarantee that the two go together like a problem and its solution.
446
OUTLOOK Who Will Do It?
Whatever is undertaken in the future to confront the dangers identi- fied, it is subject to the law of increasing improbability that dominates our overheated evolution. We can deduce from this observation why the socially conservative propaganda circulating between Rome, Washington and Fulda does not provide any suitable answer to the current world crisis - aside from possible constructive effects in smaller circles. For how should timeless 'values', which have already proved powerless and inadequate in the face of comparatively small problems, suddenly gain the necessary power to bring about a turn for the better when confronted with greater difficulties?
If the answer to the current challenges were genuinely to be found in the classic virtues, it would be sufficient to follow the maxim for- mulated by Goethe in his Divan poem 'The Bequest of the Ancient Persian Faith': 'Solemn duty's daily observation I More than this, it needs no revelation. ' Even if one is willing to admit that this - beneath the oriental mask - is the greatest utterance of the European bour- geoisie before its historic failure, it is clear that we cannot be helped merely by a rule of preservation. Next to the indispensable concern for taking established traditions with us, after all, what impresses us most is the novelty of situations that demands bold answers. Even in Goethe's Weimar home, there would be more talk today of solemn duty's daily invention, before doing away with the adjective 'solemn' - firstly because it goes against the taste of the time, and secondly because something that is invented daily is not suitable for a solemn sense of duty. After further reflection, one would also remove the preceding noun and speak of tasks rather than duty. Finally, one would issue a statement with the impenetrable suggestion that the well-intentioned people in the Harmonious Society find a fruitful way of combining the old and the new. If one studies the instructions from Rome, one will note that they consist of equally inscrutable formulas.
The law of increasing improbability opens up the perspective of two overtaxings in one: what is happening on the earth at this moment is, on the one side, an actual integration disaster in progress - that of globalization, launched by Columbus' voyage in 1492, set moving by the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521, accelerated by world trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and driven along to the point of an effective synchronization of world events thanks to the quick media of the twentieth century. These synchronize the previously scattered factions of humanity - what we
447
THE THE ,\10DERNS
an torn transaction and collision. On the other side, a
disaster is in progress, heading for a crash whose time is uncertain, but which cannot be delayed indefinitely. Of these two monstrosi- ties, the second is far more probable, as it is located on the line of processes that are already under way. It is furthered above all by the conditions of production and consumption in the world's wealthy regions and developing zones, in so far as they are based on a blind overexploitation of finite resources. The reason of nations still extends no further than preserving jobs on the Titanic. The crash solution is also probable because it offers a large psychoeconomic price advan- tage: it would save us from the chronic tensions affecting us as a result of global evolution. Only happy minds experience the piling up of Mount Improbable to the heights of an operatively integrated world 'society' as a project that vitalizes its participants. They alone experi- ence existence in the present as a stimulating privilege and would not want to have lived at any other time. Those with less cheerful natures have the impression that being-in-the-world has never been so tiring. What, then, could be more logical than the principle of mass culture: making entertainment the top priority, and accepting that as far as everything else is concerned, things will happen as they must?
It was the philosopher Hans Jonas who proved that the owl of Minerva does not always begin its flight at twilight. Through his remoulding of the categorical imperative into an ecological one, he demonstrated the possibility of a forward-looking philosophy for our times: 'Act in such a way that the effects of your actions can be reconciled with the permanence of true human life on earth. ' Thus the metanoetic imperative for the present, which raises the categorical to the absolute, takes on sufficiently distinct contours for the present. It makes the harsh demand of embracing the monstrosity of the univer- sal in its concretized form. It demands of us a permanent stay in the overtaxing-field of enormous improbabilities. Because it addresses everyone personally, I must relate its appeal to myself as if I were its only addressee. It demands that I act as if I could immediately know what I must achieve as soon as I consider myself an agent in the network of networks. At every moment, I am to estimate the effects of my actions on the ecology of the global society. It even seems that I am expected to make a fool of myself by identifying myself as a member of a seven-billion-person people - although my own nation is already too much for me. I am meant to stand my ground as a citizen of the world, even if I barely know my neighbours and neglect my
448
OUTLOOK
most my new
me, 'mankind' is nor a
that can be encountered, I nonetheless have the mission of taking its real presence into consideration at every operation of my own. I am to develop into a fakir of coexistence with everyone and everything, and reduce my footprint in the environment to the trail of a feather.
The situation of overtaxing is fulfilled by these mandates as much as by the Old European imitatio Christi or the Indian mok~a ideal. As there is no escaping this demand - except by fleeing into narcosis - one faces the question of whether one can describe a sensible motif with whose aid the gulf between the sublime imperative and the practical exercise can be bridged. Such a motif - if one leaves aside the phantoms of abstract universalism - can only be gained from a consideration of General Immunology. Immune systems are embod- ied or institutionalized expectations of injury and damage based on the distinction between the own and the foreign. While biological immunity applies to the level of the individual organism, the two social immune systems concern the supra-organismic, that is to say the co-operative, transactional, convivial dimensions of human existence: the solidaristic system guarantees legal security, provision for existence and feelings of kinship beyond one's own family; the symbolic system provides security of worldview, compensation for the certainty of death, and cross-generational constancy of norms. At this level too, the definition applies that 'life' is the success phase of an immune system. Like biological immune systems, the solidaristic and symbolic systems can also pass through phases of weakness, even near-failure. These express themselves in human self-experience and world-experience as an instability of value consciousness and an uncertainty as to the resilience of our solidarities. Their collapse is tantamount to collective death.
The strong hallmark of systems of this type is that they no longer define the own in terms of organismic egotism, but rather place themselves in the service of an ethnic or multi-ethnic, institutionally and intergenerationally expanded self-concept. This enables us to understand why evolutionary approaches to an animal-like altru- ism, which manifest themselves in the natural readiness for species to procreate and care for one's brood, develop among humans into cultural altruisms. The rationale for this development lies in the magnification of the own: what seems altruistic from the individual's perspective is actually egotism at the level of the larger unit; to the
449
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
extent to act as
serve the own making concessions in the narrower
own. This implicit immunological calculus forms the basis of
fiees and taxes, manners and services, asceticisms and virtuosities. All substantial cultural phenomena are part of the competitions between supra-biological immunitary units.
This reflection necessitates an expansion of the concept of immu- nity: as soon as one is dealing with life forms in which the zoon politik6n man participates, one must reckon with the primacy of supra-individual immunity alliances. Under such conditions, individ- ual immunity is only possible as co-immunity. All social organizations in history, from the primal hordes to the world empires, can, from a systemic perspective, be explained as structures of co-immunity. One finds, however, that the distribution of concrete immune advantages in large layered 'societies' has always shown considerable inequali- ties. The inequality of access to immune chances was already felt early on as the deepest manifestation of 'injustice'. It was either external- ized as an obscure fate or internalized as a consequence of dark guilt. During the last millennia, such feelings could only be balanced out through supra-ethnic mental practice systems, vulgo the higher 'reli- gions'. Through sublime imperatives and abstract universalizations of salvific promise, they kept the paths to equal symbolic immune
opportunities open for all.
The current state of the world is characterized by the absence of
an efficient co-immunity structure for the members of the 'global society'. At the highest level, 'solidarity' is still an empty word. Here, then as now, the dictum of a controversial constitutional law theorist applies: 'Whoever says "humanity" seeks to deceive. '20o The reason for this is plain to see: the effective co-immunitary units, today as in ancient times, are formatted tribally, nationally and imperially, and recently also in regional strategic alliances, and function - assuming they do - according to the respective formats of the own-foreign dif- ference. Successful survival alliances, therefore, are particular for the time being - in keeping with the nature of things, even 'world reli- gions' cannot be more than large-scale provincialisms. Even 'world' is an ideological term in this context, as it hypostatizes the macro- egotism of the West and other major powers and does not describe the concrete co-immunitary structure of all survival candidates on the global stage. The subsystems still exist in mutual rivalry, following a logic that repeatedly turns the immune gains of some into the immune losses of others. Humanity does not constitute a super-organism, as some systems theorists prematurely claim; it is, for the time being,
450
OUTLOOK
no means order.