No More Learning

It would not be a philosophical novel if it did not try to claim to be a general autobiography in which all that says “I” has recorded its story. This novel of the subject has a Pantagruelian mix of genres. It combines equal parts of the history of philosophy as well as the ghost story, the heroic epic as well the Picaresque novel, and must also include something of hagiography. It is the novel of birth, written as the prototype for all stories that tell of the excursion, odyssey, heroic path, and education in the labyrinth of the world. We will see how a coming into the world and coming to naught echo each other. As a by-product of this natural history of the uncanny, a summary social history of human over-exertion and a small world history of life fatigue emerges. It is a book of the human being as a questionable child of the world – not a book for children.
The Miscarried Animal and the Self-Birth of the Subject
Man is the great —— in the book of nature.
Jean Paul, “Selections from the Papers to the Devil”6
If we follow the footsteps of the uncanny all the way back to the origin, we encounter the human drama of birth. The way that humans come into the world presumably contains the complete key to the code of the problem of nothingness. If the word “nothing” is supposedly more than a pretext for charlatanism, then it is the indication that for humans it does not suffice to be born in order to arrive in the world: the physical birth of a human is the opposite of a coming-into-the-world; it is the dropping out from all that is
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“familiar,” a plunge into the uncanny, finding yourself exposed in a frightening location. This is true in three ways. First, for the human child, being born means bidding farewell to its intra-uterine life, which is probably the only stage of its reception in the world that has a truly hidden, homey character – provided that the foothills of the predatory outside world do not encroach on it; in any case, the birth exodus into the world is an adventure ride through uncanny forests that render the spookiness of Atreyu’s forest7 rather bourgeois by comparison. Second, coming into the world means arriving in uncertainty – because for humans more than any other beings, the world is something that does not get defined from the outset, that is not a foregone conclusion, but something that has to be deter- mined and established. The place of arrival itself is made uncertain and set in motion by the arrival of the human, that constructive animal; anyone who had the bad idea to fall out of the womb straight into Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, or Cairo will soon have a song to sing about the uncanny life in the thicket of cities. And, third, for humans, giving birth always means getting there way too early and finding oneself in a state that is absolutely unsuitable for a successful arrival in reality, a state of total disorientation, helplessness, and embarrassment. The only thing that helps us in this exposed situation is the fact that in the beginning, the world to which we come is identical, with one small exception, to the mother from whom we come. This small exception is precisely the measure of ontological difference. Because as soon as we are old enough to get to know our mother from the outside, we begin to get to know a “world” that is not our mother. It may be said that the strange difference between mother and non-mother preoccupies humans for the rest of their lives, because they can never quite understand how the world that at first felt like the mother could transform into the world that looks the way we know it to look now – we will not say how, to avoid summoning panic into the room.
If we want to start from a reflected concept of the world, we can no longer seriously claim that humans come into the world via their birth. A nameless something is put in a position of which it cannot promise itself anything certain or good unless it had arrived to a mother and people who promise it a certain and good world. This has a far-reaching consequence for the philosophical concept of the world: the world in which the human newcomer arrives is, by its very nature, nothing more than a promise that the older inhabitants of the world make to the newcomers, a promise predestined to be broken owing to the liability of worldly conditions. With this, the question of nothingness takes on a new form. Nothingness can now either mean that nothing is promised to those who come into the world,
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so that they cannot promise themselves much from their own human existence either, and consequently develop an inclination to return from whence they came, into the womb, to death, into the monist all-nothingness – a motif that has its place in all redemptive religions and all doctrines of all-in-one unity. Or it suggests that nothing will come of the great promises that were made and that none of the expectations of the world that have been roused in us by mothers will be fulfilled in a world as non-mother – a motif that all versions of worldly-wise skepticisms, cynicisms, and nihilisms deal with. The uncanniness of the human coming into the world therefore has its grounds in the unreliability of human promises. Does this stem from individual recklessness, from irresponsibility, from the moods of the unpredictable bipeds? No – it stems from the fact that the world given as a promise has something untenable in itself, or, if tenable, then only with luck and effort. In the uncanny, the unstoppable tendency of promises appeals to us to the point of untenability. That is why our coming-into-the-world has a pull into nothingness from the outset. Even though every birth is also inherently a promise to the world, in every promising birth a succumbing to the untenable is also at play because the promised world is marked by untenability. It even has to be said that a hint of miscarriage adheres to every birth. Humans do not arrive as solid subjects into robust worlds; rather the world emerges for them through the fact that they are born slightly to the side and exposed to the ungiven, the uncanny. Nietzsche only half-formulated this relationship when he spoke of nihilism as the uncanny visitor who haunts modern existence. It is not that an otherwise saddle-proof life receives terrible visits in rare crises – it is already a visit into the uncanny of its own accord. We always run off course, we always drift a little bit further away; in the great chain of being, humans are an open link.
As a living being, the human is therefore a pure problem, a chronic miscarriage. From the outset, there is a gap between each newly born individual and previous life up to that point – this gap opens up each time insofar as the forced displacement that the newly born endure at their arrival reaches into the uncanny. This gap is the space where we experience nothingness as something that can be “present” and into which we have been placed. The world is built into this gap; earth can rise and arrive in it; the ropes of promises stretch across it as people venture out onto them like tightrope walkers.
In the shadow of these considerations, it becomes apparent that the human is not simply a “living being” endowed with reason, but a being who must “lead” their life. Without a way of life, human life is nothing in the double sense, neither life nor human. But
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people have to promise their lives to themselves before they can lead them. As for us, the decisive thing is done under the guidance of life-giving promises, and thus we depend on them from our first to our last day. Without the inflow of affirmations that promise and validate our lives, we cannot keep ourselves alive psychologi- cally or biologically – according to paleoanthropological findings, people who are cut off from all promises die a psychogenic death within forty-eight hours. The human standard of living is always disputed by promises. If human beings are not living beings, but life-leading beings, then the source of a specifically human fragility is here laid bare: the leading of their lives depends on the keeping of promises that tend towards the untenable of their own accord. When mothers take their crying children into their arms and assure them that everything will be ok, they promise them more than can be kept – but they also cannot not promise it to them if they do not wish to let their children sink prematurely into untenability. Each individual learns early enough that the hard shadow of untenable promises falls upon human life and that existence entails not only standards of living and leading a life on the basis of kept promises, but also substandard living and the misleading of life because of promises not kept.
These circumstances help explain why life comes to account for its primary uncanniness only involuntarily and under the utmost duress. It is, after all, the usual point of “accounting” to present life as something predictable, meaningful, familiar, and reliable. The primordial promise of life, philosophically called reason, is to object to the failure to keep promises and to insist that reason delivers what it promises – was reason not at one time also an expression for the influx of auspicious reasons to live for our already ever-endangered existence? That is why reason has the structure of a self-sustaining promise for us, and the invasion of the unreasonable is generally perceived as scandalous and devastating because when the promise of reason is broken, it may seem that there is ultimately nothing to the promises of the world and of life.
These considerations make it clear why an anthropology that has not worked its way through a theory of birth must remain insipid: only philosophy of birth can become so attentive to the abyssal side of human coming-into-the-world that it fuses the term “world” together with the drama of arriving in it. From a birth- philosophical point of view, the human is the being who had the power not to be an animal and to venture out into a world that is only “given” by promise. In this respect, anthropology is nothing more than the science of recklessness – of human beings’ frivolity in establishing ways of life upon promises. Who could deny that the
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Book of History contains a great variety of impostures generated by promises? And who can escape the impression that the people of the highly cultural, that is, promising era have promised themselves something that will probably not be possible to be kept in the long run; that the psychologico-cultural and technical apparatuses that were built to keep the wrong promises are themselves approaching collapse by now in order to keep up with the untenability of what was promised?
Anthropology as a science of such recklessness becomes the central discipline of philosophy as soon as it elaborates a general concept of the subject as a holder of untenable positions. What the subject and what subjectivity is can therefore no longer be adequately grasped with conventional philosophical formulas – it is neither a substrate in the sense of the Greek Hypokeimenon, nor a pure acting or bringing forth in the sense of the modern philosophies of activity, but an ensemble of behaviors that can be grouped around the basic gestures of carrying, making, and keeping. If the world already has the form of a promise for humans in its given condition, then the human being is – insofar as it is “in” the world and has “come” to it – as the subject and receiver of the promise also already its carrier and keeper. Even the famous “self-preservation,” which has been philosophically often determined as the foundational aspiration of subjectivity, is in turn a descendant of that holding by which the world is kept and carried on as a promise through subjective efforts. The fact that modern philosophy has placed its principle in active subjectivity of course already suggests that it has found the courage to embark on a history-making adventure in order to promise itself the utmost from its own actions in the world. What else is the philosophy of subjectivity other than a logical machine that believes it has identified the keeper of all possible promises in the free-thinking and -acting subject? As free-thinking and acting, the human is regarded from the ground up as the self-preserving, auspicious being. As subject, the human is the guarantor of the promises with which the miscarried animal gives itself its world. Only where the subject renders its stabilizing contribution does the world get held up as “given” for human beings. By means of this contribution alone, the arrival of newborns does not immediately lead to a fall into bottomlessness. The subject as self-keeper of the promises given to it delays its fall at a tolerable stage. This delay or holding up is the effort-that-I-am. Subjectivity as an act of self- preservation is therefore not a calm substrate but a self-exertion. It is no coincidence that the philosophies of subjectivity at their highest level lead to theories of work – after all, the term “work” (even after
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its deceptive career at the firm of Hegel and Marx) still preserves a memory of the archaic efforts to keep the promises of the world, and if we know today that the equation of subject and “worker” is based on a productivist short-circuit, there are still good reasons to point out their relationship of origin in terms of subjectivity and exertion.
Funnily enough, the philosophies of the subject have made a lot of fuss about the subject’s spontaneity – people wanted to sniff out the tracks of freedom within it. In truth, the philosophy of the subject is not so much interested in freedom as in the priming of possible outlets for the effort-that-I-am. What is called spontaneity is basically the self-imposed exertion towards effort, which drifts and ferments in the subject as kinetic energy. It is hardly surprising that the freedom-impassioned philosophies of the subject could not uncover the reason for exertion in the subject itself. In all of the talk of activity, spontaneity, obligation, and desire together with the source metaphorical indulgence in the “arising from within oneself,” it was misunderstood that the basic exertion or effort that flows into spontaneity stems from a trace of miscarriage on the human. The human becomes subject only because of and to the extent that it does not come into the world only by leaving its mother’s womb, but has to offer up enormous additional efforts to establish and maintain the world into which it comes. Although subjectivity is, as idealism has taught us, only understandable from the omen of pure activity, this in turn is not a “deed,” neither a Fichtean self-positing nor Sartre’s self-choosing, but rather one with the already exerted effort in contrast to the pre-subjective abandonment into the uncanny, to bring oneself by means of self-birth into the world and gain status in it through one’s own self-stance. A subject is everything that tries to become and be its own world for itself – how? By sticking to itself, its “principles” and its concern for itself. This self-stance has several faces: it appears as abstinence, as a holding oneself to chosen norms, as self-reliance, as self-preservation, as self-justification.
Therefore it is not surprising that the history of the subject has been a history of stances since the very beginning. From the Stoics to existentialism, from the glowing desert saints to the cool young city dwellers, the subject always steps in front of us as a self-composed center of effort, as the active principle of an exerted stance against the sluggish, shapeless, and depressing outside world. Whether the subject holds itself up as an ascetic self by abstaining from all seductive, disruptive, and frightening influences; whether it stands up to the hopeless and untenable world by holding on to the belief in God or godliness; whether it constitutes itself as an autonomous self, sustained by a philosophizing reason, which is,
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in turn, appointed as the self-guardian of its laws; whether it tries to maintain itself as a conqueror of life fatigue in order to make itself heroically and self-extravagantly a gift to the world; whether it knows itself, gloomily resigned to self-acceptance, to be held out into nothingness; whether it rides the waves on the surfboard of its desire in anti-oedipal exhilaration; whether it angrily sticks to the style of its terribly splintered way of writing before sovereignty, and watches from the corners of its eyes as it eludes itself: the subject is always there to give itself a firm foothold in a stance through efforts that resemble a self-birth. Through its inevitably monstrous position, the subject is “spontaneously” condemned to the effort to stabilize its hold by means of its own promises in a world taken over on revocation.
According to their purpose, stances are always expectations of the world’s continued existence and of the keeping of its promises – not least also expectations of the repeatability of once acquired programs. Even those who are committed to the Stoic doctrine of nil admirari and no longer promise themselves anything from the world at least expect that the world will no longer agitate them out of their stance through some kind of a surprise. Then the house of cards of external conditions may by all means collapse as long as one’s stance musters the power to persevere, as long as the subject’s status remains unaffected by the upheavals of external holdings. As self-holder and self-carrier, the subject cannot help but become set on tendentially world-less or at least counter-worldly attitudes – after all, it lives, as we have seen, only on the effort to bring itself forth and outward through a self-birth like the keeping of its own promises or those it has appropriated. Thus, the self-sustaining activity of the subject is inseparable from a certain counter-worldly self-breeding – Foucault would say self-care – which serves a heightened coming-into-the-world.
Nietzsche is more responsible for this than other, newer thinkers. It was he who, in his Genealogy of Morality, elevated the subject’s autogenesis to a philosophical agenda.
To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise – is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? is it not the real problem of humankind? . . . That is precisely what constitutes the long history of the origins of responsibility. That particular task of breeding an animal with the prerogative to promise includes . . . the . . . task of . . . making man . . . predictable. Let us place ourselves . . . at the end of this immense process where . . . we then find the sovereign individual . . . a man with his own, independent,
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enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise . . . the possessor of an enduring, unbreakable will. 8
How does nature come to take on such a demanding task with regard to humans? How does it lapse into the idea of creating beings who have to plunge into the adventure of self-generation so that they can live? Nietzsche leaves these questions unanswered – but his way of speaking of nature’s self-posed task invites us to think of an ambitious mother who celebrates herself in her children. In Nietzsche’s rhetoric of increase and breeding, the self-generating process of increased life in the wake of highest promises comes very clearly to prominence. The clear text version of this idea can be found – one would like to say: of course – in Karl Marx, who in Nietzsche’s year of birth in 1844 identified man as a born self- generator: “Because socialist man understands the whole of what is called world history as nothing but man’s creation through human labor . . . he has the observable, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself. ”9 Of the triumphs and torments of self-generating effort, however, it is only Nietzsche, not Marx, who can convey a term because he, unlike the thinker of socialism, knows that in the self- birthing of the self, it is not “work” that is at stake, but burdens of pregnancy, birth pains, suffering, labors in the English language, the struggle for existence, ponos in the Greek language, the inevitable self-generating expropriations of life to which no reappropriation corresponds, and at best the euphoria of taking a deep breath outside.
What do I find absolutely intolerable? Something which I just cannot cope alone with and which suffocates me and makes me feel faint? . . . That something failed comes near me. . . . Apart from that, what cannot be borne in the way of need, depri- vation, bad weather, disease, toil, solitude? Basically we can cope with everything else, born as we are to an underground and battling existence; again and again we keep coming up to the light, again and again we experience our golden hour of victory, – and then there we stand, the way we were born, unbreakable, tense, ready for new, more difficult and distant things. 10
The subject’s self-birth, Nietzsche’s formulas say, is a birth into standing. Marx also provides the consonant second voice: “A being only counts itself as independent when it stands on its own two feet and it stands on its own two feet as long as it owes its existence to itself. ”11 Thus, this type of birth leads directly into the vertical,
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that is, to standing thanks to one’s own erection, without sidelong glances for possibilities of tolerably lying down or fundamentally being carried. Because it is about immediate self-establishment, the self-born and increasing subject for Nietzsche is also not the same as the passively born, misguided subjects who – because they themselves are reduced, poisoned, suffocated – can’t help but spread an atmosphere of asphyxiation and reduction around them, much to the agony of those who still carry the sting of success in their flesh. That is why the determined self-birthers must repel the obscenely comfortable, mediocre, and atrophied.
. . . but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned? 12
The willingness to face what is frightening is given to the self-birther as a sign of election, that is, as a spur of self-intensification. The intensity of the subject is synonymous with the urge of its being pregnant with itself. What the subject can bring forth from itself through the force of its exertion is always only itself, and the world, into which it will come, can never be any other than its own, self- designed, self-generated. By energetically bringing itself to its own world, the subject opens up an unbridgeable distance to the world of others. From this distance – maintained by the self-care of the self-producing subject – the abstinent stances arise for which the Greeks coined the word “askesis,” and the moderns the term “individuality. ” If the self-emphasizing subject displays a brittle stance towards foreign-worldly seductions – talk, fame, topicality, women, princes, careers – it is not from morbid or self-torturous inclinations (as befits a corrupt notion of asceticism), but out of the clear instinct of wanting to serve only a single effort.
His “motherly” instinct, that secret love towards what is growing inside him, shows him places where he can be relieved of the necessity of thinking about himself . . . not . . . out of virtue, out of a creditable will to moderation and simplicity, but because their supreme master so demands . . . it is [his] dominating instinct, at least during periods when they are pregnant with something great. 13
What Nietzsche discovers here is the birth of asceticism from the requirements of self-birth. Asceticism in the fundamental sense does not reject the will; it is, on the contrary, an expression of a
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strong pooling of will, an energetic summary of all partial drives in a single ray of will. Nietzsche’s discourse on the will to power is also latently at the service of this thought and remains incompre- hensible without this discovery. In it, the idea of the possibility of a univocal existence of language inches forward – it is the idea of the possibility of a monothematic will. Only the monothematics of the will steers the will towards itself and thus onto the self-bearing track. All that an ultimately pooled-together will to oneself can possibly want is eo ipso self-making, self-reliance, self-birth, self- realization. To the extent that asceticism is an exercise of the will to abstain from parasitic auxiliary drives and stray impulses, it serves the self-bearing erection of the subject. 14 Through it, it becomes its own content – because only those who know to abstain can contain themselves, find themselves to be enough, keep themselves upright, and become those who stand, hold, carry, set up, give, and found from their “own efforts. ”
In this program of a self-upright-holding stance, it is impos- sible not to hear the masculinist tenor. The suspicion arises that the subject of the philosophers is perhaps nothing more than a logically encoded fantasy about the possibility of permanent erection from cradle to grave. In the self-born formation of the subject, the dynamics of masculinity as an urge to one’s own standing are actually at work. Masculinity in the narrowest sense of the word exists only in connection with the history-making illusion of the independent erection – the philosophical code word for this is subject autonomy. Since the days of Plato, the phenomena of vocation to self-birth, male high-feeling, and existential self-intensi- fication in thought have been intimately interwoven; an impetus of Eros into the vertical pulses through all of them. Can it be a coinci- dence that in Socrates the metaphysics got under way as Maieutic, that is, as an obstetrics for a subjectivity that has to fight its way out of the womb-grave of the body in order to keep itself upright in the heights of ideas? This peculiarly masculine obstetrics has created a historical precedent. What has been promoted to the light of the world by the art of philosophical midwifery in Greek antiquity has consequently continued to develop the metaphysics of work and technology as a mechanical uterus of human self-fabrication over the course of more than two thousand years. The Maieutic of the subject, metaphysics, and technology are each only aspects of the same phenomenon, which, with its grandeur as with its riskiness, has the historical world holding its breath: aspects of the self-birth of the man-human. This takes place as a conquest of the vertical, as a revolution of self-born sovereignty against the humiliation of the old way of birthing, thus as a repulsion against old nature and as
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the establishment of a phallic will of its own against the dictatorship of mothers. Through a colossal tearing away of oneself, the andro- logical subject has begun to be self-interested and has mobilized as the commissioner of its own worlds.
But it is precisely through its mobilization that it is finally confronted with the questions of how, after all, it intends to deal with nature as its origin, and whether it really believes it will escape its first birth via its second.
Among those who have let this question be asked, Martin Heidegger stands out in a twilight greatness with his attempt at a new thinking of being. This is to be understood quite literally – because what constitutes Heidegger’s meaning is inseparable from the threefold problem that is incarnated in him; the problem of preeminence, of greatness, and of twilight.
Heidegger looms – to engage with his thought, we have to begin from this perception. Because for most, dealing with what looms is annoying or overwhelming; there is usually no engaging, but either aversions or subjugations. But when dealing with Heidegger, it is a question of recognizing in the looming itself the problem to which his thinking bears witness. In fact it is like this: Heidegger not only looms “forth,” he is also the thinker of looming, of standing out, of erecting oneself, of bringing forward. By emphasizing within the event of truth its moments of unconcealment, emergence, opening, and clearing, he grasps – like no metaphysician before him – the kinetics of being as a coming forward, a placing into the open, and a being challenged to the open expression of presence-ing. 15 It is fair to say without exaggeration that Heidegger, instructed by his own outstanding dynamism, was the only thinker of the philosophical tradition able to conceptualize what placing means according to its onto-kinetic nature. For him, it is the visible (and, through excessive visibility, equally hidden) gesture of the “occurrences of being” – insofar as the equation of being and being brought forth is valid. The taste of being, as he notes, adheres only to what is capable of “existing,” which also takes part in the ecstasy of being brought forth. Being is the ontological aroma of that which is in front, up high, and spoken out loud. To attain it, entities must have been brought forward natally, brought upward phallically, and evocatively come up for discussion. Only in an austere decision-making climate, where nothing lies around or stands there undecided, but everything is taken up decisively, does human existence know itself as “great. ” By letting itself be challenged, it accepts its emergence into the arena of being, and by assuming only important things as a challenger, it rises up to the level of that by which it has been “enframed. ”16 It is great through standing up to the enormous; greatness becomes its
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aura by the fact that the having-been-placed-upright has nothing to do with anything less than with the “fate of being” itself. Heidegger’s looming corresponds to the self-consciousness of a being-there that sees itself as the location of a Titans’ battle for being. Its atmosphere of greatness is the shiver of the air over the ontological battlefield. There is something of a metaphysical priapism in it – painfully heaved up towards the most important thing, it rises up with a heroic positioning into the bald skies of being and nothingness. In these erections, however, it is true that the subject, who has been necessarily forced to greatness, does not stand upright of its own accord. Heidegger knows that the grammar of placing upright is imbued with an irony: precisely that which stands itself upright is the most upright-placed. The new thinking of being can subvert subjectivity and its game of placing because – in a more or less explicit way – it sees all self-births from the point of view of the first birth, understands all phallic installations from the point of view of an exciting-challenging other, and hears all of the subject’s own statements through the “reception” and address of the other.
It is only because he strives for nothing more than to think through the deadly seriousness of ontologically ironic subjectivity that Heidegger can, as the outstanding upriser among philoso- phers, feel his way towards a different ontological gesture, one that reclaims the uprising. By looking for the not-rising-up in his thinking in a towering way, he becomes a thinker who “stands” completely in the dubious twilight. One will have to accept that he – to greatness obliged – does not accept responsibility for this twilight as a personal dubiousness or logical ambiguity, but elevates it back into the great text of the happenings of being. If the enframing, the placing upright, was also not our doing, but the destiny of being, so a possible dis-stance will again remain wholly a thing of being and only from out of “this itself” can the page be turned, if that is really necessary. With pride and sorrow, Heidegger’s twilight of metaphysics mingles with the dusk of metaphysics that he defined, which probably thinks of itself as the appropriate working environment for the dismantling of the world-historical framing structure that demanded subject dominion, metaphysics, and technology all at the same time. Both gloomy and serene, this thinking takes its solitary exemplary position. It is gloomy because it still carries with it in a forceful gesture the legacy of the history of metaphysical exertion and armament; it is serene because it has repeated and overtaken the huge wave of erecting installations to which it itself belongs, and has already reached a point of détente, at which others can let themselves be intuited as erecting stances. These other stances promise to be restrained and unassuming, but
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by promising that, they multiply the twilight because they need to emphasize the unemphasized and want the unwanted. Heidegger’s ambivalence leaves open the question of whether his thinking continues or ends metaphysics; yes, according to his gesture, it almost parodically and gaudily repeats the metaphysical rising up to prepare its overcoming. There is little concern about whether this overcoming will be thwarted by the pathetic preparation for it. Twilight-like to the core, it conjures up a Titanism of inconspicu- ousness and opens the horizon with thunder, from which the other approaches on “the feet of doves. ”17
Meanwhile, it seems, the gun smoke over the philosophical battlefield has cleared. After the wound that was Heidegger, the time has come to also perceive the matter that is Heidegger. If it is taken up again, it already pushes beyond the formulation in which the master from the Black Forest left it. I hope we have left no doubt about the direction in which the “question of being,” once newly set in motion, strives: towards a theory of birth, a phenomenology of the coming-into- the-world – a new Maieutic, an onto-topology, an onto-kinetics, an onto-politics. From these tendencies one thing becomes clear: it is a revenge on Heidegger since he considered psychology unnecessary and anthropology beneath him. As soon as a psychologically and anthropologically grounded philosophy enters into a meditation of self-born structures, it arrives at a more radical destruction and a more substantive salvation of metaphysical discourses about being and nothingness than Heidegger’s memory of being was able to accomplish. For what the history-making intrusion of subjectivity was and is can, according to Heidegger, be sharply reconstructed in a grammar of dramas of self-birth,18 and the interlocutors who inform us about the categories of self-bringing-forth are the great birth theorists of tradition and current research: Plato and Bloch, Schelling and Rank, Patanjali and Marx, Johannes Climax and Nietzsche, Maine de Biran and Stanislav Grof.
Practical knowledge is provided by the mothers, the midwives, the phenomenologists of bringing forth and carrying. The task of moderating this conversation, of course, can rest with none other than the Master Lao Tzu, the Old Child, who had lived through the risks of becoming to the end, before he, after eighty-one years, as white-haired as an elder and as profound as the world itself, emerged from his mother’s womb to take on life on the outside, in the certainty of being, even in the outside world, the same as he was while inside. In his world-superior serenity, the question for us is what else are the self-birthing struggles of historical humanity other than efforts to compensate for the disadvantage of all disadvantages,
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the “disadvantage of having being born. ” (Emil Cioran is the most eloquent witness of this in the twentieth century, alongside Beckett. ) As a school of coming-into-the-world, philosophy really enters into the post-metaphysical “basic position,” which it has been demanding for two hundred years with great noise and insufficient arguments. From this new (even pre-Socratic and gynecological) basic position, philosophy is at the end and the beginning at the same time; it has its story behind it and at the same time before it; it has both failed as an attempt to come into the world, and has not even seriously begun with it. In vain and unceasingly, it remains
thrown back to the effort-that-it-is. Because effort is at the core of subjectivity, philosophy as a phenomenon of exertion can never get away from subjectivity, no matter what denying, subversive, or suicidal strategies it may still come up with. Its only chance lies in the rise to serenity – but serenity begins with the willingness to allow oneself to be exerted by the real. According to metaphysics, it can take philosophy all the way to humor, the democratic version of divine madness. Beyond exertion, there remains only exertion to overcome exertion. Philosophy, for now, can do nothing better than confront its destiny of being the logical pinnacle of subjectivity at the most exciting, exhausting, and crazy places. It must reenact its history in order to understand what it was and is, and in this way stand, in solidarity with its hybrids as well as its tragic stances, its misguided and its inevitable gestures. If rigor still has a purpose in this questionable discipline, then it is to think oneself into the surge of the most extreme exertion in order to ascertain the limits of exertion.
Subjectivity, we said, is kinetically the effort-that-I-am. The limits of my effort are the limits of my stance, the limits of my standing of my ground, my persevering, enduring, maintaining, entertaining. Where the effort ends, there the standing upright comes to its limit on its own, that is where that which “lies otherwise than this” begins. Perhaps “the other” in that sense is just a term for what lies down while we stand upright – even possibly what we need to actively make to underlie in order to have something for our standing upright to stand on. For the subject there lies behind its limit at first only that which falls victim to exhaustion: the subject self – in the mode of collapse. Overtired, overwhelmed, devastated, it encounters itself yet again beyond its own limit. There, its stances prove untenable and its promises baseless. The uncanny place in the forest from which the hero on his tree sees nothingness eating itself forward is none other than the place the sight of which is unbearable to the eye of the subject, because it shows that, with all its efforts, the
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subject is literally nothing in the end. Nothingness is the manifestly progressive untenability of the promised, it is the leaching of every- thing that exists into a holding device for stances long recognized as untenable. This is the surge of life fatigue that rolls over the dams of broken promises, making the bodies as heavy as their own burial plates. This nothingness protrudes into the self-experience of the overexerted subject when it comes to the limits of its standing its ground. It is only through the fully endured overload that the subject gets to where it can see through its Great Orthopedics. What no external criticism can tell it, it learns of the symptoms of its own overexertion. Only too late does it understand that it has set up the world as a device for keeping untenable promises, and from then on it finds itself in danger of being slain by the collapse of these buildings that are as enormous as they are unstable. Even greater is the danger of drowning in one’s “adult” stance – that’s Neo-Stoicism – or, at the first regressive liberalization, exploding into murderous disinhibitions – that’s fascism.
In the disintegration of its stances, the subject comprehends how all its self-birthing stances depend on guidelines that elude its independence. In collapse, it approaches the “ground” that underlies all installations. In this approach, it makes acquaintance with what psychiatrists call the chance of depression. The remark that even an upright stance is just a lying down in an unlikely bed corresponds to this. Lying down, however, is another term for the kinetic pattern of serenity: letting oneself be carried. What Heidegger lamented with enormous effort as “forgetting of being” corresponds to a forgetting of letting oneself be carried within the kinetic consciousness, which is a precondition of every rage of self-reliance. However, this forgetting is not an actual forgetting; it springs from the memory of the body in the real episodes where it experienced itself as being not carried, abandoned, forgotten, and imprisoned in its own despair – of the moments in which it accumulated the most unforgettable motivations to stand on its own. But however deep the forgetting of letting oneself be carried and its recoil towards self-uprising, even the most extreme rage of self-birth can make of itself no more than what the first birth has already made of it: a being who always hovers in danger, even if it is a self-created one. The first and second births agree that they bring into the world living beings who, as beings who exert themselves, strive for self-protection, but who, at the end of the day, can achieve nothing better than to accept themselves as the hovering beings that they have always been and still are. This is the chance of depression. You have to get on the ground to learn that it has a double bottom. Those who come from untenable standing to lying down cannot be far from learning that lying down is just another kind of hovering.
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At the turning point between the subject’s extreme self-estab- lishment and its plunge into a carried hovering lies a passage for which Heidegger introduced the ominous word “turn,” a word supposed to form a common denominator for both the giganto- mania of Meßkirch and the history of the European spirit – how could it not if, after millennia of self-forgetfulness, being was in the mood to choose the musings of this man as the stage of its own self-remembrance.
There is nothing to the word “turn” and its religious reverber- ation. What is essential about it is the reference to the movement through which the wave of the subject’s force runs back into itself. This movement would be impossible without the gentle counter- violence of failure. But anyone who speaks of a “turn” thinks of failure not as a mere collapse, not just as entropy, which puts an end to an unlikely state, but as a “sign” from the other side. Those who hear it and look in its direction have already allowed themselves to be turned around and made a movement away from the wrong movement. Such a turnaround is more than a mechanical change of direction, nor does it have anything to do with what the installation technicians of the New Age call switching to “complex thinking. ” The turning process would precisely not be a future- greedy continued muddling under new auspices, but an ontological ebb of subjectivity; but the ebb is not made, it only occurs when the tide changes its mind. If we take the tide as an image for the exertion- that-we-are which we cannot refrain from, it becomes clear that a returning tide kinetically remains a thing of impossibility as long as the waves of exertion have not dissipated of their own accord and been used up. Here, the thrill of the danger into which the project of modernity has led us makes itself palpable on an ontological level: anything less than a change in the meaning of “being” will not suffice for our “salvation. ” Because modernity is in its process nothing other than being-towards-movement, movement towards movement in increasing loops of self-intensification, our survival is tied to a self-withdrawal of the kinetic tidal wave “within us. ” This cannot be changed with external canalization and decelerations. A critical movement can only emerge from the self-absorbing of the mobilization wave if it has thrown itself forward to its critical point. For us, however, it cannot even be considered that such a critical point “exists” – certainly, there “is” no such point in the sense of an external threshold, a “line,” which one only has to cross in order to romp in a neo-positive way of being. If such a point exists and if it actually occurs, then initially it is only so that the mobilizing fury of individual subjects ebbs away – whether it has exhausted itself, it has collapsed through sudden twists, or the élan of the subject has taken
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leave of its expenditure in trivial motor skills in order to instead reach “yogic” or artistic heights. It would be unwise, though, to deny the unpredictable in the emergence of such turning points – as unwise as are the thought patterns that circulate today that directly run from danger to salvation and from a hopeless world situation to a logic of salvation. Even if salvation existed for us, it would not be logical, but cyclical, not the product of necessity, but a gift of opportunity. Those who promise themselves anything more are only making use of auto-hypnotic forces; they mobilize the wonderful ability to deceive themselves as much as they think it necessary to live. But aren’t those days over, when auto-hypnotists were allowed to act like philosophers of history?
Let us presuppose: there is no detectable point of “turnaround” and no necessary and sufficient conditions for it. But there are twists and turns that we cannot create ourselves which place themselves on unpredictable points of the curve of action.
“Turn” could be the title for the subject’s relaxation from its self- birthing overstretches. It would then refer to the transition from a way of being determined to do everything to one serene towards some things. Of course, the transition to serenity itself is something that cannot make a serene impression. In transition, the fragility of the world is exposed. The powers that have piled themselves up in the enframing of civilization breathe a fatal breeze towards us through the membrane of a soft consciousness. Just as the warm Alpine wind draws the mountains to the front of the city limits, serenity exposes the panorama of the world to be pure explosiveness. If there is an active part in the turn, it is one of precaution against the destruc- tiveness that is unleashed in the collapse of untenable positions. The serenity leads not only out of false efforts, but even more so away from the false alleviations of the mobilization processes.
Serenity grows out of the advantage of not having won. It resembles defeat in a fight that would be a disaster to win. Those whom it reels in feel a relaxation from the struggle with the struggle, from the sting of subjectification, which crumbles more into itself the more it tries to raise itself upright. Serenity colors the self- knowledge of the subject who knows what it is like to have tired oneself out on the impossible. While the self-birth of the subject is the eternal agony and, as the engine of history, also represents the grotesque attempt we cannot refrain from to come to a world of our own through our own power, the serene dependence upon our first birth leads to the rediscovery of the inevitable. It could be that this discovery presupposes the odyssey of subjectivity. On a big journey, one tends to spin and wear out stories of self-reliance and self-preservation. Perhaps the inevitable shimmers through the
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thinly woven threads of one’s “own” will, from which the subject drifts away on its way to the exit with fateful force. Wasn’t subjec- tivity the effort to bypass the inevitable? Thus, at the end of its being completely worn out and used up, the subject becomes transparent to itself as an indefensible and at the same time indissoluble fiction – some say in the form of a divine lie. One rubs one’s eyes and becomes acquainted with the inevitable.
Once again, we must return to Heidegger, for it is he who made the remembering of the “inevitable” into an explicit topic. (However, one may suspect that it was not the inevitable that interested him, but “inevitability,” because he was after all a philosopher whom metaphysics held in its grasp, and, as such, has incorrigibly fallen prey to generalities. ) When Heidegger proclaims in one of his most whispering speeches the phrase that people would first have to become “mortals,” he arrives, banished to the classical metaphysical questions, only at the weaker inevitability, at least in comparison with the first and strongest inevitability that people must first become those who are born, those who come into the world. What they have always been the most is what they are the least at the end. Frightened and fascinated by their mortality, they look beyond birth as well as beyond what is most incidental. The cogito of death has stifled even the smallest approach to a cogito of birth – to Heidegger and to this day. 19
But if the age of metaphysics were to really end, it would not be the I-die that must be able to accompany all my ideas, but the I-come-into-the-world. A post-metaphysical devotion of thought to the finite earth cannot be marked by mortality, which forever remains a motive of metaphysical temptation, but must only be marked by the sign of birth. Because it is not enough for people to be born; in order to come into the world, they are condemned to see themselves as arrived beings – beings who cannot yet be ascertained because they have not yet come into the world, and whose every attempt to nevertheless ascertain themselves is doomed. The most radical self-recognition of human beings refers not to the fact that they refuse to recognize that they will die, but to their evasion of the idea “I-was-born” in a panicked flight. No one wants to have been present at the event that brought them to the light of the world. Being born – that only happens to other people. 20
No one, it seems, remembers their entry into the world, though, in terms of the physiology of memory, there is nothing that should prevent us from visualizing even the most archaic event. So here we “are,” and no one knows how. When we start talking about things of this world “in the world,” our sentences begin in the middle, subse- quently, straggling, without direct insight into how we managed to get to where we are.
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But however much we talk and reflect, no talk, no reflection cancels out the fact that our utterances are overtaken by birth and released only by birth. This darkness of birth, which serves as a foil for all knowledge, is not an innocent not-yet-being- acquainted with something new. It is a constitutive not knowing, a darkness as the first intention. The forgetting of birth is a well-established non-knowledge that provides the fundamental effort to self-formation: not to have been there. Only when the subject reaches the limit of its erection efforts can it extract from its exhaustion the otherwise unacceptable and feel its origin in the fright of birth, in the falling out and staying lying down, in the feeling of being too heavy for itself. As soon as the defensive tension of self-birthing crumbles, an inner flow gets under way, trickling old self-knowledge of the first birth into the present. The more presently a life takes place, the lower its amount of effort towards misunderstanding in relation to its birth dowry. On the abyssal ground of the present, the ex-subject can retrospectively comprehend what its “true nature” was: the urge not to have nature; the drive to crush the stepmotherly earth beneath oneself; the tension of getting out of the suffocating, abused downsizing as a motherless self-birther. These energies are what make history. Everything that is considered a subject in this specific sense contributes to the great world text that appears under the title My, Your, His, Our, Their Struggle. It is about miscarriage into a false world and rebirth into a proper one, it is about heroic exodus and crusades through time, missions and time turns, last battles, projects of modernity and the final realms of self-government – however, the “last” chapters are always written by those who have somehow escaped the catastrophes of the subject. Will there be someone to tell of our struggle, too?
Because, following philosophical tradition, we have characterized the path of subjectivity as an odyssey-like cycle into an unfamiliar starting point, the impression could now arise that the simplest things must always and inevitably only emerge at the end of a long expedition. From here, one could infer that the mind has a necessity to go on detours. For the kind of thinking that has come under the metaphysical compulsion to exert itself, this is actually true: the subject’s path to the world has the structure of a detour into the elementary. On it, the inevitable and the self-evident appear last. And as long as philosophy is embroiled in the drama of the subject’s self-birthing efforts, it seems doomed to always opt for the longest detour as the shortest route to things. Where heroes think, there the long road is the only reasonable one; for them, overexertion is the minimum contribution.
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Is there no alternative to this? Do only tired heroes have the final say after returning home from the colonies? Is the inevitable always such that those who avoid it always encounter it at the last minute anyway? No – there is another beginning of conscious life that has not ended up on the long road through history. But this other consciousness has found no forceful advocates – except in marginal literature. Only today, in contrast to heroic thinking, which only admits the self-evident too late and at the last minute, can an unheroic consciousness come into its own, which does not win its insights on a detour across the path of maximal misunderstanding of that which is most simple. Like Hercules at a crossroads, human consciousness has a choice from the beginning between the short and the long way, between the odyssey and the stroll, and even if the choice must first fall on the long route, because self-birthers, who burst with their compulsion to strength, do not know what else to do with themselves other than to overexert themselves, that does not mean our right to take the short way has been denied. This right is known to a hidden tradition, a tradition unaffiliated with any faculties, especially law faculties, to speak nothing of philo- sophical ones. To remind us of this right is the metaphysical-critical purpose of the confrontation between the great thinker Plato and the gutter-level mime artist, Diogenes, as we have learned from Greek anecdote. As a philosopher, the clown shows the philoso- phers that there is an alternative to the spiritual heroic ascent into the life of ideas. Even divine mania has a more popular variation. The other way out of the overexertion is to not enter into it – the enlightened beggar from Sinope has demonstrated how this can be done. From his cynical impulse, discreet and denigrated traces of pre-metaphysical wisdom run through the age of metaphysics and the philosophy of the subject, to become more conspicuous and self-confident again at their twilight. Just as in the uprising period of metaphysics, the other consciousness retreated into pantomime, literature, comedy, and quiescence, so in its time of collapse the voices of wisdom become audible again. They are the voices of the oldest dissidence; they belong to women, children, ecstatics, rogues, inconspicuous people – people who don’t let themselves be persuaded that they were not there when they came into the world. No, they were there. Whatever happens to them meets their amazement. They know in their own way what it means to come out into the uncanny; without a metaphysical fishing net, they balance across everyday cliffs. From them, the down-and-out subject can learn the self-evident that indeed arrives last “before its eyes” and “to its ears. ”
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Eurotaoism
He who stands on tiptoe is not steady. He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
Tao Te Ching, 2421 The Eurotao that can be spoken is not the real Eurotao, etc.
4
THE FUNDAMENTAL AND THE URGENT – OR: THE TAO OF POLITICS
Also a contribution to the answer as to why a credible politics currently does not exist
Difficile est satyram non scribere.
Juvenal, The Satires1
Americans are surely to be envied. If a writer in the United States who was rumored to belong to an alternative movement were invited into political circles to initiate a conversation about opposing world- views (literary supplements might appreciate this), then that writer would bring a manuscript that gloriously displayed the words THE TAO OF POLITICS on its title page, and everyone among those involved would think it perfectly fine for this person to use the tools at their disposal. Even in the choice of words, the message would be clear – Good morning, America, welcome to the New Age where a young Aquarian ease converses with the old fishy severity of reality; the End of World War, the Beginning of Intercontinental Eroticism! – and hardly anyone would take offense at the esoteric wink across the Pacific towards Old China, where, as we know, there are so many sages that only one child per family is allowed in order to stop the rush towards the bosom of enlightenment – it is rumored that these days, only the billionth young Taoist sees the light of day.
Old Europe is having a harder time, and a writer who has discus- sions with politicians has a harder time here, too. There is no trace of transatlantic relaxation and no talk of the Tao of politics. Here, Protestant ethics are still intact; in Bonn, there is a tough negotiation on the matter. Mr Johannes Rau2 will present his political moral doctrine in a forward-looking keynote speech and then the invited author will give his lecture. The organizer has left no doubt as to the
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subject on which he wishes statements to be made: “Of the possibility and difficulties of credibly embodying political principles in everyday operations. ” This is how an officer of the hosting foundation has formulated the impressive problem, and it must be admitted that the question is quite deliberate. Political morality is at stake and how to avoid the mistake of having too much of it – we are in the territory of classical social democracy. The thought of the “embodiment” of principles is ominously surrounded with precautions. One suspects that in the race between the difficulties and the possibilities, the diffi- culties will be at the forefront, but that does not disturb us; we are all adults here. (Klaus Staeck, who is also on the podium, will immedi- ately swear to the party’s capacity for suffering, and Paul Lorenzen, who is sitting in the audience, will afterwards, while on the floor, emphasize his inability to be shocked by anything the author says.