No More Learning

The person who is enraged in the highest form "enters the world like the bullet enters the battle. "9
THE THYMOTIC WORLD: PRIDE AND WAR
IT IS BECAUSE OF THE INGENIOUS READING OF HOMER BY THE CLASSICAL philologist Bruno Snell that contemporary reinterpreters of the Iliad have become aware of the specific premodern structure of its epic psychology and plot. In the main chapter of his inspiring book The Discovery of Spirit, which deals with Homer's conception of the human being, he elucidates an important feature of the text: that the epic characters of the oldest epoch of Western writing still lack, to a large degree, the formative characteristics of the classical conception of subjectivity. In particular, they lack reflective inwardness, intimate conversations with themselves, and the ability to make conscientious attempts to control their affects. 10 Snell discovers in Homer the latent conception of a "composite" or "container" personality, which resembles in some respects the image of the postmodern human being with his chronic "dissociative disorders. " Seen from a distance, the early
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? INTRODUCTION
hero indeed puts one in mind of today's "multiple-personality" disorder. For Homer there does not yet seem to be an inner hegemonic principle, a coherent "I" that is responsible for the unity and self-control of the psy- chic field. Rather the "person" turns out to be a meeting point of affects or partial energies. These energies introduce themselves into their host, the experiencing and acting individual, as visitors from afar. They have come in order to use their host for their own concerns.
The rage of the hero thus may not be understood as an inherent attribute of the structure of his personality. The successful warrior is more than just a character that is exceedingly irritable and aggressive. It does not make much sense to speak of Homeric figures the way school psychologists speak of problematic students. Otherwise Achilles would be presented too quickly as a delegate of extravagant parental ambitions. 11 This would falsely por- tray him as the precursor of a psychologically deformed tennis prodigy, but because with Achilles we are still in the domain of this container psychol- ogy, one needs to pay special attention to the basic rule of this spiritual universe: rage, which blazes up in intervals, is an energetic supplement to the heroic psyche, not a mere personal trait or intimate feature. The Greek catchphrase for the "organ" in the chest of both heroes and regular human beings, the organ from which these great upsurges take their departure, is "thymos. " Thymos signifies the impulsive center of the proud self, yet at the same time it also delineates the receptive "sense. " Through this sense the commands of the gods reveal themselves to mortals. The supplementary or "joining" quality of impulses connected to thymos explains, by the way, the lack of any control over the affects of Homer's characters. This is particu- larly strange to us moderns. The hero is a kind of prophet and is assigned the task of actualizing instantaneously the message of his force. The hero accompanies his power in a way similar to how a genius is accompanied by his protege. When the force becomes actualized the protegee has no choice but to go along with it. 12
Even though the hero is not the master and owner of his affects, it would be a mistake to think that he is only its blind instrument, without any will of his own. Menis belongs to the group of invasive energies. The poetic as well as the philosophical psychology of the Hellenics included these energies and taught that they were to be considered gifts of grace from the divine world. Just as every gifted person is asked from above to carefully administer the gift that has been entrusted to him, the hero, the guardian of rage, also has to create a conscious relationship to this rage. Heidegger, who we can well
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imagine to be a thoughtful tourist on the planes of Troy, would probably say: fighting is also thanking.
After the transformation of the Greek psyche from extolling heroic mili- tancy to extolling civic excellence, rage gradually disappears from the list of charismatic affects. Only the more spiritual forms of enthusiasm remain, as in Plato's Phaedrus, in which he presents an overview and list of psyche's beneficial obsessions, primarily medicine, the gift of prophesy, and the enthralled song that is granted by the muse. Beyond this, Plato also intro- duces the novel paradox of enthusiasm, the sober mania of viewing ideas. These ideas are the central reference point of the new science Plato founded, that is, philosophy. Under the influence of this discipline, "manic" psyche, illuminated through logical exercises, once and for all distanced itself from its "menic" beginnings. The exorcism of great rage from culture began.
Since then, the rage of citizens is only a guest that one welcomes within a framework of strict regulations; old-style fury does not fit at all into the urban world. Only on the stage of the Athenian theater of Dionysus is it sometimes presented in its old-fashioned, delusional intensity. One may think of Sophocles' Ajax or Euripides' The Bacchae. However, generally it is presented only to remind mortals of the terrifying freedom of the gods. It serves as a reminder that the gods possess the power to completely destroy whomever they wish. The stoic philosophers, who turn to the civil audience during the following generations, will defend as convincingly as the best Sophists the claim that rage is in the last instance "unnatural" because it objects to the reasonable essence of the human being. 13
The domestication of rage creates the ancient form of a new masculin- ity. Indeed, the remaining affects that are useful for the polis are incor- porated into the bourgeois thymos. Thymos survives as "manly courage" (Mannesmut, andreia), without which it is impossible for the practitioner of urban life to assert himself. Rage was also allowed to live a second life as use- ful and "just rage," responsible for protecting its possessors against insults and unwanted impositions. Additionally, it helps citizens to step in for the Good and the Right (or, to put it in a modern idiom, our interests). Without stout-heartedness (Beherztheit)--this is how one should better translate the term thymos nowadays--bourgeois metropolitan life is unthinkable. (This theme is especially interesting for Germans because they produce a new and special form of stout-heartedness after 1945. I mean the often praised civil courage, the meager level of courage for losers. With this form of courage the joys of democracy were introduced to an otherwise politically timid
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? INTRODUCTION
population). Moreover, the possibility of friendship between adult males in a city still depends on thymotic premises. After all, one can only play one's role as a friend among friends, an equal among equals, if one appreci- ates in one's fellow citizens the clear presence of universally acknowledged virtues. 14 One does not want only to be proud of oneself but also of the alter ego, the friend, who distinguishes himself in front of the eyes of the community. To be in good reputation among competing men creates the thymotic fluidity of a self-confident community. Individual thymos appears now as part of a force-field that provides form to the common will. The first philosophical psychology of Europe unfolds itself as a political thymotic within this horizon.
BEYOND EROTICISM
RECENTLY, THE SUSPICION THAT PSYCHOANALYSIS MUST HAVE BEEN mistaken in an important respect about the nature of its objects has become more concrete. This marks a break with the earlier twentieth-century con- ception of psychoanalysis as a form of privileged psychological knowledge. Sporadic objections against the teachings of psychoanalysis, which go back to the early days of the discipline, have today turned into a theoretically supported dismissal. The point of origin of this dismissal does not, though, lie in the endless quarrels concerning whether psychoanalytic theses and results are "scientifically" ascertainable. Rather, the origin of the objec- tions to psychoanalysis consists in the increasingly widening gap between psychic phenomena and academically accepted conceptions--a malaise that has already been discussed for a long time by the creative authors and practitioners of the psychoanalytic movement. It is important to note that chronic doubts about its specific efficacy are not the cause of the resistance to psychoanalysis.
The source of the fundamental misunderstanding to which psychoanal- ysis has succumbed is rooted in its naturalistically concealed cryptophilo- sophical pretense to explain the human condition in its entirety based on the dynamics of libido, that is, from the standpoint of eroticism. This did not necessarily have to lead to a disaster for psychoanalysis, if the legiti- mate interest of therapists in the dimension of eros would have been con- nected with an equally vivid attention to the dimension of thymotic ener- gies. However, psychoanalysis was never willing to turn as much detail and basic interest to dealing with the thymotics of the human being of either
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? INTRODUCTION
sex. It did not sufficiently investigate human pride, courage, stouthearted- ness, craving for recognition, drive for justice, sense of dignity and honor, indignation, militant and vengeful energies. Psychoanalysis somewhat condescendingly left phenomena of this kind to the followers of Alfred Adler and other allegedly minor interpreters of the so-called inferiority complexes. If at all, it conceded that pride and ambition can take over con- trol whenever sexual wishes do not get realized adequately. With a little irony, psychoanalysis called this transition of the psyche to a second pro- gram "sublimation"--a fabricated elevation for those in need of it.
For the most part, classical psychoanalysis was not interested in con- sidering the possibility that there might be a second basic force operative in the psychic field. This fact changed only marginally through additional conceptual inventions such as the "death drive" or mythic figures with the name of "destrudo," or primary aggression. The psychology of the self that was added later functioned only as compensation. It is understandable that it always remained a thorn in the eye for the classic Freudians, the partisans of the unconscious.
In conformity with its basic erotodynamic approach, psychoanalysis brought much hatred to light, the other side of love. Psychoanalysis man- aged to show that hating means to be bound by similar laws as loving. Both hating and loving are projections that are subject to a repetitive com- pulsion. Psychoanalysis remained for the most part silent when it came to that form of rage that springs from the striving for success, prestige, self-respect, and their backlashes. The most visible symptom of the delib- erate ignorance that resulted from the analytic paradigm is the theory of narcissism, the second offspring of psychoanalytic doctrine, with which the inconsistencies of the oedipal theorem were supposed to be resolved. It is telling that the narcissism thesis focuses on the human forms of self- affirmation. However, it aims to incorporate this thesis against all plau- sibility into the framework of a second erotic model. It thus takes on the futile effort to deduce the peculiar richness of thymotic phenomena from autoeroticism and its pathogenic fragmentations. Although it formulates a respectable educational program for the psyche, a program that aims at the transformation of the so-called narcissistic state into that of the mature love object, psychoanalysis never considered outlining an analogous edu- cational path for the production of the proud adult, of the fighter and bearer of ambitions. The word "pride" is for most psychoanalysts only an empty entry in the dictionary of the neurotic. They have practically lost
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? INTRODUCTION
access to what is designated by the word "pride" because of an exercise in forgetting, an exercise called education.
Narcissus is incapable of helping Oedipus, however. The choice of these mythic models reveals more about the person who made the choice than about the nature of the object. How should it be the case that a young man with a moronic character, someone incapable of differentiating between his mirror image and himself, is supposed to make up for the weaknesses of a man who only gets to know his own father in the moment when he kills him and then, just by accident, bears offspring with his own mother? Both are lovers traveling obscure paths. Both get lost in erotic dependencies to such a degree that it would be difficult to decide which one of them is sup- posed to be the more miserable creature. One could convincingly start a gallery of prototypes of human misery with Oedipus and Narcissus. One would feel sorry for these creatures but not admire them. Their fates, if we trust the teachings of the psychoanalytic school, are supposed to reveal the most powerful patterns for the dramas of everyone's life. It is not difficult to see which tendency is the basis of these "promotions. " Who would make human beings into patients--as people without pride are thus called--can do no better than to elevate such figures as these into emblems of the human condition. In truth their lesson should have consisted of a warning that unadvised and one-sided love easily makes fools out of its subjects. Only when the goal is to portray the human being ab ovo as the "jumping jack" of love is it possible to make the miserable admirer of his own image and the miserable lover of his own mother into paradigms of human existence. One may add, by the way, that the basic contract of psychoanalysis has been undermined by the excessive dispensation of its most successful fictions. From a distance, the cooler youth of our day still knows what was the mat- ter with Narcissus and Oedipus. However, this youth takes only a rather
bored interest in their fate. He does not see in them paradigms of human existence, but only sadly trivial losers.
Anyone interested in the human being as a bearer of proud and self-affir- mative affections should leave unsevered the knots of this tangled, over- extended eroticism. One must probably return to the basic conception of philosophical psychology found in the Greeks, according to which the soul does not only rely on eros and its intentions with regard to the one and the many. Rather, the soul should open itself equally to the impulses of thymos. While eroticism points to ways leading to those "objects" that we lack and whose presence or possession makes us feel complete, thymotics discloses
15
? INTRODUCTION
ways for human beings to redeem what they possess, to learn what they are able to do, and to see what they want. According to the first psychologists, the human being is quite capable of loving, and this is the case in a twofold sense: he can love according to the high and unifying eros, insofar the soul is marked by the memories of a lost perfection. Second, a human being can love according to the popular and diverting eros, insofar as the soul con- stantly succumbs to a colorful multitude of "desires" or, we could also say, complexes of appetite-attractions. However, one cannot not surrender one- self exclusively to desiring affects. With equal emphasis it needs to be said that one should watch over the demands of thymos, if necessary even at the cost of leaving erotic inclinations unrealized. A person is challenged to pre- serve dignity and self-respect even while earning the respect of others in the light of their high standards. It is this way and could not be different because life requests every individual to step out onto the external stages of existence and expose his powers to prove himself before his peers. This is necessary for one's own personal benefit as well as for the benefit of the community.
If one wants to replace the second determination of the human being with the first one, one evades the need of having an education in both psy- chic dimensions. This leads to a reversal of the energies in one's mental household, which results in damage to the housekeeper. In the past it was possible to observe such reversals mainly in religious orders and subcultures that were crazy about humility, subcultures in which beautiful souls sent one another messages of love. In these ethereal circles the whole thymotic field was sealed off by accusations of pride (superbia), while one at the same time preferred to indulge in the delights of moderation. Honor, ambition, pride, a heightened sense of self-esteem--all of these were concealed behind a thick wall of moral prescriptions and psychological "insights," which all aimed at fencing off and domesticating so-called egoism. The resentment of the self and its inclination to put itself and what it possesses at center stage instead of being happy with subordination--a resentment that was practiced early on in imperial cultures and their religions--has diverted for more than two thousand years the insight that the often criticized egoism actually presents the best human possibilities. Nietzsche was the first mod- ern thinker to provide convincing ideas about how to address this issue.
It is remarkable that contemporary consumerism achieves the same interruption ofpride for the sake of eroticism, an achievement reached with- out altruistic, holistic, or other noble excuses. Consumerism simply buys the interest of dignified human beings by providing material concessions
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? INTRODUCTION
and discounts. The initially absolutely implausible construct of the homo oeconomicus thus reaches its goal in the form of the postmodern con- sumer. Anyone who does not know of any other desires or is not supposed to know any other desires than those that, to cite Plato, derive from the erotic or desiring "part of the soul," is a mere consumer. It is not an arbi- trary fact that the instrumentalization of nudity is the leading symptom of the culture of consumption. Nudity always operates out of an orientation toward desiring. At least the clients who are called to desire do not, for the most part, totally lack forces of resistance. They respond to the perva- sive assault on the dignity of their intelligence either with constant irony or with learned indifference.
The costs for a one-sided eroticization are high. In reality, the "darken- ing" of the thymotic dimension makes human behavior incomprehensible. This is a surprising result, considering this darkening could have only been reached through psychological enlightenment. Once one subscribes to this mistaken view, it becomes impossible to understand human beings in situ- ations of tension and struggle. As usual, this failure to understand supposes the failure everywhere, just not in one's own field of vision. The moment that "symptoms" such as pride, indignation, rage, ambition, overzealous self-assertiveness, and acute readiness to fight occur, the member of the thymos-forgetting therapeutic culture retreats into a belief that the aggres- sive people must be victims of a neurotic complex. Therapists, according to this assumption, stand in the tradition of Christian moralists. These mor- alists speak of the natural disease of self-love as soon as thymotic energies begin to openly reveal themselves. Had Europeans not heard about pride-- or likewise rage--from the days of the church fathers, when such impulses would have been taken as signs pointing to the abyss for those cast away? Indeed, since the time of Gregory I, pride, also known by the name of super- bia, is at the top of the list of cardinal sins. Almost two centuries earlier St. Augustine had described pride as the matrix for a revolution against the divine. For the church fathers superbia signified a conscious state of not wanting as the Lord wants (an impulse whose more frequent appearance in monks or civil servants seems understandable). To claim that pride is the mother of all vices expresses the conviction that human beings have been created to obey, and every inclination that leads out of hierarchical relation- ships could only mean a step toward corruption. 15
In Europe one had to wait until the Renaissance and the creation of a new formation of urban and civic pride before the dominant humilitas
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? INTRODUCTION
psychology, which was inscribed into the bodies and souls of farmers, cler- ics, and vassals, was at least partially pushed back by a neo-thymotic con- ception of the human being. It is easy to see that the rise of the nation-state was a significant cause of reemphasizing and reassigning a leading role to the affects of achievement. It is not by accident that the masterminds who helped to prepare the way for the nation-state, most importantly Machia- velli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Smith, Hamilton, and Hegel, turned their atten- tion again to the human being as the bearer of valuing passions. They were particularly interested in the desire for glory, vanity, amour propre, ambi- tion, and desire for recognition. None of these authors ignored the dan- gers inherent in these affects, yet most of them made an effort to emphasize their productive aspects for the sake of humanity's being together. Since the bourgeoisie likewise articulates its interest in the inherent value of dignity and, even more, since the entrepreneurial human beings of the bourgeois age developed a neo-aristocratic conception of an earned form of suc- cess,16 traditional training in humility is compensated through an aggressive demand for opportunities to exhibit one's own power, arts, and amenities in front of an audience.
Thymotics receives a second chance in the modern world under the guise of the concept of the sublime. No wonder that the do-gooder of the present instinctively shies away from the sublime as if he sensed the ancient danger in it. The way in which the modern appreciation of effort is enlisted is even more threatening. The partisans of the tearfully communicative eros lament and defy this allegedly inhumane principle not without a sense for the stra- tegic position they are in. 17
The task is thus to regain a psychology of self-confidence and self- assertion. Such a psychology needs to do more justice to the psychodynamic conditions of our existence. This presupposes a correction to the erotologi- cally partitioned conception of the human being, which characterizes the horizons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, what is needed is a radical distancing from the ways of conditioning the Western psyche that have deeply engraved us, in the older religious form or in the younger metamorphoses. Most important, we need to distance ourselves from the blatant ideology that results from the Christian anthropology according to which the human being is a sinner, an animal that is sick with pride, one that can only be saved through faithful humility.
Clearly, a movement that would distance itself from these phenomena would not be easy to bring about. Although the phrase "God is dead" is
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? INTRODUCTION
already looked up by journalists on a regular basis, the theistic resources of humility continue to exist in democratic consensualism without being seriously endangered. It is quite possible to let God die and yet continue to have quasi-god-fearing people. Even if it is the case that most contemporary people have been carried off by antiauthoritarian currents, even if they have learned to express their own need for recognition, from a psychological point of view they continue to depend on a relationship of semi-rebellious obedience with regard to the lord who takes care of them. They demand "respect" and do not want to give up on the advantages of dependence. It would be even harder for them to emancipate themselves from the con- cealed bigotry of psychoanalysis. They continue to believe dogmatically that even the most powerful of human beings cannot be more than a conscious sufferer of his love-sick condition, which goes by the name of neurosis. The future of these illusions is secured by the big coalition: Christianity and psy- choanalysis can successfully defend their claim of outlining the horizon of human knowledge so long as they understand this monopoly as providing a definition for the human condition as characterized by a constitutive lack, a lack that used to be known as "sin. " Whenever lack is in power, the "ethics of indignity" has the word.
Hence, as long as both of these smart systems of bigotry dominate the scene, our understanding of the thymotic dynamic of human existence remains covered up for both individuals and political groups. Thus access to studying the dynamics of self-assertion and rage in psychic and social systems is practically blocked. In this situation we are constantly forced to grasp thymotic phenomena by way of the inappropriate concepts of eroti- cism. Under conditions of such a bigoted blockade, the direct intention never really comes to the fore because it is only possible to approach the facts by way of distorted traits. At least the underlying traits are, in spite of the erotic misconception, never fully covered up. Once we have called this dilemma by its name it becomes clear that it can only be overcome through the underlying conceptual apparatus.
THEORY OF THE PRIDE ENSEMBLE
POLITICAL SCIENCE OR, BETTER, THE ART OF THE PSYCHOPOLITICAL steering of the community, has had to suffer most from the thoroughly practiced but mistaken approach of psychological anthropology in the West. This approach misses a whole set of axioms and concepts that would
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? INTRODUCTION
be appropriate for the nature of its object. What from the vantage point of thymotics is seen unmistakably as the primary condition cannot be pre- sented directly through the detour around available erotodynamic con- cepts. At this point let me mention the six most important principles that can serve as the point of origin for a theory of thymotic unities:
? Political groups are ensembles; they endogenously stand in relationships of thymotic tension
? Political actions are started through a decrease in the tension between cen- ters of ambition
? Political fields are formed through the spontaneous pluralism of auto- affirmative forces; the relationships among these forces change because of interthymotic frictions
? Political opinions are conditioned and steered through symbolic opera- tions that present a sustained relationship to the thymotic emotions of collectives
? Rhetoric, the doctrine of controlling affects in political ensembles, is applied thymotics
? Power struggles within political bodies are always also struggles for priority between thymotically charged, ambitious individuals and their following; the art of the political thus includes the process of compensating losers
If one presupposes a natural pluralism of thymotic power centers, one needs to investigate their relationships according to their specific field regularities. Whenever real force-force relationships are at stake, reference to the self-love of the actors does not help us get further--or if it does, it is only with regard to subordinated aspects. Instead, it needs to be stated first that political units (conventionally understood as peoples and their subgroups) are, from the perspective of systems theory, "metabolic quanti- ties. " They continue to exist only as producing and consuming entities that convert stress and fight with enemies and other entropic factors. It is strik- ing that to the present day, thinkers formed by Christianity and psycho- analysis have trouble admitting that freedom is a concept that only makes sense within the framework of a thymotic conception of the human being. Economists zealously recite the doctrines of the latter thinkers, situating the human being as the consuming animal in the center of their appeals-- according to which they only want to see human freedom as the choice of feeding dishes.
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? INTRODUCTION
Through metabolic activities heightened inner achievements in a vital system become stabilized, at the physical as well as at the psychological level. The phenomenon of warm-bloodedness is its most impressive embodiment. With it, the emancipation of the organism from surrounding temperatures was accomplished approximately at the "half-time of evolution"--the bio- logical departure to being able to move freely. Everything depends on one's ability to freely move, an ability that will later be called freedom, with all its different connotations. From a biological perspective, freedom means the ability to actualize the entire potential of the spontaneous movements that are specific to an organism.
The separation of the warm-blooded organism from the primacy of its milieu finds its mental counterpart in the thymotic impulse of the indi- vidual as much as it does so in that of groups. As a moral, warm-blooded animal, the human being is dependent on keeping up a certain internal level of self-esteem. This also initiates a tendency toward disassociating the "organism" from the primacy of the milieu. Whenever proud impulses assert themselves, there arises on the psychological plane an inner-outer gradient on which the inner, self-pole naturally has the higher frequency. If one prefers nontechnical parlance, one can contradict the same con- ception by showing that human beings share an innate sense for the dig- nity of justice. Every political organization of communal life has to honor this intuition.
Part of the business of morally complex systems--that is, cultures--is the self-stimulation of its actors through an elevation of thymotic resources such as pride, ambition, the need for recognition, indignation, and the sense of justice. Units of this kind cultivate throughout the conduct of their lives locally specific values that can lead to the use of universal dialects. Empiri- cal research can convincingly prove how successful ensembles will keep their form through a higher inner frequency--but what is noteworthy, by the way, is their frequently aggressive or provocative style of relating to the environment. The stabilization of self-confidence in such a group is subject to a body of regulations, which more recent theory of culture has called "decorum. "18 In a victorious culture, decorum is understandably measured according to the polemic values to which it owes its previous successes. This is the reason for the close liaison between pride and victory in societies that have emerged out of successful battles. Groups that are moved by the dynamics of pride often enjoy being disliked by their neighbors and rivals so long as this provides strength for their feeling of sovereignty.
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? INTRODUCTION
As soon as the stage of initial ignorance among various metabolic col- lectives has passed, that is, once the mutual unwillingness to recognize one another has lost its innocence, they inevitably enter a situation of being forced to compare themselves and to establish a relationship. This leads to the discovery of a dimension that can be called, in a broad sense, for- eign politics. As a consequence of their becoming a reality for one another, the collectives begin to understand one another as coexisting quantities. Through this consciousness of coexistence foreigners are experienced as chronic stress factors, and a society's relationship to them needs to be con- verted into institutions--usually this takes the form of conflict prepara- tion or diplomatic efforts. From this point onward, each group reflects its own desire for being seen as valuable in the manifest recognition of the others. The poisons of neighborhood slowly seep into these mutually relating ensembles. Hegel discussed this form of moral reflection with the influential concept of recognition. He thus anticipates a powerful source of satisfaction or fantasies of satisfaction. That he at the same time named the origin of countless irritations becomes evident from the nature of the subject matter. On the field of the struggle for recognition, the human being becomes a surreal animal that risks its life for a colored scrap, a flag, a chalice.
Recognition would be better described anew as primarily a matter of interthymotic relationships. What contemporary social philosophy dis- cussed with varying success under the heading "intersubjectivity" often means just the opposition and the interplay of thymotic centers of tension. Where common intersubjectivism is used to present the transactions among actors in psychoanalytic and thus ultimately erotodynamic concepts, from now on it is more advisable to move on to a thymotologic theory of mutual effects and actions of multiple ambition agencies. Although ambitions can be modified by way of erotic affects, taken for themselves they originate in an idiosyncratic center of impulsiveness and can only be understood from the perspective of this center.
GREEK PREMISES, MODERN STRUGGLES: THE THEORY OF THYMOS
FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF SUCH PHENOMENA IT IS USEFUL, as I have already indicated, to go back to the far-sighted formulations in the philosophical psychology of the Greeks. Thanks to the studies of the neo-
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? INTRODUCTION
classical Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss and his school (which have largely and unjustly been claimed by political neoconservatives in the United States), it is again today possible to pay attention to the bipolar dynamics of the human psyche acknowledged and investigated by the great Greek think- ers. Strauss created a situation in which we become aware, apart from Plato the erotologist and author of the Symposium, of Plato the psychologist of self-respect. 19
In book 4 of the Republic, Plato presents an outline of a theory of thy- mos of great psychological richness and extensive political importance. The impressive achievement of Plato's interpretation of thymos consists in a per- son's ability to be infuriated. This turn against oneself can come about when a person does not live up to the expectations that would have to be satisfied in order for that person not to lose self-respect. Plato's discovery thus con- sists in pointing out the moral significance of intense self-disrespect. This manifests itself in a twofold way: First, it expresses itself in shame, an affec- tive, all-encompassing mood that completely fills the subject. Second, this rage-drenched self-reproach takes on the form of an inner appeal to one- self. The act of being dissatisfied with oneself proves to the thinker that the human being has an inert, even if only obscure idea of what is appropriate, of what is just and worthy of praise. When not living up to this idea, a part of the soul, that is, thymos, lodges an appeal. With this turn to self-refusal the adventure of independence begins. Only he who is able to disapprove of himself is able to control himself.
The Socratic-Platonic conception of thymos presents a milestone on the way to the moral domestication of rage. It is situated halfway between wor- ship of quasi-divine Homeric menis and the stoic dismissal of wrathful and intensive impulses. Thanks to Plato's theory of thymos, civil and militant impulses receive the right to remain in the philosopher's city. Because the polis that is governed by reason also needs the military, which is introduced here as the group of guardians, civilized thymos is allowed to remain within the city walls in the spirit of protection. Plato insists upon the recognition of protective virtues as powers that constitute society in many different ways. Still, in the late dialogue Politicus, which deals with the skills required for statesmanship, the well-known allegory of the weavers underlines the necessity of creating the spiritual web of the "state" by interlacing prudent disposition and courageous attitude.
Aristotle also mentions the advantages of rage. His evaluation of this affect is surprisingly positive, at least insofar as it is coupled with courage.
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? INTRODUCTION
Legitimate rage still has an "ear for reason,"20 even if it often storms off like an overly hasty servant who does not listen until the end of his orders. It becomes a vice only if it appears together with a lack of abstinence, that is, when it leads to excess. "Rage is necessary. Nothing can be achieved with- out it. Nothing can be achieved when it does not fulfill the soul and ani- mate courage. One should, to be sure, not make it into a leader. Rather one should only take it to be a comrade-in-arms. "21
Given that the thymos that has been conditioned by civilization is the psychological location of what Hegel depicted as a striving for recognition,22 it becomes clear why the lack of recognition by relevant others excites rage. If one demands recognition from a specific opponent, one stages a moral test. If the other who is addressed rejects this test, she needs to deal with the rage of the challenger, who feels disrespected. Rage occurs first when the recognition from the other is denied (which leads to extroverted rage). However, rage also flourishes if I deny recognition to myself in light of my value ideas (so that I have reason to be angry with myself). According to Stoic philosophy, which situated the struggle for recognition fully inside the human psyche, the wise person is supposed to be satisfied with self-respect, first, because the individual in no way has control of the judgment of the other and, second, because she who is knowledgeable will strive to keep her- self free from all that does not depend on herself.
Usually the thymotic impulse is connected to the wish to find one's self- worth resonating in the other. This desire could easily be an instruction manual for teaching oneself to become unhappy, one with a universal suc- cess rate if it were not for those dispersed cases of successful mutual recog- nition. Lacan probably said what is necessary concerning the profound idea that there is a grounding mirroring process, even though his models, prob- ably unjustly, situate early infantile conditions at the center of investigation. In reality, life in front of the mirror is more of a children's disease. But among adults the striving for reflection in the recognition of others often means the attempt to take possession of a will-o'-the-wisp--in philosophi- cal jargon: to instantiate oneself in what is insubstantial. Lacan's oeuvre moreover expresses the ambition to amalgamate the theory of thymos (as it was reformulated by Kojeve) with psychoanalytic eroticism. At the kernel of his project is the freebooting mixture of the Freudian death wish with Hegel's struggle for recognition. Through the introduction of foreign fac- tors Lacan exploded Freud's systematic edifice, but not without claiming that in truth the project meant a "return to Freud. "23
24
? INTRODUCTION
Without a doubt, the introduction of a thymotic element into psycho- analytic teaching pointed in the right direction. However, the initial con- sequence was the confusing growth of a performance that popularized the hybrid concept of desire (desir). With this concept, Lacan was also able to conceal his strong misjudgment of sexuality. To talk of "desire" was attrac- tive because it covered two phenomena that, although completely different in terms of their origin, could be connected because of their mutual rela- tionality. The confusion was as complete as it was welcome. It is telling that nowadays there are countless confusing "introductions to Lacan"; we are still waiting for a clear summary. As one can see, the reason is easy to point out: Lacan's contributions to the psychological knowledge of the present could only be reformulated by means of a framework in which the relation- ship of eroticism and thymotics is explained. However, as long as the theory that needs to be framed is intended to be itself the frame and measure, there is no end to the confusion.
NIETZSCHE'S INSTANT
LOOKING BACK AT THE HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AND IN particular its convulsive first half, one gets the impression that it saw the failure of the civilization of thymotic energies on all fronts. This means a failure of the project that Plato demanded, Aristotle praised, and the peda- gogues of the bourgeois age attempted to put into practice. If the goal of the political experiment of modernity consisted in translating the thymotic energies of the masses into political forms and in mobilizing these energies for standard "progress," we have to acknowledge a catastrophic failure. This has ultimately led to tearing down the experiments, regardless whether they were conducted under white, red, or brown flags.
To a large extent, this failure was caused by modern radicalisms that attempted, under idealistic as well as materialistic pretenses, to open up untraveled paths for collective rage, paths that were supposed to lead to sat- isfaction. Leaving modern institutions such as parliaments, courts, and pub- lic debates by the wayside, and in contempt of small escapes, these pathways resulted in huge releases of rage, resentment, and fantasies of extermination. They were excesses of previously unknown quantities that should finally be understood as what they were in terms of their psychopolitical quality: a chain of thymos catastrophes caused not only by the failure of the tradi- tional religious and civilized management of rage but by the organization
25
? INTRODUCTION
of a new politics of rage or, to put it more drastically, the organization of a novel economy of rage. It needs to be insisted on that the violence of the twentieth century did not "erupt" at any point in time. It was planned by its agents according to entrepreneurial criteria and controlled by its managers with long-term oversight for its objects. What at first sight appeared like the highest level of running amok in reality consisted of bureaucracy, party organization, routine, and the effects of organizational reflection.
Before focusing on the new economy of rage, the science of war and resentment, before considering this as the psychopolitical riddle of the twentieth century, Friedrich Nietzsche's unique position in the history of ideas should be pointed out. This author, who is as disturbing today as he ever was, introduced himself to his posterity as the "happy messenger with- out comparison. " At the same time he referred to himself as the "destroyer
par excellence. "24 From the "evangelical" perspective he speaks as the teacher of emancipated egoism. From his position as destroyer, he speaks as a war- lord who campaigns against morality as a means of domination used by the weak. Nietzsche exposed resentment and its modern repercussions as the fundamental affects of the metaphysical age. His self-consciousness was infused with the certainty that his great deed, exposing resentment as what it is, would divide human history in diametrically opposed periods, just as the Christian calendar divided the entirety of world history into the time before and the time after the birth of Christ. Nietzsche comments on this in his self-portrait, Ecce Homo, revealing a deliberate exposition of equanim- ity: "The concept of politics will have then merged entirely into a war of spirits, all power structures from the old society will have exploded--they are all based on lies: there will be wars such as the earth has never seen. "25
My goal is not to applaud the prophet Nietzsche for having conceptual- ized the giant thymotic battles of the twentieth century in advance. Nor do I intend to once again spread out in what sense and based on which teachings Nietzsche was the most inspiring neo-thymotic psychologist of modernity. His fateful interpretation of Christian morality should rather be interpreted within the parameters set by the knowledge of our age as an act of revenge against life. Speaking about "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Our Experience," as Thomas Mann paradigmatically did in a rich essay in 1947, is not easy. It is not only because of political and technical evolution that the 120 years that separate us from the hysterical-lucid endgame of the author con- stitute an obstacle for interpretation. Perspectives have shifted significantly; in some cases, even issues of epochal consequence have been clarified.
26
? INTRODUCTION
Today, for example, we can perceive clearly that, in general, Nietzsche's ingenious analysis of resentment and, in particular, of the priesdike type of human being have been burdened by a mistake of address as well as a mis- take of dating. The wanderer of Eze and Sils-Maria condemned Christian- ity by means of a biblical pathos. At the time Christianity had for a long time already not represented an adequate object for such a vehement attack. It had already, particularly in its Protestant wing (which Nietzsche should have known better), mutated into a happy (Hfe-friendly), mild, and human- itarian-supernatural wellness enterprise. The only way it differed from its worldly competitors was in a couple of bizarre suprarational dogmas-- complemented by a metaphysically well versed euthanasia, the charms of Church music, and an old-style Sunday collection for the sake of the needy and, lest we forget, a penny for Africa. The fact that Catholicism presented itself after 1870 as being at the peak of its antimodern campaign does not change the general situation. All of its efforts on the theological and politi- cal fronts were only the effects of weakness: the flight of the pope into the dogma of infallibility, the mobilization of an external mission, the militant incitement of Marianic fervor, the condemning of liberal and secular books, the founding of ultramontane parties in the parliaments of the secular world. All of these actions revealed the frightful panic of a declining power. The most important symbols for the situation of the Catholic cause remained, despite everything, the expropriation of the church states through the young Italian nation as well as the retreat of the humiliated pope into the walls of the Vatican, where until 1929 he put on the face of a martyr. 26
At the same time, in the milieu of nationalism and internationalism new and acute breeding grounds for resentment emerged and were supported by an unknown type of clergy, the secular clergy of hate, who stormed against "existing conditions. " In defense of Nietzsche's honor, we may say that he was always a strong opponent of both of these tendencies. This does not change the fact that he was wrong about his main enemy and that his main problem consisted in his anachronistic judgment. If it truly was the resis- tance to resentment that constituted the highest priority of the age, then the "attack" (Abrechnung) on Christianity would have had to take a back- seat to the struggle against national-revolutionary and world-revolutionary "moodiness" (Muckertum), to use Nietzsche's term. In fact, "rage," which is a recurrent point of reference in Nietzsche's deduction of dominating morality from slavish reflexes, can also be applied to the most active move- ments of resentment ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its timeliness
27
? INTRODUCTION
is not exhausted by these considerations. On the basis of everything that we know today about what we might expect, we have to assume that the first half of the twenty-first century will also be characterized by large-scale con- flicts. These will be initiated by collectives of rage and by humiliated "civi- lizations. " This is yet one more reason to continue the work that Nietzsche started and to put on the agenda a more fundamental reflection on the causes and effects of rage in modernity.
What primarily needs to be kept in mind against Nietzsche's furious con- clusion is that the Christian era, taken as a whole, was not the age of practic- ing rage. It was an epoch in which an ethics of deferring rage was solemnly implemented. The reason for this is not difficult to identify: it lies in the Christian belief that the justice of God will one day, at the end of all time, ensure that moral actions will be rewarded and immoral actions punished. The prospect of a life after death has always been connected in the Chris- tian sphere of ideas with the expectation of a transhistorical act of balancing pain and suffering. The price for this ethics of abstaining from rage in the present for the sake of retribution in a world beyond was high--Nietzsche's judgment on this point was clear. He insisted on the generalization of a latent resentment that projected the postponed wish for revenge onto its counterpart, the anxiety of being condemned. It was projected into the cen- ter of belief, the teaching of last things. The punishment of arrogant people thus became for all eternity the condition for the ambivalent arrangement of men of goodwill with bad circumstances. The side effect of this arrange- ment was that those people who were good and humble themselves started to be afraid of what they attributed to omniscient evil. I will discuss this issue more extensively in the following chapter, which concerns the wrath of God and the establishment of a transcendent bank of vengeance.
PERFECTED CAPITALISM: AN ECONOMY OF GENEROSITY
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE "AGE OF EXTREMES," AS ERIC HOBSBAWM HAS characterized it,27 Georges Bataille began to draw from Nietzsche's psy- chological intuitions their economic consequences. He understood that Nietzsche's attempt to criticize morality, as a last consequence, necessitated a different economy. If one wants to understand morality in terms of thy- motic concepts, one needs to reform the economy in a thymotic way. But how could we conceive of an economic life not based on erotic impulses, that is, desire, greed, and impulsive consumption? What would an economy look
28
? INTRODUCTION
like were it based on thymotic impulses such as the desire for recognition and self-respect? How would we conceive of the introduction of pride into the capitaUst economy, an economy that openly confesses that it abides by the primacy of profit maximization, avarice, an overall unnoble motive that becomes justified even by its defenders only in reference to the claim that the entrepreneurial realist is himself condemned because of the vulgarity of the real. The axiom of everyday business, as is widely known, is that he who wants to come out of a nasty match the winner has to accept the rules of the game. Realism against this background means to be cool with one's cruelty.
The often cited revaluation of values could never approach its goal if it could not manage to show the facts of capitalist economy in a different light. There are two options for the introduction of pride into economy: either one needs to be willing to ruin oneself through ostentatious expendi- ture for the sake of the prestige of one's name, as did the aristocrats before the French Revolution, or one needs to find a post-aristocratic sovereign use of wealth. The question is thus: Is there an alternative to the blind accu- mulation of value? Is there an alternative to the chronic trembling in the instant of taking stock? Is there an alternative to the unrelenting compul- sion to pay off one's debts?
The search for the answer to these questions leads to a domain in which economic and moral facts are not easy to distinguish. The Nietzsche- inspired critic of the general economy discovers in the heart of common economic life the transformation of moral guilt through monetary debt. It is hardly necessary to state the obvious. The capitalist mode of economy could only have started its victory march because of this pragmatic trans- formation. The time of guilt is characterized by the pursuit of a criminal by the consequences of his deeds. This time ends consequently with the atonement for the effects of the deeds. To be in debt means thus nothing less than to live through a time of compulsive repayment. However, while guilt makes one depressed, debts make one feel alive, at least as long as they appear together with entrepreneurial energy. 28 Guilt and debt have one decisive connecting trait: both make sure that the lives of those they affect remain bound by a knot created in the past. Jointly they create a retrogres- sive compulsive union, through which what has been retains its domina- tion over what will be.
To pay off and to pay back are acts that point back to the center of trans- actions. They are the objective operations that, when translated into sub- jective feeling, lead to resentment. If one traces the concept of resentment
29
? INTRODUCTION
to its material and economic sources, one finds the basic and original con- viction that nothing in the world can be gotten for free and that every step must be paid back to the last penny. Here economic thinking passes over into ontology, and ontology, into ethics. Being, which is intended to mean the sum of all transactions, secures a balance between what has been bor- rowed and what needs to be returned. In the spirit of macroeconomics, which was bewitched at the beginning of the metaphysical era by the idea of reimbursement, one can even interpret death as the repayment of a debt that the recipient of life has borrowed from the giver of life. The high- est articulation of this thought appears in an obscure sentence of Anaxi- mander that interprets the basic happening of Being as "reimbursement" (tisin didonai). 29 If one wants to understand the degree to which Nietzsche intervenes against the spirit of revenge, one needs to take into account that the author of Zarathustra attacks Anaximander himself. Nietzsche aims to efface Anaximander's proposition by stating its opposite: "Observe, there is no retribution. "30
The other economy is based on the thesis that the worth of paying back is a fiction that is rooted in the compulsive use of the schema of equal value. If one wants to leave the illusion of equivalence one needs to call into question the equals sign between what has been taken and what has been paid back. Moreover, one would have to interrupt the illusion of equal values in order to lend priority to a form of thinking with unequal values. In a transcapital- istic economy, the progressive, creative, giving, and excessive gestures need to become constitutive. Only operations that are engaged for the sake of the future have the power to explode the law of exchanging equivalences, by way of forestalling becoming-guilty and going into debt.
The moral pattern of this new capitalism is the psychologically unlikely but morally indispensable gesture of forgiving someone who is guilty. With this gesture the primacy of the past in a victim-perpetrator relationship is canceled out. The victim supersedes his humanly plausible and psychody- namically legitimate wish for revenge and returns to the perpetrator the freedom to make a new beginning. Wherever this happens, the chain of revenge, the economy of payback, is broken. Through recognizing the inev- itable imbalance between guilt and atonement, the person who was harmed once again finds freedom. The time after forgiving can thus gain the quality of an enriching new beginning. With forgiveness, the antigravitational ten- dency of human coexistence gains the upper hand; antigravitation is move- ment for the sake of increasing unlikeliness.
30
? INTRODUCTION
In the material sector, the corresponding act is the voluntary offering that is not rooted in having good credit and that does not entail any specific duty on the part of the recipient. The same gesture can manifest itself in the form of debt relief or as the renunciation of the violent collection of an open debt. This also violates the primacy of revenge and the compulsion to pay back. The essence of the gift consists in extending the scope of freedom on the side of the receiver. The gesture is at times augmented to the point of festive generosity, when the giver and the receiver are for a moment con- nected through joint exaltation, a feeling that can possibly have long-lasting consequences. It stimulates the pride of the recipients to think over what would be an adequate response. It reaches its highest degree in donations to beneficiaries who are not close in time and space to the giver and thus cannot return anything--Nietzsche designed for this form of exaltation the interesting name "love of those most remote" (Fernstenliebe). These acts of "giving virtue" leave it up to the future to do with the gift whatever it can and wants. Whereas the common economy that is dictated by the "lower Eros" is based on the affects of wanting to have, the thymotic economy is based on the pride of those that are free enough to give.
Bataille traces in Nietzsche's writing the contours of an economy of pride in which the concept of investment is radically modified. While typical investors use their means in order to get back more than they invest, other people invest their resources to satisfy their pride and to attest to their good fortune. Both impulses make it impossible for the providers to expect gains in the same currency, while gains in reputation and pride are completely legitimate and desirable.
However paradoxical this behavior might appear, the economy of pride is founded on the conviction of its participants of their meaningful investments--admittedly only after other dealings have been satisfied. In 1900, the great sponsor Andrew Carnegie expressed this circumstance in a classical expression: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. " This is a sentence that the ordinary wealthy person is careful not to cite. From the perspective of experienced givers, holding onto inherited or achieved wealth can only be judged a missed opportunity of expenditure. Whereas the usual types of businessmen can increase, with a bit of luck, their assets or that of their shareholders, this different breed of investor can add new lights to the splendor of the world. Through their dealings, and in how they handle them, they elevate their very existence to splendor.