No More Learning

Whether it is the form of the tonsures, the dress code, the regulations for setting up the sleeping quarters and the behaviour of the older and younger monks in them, the allocation of sleeping times, the holy readings, the gath- erings to prayer, the work in the scriptoria, the arrangement of the storerooms and dining rooms, and so on - all the concrete rules are embedded in the rule of all rules, which states that the monk must not carry out the slightest action out of mere dull habit, but rather be prepared for interruption by orders from his superior at any moment - as if constantly expecting the Saviour to enter the premises. St John Cassian insisted that a scribe called to the door by his superior should not even finish the letter he had begun: he should rather leap up to be fully ready for the new assignment. 44
Monastic life thus differs from ordinary life in three ways: firstly, entering an order implies compliance with the artificial system of carefully written rules that animate the monastic life of whatever observance. In the case of ordinary culture, by contrast, one grows into it without ever being asked if one wishes to accept its rules - indeed, most never reflect on whether there is any regula for the local forms of life at all. Secondly, living behind monastery walls creates a special climate of vigilance and readiness for any given tasks that is not found in any form of life in the non-monastic sphere - 'obedience' and 'piety' are metaphors for total availability. The basic rhythm of
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
in way, the to monastic-communist maxim that work is good, but prayer is better. In monastic culture, after all, the strongest characteristic of profane culture disappears - the division of labour between the sexes, and the concern for the transference of existing forms of life to the little bar-
barians who emerge from the intercourse between the sexes.
Culture Arises from Secession
Wittgenstein's point was clearly a different one. When he notes 'Culture is a monastic rule', the meaning of 'culture' here has shrunk to a finely sieved residue. By no means should every form of life that appears in 'societies' be considered culture, only those comparable to existence under a monastic rule in terms of explicitness, strictness, vigilance and reduction to the essential - and which permit a modus vivendi whose first and last criterion is relief from the consequences of sexuality. It is insignificant here that the monastic rules, in their sacral transparency and elitist unambiguity, are ultimately no less arbitrary than the fixed regulations of any grammar among natural languages. All that matters is the separatist dynamic of life under the rule. Wittgenstein's use of the term 'culture' leaves no doubts: for him, culture in the substantial sense of the word only comes about through the isolation of the truly cultivated from the rest of so-called 'culture', this muddled aggregate of better and worse habits whose sum is barely more than the usual 'swinishness'.
From this perspective it is easier to explain why Wittgenstein is one of the few authors of modernity - perhaps the only one of real distinction in the period between Nietzsche and Foucault, except for Heidegger - whose work displays the transformation of philosophy from a school subject back to an engaging discipline. His example shows what happens when study becomes exercise. The reason for this change can be found in his secessionist understanding of culture. It is easy to show that this was part of Wittgenstein's Austrian legacy, which he never abandoned.
Wittgenstein knew from childhood what a secession is, as the breaking away of the group of artists around Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann from the historicistically inclined con- servative Vienna Kunstlerhaus in 1897 had been one of the main events in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), the philosopher's father, a steel industrialist and music patron, was one
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'CULTURE IS
most - not con- the building on the also personal support for individual artists. The young Wittgenstein was sixteen when Klimt staged his next act of self-removal by leaving the seces- sion, and nineteen at the publication of Adolf Loos's epoch-making essay Ornament and Crime. One can assume that from that moment on at the latest, the concept of culture had merged irreversibly with the secession phenomenon - for the young man and the young Viennese culture scene in equal measure. This included the experi- ence that a secession is not sufficient in order to remain faithful to the impulse to break away from the usual. Only a constant progression in distancing oneself from the misery of conventions can preserve the purity of the modernizing project - hence the never-ending rhythm of secession in the art of the twentieth century, which remains in motion until there is nothing left from which to secede. In fact, Loos was one of the strongest critics of the first aesthetics of secession. He saw it as no more than the replacement of one form of kitsch with another - of
the vulgar ornament with a select one.
As Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have shown, Viennese moder-
nity as a whole was characterized by secessionist motifs in the broad- est sense. For its protagonists, the culture-founding gesture consisted in exiting from the system of conventions in which the aristocratic- bourgeois audience in the imperial capital revelled. Regardless of whether it was architecture, painting, musk or language, the group of modems constituted itself through a secessionist operation in every field - through the separation of the purists from the ornamentalists, the constructivists from the indulgent, the logicians from the journal- ists and the grammarians from the chatterers. What united the new artists was an aversion to every form of excess. In their view, culture and art could only progress through a radical opposition to what Karl Kraus called the 'debasement of practical life by ornament, demon- strated by Adolf Loos'. 45 The equation of ornament and crime pre- sented by Loos in his essay perfectly expresses the new ethos of formal clarity determined by the true use of things - it also reminds us that functionalism was initially a form of moralism, or more precisely an ascetic practice that sought to come closer to the good by dispensing with what could not be justified. It would not be difficult to pinpoint the Loos factor in detail in Wittgenstein's logical habitus, for example when the philosopher notes: 'I assert that use is the form of culture, the form which makes objects. '46 The polemical atmosphere in which the search for the 'form of culture' took place is demonstrated in an aphorism by Karl Kraus:
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
Adolf Loos I, he have done no
[han to show that there is a between an urn and a chamber pot, and that culture only has room to move within this difference. The others, however, the positives, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as an urn. 47
Wittgenstein's late note 'Culture is a monastic rule' still presupposes the aggressive ethic of reduction and the future-postulating tenor of the formal purism characterizing early Viennese modernity. The bizarre overtones accompanying his remark make sense when one grasps the paradox underlying the basic secessionist stance: that a credible ascent within culture can only be achieved through a descent to elementary forms. For these form zealots, the simple stood above the complicated. For the participants in the great exodus from the 'debased' sphere, the calls to return 'to the things', 'to the elemen- tary life forms' or 'to real use' were synonymous. Through these campaigns, the phenomenological as well as the functionalistic, the reductionistic as well as the postivistic, entire worlds of 'ornaments' - or whatever one wishes to call the superfluous elements - fell by the wayside. What would count in future was the study of primary forms, grammars and their constructive principles. The participants in the course of study that enabled and justified 'culture' in the new sense were a group of artist-ascetics living under an explicit rule. For them, ethics, aesthetics and logic pointed in the same direction. The Viennese monastic rule was only decisive for the growth of a new 'culture' because it took an opposing stance to the predominance of debased conditions in every single one of its tenets. The style was neo- Cistercian and depourvu, founded on the trinity of clarity, simplicity and functionality.
Form and Life
I would not have to remind readers of these connections if the figure of secession, independently of its Viennese history, were not to become significant for everything that will be said in the following about the organizational forms of the practising life, in its earlier and earliest manifestations too. The secession gesture as such already expresses the imperative without which there could never have been any monastic 'order', any reform or any revolution: 'You must change your life! ' This presupposes that life has something about it which the individual has - or can acquire - the competence to change. In 1937, Wittgenstein noted: 'The fact that life is problematic shows
138
'CUL TURE IS A MONASTIC
RULE'
your
not once your life
The belief in the possibility of a better 'fit' between form and life is based on a concept of form that can be traced back to the founding phase of philosophy in the work of Socrates and Plato, and to the early period of Brahmanic asceticisms. It expresses the conviction that there is a 'good form' of life, regardless of whether it comes from the Viennese workshops, the Athenian school or the monasteries of Benares - a form whose adoption would necessarily lead to the elimination of disturbances in existence. Finding the good form is a design task that includes a moral-logical exercise. It is only because philosophy itself implies such a task from the outset that it can catch on as a 'school'; the school as such is itself a secession phenomenon - as much in the case of Plato, the founder of the Academy, as among the Viennese moderns. Where there is secession, the reformers have run out of patience with the pre-existing facts. They no longer want to see either the conventional conditions or their reproductions; the hour of a return to the original models has struck. The model does not represent life; it precedes it. One can virtually speak of the birth of philosophy from the spirit of secession to models. It is not quite by chance that Platon's Athenian Academy, founded in 387 BC - and consistently in use until its destruction by Sulla in 86 BC - was located out of the way, almost a mile to the northwest of the city centre, though very appropriately next to a larger sports venue, the gymna- sium, which was soon incorporated into the educational system.
The founding of a school implies a rejection of fate kitsch - be it late Athenian or late Habsburg. It requires the conversion of ques- tions of fate into tasks of discipline. Plato had already rejected tragedy because he sensed a moral 'debasement' in it: instead of watching comfortably and sentimentally as other people perish in their entan- glements, he considered it more commendable to tend to one's own mistakes and, once aware, to correct them to the best of one's ability. One could almost say that the school is based on the invention of the 'mistake' - the mistake is a secularized, revisable misfortune, and a pupil is someone who learns from mistakes and attempts to elimi- nate them. What is conspicuous here is the convergence of the basic Socratic position, as developed by Nietzsche in his early writings, and Wittgenstein's approach to continuous self-clarification. For the latter too, the language analyst, there is nothing tragic, 'and conflict [does] not become something splendid but a mistake'. 49
Let us be open about the point of these reflections: in showing 139
change your
problematic will disappear. '48
So you must into the mould, is
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a secessionist on one's personai mistakes the mistakes of collective sensibility, one removes every possibility of co-opting him for the egalitarian and relativist ideology that accompanies the numerous varieties of Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. In reality, Wittgenstein's 'work' is probably the harshest manifestation of ethical elitism in the twentieth century - perhaps excepting Simone Weil, as the only reform elitist of equal stature. His secessionist-elitist approach extends so deep that the author even wished he could have withdrawn from himself and his various forms of 'swinishness',
had this been possible. Once Wittgenstein's unbending elitism - which, incidentally, is as radical as it is apolitical and ahistorical - is revealed, this not only affects our understanding of his most success- ful theorem, that of 'language games'; it also casts a very different light on Wittgenstein's role as a teacher.
language Games Are Exercises: The Deception of 'Ordinary language'
Now it becomes directly apparent that the 'language games' cited ad nauseam in reality constitute asceticisms, or rather micro-ascetic modules: verbally articulated practical exercises whose performance is usually acquired via imitation - without anyone to tell us whether it is worthwhile or desirable to carry out these games. Evidently the cultures themselves do not enlighten us here - they are condemned to affirmation in these matters. What is less acceptable is that the lan- guage game theory also answers these questions evasively. It thus con- ceals the fact that an imitation of ordinary'swinishnesses' is inherent in most language games, while the most important thing, namely participation in secession, usually remains unspoken or uncompre- hended. In the conventional language game, one practises something that is not actually worth practising. One practises it nolens volens by doing what everyone does without considering whether it is worth doing. A conventional language game is the everyday, not explicitly declared training of the 'swine', and hence of those who do not care whether their form of life stands up to examination.
Only in the rarest of cases is the ability to participate in language games acquired through a voluntary adoption of a clarified seces- sionary form of life. This, as Wittgenstein emphasizes in the second half of his statement, would presuppose an explicit 'monastic rule' - although the word 'explicit' refers to a form knowledge or asceti-
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'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
cism knowledge that was either distilled in the course of long experi- ments with the practising life (as in the era of the regula authors from Pachomius to Isidore of Seville, or in the Brahmanic and Yogic tra- ditions) or had to be newly developed amidst a cultural crisis (as in fin-de-siecle Vienna) through a radicalized design. Then, however, and only then, practising means assimilating the practice-worthy via declared asceticisms. Exercises of this level lead to language games and forms of life for non-swine. As elementary as they might seem, they constitute the perfect impregnation of everyday life through artistry. The perfect depiction of normality thus becomes an acro- batic exercise. For Wittgenstein, the ethical miracle takes place at the
, summit of Mount Improbable: the miracle that forms of life can be clarified through logical analysis and technical reconstruction.
For all his efforts at humility, one cannot help but note a certain hypocrisy in late Wittgenstein, because he usually pretended not to know that his language game theory contained a murky concession to existence in the trivial and 'swinish' dimension, even though he had always striven to keep away from it. For himself, he kept an eye out for clarified monastic rules under which exceptional humans of his cast and secessionists of equal stature would want to live - and would, perhaps, also be able to live according to their standards. These forms are also known as 'language games', but one can tell that the robes are of the finest cloth. When the once-fashionable movement of ordinary language philosophy invoked Wittgenstein as an influence, it fell prey to a deception of which the master himself was far from innocent. He was never interested in the ordinariness of 'ordinary lan- guage'; the art would have been to sense something of the perfection- ism of the Viennese workshops coming through the word 'ordinary'. People forgot to remind the English patients that they should not be too hasty in their eagerness to praise the everyday. It was in the spirit of great reform to say 'ordinary' while meaning 'extraordinary'. One would have had to explain to the interested what the search for the quintessential form of use actually meant, at the risk of spoiling the party for the ordinarists. Anyone who has hung their coat on a hook designed by Adolf Loos has a standard that will remain unforgotten. If one then sees where one's British and American colleagues hang their things, one can never take them seriously again.
The subtle mendacity of language game theory is undoubtedly the secret of its success. It also reveals something that otherwise only 'shows itself' in Wittgenstein's habitus as a 'teacher'. He knows that teaching means demonstrating, but what he is able to demonstrate as a virtuoso - the logical analysis of language - is worlds apart
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
from what he actually wanted to demonstrate: the saint's form of life. What 'shows itself' in Wittgenstein's teaching is that he does not show what he is concerned with - and that he cannot do what he wants, and never stops wanting to do what he cannot. The estab- lished Wittgenstein hagiography has long since admitted that its hero more or less failed miserably in his role as primary school teacher in Austria between 1920 and 1926. But no one dares utter the fact that he failed equally - and even worse, as there were consequences to this failure - as a university lecturer, presumably because, in secret, people exculpate the author psychologically, as well as believing that by becoming a global celebrity, he achieved more than a Homo aca- demicus could dream of anyway. When Wittgenstein wrote in 1946, shortly before leaving the teaching profession, 'I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know',50 he was implicitly admitting to keeping his audience in the dark as to his real preferences. He could have done more to illuminate those parts of the landscape that concerned him, but he preferred to offer noble disorientation - as if his Christian perfectionism were as much of an undisclosable private matter in Cambridge as his homo- sexuality, something that was not appreciated at that time.
What Shows Itself
In my view, the absence of any explicit criticism of Wittgenstein's role as a university lecturer indicates that his students turned a blind eye to their teacher's ambiguity and contented themselves with half the lesson. What one could achieve with half the lesson is demonstrated by the trends that have dominated university philosophy for over fifty years on both sides of the Atlantic. The paradigm of the mental athlete and arrogant epistemologist, bursting with acumen, to which Wittgenstein himself had contributed through his academic persona, became dominant everywhere, while the things that truly mattered to the thinker all but disappeared from the curricula of analytic semi- nars. Wittgenstein must have noticed that on the path of 'it shows itself', something quite different from what he desired was coming to light. The idea of having any direct effect as a role model had long since collapsed when he noted in 1947: 'Most likely I could still achieve an effect in that, above all, a whole lot of garbage is written in response to my stimulus and that perhaps provides the stimulus for something goOd. '51
It would be impossible to find another example in the history of 142
'CULTURE IS RULE'
philosophy own so At the same statement also sums up intellectual catastro- phe of the second half of the twentieth century. The 'garbage' that Wittgenstein knows he will provoke soon or posthumously is no dif- ferent from the 'swinishness' into whose hands he would play with his official later theory, the pseudo-neutral language game principle. Wittgenstein's late ambiguity does not, admittedly, express merely a private complex; it testifies to an objective difficulty that he was unable to overcome. For him, the survivor of the late Habsburg world, the clocks had stopped in November 1918 - and would remain immobile for the rest of his life. Until then, like the other pro- tagonists of Viennese modernity, he had been ahead of his time - part of the ascetic-formalist problem community of those who embarked on the great reform. After the collapse of the Austrian world he lost all connection to the topics of the present, navigating in a space of undated and unaddressed problems - in this perhaps comparable only to Emile Cioran, who, after breaking with the hysterical exag- gerations of his early 'committed' phase, had also moved towards a form of exiled and decontextualized resistance to the conventionali- ties of existence. It would be a worthwhile undertaking to examine Wittgenstein and Cioran alongside each other with reference to their anachronistic exercises - both invented something aptly summarized by the younger in his discarded book title Exercices negatifs. 52 The sum of Wittgenstein's achievements during his British years (1929- 51) is a tragic testimony to the immobilization of the Kakanian refor- matio mundi caused by the war.
Since the amputation of its world, Austria has been a country without reality, and Wittgenstein's re-imported philosophy its great lie. Before 1918, Wittgenstein's defection from late Habsburg Austrianhood to a designer Christianity ala Tolstoy may have sym- bolized part of the inevitability of radical reform sensed by the best; after 1918, however, such an option only formed part of the almost universal failure in formulating the rules for life in a post-dynastic world. Had Wittgenstein already believed then that culture was a monastic rule, the emergency of the time would have led him either to write one or to participate in its production - even if it were only in the inelegant form of a party programme or an educational plan for post-feudal generations. Instead, he fled to the obsolete world of rural Austrian primary schools - a Narodnik who had chosen the wrong century. Later on, his philosophical analyses contributed to popular- izing the Austrian modus of flight from reality by way of England. The lie of language games began its triumphal march through the
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
W estern
of the deception. It was as if American stores
to stock only products of aristocratic formalism ala Loos - ignoring the fact that hardware stores inevitably restrict themselves to a stand- ard inventory. Through the manner in which he stood still in 1918, Wittgenstein was one of the ideological contributors to the intellec- tual standstill in the Anglophone world after 1945: on the outside a seeming equality of all forms of life, analytic fitness and a liberal 'anything goes' mentality, but on the inside a homesick longing for the green valleys of silliness and feelings of hierarchy belonging to an elite from times past.
Declared Exercises
I do not want these diagnoses to be misunderstood as destruc- tive criticism; on the contrary, correcting the distortions caused by Wittgenstein is no insoluble task. A reminder of the secessionist dynamic of searching for the good form is sufficient to understand that the language game theory is really a training theory based on the - itself undeclared - difference between declared and undeclared asceticisms. The individual language games are micro-ascetic modules normally carried out by the players without knowing, let alone reflecting upon what they are doing. If they act as they have been taught, they are possessed by the grammar, as it were, even if it is only a mild possession by habits of sentence structure. Nonetheless, possession by an unconsciously or semi-consciously followed rule cannot be the right way for humans to act in relation to the right and the true. True as it might be that the meaning of a word is determined by its real usage, the decisive factor is the refinement of that usage. Did Adolf Loos not study the independent life of everyday things in minute detail, then replacing the most trivial objects with utensils of the most ingenious simplification and the greatest material purity? And Wittgenstein himself - did he not, in the house in Vienna that he designed for his sister, even abandon the seemingly definitive shapes of door-handles and supplant them with his own, handles whose shape indicated whether the door opened inwards or outwards?
The conclusions to be drawn from these analogies are far-reaching: many undeclared exercises can and should, in fact, be concerted into declared ones and clarified in the process. The asymmetry between the undeclared and the declared exercise is itself one of the first ethical facts. This difference justifies Wittgenstein's assertion - directed
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RULE'
against
the of
perspicuity are valuable in themselves. '53 This supposed end in itself is, in truth, the medium in which the conversion of possessed rule- applications to free exercises takes place.
For the primal ethical imperative 'You must change your life! ' to be followed, therefore, it is initially necessary for the practising to become aware of their exercises as exercises, that is to say as forms of life that engage the practising person. The reason for this is self- evident: if the players are themselves inescapably affected by what they play and how they play it (and how it has been drilled into them to play it), they will only have access to the bridge of their self-change by recognizing the games in which they are entangled for what they are. Consequently, the language game theory is not an expression of 'therapeutic positivism', as the American philosopher Brian Farell claimed in 1946 with the insensitivity of the hardware store customer - one can understand why Wittgenstein was extremely displeased by this. It is the working form of transformative ascetism, and hence aes- thetic secessionism in action. It is carried out with the aim of choosing between the muddle of life forms dictated, absorbed under situative compulsion and inevitably close to 'swinishness' to find those that can be taken up into the clarified 'monastic rule'. Every thing is a 'language game', living crystal and swinishness alike - what matters is the nuance.
Whereof One Should Not Be Silent
This takes care of the chatter, rampant among Wittgensteinians, of the silence that must allegedly be maintained about everything that truly matters in life. One does not keep silent when it is a matter of preferences. Here too, looking for the source of the confusion leads us to Wittgenstein himself. On this sensitive point he fell for his own ideology by amalgamating the Jesuan and monastic habitus of silence, which had already been attractive for him early on, with his logically weak denial of the possibility of metalanguage - had his entire output not been one great breaking of the rule of silence, a speaking, scat- tered over the decades, about the what and the why of speaking?
All that remains of the talk about silence is as much as is required to show a practising person that the main thing is to carry out the exercise, not to reason over it. One can only carry out a throw of the
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clarity 'For me on the contrary clarity,
THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
no amount of
righr way to throw them can replace throw and the
biographies of throwers nor the bibliography of throwing literature will lead a single step further. This by no means changes the fact that 'discology' could become a discipline carried out in keeping with the standards of the art, assuming it existed. Its performance would consist in carrying out the language games belonging to this -ology lege artis - why not in a special department for throwing research and human projectile studies? Whether it would be better to be a discus-thrower or a discologist is another matter. It forces one to choose between two disciplines, each of which requires its own form of expertise - or it results in a combination of subjects and leads to the emergence of the athleta doctus.
Taken on its own, Wittgenstein's silence-posturing has no deeper meaning than Erich Kistner's verse 'Nothing good happens unless you do it. ' One could, if one liked, also associate it with the Regula Benedicti, which states in the section 'What Kind of Man the Abbot Ought to Be'; 'Therefore, when anyone receives the name of Abbot, he ought to govern his disciples with a twofold teaching. That is to say, he should show them all that is good and holy by his deeds even more than by his words. '54 Wittgenstein's habitus becomes 'religiously' charged because the primal scene of 'silently embodying the truth', like Jesus standing before Pilate, shines through him. The philosopher's behaviour perhaps becomes easier to understand if one imagines him standing constantly before Pilate. This provides a picto- rial commentary on the statement 'But Wittgenstein was silent. ' In reality, he was not silent; on the contrary, he gave lectures through a behaviour befitting a man who is convinced that the world is the ideal place to show something. But he was never entirely sure about the content of what had to be shown; he was neither able to take the step of adopting a formal teaching and training role nor that of choosing a manifest guru or messiah role. He remained indecisive in the most important question, partly for mental reasons and partly because, within his doctrine of silent showing, he did not separate two tasks: providing examples as a technical master and setting an example as a life teacher.
The Ascetological Twilight and the Gay Science
Wittgenstein's inability to explicate the difference between asceti- cism and aesthetics - and the resulting confusion between the
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'CUL TURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
an exercIse a - may caused a
in the camp of analytic opportunism, but it is not in itself an incur- able ailment. To put it in the terms of the attempt developed here, Wittgenstein's work, like that of all the authors treated so far, belongs to the movement that began in the late nineteenth century and which I call the ascetological twilight. We must draw the necessary conclu- sions from it - and I repeat my claim that they will culminate in a general anthropotechnics. What the author left behind is a wealth of coherently incoherent studies on the clarification of the purpose of a practising behaviour. Strangely enough, his active vocabulary shows a gap in the decisive place - at least, I do not know of any passage in his writings where the word 'practise' is used in more than a passing fashion. Nor do I find any indication that Wittgenstein was aware of the etymological equivalence of askesis and 'exercise'. One can, there- fore, perhaps say that Wittgenstein's 'work' was arranged around a blind spot, the missing central concept of askesis. His explicit sense of the grammatical cannot be separated from his implicit understanding of the ascetic.
Wittgenstein's investigations into the diversity of language games should therefore be read as contributions to General Ascetology - as collected references to the ubiquity of the practical-practising motif in all fields of human behaviour. Micro-asceticism is always current. It remains involved in all that humans do - indeed, it even extends to the pre-personal zone, into the idiolects of all body parts, each of which has its own history. There is no escape from the games and language games because the law of practice misses nothing, whether it happens deliberately or in ego-remote and non-intentional chains of repetitions. That everyday life and practice are identical is one of the strongest intuitions of language game thinking. It needs to be made clear, however - against the mainstream of evened-out language game chatter - that not all everyday things are acceptable per se, and that not every repetition of a well-worn language game helps the practis- ing person to progress, or is even of use to them at all. What is more, it is untrue that philosophy is a sickness of language that can be cured by regressing to everyday usage. If anything, listening closely to ordi- nary language teaches us the opposite: it is often far sicker than the philosophy it claims to cure.
In my view, everything Wittgenstein put down on paper as a lan- guage ethicist and logical reformer only makes sense if understood as the most serious resumption at that time of Nietzsche's programme of the Gay Science. This science is gay to the extent that it advances
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
~ ro tendency fundamentalist moroseness that is usually con- nected to reformist polemidsm. I shall therefore take the liberty of regarding Wittgenstein as an occult Nietzschean - not only on the tac- tical or formal level (for, like the author of Human, All Too Human, he recorded the best part of his insights in small attacks) but also strategically, in that he, like Nietzsche, gave philosophy a guerrilla form and developed an existentially binding transformative analysis with the aim of bringing about a clarifying change in the form of life,
and thus changing life itself from the ground up.
Foucault: A Wittgensteinian
If Wittgenstein was an occult and involuntary Nietzschean, Michel Foucault emerged from the outset as his manifest and voluntary counterpart. Nonetheless, one can say that Foucault started from where Wittgenstein left off: showing that entire branches of science or epistemic disciplines are nothing other than complexly structured language games, also known as discourses or discursive practices. Just as Wittgenstein had broken with the cognitivist prejudice in language theory to show how much speaking is an act rather than knowledge, Foucault broke with the epistemist prejudice in the theory of science in order to explain how much the disciplines he examined are per- formative systems rather than 'reflections' of reality. His choice in the book The Order of Things to refer to the group of disciplines whose performativity of scientific knowledge or of knowledge effects he demonstrates as the 'episteme', of all things, is a case of exquisite irony - comparable in this only to the psychoanalytical use of the word 'rationalization' to describe the 'logical' explanations of neu- rotics dictated by wishful thinking. Analogously, the disciplines of the 'episteme' constitute the discursive pseudo-explanations of those who dominate theory, be they psychiatrists, doctors, biologists, economists, prison directors or jurists by profession. Owing ro their performative status, the 'discourses' at any time in the history of practical power are an amalgam of knowledge effects and executive competencies.
One could therefore describe Foucault's work as it developed between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s as a Wittgensteinianism intensified via Heidegger - and hoisted up further with surrealisms - that grew, curiously enough, without any closer knowledge of German or British sources, just as French culture after 1945 in
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'CUL TURE ,'v10NASTlC RULE'
nHprp·rl no
tion. Naturally, attempts
of Parisian structuralism - aside from certain parallels in the stance against the dictates of 'hyper-Marxism'. 55
Tragic Verticality
His work, however, is too varied and too flamboyant to be summed up from a single perspective. I shall focus on two aspects with an obvious connection to our inquiries: firstly, Foucault's laconic and prescient early contributions to a redefinition of the vertical dimen- sion in human existence, and secondly, his richly varied late studies on the autoplastic or self-sculptural life techniques of antiquity. I would consider the first relevant document to be Foucault's lengthy introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's book Dream and Existence (1954), in which he addresses the 'tragic verticality' of existence; the other sources are from the group of studies he pursued during his hiatus from writing between 1976 and 1984, which organize the posthumously edited body of work around such figures as 'self- concern', 'self-culture' and 'struggle with oneself'.
The 'acrobatic' dimension - as a stance taken by existence upon the appearance of its inherent vertical tension - is unmistakably visible at both poles. I shall pass over Foucault's reflections on the horizon- tal phenomenon, the oft-cited historical formations of 'discourses', as they are not productive for our line of questioning, and because they exhibit the same seductive ambiguity as Wittgenstein's language game theorem; they have the effect of traps into which intellectuals like to walk in order to confirm their critical reflexes - when Foucault himself especially emphasized that he had never met an 'intellectual' in his life, only people who write novels, people who work with the sick, people who teach, people who paint and people 'of whom I have never really understood what they do '" But intellectuals? Never. '56
One thing that has scarcely ever been noted among the turbulences of Foucault's reception after the breakthrough of The Order of Things in 1966 is that the author's emergence twelve years earlier had begun with a grand anti-psychoanalytical gesture: with amazing self- confidence, he pushed aside the mechanics of deformation described in Freud's dream analysis, the 'dream work' [Traumarbeit], defin- ing the dream as the decisive manifestation of the tragic truth about human beings:
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If the dream is the bearer of the deepest human meanings, this is not insofar as it betrays their hidden mechanisms or shows their inhuman cogs and wheels, but on the contrary, insofar as it brings to light the freedom of man in its most original form. 57
While sleep denies death by simulating it, dreams - especially the dream of death - speak the truth. It thus achieves a form of 'self- fulfilment' by causing the 'emergence of what is most individual in the individual'. 58 'But in every case death is the absolute meaning of the dream'. 59
If this is true, the structure of existence can only be elucidated through the analysis of dreams. It is in dreams that humans enter the true Dionysian theatre - but not to become a new Oedipus. When we dream, we move within a directed spatiality more originary than geometry and the clear disposition of things in bright spaces. The character of the vertical axis in the existential spatiality of dreams is completely different from those in mathematics or architecture. It provides enthusiasm with the direction of its ascent - up until the calm at the summit, close to the divine.
At the same time,
The vertical axis can also be the vector of an existence that has lost its place on earth and, like Solness the Builder, is going to resume, up above, its dialogue with God. Then it indicates flight into excess, and from the start is marked by the vertigo of a fall. 60
Binswanger had already asserted the anthropological priority of the vertical dimension because for him, the essential temporality of existence revealed itself in the dramas of ascent and fall. Foucault adopts Heidegger's definition of 'transcending' on the vertical axis as 'breaking away from the foundations of existence'; the complemen- tary movement reveals itself as a tragic 'transdescendence', the fall from a pinnacle whose only purpose seems to be that of supplying the extravagant with the necessary altitude for fatal plunges.
It would take some twenty-five years for the paths of Foucault's thought to return to the place he had touched on in his Binswanger commentary. From that point on, he knew that work on verticality is not simply a matter of the originary imagination discussed in the early reflections. Now it meant a power of self-shaping in which the ethical competence of the individual is concentrated. Just as the young Foucault - who survived two suicide attempts in his early twenties - interprets suicide as the regained original gesture 'in which I make myself world',61 the older Foucault discovers practising self-shaping as the movement arising from one's ownmost possibility of existence: beyond oneself with oneself.
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it
as a man of the vertical, without arousing any suspicions that he secretly wanted to return to the well-trodden paths of a run-of-the- mill transcendence in the Christian-Platonic style. 62 In the same act, he clarified his relationship with Nietzsche by correcting the tempta- tion to excess emanating from the latter's work through Nietzsche's own late asceticism - or, more precisely, through its pre-Christian patterns, of which Nietzsche had dreamed when he declared his aim to 'make asceticism natural again'. Foucault had understood that the Dionysian fails if one does not implant a Stoic inside him. The latter admits entertaining the misconception that getting beside oneself already means going beyond oneself. The 'beyond' in the practising going-beyond-oneself63 is now only seemingly the same as the one discussed upon the early discovery of tragic or karian verticality. 64 It is, in truth, the 'beyond' of superior maturity, acquired on the rungs of the practice ladder. 65
The transgressive kitsch that Foucault had picked up from Bataille many years beforehand, and to which his mimetic talent enabled him to contribute a few precarious specimens of his own, stepped into the background. In retrospect it would prove no more than an episode on the way to a more general understanding of the self-forming consti- tutions of practising life. Needless to say, the last connections to the ressentiment-driven leftist milieu in France were now also severed. Foucault had distanced himself from its fabrications long ago, and when he stated in a 1978 interview that 'nothing is more foreign to me than the idea of a "Master" who imposes his own law. I accept neither the notion of domination nor the universality of the law',66 he voiced a conviction that had estranged him from the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist wings of the French intellectual scene for over two decades - to retain only a few connections to anarcho-liberal and left-Dionysian tendencies.
More importantly, he had now also liberated himself from the paranoid leftovers of his own studies in power. It was only the atti- tude of methodical calmness, acquired late on, that enabled him to formulate a concept of regimen, disciplines and power games devoid of all compulsively anti-authoritarian reflexes. When he states sen- tentiously in the same interview, recalling his beginnings in abstract revolt, 'One not only wanted a different world and a different society, one also wanted to go deeper, to transform oneself and to revolution- ize relationships to be completely "other''',67 he is already speak- ing as someone genuinely changed who, light years away from his
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longing complete this turn phrase is beyond , even beyond
In his way, Foucault repeated the discovery that one cannot subvert the 'existing' - only supervert it. He had stepped out into the open and become ready to perceive something strictly invisible for an intel- ligence conditioned in French schematicisms: the fact that human claims to freedom and self-determination are not suppressed by the disciplines, regimes and power games, but rather enabled. Power is not an obstructive supplement to an originally free ability; it is consti- tutive for ability in all its manifestations. It always forms the ground floor above which a free subject moves in. Hence one can describe liberalism as a system of disciplinary checks and balances without glorifying it in the slightest - but without denouncing it either. With the calm severity of a civilization trainer, Foucault states: 'Individuals could certainly not be "liberated" without educating them in a certain way. '68
Language Games, Discourse Games, General Disciplinics
This cleared the way for a General Disciplinics. Foucault had gone a certain distance along this path by newly covering the universe of ancient philosophical asceticisms in a series of meticulous rereadings of mostly Stoic authors - unimpeded by the ubiquitous barriers of critical kitsch, which sees domination in every form of 'self-control', and immediately suspects any discipline in one's way of life of being a self-repression that doubles an external repression. We recall, to name one of the best-known examples, the discrepancies read into the Sirens chapter of the Odyssey by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, where the Greek seafarer becomes a bourgeois with suppressed drives who instantly advances to the pro- totype of the European 'subject'. One thinks back with trepidation to the times in which a younger generation of intellectuals viewed such gaucheries as the non plus ultra of critical thought.
The attraction of Foucault's late writing lies in the undisguised expression of wonder at the regions into which his study of ancient authors led him. He claims the status of a 'philosophical exercise' for his expedition into the history of asceticisms or 'self-techniques':
There is irony in those efforts one makes to alter one's way of looking at things. [. . . JDid mine actually result in a different way of thinking? Perhaps at most they made it possible to go back through what I was
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already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. Sure of having travelled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above. 69
The proximity between Wittgenstein's clarification of form and Foucault's philosophical exercise is remarkable. The analogies between the 'language games' and 'truth games' are also unmistak- able. The essential differences between the two thinkers of the prac- tising life, on the other hand, become clear when one compares their interpretations of the stay at the summit of Mount Improbable. While Wittgenstein finds it amazing enough if forms of life can be clarified to the point where existence on a plateau is identical to a stay at a Tibetan mountain monastery, Foucault hurls himself into the role of the mining engineer who, through deep drilling at different points, reveals the height of the mountains and the number of concealed folds within them. For him, the mountain of improbability is an archive, and the most plausible way to inhabit it is by penetrating the old corridors in order to study the physics of the archive. His intuition, admittedly, tells him that the mountain culminates in each individual that inhabits it, which is why the ethics of these studies seeks to make it clear that what looks like a rock mass is in truth an accumulation of respectively singular culminations - even if these do not, for the most part, sense themselves as such. Here the imperative 'You must change your life! ' means: 'You yourself are the mountain of improbability, and as you fold yourself, thus will you tower up. '
The objective parallels between Wittgenstein and Foucault are impressive, even if we leave aside the psychodynamic aspect of the bioi paralleloi of two precocious homosexuals who, after a phase of advanced self-destruction attempts, managed to arrive at a form of self-therapy. To my knowledge, Wittgenstein's note from 1948 - 'I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything important. The industry of the great is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth'70 - has not yet been examined in the light of Foucault's studies on confessional practices. One could easily imagine those lines being written after an encounter between Wittgenstein and Foucault - though Wittgenstein would have felt more disgust than admiration for Foucault's work up to 1975, as he would have found his early and middle style unbearable. But he would probably have read the posthumous writings as the marvels of mannerism-free clarity that they are.
It is in the effective histories of the two thinkers, however, that their kinship is strongest. For both, it was the point of highest imitability
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success, in cases it
the most suggestive misunderstandability. We have seen how Wittgenstein's language game theory turned into the misdirec- tion of 'ordinary language'; in Foucault's case, it is easy to understand why his discourse theory seemed an easy target for critical conform- ism. People took all those analyses of asylums, clinics, police insti- tutions and prisons for a slightly outlandish form of social critique and lavished praise on its lyrically drugged fastidiousness. None of his readers understood that they were always also ascetic exercises in self-shaping in place of a third suicide attempt, and possibly even the author himself was not always aware of it. His insistence on the anonymity of authorship aimed in the same direction: if no one is there, no one can kill themselves. The bafflement was therefore great when the older Foucault sidestepped with the irony of one who had detached himself, shaking off his critical and subversive followers. Whoever still wanted to remain on his trail after that comforted themselves with the oft-repeated assurance that philosophy is not a discipline, but an activity that 'crosses' disciplines. Thus he offered anarcho-criticistic kitsch - or, to tell the truth, the laziness that likes
to think of itself as a subversive power - a final refuge.
Philosophical Multisport: The Subject as Carrier of Its Exercise Sequences
In reality, he had completed the breakthrough to a conception of philosophy as exercise and trained off the last remnants of excess surrealistic weight. He had realized that aestheticism, activistic Romanticism, constant irony, talk of transgression and subversion- ism are but dreamy and sluggish pursuits that conceal with difficulty a lack of form. He had long since understood: whoever speaks of sub- version and effuses about becoming belongs in the beginners' class. Foucault had turned himself into something of which Nietzsche had provided a first notion in his last 'physiological' notes: the carrier of an intelligence that had become pure muscle, pure initiative. Hence the complete absence of mannerisms in his late style. The replacement of extravagance with manneredness - the secret of his middle period that can be unlocked through Binswanger - had become superfluous.
According to Foucault, philosophy can once more imagine becom- ing what it was before the cognitivist misconception threw it off course: an exercise of existence. As the ethos of the lucid life, it is pure discipline and pure multisport - in its own way, it entails the res-
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LE'
ancient
group of agones. analogy between forms
to a
sport and of
discourse and knowledge should be taken as literally as possible. The philosophical intelligence practises the discipline that it is primarily in the individual disciplines in which it immerses itself; if need be, even in 'philosophy'. A word of warning about 'crossing': in 99 per cent of cases, it falls prey to beginners' mistakes. There is no meta-discipline, of course - and hence no introduction to philosophy that is not itself the decisive exercise from the outset.
It seems to me that one can only do justice to Foucault by taking his impulse together with that of Pierre de Coubertin. The comple- tion of the renaissance through the return of the athlete around 1900 encompasses the return of the wise man: in the panathlon of intelli- gence, he makes his own contribution to clarifying the form in which that renaissance continues today. Whatever the answer, the term can no longer be reduced to its art-historical and educated middle- class meanings. It indicates an indefinitely far-reaching unleashing of ability and knowledge forms beyond the Old European guild- and estate-based societies. By producing new configurations between con- templation and fitness, the current 'renaissance' enables new festivals on the plateau of the mountain of improbabilities. Anyone who has ever taken part in such a festival knows that neither a 'knowledge society' nor an 'information society' exists, as much as the new mys- tifiers might speak of them. What has constantly been arising since the renaissance is a multi-disciplinary and multi-virtuosic world with expanding limits of ability.
View of an Immense landscape
Once free from the phantom of a 'philosophical activity' beyond discipline and disciplines, one can experience in Foucault's world the moment in which the whole scene is in open view. It can best be described with Wittgenstein's reference to showing his pupils an 'immense landscape which they cannot possibly know',71 It is the inconceivably wide landscape of disciplines; its sum forms the basis for the routines of all cultures and all trainable competencies. Here we have, both de facto and de jure, the 'broadest and longest fact that exists'. The path followed in exemplary fashion by Foucault leads, if pursued far enough, to a General Disciplinics as an encyclopaedia of ability games.
The discourse formations and knowledge games examined by 155
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a narrow one paradigmatic energy. The consequences of suggestions will only be appreciated if there is one day a fully worked-out form of General Disciplinics - which would probably take a century to develop. Its implantation would require a suitably contemporary transformation of universities and colleges, both in the structuring of the so-called 'subjects' or 'courses' and in the basic assumptions of academic pedagogy - which, against its better judgement, still clings to the briefcase-and-box theory, where teaching and learning is nothing but transferring knowledge from the professor's briefcase to the students' file boxes, even though it has long been known that learning can only take place through a direct participation in the disciplines. Establishing an academic system with discipline-based content and methods would at once be the only realistic way to coun- teract the atrophy of the educational system, founded on a reformed
idea of the subjects and tasks of a Great House of Knowledge.
In the course of such a rearrangement, the effective geology of the man-made Mount Improbable would come to light. This universitas of disciplines embodies the real cultural science after the dissolution of cultural phantoms into the wealth of competency systems and trainable ability units. The over-discussed question of the subject is reduced to this compact formulation: a subject is someone who is active as the carrier of a sequence of exercises - which, furthermore, means that intermittently popular thought figures such as excess, decentring and the death of the subject are at best parasitic supple- mentary exercises to the qualifying ones; they can be assigned to the
category of advanced mistakes.
In this context, I can only hint very cautiously at what elements might come together in General Disciplinics. This would certainly no longer be a mere theory of discourses, or groups of statements including cor- responding asceticisms and executives. It would integrally encompass the spectrum of ability systems composed of knowledge and practical acts. This spectrum extends from (1) acrobatics and aesthetics, includ- ing the system of art forms and genres - NB: in the post-university House of Knowledge, the studium generale consists of artistry, not philosophy - via (2) athletics (the general study of sporting forms) to (3) rhetoric or sophistry, then (4) therapeutics in all its specialized branches, (5) epistemics (including philosophy), (6) a general study of professions (including the 'applied arts', which are assigned to the field of arts et metiers) and (7) the study of machinistic technologies. It also includes (8) administrativics, which constitutes both the static
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IS MONASTIC
or the
legal as as the encyclopaedia of meditation systems in their dual role as self-techniques and not-self-techniques (the dis- tinction between declared and undeclared meditations comes into play here), (10) ritualistics (as humans, according to Wittgenstein, are ceremonial animals and the ceremonies form trainable behav- ioural modules whose carriers appear as 'peoples' - which is why the linguistic sciences, like the theory of games and 'religions', form a sub-discipline of ritualistics), (11) the study of sexual practices, (12) gastronomics and finally (13) the open list of cultivatable activities, whose openness means the interminability of the discipline-forming and thus subjectification-enabling field itself. One can see from this list that Foucault's interventions touch on fields 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 11. Ordinary philosophers restrict themselves to field 5, with occasional excursions to 8 or 1 and 3, which tells us enough about
Foucault's panathletic qualities.
By way of precaution, I would point out that this first view of the
thirteen-headed monster of disciplinics lacks the phenomena of war and 'religion', which are imposing ones for the everyday conscious- ness. There is a sound methodological reason for this: war is not a discipline of its own but an armed sophistry (a continuation of the art of being right by other means) that incorporates elements of athletics, ritualistics and machine technology. Nor is 'religion' a clearly demar- cated discipline, but rather - as already hinted - an amalgam of rheto- ric, ritualistics and administrativics, with the occasional addition of acrobatics and meditation.
Between Disciplines
Finally, I would like to point out how the question of the 'critical' dimension is inherent in each of the fields and oversteps each one of them: in every single area there is a constant practical crisis that leads to a separation of the right and the wrong in the execution of the discipline - often with immanently controversial results. Hence each individual discipline possesses a vertical tension that is unique to it and only comprehensible from within it. The status of an achiever in a given field does not tell us anything about their ranking in other areas. From a moral-philosophical perspective, it is decisive that the internal differences within a field form the dimension subject to Nietzsche's distinction between good and bad - which also means that there can be bad things within a discipline, but not evil ones.
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is a constant
disciplines individuals are remote
these value or frown upon the results of exercises in foreign spheres according to their own standards. Outside observers can find what athletes do unimportant and what jewellers do superfluous without having to worry about whether the athletes or jewellers are the best in their field. External observers are even free to say that it would be better if this or that discipline, or even an entire complex of dis- ciplines, did not exist - indeed, that the existence of some disciplines as such is a reprehensible aberration. Thus early Christians were convinced that gladiatorial fights were evil, even if the fighters were masters of their field, and the whole system of bread and circuses was nothing but a loathsome perversion. These negative assessments prevailed in the long term - which, to my knowledge, no one regrets. The decisive factor in their success was the fact that they precisely introduced alternative disciplines and surrounded these with positive evaluations. Some people today, by contrast, are of the opinion that parliamentary democracy, orthodox medicine or large cities should be abolished, as nothing good can come of them. These critics will not prevail because they do not show what should be done instead. The operative distinction here is between good and eviL What is evil should not be; one cannot improve it, only eliminate it. Just as the first distinction works with a withdrawal of value, the second works with a withdrawal of being.
Clearly only the first distinction is significant for the disciplinicist. For them, the wealth of disciplines itself is Mount Improbable, and one does not criticize mountains - one climbs them or stays at home. Nietzsche was probably the first to understand what conventional moralism is: the criticism of mountains by non-climbers. One can indeed resolve to turn one's back on the 'world' as the epitome of unaffirmable exercises and practise something other than life 'in the world' to the point of perfection - this is precisely what the escapists of late antiquity had in mind. There is, however, a notable difference between early Christians and modern radicals in this respect. The Christian bishops wrote monastic rules for life on other mountains, rules under which people could live for 1,500 years - in some cases to this day. The latter faction, by contrast, reacts to whatever is the case
by standing around and finding it unfair. To them, all mountains are evil.
Foucault had grasped that 'subversion', 'stupidity' and 'unfitness' are three words for the same thing. When two journalists from Les
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m 'Does your return to in a weakening of ground on which we
and live? What did you want to destroy? ', his laconic response to the subversion parrots was: '1 did not want to destroy anything! '72 Together with his declaration of 1980 - 'From this point of view all of my investigations rest on a postulate of absolute optimism. [. . •J I say certain things only to the extent to which I see them as capable of permitting the transformation of reality'73 - this rejection of a two-hundred-year folklore of destruction constitutes Foucault's philosophical testament. His response in 1984 was almost literally his last word; a few days after the interview, conducted in late May, he collapsed in his apartment and died three weeks later, on 25 June, at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, whose former functions he had described in his book The History of Madness.
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
On the Demons of Habit and Their Taming Through First Theory
The Cure for Extravagance: Discourse Analysis
Ludwig Binswanger was probably the only psychiatrist who Foucault knew understood, not to say predicted him - in the sense that he found in Binswanger's writings the most important elements for a language of endangered life, both in general and in his own particular case. In those writings he became acquainted with the tragic interpre- tation of verticality, in which the 'extravagance' of existence means being stuck too high up on the existential ladder. It was also clearly from Binswanger that he adopted the reference to Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder (premiered in 1892) - it portrays a manic archi- tect who 'builds higher than he can climb' and ultimately falls to his death from the unliveable height of his tower. 74 Most of all, Foucault owed to Binswanger his early insights into the basic problem of his own existence, which the Heidegger-inspired psychiatrist had summa- rized in space-analytical terms: as a disproportion between width and height - or discourse and flight. This imbalance can, as Binswanger explained in his 1949 essay 'Extravagance', manifest itself either as a manic volatility and rapid digression through ideas in the vols imagi- naires750r as a schizoid scaling of heights that do not stand in any productive relation to the narrowness of the experiential horizon/6 in this sense, extravagance is the disease of the talented youth. The therapy consists of a form of mountain rescue intervention: the aim is to bring the lost climber back to the valley and explain the terrain to them until they feel able to respect the circumstances on their next climb. Understanding those circumstances involves knowing the rela- tion between the difficulty of the slope and the training level of the peak conqueror.
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The First Ethical Distinction in Heraclitus
The earliest reference in the Old European space to a mode of thought that formulates an ethics of the kind touched on above can be found in a collection of fragments attributed to the Ionian proto-philosopher Heraclitus, who lived at the turn from the sixth to the fifth century Be. I am thinking in particular of the equally well-known and enig- matic Fragment 119 quoted by Stobaeus: ethos anthr6po daimon, conventionally translated as 'Man's character is his fate. ' Heidegger famously expressed his dissatisfaction with this trivial translation in the 'Letter on Humanism' addressed to Jean Beaufret in 1946. He accuses it of being thought in modern, not Greek terms - an objec- tion that still applies to the slightly modified, Swabian-tinged version 'Man's particularity is his demon. ' In order to shift things into place, Heidegger feels it necessary to bring out the heavy fundamental- ontological artillery: he treats the seemingly unassuming terms ethos
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man
possible interest rate, now, over two thousand
years grown into an enormous fortune. In his view, only fun- damental ontology is entitled to make withdrawals from this ancient meaning account, for it alone is capable of thinking pre-Socratically and post-metaphysically at once. I will now show how, as exagger- ated as his suggestion may be, he was not entirely wrong.
Heidegger's Cunning
In order to gain access to the treasure of meaning, Heidegger uses a hermeneutical trick: he brings the ethos daimon statement together with the anecdote, related by Aristotle, in which Heraclitus, the philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor, is visited by a group of hesitant strangers who find him warming himself by the oven and bids them enter with the words 'Here too the gods are present. ' The contextualizing strategy is as simple as it is effective. Just as the oven anecdote is meant to remind us that even in the ordinary, the unusual shines through, that the divine is present even in the most unassum- ing, the fragment to be interpreted seeks to express that the unknown is present in the known and the supra-real in the everyday. Hence the saying, if one translates ethos with 'stay' or 'abode' (which is prob- lematic) and daimon with 'God' (which is probably a little too lofty), would mean: 'Man dwells, in so far as he is man, in the nearness of God. '78
Although I consider this first translation by Heidegger unsuc- cessful, both philologically and philosophically, it has a stimulating element. For living in the nearness of God means discovering a form of vertical neighbourhood in which it is even more important to find a modus vivendi with the resident of the apartment above than with one's next-door neighbour. One can work with this point, even if the rest is unconvincing. But that is not the end of it: Heidegger then makes a second translation suggestion, in which he turns the prob- lematic into the grotesque by augmenting the motif of neighbourhood with that of uncanniness. Now the three little words ethos anthropo daimon supposedly mean: 'The (familiar) abode is for man the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one). '79 If that were truly the meaning of this statement, it would make Heraclitus the most profound commentator on Heidegger's work ever to come from ancient Greece.
Nonetheless, Heidegger did understand one aspect of Heraclitus' 162
SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
sense, and
ciously as 'behaviour' or 'habit', is placed in a state of 'upward'
tension through its combination with the word daimon. Here, instead of thinking of 'the god', it is sufficient to imagine some higher spirit force that could tend equally towards good or evi1. 80 Nor does this power simply border externally on the human ethos complex, for it is capable of overpowering it from within and sucking it up.
What the Dalman Brings About: The Ethical Distinction
If one leaves aside the curious aspects of Heidegger's consideration of Heraclitus, something remains that is more than a mere projec- tion: every complex of human behaviour contains a certain tension between height and depth. It consists, if the image is permissible, in an ontological two-storey structure that is explicitly noted from now on - in so far as one can equate noting with describing. It entails that the lower, the habitual foundation, and the upper, the demonic, are capable of absorbing each other - in both directions, one should note. Firstly, if a bad ethos pulls man cacodaemonically downwards until he keeps the swine company, as Heraclitus tirelessly asserts in a series of drastic animal comparisons - the language game 'man equals swine' evidently runs through from Heraclitus' Ephesus to Wittgenstein's Vienna - or secondly, if a good ethos lifts him up agathodaemonically, so that he approaches the sphere of the divine (theion). This corresponds to the saying of Heraclitus quoted by Celsus (Fragment 78), which states that ordinary human behaviour (ethos anthropeion) has no valid insights (gnomas), whereas that of the gods (theion) does.
No talk, then, of the familiar human 'abode' transcending towards the 'unfamiliar' of its own accord. Heraclitus' opinion is more along these lines: as long as man remains in his average ethos, he has nothing that connects him to the realm above. If it were true that Fragment 119 implicitly adopts any stance concerning the 'place' or 'abode' of humans, it would be this: where we are, the animal confinement of the many to their habits collides with the openness of the few to the logos. This is completely in keeping with the tendency of numerous other statements attributed to Heraclitus, which leave no doubt as to how he, whom tradition portrays as a melancholic and eo ipso a man of distance, judged the forms of life among the masses. That this 'misanthropic' thinker should have stated that 'man' as such in his
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open to as is quite simply unthinkable.
Nonetheless, Heidegger was right to note a fundamental problem- aties of verticality in Heraclitus' use of the word ethos. This does not concern the alleged transcendence of 'man' towards the divine, regard- less of whether one calls it the super-ego, the super-tu or the super-id. Heraclitus was an ethicist, not an anthropologist. The first ethics deals with a difference among humans that first becomes explicit through thought - or perhaps one should call it becoming aware of the logos dimension. Heraclitus' misanthropy is the fanfare that opens the expli- cation. It shows how the difference within each human manifests itself as a difference between humans. If Heraclitus places the many and the few in stark opposition to each other, it is not because his thought is elitist, but rather because he is among the first of those who became specifically aware of the thought that has always been acting unno- ticed within us - and who thus actualized the difference between the thinking, or more precisely those attentive to the logos, and the others, the inattentive ones, in the first place. He could not have done this if he had not first established within himself the predominance of thought over non-thought - or rather of having good sense (sophronein), which Fragment 112 thus terms the greatest virtue (arete megiste).
It is precisely from this gesture, the subordination of non-good sense to good sense, that ethics comes about as First Theory. Consequently, ethics can only take the form of a duel between man and himself - though this duel can be externalized as a provocation of those who evade it. From its first word, the first ethics already deals with the difference between that which is above and that which is below, yet usually strives to reach the top. This 'ethics' as a primary orientation has an immediate 'ontological' sense, provided it contains the thesis 'sophronein exists'. It would be a theoreticistic reduction of this state- ment, however, if it were used to express no more than its proposi- tional content. It is an authoritative, spurring and tonic statement that confronts its addressees with the challenge: 'Give precedence to sophronein! ' The oldest version of the metanoetic imperative already demands that humans distinguish between the upper and the lower within themselves.
Being Superior to Oneself
That the primal ethical directive 'You must change your life! ' becomes acute in the pre-Socratic word sophronein - and with a manifestly
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practice-theoretical tendency - can be explained with reference to a thought formulated by Plato a hundred years after Heraclitus in a greatly admired passage from book four of the Republic (430e-432b), dealing with prudence (sophrosyne) in the individual and in the polis. There, prudence is defined first of all as 'dominance over the desires' (epithymion epikrdteia) - though I cannot say at this point what these 'epithymic' feelings known as 'desires' are, or what is meant by 'dominance'. Then Socrates draws our attention to the peculiarity of the self-relationship to which this refers: if prudence is related or identical to dominance over affects or passions, it manifests an inner asymmetry within humans - a dramatic difference from themselves that can be evaded, but not neutralized. This is demonstrated by the figure of speech that someone is 'stronger than themselves' (kreitto
-hautou) - which is also translated as 'superior to oneself'.
At first glance, Socrates says, such a phrase seems ridiculous, and paradoxical to boot: 'For the man who is master of himself will also,
I presume, be the slave of himself, and the slave will be the master'81 - as both statements are made by the same person. In reality, the laugh- able expression is a symptom of the most serious matter: 'in man himself' (en auto to anthropo) there is evidently a better and a worse side relating to the soul (peri ten psychen). This matter, which is no laughing one, emerges in actu in twofold fashion: in the reflections formulated here and in the life conditions they address. If the part that is by nature (physei) better rules over the worse part, one calls this being stronger than oneself or superiority over oneself and rightly praises it. If the situation is inverted, however, and the worse part - which is also the larger - overpowers the better - which is naturally smaller - one speaks of being weaker than or inferior to oneself, and rebukes it accordingly. The further applications of these reflections result from the maxim of all political psychology: as in the psyche, so in the polis. 82
Two aspects are decisive for an understanding of this philosophy- historically fateful passage. Firstly: Plato here manages to integrate the affect of contempt, which appears in a crudely external way in Heraclitus, into the structure of the psyche, so that contempt becomes a regulative principle of the person and an agent of their self-direction. Whoever is able to feel self-contempt has already mas- tered the decisive aspect. Secondly: Socrates clarifies why the worse part can only take over after 'bad education' - whose criterion lies in leaving untethered (akolaston) something that requires tethering, and, if all were as it should be, could be tethered with ease. If one assumes that, for the Greeks, paideia was an amalgamation of insight
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takeover by the
side unmistakably contains a call for more training, or a lament about
the failure of the current scheme.
Naturally one could, in the style of the sociologizations still cus-
tomary today, raise the objection that Plato's talk of self-superiority was a projection of Greek class structures onto the psyche.