No More Learning

It can be taken as the starting point for the central questions of General Ascetology: what is the business of the practising life, and to what end is it pursued? In what sense can we distinguish here between horizontality and verticality, whether the concern is the ascending line from parents to children in particular or the gradation between the levels of the practising life in general? Whence does Nietzsche draw his conviction that the kinetic attribute 'onward' has less value than 'upward'? From what sources does he acquire his knowledge of what above and below mean in such contexts? How can one form of life, one mode of being, be located over another in this field anyway? Where do the criteria for judge- ments of 'over' come from? Are they immanent in circumstances, or are they introduced from without? Why is continuing horizontally no longer the highest goal for Nietzsche - as it is for the majority of seasoned traditionalists in all times and peoples - and what motives underlie his conviction that a continuation of the game of replications is only affirmable and non-trivial if it brings about an enhancement?
It is clear from these questions that we will not advance any further in these reflections on the nature of practice directions without a 'critique of the vertical'. For the pedagogical, athletic, acrobatic, artistic, and ultimately any symbolic or 'culturally' mediated interpretation of the words 'above' and 'over' obviously addresses a second spatial meaning overlying the primary orientations in the physical or geographi- cal space. These two spatial meanings are of the same evolutionary age - indeed, one cannot rule out the possibility that what we are here terming the second meaning should, at least in development- psychological terms, be given priority over the first. The reason for this is not an esoteric one: in its relationship with its mother, every infant experiences a pre-symbolic and supra-spatial Above to which it looks up before it learns to walk. Fathers and grandparents are likewise 'up there', long before the child begins to build towers from blocks and
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
one on as the can over its edifices learn that one always remains superior to self-made constructs. It is sufficient to observe how the highest block returns to its original position on the ground following the collapse. This provides an experience of primitive sovereignty whose develop- ment continues into the games of critique among adults - every decon- struction is a game of little towers with the classics. By contrast, the child cannot similarly overturn the established polar situation with the parents up there and itself down there. At the experiential level, it remains - barring psychotic deregulations - embedded in a stable ver- tical tension, possibly until old age, when it has long since physically outgrown its progenitors. The 'looking up' of children to their parents and adults in general, especially to cultural heroes and transmitters of knowledge, gives rise to a psychosemantic system of co-ordinates with a pronounced vertical dimension. One could almost describe the
world of the early psyche as monarchic.
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche presupposes the decline of the four-
thousand-year empire of monarchies as a fact. The psychopolitical situation in which he wants to make himself useful as a procreation adviser is thus informed not only by the statement 'God is dead', but equally by the assertion 'the king is dead'. While the first claim must be augmented by the supplement 'God remains dead' - this is the novelty in the message of the madman [der Tolle Mensch], whether one hears it as bad news or welcomes it as a gospel - the second, in keeping with the old ritual law, is followed by the proclamation 'Long live the king! ' Nietzsche also yields to this law, but not without raising it to a more abstract level. Though empirical kings have ceased to be impressive and are only 'above' others from the perspective of protocol and the tabloid press, the royal function as such, understood as a pole of attraction to the pure Above, Over and Upwards, remains imaginarily intact in many individuals despite real circumstances, and demands a new interpretation. The replacement of kings with presidents and celebrities does not provide any solution to the task at hand. It deals with the problem on the surface, without even notic- ing the necessity of redefining the pre- of presidency and the pro- of prominent.
The Time of Artistes
Only within the framework of a comprehensive reform in the vertical system, with all its psychosemantic and culture-dynamic aspects, can
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one
death was at once that His the previous human being, and whoever would declare a successor must acknowledge that man, the conventional representative of the 'symbolic species' gov- erned by notions of God, 'remains dead'. 6 If one wanted to follow the ritual law and proclaim a living king under the new conditions, one would have to find a candidate who was neither king or man in the conventional sense. The only suitable being would be one with special traits that placed it outside the horizon of ordinary human existence - a creature sufficiently inhuman or post-human to meet the require- ments of this bizarre line of succession. Going by everything we know about human forms of life in general and Nietzsche's view of them in particular, only a figure from the pandemonium of the human is suitable for this role: the artiste, or more precisely the acrobat. The undermining of the human through the radically artificial began long ago with his emergence - could he be the figure for whom great times are now beginning?
We recall: Zarathustra's first conquest on his way from the moun- tains to the cities was a fallen tightrope walker who said that he was never much more than an animal trained with blows and fodder. If one accepts a first pointer from him towards possible meanings of the provocative word Obermensch, an image forms of a living being that is subjected to constant grooming and physically experiences adaptations to the improbable. Such an Obermensch is closer to ani- mality than the educated bourgeois because of the physical dimension of its art, yet simultaneously closer to an extra-human dimension by virtue of its removal from the everyday sphere through its daily occupational hazards. Someone who balances on the high wire lives from giving the audience a reason to look up. No one would do so without effective attractors: the danger that constantly accompanies the artiste, the embodied bravura that saves him at every step, and the overcoming of impossibility that enables its conqueror to walk between the precipice on the right and the precipice on the left as the ordinary person walks from their front door to the parlour. Thus the Obermensch's other qualities are not important; he brings traits that distinguish him from previous humans in the same way the tightrope walker differed from his audience. Thomas Mann, incidentally, in the chapter on the Parisian circus in his Confessions of Felix Krull, had already put a vehement denial of the artiste's membership of the ordi- nary human race in the mouth of his protagonist. One reads that the trapeze artist Andromache, 'daughter of the air', is neither a woman in the conventional sense of the word nor even a human being at
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a
voices 'Does anyone in on a
wire or express himself in verse? It's sheer madness. Man or woman? Unquestionably a monster. '7
Initially, the 'uber' [over] in Obermensch refers only to the alti- tude at which his rope is fastened above the heads of the spectators. I do not think it an affront to Nietzsche if we note that beneath the Romantic mask of his most oft-cited idea lies, initially, nothing other than a fantasy of prominence,8 in so far as one takes prominence as the category of people worth seeing - worth seeing according to criteria that remain to be discussed. Whether the protruders and outstanders (Latin prominere, 'to protrude' and eminere, 'to stand out') walk over tightropes, catwalks or red carpets is merely a techni- cal difference. What matters is the position of the monster (from the Latin monere, 'to warn'), in which the skill increased through strict training and its exposition in total visibility are drawn together into a single complex. In this sense prominence, after artistry and in alliance with it, provides the second impulse for the subversion of the human being through a non-human principle. Ultimately, with his hysteroid
Obermensch propaganda, Nietzsche simply ensures the possibility of fastening new ropes overhead that are worth looking up to. The 'over' here refers to the dimension of looking upwards. The human of the 'over' is the artiste who draws our gaze to wherever he is active. For him, being there means being up there. 9
At this point one could raise the objection that the artiste Nietzsche was primarily an evolutionist, even a biologist of the worst kind whose work exemplifies the fatal gesture of his century - the betrayal of the world of the intellect in the name of a naturalism without limits. What else could the desire to 'translate man back into nature' mean? Had Nietzsche not genuinely undergone a dangerous conver- sion that estranged him from his beginnings? Had he not turned away from Schopenhauer, the last thinker of renunciation, to join the camp of Darwin, the master thinker of affirmation through adaptation? Did he not, in fact, push the idea of success in life through adapta- tion further, arriving at the even more dangerous doctrine of success through conquest - with this inversion of the adapting direction entirely following the line of a biologically founded, metabiologically over-elevated concept of power? When Nietzsche, in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra quoted above, lets the prophet say to the city-dwellers in his first speech that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and overman [Obermensch] - a rope over an abyss', are we not hearing, above all else, the voice of the biologist insisting that
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on
not
HEIGHT
Nature Acrobatics on Mount Improbable
This objection to the artistic-acrobatic understanding of the term Obermensch does not hold up, because the artistic dimension does not conform to the exhausted separation of nature and culture. Evolutionary biology, for its part, only makes sense if viewed as a doctrine of nature's artistry. With Darwin's optics, nature itself is transformed into a circus in which species work their way upwards to the most incredible performances through a never-ending repetition of the simplest procedures known as variation, selection and hered- ity, generally in a co-evolutionary and co-opportunistic manner and in trans-species ensembles - one need only recall the 900 species of figs that exist worldwide: each one of these has its own exclusive species of fig fly that lives in the fruits, and without which none of the fig species could reproduce. lO Among the artiste-like inventions of culture, Nietzsche mentions those equalling the natural work of art 'a woman's breasts', this masterpiece of pre-human evolution- ary artistry that is 'useful and at the same time pleasing',11 Viewed through the opera glasses of evolutionary theory, the thing we call life is nothing other than a vaudeville with an immeasurable wealth of forms in which every branch of artistry, that is to say every species, attempts to perform the feat of all feats: survival. There is no species that has not, like Nietzsche's tightrope walker, made danger its pro- fession in some way. If one hears from natural historians that well over 90 per cent of the countless species that have lived on the earth have died out (for example, 150 of the 9,800 known species of birds in the last few centuries alone), the phrase 'occupational hazards' takes on a non-trivial meaning. From this perspective, biology
becomes historical thanatology.
If, on the other hand, one speaks of current life forms, one must,
especially as a naturalist, be able to recount their success story and illuminate the principles of their continuation - which means saying how they succeeded in staying on the survivors' side to this day, The star biologist Richard Dawkins took on a project of this kind over a decade ago when he recounted, in a popular lecture series at the Royal Institute - broadcast by the BBC under the seemingly child-friendly title Growing Up in the Universe - the history of life and its most imposing success forms. The title of the resulting book, Climbing
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THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
once more
with formulations,12 In this particular case
surpassed his own aims. Natural history - described as a climbing tour in the mountains of improbabilities - directly becomes a nature- artistic affair in which one cannot decide, and fortunately does not have to, whether the ascent of 'Mount Improbable' is car~ied out by the different species or the biologist who studies them. The image of climbing this peak of improbability is itself most likely to be inad- equate, as the rise of species cannot be understood as the conquest of a pre-existing summit. Rather, its development constitutes the folding-out of the mountain to its current altitude. Behind the image of the ascent to the mountain of the improbable lies a deeper figure, namely the emergence of a peak that is raised from the more probable to the more improbable by trivial evolutionary forces. Whether one takes the path to the summit as a climbing or a lifting of the entire rock mass, however, natural history takes on an immanent artiste- like dimension through this observation. 'Survival' is a code word for nature acrobatics. The question of who watches nature perform its feats cannot be answered from a human perspective - the only observer we can point to is the biologist, who enters the theatre of evolution with a delay of hundreds of millions of years.
In the light of these reflections, it would seem logical to relate the 'over' in survival rOberleben] and the 'over' in Obermensch to the dimension of growing improbabilities. 13 While dying out would always be the more probable result of a species's attempts to live, and the stagnation of humans in a final form of human existence would certainly be the more probable end to human history - an end that is not espoused without some self-satisfaction by the proponents of a supposed 'right to imperfection' - survival and over-humanization together embody the tendency towards the rise of the probable to the less probable. A surviving species embodies the current link in a chain of replications that has succeeded in stabilizing its improbability. If one assumes that a stabilized improbability immediately becomes a base for further ascents, this provides the basic principles for an understanding of the evolutionary drift towards the summit of Mount Improbable.
The biologist's reference to peaks of the improbable thus offers an answer to the question posed above as to the meaning of 'upwards' in Zarathustra's command - 'Not only onwards shall you propagate yourself, but upwards! ' - that is plausible in the context of current knowledge. This response assumes that evolution as such always moves 'upwards', in the sense that it establishes a continuum of life
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at
is not a planned progress, course; as a move~
ment towards increasing complexity, it is an unmistakably directed process. The contrast between 'onwards' and 'upwards' disappears of its own accord in the succession of generations, because, when viewed diachronically over extended periods, all species that seem to embody stable final forms transpire as momentary states within a genetic drift that is unpredictable in its details, but points 'upwards' overall. The global drift in the fitness current shows an increase in those species rewarded with survival, and it is precisely this tendency - that the current runs uphill counter-intuitively - that Dawkins illustrates with the image of climbing the heights of the improbable.
the evolutionary high ground cannot be approached hastily. Even the most difficult problems can be solved, and even the most precipitous heights can be scaled, if only a slow, gradual, step-by-step pathway can be found. 14
This pathway is sought by the 'selfish' genes, which are simultane- ously passed onwards and upwards in the constant reality test of species life.
Nietzsche's 'artiste metaphysics' can follow on effortlessly from the tenets of Darwinist biology. In terms of their improbability, natural species and 'cultures' - the latter defined as tradition-capable human groups with a high training and skill factor - are phenomena along the same spectrum. In the natural history of artificiality, the nature-culture threshold does not constitute any particularly notable . . ::aesura; at most, it is a hump in a curve which rises more rapidly from that point on. The only privilege of culture in relation to nature is its ability to speed up evolution as a climbing tour on Mount Improbable. In the transition from genetic to symbolic or 'cultural' evolution, the shaping process accelerates to the point at which humans become aware of the appearance of the new in their own lifetime. IS From that point, humans adopt a stance on their own capacity for innovation - and, until recently, almost always one of rejection.
Primary Conservatism and Neophilia
During the last forty thousand years of human evolution, the stand- ard reaction to the increased conspicuity of additional improbability was, as far as one can see, an unconditionally defensive one. On their habitual surfaces, all old cultures, extending back to their
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
seem a presum- ably because the task of transferring their conscious content, their symbolic and technical conventions to subsequent generations with consistent intensity already taxes them to the limits of their capacity. Cultures as such are consistently based on the fundamental contradic- tion between the acquired neophilic attitude of Homo sapiens and the - at first - inevitably neophobic constitution of their rule apparatuses. Because the reproduction of their ritual and cognitive content is its first and only concern, its path through the ages is massively neoclastic - the shattering of the new in general precedes the iconoclasms in par- ticular by many millennia. For every Cataline, every rerum novarum cupidus, there are ten thousand preservers of the old like Cato. As even the most stable cultures are constantly infiltrated by symbolic and technical innovations, however, whether inventions of their own or infections through contact with the arts of neighbouring cultures, they employ the trick of camouflaging the novelty of what has been newly absorbed, adapting the elements integrated nolens volens to the store of their own oldest material as if they had always belonged to their domestic cosmos. Such an integration of the new into the archaic is one of the primary functions of mythical thought: making experienced improbabilities, whether events or innovations, invisible as such and backdating the invasive, unignorable new to the 'origin'. The preference of metaphysics for the substantial and its resentment towards the accidental are unmistakably still offshoots of the mythi- cal thought form.
One cannot emphasize enough how significantly the later positiviza- tion of the new that began in Europe in the fifteenth century impacted the mental ecosystems of threshold peoples. 16 It amounts to the revalu- ation of all values, because it turned the oldest civilizatory paradox - that neophilic individuals lived in neophobic social structures - on its head. Over the centuries, it forced most people into an involuntarily neophobic position from which they were scarcely able to keep up with the ecstasy of innovation in the surrounding civilization. This change breaks with the majesty of the old and transfers the kingly function to those who bring the new. Now, whoever calls out 'Long live the king! ' must be referring to innovators, authors and multipliers of the cultural patrimonium. Only because the Modern Age opened the era of neo- latry was Nietzsche able to risk pushing this trend even further and suggesting radically modified rules for procreation. While procreation had previously always been dictated by the reproducing side, and its criterion for success was the return of the old in the younger, the child
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was now to take priority - which it achieves when, as Nietzsche unam- biguously states, it becomes the one that is more than the two who created it. Those who oppose this are the last humans.
Artiste Metaphysics
The evolutionary preconditions for this turn can be clearly named, even if the consequences remain unforeseeable: they lie in the neo- Iatric valuations of the European Renaissance, which ultimately go back to the reinterpretation of the Christian Trinity in favour of the creative spirit and the shifting of the imitatio Christi to the imitatio Parris Spiritusque. Against this background, Nietzsche did not have to do much more than tear away the husks of convention from the cult of the new, which was already fully developed in his time, and embrace the dogma of innovation without limits. He was one of the first who was able to perceive Mount Improbable emerging from the mist. At the same moment he realized the relativity of height, for he observed that even high mountain ridges seem flat when one stands and walks on them. Only thus could he arrive at the opinion that the mountain of evolution was not yet high enough - he wanted to place a second mountain on the first, and a third on the second. Accordingly he wrote: 'fewer and fewer climb with me on ever higher mountains - I build a mountain range from ever more sacred moun- tains'. 17 Above every mountain range of results, there is a mountain range of tasks to be unfolded upwards. Only erecting new steep faces can compensate for the flattening out of the mountain resulting from the habit of living on it.
One must realize how much Nietzsche is speaking here as an artist: the desire to push improbability further to a mountain range of mountain ranges articulates the highest level to which an artiste's confession can advance. Only the artistic will to transform the future into a space of unlimited art-elevating chances enables us to under- stand the core of the procreation rule: 'a creator shall you create [. . . ] a self-propelling wheel, a first movement'. This rule contains no less than Nietzsche's theology after the death of God: there will continue to be a God and gods, but only humanity-immanent ones, and only to the extent that there are creators who follow on from what has been achieved in order to go higher, faster and further. Such creators never work ex nihilo, of course, contrary to a scholastic misconcep- tion; they take up results of earlier work and feed them into the process once again. Creation is a resumption of the first movement,
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return into or
'self-propelling wheel' moves itself'
formulation brings into play the better form of scholasticism, where the from-within-itself constitutes the kinetic dimension of the in-itself and the for-itself.
The creator follows a metaphysical assignment: if life itself is already a vibrating mountain of improbabilities, one can only prove an affirmation by piling that mountain up even higher. That is why upward procreation is meant to create a creator. By producing addi- tional increasers of the improbable, one acclaims the dynamic of improbability increase as a whole. Hence the demand for a human being who has overcome their own obstacles in life and is free of resentment towards creativity. Only such a person would no longer take themselves - let alone their ancestors - as a yardstick for the becoming of the next generation. Only they could affirm without neo- phobic reflexes the idea that the cultural mountain range of improba- bility must, in future, be unfolded a level higher with each generation; they would not turn their own imperfection into an obligation for their descendants. They would rather die out than return unchanged. They understand and welcome the fact that according to the law of the normalization of the improbable, earlier peaks present themselves as mere hills or plains in the perception of later generations. One also finds this law among parasitic and flattened-out forms - in the law of increasing jadedness on the art market, for example, or the escalation trends in the hardcore erotic sector.
For the 'creative' (a word that died a heat death in less than a century) person, the comparative - in the form Indo-Germanic languages place in their speakers' mouths - is more than simply a grammatical function. The elementary triads big - bigger - biggest, bonus - melior - optimus, or potens - potentior - potentissimus give a primitive impression of life's graduated acts of enhancement. One need only undo the theological blockage of the superlative in order to understand that the maxima have always left room for increase, even when they are secured with nee-pius-ultra fences. It is the very cultural process of life that presents what was great yesterday as smaller, and passes off the greater of earlier times as normality only a short time later. It transforms the insurmountable difficulties of yes- terday into paths on which, soon afterwards, even the untrained will advance with ease. For those who have lost faith in the omnipotence of obstacles - and what was classical ontology if not a faith in large- scale obstacles? - the previous state is the base camp for the next outing. From that point on, the acrobatic path is the only viable one.
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Making Asceticism Natural
On closer inspection, what people sought to call Nietzsche's 'biologism' - and 'biologism', as some diagnosticians of imperialism suppose, is the mystified form of capitalist competition - transpires as a generalized acrobatism: a doctrine of the processual incorporation of the nearly impossible. This has less to do with economy than with an amalgam of artistry, artistedom, training science, dietology and ascetology. This combination explains the programmatic statement entrusted to a notebook by the author of The Genealogy ofMorals in the autumn of 1887:
I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening. 18
The existence of tomorrow's humans is thus to be based entirely on practice and mobility, including a gymnastics of the will and tests of courage for one's own powers. Nietzsche even envisages a training for moral virtues in which one can prove one's 'strength in being able to keep one's word'. 19
For the philosophical acrobat, making asceticism 'natural' involves basing anti-naturalism on nature - which means that the body must always be taken along, from the bottoms to the tops of the acrobatic figures. When the artistes of the Chinese State Circus show in one of their pyramid stunts how five, six or seven artistes climb up one another such that the uppermost is standing on the shoulders of countless others lower down, and he then performs a one-handed handstand while, to top it all, balancing glasses of water on a tray placed on the sole of his left foot - then philosophers too should realize (assuming they go to the circus) what Nietzsche observed with such pathos: that there is no less corporeality involved at the highest point than in the middle or at the bottom,20 It is also clear how the acrobatic figure provides its own commentary on the topos 'mind over matter'. Artistedom is the somatization of the improbable.
Nothing More Monstrous than Man: Existence at High Altitude
This viewpoint is not entirely contemporary. It is foreshadowed in older bodies of wisdom literature - in the European context, prob- ably most decisively in the oft-discussed choral song from Antigone by Sophocles, in which 'man' is described as the most wondrous
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THE
beings,
as Holderlin
most monstrous
it strikingly,
tiously. He is a danger-seeking monster of disturbance that slanders the status quo and leaves nothing as it was: as a seafarer who explores the most perilous zones of the sea; as a desecrator of the holy soil who weakens it with his plough; as a bird-catcher who lays out treacher- ous nets; as an extravagant big-game hunter in the mountains; as a state-builder and lawmaker; as a doctor who pushes back suffering - in all of these, then, an artiste: 'Skilful beyond expectation are the contrivances of his art' - at a loss only before the inevitability ofdeath. With such a nature, arrogance is to be expected - the acrobat's pride over the heads of the crowd, and hubris outside of the common rules. Sophocles has a splendid word for this disposition towards immodera- tion: dpo/is, 'cityless', overstepping the polis, 'apolitical' in the sense of a sacrilegious non-participation in the citizen's religion of golden mediocrity - one cannot help thinking of the Athenian model monster, the over-gifted Alcibiades, who danced on more than one tightrope. 22
Sophocles here brings up a principle by which the subversion of humanity comes from within humans themselves: it was convention- ally termed 'hubris'. This interpretation is short-sighted, not to say bigoted, because it remains compulsively bound to a praise of the middle - even if the meson, as the ancients viewed it, was something quite different from what the word means today. The advantage of this reading, at least, is that it brings up the vertical tension that is inseparable from human existence - even if it is only by defining humans as beings endangered by a harmful height. The Old European critique of hubris thus represents the basic form of what was known in the twentieth century as 'height psychology'. In modernity, admit- tedly, hubris has changed its approach: it no longer appears as self- elevation, but rather as the presumption of a lowness to which, on closer consideration, no one can lay claim.
Max Scheler arrived at the phrase 'height psychology' in the 1920s to express his dissatisfaction with the psychology of the unconscious propagated by Freud, Jung and others and, for a time, known as 'depth psychology'. In Scheler's view, it explained humans one-sidedly 'downwards', oriented towards the mental mechanism, whether drive-theoretically or neuro-theoretically underpinned. 23 He believed that the psychologies of modernity excessively biologized humans, underestimating or entirely neglecting their involvement in a register of metabiological realities, the sphere of intellectual and spiritual 'values'. The word Geist - denoting both the spirit and the mind - is taken by Scheler as indicating the partial release of humans from the absolutism
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once
! ion', after simply meant an access to objects while retaining
one's organic shackles. Humans project into this 'other world', the spiritual or metabiological (some authors caU it 'bionegative') zone of values, by attempting to reach the more-than-natural by natural means. Under Nietzsche's influence, Scheler had understood that the body must be taken along in the transition to the higher register; this distinguishes him favourably from spiritualists and dualists.
He also knew this: the task faced by modern height psychology is the opposite of that dictated to its Old European precursors. While the ancients had to bring 'extravagant' back to the meson, the healthy middle, the moderns have to remind their contemporaries of the region of height as such, assuming these are humans of the type who feel most comfortable at the average level and below. Left to their own devices, they chronically excuse themselves downwards, and prefer to follow models which prove that downhill paths are more likely to be successful than steep climbs. The modern human being can therefore only be 'sub'verted from a height, from the overground. The hidden overground, however, lies - and this is new - more in artistedom than in 'religion', in that 'religions', as hinted above, can be co-opted much more easily for artistic purposes (with their branches of asceticism, ritualism, ceremonialism) than vice versa. Artistedom is subversion from above, it superverts the 'existing'. The subversive, or rather superversive, principle lies not in the 'height' of haughtiness, the hyper of hybris or the super of superbia; it is con- cealed in the 'aero' of acrobatics.
The word 'acrobatics' refers to the Greek term for walking on tiptoe (from akros, 'high, uppermost' and bainein, 'to go, walk'). It names the simplest form of natural anti-naturalness. Before the nineteenth century, the term was used almost exclusively for tightrope acrobatics and later expanded to include most other forms of bodily wizardry, such as advanced gymnastics and the corresponding circus routines. The athletisms and extreme sports, on the other hand, for reasons that remain to be established, sought to avoid any association with acro- batics, as obvious as their kinship might seem - to say nothing of their joint campaign to make the mountains of improbability higher.
Jacob's Dream, Or, The Hierarchy
The central document of the subversion, or rather supraversion, of humanity through artistry far predates Sophocles' references to the
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THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
the vision of Jacob as
book of Genesis, here in chapter 28:
lOJacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. llWhen he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13There above it stood the Lord, and he said: 'I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. '24
The Old European tradition does not know any image for the inter- pretation of human ties to vertical forces that has a comparably pow- erful effect. Here too we find over-humans, though not of the species coming from humans, but rather those who are created thus by God. The work carried out here by angels is that of acrobats from the start: they climb up and down a ladder - in some translations a staircase - between heaven and earth. This is meant to demonstrate a fact that should be pointed out very plainly: the sphere in which humans lead their lives forms the midpoint between worlds above and below it. Every human operation, even the most skilled and meaningful, whether profane or sacred, is overarched by a higher world of tran- scendental actors whose agents are the angels. Whatever humans are capable of doing can be done better at the over-human level. Thus, since time immemorial, angels have been making their own contribu- tion to an artistic superversion of the human.
There is good reason to claim that the history of Old Europe is, in many respects, the history of translations of Jacob's Ladder from the dream sphere into daily culture. It constitutes the shared history of hierarchy and acrobatics - in so far as one transfers the initial akro bainein, the 'walking high up on tiptoe', onto walking and stand- ing on the steps of a ladder between the earth and the Highest, and onto the many ranks of nobility between the king and the people. Incidentally, ladder acrobatics in the circus constitutes a transitional form to aerial acrobatics - as with angels, whom one imagines not only as rung-climbers, but also as a flying company. 25 It makes good sense, therefore, when Jacob builds the first house of God, Bethel, in the very place where the angels' ladder touched the earth. For the first brick, he takes the stone that he used as a pillow on the critical night. When an old nomadic people territorializes itself, the best place to do so is one from which the route continues vertically.
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as the one in ten from the
ping seraphim to the executive angels of the basic courier service, the members of the actually existing church should also stand above one another, according to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - and like- wise the functionaries of actual administrations and the all-too-actual corporations of bureaucrats; whether the Old European nine-level secondary school [Gymnasium] also contains a distant ptojection of the Neoplatonic-Christian choir levels is an open question. 26 What
Jacob, the patriarch of the hierarchy thinkers, dreams up is an artistic pyramid of subtle bodies. Unlike in the circus, its sight results not in storms of applause as soon as it persists for a minute; it is meant to last for millennia - at least, that is how Pseudo-Dionysius translated the ladder vision into his system.
That the Areopagite thus simul- taneously created a symbol of the acrobatization of both heavenly and ecclesiastical hierarchies, however, can only be noted from the current pole of history, once the dissolution of traditional hierarchical systems provokes a new reflection on the reasons, modes of operation and metamorphoses of verticality.
It testifies to the power of the ladder tradition that even Nietzsche was still under its influence when he lets Zarathustra say to his friend that he wants to show him 'all the stairways to the Obermensch',27 What is notable here is the paradoxical construction whereby the stairway is to continue existing, even if there is no longer anything above it to lean against. The old world's most powerful symbol of verticality mysteriously survives the atheistic crisis. It continues to indicate a tension coming from the heights, even though it is no longer consolidated by any transcendental opposing camp. The prob- lematic motif of the transcendence device that cannot be fastened at the opposite pole also returns in Zarathustra's declaration that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and Obermensch' - whether ladder or rope, one can no longer tell with this imagery where the upward tension is supposed to come from. This difficulty remains irresolvable at the level of traditional imaginations; indeed, it would have ruined the entire structure, had Nietzsche not long since adapted implicitly to the completely different kind of evolutionary enhancement of improbability. With its help, the transformation of angels into artistes succeeds almost unnoticed. In the same way the former served as God's messengers, the latter act as messengers of art. They convey the good and alarming news that people are piling up ranges of ever higher and more sacred mountains.
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THE OF THE
Over-Words
Finally, it should noted that Nietzsche, though the most radical analyst of the newly broached problematics of verticality, was not alone in his time. One could say that the most contemporary thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were those who added at least one term to modernity's vocabulary of verticality: Marx speaks of superstructure and overproduction, his brother-in-law Lafargue of overconsumption, Darwin of survival, Nietzsche of the Obermensch,28 Freud of the superego, Adler of overcompensation, and Aurobindo of the supermind and the supramenta1. 29 We owe the word 'overkill' to an astute nuclear strategist, 'hypertonia' to an obscure doctor, 'over- population' to an obscure demographer, 'supermarket' to an obscure wholesaler, and 'superstar' to an obscure journalist. One must go as far back as the fifth century to find an analogous wave of new verti- cality words; they were introduced almost exclusively by the master thinker of hierarchism, the aforementioned Pseudo-Dionysius, who stirred up the vocabulary of Christian-Platonic theologians for the next thousand years with his numerous neologisms using the prefix 'hyper-'. 30
If there is a word missing from the dictionary of the twentieth century, even though the matter itself was ubiquitous, it is the word Obermorder [super-murderer) - it would apply to the group of dic- tators who capitalized on the vertically blind and anti-hierarchical affects of mass culture to make great politics, usually under socialist pretences. As far as Nietzsche's ominous Obermensch is concerned, I cannot refrain from ending my reflections on this concept with an ironic note. One thing is clear: in the dating of the era of the Obermensch, its inventor fell prey to the greatest of all possible optical illusions - which is astoundin! ? , for nothing seems more obvious than the fact that the age of the Ubermensch lies not in the future, but in the past. It is identical to the epoch in which humans sought to elevate themselves above their physical and mental status by the most extreme methods for the sake of a transcendent cause. Christianity undeniably has a share of the copyright on the word Obermensch, incurring royalties even when it is used for anti-Christian purposes. 31
No Slave Revolt in Morality: Christian Athletism
I part ways most importantly with Nietzsche in his interpretation of the difference between master morality [Herrenmoral] and slave
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HEIGHT
event as the
Nietzsche ever occurred. I tend more towards view that this sup- posed revaluation of all values, this most far-reaching distortion of all that was naturally right in the history of the spirit, was a fiction in which the author elevated a number of very significant and correct observations to an untenable construct. His motive lies in the fact that Nietzsche, though not intending to found his own religion, did intend to de-found traditional Christianity with holy fury.
It is precisely the ascetological perspective reopened by Nietzsche that highlights the continuity in the transition from 'heathen' antiq- uity to the Christian world, especially in the area most relevant here: the transference of athletic and philosophical asceticism to the monastic and ecclesiastical modus vivendi. Had this not been the case, the early monks of Egypt and Syria would not - citing Pauline images of the apostles' agon - have called themselves the 'athletes of Christ'. And were monastic asceticism not an internalization of the regimen of physical warriors as well as an adoption of philosophical doctrines of the art of living from a Christian perspective, monastic culture - especially in its West Roman and Northwest European manifestations - could not possibly have led to the unfolding of powers on all cultural fronts - charitable, architectural, administra- tive, economic, intellectual and missionary powers - that took place between the fifth and eighteenth centuries. What actually happened, then, was a displacement of athletism from the arenas to the mon- asteries; or, more generally speaking, a transference of proficiency from declining antiquity to the burgeoning Middle Ages - to mention only the periods, and not name each of the old and new carriers of competence, the aretological collectives of that time and later times. 32
Hugo Ball put his finger on the essence of these shifts when he emphasized, in his book Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), that the intellectual heroism of the monks constituted a superior counter- project to the 'nature heroism' of warriors. 33 It is obvious that this great transfer led to distortions under the influence of ressentiment. But even as tendentious a statement as 'But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first' (Matthew 19:30), which Nietzsche mercilessly exposed, could also be read from the perspec- tive of the great shift of arete. It could be saying that the hierarchy resulting from the conditions of power and ownership should not remain the only permissible view - in fact, not even the central one - of intellectual rankings.
in
129
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
Aristocracy or Meritocracy
I repeat: a slave revolt of morality did not, in my view, take place at any time in the Old Europe. In reality, a revaluation of values occurred in the separation of power and virtue (arete, virtu) that would have been inconceivable for the ancient Greeks - a separa- tion whose effects continued into the woolly endgames of European aristocracy in the nineteenth century. The Old European social order committed its true sin against the spirit of positive asceticism not through its Christianization, but rather through the Faustian pact with a class system that saw a nobility without virtu reaching the top in many places. This enabled the consolidation of a non-meritocratic exploitative aristocracy whose only achievement lay in the identical transference of its inflated self-image to equally useless descend- ants, often over several centuries. One gains a clearer picture of this chronic European disgrace, the hereditary nobility, by comparing conditions in the ancient scholarly culture of China, which pushed back the hereditary nobility with an educated nobility for over two thousand years. The indicated revaluation of values did not bring to power the ressentiments of sick little people, as Nietzsche sug- gests; rather, the mixture of laziness, ignorance and cruelty among the heirs to local power was expanded into a psychopolitical factor of the highest order; the court of Versailles was only the peak of an archipelago of noble inutility that spread over Europe. It was only the neo-meritocratic renaissance between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, borne by the middle class and the virtuosos, that gradually put an end to the grotesque of hereditary aristocracy in Europe - leaving aside the still-virulent phantoms in the yellow press.
Only since then have we been able to say once more that politics as a European form of life means the struggle and the concern for the framework of institutions in which the most important of all emancipations can take place - the emancipation of the differences that arise from achievements and are controlled from the differences created and passed on through subjugation, power and privilege. Needless to say, the aforementioned group of Obermorder were not politicians, but rather exponents of an oriental power concept that does not acknowledge any discipline except the art of domination. They had no interest in the European definition of the political, for all they got to see of the range of differences was the portion that could be explained by theories of class and race. Such theories have always been blind as soon as the birth of difference from levels of proficiency came into focus.
130
ICULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
Twilight of the Life Formsl Disciplinics
Non-Dominatory Gradations
After the first excursions into the preliminaries of an analysis of verti- cal tensions, it should be appreciable why any theory of culture must be viewed as half-blind if it does not pay attention to the tendencies in cultural life to form internal multi-storey structures - and not only ones dependent on political hierarchies. This thesis is not intended to rekindle the tiresome debate on so-called 'high culture', which, for various reasons, has become conspicuously quiet in recent decades. My concern is rather to develop a more ethically competent and empirically adequate alternative to the heavy-handed attribution of all hierarchy effects or gradation phenomena to the matrix of power and subjugation.
The necessity of such an undertaking has become apparent since modern 'society', after two hundred years of experimenting with egalitarian and neo-elitist motifs, entered a phase in which it is pos- sible to draw conclusions from these attempts as a whole and assess their results. A paradigmatic phenomenon for the new situation is the emergence of the sport system in the twentieth century - what I termed the 'athletic renaissance' above - which enables a wealth of conclu- sions about a non-dominatory dynamic of gradations. An equally significant stimulus came from the formation of a non-aristocratic economy of prominence, whose investigation is indispensable for an understanding of the driving forces behind the vertical differentiation of modern large-scale groups in the public sphere. The gradation phe- nomena within the worlds of science, administration, school, health and political parties, to name only these few areas, lie far outside what can be grasped with the crude claw arms of a theoretical set-up
131
THE OF THE IMPROBABLE
a more
the step-forming forces as figures in the field of a political psychology
of thym6s (pride, ambition, will to self-assertion), in my book Rage and Time. 34 Neo-thymotic analysis, which incorporates Platonic, Hegelian and individual-psychological motifs, describes the social field as a system driven in equal measure by pride and greed. Pride (thym6s) and greed (eros) can form alliances despite their antitheti- cal natures, but the rewards of pride - prestige and self-respect - and greed - appropriation and enjoyment - belong to clearly separated areas.
In the following, I will show in broad terms how the shift from a theory of class society (with vertical differentiation through domi- nance, repression and privilege) to a theory of discipline society (with vertical differentiation through asceticism, virtuosity and achieve- ment) can take place. For the first round of this operation I shall take Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault as philosophical and idea-historical mentors - the former because his attentiveness to the integration of language into behavioural figures ('language games') provided modern sociology with an effective instrument for revealing manifest and latent ritual structures, and the latter because his inves- tigations into the interlocking structures of discourses and disciplines led him to a breakthrough in reaching an understanding of power beyond simple denunciation - and thus an exit from a long history of ideological misunderstandings that ultimately refer back to patho- genic legacies of the French Revolution. This double stimulus at once clarifies the direction in which the next steps have to be taken: beyond Wittgenstein, by moving on from the language game theory to a universal theory of practice and asceticism, and beyond Foucault, by developing his analysis of discursive forms further into a de-restricted disciplinics.
Wittgenstein's Monastic Rule
Our starting point is a brief, at first glance somewhat mysterious note that Wittgenstein entrusted to one of his notebooks in January 1949, two years before his death: 'Culture is a monastic rule. Or it at least presupposes a monastic rule. '35 The appearance of a term such as 'monastic rule' in the philosopher's vocabulary might initially take the reader aback. His way of life in Cambridge contained little that
132
IS A
monastic one's """Hr. ",. ,
a'-'HA""lHJl~ rituals. striking phrase appears somewhat
less astounding in the light of recent biographical studies, which show to what extent Wittgenstein's life was infused with religious motifs, and how profound his efforts were to achieve ethical perfection. 'Of course I want to be perfect! ' he supposedly said as a young man in reply to a critical question from a female friend. 36 In a New Year's letter to Paul Engelmann, his friend during his Vienna years, he wrote in 1921: 'I should have changed my life for the better and become a star. But I stayed put on the earth, and now 1 am slowly wasting away. '37 According to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein was toying with the idea of entering a monastery around 1919; he had completed the Tractatus a year earlier, and realized that he could scarcely expect much of an echo. In 1926 - after his humiliating failure as a primary school teacher in rural Austria - he did indeed work as a gardener at the monastery of the 'Barmherzige Bruder' [Compassionate Brothers] in Hutteldorf, near Vienna. Wittgenstein's most revealing statement on religious matters is contained in a note from 1948:
The honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. 38
I shall now combine these isolated observations to form the thesis that Wittgenstein is a rare example of an inverse acrobat, one who found the easy more difficult than the impossible. Naturally his art was also located on a vertical axis; if one were to place him somewhere on Jacob's Ladder, however, this thinker would undoubtedly belong to the group of descending angels (we shall omit the fallen ones). When the thirty-two-year-old author writes in a letter to Engelmann that he should have become a star, one could perhaps read 'become' as 'remain'. Who would want to become a star without some prior con- viction that they had once been one? This strong observer comes from very far above - with time, he realizes that it is a mistake to remember overly lofty origins if one is fated to exist on the ground.
One statement in a letter to Engelmann from 1926 reveals what existence on the ground can mean: '1 am not happy, and not because my swinishness troubles me, but within my swinishness. '39 Wittgenstein's oft-cited 'mysticism' is the trace of a disconcertion upon arrival that never entirely ended - in the inelegant terminology of psychiatry one would presumably speak of a schizoid structure. Such an immigrant would not simply find one or two aspects of what is the case here astounding, but rather the totality of what he
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THE OF THE IMPROBABLE
for a being brought to earth - without an overly great loss of the lucidity he brought along with him. Grasping things as they are and performing the unavoidable acts of life as they happen to be dictated by. the local grammar, without getting even deeper into 'swinishness' - that may have been the goal of Wittgenstein's exercises. Hence the obstinately resigned note from 1930: '1 might say, if the place 1want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.
Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. '40 An entry from 1937 shows how strongly Wittgenstein wanted to persuade himself to adopt a floor-gymnastic interpretation of exist- ence: 'You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet. '41 On the other hand, the author can imagine what it would be like to be saved (from sin, from reality or from gravity): then you would no longer stand on the earth but hang from the sky - though an outside observer would not easily distinguish between the two, as hanging from the sky and standing on the earth look practically the same from the outside. 42 Wittgenstein remains convinced to the end that the goal is to become as happy after the descent into existence as one destined for despair can be: 'Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness. '43 Such premises no longer permit a philosophical project in the usual sense of the word, in so far as philosophers had, until then, always wanted to keep the ascending angels on the ladder company. For Wittgenstein, this was obvious; it would have been helpful if those who plundered his ideas in the
strongholds of Analytic Philosophy had seen it with the same clarity. If, under these conditions, one asks as to the meaning of the state- ment 'Culture is a monastic rule. Or it at least presupposes a monastic rule' - penned by a sixty-year-old - one notices first of all how casu- aily, almost carelessly, the author uses the word 'culture' - he of all people, who always displayed a seventh sense for seeking out hidden ambiguities beneath identical surface formulations. Everything sug- gests that he was, at that moment, less concerned with the word 'culture', under which he would immediately have sensed the lacunas if he had been interested in looking more closely, than with the phrase 'monastic rule' [Ordensregel]. This, despite its unusual sound, is unmistakably where the greater analytical emphasis lies. Its meaning was clearer to Wittgenstein: such a rule expresses one of the most suggestive attempts to approach what a grammar meant for him - it
134
set
sum produces a
no
monastic way life, 1f1
'CULTURE
A MONASTIC RULE'
Pachomian, Augustinian, Cassianic, Benedictine, Franciscan or any other style. To understand what it means to follow a rule - and this is the chronically recurring question in later Wittgenstein - it is suf- ficient to imagine how one would live if one entered a religious order. What gives it its specific character, and how the rule affects those who follow it, is only revealed to those who make it their own by choos- ing the monastic way of life themselves. The Wittgensteinian monk, however, would be condemned to playing the role of ethnologist in his order, as he would remain incapable of absorption into the col- lective form of life for psychological reasons. He would, furthermore, be an ethnologist who is tricked by the natives - for he would be joining a tribe that contained no natives, only joined members like himself.
The particularity of a monastic rule - and this is where Wittgenstein's statement becomes problematic - is that whatever the individual pre- scriptions, it requires the monks (the author would scarcely have been thinking of nuns) to carry out every step, every action in meditative contemplation and choose every word carefully. Whether it is the form of the tonsures, the dress code, the regulations for setting up the sleeping quarters and the behaviour of the older and younger monks in them, the allocation of sleeping times, the holy readings, the gath- erings to prayer, the work in the scriptoria, the arrangement of the storerooms and dining rooms, and so on - all the concrete rules are embedded in the rule of all rules, which states that the monk must not carry out the slightest action out of mere dull habit, but rather be prepared for interruption by orders from his superior at any moment - as if constantly expecting the Saviour to enter the premises. St John Cassian insisted that a scribe called to the door by his superior should not even finish the letter he had begun: he should rather leap up to be fully ready for the new assignment. 44
Monastic life thus differs from ordinary life in three ways: firstly, entering an order implies compliance with the artificial system of carefully written rules that animate the monastic life of whatever observance. In the case of ordinary culture, by contrast, one grows into it without ever being asked if one wishes to accept its rules - indeed, most never reflect on whether there is any regula for the local forms of life at all. Secondly, living behind monastery walls creates a special climate of vigilance and readiness for any given tasks that is not found in any form of life in the non-monastic sphere - 'obedience' and 'piety' are metaphors for total availability. The basic rhythm of
135
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
in way, the to monastic-communist maxim that work is good, but prayer is better. In monastic culture, after all, the strongest characteristic of profane culture disappears - the division of labour between the sexes, and the concern for the transference of existing forms of life to the little bar-
barians who emerge from the intercourse between the sexes.
Culture Arises from Secession
Wittgenstein's point was clearly a different one. When he notes 'Culture is a monastic rule', the meaning of 'culture' here has shrunk to a finely sieved residue. By no means should every form of life that appears in 'societies' be considered culture, only those comparable to existence under a monastic rule in terms of explicitness, strictness, vigilance and reduction to the essential - and which permit a modus vivendi whose first and last criterion is relief from the consequences of sexuality. It is insignificant here that the monastic rules, in their sacral transparency and elitist unambiguity, are ultimately no less arbitrary than the fixed regulations of any grammar among natural languages. All that matters is the separatist dynamic of life under the rule. Wittgenstein's use of the term 'culture' leaves no doubts: for him, culture in the substantial sense of the word only comes about through the isolation of the truly cultivated from the rest of so-called 'culture', this muddled aggregate of better and worse habits whose sum is barely more than the usual 'swinishness'.
From this perspective it is easier to explain why Wittgenstein is one of the few authors of modernity - perhaps the only one of real distinction in the period between Nietzsche and Foucault, except for Heidegger - whose work displays the transformation of philosophy from a school subject back to an engaging discipline. His example shows what happens when study becomes exercise. The reason for this change can be found in his secessionist understanding of culture. It is easy to show that this was part of Wittgenstein's Austrian legacy, which he never abandoned.
Wittgenstein knew from childhood what a secession is, as the breaking away of the group of artists around Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann from the historicistically inclined con- servative Vienna Kunstlerhaus in 1897 had been one of the main events in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), the philosopher's father, a steel industrialist and music patron, was one
136
'CULTURE IS
most - not con- the building on the also personal support for individual artists. The young Wittgenstein was sixteen when Klimt staged his next act of self-removal by leaving the seces- sion, and nineteen at the publication of Adolf Loos's epoch-making essay Ornament and Crime. One can assume that from that moment on at the latest, the concept of culture had merged irreversibly with the secession phenomenon - for the young man and the young Viennese culture scene in equal measure. This included the experi- ence that a secession is not sufficient in order to remain faithful to the impulse to break away from the usual. Only a constant progression in distancing oneself from the misery of conventions can preserve the purity of the modernizing project - hence the never-ending rhythm of secession in the art of the twentieth century, which remains in motion until there is nothing left from which to secede. In fact, Loos was one of the strongest critics of the first aesthetics of secession. He saw it as no more than the replacement of one form of kitsch with another - of
the vulgar ornament with a select one.
As Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have shown, Viennese moder-
nity as a whole was characterized by secessionist motifs in the broad- est sense. For its protagonists, the culture-founding gesture consisted in exiting from the system of conventions in which the aristocratic- bourgeois audience in the imperial capital revelled. Regardless of whether it was architecture, painting, musk or language, the group of modems constituted itself through a secessionist operation in every field - through the separation of the purists from the ornamentalists, the constructivists from the indulgent, the logicians from the journal- ists and the grammarians from the chatterers. What united the new artists was an aversion to every form of excess. In their view, culture and art could only progress through a radical opposition to what Karl Kraus called the 'debasement of practical life by ornament, demon- strated by Adolf Loos'. 45 The equation of ornament and crime pre- sented by Loos in his essay perfectly expresses the new ethos of formal clarity determined by the true use of things - it also reminds us that functionalism was initially a form of moralism, or more precisely an ascetic practice that sought to come closer to the good by dispensing with what could not be justified. It would not be difficult to pinpoint the Loos factor in detail in Wittgenstein's logical habitus, for example when the philosopher notes: 'I assert that use is the form of culture, the form which makes objects. '46 The polemical atmosphere in which the search for the 'form of culture' took place is demonstrated in an aphorism by Karl Kraus:
137
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
Adolf Loos I, he have done no
[han to show that there is a between an urn and a chamber pot, and that culture only has room to move within this difference. The others, however, the positives, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as an urn. 47
Wittgenstein's late note 'Culture is a monastic rule' still presupposes the aggressive ethic of reduction and the future-postulating tenor of the formal purism characterizing early Viennese modernity. The bizarre overtones accompanying his remark make sense when one grasps the paradox underlying the basic secessionist stance: that a credible ascent within culture can only be achieved through a descent to elementary forms. For these form zealots, the simple stood above the complicated. For the participants in the great exodus from the 'debased' sphere, the calls to return 'to the things', 'to the elemen- tary life forms' or 'to real use' were synonymous. Through these campaigns, the phenomenological as well as the functionalistic, the reductionistic as well as the postivistic, entire worlds of 'ornaments' - or whatever one wishes to call the superfluous elements - fell by the wayside. What would count in future was the study of primary forms, grammars and their constructive principles. The participants in the course of study that enabled and justified 'culture' in the new sense were a group of artist-ascetics living under an explicit rule. For them, ethics, aesthetics and logic pointed in the same direction. The Viennese monastic rule was only decisive for the growth of a new 'culture' because it took an opposing stance to the predominance of debased conditions in every single one of its tenets. The style was neo- Cistercian and depourvu, founded on the trinity of clarity, simplicity and functionality.
Form and Life
I would not have to remind readers of these connections if the figure of secession, independently of its Viennese history, were not to become significant for everything that will be said in the following about the organizational forms of the practising life, in its earlier and earliest manifestations too. The secession gesture as such already expresses the imperative without which there could never have been any monastic 'order', any reform or any revolution: 'You must change your life! ' This presupposes that life has something about it which the individual has - or can acquire - the competence to change. In 1937, Wittgenstein noted: 'The fact that life is problematic shows
138
'CUL TURE IS A MONASTIC
RULE'
your
not once your life
The belief in the possibility of a better 'fit' between form and life is based on a concept of form that can be traced back to the founding phase of philosophy in the work of Socrates and Plato, and to the early period of Brahmanic asceticisms. It expresses the conviction that there is a 'good form' of life, regardless of whether it comes from the Viennese workshops, the Athenian school or the monasteries of Benares - a form whose adoption would necessarily lead to the elimination of disturbances in existence. Finding the good form is a design task that includes a moral-logical exercise. It is only because philosophy itself implies such a task from the outset that it can catch on as a 'school'; the school as such is itself a secession phenomenon - as much in the case of Plato, the founder of the Academy, as among the Viennese moderns. Where there is secession, the reformers have run out of patience with the pre-existing facts. They no longer want to see either the conventional conditions or their reproductions; the hour of a return to the original models has struck. The model does not represent life; it precedes it. One can virtually speak of the birth of philosophy from the spirit of secession to models. It is not quite by chance that Platon's Athenian Academy, founded in 387 BC - and consistently in use until its destruction by Sulla in 86 BC - was located out of the way, almost a mile to the northwest of the city centre, though very appropriately next to a larger sports venue, the gymna- sium, which was soon incorporated into the educational system.
The founding of a school implies a rejection of fate kitsch - be it late Athenian or late Habsburg. It requires the conversion of ques- tions of fate into tasks of discipline. Plato had already rejected tragedy because he sensed a moral 'debasement' in it: instead of watching comfortably and sentimentally as other people perish in their entan- glements, he considered it more commendable to tend to one's own mistakes and, once aware, to correct them to the best of one's ability. One could almost say that the school is based on the invention of the 'mistake' - the mistake is a secularized, revisable misfortune, and a pupil is someone who learns from mistakes and attempts to elimi- nate them. What is conspicuous here is the convergence of the basic Socratic position, as developed by Nietzsche in his early writings, and Wittgenstein's approach to continuous self-clarification. For the latter too, the language analyst, there is nothing tragic, 'and conflict [does] not become something splendid but a mistake'. 49
Let us be open about the point of these reflections: in showing 139
change your
problematic will disappear. '48
So you must into the mould, is
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a secessionist on one's personai mistakes the mistakes of collective sensibility, one removes every possibility of co-opting him for the egalitarian and relativist ideology that accompanies the numerous varieties of Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. In reality, Wittgenstein's 'work' is probably the harshest manifestation of ethical elitism in the twentieth century - perhaps excepting Simone Weil, as the only reform elitist of equal stature. His secessionist-elitist approach extends so deep that the author even wished he could have withdrawn from himself and his various forms of 'swinishness',
had this been possible. Once Wittgenstein's unbending elitism - which, incidentally, is as radical as it is apolitical and ahistorical - is revealed, this not only affects our understanding of his most success- ful theorem, that of 'language games'; it also casts a very different light on Wittgenstein's role as a teacher.
language Games Are Exercises: The Deception of 'Ordinary language'
Now it becomes directly apparent that the 'language games' cited ad nauseam in reality constitute asceticisms, or rather micro-ascetic modules: verbally articulated practical exercises whose performance is usually acquired via imitation - without anyone to tell us whether it is worthwhile or desirable to carry out these games. Evidently the cultures themselves do not enlighten us here - they are condemned to affirmation in these matters. What is less acceptable is that the lan- guage game theory also answers these questions evasively. It thus con- ceals the fact that an imitation of ordinary'swinishnesses' is inherent in most language games, while the most important thing, namely participation in secession, usually remains unspoken or uncompre- hended. In the conventional language game, one practises something that is not actually worth practising. One practises it nolens volens by doing what everyone does without considering whether it is worth doing. A conventional language game is the everyday, not explicitly declared training of the 'swine', and hence of those who do not care whether their form of life stands up to examination.
Only in the rarest of cases is the ability to participate in language games acquired through a voluntary adoption of a clarified seces- sionary form of life. This, as Wittgenstein emphasizes in the second half of his statement, would presuppose an explicit 'monastic rule' - although the word 'explicit' refers to a form knowledge or asceti-
140
'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
cism knowledge that was either distilled in the course of long experi- ments with the practising life (as in the era of the regula authors from Pachomius to Isidore of Seville, or in the Brahmanic and Yogic tra- ditions) or had to be newly developed amidst a cultural crisis (as in fin-de-siecle Vienna) through a radicalized design. Then, however, and only then, practising means assimilating the practice-worthy via declared asceticisms. Exercises of this level lead to language games and forms of life for non-swine. As elementary as they might seem, they constitute the perfect impregnation of everyday life through artistry. The perfect depiction of normality thus becomes an acro- batic exercise. For Wittgenstein, the ethical miracle takes place at the
, summit of Mount Improbable: the miracle that forms of life can be clarified through logical analysis and technical reconstruction.
For all his efforts at humility, one cannot help but note a certain hypocrisy in late Wittgenstein, because he usually pretended not to know that his language game theory contained a murky concession to existence in the trivial and 'swinish' dimension, even though he had always striven to keep away from it. For himself, he kept an eye out for clarified monastic rules under which exceptional humans of his cast and secessionists of equal stature would want to live - and would, perhaps, also be able to live according to their standards. These forms are also known as 'language games', but one can tell that the robes are of the finest cloth. When the once-fashionable movement of ordinary language philosophy invoked Wittgenstein as an influence, it fell prey to a deception of which the master himself was far from innocent. He was never interested in the ordinariness of 'ordinary lan- guage'; the art would have been to sense something of the perfection- ism of the Viennese workshops coming through the word 'ordinary'. People forgot to remind the English patients that they should not be too hasty in their eagerness to praise the everyday. It was in the spirit of great reform to say 'ordinary' while meaning 'extraordinary'. One would have had to explain to the interested what the search for the quintessential form of use actually meant, at the risk of spoiling the party for the ordinarists. Anyone who has hung their coat on a hook designed by Adolf Loos has a standard that will remain unforgotten. If one then sees where one's British and American colleagues hang their things, one can never take them seriously again.
The subtle mendacity of language game theory is undoubtedly the secret of its success. It also reveals something that otherwise only 'shows itself' in Wittgenstein's habitus as a 'teacher'. He knows that teaching means demonstrating, but what he is able to demonstrate as a virtuoso - the logical analysis of language - is worlds apart
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
from what he actually wanted to demonstrate: the saint's form of life. What 'shows itself' in Wittgenstein's teaching is that he does not show what he is concerned with - and that he cannot do what he wants, and never stops wanting to do what he cannot. The estab- lished Wittgenstein hagiography has long since admitted that its hero more or less failed miserably in his role as primary school teacher in Austria between 1920 and 1926. But no one dares utter the fact that he failed equally - and even worse, as there were consequences to this failure - as a university lecturer, presumably because, in secret, people exculpate the author psychologically, as well as believing that by becoming a global celebrity, he achieved more than a Homo aca- demicus could dream of anyway. When Wittgenstein wrote in 1946, shortly before leaving the teaching profession, 'I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know',50 he was implicitly admitting to keeping his audience in the dark as to his real preferences. He could have done more to illuminate those parts of the landscape that concerned him, but he preferred to offer noble disorientation - as if his Christian perfectionism were as much of an undisclosable private matter in Cambridge as his homo- sexuality, something that was not appreciated at that time.
What Shows Itself
In my view, the absence of any explicit criticism of Wittgenstein's role as a university lecturer indicates that his students turned a blind eye to their teacher's ambiguity and contented themselves with half the lesson. What one could achieve with half the lesson is demonstrated by the trends that have dominated university philosophy for over fifty years on both sides of the Atlantic.