No More Learning

In a panicked-ecstatic culture, entire populations would perform an act that was previously only done by a scattered few: the leap of consciousness through time to the end-times and the subject’s exit from the causality of flight and hope. Thereby, the post-historical culture of panic would be the only alternative to the culture of historical mobilization, which already has no more history left ahead of it – just a countdown.
The First Alternative: Metaphysics
Alternative cultures come into existence when humans find themselves in an irrevocable disagreement with the world. For this reason, today’s individuals with an alternative view cannot be seen as the inventors of the alternative. They are not the first ones to have their discontent with the world become confident and fundamental. In order to understand the meaning of alternative culture in a more radical sense, we must dig around in the submerged layers of our tradition of ideas. If we go back a few millennia, the archeological
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dig for traces of an old protest against the world will make a find. There, we encounter sediments containing the beginnings of high forms of religion and metaphysical interpretations of the world. What metaphysics presents as a philosophical phenomenon is not up for discussion; so too, its basic conceptual structures and the variants of its architectonics are of no concern to us at this moment. Metaphysical statements made by humans are only of interest to us insofar as a crucial chapter in the prehistory of discontent with the world connects to their emergence. We interpret the appearance of metaphysical forms of thought as an indication of the increased need for harmony and abstraction in the face of increasing social and existential dissonance. In this respect, metaphysics could not be separated from its pathogeneses out of the malaise in the high cultures. To convince ourselves, it suffices to see how the most painful fundamental experiences of human existence are hidden beneath the fabric of fundamental metaphysical words: the One, substance, reason, God, logos, cosmos, soul, immortality, idea, order. Admittedly, they are experiences that always appear within the pure text of metaphysics as something that has already been overcome. The purpose of the pure text is to report the success of metaphysical harmonization efforts. In it, we can already hear the logical triumphs of consciousness over the dark, hurtful world.
As people of today, we can no longer easily understand the texts of such victory reports, because we have come to use different weapons from the old metaphysicians in our battles against world- weariness. But if we go back to the fundamental experiences through which metaphysics was first crystallized, we can see how metaphysics emerged as the very core of the first alternative cultures. These experiences are probably inaccessible to today’s everyday consciousness at first, but they are available to contemporary conscious life at the very least when it comes to situations where treatments from modernity’s pharmacy are no longer helpful. Ironically, the modern-day crisis includes involuntary access to the metaphysical attempt at world management – after all, we are watching (with a perplexity that befits primal peoples rather than late cultures) an age of a second helplessness emerge on the passive side of modernity’s status as a jack of all trades. As a result, the present time, which is philosophically based on its fundamentally post-metaphysical position, has created a piquant community of experience with the old metaphysics-kindling world conditions. The threats that loomed over the world at the end of the metaphysical era reveal its beginnings as well, so much so that restorations seem inevitable. One glance at the New Age scene in North America and Central Europe gives the impression that we are dealing with a
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gigantic remake. A holistic consciousness industry has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic and it lives on metaphysical plagiarism. To put it a bit more amicably: countless contemporaries spontaneously quote from early metaphysical sources to articulate aspects of their current feelings about the world. They deem it necessary to skip over several millennia to find answers for their own questions. A portion of modernity must fall back on archaic speeches to say things for which no usable modern words exist.
What questions are we referring to? I will only discuss two here, which were essential in motivating the upsurge of thinking towards metaphysics: the inequality between different fates in life and the fear of all-devouring time. As for the first of these experiences, it was brought into language through the classical verses of the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal (one could add, with the mild somnam- bulist cynicism that is sometimes the privilege of poets):
Many will of course have to die down there
Where the heavy oars of the ships sweep
Others reside above near the helm
Aware of the migration of the birds and the lands of the stars. 7
This poetic meditation aims at balancing the inequality of destinies by way of a metaphysical world-housekeeping. On that higher level which constitutes the scene of metaphysical movement, everything is both closely linked and haphazardly connected to everything else; thus, the misfortune of the one comes together with the fortune of another in a sublime harmony.
But a shadow falls from those lives Across and into the others’ lives, And the light are bound to the heavy As the air is bound to the earth.
Through an awareness of connection, an evident scream to the heavens becomes music to the metaphysician’s ears. This desperate need for music is driven by the evidence that human destinies are unstoppably unequal and that there is no compensation for this inequality on a human level. Without a doubt, this experience points to the emergence of hierarchized large-scale societies and the separating of the fate of those at the top and those at the bottom. From there on out, the social world appears like an enchanted galley where rowing slaves perish below deck while a comprehensive view develops above in which the misery of others is redeposited into the harmony of the whole.
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Many fates weave alongside my own,
All are interconnected by a common existence And my part is more than simply this life’s Slender flame or narrow lyre.
The metaphysical impulse demands that thinking make this climb out of the inequality and confusion of life into an order-creating contemplation, and insofar as efforts towards order of this kind simply belong to the very nature of thinking, we can never entirely eliminate the metaphysical or “cosmic” holdings on the activity of the mind – unless this activity were willing to become as incom- prehensible and confused as the reality it works on, but then we would lose the difference between mind and reality and confused de facto existence would no longer relinquish any work to the mind. Some mystics have indeed taken this path of indifference. But for metaphysical thinking its task is entirely unambiguous: to show messy life the pathways that lead to order. For us, the claim to validity of the old metaphysical cosmic ideas of order fails because of a simple logical distinction: an ordering contemplation is not the contemplation of order per se. Music and metaphysics rise up against the noisy physics of life as an unstoppable first alternative because the will to order is at the very root of the entire impetus. Metaphysical study turns away from the desolate “surface” of things and looks down into depths or up into heights, from where intel- ligible order shines towards us, if we are willing to look away from the all too visible and not see through the intrusive glow. In order to advance to such order, the not yet refined eye and the not yet spiritualized ear must shift to more abstract forms of hearing and seeing – to seeing with the third eye, hearing with the third ear. This alternative – metaphysical seeing and hearing – is always already an overseeing and overhearing as well; a hearing all the way to the end and a seeing through, a not listening and a looking away, a right hearing and seeing, an inner listening and a seeing inward. The metaphysical break with the “superficial” world of appearance grips the organs of perception first: to ensure the effect of order, they have to spiritualize themselves and withdraw from the gross turbulence of what is present and existing. With that, the first step into an “enlight- enment” is made – it leads to a culture of transparence where all existing things shift from the state of being naturally lit or shaded to that of a logical transillumination. Thus, the analytical mythos moves into its invasive phase. The analytical mythos no longer sees the world as a sovereign play of light and dark onto illuminated non-luminous things; instead, it becomes the object of constant transillumination where a permanent intellectual light pierces
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through fleeting phenomena to reach eternal structures and bring them to definitive determinations. There are grounds for suspecting that the history of nihilism begins with the advent of such transillu- mination ontologies. If so, this history would be identical to the fate of analytical rationality which sees right through the facts to grasp their cause, through appearances to see their essence, and through structures to understand their function. This suspicion contradicts the vulgar idea of nihilism that sees the phenomenon as a modern affair and derives it from the collapse of the metaphysical “sphere. ” In reality, what has gone by the name of nihilism for a hundred years could only be the latest explication of the basic nihilism that has inhered in the transilluminating, backwards-leading, and, from presently tangible appearances, refraining rationalizations of the world since their emergence.
Next to the irremediable affronts on thinking by the mysteries of inequality and dissonance, the experience of death and tempo- rality by all individual life plays a decisive role in the emergence of metaphysics. Essentially, they form one complex, and time and death are not two different experiences, but a single experience that consists of temporality. The eventual death of all individual life is already implied in the fact that everything real seems to exist “within time” and that nothing living can escape the decay that comes with the passing of time. Whatever exists in the passing of time must suffer from the illness of becoming and the injury of passing away. Whoever is born in the passage of time owes a death to nature. The Greek myth of Kronos who devours his children captures this idea in its pervasive morbidity. It speaks of life bound to time as fateful self-consumption. This idea of time has defined the Western “civilizing process” (ow! ) and modernity has advanced this “fall into time” (first registered by the old metaphysics) to a consummate “chrono-latry,” to quote Massimo Cacciari’s baroque term for the modern cult of time. 8 But what is obscured by the contemporary dictates of clocks was glaringly obvious in the early metaphysical experience of time: Chronos,9 the passing of time, is fundamentally a period of suffering, lack, failure – a deadline for the inevitable undoing of life.
Older metaphysical thinking was aware that the time of Chronos moves directly towards death. Metaphysics (Christian metaphysics above all) understood that, being mortals, we are zombies: the living dead, walking around in their own corpses with the ghastly pretense of being alive. Indeed, this perspective forces itself to be accepted by a thinking that has conceived of all individual life as falling prey to all-consuming time. Those who conceive of life as occurring within time and understand time as an indomitable process do not only see
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themselves as continuously dying but must also imagine themselves already as those who will have died. Together with their physical and moral being, they fall victim to Chronos – not just in retrospect, but at the outset. Life must cope with this outrage if it has understood the predicament of time in its universality. From that point on, one of the fundamental questions of conscious life is how it can cope with its irreversibility. Full of horror, the one who can imagine the passage of time with respect to their own existence will see their own flesh fall from their bones – flesh and bones that are already no longer really one’s own, but that we have been dispossessed of from the outset by all-devouring Chronos. There is a reminder of this kind of shock brought on by the sight of the ephemeral in the Buddhist legend that tells of the first time that Gautama ventures outside of his father’s protective palace and sees with his own eyes the suffering nature of life falling prey to time in the form of the sick person, the beggar, and the deceased. The shock penetrated so deeply that thereafter the young man no longer wished to have his “own” eyes so they could captivate him with the deadly play; he wanted to detach himself from the sense of sight and what it perceived both at the same time.
Emil Cioran is a witness to this kind of feeling in our time. In a text called Paleontology, he recorded the shudders of an unredeemed metaphysician when confronted with the flesh:
An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me into the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology. . . . Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed on its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves . . . the solidity, the seriousness of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life. 10
Flesh and bones stand in ontological opposition to each other. While the flesh obscenely passes away, a promise of eternity belongs
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to the essence of bones. With cynical self-sufficiency, the bones perform metaphysics’ rejection of this temporary life; grinning, they bode beyond flesh and transience. A gaze that looks upon the disease of life and remains unshaken can only emerge from empty eye sockets. Thus metaphysics and cynicism come into being from the same impulse; the first as an overcoming of the temporal through an ascent into timelessness and the second as a sarcastic lingering of consciousness in what is fleeting, what is null and void. Together, cynicism and metaphysics speak about this ridiculous life with the humor of destruction.
The symbol of bones shows how metaphysics’ alternative to the ephemeral took shape. This alternative looks through the ominous fiction of the flesh all the way to the bony substance, to the very skeleton of life which continues to exist as a time-superior residuum. But bones only function as parables for last principles. Since they, too, are mere “apparitions,” they can be reduced and converted to their nothingness. In the past, it was fire that took on the work of metaphysical alchemy, distilling the imperishable from perishable life. Whatever has gone through fire has overcome this final breakdown. What remains is imperishable essence. In the end, nothing remains from living bodies that lasts – only ash and spirit, dust and weightlessness, mineral and light. This is the substance that eternity is made of. In its last distillates, the ravenousness of time breaks down. By means of an extreme reaction, the imperishable is filtered out from the murky and volatile elements.
Thus we can see how the old metaphysics sought to cope with the irreversibly oriented-toward-death: it answered the question about an antidote to transience with eternity; its answer to the question of overcoming death was immortality. These answers were enforced as the irreversibility of life processes could no longer be compensated by older, cyclical concepts that had sufficed for a mythical interpre- tation of the world. Cyclical thinking only has a chance in the life forms where world-changes in linear time can be pronounced by myths of nature as never having happened. It is only in the mythic circle of nature that life is annually reborn as if nothing irrevocable, irreversible, inseparable had ever happened. However, in historical mobilized cultures, time’s arrow flies irrevocably forward. In them, the irreconcilability of the fates and the transience of living condi- tions become overwhelmingly evident. They can only be processed with metaphysical strategies.
The metaphysical alternative (with which most of the continu- ances of modernity are still impregnated) contains the primordial history of human dissatisfaction with a lapsed world fallen prey to time. Radical metaphysics knew that only a radical overcoming
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of this reality can be its remedy. Only that which transcends life can make it bearable. And thus, metaphysics responded to the sickness of life with a witty self-cremation. Passionately, it sought the reduction of reality to its time-superior residues in matter or in spirit. It countered sickly flesh with serene bones, the burning wound with cooling stone. The metaphysical alternative has above all expressed itself consummately in the erection of stone monuments. Towering works of rock – menhirs, pyramids, temples, gates, obelisks, columns, towers – physically represent the ideals of law, permanence, and divine finality. Some of this Egypticism can still be found in the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong. In its architectures, metaphysics illustrates the thesis that the wound of time is healed only by eternal stone. In stone, the physical itself gains metaphysical content. The metaphysical exercise works ceaselessly towards a mineralization of the soul. Only those who discover within themselves the inert wisdom of the stones have found the Philosopher’s Stone.
Thus, the yearning to turn to stone lends an Eleatic trait to the metaphysical need for validity. For those unable to make peace with impermanence under any circumstances, there is no greater promise of salvation than the one that lies in the discovery of the immobile. This is why God is philosophically called the unmoved mover. To become similar to him – or to restore a lost resemblance to him – the radicals of the first alternative were happy to use impossible means. Whether they went into the desert to become a grain of sand of eternity in an ecstasy of loneliness, let themselves be walled in alive to force a stand-still of the absolute with the ultimate rejection of movement or prove with crushing logic that the flying arrow stands still in the air – each time, the Eleatic effect is at play, the desire to see through false movement in order to enter into true immobility. The authentic old metaphysics abhors what moves, teems, mixes, circu- lates, but, above all, the revolting food cycle that requires movement and violence of the highest degree. Eat and be eaten – it is this bestial macrobiotics in particular for which metaphysical movement phobia seeks a remedy. Only a static alternative can free human existence from its movement in the direction of death. Therefore, the misery of life can be simultaneously overcome by overcoming its movement. Hardly any metaphysicians of the old kind would shy away from the thesis that only the immobile could be good whereas everything else – all greed, lack of freedom, fear, violence, misery, and exploitation – moves, whether on legs, wheels, through automation, or with motor engines.
For a few centuries now, the immobilizing affect has been exhausting itself in Europe. As a result, metaphysics of the older
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kind has become impossible. Since being is thought of as a verb and the subject is thought of as an activity, ontology in its classical form is no longer “tenable. ” Even modern science has devoted itself to a concept of movement according to its mode of operation, namely that of research; when it comes to Hegel, the suspect movement has conquered metaphysics itself and made eternity get a move on. Meanwhile, Chronos devours not only his children but also the timeless magnitudes which we once thought to have evaded his appetite. We reside in such a penetrating de-eternalization and mobilization that we are not even able to speculatively conceive of an opposite concept to the dominant concepts of movement and event. Two centuries were all it took to use up the immobilistic reserves of a world age. A cult of movement without historical precedence has enveloped modern thought and agency. It sees all that stands still, holds on, relies on itself, and rattles unused as ridiculous. As if it had to recover from a long illness, modernity has broken away from its rigidity-enamored former times and now enjoys its new power to evaporate “all that is solid. ” Nowadays, only real estate brokers believe in immovable property.
However, disestablished eternity casts a long shadow over the great dynamization epochs. Modernization visibly attacks the Old World basis of existence and does as much violence to the primary courses of life through increasing mobilization as the most raging immobilization. Thus, a discontent grows out of the “civilizing process” and calls forth new alternatives. Does metaphysics thereby return? Do the Egyptian and Eleatic motifs once again have a chance? Are the apostates of modernity once more seeking the exit from earthly confusion in cosmological order? Was the collapse of the old metaphysics through the attack of modern concepts of activity not definitive? Or was that first static metaphysical alter- native perhaps not the only way to disagree with the world? Is there another alternative that does not have to end up in stone, purity, and self-mortification in order to cope with the transience of life?
The Second Alternative: Poeisis
It is still not broadly understood that a philosophical discourse of modernity is only possible as a critical theory of mobilization. To put this more pointedly: there is no Frankfurt school of critical theory, only a Freiburg one. Because if mobilization is indeed the basic process of modern times against which a critical theory must define itself in the form of diagnostics and therapeutics, then the Frankfurt theory has no critical principle, whether as an aesthetic
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theory or a theory of communicative action. As a negative aesthetic, it fails the critical moment with its latent argumentation that is without a world; as a theory of action, it becomes indistinguishable from its object insofar as communicative action manifestly operates as a principle of mobilization. 11 In contrast, the Freiburg theory has found a critical “principle” in the concept of releasement, which expresses an acute if not unmistakable difference to mobilization. The acuity of this difference consists in the fact that it describes the kinetics of modern processes as an active plunge into autom- atization without any illusions and then serenely recommends accepting the modern ability to act as an illness to be endured. Its ambiguousness stems from the fact that this acceptance is easily distorted into an assent to the fatal course of the world – it is but one step from intellectus fati to amor fati; one small false movement between the positivity of an understanding of the history of Being and the affirmation of calamity inherent in destiny. Nevertheless, only releasement, correctly understood, contains the difference that is able to render a theory of the world process critical – it acts not as a driving force of an alternative mobilization but as an alternative to mobilization; it does not place any other movements onto the path of the illusion that there is a path.
A critical theory of mobilization circles around the point where the kinetics of metaphysics turns into the kinetics of modernity. The old metaphysics as a passion for immobility and self-absorption is the original accumulation of subjectivity, which plunges itself forward within modernity as a passionate mobilization. Modernization takes place as the work of those powers that have catapulted out of the age of the first alternative: as the action of big science, big capital, big technology, big media. These are the essential carriers of the modern processes – and we deny ourselves an insight into their kind as long as we speak of them as “productive powers. ” In truth, productive powers are powers of mobilization. Mobilization is the modern response to the transience of life and the inequality of destinies. Through it, the lawsuit of dissatisfaction with the world moves to the next level of authority. The great mobilizers of modernity carry the promise of defeating the finitude and transience of the human condition by delimiting the mobilization of the finite and transitory conditions themselves. 12 The rapid planetary enforcement of this impulse illustrates the coercion with which life in post-metaphysical times seeks to cope with its irreversibility in the death-oriented process. Instead of implausible striving towards eternity, it thus brings modern dynamization strategies into play. We no longer look through smoke and mirrors at ancient images and primal sounds but have learned to banish images with images and
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sounds with sounds. Through the combined effect of the mobilizers, modernity forms the image of an inverted metaphysical culture. We now react to the horror of irreversible movement not with a flight into non-movement but with a flight into the fleeting. Strangely enough, modern immanentism, with its rejection of a hidden world and an after-life, has brought about no solid sense of the here and now, but has rather transformed it into a phantom and mobilized it to the point of evaporation. Heinrich Heine would revoke his most generous verses: ever since heaven has really been left to the angels and sparrows, the earth is becoming more and more unreal. A Dionysian-kinetic nihilism has superseded the metaphysical one. In it, the world is not overcome by way of the eternal, but actually revolutionized and made to disappear through the acceleration of changes. Thus, Old World metaphysics and New World technology seem to agree not to take the transient existences they encounter too seriously but to place them at the disposal of campaigns for conquest and change. In this new functional dynamism, the old Eleatic immobilism possesses its closest ally. The nihilism of transcendence is perpetuated and outbid by that of immanence. One could probably demonstrate that the newly nihilistic mobili- zation prevailed first and with special ferocity in those parts of the world where ancient nihilistic metaphysics and religions had tilled the ground within people’s subjectivities. Seen through this optic, a nihilistic meridian becomes visible which emerged from Old Europe, from Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, and passed through Russia, Japan, and North America. Without a training to overcome the world that lasted thousands of years, there would be no modern evaporation of it. Wherever this training did not take place, modernity implants itself with great difficulty because it has no connectors to latch on to within people’s mentalities. One must experience things in the world as having seen through them to their very “grounds” before developing a taste for making them dance in a kinetic revolution of modernity.
Only now does it become clear what we mean when we ask about the possibility of a second alternative. This question searches for the possibility of a non-nihilistic position of conscious life towards its irreversibility, an attitude that does not counter the death-bound passing of time with either the old nihilism of eternity and substance or the new nihilism of mobilization and change.
What we understood alternative cultures to be were remedies against the inevitable and unbearable grounds for discontent with the world – particularly against the unacceptable transience that adheres to all life which has come under the rule of an idea of time. A non-nihilistic alternative to that which is unacceptable can only
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stem from a different concept of time. Since the nihilistic image of the world is one that is dominated by Chronos as the passing of time, a non-nihilistic alternative must above all be one that owes nothing to Chronos. This is only possible if a present, lived time reabsorbs an imagined time. Imagined time, I argue, is the ruinous time of mortality. It stretches out between the lead up to the end and the walk backwards to the beginning – these two gestures that open up the imagined space of time’s passing within a subject. But there is no reason why these gestures should compulsively and irreversibly dominate our conscious lives. The present existence is not doomed to rush forward into its imagined end, nor must it cling to the ideas of an origin, a “nature,” or an initial essence. As long as it remains freely movable, it can always bring its occasional fast-forwarded imagining of the end and its momentary recourse to ideas of origin back to the balancing point in the present.
Life in the moment thus stays on this side of the compulsion towards metaphysics and outside the curse of history; for neither does it have to encompass the entirety of transitory processes within historical overviews, nor does it feel it necessary to circumvent such ideas towards a concept of a non-moving eternity. The living moment is also not seduced by the suggestive idea of an infinite becoming and passing, where it would be classified as a fleeting point in time. For then, even points in temporal lines and circles would lose their character as moments in time, no longer considered to be the present.
What follows from this? Nothing less than a mildly radical critique of historical existence. If the second alternative culture actually arises from the present as its source, it will reject all of the world’s structures that have been placed in the imagined space of time’s passing: the mythical world of origin, the utopia of the future, the world as historical enterprise, the world as mission and mobilization.
But doesn’t such presentism push aside all that counts as inter- esting about human existence? Does the retraction of imagined time back into the present not dissolve all the excitement that convinced life that it was worth living and carried it out into the adventure of history? Isn’t this alternative presentism a dull, nirvana-like fundamentalism that has to ultimately fade away in an uncreative indifference?
Under the assumptions of representational thinking, these are good questions. However, if these questions do not remain inquiries but become entrenched in theses, their only use will be to illustrate the lack of understanding that this type of thinking has of the essence of presence. Whoever believes that the permanent present amounts to boredom is stubbornly imagining the present as a point
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in time. In truth, the present does not belong to the concepts of time. Correctly understood, it is a category of movement or drama. The present refers to the kinetic structure through which things that exist become apparent to us as that which enters the space where we encounter it. Presence is movement in the sense of the drama of arrival, emergence, and entrance. The experience of presence is one of the distinctions of human existence, because the very essence of humans is that of arrival and entry par excellence – we are predis- posed to wake up, come out, bring forth, and begin. Presence exists only where humans do, and humans only exist where they are born. Presence is the sting of the unfinished birth.
If people live in ruinous times, they know that they are mortal – creatures for whom it befits to be drifting towards their own ruin at every moment. They have explicitly named themselves as such with melancholy correctness as long as the metaphysical era lasts. But if humans participate in presence, they are the born ones – creatures in whom the movement of birth continues. Presence as a dramatic term thus encompasses a twofold movement: the opening up of the world as arriving-from-without and the subject’s holding-out of itself into the world as the space of arriving. Presence is therefore always accompanied by the awareness of a twofold happiness and a twofold horror. One instance of happiness and terror emanates from the intrusion of external powers and the arrival of unhoped-for gifts, the other from the euphoria and pain of the human exodus itself.
Because it stands in the present, the second alternative is entirely defined by natality. 13 Natal presence cannot contribute to the impulse of running ahead into one’s own death; this is why it differentiates itself in its fundamental movement from the ruinous being-towards- death of the metaphysical or existentialist kind. Presence as a staying in the open arises only through the movement of human birth, and wherever this movement begins, the natal, the present, and the open attain their character in one and the same process. A life of presence realizes that something stands “before it. ” Metaphysics has under- stood the human position that implies this having of something before oneself to be mortality – which is just another way of saying that it interpreted the open “before” us as time; more precisely, as future. The modern interpretation of human existence as “histo- ricity” is also linked to this interpretation. But the result of this historical modeling of the open-before-us is the present world with its steep increases and its reflection in our nervousness – a world that no one would dare to claim as having much time left. It is the privilege of late modern contemporaneity to know that the horizon of the world as history is no longer open. One does not necessarily have to be someone who constantly cries “Woe is me! ” to grasp
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the end-times claustrophobia that envelops modernity’s inevitable farewell to the progressive-historical filling in of the open.
But if the open before us is neither time nor future, what is it then?
Now the moment has come when I have to say goodbye to my readers. As long as I have the floor to myself, it is not possible to determine what the open is on fair terms. My monologue must seem like a mock-up, blocking the subject with statements about it: what to do? Silence would not be an answer any more than the crossing out of the following sentences would – we uncomfortably recall Heidegger’s clumsily significant crossing out of the word “being. ” In such a situation, all that remains is the retreat of assertions into asociality. From this line on, I march alone; abandoned by tradition and the public, I scribble some sentences onto the blank piece of paper in front of me that speak about the open as if it were a tangible quantity.
The question remains: if the open before us may not be presented as time or future, then what is it?
The most obvious thought is that it is simply the space before us that opens up before our eyes as a field of vision and action. But obviously space is also not the open per se, first, because space as space is filled up by its contents or elements so that we can hardly speak of an open in this case, and, second, because we must not succumb to the danger of thinking of the open as a vacuum that can be filled by the next-best thing that can seep inside to occupy it. What remains, then? If the open is not the time-before-us in the form of future and not the space-before-us in the form of a field of vision and action, then it must be understood as something that already opens up prior to the existence of spatial and temporal orientations. The reassurance of orientation is already secondary.
We notice the fact that we are “standing” in the open by feeling insecure in it. The open allows itself to be recognized by the fact that one “exists” in it. The open would then be the tension or force field that establishes itself around the eccentric human “positionality. ” To be in the open would therefore mean becoming aware of existential ecstasy as innate discomposure. It is in vain that our ecstatic abundance and agony always flees into space and time in order to escape its discontent with itself. The great departures and flights of humanity into historical time and geographical space, however, have led to breathtaking processes in which both become scarce – and to the certainty that if something should still be open today, it is certainly not the geographical horizon or the historical future, but the force fields of present life alone.
These force fields are the home of what modernity calls “art” and the classical tradition refers to as poeisis. Only the activities
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that produce something in such a way that it “stands” in the open can belong to art. The place of art as poiesis is presence – the natal force field. However, the already very old differentiation between art and technology reminds us that there are radical differences in types of production. While technology emphasizes ability and operates manufacturing as a methodically controlled making available of a product, in poiesis a trace of the natalic proceeding into presence is at work. In fact, both activities have a making character and are based on successful “art” – but they differ from the ground up in their existential content. By bringing something forth – that is, forward into the open – poeisis is the taking up of nature’s produc- tivity through the eccentric human subject. Its poetry continues the forth-bringing giving birth of natural life; indeed, it is poetry only to the extent that it is such a resumption and it can only be such a resumption to the extent that it succeeds at the fundamental gestures of the birth drama: coming-into-the-world and bringing- into-the-world. 14 Poiesis does what it “does right” by placing it “into presence” – not merely turning it out but bringing it forth, putting it out there, into the open and into the public. (Incidentally, this is where an ontopological definition of public as non-uterus emerges: that is, as a space of obstetrical “unconcealments” and as an ontological glacis of what is capable of arriving, so that it is – still incidentally – inevitable to understand public space from the concept of Heideggerian “clearing” as much as Habermasian “enlightenment. ”)
Through poiesis, the spirit gains maternal competencies, even if it happens to be male. This cannot be otherwise, because human productions have to follow the natural process of creation in order to follow nature as old natality into culture as new natality. However, as a new natal process, culture opens its marvelous fan and produces things that would not have occurred to old nature. It is in these risky novel productions that the human creature (stigmatized for its talent for stepping out) invents itself and its worlds. Therefore, poiesis is not a theme of aesthetics as we understand it in the modern era but one of philosophical gynecology, if I may be allowed the expression. Its jump point is the natura naturans that becomes cultural drama within human production and its axiom states that truth is indeed not a woman, but poiesis is a “mother. ” As a doctrine of bringing forth, poietology deals only with the one art in all of the arts: coming-into-the-world or ars nascendi, bringing into the world or ars pariendi, and the serene letting live or ars vivendi.
Needless to say, this is not the approach of the modern “civilizing process. ” (Now that the term has burned through the cheeks, leaving the teeth and jaws horribly visible, as with lepers, it will have to be
The Other Change 57
taken out of circulation. ) This “civilizing process” is expedited by technology’s flight away from the open. It does not bring “forth” its products in the true sense, rather its production mode is a motherless forcing of things that function. With respect to the allocation of resources, technology is a consumption that depletes; with respect to kinetics, it is an aggressive mobilization; with respect to giving birth, it is a breeding of monsters by monsters. If that sounds harsh, then I have struck the right tone; one that is appropriate where technology leads to nothing better than the tearing apart of the great chain of life. If the question remains whether a poietic technology is possible, we would immediately speak differently about it.
The lonely stretch is now behind us and I can look for company again. It is high time that the misleading gestures used to construct this chapter were undone. They concern the order of presentation and counting of alternatives. For architectonic reasons, we had to pretend that we really believed that the second follows the first and that poiesis does not come into play until metaphysics has made its spectacular exit. Of course, that is most definitely not the case. As soon as we think of poiesis, it appears in such a way that we cannot doubt its primacy over metaphysics and technology. Because, if it is that which we claim it to be – the anthropogonic instance that dominates our ars nascendi as the art of coming-into-the-world and bringing-into-the-world – then metaphysics and technology, too, are subordinate extents in the happening of bringing forth and arriving, subordinate admittedly as problem children of natura naturans, as monster children, who not only grow to be too much for their mother but also ultimately challenge her for her reproductive competence.
The chapter did not mislead by reminding us of panic at the beginning and of poiesis at the end. Panicked culture here, poietic technology there; how is that supposed to go together? Obviously, it is not possible nor should it so long as we do not Hegelianize – that is, establish hybrid programs for calculating the incalcu- lable. Pointing to the motif of panic brings to mind the necessity of culturally hemming in what is without measure; doing so with poiesis maps out an intensive taking of measurements of what is actually present. It is likely that we must here – post-dialectically in a demanding sense – reckon with a dual citizenship of human beings and believe them to be capable of the immense as well as the proportional, of ecstasy as well as design. There can be no synthesis of poiesis and panic in the sense of a meta-identity of measure and immeasurability. Excess and pragmatism do not result in a unified whole when put together, even if it is impossible to separate one from the other.
58 The Other Change
In the fall of 1985, I had the opportunity to visit Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art on a trip to Asia. In a painting by a Korean artist that was on display there, I found the paradox of contemporary reflections on time and being more lucidly visualized than in hardly any modern Western artwork. The symbol of Yin and Yang was depicted on a large canvas in light pastel shades; the venerable image of a circle made of complementary waves of light and dark, hard and soft, the eternal cipher of polarity and moving harmonization of opposites. However, in this artwork, the circle was disrupted by a flat grey wedge that split the image in two from right to left. It was as if that grey wedge wanted to refute the holistic old Asian world of roundness and completeness. It testified to a catastrophic experience of the world where the one and the other no longer add up to a “higher” unity. It was both disturbing and relieving at the same time to see how the holistic lie was here brought to an end – the split went through the image of the Tao itself. While circle and wedge do come together to create a new and more complex structure, that structure appears before us as something that is forever broken apart, injured, disjointed. Within this structure, neither could the previously harmonious circle incor- porate the aggressive wedge within itself, nor was it possible for the aggressive wedge to completely alienate the two circular halves from each other and make their previous connection unrecognizable; separated, they still remind us that parts can assert their belonging to one another in a disintegrated world. Here and there, a ruined symbol also reveals the structure of something knitted, woven, consonant, netted together. Even after the destruction of the perfect roundness, old links, new links, joints and correlations remain in effect, at least as preliminary sketches of a harmonious life. From these, poiesis can form its resulting qualities. But circle and wedge do not result in a whole just as panic and poiesis do not. As soon as we grasp the common origin of both motifs to be their irreducible obstinacy, the imagined wholeness of old and new metaphysics is foiled. Of the totality of reality it is impossible to say that it is the whole. The paradox of wholeness ruptures all ideas of wholeness since the whole ought to be able to withstand its own disintegration and transgression but cannot. When is wholeness whole? Perhaps when it falls into nothingness as a whole.
3 EUROTAOISM?
Many will find the fact that philosophy is here transformed into a preschool of gynecology to be a severe deviation from the orthodox path. But nothing is so bad that it could not get worse – especially when we set about with heterodox energy to also gynecologize major philosophical topics like “the self,” “autonomy,” “freedom,” “being,” “nothingness. ” How is that supposed to work? Effortlessly: by showing in the very first section that the problem of nihilism must be addressed differently from the way Nietzsche has done it – less heroically, that is; in the second section, by developing the idea that Western metaphysics of the subject was a purely andrologically executed attempt to compensate for the uncanniness of having been born through a power- driven erection of the self, where we will not miss the opportunity to infiltrate the classical definition of philosophy as midwifery of the soul in actually gynecological terms; and in the third section, by explaining the right use of the term “Eurotaoism” – not without bringing the Old Chinese intra-uterine bonhomie into play, which interprets the carryings-on out there as a deadliness in vain.
Nothingness and Historical Consciousness: A Note on the World History of Life Fatigue
The sight of man now makes us tired – what is nihilism today if it is not that? . . . We are tired of man . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality1
Nietzsche’s special position in the history of newer philosophy is constituted by the fact that after him one learns to understand
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the connection between historical thinking and melancholy. This discovery contains the quintessential legacy of the nineteenth century. It is understandable why this century is so poorly regarded by those who came later as one of crooked postures, pompous gestures, and titanic sentimentality. Its major crime, however, is that it left the twentieth century with a paradox that seems more trying than the most hopeless double bind. By bringing up those who are born later to think historically, it infected them with an incurable melancholy. Its historicism destroyed the immune system of naïve life that protects it from seeing itself historically and provided it with a vision of its forlornness in the great realms of time. Just as Pascal shuddered before the eternal silence of infinite space, so the humans of historicism must have felt dejected when faced with the eternal noise of historical epochs. History’s lesson for the present time is that it gives us reasons to despair of it. For this reason, historicity is the philosophical code word for depressiveness – we have known this ever since the young Nietzsche insightfully pointed to the disad- vantage of history for life. One can assume that the generation of romanticists who consisted of witnesses and survivors of the French Revolution already had to suffer through the detrimental side of historical mobilization; for them, the evil of the century lay in the feeling that this historical world was nothing but a graveyard of enthusiasms – all the beautifully begun projects rot within it. Since then, thinking historically means orienting oneself in a situation where life is no longer a match for its own reflectivity. This, too, has been the subject of the European philosophy of alienation since the work of Hegel’s students. Their critique revolves around a structure where life discovers that it is equipped with more morality than vitality, more memory than enterprising spirit, more inhibi- tions than drives. Only historicism makes palpable the nightmare of the past generations that burdens present ones. Aside from a small amount of scholarly happiness, there is hardly a thought within this structure that is not marked by anger at the outcome of history. We constantly succumb to it as into an enormous inhibitory device that imposes itself on us in the form of civilization, education, memory, conscience, lesson plan, capital, objective spirit. In historicism, every life has the feeling of having arrived too late. It finds itself in the position of an heir who realizes only after the fact that the inher- itance that was to make them rich is actually overcharging them and leading them into ruin. Among rebellious spirits, this discovery translates into the furious flight forward. 2
The effect of being ruined by an unprovable and inviolable inher- itance is extraordinarily ironic. We must remember that European historicism first began as an optimistic enterprise of appropriating
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humanity’s entire past as our prehistory. The heroic optimism of total historical appropriation is primarily linked to the works of Hegel and Marx: Hegel attempted to reclaim the total past of all thinking humans as the property of a self-resonating absolute spirit, while Marx asserted the claim of organizing the entire future as an expression of the essence of a humanity that wades through itself to get to itself. For a long time now, however, the impression has been spreading that these two greatest programs known to recent history both lead to exhaustion in their respective ways. We are just happy if nothing happens to us on our way to work and we cannot even imagine hoping to convert the world into a condominium for our species via our work. To this day, the earth is regarded by ideologues in the succession of Marx as a future single-family house of the working class, while for Hegel, world history is a family tomb in which each skull represents a relative. Both of these massive endeavors fall back into the universal history of fatigue, and in view of both of these last two great Titanisms, it becomes increas- ingly clear that the more historicity reflects on itself, the more it comes under the sign of Saturn. As far as depressive historicism is concerned, the present is characterized only by the fact that it perceives fatigue not only retroactively, but also prospectively. Today, you do not have to be a historian so much as a futurologist to have history come to mind as a patchwork of despair. Nowadays, those who feel like being sad think not so much about what once was but about what the already surprisingly recognizable future will bring. Now that historicism has usurped the future as well, the circle of historicity is closed. World history in the form of an energetic account made on the steps that lead up towards us is no longer easily possible and will heretofore always be sabotaged by counter- narratives that speak of losses and fractures. Thanks to historical enlightenment, the world is now under the eye of a sad science – unable to be romanticized; the best remembrance has the most evil eye. As a result, all history is dis-evangelist – history is bad news.
At this point, the question of nihilism can be introduced. It is obvious that in the declarations of nihilism as they arose barely more than a hundred years ago, the affirmability of life as a whole was called into question. This is directly related to the triumph of historicism and its disenchantment with the temporal world. It creates a cultural situation where life has to see its own history as a process of increasing inhibitions and deformities. Historicism, as an application of enlightenment onto the existence of the enlighteners themselves, dismantles reasons to live and dissolves the vigorous self-invention of local narcissisms in a relativistic way. Therefore, the issue of nihilism must become the focal point of modern cultural
62 Eurotaoism?
self-understanding at a time when the victory of inhibitions over impulses, depression over initiatives, comparison of lifestyles over the decision to choose one is almost complete. This is precisely Nietzsche’s moment. He positions his thinking at the lowest point of universal historical decadence on the assumption of having reached a turning point at the same time. He understood that historicism and nihilism are allies insofar as a historical reflection that is thought through to its inevitable end can be about nothing other than the history of an unstoppable nihilistic inhibition of life which enforces itself out of Europe onto the entire world in the name of high religion, morality, and civilization.
For Nietzsche, the history of the Christian West unfolds as that of a slow-moving suicide. In it, life-denying impulses permeate all forms of thought, sensations, arts, and institutions with fearsome thoroughness. The psychological term for this process is the seizure of the power of resentment; the biological term, decadence; the religious term, Christianity; the philosophical term, nihilism. For Nietzsche, the world history of Christian resentment is the story of an immeasurably consequential devaluation of life and world. This devaluation is the aggressive spike in negation that emerges from the feelings of resentment of an already denied, inhibited, mutilated life. In the Christian rejection of the world, a whiff blows over to us of the suicidal depths of Asia. For Nietzsche, Western nihilism is the world history-making enactment of a radical negation of all that he calls the vital “values”; in it, he sees a will to nothingness at work that empowers negative stirrings instead of vital self-affirmations. What our nihilism wants would be nothingness as the highest value. This is a nothingness in the form of an absence of valuing life as worthwhile, an absence of the motivation to exist; in short, a depressed nothingness rooted in the refusal to accept life as it is. The exploration of motivational nihilism runs through Nietzsche’s entire body of work. With angry lucidity, he works out the mecha- nisms of the inhibited and inhibiting negation that has acquired a theoretical, moral, and psychological monopoly in the modern age. Disguised as Christian mission, philanthropy, and civilizational progress, Western nihilism has gained the power to move the world and bring it down at the same time. Talk of nihilism forced itself upon the waking spirits of the nineteenth century because they understood how powerlessness had established itself as a world power. The inability to reach a comprehending affirmation of life gained favor in institutions that constitute a disguised denial of life. Nihilistic modernity is the world realm of resentment in the form of a will to break life. With this diagnosis, Nietzsche has issued the moral death certificate to the West and its heirs in the East and West.
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With outrage, he reminded us that the word “world” is a Christian expletive. Seeing the world be dominated by the Christian “no” that was masked itself as post-Christianity, he felt justified in taking the side of denied life and disdaining his age as an era of consummate nihilism. Instead, he taught a Dionysian law of nature – the right of life to follow motivations other than moral ones. His utopia was a heroic positivism by way of which a positive, noble self-affirmation without consequences could dissociate itself from any origin that consisted of poisoned emotions.
All this is well known and only sketched out here as a background for what comes later. Of course, no one will deny the combat value of Nietzsche’s diagnoses, nor cast doubt on the strategic reach of his religion-critical gaze. Nevertheless, in order to talk about the dynamics of nothingness today, we can no longer continue directly in the tradition of Nietzsche’s theorems. Strange as it sounds, his conception of nihilism remains philosophically too innocuous, to the extent that it stops at motivational nothingness and its “overcoming. ”
“We are tired of man . . . ” – this sentence, more than its author knew, succumbs to a process where the increasing effort of human existence triggers a wave of life fatigue. This process also includes Nietzsche’s escape from fatigue into violent affirmations and walks right past the Dionysian revivals as if bored by them. After its misleading upswings, thinking has to come to the decision to perceive its own gravity, fatigue, and vested depression in positive terms. We will show that a meditation on gravity is needed to enliven philosophical talk about nothingness and nihilism. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality and his analysis of the feelings of resentment are not enough to understand gravity. At best, they elucidate the will to nothingness but they fail before the (perhaps more sophisticated?