No More Learning

The global spiritual conspiracy against the ego is not without a certain irony, as it stems from the same movements that spawned the ego phenomenon in the first place. If there has ever been an ego that made itself the measure of all things, there can be no doubt that it was first and foremost in the radius of the egotechnic procedures described here - and only secondarily on the side of the world-people who fall prey to games of power and prestige.
The oft-cited ego is itself the shadow of enclavement - and plausibly enough, it steps into view because, after the ontological local govern- ment reorganization, the excluded self as such becomes conspicuous. As soon as the recessively isolated subject turns around, it becomes aware of its shadow - which falls, understandably enough, on the entire 'rest of the world'. If this is noted, it is inevitable that the indi- vidual will be shocked and accuse itself of casting such a monstrous shadow. As soon as priests and master teachers seize this observation, the accusation is passed on to all mortals - even the majority of poor devils to whom it has not even occurred to have an ego.
As far as the ordinary vanity of mortals is concerned, something that is so eye-catching for spiritual persons, it is generally not an indication of an increased ego relation, but rather of the possession of individuals by collective idols and their more or less naive efforts to become like them. In reality, the phenomenally conspicuous 'egotism' of world-people shows an overwhelming of the psyche through an illusory image of the other - which is why it is usually simply a mis- understood form of invasive altruism, an obsessive need to shine in the eyes of their parents or the tribal elders.
239
as
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
are
trast, conceal actual practice
are founded on endavement - extending all the way to systems of 'subjective idealism'. Small wonder that they could only flourish under the protection of the archaic class order - most obviously in ancient India, where the tendency to flee from social restraints took on epidemic proportions early on, and could only be calmed through the integration of spiritual withdrawal into the normal course of life, as a form of retirement. Thus it was part of the standard Brahman's career that the married father or the mother of a family, once they had fulfilled their duties as students and parents, prepared in the third phase of their life for 'withdrawal to the woods' (vanaprastha), then finally leading the life of a wandering beggar (bhikshu).
In Christian times, the evasions of recessive subjectivity had to be balanced out with strong communitary counterweights, in particular the obligatory exercises in humility, whose basal paradox - reaching the top through degradation - is all too familiar. It was therefore indispensable for the internal stabilization of spiritual egotisms that they resolutely, even fanatically deny being such programmes from the start. One identifiable symptom of this denial is the beggar's exist- ence, which became characteristic in both the East and the West of the antisocial or 'houseless' ways of life. In this historic compromise between withdrawal from the world of humans and participation in its surpluses, the radically practising had found the suitable form to persuade themselves that their methodical isolation was in fact a mode of living in the humblest possible way.
Entirely in keeping with this, the cutting-out of the inner region from the continuum of the existent marks the beginning of a pathos- laden compensation programme against both spiritual and profane egotism, without making ethical secession credible or even merely tolerable either for itself or in social terms. In short: the recessive subject has scarcely been successfully excluded and elevated to its exceptional ontological status before it becomes the object of a tire- less propaganda of humility and self-abdication. Here one should no longer imagine that before which it humbles itself - the divine, the universe, the whole, the universal monad of life, nothingness, etc. - in the meanwhile problematic form of the external. The great humility- demanding entity can now only appear from the side of the self: as a god from within, a cosmos from within, as a not-self from within.
Hence the typical two-stage structure of subjectivity in the advanced-civilized space. In this structure, an everyday and illusory Little Ego must be set apart from a true and real Great Ego, and it
240
FIRST
~rH"n"'r is meant to
still has any significance, it is as
a parable of the power of the all-causing monad of life, as a source of transcendental metaphors of strength and a sparring partner of the soul, which wants to test how many things already leave it indifferent - thus there were monks who enjoyed boasting that they could spend an entire night lying next to a young woman without being tempted. As soon as the psyche has followed the imperative to change its life by embarking on recession to itself, it hears the corrective command to change the change. Successes in the striving to become holy must therefore not penetrate too far into the self-awareness of the holy, otherwise they lose their exemplary role for others. The paradox of this position is systematically obscured everywhere: that the holy man must not know about his own situation, even though he is the first who should know. Holiness seems attainable only at the price of mental shallowness, as it is incompatible with self-reflective individuality - a trait that, as a remark by Luhmann states, the saint shares with the hero of the modern novel. 34
Rehabilitating Egotism
I shall conclude these reflections on the original emergence of the practice space through the secessionary movements and the recessive withdrawal of the subject as a practice carrier with a recollection of Nietzsche's efforts towards a rehabilitation of egotism after millennia of denigration. These drew above all on two critical observations that were frequently ignored in the history of the inquisition against the ego: firstly, that criticism of egotism was highly premature for most people, because they were not yet faced with the task of forming an ego that could cast a negative shadow in the first place. Secondly, that even among those who had developed an ego by recessively taking over themselves, this certainly did not always merit the humbling imposed on them by the agents of the anti-egotism inquisition.
This inquisition, as we now understand, means nothing other than an indispensable measure for darkening the basal paradox that the saint must not know that they are a saint, or, technically speaking, that the old-style religious 'virtuoso' - to use Schleiermacher's fatal term - remains condemned to conceal their virtuosity from them- selves. Perhaps the right hand should not know what the left is doing - but the brain that knows what the left hand is doing has always also been aware of the right hand's activities.
241
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
Nonetheless, the saints could be plagued by the demon of self- reference without noticing its presence. This is revealed by a passage from Thomas of Celano's second life of St Francis (1246/7). In this account the young man, still 'unconverted', was imprisoned after a skirmish between the citizens of Assisi and Perugia and predicted his future in an exalted tone to his depressed fellow inmates: he himself was not downcast, for he knew that he would 'yet be venerated as a saint throughout the whole world'. 35 We note in passing that to avoid further evidence of such spiritual career reverie, the stigmati- zation with the wounds of the Lord, following St Francis of Assisi's great example, was the only tolerable form of pretension to holiness during one's lifetime, because it bypassed the self-awareness of the candidate, as it were, and presented the status of sanctification as an objective passion fact. The question of the stigmatized party's own contribution to producing the sacred marks has always remained taboo within pious circles. 36
As soon as one understands that the subject itself is nothing other than the carrier of its own exercise sequences - on the passive side an aggregate of individuated habitus effects, and on the active a centre of competencies that plays on the keyboard of callable dispositions - one can join Nietzsche in calmly admitting what was unspeakable for millennia: egotism is often merely the despicable pseudonym of the best human possibilities. What, by the light of the humilitas hys- teria, resembles a sinfully exaggerated self-relation is usually no more than the natural price of concentrating on a rare achievement. How else should the virtuoso reach and maintain their level if not through the ability to evaluate themselves and the state of their art soundly? Only where the self-relation keeps running idly can one speak of an out-of-control exercise. In such cases one should speak of an aber- ration rather than a sin, a malformation rather than a malicious act. Something that theological authors considered a major factor, namely the desire to be evil purely for the sake of it - including the oft-cited Augustinian incurvatio in seipsum - is presumably as rare as perfect holiness. Where people supposed egotism, and accordingly con- demned it in brief malediction procedures, closer inspection shows the matrix of the most exceptional virtues. Once this is revealed, it is the turn of the humble to explain what they think of the outstanding.
242
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories
In the Time of Completion
The remoulding of humans as carriers of explicit practice programmes in the more advanced civilizations not only leads to the eccentric self- relation of existence in spiritual enclaves. It also imposes a radically altered sense of time and the future on the practising. In reality, the adventure of advanced civilizations consists in lifting an existential time out of the cosmic, universally shared time. Only in this frame- work can one call upon humans to cross over from the even years of being into the dramatic situation of a project time. The acceleration whereby existence frees itself from the inertias of the course of the world is characteristic of existential time. Whoever takes the step into the practising life wants to be faster than the whole - whether they seek liberation still 'in this life' or still aim for 'heavenly exalta- tion' (exaltatio caelestis) in vita presente. If even Benedict of Nursia, the master of Western monasticism, spoke of a rapid ascent to God, this was not indicative of his personal impetuousness. He was acting entirely in keeping with the rules of life in the time of the spiritual project. His instructions for a holy life followed on consistently from the apocalyptic 'soon' (mox)37 and the apostolic 'quickly' (velociter}. 38 Because recessively isolated existence itself constitutes an anti-inertia programme, its elan is always ahead of the general evolution. Existing and hurrying (festinare) are the same thing, just as the coercion to hurry and the will to perfection belong together. 39 This is where the seemingly patient East and the manifestly impa- tient West converge. Just as Buddha advises his followers to lead this life as if it were the last, the Christian doctrine, bringing together Jewish and Mediterranean thought, convinces its adepts that this life
243
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
is the only one they will ever have, and each day a part of the last chance.
I have attempted elsewhere to show how the longing for justice and alleviation of suffering in the first pre-Christian millennium led to the establishment of a temporal structure with a new tension, marked by the purpose of delayed revenge. 40 This temporal connection ensues because the pain of injustice suffered produces an individual and cul- tural memory that does everything in its power to inflict an equivalent punitive pain on those responsible. This leads to an existentialized time with a clear retributive finality. As not everyone who suffers injustice is in a position to gain satisfaction by their own actions, however, a large part of the retributive energy must be passed upwards and managed by a divine economy of balancing out suffering. This results in the moralized conceptions of world time in Christianity and Hinduism. In the former system, world time is compressed into the relatively short span between creation and the impending Final Judgement, where wrongful deeds will return to their perpetrators; in the latter, the stored mass of injustice itself propels the karmic process, which, like a permanent martial law, ensures that the moral balance of each individual's deeds expresses itself in that life during its early embodiments. In both cases, the lifetimes can be integrated more or less plausibly into the process of moralized world time.
In the following, I shall explain how this derivation of existential time from retributive tension, or from the transcendentally heightened demand for suffering to be balanced out, must be augmented by a second derivation from practice tension, or from the anticipation of completion. This is only possible if one can show the existence of a clear finality running through the entire lifetime of the practising. This condition is unmistakably fulfilled by the classical forms of the practis- ing life. Just as the time of revenge is structured by anticipation of the fulfilled moment in which pain catches up with the one who caused it, the time of practising is structured through the imaginary anticipation of the arrival of the practising at their distant practice goal - be it vir- tuosity, illumination or alignment with the highest good. The tempo- ral form of the practising life also inalienably includes the more or less situationally or concretely envisaged fantasies of arrival without which no beginner could set off on their path, and no advanced adept remain on course. If one can describe the temporal structure of a life subject to retributive intentions as a being-unto-revenge, the temporal mode of the practising life is a being-unto-the-goal - or directly a being-to-
244
THE COMPLETE
THE
It
draws closer to them, is usually only explained to advanced adepts.
Movedness by the Goal
One characteristic of the structure of the practising and zealous life in its initial phase is the ability to be moved by its goal-image from any distance. It provides the most vivid example of what is listed as the fourth causal type in Aristotle's doctrine of causes (after material, formal and efficient causes) - the final cause (causa (inalis): while the other causae 'carry' the effect or push it along in front of itself, as it were, the final causality has the property of contributing to the effect in question through a pulling tension acting from above or in front. By this logic, goals resemble magnets, which irresistibly draw in suit- able objects located within their radius of attraction. The only way to imagine this is that the goal is, in some opaque way, already planted within the body that is drawn towards it - whether through what Aristotle called entelecheia (which literally means 'inward purpose- fulness' and refers to being moved a priori), native to all organisms, or because a creature capable of desire is, at a given moment, shown a goal it did not previously know about, or of which it was not con- sciously aware, towards which it subsequently strives like a goal that can never be abandoned.
This second form of goal-directedness, this phenomenon of being moved by a goal recognition a posteriori, implies the activation of a latent ideal of perfection or the promise of an irresistible prize in case of victory - comparable to the athlon fought over by Greek ath- letes. What Christian martyrs called the wreath of victory, stephanos (also a crown, and later a bishop's mitre), constitutes such a reward. Nowhere is the predication of one's own behaviour on a motivating prize expressed more clearly than in the well-known athletic meta- phors of St Paul, who, referring to his later apostolic vigour, writes in 1 Corinthians 9:26:
Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air.
Here Christian determination is connected with remarkable direct- ness to the athletic focus on success. This does not mean that Paul was
a a
ancient sense of
- hence the Greek word skop6s, which emphasizes the recognizability of the 'target' from afar. The irony of the goals, namely that they lose concreteness as one
245
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
especially familiar with the customs of the athletic world; he simply adopted the athlon motif in order to explain to his fellow believers the unusual notion of an immortal winner's prize as vividly as possible.
Concerning the Difference Between a Wise Man and an Apostle
What counts is the fact that the apostle himself is not speaking from the position of one who has achieved the goal, but from that of a practising person halfway there - or, in modern terms, someone committed - who is almost as far away from the goal as those to whom he turns as spiritual mentors. This makes him testify all the more emphatically to the significance of being moved by the idea of the goal. What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the exist- ence of the anticipator towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy to the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect. This is precisely what Paul is referring to in his exhortation to the Corinthian readers of his first letter: 'Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ' (1 Cor. 11:1). The speaker's imitation- worthiness here lies not in the successes he has achieved, but rather in his movedness by the goal. Whoever imitates such an imitator of Christ is running behind a runner. 41
This approach outlines the minimum for a culture of practice. It implies the elementary three-step structure without which there can be no organized guidance of practising beginners towards higher goals. The leader of the field is naturally the one who has fully reached the goal, the perfect one: in this case the God-man, Christ in person, 'belief' in whose perfection is already equivalent to faith in his relative imitability - as believing and anticipating, as noted above, mean the same thing in this context. The paradox of pedagogy in advanced civilizations, namely that it teaches the imitation of the inimitable, is discussed at greater length below. 42 In the middle of the field, here and everywhere else, one finds the figure of the advanced adept - in this case the apostle - who places himself as a first-degree successor in front of the main field, consisting of beginners and sec- ond-degree imitators, in this case the spiritually frail members of the young community in Corinth, who require guidance and inspire the apostle through their neediness.
246
THE COMPLETE AND THE ! NCOMPLETE
matters is
the simplest hierarchy, a project is to realized in actually lived time. The things lying on top of one another in the illustration are projected onto the time axis, after which the beginner's position can be identified with the Now, the advanced position with the Later and the position of perfection with the Finally. From now on, onwards and upwards mean the same thing. One can say that encompassing practice histories are not only teleologically directed; they also show a latently eschatological structure. In this field, imaginary goals and last things show a tendency to merge. As soon as the practising person is concerned not simply with the learn- ing of an art or craft as a process that can be concluded with the attainment of mastery, but rather with the existential art in which life as a whole strives for elevation and transfiguration, death and perfection inevitably come into contact. This trait is shared by paths of spiritual practice in the most diverse cultures; what sets them apart from one another are the codings of the highest and last, the modes of approach, the number of steps to complete, and the shaping of the different degrees of harshness against which the advanced must fight. The being-unto-death that the young Heidegger sought to attribute purely to the thrown Dasein's awareness of finitude had been known to apprentices of withdrawal since time immemorial - though they admittedly understood it as a being-to-completion. Consistently, their existential was not thrownness; that, as we know, is only true of those who cling to the world. Their existence was entirely centred on being drawn to the highest.
Paul's call for the Corinthians to be his imitators, just as he imitated Christ, makes it clear how the formation of stages is controlled from the middle. The middle is what lies below the perfect and ahead of the beginnings. Unlike in the Indian world, however, where the licence to teach is made dependent on the master's own complete realization, Stoicism and Christianity know the phenomenon of the imperfect teacher, who overrides his weaknesses by incorporating them into his teachings. To the extent that Paul felt able to teach virtues he himself did not possess, he could only present himself to fellow believers as a role model in the sense of a particular committed 'runner'. This indi- cates less, as is sometimes claimed, a proximity to the thought forms of Greek sports - something that he, as an educated zealot, must have loathed - than his talent for transforming himself into his addressees when writing. So here, speaking to Greeks, he experimentally became a Greek, just as he became a Roman when he needed to speak to Romans. It was, furthermore, quite clear to him that the perfection
247
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
vital for goal magnetism could not come from his own person, only from the great model he himself was emulating - which is why he carried out his magisterium as a stand-in, in the name of the one who would really have been authorized to teach, had he still been willing and able to act in praesentia after the resurrection. Paul was painfully aware of his lack of personal charisma, and he was always aware that his slight appearance made little impression on others. Logically enough, he therefore shifted his claim to authority to hysterical apos- tolic speech acts from afar. He was able to incorporate such addresses uncontradicted into his letters of instruction, which are dated to th. e years between AD 48 and 60.
In analogous fashion, Seneca discovered the position of the advanced adept as a literarily fruitful starting point for a philosophical lecture- ship, and likewise distinguished himself from AD 62 onwards as a writer of instructive epistles. Formally, these were addressed to a certain Lucilius, a younger man of uncertain personal profile who had resolved to devote his life to philosophical exercises, but they were aimed beyond him at a larger audience from the start. In formal terms, Seneca approached his own role as an apostolic orator by speaking up as the intermediary of a doctrine of completion; he too drew on halfway experiences to initiate the beginner into the exerci- tationes spirituales of the school and attract a wider audience at the same time. He knew that he was still on the way to perfection, with a substantial distance still ahead. Nonetheless, his advanced degree of maturity allowed him to speak with authority about the highest good, which lay beyond his present status. Thus he asked, 'What can augment the complete? ', directly giving the answer himself: 'Nothing - unless that which it augmented was not perfect. ' 'The ability to improve is a sign of something imperfect. '43 If growth suggests imper- fection, then reduction does so all the more.
Death Exam: Wisdom Teaching as Training for the Theatre of Cruelty
Seneca's concept of wisdom as a goal of perfection is infused in its every fibre with the Roman principle of reality, which understands the reality of the real as the harshness of life. Thus education to reality always meant preparation for an examination in tolerating cruelties. While Roman power is exerted as a collaboration with fate, Roman wisdom can only be proved as an unwavering resistance to the power
248
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
that people through No culture was so skilled at turning terror into theatre and placing the taking of life at the centre of public rituals. Where else could one observe such a unity of enter-
tainment and massacre?
Where one conceives the world after the image of a theatre of
cruelty, the wise man can only be presented on such a stage as an actor. No simulations are permitted on this stage, as the games appear realer than life itself. While life is only cruel on occasion, the Roman arena elevates cruelty to a central principle and a routine, extending to the actual butchery in the sand and the genuine tortures at the ramp. On a world stage of this type, there is only one difference that makes a difference: that between the standing, who will still be upright at the end, and the falling, who stay fallen. 44 Consequently, wisdom can only be invoked here with the image of standing upright - if there was ever a substance prior to Hegel that needed to be devel- oped as a subject, it is the one that presented itself in the figure of the Stoic seer. This is why Seneca says that it is not surprising if someone who is not tested goes about their life quietly; what is amazing is when 'someone stands up (extolli) while everyone allows themselves to be kept down (deprimuntur), and stays standing while everyone is lying on the ground: ibi stare ubi omnes iacent'. 45 The only risk posed by torture is that it could break the organ of upright stance, namely the spirit. The completely wise man, however, is the epitome of intransigence: 'He stands there upright under any given load. Nothing makes him smaller, nothing that has to be carried displeases him [. . . ] he knows that he lives to carry a burden. '46
Like Paul, Seneca requires a solid embodiment of perfection in an exemplary individual for the credibility of his message, even though he cannot point - like the apostle - to a master of constancy whose stabilitas extended beyond death. Thus the author contents himself with invoking the ideal, which would still be equally binding for us if there had never been a perfect sage. The Stoics' victories over death require the participation of the practising person in a different mode of perfection: they aim for a non-Christian savoir mourir. Their appeal is directed at a summum bonum that resides in the developed human mind (mens). As long as this mind has not worked its way to complete self-confidence, it continues to know uncertainty and fleet- ingness (volutatio). If it is perfect, it enters a lasting state of immobile solidity (immota stabilitas)47 - and in the Roman context, as noted above, stabilitas always means resistance to torture in the death exam. In this criterion alone lies the difference between a completely
249
EXAGGERA TION l'ROCEDURES
an
BU. ""'-"" one itwas
look back on decades of serious philosophical practice. Even after so long a time, however, he was forced to admit that he had so far only been able to talk himself (suadere) into believing what was best for him; in all those years, he did not manage to achieve a complete per- suasion (persuasio). And even successful self-persuasion would still, as he knew, not have brought him to his goal, for this would only be achieved when his wisdom teaching had become completely ingrained in him and available (parata) in any situation, even the most adverse. It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.
Seneca's testimony not only offers an insight into the endo- rhetorical procedures of Latin Stoicism; it also shows an incipient theory of stages, with the typical three-stage structure comprising the beginners, the advanced and the perfect - though the peak of the final stage is hidden by clouds. As usual, the operative essential is in the middle, for only here can work on the assimilation of the improbable take place.
Seneca the teacher is charming enough to take his own imperfec- tion together with that of his student. Hence the admonition to both: 'More than we have overcome so far still lies before us, but the most important factor in advancing is the will to advance. ' The way is long, for what we want to win are not victories in the Persian Wars, but vic- tories over the forces that have defeated the greatest peoples: greed, ambition and fear of death. 48
Elsewhere (especially in letters 72 and 75), Seneca develops the outline for a five-stage pyramid by dividing the advanced adepts in the middle zone (medii) into three groups and levels (gradus): those who are finding their feet like convalescents; those who have already made significant progress (profectus), though there is still a long way to the highest level (multum desit a summa); and the third kind (tertium genus), for whose members complete wisdom is already within reach (in ictu) - 'they are not yet on dry ground, but have reached the harbour' (nondum in sicco, iam in portu). With each level of ascent, the practising person comes closer to the summum bonum, of which it is said that our desire inevitably pauses before it, 'for there is no other place above the highest' (quia ultra summum non est 10cus),49 The higher the ascent to perfection, the more stable one's anchoring in a final immunity.
In its doctrine of the final goals of life, Stoic theology adopts ele- 250
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOM1'LETE
ments in
in the noetic sphere, take part in
practice purely concerns the task of turning listless sharing into clear co-ownership and minimizing the proportion of the corruptible in relation to the non-corruptible. The chance for humans is the trans- formation of an unstable methexis (share) into a stable hexis (pos- session, habit). They are meant not only to touch the higher sphere occasionally, but to settle there firmly and irreversibly. How this can be achieved is explained through the conventional circle of perfection: we could never perfect ourselves without already having a share in perfection; indeed, we could not even want to approach the summum bonum were it not already within us as a target image, albeit only darkened and broken. The purpose of all practice is to break this breaking, to clear the darkening, and to correct the deviation of the perfect into the imperfect that has been imposed by fate.
Curriculum Vitae a Priori
The wise man, then, is not an artist with visions of something new, but rather a conservator in search of the original state. The restora- tion of a concealed archetype is his passion. Whether the conserva- tion succeeds is another matter, as Western apprentices of the cura sui have only a fraction of the resources known in the Orient at their disposal - they must seek redemption primarily in the automatiza- tion ensured by countless repetitions that are meant to ingrain the improbable habitus of inner peace in the bodily memory. Whether this meets the requirements of an ars moriendi worthy of the name remains uncertain - in extremis, it is the psychophysical constitution that is most decisive, while the lifelong habit of suppressing the fear of death and preventing our fantasies from making things even worse than they already are only plays a collaborative part.
The simple three-stage schemata already show how the lives of the practising are integrated into plans for ascent. Recessively excluded subjectivity can no longer participate in the conventional lives of the worldlings, and must therefore rely on special curricular paths. As the fates of the external human are to become indifferent, while inner development demands full attention, it is not surprising if the practising being-in-the-world consistently takes the form of an ascent on a spiritual or anthropotechnic ladder - and the advances in the field of subtle physiology, especially in Indian practice forms, must also always be taken into account. Regardless of whether one looks
251
indestructibility. work
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
at Eastern or however, it is
the act of withdrawal as such only marks the very beginning a career. The real difficulties of existence on the shore of observation reveal themselves in the working-out of curricular steps. These ensure the division of the practising life into meaningfully experienceable sequences and the structuring of the journey towards the high goal in stretches that are congruent with the aspirant's self-experience. The chapters of this curriculum vitae correspond to the intermediate rounds and daily legs of lived life (and in bio-mimetic sports events such as tournaments and major bicycle races).
As soon as the motif of being-unto-completion takes hold of exist- ence, it causes the projection of the vertical ladder schema onto the time axis. That is why ascent can be understood as progress, and movement on the scala as the course of life. Being-unto-completion thus becomes the most powerful 'biography generator' - to adopt a technical term from recent literary criticism. 5o It causes curricular effects not only in the sense that occasionally, ascetic projects indeed produce careers that seem worth recounting in retrospect; rather, the generative energy of perfection-driven life projects already refers to future life stories, as if these had already been recounted in advance. The practising person would then only need to enter their personal or spiritual name and the local particularities of their practice life in the biographical form. The schematization of existence in the step-based systems of practice paths extends so far that a person could only give their story an individual touch through an admission of failure, or by a description of how they fell short of the requirements for asceticism. The 'path' they have taken, furthermore, seems like a curriculum vitae a priori. AU it needs in order to match its factual content with the schema is actually to be lived.
Needless to say, the dominance of the schema over lived life is by no means specific to spiritual lives; it appears equally often in the biog- raphies of the other 'classes'. For as long as humans can remember, societies layered in classes have understood the fulfilment of the type as the fulfilment of the individual. Only where new fate-generators such as greater vertical mobility, differentiated educational paths, social unrest and epidemic neuroticism (with its side effect, the com- pulsion to compensatory self-invention) ensure greater variation on the side of lived life can recounted life increasingly deviate from the schematicism of advance biographies. This shift of emphasis mani- fested itself in late medieval Europe in the emancipation of the novella from the legend. It was above all the modern novel that articulated the needs of individuals for non-schematic biographies between the
252
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
seventeenth and twentieth centuries - not without creating schemata for deviating life stories, which in turn provoked new distinctions.
Wherever individuals submit to the call of being-unto-completion, the absolute imperative 'You must change your life! ' is concretized into the ascetic or perfectionist imperative: 'Always behave in such a way that the account of your development could serve as the schema for a generalizable history of completion! ' This call to an exemplary life takes its addressees out of the natural and people's histories once and for all, placing them instead under the star of completion. This may have been called the star of redemption in some spiritual com- munities - it is the same heavenly body, and approaching it follows the same law of existence in the vertical. Hence approaching a star - and only this! - is the primary motto of existence in the time of com- pletion. Heidegger, however - to whom we owe this turn of phrase- concealed this star behind a seemingly impenetrable cloud cover in his early work and camouflaged the indirect approaching thereof under the pseudo-fatalistic formula 'being-unto-death'. In reality, even the young Heidegger had not entirely lost sight of the noble death that faces the individual as a death of completion, and the only substantial concession to modernity'S breakdowns of meaning that he was pre- pared to make in the shadow of the World War consisted in showing the impenetrable facticity of the end as emphatically as that of the beginning: where there are thrown people, there are also fallen ones. Consequently he ascribed a certain purpose of completion to prema- ture and externalized death, so that every death implicitly revealed an element of complete incompletion or incomplete completion. 51
In the older traditions, approaching the star of completion (or the ascent to the summit of perfection - ad celsitudinem perfectionis52) took place under a protocol documented as much by the manifold monastic rules and books of exercises in the Christian hemisphere as the incomprehensibly multi-variant spiritual curricula of the Indian world, regardless of whether they belong to the Yogic, Tantric or Vedantic schools. In both universes, the practising life per se takes the form of a grand narrative.
The concern is the same in both cases: the assimilation of the split-off individual to the absolute.
Benedict's Ladder of Humility
Such similarities come about in two forms of asymptotic move- ment: on the one hand along the via perfectionis, through a constant
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
increase in the powers that make us resemble the summum bonum or final life monad, and on the other hand along the via humilitatis, where the adept discards their self on the assumption that the old ego will sooner or later be replaced by the absolute self or nothingness. The first movement is translated into a novel of achievement with a markedly forward-striving finality - I attempted earlier on to show elements of this in the two great death scenes of Old Europe, the death of Socrates and the crucifixion of Christ in John's account; by contrast, the second movement must, in a sort of backward motion, be recounted as the history of a progressive self-evacuation. While the first form is intended to 'realize' the hidden God-man beneath the mask of trivial humaneness, the second depends on taking the sensory or empirical human to the point where their 'own' entirely disappears and is replaced by the Great Other, or great not-self.
I would like to show with an example from the early days of Western monasticism how the exchange of the profane subject for the higher self was envisaged in the Christian tradition. In the decisive seventh chapter of his Regula, 'On Humility', Benedict of Nursia outlines a twelve-step de-selfing course that he presents as a monastic analogy to the ladder that appeared to Jacob in a dream. This exer- cise in humility is described as a paradoxical ladder which the monk ascends to the extent that he learns to denigrate himself - or rather the natural human within him. While both ascending and descending angels can be seen on Jacob's Ladder, in keeping with the different angelic functions, Benedict rather wilfully equates the descending angels with hubristic souls - of which, following the oldest spiritual suggestion, one can then say that their downward motion is the just punishment for superbia - with no further thought for the possibility that descending angels could be selfless messengers in field service. The only true verticality is that which allows the practising to ascend self-humbling (humilitate ascendere). 53
On the first step - in fear and trembling - the pact with the observer beyond is sealed and the decision to renounce personal will is reso- lutely made. On the second, the abandonment of one's own will (propria voluntas) is put into action. On the third, the inner submis- sion of the adept to the higher authority is completed - comparable to a first instalment of the imitatio Christi. The fourth step serves to heighten obedience, not least in situations where the natural self tends to rebel against unjust treatment. On the fifth, all evil and base stir- rings of the heart are confessed to the abbot: the beginning of sacred psychoanalysis. On the sixth, the monk reaches the moment when
254
AND THE INCOMPLETE
IS thought
With a light insight, he now
'1 have become nothing and know nothing' (Ad nihilum redactus sum et nescivi). The seventh step sees the monacus entirely infused with the truth to which his lips testified on the sixth. He now says openly: 'I am a worm and not a man' (sum vermis et non homo). On the eighth step, the monk has learned to be no more than an organ of monastic life: he does only what the rule demands - not in the mode of service according to regulations, but rather in the spirit of highly motivated availability. On the ninth, tenth and eleventh steps
- described by Benedict with conspicuous haste, and written after one another without any real sense of progression (presumably because he took these passages, like some of the preceding ones, somewhat mechanically from the analogous sections of Cassian's Regula) - it is emphasized how important it is to reinforce silence and suppress unruly laughter. This means that whoever values the imitatio Christi must reduce their words until nothing issues from their mouth except what is exemplary and necessary for salvation.
Finally arriving at the goal, the twelfth step, the monk who has emerged from the Benedictine mould has become the perfect image of monasticism, his gaze ever lowered to the ground, a sinner and accused at every moment, bent and humbled, incurvatus et humil- iatus. 54 And yet, by the end of the course, love is supposed to have driven out fear; the lightness of the detached would have replaced constant effort. This lightness is the signature of spiritual success: where there was fear and trembling, there shall now be effortlessness. Instead of fearing hell, one is now a friend of the Lord.
At this point - to label the culmination - we encounter the central anthropotechnic principle of bona consuetudo: good habit. Tellingiy, the ending of this treatise on perfection contains not a word about illumination, completion or transfiguration. The description 'perfect' can no longer be applied to the human carrier, only to their most important quality, the love of God (caritas dei), of which it is said that because it is perfect (perfecta), it wards off all fear. The word timor stands for the sum of pathological affects by which the beginner felt possessed; one who has reached the goal will no longer discover any trace of them in himself. He has ceased to be the psychopath of God, and is now himself godlike through the easiest availability, pure kindness and collected spontaneity - though the creative, expressive dimension is excluded by the unflinching precept of taciturnitas. 55 If he has come to resemble the Highest, it is not on the side of the father but of the son, obedient to the end. The transformation of the monk
255
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
into statue to highest gradus on without any danger pride. This is the level at which the impossible has become easy, the wondrous has become habit, and detachment has become everyday: velut natural-
iter, the monk is already living here as if he were yonder.
Scala Paradis;: Anachoretic Psychoanalysis
Perhaps too little attention has been paid to how far the Benedictine Rule fostered an implantation of the Orient into the path of the West. The immeasurable successes of this monastic rule led to that transla- tion of the desert without which the older European culture of subjec- tivity would be inconceivable. It was only with Luther's Reformation that the Orient was driven out of newer Christianity - and along with it the priority of monastic strivings for salvation over lay spirituality. The anachoresis of the patriarch Antonius was certainly Eastern, for he transformed the desert into a spiritual palaestra, a training hall for demonic agons; the gymnosophk and semi-Yogic excesses of the Syrian pillar saints, whose reputation extended to Britain and India, was Eastern; the transformation of hermitdom in the rigid monastic barracks system of the early cenobites (from koinos bios, 'shared life'), which provided the matrix for obedient communism, was Eastern;56 the idea of unconditional obedience, which followed from the transformation of the spiritual teacher into the dominus, the sole ruler of the soul, was Eastern; and, not least, the over-enthusiastic idea of forcing salvation during one's lifetime, as evident in the crypto-angelistic concepts typical of the time, which stated that it was possible to exchange the profane ego for a holy selfness at the end of laborious asceticisms, was Eastern.
The master of early Catholic orientalism was undoubtedly St John Climacus (c. 525-605), abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai from around 580 onwards, author of the pldkes pneumatikai - 'spiritual tablets' - whose first scribes gave the name klimax, 'the ladder', which in Latin became the scala, that is to say the Scala Paradisi. The work stands out from the flood of monastic literature not only through the power of its language and its conceptual confidence, but even more through its masterful overview of monastic psychagogics. It offers no less than a sum of the anachoretic psychoanalyses that had developed in the Christian East in the wake of Athanasius' Life of Anthony, in a learning process that spanned several centuries. In the psychagogic analyses, everything revolves around uncovering and heightening the
256
AND THE INCOMPLETE
awareness struggling resistance
depression and (gastrimargia, gula), as as healing the soul through the complete elimination of pathological Here too, the fact that completion is described with the term apatheia, or transquillitas animi, testifies to the continuities that tie the monastic practice system back to the ascetic arts of pre-Christian practical philosophy and metaphorized athletism. In both cases, the life of the complete remains an anabasis unto death. 57
This text shows as scarcely any other document does that Christian Methodism comes from the desert, unlike the Greek, which was at home in the palaestra, the stadium and the schools of the rhetoricians; and unlike the Roman, which never denied its origins in the Field of Mars - it is no coincidence that Cicero, among others, had already pointed to the connection between the name of the army (exercitus) and its specific training, the drill (exercitatio). And naturally the con- nection to Jacob's dream image in Bethel cannot be omitted. In the Spiritual Tablets, the monastic mystical narrative of the long migra- tion of the soul also appears, beginning with the obligatory exodus from Egypt - and Egypt is to be found wherever there is a conceptu- ally, morally and emotionally alienated 'outside world' - ending with 'the resurrection of the soul before the general resurrection'58 and its retreat to the heaven of apathy, in the closest possible similarity to the image of God (homoiosis theou, similitudo Dei).
The thirty logoi or chapters of the scala were already equated early on with the steps (gradus) of the heavenly ladder, even though the order of chapters does not always form a systematically developing curriculum - otherwise it would scarcely be imaginable that the prayer on which John writes such exalted words is only mentioned on the third-last step. As in the chapter on humility in the Benedictine Rule, the scala of the Sinaite monks constitutes a ladder of humbling whose first rungs consist in the renunciation of worldly life, the discarding of social cares and the embarking on a pilgrimage - the peregrinatio is here simply equated with flight from the times (fuga saeculi) and the entrance into 'religious life'. 59 This, furthermore, makes it clear once again that when earlier authors use the epithet religiosus they are referring exclusively to the monastic and ascetic modus vivendi, with the modern scarecrow 'religion' far in the distance. Even as late as Diderot, the nun was simply called La reiigieuse, which meant a person who has chosen world renunciation as their profession - with tragic consequences in this particular case. If there is anything that must be completely frowned upon at this stage of incipient detach- ment from the trivial world, it is any hint of homesickness for Egypt.
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
If someone wants to become a stranger (xenos) to the world, they will regard the whole of it as a strange land. Whoever turns around will be turned into a statue, like Lot's wife. 60
While the three introductory logoi dealt with the curative secession from the outside world, the fourth chapter sees the author summon- ing his readers to God's training camp: this cannot occur under any other heading than 'blessed obedience' (de beata obedientia). These expositions are not so much a step in a curriculum as the platform for the entire existence of these 'fist-fighters and athletes of Christ', whose aim is 'to shatter the iron breastplate of habit'. 61 This demonstrates that flight from the world remains insufficient if not assisted by self- flight. Obedience is the monastic code word for those techniques that are suitable for renouncing the old human self by every trick in the book. The collection of examples provided by John in this chapter, by far the longest of all, testifies to the procedural awareness of the old abbots who were entrusted with supervising the monastic meta- morphoses. Here one sees how far the old self-experiential knowledge is cumulative in its constitution: after two hundred and fifty years of psychagogic experiments in the desert, the treasury of monastic empiricism was full to the brim. Those responsible for maintaining this knowledge knew clearly that all further ascents among their adepts would depend on the instruction they received in the first term of heavenly studies - hence their strictness, inconceivable by today's standards, in which the inhuman and the superhuman came into contact.
If there is a mandatory progression at any point on John's ladder, it is at the transition from the fourth step to the fifth, which concerns penitence and detention. Contemporary readers cannot help finding analogies between the description of penitential exercises and the harsher forms of modern group therapy, while the pathos of the sec- tions on the prison room is closest to modern regression methods such as primal therapy, rebirthing and the like - though in both cases, the possibility of breaking the patients mentally through excessive tests is accepted with pious or pseudo-salvatory ruthlessness. The old and modern cathartists are also surprisingly close together in how they view the meaning of tears; the Desert Fathers had already celebrated the gift of tears as a redemptive dowry. 62 Sin, we are told, is not a single isolated fact; the entire old human being must be called thus. 63 In what follows, we consistently re-encounter the concepts of askesis and p6nos familiar from athletic and philosophical contexts. 64 Even the Stoic concern only for one's own things (sua tantum curare) receives a suitable place in the monastic code; it ensures that whoever
258
THE COi'vlPLET£ AND THE INCOMPLETE
Theomimetic Radiance
I would like to dispense with a full description of the scala (which, in its further course too, remains more of a handbook of monastic psy- chology than a plausible novel on a journey of the soul) and content myself with a brief glance at the final steps. On the twenty-seventh step of ascent one reads of holy calmness (peri hieras hesychias), which is meant to be achieved after shedding profane selfdom. This is the state alluded to by the expression 'walking in the Spirit'. Nonetheless, one must still be wakeful; justified fear of relapse is found even in the cells of the most advanced practising, This is followed by remarks on prayer that are notable not only for their heightened tone, but above all for their late appearance, as if adepts were only permitted to receive this powerful instrument at the last minute - and yet the monks practise it from the very first day. The twenty-ninth step sees the triumph of the central term of monastic anthropotechnics: perfec- tion (teJei6tetes, perfectio). No other word can contribute more to the definition of this anthropotechnics than the 'theomimetic apathy' already mentioned in the title of this gradus - the calmness that imi- tates God. It is only with reference to this state that John can resort to so conventional and effusive a phrase as God's 'inhabitation' in the mortal human vessel,65 though not without reassuring himself with the Pauline formula for the integral change of subject: '1 no longer live, but Christ lives in me. '66 Apathy leads to detachment not only from human matters of every kind, but even from the memory of these. In perfect Platonic fashion, it grants the gift of seeing immortal- ity in beauty,67
A meditation on the three evangelical virtues of faith, hope and love is reserved for the thirtieth and final step. Here, the human body is transformed into a living monstrance: 'For where the heart is joyful, the face blossoms. '68 Some monks forget to eat and drink on this
259
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
are
surrounded
a bright glow. Now one can even use the phrase status angelicus, which puts Christian supremacism in a nutshell- and simultaneously explains how aspects of the highest can be present in the non-highest. Because the ontological difference between God and humans remains in force to the end, an intermediate element is required to ensure the participation of the lower in the higher. Assuming that angels are closer to God than to the human world, the angelization of a human being is synonymous with removing them from the human condi- tion and transferring them to the trans-human register of being. At the same time, angelic individuation - if the spiritual authors have their way - is no more than the return of humans to what they would always have been and remained if the corruption of their nature through the imitatio diaboli had not interfered.
Perfectionism and Historicism
After these overly hasty remarks on various manifestations of 'occi- dental teleology',69 one thing is plain: in the early days of the perfec- tion motif, the focus on perfection exclusively concerned the lives of the wise men and saints'? o The question of how the perfection- ist tendency was extended to the 'people' and the human race as a whole, occasionally even to the universe, is something that should be addressed in the necessary detail elsewhere. At present, what is missing is a critical account of the shared history of perfection- ism and universalism. Hints in this direction have been circulating for two hundred years under such broad terms as 'Enlightenment' or 'evolution', and in the corresponding grand narratives. Scarcely anyone would suspect in these the continued effects of anonymous ideas of perfection, hatched in the Christianized desert under strictly individual auspices and concerning the individual soul. It was only because the soul had gained a history there that the church, the ferry to the beyond, could conquer an analogous historicity. As church history could not keep its secret of perfection to itself, it was dis- closed to world history and published by philosophy. ? l 'Let us hasten to make philosophy popular' - Diderot's slogan would become the password of the anonymous perfectionists who, calling themselves Enlightenment thinkers, continued an old narrative form.
What we call historicism would then only superficially be the observation of all things from the perspective of becoming; in its
260
COMPLETE THE INCOMPLETE
same as
units - to
existing maximum, whether one it a people, humanity or the uni- verse. As the curriculum leading to perfection consists of a sequence of purifying ordeals, the extension of the idea of perfection from the individual to the church community, and from the community to the species, amounts to a constant increase in the format of the collective that is to be cathartically tested. It was initially the hermits who dis- covered the desert as the stage for the individual purgatory; they were followed by the cenobites as the inventors of the group purgatory, known first as the asketer{a, then later the monasterium and cloister - the first training camp for group perfection and centre of religious communism. The high Middle Ages then popularized the notion of a 'third place' (as Luther called it) in the beyond, which was now officially dubbed 'purgatory' and in which - an early manifestation of democracy - the Christian majorities received follow-up treatment. 72 Here we see a transcendent transitional society taking on its first contours. The Enlightenment, finally, invented progressive 'history' as an inner-worldly purgatory in order to develop the conditions of possibility of a perfected 'society'. This provided the required setting for the aggressive social theology of the Modern Age to drive out the political theology of the imperial eras. What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering - mathein pathein - into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things?
Our experiences with 'history' and its goddess 'society' offer so little encouragement, however, that one can find the anti-teleological reaction pervading the postmodern (or post-perfectionist) zeitgeist understandable in every sense, including its exaggeration as the intox- ication of aimless drift. Against the background of this disenchant- ment we can appreciate Chateaubriand's profound observeration: 'Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not. '73 In the eyes of the Romantic, the future means the dimension in which the poetry of imperfection unfolds. This can be shared in by those who resist the temptation of both perfection and inertia - the hellish parody of arrival. Need we still say that Nietzsche was the last true historicist? It was he who, in a century of shallow general education, guarded the eremitic secret of individual purgatory, which produces the greater human being.
261
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
Indian Teleology
I would like to conclude with an overview of the elementary forms of Indian perfectionism and its relationship to the temporal structures of the practising existence. If there has ever been a form of thought that left even the escalations of the occidental being-unto-the-goal behind, it is the Eastern teleology that developed on the Indian subcontinent. It is a truism that the magnetism of perfection has had more power- ful effects in ancient and modern India than in any other civilization. Indian spirituality is the planetary granary of narcissism - assuming one can free up this term, coined by psychoanalysis but no longer monopolized, for a new description of spiritual self-relationships in general
While Narcissus, the egotechnically unenlightened youth, leans over the water's edge and seeks to embrace his delightful mirror image - causing him to lose his balance, topple forwards and drown - the Indian contemplator bends over their inner self and begins to ascend. They waste little time with the reflections looking back at them, rather being careful to open their field of consciousness for the presence of the transcendent witness, though here too, it is initially and mostly amalgamated with the figure of the Great Other. In a culture where the number of gods exceeded that of humans, spir- itual life inevitably became an endless tournament of Great Others - the pre-Socratic dictum that everything is full of gods applies far more to Indian than Greek conditions. 74 The consequence of divine overpopulations is that elements of imagining thought are superim- posed on the pure expectation of the witness self. The theological phantasm involuntarily steps in front of the imageless presence of the all-encompassing soul in the individual soul. Removing such super- impositions and burning up the residues of pathological individual- ity from earlier life and current childhood in the 'flame of attention' is the declared purpose of all the spiritual techniques developed on Indian soil; gaining an adequate sense of their wealth of forms, peaks and nuances in extenso is an almost equally futile undertaking for Indians and non-Indians alike.
The beginnings of Indian anthropotechnics refer back to an archaic mental and psychagogic process that can be traced to the pre- Aryan period. It is no coincidence that one of the oldest names for the ascetic is shramana, 'the toiler' - a word that directly recalls the Greek ponos and the athletes who prided themselves on their philoponia. Supposedly the word ashramas, which is traced to the
262
THE COMPLETE AND
INCOMPLETE
to
forest hermits; this also seems to be the origin of the term 'ashram',
which originally denoted a hermitage, an ascetic's place of practice, before branching out to all manner of venues for meditative retreat, including the monastery-like settlements in the vicinity of a spiritual teacher. The parallels with the phenomenon of Christian eremitism are plain to see - and the affinity between athletic-somatic practice and Yogic and spiritual self-concern is obvious. The reverence shown towards silence both in India (where the holy man is known as the muni, meaning 'silent man') and in the Egyptian deserts points in the same direction. In both centres of asceticism, people had understood that any form of ordinary speech amounted to a profanation that entangled the soul once more in the very thing from which their with- drawal was meant to free them.
A brief glance at the vocabulary with which those contemplators had articulated their spiritual goals since ancient times already shows how radically Indian spirituality is based on the elaboration of seces- sion motifs. The four basic terms of spiritual life - mok~a, apavarga, nirvrtti and nivrtti - all belong to the verbal field of withdrawal, turning away, disappearance, desisting and expiry, each with an extensive apparatus of anthropotechnic procedures responsible for the assimilation of recessive qualities. Without further commentary, I shall follow Heinrich Zimmer's overview of the semantic fields of the highest goal-related words:
Moksa, from the root muc, 'to loose, set free, let go, release, liberate, deliver; to leave, abandon, quit', means 'liberation, escape, freedom, release; rescue, deliverance; final emancipation of the soul'. Apavarga, from the verb apavrj, 'to avert, destroy, dissipate; tear off, pull out, take out', means 'throwing, discharging (a missile), abandonment; comple- tion, end; and the fulfilment, or accomplishment of an action'. Nirvrtti is 'disappearance, destruction, rest, tranquillity, completion, accom- plishment, liberation from worldly existence, satisfaction, happiness, bliss'; and nivrtti: 'cessation, termination, disappearance; abstinence from activity or work; leaving off, desisting from, resignation; discon- tinuance of worldly acts or emotions; quietism, separation from the world; rest, repose, felicity'. 76
If one wishes to follow the development of Indian practice cultures from the perspective of high abstractions, one should ask here too in what mode the original ascetic secession and the development of cultures of recessive subjectification took place. The fates of Indian anthropotechnics only differ very fundamentally from their Western
263
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
is more or as a family
and therefore does not initially need to acquired through an indi- vidualized reaction to the absolute imperative. The answer to the call 'You must change your life! ' is inherent in the Brahmanic life as such, which in its sum represents nothing other than a collective secession. In essence, it is the implantation of a caste of god-men, or rather man-gods, amidst and above the non-Brahmanic populations. From this point of view, the oldest Brahmanic existence promises a quiet growth into a firmly established structure of hereditary superhuman- ity. Just as one could define the ordinary Westerner as 'so politic a state of evil',77 to use a Shakespearean phrase, which does not permit the influx of a single virtue, then the modus vivendi of the Brahmanic man-god could be described as a stable republic of unaugmentable merits.
The Secret of the Second Secession: Karma-Darkening and Striving for liberation
Even in such a culture, however, the question of the personal appro- priation of the legacy arises - especially in the time of social change, when the first individualization began in the early cities. Just as being born into a priestly house did not automatically solve the spiritual problems experienced by the sons of Protestant vicars, descent from a Brahman family could not remove all the uncertainties of life that might accompany the existence of a Brahman's progeny. The indi- vidualization of a sense of class superiority demanded by this can, according to the logic of the matter, only be achieved through an addi- tional secession of the single member from the seceded group. This necessity of a second secession was the evolutionary motor of ancient Indian culture. Its initial paradox was that it alleged a seemingly unsurpassable peak as the starting point for further differentiations. Consequently, the only dimension of Brahmanic existence suitable for heightening and surpassing was the area of negative statements on life and the world. Certainly the earliest Brahmans were already familiar with a degree of world-distance; this came from the emphasis on the ecstatic departure from the world of senses - praised since time immemorial as the royal road to experiencing the final reality - but the priestly and familial ties affecting the heads of Brahmanic house- holds, together with their divine self-assurance, set palpable limits to an actually realized flight from the world. If members of the younger
264
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
generations aspired to a deeper appropriation of the ecstatic legacy, they were directed almost automatically towards the radicalization of withdrawal - not only in the second half of life, after fulfilling one's Brahmanic procreative duties and passing on the divine secret to one's descendants, but in the first, discarding the procreative urge and ignoring the previously unassailable passing on of the holy fire from father to son. It is above all through this - more than through the oppressive real plight that had always affected India - that the pessimistic blurring of judgement concerning the totality of existence was able to gain the upper hand.
Only in this context can one make sense of the otherwise barely explicable opening of Indian culture to the wheel of rebirths, an image still unknown to the Vedic singers. The mysterious success of the doctrine of rebirth can only be appreciated if one views it as the means chosen by the ascetics to advance the necessary darkening of the worldview in the spirit of the second secession. It provides the ontological foundation for the asceticism of the early leavers; only this asceticism could have an interest in describing the universe as a trap for the soul, a penal and illusionistic institution in which those who are conceived and born are all reconceived and reborn beings who move forward from one imprisonment to the next. From this perspective, the doctrine of rebirths not only articulates a sublime metaphysics of self-propagating guilt - in this sense the functional equivalent of the Egyptian-Christian judgement myths, and hence to an extent a vehicle for metaphysicized ressentiment - but is also the conditio sine qua non for the secession of a class of young profes- sional ascetics. These rebels adopted the chronic resistance to the curse of procreation once it occurred to them to understand it directly as the procreation of the curse. From that point on, the reality of the real could not be defined alone by the misery that humans synchroni- cally inflict upon one another; it equally asserted itself diachronically as a proliferation of stored guilt. Henceforth, the great watchword 'liberation' (mok~a) referred less to the possibility of following on from the original ecstasy; instead, it changed into the password for the flight from impure and hopeless being.
One can see how liberation had to mutate into a phenomenon of longue duree under such conditions. As such, it was not yet suitable to be heightened into an existential project - for 'existential' is always synonymous with 'manageable in this life'. As long as individuals wander on the long tracks of karmic time, the pilgrimage to liberation is dominated by inert rhythms. Although, after the infiltration by the doctrine of rebirth, all substantial time was recognized as a time of
265
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
of individual - it was of
Buddha that sought to exceed the limits of the inert karmic machine and ensure its standstill in this life. What is decisive, however, is that Indian asceticism, like that of the Christian desert, ultimately knows only individual-purgatorial tests and individual-eschatological salva- tions. If it were capable of conceiving something resembling a world salvation time, it would perhaps be most feasible under the image of a thick rope of countless karmic threads with varying length, colour and purity. India's immunity to temptation by the idea of a history common to all stems from the fact that its culture of meditation had already dissolved the phantom of a universally shared world time into millions of invidualized salvation histories early on - an opera- tion that would only present itself to the socia-holistically enchanted Europeans, mutatis mutandis, through the post-Enlightenment of the twentieth century. Though it was deeply perfectionist, and in this sense historicist, it never occurred to Indian culture to acknowledge collective perfections as serious options. Its indifference to the ideas of progressive salvation politics was repaid by Western ideologues with the label 'ahistorical',
Against this background, one can understand the mounting nega- tivism that took over Indian spirituality from the days of the early Vedic man-gods onwards, finally maturing into the complete systems of mutually reflected world- and life-denial during the generation of Buddha and Mahavira (in the fourth century Be, according to recent dating). At the time of these great teachers, the impulse of ascetic secession had long spread to the other castes and infected them with the spirit of radical negation - certainly always against the back- ground of the old, generally Indian concern for purifying sequences of acts and touches. Naturally such evaluations are always based on an element of authentic existential disposition. One does not need to deny the distress of the young Siddhartha upon his first departures from his father'S palace, when he first saw the ills of the world in the shape of the sick, the old and the dead with his own eyes, nor his fasci- nation with the ascetic, whom he supposedly met last when he left the palace by the north gate, and whose sight pulled Siddhartha onto the path of redemption. We must be allowed to surmise, however, that he saw the ascetic first, and that this encounter indicated to him the necessity of liberating oneself from sickness, age and death. No prince outside of legend would ever think of relating the sight of poor or sick people to himself. Only someone whose interest in asceticism had
266
THE COMPLETE THE INCOMPLETE
1S
in favour, would in a way. A
son does not ask for vaccines against the ills of existence; he is inter- ested in a fight where victory seems nobler than a royal inheritance. The great systems of pessimism are less concerned with idiosyncratic tendencies coming from the existential disposition of the protagonists than with the laws of second-degree ethical secession, or the break with worldly life from the non-Brahmanic position. For ascetics who had chosen this gesture, the path to the negativization of existence was the only one still open.
These circumstances are expressed in all varieties of Indian perfec- tion projects in post-Vedic periods. The highest goal- the unification with absolute reality, whether this was taken as the final self or not-self (in a systemically defamiliarized version: the striving for total immu- nity in being or nothingness) - is fixed a priori, and it is correspond- ingly stereotypical to state that people should go to whatever lengths necessary to attain it. It is therefore more than justified to speak of 'Eastern teleology'. Where such a high level of goal-awareness, even supremacist frenzy, belongs to the basic characteristics of a practice culture, it is inevitable that there will be greatly differing notions of these goals.
The Slow and Fast Paths
The fundamental division of Indian thought in terms of the concep- tion of final goals was summed up most plainly by Mysore Hiriyanna: 'So far as the nature of the goal of life is concerned, the Indian systems may be divided into two classes - those which conceive of it merely as one of absolute freedom from misery and those which take it as one of bliss also. '78 (The author makes no mention of the altruistic turn in Mahayana Buddhism, presumably because he views the elevation of sympathy to one of the highest goals in life as an element that is foreign to the basic Indian tendency. ) In general, one can probably say that the more developed the motifs of world-denial and release from the compulsion to be are in a practice system, the more decisively it espouses the former option (which corresponds typologically to Stoic apatheia), while the world- and life-affirming movements naturally tend more towards a culmination of asceti- cism in a divine, even supra-divine rapture. Similarly, the affinity of negatively redemptive systems with a quick solution that can still be attained in this life is just as plausible as the compatibility between
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
of progress in rooms of reincarnation.
With regard to the temporal profiles of practising life, no other system displays such extreme variations as Buddhism: wherever it mingles with traditions of archaic shamanic magic, as in Tibet, it reaches excesses of ascetic negativity that are unmatched in the world - here the salvific impatience of early Buddhism lost virtually all influence, while the fatalism of rebirth triumphantly returned, infused with the darkest manifestations of a life-swallowing sacrifi- cial mentality. Even the most extreme contemplators, including those entombed alive and other athletes of self-elimination, are here faced with the prospect of numerous returns. Even with the harshest of asceticism, then, progress can only take place in small steps. At the other end of the scale are the reflections, typical of Zen Buddhism, on the question of whether enlightenment comes suddenly and soon, or gradually and late. Concerning this, the Chinese master Huineng (638-713) tells us in the Platform Sutra: 'Good friends, in the Dharma there is no sudden or gradual, but among people some are keen and others dull. '79 The question left unanswered by this remark, however, is whether the detachment takes place in minutes or decades. But regardless of whether a school of Zen Buddhism favours the sudden or the gradual line, the movement as a whole, due to its basic thera- peutic and atheoretical attitude, proves sufficiently impatient to be attractive for the spiritual aspirations of Western people, who only know life as a finale.
It would be futile to examine the procedural details of Indian self-technologies in the present context - firstly, because this subject would open up an ocean of differentiations whose exploration would require more time and energy than any interested mortal has at their disposal, and secondly, because almost every technical term in this field poses virtually insurmountable semantic difficulties for Western observers. What nonetheless seems familiar about the Indian practice doctrines is the fact that they too, like their Western counterparts, are almost universally arranged in step-based systems. Among these, the eight angas or 'limbs' from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, to name only one example, have acquired a particular reputation: (1) the tamings (yama), (2). the disciplines (niyama), (3). the body positions (asana), (4) breath control (pranayama), (5) the withdrawal of the senses from objects (pratyahara), (6) concentration (dharana), (7) medita- tion (dhyana), (8) enstatic trance (samadhi}. 80 As in all systems of progressive habitualization, the dispositions acquired in the earlier steps - especially the first two, which amount to a moral propae-
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THE COMPLETE AND THE lNCOMPLETE
an course in
the higher-level exercises, providing the base that can, and should, remain athematic in actu.
Analogous ascents are known from Buddhist self-technology as expounded in the Potthapada Sutta. 81 This nine-step itinerary of the spirit into Nirvana leads via the four elementary jhana or medita- tions (purification, concentration, emptying, purity), as well as the four higher samapatti or 'attainings', up to the final state, which is described as stasis in absolutely empty enstasy. 82 Naturally the law of escalation is visible in Indian step systems, which are prone to exag- geration at any time; according to this law, any formulation of a final step, however high, can be taken further through additional ordeals, iterations and increases in abstraction without anyone being able to say by some criteria - perhaps not verifiable, but at least utterable ones - whether any concrete content can be assigned to the addition- ally invented degrees of height. In Mongolian Lamaism, samadhi, which admittedly only nominally recalls the legendary final stage of Indian immersion exercises, is divided into 116 steps - an employment programme for numerous very full reincarnations. 83 One is inclined to suspect that some of the perfect grew too bored of perfection to put their hands in their lap after attaining it. Just as the Western world knows the horror of unemployment (the sociological name for depression), the Eastern knows that of an absence of practice. So what could be more natural than to raise the level of transfiguration? Nothing seems simpler than to 'reach' a Nirvana-and-a-half after Nirvana. Another motive for the inflation of perfections is undoubt- edly to be found in the psychodynamic instability of the final states; Western monastic literature also had a few things to say about this in the categories of 'temptation', 'testing' and 'relapse'.
As far as the semantic side of Indian practice terminology is con- cerned, its complications go far beyond the familiar discrepancy between perception and communication. The world of meditation- induced states is a broad country, or rather a galaxy with unsecured routes and uncertain borders. Whoever travels through it can never be sure whether other travellers have seen or visited the same stars in the same Milky Ways. Though the masters insist that they have reliable maps for the expanses of the meditative space, only con- tradictory things have been heard about their art of map-reading. We would be falling prey to mystification if we assumed that the routes to completion allIed to the same goal. In fact, meditation - in a comparable way to dreams - opens up a sphere of unobservable
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- are to
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
as
tion, one dependent on secondary reports
modifications after the fact. In addition, it is characteristic of mystical states that their carriers privilege silence as a form of communication.