No More Learning

Was it not necessary, then, to put the abolition of death on the agenda of a metaphysical revolution - and simultaneously an end to the fatalism of birth? What was the use of doing away with the absolutist state as long as one continued to pay tribute to the divine right of nature? Why liquidate the Tsar and his family if one did nothing to overturn the immemorial crowning of death as the lord of finitude?
Ending the Epoch of Death and Bagatelles
The speculative avant-garde of the Russian Revolution thought it had understood that one must begin directly at the highest rung on the abolition ladder if one wants to make the decisive difference. Otherwise the elimination of abuses and inequalities among people, even the abolition of the state and all repressive structures, would be provisional and in vain. If anything, they only sharpen the awareness of the absurdity that afflicts egalitarian 'society' as long as it fails to abolish death - including all forms of physical imperfection. Whoever wishes to eliminate the final cause of harmful privacy in human exist- ence must do away with the enclosure of each individual in their own little piece of lifetime. This is where the renewed 'common task' must begin. The true commune can only be formed by immortals; among mortals, the panic of self-preservation will always dominate. The equality of humans before death only satisfies that international of reactionary egalitarians who enjoy seeing the rich and powerful perish 'like cattle'. People of this kind have always sympathized with death in the role of the grand leveller - as presented annually at the Salzburg Jedermann production since 1920, dressed in the kitsch of the time. What none of these friends of the just end for all want to admit is the simple fact that death is the ultimate reactionary principle.
396
THE AUTO-OPERA TiVEL Y CURVED
nature.
by tirelessly inculcating it with the formula 'death is inevitable'. They provide the fuel for individualism, which encourages greed - in so far as one can apply this term to the striving to maximize experiences and advantages of being within the narrow window of existential time.
There could only be such a thing as a 'being-unto-death', which Heidegger emphasized as a structural feature of existence in his prin- cipal work of 1927, because even the most radical thinkers of the 'agonizing bourgeoisie' had not participated in the furthest-reaching revolution of the present day. In 1921, Alexander Svyatogor postu- lated a new agenda, beginning with the contention:
The question of the realization of personal immortality now belongs on the agenda in its full scope. It is time to do away with the inevitability of natural death. 130
In these words, we once again hear the tempus est with which Christian apocalypticism turns into the project of history: time itself has reached the point of supplying the password for the final histori- cal enterprise: do away with time! Whoever has understood the spirit of the age must ensure that there will soon be no more talk of finitude. The 'epoch of death and bagatelles' was coming to an end - what was beginning was 'the era of immortality and infinity'. 131 'Biocosmism alone can define and regulate society as a whole. '132 One year later, Alexander Yaroslavsky announced the birth of Cosmic Maximalism, which incorporated immortalism, interplanetarism and the suspen- sion of time, while Alexander Bogdanov simultaneously published his ideas on a 'Tectology of the Struggle Against Old Age'. He enthused over the notion that one could realize socialism physically by turning entire populations into artificial kinship circles and immune alliances through extensive reciprocal blood transfusions. With this physicali- zation of brotherliness, 'blood' - usually the domain of the right - transpires as the medium of an actual communist circulation. 133
,Anthropotechnics'
Among the authors of the metaphysical revolution in the 1920s, if I am not mistaken, it was Valerian Muraviev who examined the ques- tion of producing the New Human Being most extensively, thinking through its technological aspects from the widest possible perspec- tive. Naturally the contemporary thought form of the 'production of
397
corrupt
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS an
. ~ not least in the
H U . U U V U presented itself most nakedly. It the mass
production of socialist proletarians as the most pressing planned task; if they did not exist before, the supposed carriers of the revolution should at least be brought into being after the event. The language game of human production was equally firmly established in Soviet pedagogy. As far as we know, however, it was Muraviev - whose writings of the early 1920s contain the first use of the term 'anthro- potechnics', largely synonymous with the word 'anthropurgy', coined at the same time - who aimed more for the production of a higher form of human. 134 Owing to his study of Eastern and Western spir- itual traditions, Muraviev saw the connection between the ascetic and the technical revolt against nature more clearly than other authors with biocosmist-immortalist tendencies. In his view, the achievements stemming from conventional forms of 'asceticism and the Yogi move- ment' inevitably reached their limit because, through the age-old idealistic contempt for the material sphere, they remained defined by 'neglect of the bodily aspect'. The 'remoulding of human beings', however, 'was not conceivable merely in mental and moral terms'. Bs It now had be built on entirely new foundations - that is, on techni- cal, serial and collectively guided procedures. Among these, Muraviev states, eugenics would only have a secondary function on account of its clumsiness. Certainly, he writes, the eugenic procedures of the present go far beyond the primitiveness of Paracelsus' attempts to breed homunculi in calves' stomachs or pumpkins; nonetheless, they remain tied to the awkwardness of sexual reproduction and the ugly excesses of natural birth, which can only be viewed as an 'extraor- dinarily complicated, painful and imperfect process'. 136 Eugenics through breeding, which produces favourable results with plants and animals, can only be transferred to humans to a limited degree.
Consequently, Muraviev continues, one must think about new procedures in which the division of humanity into men and women becomes meaningless. The abolition of birth and the production of humans in the laboratory must lead to a 'fourth method for recasting the human being' - the other three being ascetic-didactic, therapeutic- medical and eugenic-breeding measures. Here the idea of what would later be called cloning momentarily appears ('budding'), which, according to Muraviev, should by no means only be considered the domain of lower life forms. If such a procedure were applied to more advanced creatures too, and ultimately to Homo sapiens, humans would no longer be the result of a sexual relationship between two
398
THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE
more ill a community to the highest When this com- munity devotes itself to the production of humans, it celebrates a
technical sacrament - in free synthesis outside of the old nature.
The appearance of New Human Beings would mean that of new bodies which could subsist on light and would no longer be subject to gravitation. At the same time, the new technology for creating humans would bring an unheard-of level of individualization within reach. In time, the template human of today would disappear, and the basis for vulgarity would be eliminated not only socially and aes- thetically, but also biologically. Then artists of Shakespeare's and Goethe's calibre would no longer create dramas, but humans and groups of humans - anthropic singularities and social sculptures that would make the works of earlier art history look like lifeless prelimi-
nary exercises. 137
The principal operation of biopolitical utopianism in Russia can
be expressed in a simple formula: what had previously seemed pos- sible only in the imagination would now be realized in technical procedures. Where there were man-made works, there would now be man-made life. Modern technology tears down the boundary between being and phantasm, and transforms impossibilities into schemata of the actually possible - empty sets that would now begin to be filled with actually existing entities. The term 'anticipation', which forms a common thread running through Marxist commentar- ies on the 'achievements' of earlier cultural periods, would now refer to planned phantasms. This same transgression of limits, incidentally, forms the basis of the American mass culture flourishing at the same time, which, especially since the flooding of the Hollywood 'dream factory' with European emigres, had been producing one variation after another on the motif of dreams come true. 138 Aron Zalkind (1889-1936), a Soviet psychologist who sought to combine Freudian and Pavlovian approaches in his 'pedology' of the 1920s (in order to reclaim the field of education for the widely used theory of 'condi- tioned reflexes', and to annex cultural theory as a field of application for higher reflexology), calls this 'scientifically based fantasizing'. 139 It provides the foundation for the art of socialist prognostics. 140 This is the concrete utopian counterpart of Oswald Spengler's equally pretentious attempt to place the narratability of the future on a sci- entific footing through insight into the processuallaws of 'cultures'. In his report on the psychosocial future of socialist humans, Zalkind predicted that they would be transformed through revolutionary treatment into ever more stable, more productive, more vital and
399
THE EXERCISES THE MODERNS
immune system in
a function of communal preservation - unlike in Western society, where individualist disintegration proceeds inexorably. The blurring of boundaries between didactics, therapy and politics is characteristic of Zalkind's opportunistic-optimistic argumentation: it conceives of communist humans as unlimitedly flexible patients of change who can only win if they allow unlimited operations on themselves. What Zalkind does not reveal are the methods of communist anaesthesia. Lenin knew: state terror is the functional equivalent of general anaes- thetic in difficult operations on large collectives.
Post-Communist Postlude: Revenge of the Gradual
I shall refrain from commenting on the empirical fate of the immor- talist and biocosmist impulses in the early phase of the Russian Revolution; no one should be surprised if the gulf between the pro- grammatic and the pragmatic is dramatic in such projects. If there were a pantheon of Icarian phenomena, the Russian bio-utopians would have a claim to a chapel of their own. Almost all of these protagonists of the highest abolition perished in the turbulences of the revolution they had so vigorously affirmed: except for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who, co-opted and honoured by Soviet officials 'as a brilliant son of the people', died at an advanced age in 1935, all other protagonists of the biopolitical revolt met an end more typical of the time. Svyatogor disappeared in a 'corrective labour camp' in 1937, at the age of forty-eight. Muraviev's trail ends around 1930, when he was roughly forty-five, in a detention camp - probably on the infamous Solovetzky Islands in the White Sea. Yaroslavsky was shot dead while trying to escape from said camp in December 1930, aged around thirty-five. Bogdanov died in 1928 at the age of fifty-five after performing a blood transfusion experiment on himself. Zalkind died of a heart attack at forty-eight, in 1936, upon receiving the news that the Central Committee of the Communist Party had condemned and banned his 'pedology' as 'anti-Marxist pseudo-science'.
It seems equally superfluous to explain at length why, after the end of the Second World War - and all the more after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc around 1990 - virtually no one in the East or the West had the slightest interest in a revolt against the human condition, the old Adam, the unconscious and the entire syndrome of finitudes - except in the simulation rooms of the unre-
400
become
IN THE CURVED SPACE
,n,v""-,, museum, is a curator every It would be a error, however, to conclude from global anti- utopianism 1945, which was only broken up by the third youth movement of the twentieth century - the international student revolt - that the system of modern 'societies' had lost its 'forward' orienta- tion and its quality as a universal training camp for ever-growing virtuosities, or 'qualifications' and 'competencies'.
In reality, the global system after 1945 simply carried out the neces- sary course correction. It eliminated the mode of revolution from its catalogue of operative options, instead deciding entirely on that of evolution. The appearance of neo-revolutionary discourses around 1968 was merely an expanded romanticism that appropriated such historical figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Brecht and Wilhelm Reich as ready-mades. In the principal current of the time, the gradualness party came to power once more - led by an elite of determined professional evolutionaries. Behind the exterior of the general anti-revolutionary mood, which articulated itself discursively as anti-totalitarianism or anti-fascism, lay a return to the progressive traditions of the Baroque and the Enlightenment, whose pragmatic core is the relatively con- stant, rationally supervised expansion of human options. In order to take part in these optimization movements, it was no more necessary for progress to be writ large than to feign belief in the goddess of history.
The development of the Western civilizatory complex after 1945 seems to provide almost complete confirmation for the moderate. It led to the saturation of one's surroundings with easily accessible means of world improvement for most. Their distribution occurred partly through free markets, partly through services of the redistribu- tive state and the overgrown insurance system - the two apolitical operationalizations of the solidarity principle, which do more for the practical implantation of leftist motifs than any political ideology could.
The most important intellectual-historical realignment, however, lay in the fact that metanoia changed its direction yet again: after an era of bloody slogans and malign abstractions, the commonplace seemed like something one could 'bring back' once more. Countless people realized that the here and now was a remote island on which they had never set foot. This supplied one of the preconditions for the rediscovery of the ethical distinction in its original form - the distinction between concern for oneself and attention to everything else. Nothing was more helpful for the disenchanted revolutionaries than the re-actualization of this distinction. In Jean-Luc Godard's film
401
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
utters time: 'One not save by saving a
militant youth movements, a creature that had been absent from the scene for a long time resurfaced: the adult. Its reappearance gave life to offensive pragmatisms that filled empty word-shells like 'democ- racy', 'civil society' or 'human rights' with actual content. Thus the awareness of what had been achieved was accompanied by a broad agenda outlining the next optimization steps for countless targets of progressive praxis. Today, this is the real working form of a decen- tralized international that articulates itself in tens of thousands of projects in the traditions of world improvement elan - without any central committee that would have to, or even could, tell the active what their next operations should be. 141
The all-pervasive pragmatism of the post-war years must not, therefore, be dismissed as restoration, as the eternal Jacobins would like. Nor does it express any return to modesty. In reality, the complex of Western 'societies' under the leadership of the USA has constantly raised the level of economic and technical evolution since the 1960s - to the point where the ability of populations to keep up with their fleeting financial and media system became problematic. This became manifest primarily after the neo-liberal coup against the semi-socialism of the 'mixed economy' that dominated the West after 1945 until the Thatcherist-Reaganist caesura of the late 1970s. 142 Through this aggravation of the climate, global capitalism transpired as the agency of 'permanent revolution' demanded in vain by the ideologues of the communist command-based economy. The mixed economy was popular as long as a capitalism domesticated by the welfare state could present itself as the power that more or less kept the promises of declared socialism. In the meantime, the accelerated permanent revolution known for the last twenty years as 'globalism' is compelling countless people to work once more on the expansion of their passivity competence - much to the displeasure of the last devotees of 'permanent revolution' in Europe, who dream incessantly of the lost comfort of Rhine Capitalism. 143 Exposed to the cruelties of the expanded world market, they feel the compulsion to have an operation again - this time to improve their competing fitness on the now unpredictable world markets. In the great financial crisis of 2008, however, the necessity of having operations also caught up with the operators.
The supra-epochal tendency of modernity towards a de-verticali- zation of existence continued under the present conditions. At the
402
! N THE AUTO-OPERA TIVEL Y
immune systems through some of
larism. This is the origin of the widespread new interest 'religious' and spiritual traditions - and the discreetly reawakening awareness of vertical imperatives. In fact, a resolute anti-verticalism established itself in the dominant forms of the zeitgeist after 1945: in existen- tialism as the cult of finitude, in vitalism as the cult of overexertion, in consumerism as the cult of metabolism, and in tourism as the cult of changing location. In this de-spirited time, top athletes took over the role of guarding the holy fire of exaggeration. They are the Dbermenschen of the modern world, beheaded Dbermenschen who strive to reach heights where the old human being cannot follow them - not even within themselves. It is the inner androids that now constantly exceed themselves. All that the old human being inside the athletes themselves can offer is a dull commentary on the perform- ances of the Dber-androids they embody.
403
-- 12-- EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
The Critique o f Repetition
Damned to Distinguish Between Repetitions
The ethical distinction took effect from the moment in which repeti- tion lost its innocence. The appearance of ascetics and asceticisms in the twilight of the advanced civilizations revealed a difference that had not been open to explicit development in earlier stages of civili- zation: in choosing to withdraw, the early practising ethicists broke with the conventional forms and attitudes of life. They abandoned the established repetition sequences and replaced them with different sequences, different attitudes - not arbitrarily different, but rather redemptively different ones. Where the original distinction between high and beneficial life forms on the one hand and hopelessly ordi- nary ones on the other hand makes its cut, it does so in the mode of a neuro-ethical programming that turns the entire old system against itself. Here there are initially no intermediate forms. Body and soul reach the other shore together - or not at all. 'The whole man must move at once. '
The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philoso- phers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehen- sive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodelled, the world of thoughts
404
EXERCISES AND
up,
rises up as a new construction on
favourable repetition.
A first enlightenment came about when the spiritual teachers
showed that humans are not so much possessed by demons as con- trolled by automatisms. They are not assailed by evil spirits, but by routines and inertias that force them to the ground and deform them. What impair their reason are not chance errors and occasional errors of perception - it is the eternal recurrence of the cliches that render true thought and free perception impossible. Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit: he recognized everyday opinion, the doxa, the pestilence that does not kill, but does occasionally poison entire communities. Empty phrases that have sunk down into the body produce 'characters'. They mould humans into living caricatures of averageness and turn them into incarnated platitudes. Because existence in the ethical distinction begins with the annihilation of empty phrases, it inevitably leads to the nega- tion of characters. Part of the charm of free humans is that one can see in them the caricature they might have become. Whoever sought to eradicate it would be the human without qualities, free for an absence of judgement, character and taste. Such a person would, like Monsieur Teste, state: 'La betise n'est pas mon fort. ' [Stupidity is not my strong suit. ] They would be the human who had killed the mari- onette inside them. The transformation occurs through mental de- automatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools to empty the cliche depot - a procedure that usually takes longer than a major psychoanalysis. Pythagoras sup- posedly demanded a five-year silence of his pupils at the beginning of their studies. Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: 'Every char- acteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. '144 The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.
This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the
405
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
lmmerse
costly is, now, point.
matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form. It results from an awkward discov- ery: there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour. The first ethicists faced the decision between a life in the usually unnoticed iron chains of involuntarily acquired habits and an existence on the ethereal chain of freely accepted discipline. The most erroneous possible conclusion one could draw from this is that the appearance of genuine practising awareness concerned purely the active. Let the sadhus torture themselves in their lonely forests with complicated breathing exercises; let the Stylites feel closer to heaven on their absurd pillars, and let the philosophers sell their second coats and sleep on the ground - the average mortals will cling nonethe- less to the opinion that these extravagant distortions of the ordinary are meaningless for them, the business of a sacred-perverse private meeting between the incomprehensible God and his artiste followers. Whoever is unable to participate can continue in their old habitus, which, though not perfect, seems good enough for everyday life.
The Creature that Cannot Practise
In reality, the secession of the practising places the entire ecosystem of human behaviour on an altered foundation. Like all acts of ren- dering things explicit, the appearance of the early practice systems brought about a radical modification of the respective area - that is, of the whole field of psychophysically conditioned actions. Explicit exercises, whether the asanas of the Indian yogis, the Stoics' experi- ments with letting go of the non-own, or the exercitationes spiritu- ales of Christian climbers on the heavenly ladder, cast a shadow on everything that lies opposite them on the implicit side: this is no less than the world of old Adam, the gigantic universe of unilluminated conventionalities. The shadow zone encompasses the area dominated by repetitions of an undeclared practice character. We can leave open the question of whether the psychoanalytical insult to humans claimed by Freud - triggered by the purportedly unwelcome discovery that the ego is not the master of its own house - ever really existed. There is certainly no doubt about the reality of the behaviouristic insult to humans, which could equally be called the ascetological one. It follows from the observation that 99. 9 per cent of our existence comprises repetitions, mostly of a strictly mechanical nature. The
406
EXERCISES AND MlSEXERClSES
IS to one IS original plenty others. If one to more
self-examination, one finds oneself in the psychosomatic engine room of one's own existence, where there is nothing to be gained from the usual flattery of spontaneity; and freedom theorists would do better to stay upstairs.
In this investigation, one advances into a non-psychoanalytical unconscious encompassing everything belonging to normally athe- matic rhythms, rules and rituals - regardless of whether it stems from collective patterns or idiosyncratic specializations. In this area, everything is higher mechanics, including intimate illusions of non- mechanics and unconditioned being-for-oneself. The sum of these mechanics produces the surprise space of personality, in which surprising events are actually very rare. Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted.
Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practise implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot practise - if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being's dispo- sition towards the next repetition. Just as Mr K. is always preparing his next mistake, humans as a whole are constantly taking the neces- sary steps to ensure that they will remain as they have been up until this minute. Whatever is not repeated sufficiently often atrophies - this is familiar from everyday observations, for example when the musculature of static limbs begins to degenerate after a few days, as if concluding from its temporary disuse that it has become superflu- ous. In truth, one should probably also keep the non-use of organs, programmes and competencies for exercises in steady decline. Just as there are implicit fitness programmes, there are also implicit unfitness programmes. That is why Seneca warns his pupil: 'A single winter relaxed Hannibal's fibre. '145 Other states of weakening may follow years of neglecting-work. 146
From this it follows that even a simple maintenance of bodily - or rather neurophysical - form can only be comprehended as an effect of undeclared training. This comprises routines whereby the stand- ard movements of an organ complex are, through inconspicuous procedures, employed often enough to stabilize the complex at its current fitness status. The self-activations of organisms in sequences of undeclared practice programmes, sequences that constantly have to be run through anew, culminate in a mute autopoiesis: the element
407
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
training programmes. The nocturnal actlVltleS of the brain, part of which one experiences as dreams, are probably first and foremost back-up processes for the self-programme in its state prior to the last waking
phase. The self is a storm of repetition sequences beneath the roof of the skull.
Personal identity, then, offers no indication of a mental essence or inert form; it rather shows the active overcoming of a probability of decline. Whoever remains identical to themselves thus confirms themselves as a functioning expert system specializing in constant self-renewal. For surprise-friendly creatures of the Homo sapiens type, even triviality is not futile. It can only be attained through a con- stant cultivation of identity whose most important aid is inward and outward self-re-trivialization. Re-trivialization is the operation that enables organisms capable of learning to treat something new as if they had never encountered it - whether by equating it mechanically with something familiar or by openly denying its didactic value. Thus the new, initially and mostly, has no chance of integration into the apparatus of operating gestures and ideas because it is assigned either to the familiar or to the insignificant. 147
If, in turn, the neolatric culture of modernity posits meaning in the new per se, this causes a brightening of the global learning climate; the price of this is a historically unprecedented will to be dazzled that gives unlimited credit to illusions of the new. Even manifest stupid- ity, incidentally, cannot be taken as a simple datum: it is acquired through long training in learning-avoidance operations. Only after a persistent series of self-knockouts by the intelligence can a habitus of reliable mindlessness become stable - and even this can be undone at any time through a relapse into non-stupidity. Conversely, every learning-theoretical romanticism should be viewed sceptically, even if it appears under classical names. Aristotle was speaking as a roman- tic when he stated in the first line of his Metaphysics: 'All humans strive for knowledge by nature. ' In fact, every striving for knowledge - understood by Aristotle above all as primary visual enjoyment - encounters its limits as soon as something new appears that one does not want to see. Such things are usually sights that are irreconcilable with the imperative of preserving identity. Then the much-lauded thirst for knowledge among humans turns in a flash into the art of not having seen or heard anything.
The ethical distinction not only uncovers the hidden practice char- acter of ordinary life; it also reveals the gulf between the previous
408
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
existence in the accustomed and the metanoetic life forms that must be newly chosen. This distinction demands cruelty towards oneself and others; it leads to overload in its most naked state. We hear its original voice when Jesus says: 'Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. '148 'Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple. '149 'I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. '150 The blade of distinction is the apocalypse that takes place now or never.
The Re·Exercising of All Exercises
Just as a person's unexpected suicide calls their entire social environ- ment into question, an individual's conversion to philosophy or their entrance into an ethical group problematizes the modus vivendi of all those with whom they had previously lived under the same roof - bound by the same customs, impregnated with the same habits, entangled in the same stories. Every conversion implies the speech act: 'I herewith leave the shared reality', or at least the statement of intent, 'I wish to leave the continuum of the false and harmful. ' To do this, the adept does not need to board the ship that would take them to the island of Utopia. The destinations are often only a few hours' travel from the hopeless villages or a day's walk from the agitated city. Whoever seeks out these heterotopias knows that once they arrive there, they will have to undertake far longer inner than outer journeys.
If an applicant is taken up into a community of the practising, their further life consists in the systematic revaluation of values. The Cynics called this procedure 'defacing the coin' (paracharattein to nom;sma), which also means 'changing one's customs'. Thus a counterfeiter's metaphor provides the keyword in the history of higher morals. The ethical mints are training camps for the ethos in need of remoulding.
For the cynics of the fourth century Be, this meant renouncing all forms of behaviour based on arbitrary human rules and henceforth listening only to the physis. These unabashed dissidents were prob- ably the only wise men to believe that one could do such a thing in the middle of the city - provided one could find a vacant barrel. The other adepts of ethical difference knew very well that it is best to turn one's back on one's usual abode. As ethos and topos belong together, a different ethos calls for a different residence - one can only return to the origin if one is so deeply rooted in the new place and the changed habitus that there is no risk of relapsing into the old one. Until one
409
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
llH,aUH a spacein
many - ton pollan 151 - bounce
the better knowledge of few. Among the early Greek Christians, one openly named a remote training centre after the activities that went on there: asketeria, or sometimes hesychasteria, a place for exercises in silence. The Indian word ashram, still in frequent use today, refers to the 'place of exertion'. Sannyasin, on the other hand, the Indian name for the world-abstinent, literally means 'one who has cast off all things' - including the ties to a profane abode. It is said that the Indian wise man Tota Puri (c. 1815-75), Ramakrishna's teacher, who bore the epithet 'the naked' (nagka), never wore clothes, never slept under a roof and never stayed in one place for more than three days in his entire life. For Nietzsche, only a generation younger than the evasive Indian, the other place was Sils Maria, at the foot of mountains that are mirrored in the severe smoothness of Lake Silvaplana, 'six thousand feet beyond man and time'.
The ethical distinction brings about the catastrophe of habits. It exposes humans as beings that grow accustomed to anything. 'Virtue' is one possibility of habituation among others. Humans are equally able, however, to make the worst their own until it seems incontest- ably self-evident. Any inhabitant of a somewhat freer country today who looks at conditions in overt dictatorships will find ample evi- dence of this, whether in the daily news or in the archives. One has to have seen a Nuremberg Rally, a Moscow parade on 1 Mayor a mass gymnastic performance in Pyongyang to have an idea of how far an attachment to the abhorrent can extend. From the perspective of the Greek asketeria, the Indian ashram or the Upper Egyptian hermitage, however, the entire empirical world of humans was already nothing but a corrupt training camp early on, one in which comprehensive wrongness exercises were performed day and night - under the guid- ance of semi-lucid kings with the rank of gods, pseudo-knowledgeable elders and gloomily severe priests who only knew how to pass on conventional rules and idle rituals: they translated external necessi- ties into holy customs, which they then defended like holy necessities. The rest is 'culture' - in so far as this means the copier that guarantees the self-preservation of the convention complex (in newer jargon: a memeplex) through the transference of prevailing patterns from one generation to the next and the one after that.
All moral philosophy is superficial, then, if it is not based on a distinction between habits. Even a Critique of Practical Reason relies on unguaranteed conditions as long as the most important
410
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISE<,
not can
even out of bad habits, under what circumstances do they succeed in finding a new rooting in good ones? Kant's well- known argument from the text on peace, that even 'a race of devils', if it has a modicum of sense, must find a passable modus vivendi by establishing a legal order uncannily similar to a civil constitution, is flawed because he fails to understand anti-moral gravitation: 'being a devil' - whether poor or evil is unclear - is only a metaphor for an actor's trapped state within an ignorant habitus, and it is precisely the undoing of this that Kant makes too easy for himself in his appeal. 152 The Kantian devils are merchants who know how much they can go too far, well-behaved egotists who have attended their rational choice seminars. A true race of devils embodies a collective of fatal- ists where de-disciplining has reached the fundamentalist level. They do not merely live in the squalid cellars of St Petersburg; they are at home in every dead-end banlieue and every chronic battle zone. In such circumstances, individuals are convinced that nothing is more normal than the hell they have provided for one another as long as anyone can remember. No devil without its circle, and no hell without the circle made of circles. Whoever grows accustomed to hell becomes immune to the call to change their life - even if it is in their own interests. The meaning of own interests is already trapped by running in the harmful circle. Under such conditions, it is almost irrelevant what instructions one gives the inmates of these personal circuli vitiosi to bring them to their senses, for failure is certain what- ever one does: one should neither hope for any results from the inner 'moral improvement of man', which Kant too wisely abandoned, nor from the external 'mechanism of nature working through the self- seeking propensities of man',153 whose reciprocal neutralization the philosopher considered a way to achieve at least an enforced peace. Experience shows that peace between inhabitants of infernal circles comes not from a mutual tempering of 'self-seeking propensities', but from concrete asymmetries. These can result from one-sided exhaus- tion or a resounding victory by one party. That is why systemicists
say that the one of the tools of evil is the inability to win.
The Source of Bad Habits: On the Metaphysics of the Iron Age
Before we settle the matter of whether humans can be uprooted from bad habits, and if so, by what method, we should recapitulate
411
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
how they were able to take root in them in the first place. Instead of unde malum? we now ask: unde mala habitudo? The classical moral- theological answers exist as catalogues of vices, of which the seven- part list by Gregory the Great from the late sixth century enjoyed the greatest success. 154
These state that bad habitus is the consequence of an evil decision, born of leisure and encouraged by arrogance. Some mythical answers go deeper, looking beyond the individual and relating bad habits to the necessity of inhabiting a barren world. If this were a culture- historical investigation, a passage on the natural history of need and its translation into the human sphere would have to follow here. In our context, it is sufficient to note that the earliest articulations of the difficulty of being a human date from the era of Mesopotamian and Mediterranean empires. One finds anonymous authors speaking for the first time of an unease in the world that points beyond any unease in culture. Hs
Instructive statements about the genesis of negative habitualiza- tions are provided by the two great myths about the human condition that mark the beginnings of the ancient Western civilizatory complex: on the Judaeo-Christian side the biblical tale of the expulsion of the first human couple from Paradise, and on the Graeco-Roman side the doctrine of the Golden Age - which, owing to a dark causality of deterioration, had led to the present Iron Age via the intermediate stages of the Silver and Bronze Ages. Both narratives share the inten- tion of explaining the normality of the bad; what sets them clearly apart from each other is the means they use to achieve this. The former explains the stay of post-Paradise humanity in a chronically unsatisfying reality using a moral catastrophe model known as the Fall of Man; the latter attributes the difficulties of the human race to a law of destiny that defines the present as the third stage of decay in a providential worsening process. While the moralistic model explains the unfavourable status quo as a consequence of overstepping a single boundary, the myth of the Ages of Man needs three descending steps to interpret mankind's unbalanced state as a result of the adverse conditions of the Iron Age.
I will not linger on the conclusion that the fatalistic interpretation far exceeds the moralistic one in terms of contemplative breath and historico-philosophical substance, whereas the moralistic version has a stronger personal effect on addressees due to its invasive tendency. From a systemic perspective, the biblical account contains a signifi- cant element of 'moral insanity', as it twists the knife even deeper into
412
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
the chronically burdened humans in order to read their situation as an inherited debt and well~deserved punishment. At the same time, there is a certain psychagogical prudence in the culpabilistic arrangement, for humans, as empirical findings show, become substantially more resistant to suffering when they are presented with a clear sense of 'what for' - or, failing that, at least a 'why' and a 'from where'. The Christian reception of the tale describing the expulsion from Paradise produced a civilization whose members cannot experience hardship without thinking they deserve it. We regularly display our willingness to take the blame for our suffering, as if making a contribution to a semantic health insurance - in fact, what was viewed as a commit~ ment to the Christian 'religion' was often no more than our manda~ tory contribution to this guilt system.
In the present context, however, what concerns us is the shared dedication of the Jewish and Graeco~Roman narratives to interpret- ing the situation of humans in the world as a permanent stay in a malign milieu. The point of departure for both is the evidence that human existence in its present manifestation is fundamentally a being-in-need - including the necessity of adapting to need. Together they support the complementary evidence that the current state of affairs can only be understood as a fall from an originally completely different state. The chronic misery only appears as a consequence of epochal deteriorations, whether gradual and repetition~based or singular and catastrophic. In both cases, habitualized misery is experienced differentially: in the real domain it contrasts with the modus vivendi of happy individuals, who are still better off than most others, and in the imaginary domain with the notions of times in which things were better for everyone. This difference provides the matrix for the search for the other condition. 'Where life itself is a withdrawal treatment, it provides fertile ground for addiction. '156 The connection between addiction and search is explained by etymolo~ gists and psychologists. 1s7
Realism, Scarcity, Alienation
According to the oldest behavioural theories, adaptation to a chroni~ cally inappropriate climate creates a habitus that could, in a non~ philosophical sense, be termed realism; it is best described as a reinforced perseverance under chronic pressure. In the biblical account the emphasis is placed on holding out in a bowed state - 'by the sweat of your brow' under the constraints of agriculture - while
413
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to lead an existence in
and corrupt neighbours. The most important results of banishment, according to the Book of Genesis, are the curse of work and the hardship of birth, and in Hesiod's version the chronically unreliable nature of social relationships and the perversion of neighbour-ethical norms. ISS
Both models contain rudimentary social philosophies and elemen- tary hermeneutics of need that can be mapped onto modern theories of alienation: according to the former, the fall from the paradisaic non-working world to the sphere of forced work through the trau- matic advent of scarcity. The necessity of living in a milieu of scarcity results from humanity's primal guilt: no one who has sinned will ever get enough. Because of an unforgivable transgression, the primal habitus of enduring in the face of constant lack is burned into the notion of the world entertained by man, the supposedly 'deficient being'. 159 It constitutes a primary disciplining elevated to a prevailing mood. From this follow primal resignation, which leads to realism as an inner regulator of hardness, and primal escapism, which postulates the establishment of imaginary wealth enclaves.
This places the stranger in the role of the one who dramatizes scar- city by threatening to consume that on which my survival and the self-assertion of my group depend. The first stranger is the master on whom I have become dependent and who keeps me alive, but takes away every surplus that would improve my lot if I could keep it; he is my exploiter and my rescuer at once. The second stranger is the enemy, who takes until there is nothing left. One is alienated, then, if one has a master and an enemy - regardless of whether, as in psy- chopolitical set pieces, one joins forces with the master against the enemy in an emergency or with the enemy against the master - as can be observed in the dissolution of loyalties in palace revolts, rebellions and revolutionary wars.
What Sartre writes in his investigations of alienated 'praxis' on the 'man of scarcity' (l'homme de la rarete)160 is, in essence, merely an exegesis of the biblical expulsion myth, read through a Hegelian conceptual grid. Scarcity imposes the impossibility of coexistence on the collective. Sartre locates this infernal existential one dimension too deep to reconcile it with the Marxist concept of exploitation; likewise, he places competition and mutual reification through the evil 'gaze' in such depths that no reconciliation or befriending could ever overcome them, either inside or outside the sphere of scarcity. Thus he not only fails to see the possible productivity of competi-
414
EXERCISES MISEXERcrSES
through modern property economy. project recuperating Marxism by enriching it with existentialist motifs was thus doomed to miss the mark from the outset. The deepest source of Sartre's failure, however, is not his pandering to the internally flawed critique of political economy; it is rather his philosophical equation of the human being with the epicentre of nothingness. It is where he draws most resolutely on metaphysical jargon that he becomes most remote from the present state of human knowledge. The human being is not negativity, but rather the point of difference between repetitions.
Hesiod emphasizes the disintegration of social cohesion in his state- ments on the Iron Age. What strikes him most is that the habitus of disloyalty predominates in the current race of humans, even among relatives and apparent friends. The 'natural' parameters of good and bad, honour and dishonour etc. , all seem to have been inverted in the Iron Age. From a culture-historical perspective, this shows a pragmatic general climate in which populations with a rural char- acter are obliged to learn unaccustomed urban-strategic life forms. In this change, individuals must learn to switch from mentality to success; they are forced to exchange recognition from their relatives and neighbourhoods for recognition from public markets and power cliques. They have to abandon the intuitive sense of right and wrong they have developed and become accustomed to the primacy of insti- tutionalized court procedure. Together these adjustments amount to a change of habitus that followers of older values, like the farmer- poet Hesiod, could only view as training for a world gone wrong. I shall add in passing that the Koran, despite coming into existence twelve hundred years later, shares several aspects of Hesiod's world- view as described in Works and Days. Here the farmer's distrust of the incomprehensible new world of traffic has grown into the desert- dweller's apocalyptic hatred of large cities, which were impenetrable for the old mindset. Here, what some call prophetism is the fiery form of saying no to heightened complexity.
The Ascetic Suspension of Alienation: The Five Fronts
These considerations enable us to define the consequences of the ethical distinction more precisely: it aims for the systematic weaning of the subject from the reality effects of the Iron Age. Contrary to one's first impression, it questions the finality of the post-paradisaic condition. To separate the practising individual from the dominant
415
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
reality bloc, the ascetic revolt consistently attacks its opponent's strongest point. The great weaning process, as the history of asceti- cisms shows, is directed at the five main fronts of need: material scar- city, the burden character of existence, sexual drive, alienation and the involuntary nature of death. In these fields, the early explicitly practising life proves that it is possible to compensate for even the most widespread existential deformations - albeit at a price that leads most to accept the ills instead. It is not only the fear of something after death, as Hamlet says, 'that makes calamity of so long life'; even more, it is the hesitation before breaking out of a well-rehearsed and accepted misery. Given the choice between acquired deforma- tion through reality and the feared deformations through asceticism practised lege artis, the majority has always chosen the former. They preferred to wait for a comfortable revolution that, so they were told, would come as an 'event'. People have always recoiled from the inconvenient realization that nothing happens unless one brings it about oneself.
Against Hunger
Historical evidence shows that the earliest asceticisms developed on the poverty front: the ancient Indian practice masters were probably the first to discover the principle of voluntary withdrawal that, one could say, takes the subject to the other side of suffering. As early as the earliest Brahmans, an extremism of abstinence came about, driven by the fantastic belief that the metabolism is but one of the illusions with which Maya, the sensuous veil maker, makes fools of humans. By expanding abstinence from food to a somatic-spiritual technique, they transformed hunger into a voluntary act of fasting; they turned a humiliating passivity into an ascetic action. The dis- empowerment of hunger led directly to the emancipation from the compulsion to work. Whoever chooses abstinence exits the producing life and knows only exercises. The early cultures of beggar monks in Asia and Europe prove that for their fellow humans, the spectacle of the spirit's superiority to the minimized body was worth a sacrifice: alms were the entrance fee for the theatre of spiritual triumphs. One could say that those who made donations to the monks were falling for priestly deception, but the psychological reality was very differ- ent. The ancient beggar economy belongs to the realm of the search for autonomy, even for the poorest of the poor: someone who has almost nothing, yet shares the most frugal meal with someone else,
416
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
m
case Francis of Assisi, the appears in the relationship of courtly love to Lady Poverty - some Europeans, perhaps not the most morally insensitive, are impressed to this day by this transformation of a misery factor into a gallant allegory. Let us note that the old workers' movement in Europe still knew something
~about the first rebellion against the tyranny of need. Whether starving or eating: solidarity . . .
Against Overtaxing
The second expansion of the autonomy zone is due to the early ath- letes and their forerunners in the military nobility. They found a way to disable the law of permanent overtaxing to which the great major- ity of people in class societies submit. While the normal response to chronic strain is a mixture of hardenings and little escapes that wear individuals down sooner or later, warriors and athletes develop the opposite response: they gain degrees of freedom from the burden character of existence by consistently outdoing the difficult through the even more difficult. They show that a state of great effort is no sufficient reason not to make an even greater effort. The image of Hercules at the crossroads is the primal ethical scene of Europe: this ultimate hero of being-able-to-do-something embodies the rule that one becomes human by choosing the difficult path. For this, it is nec- essary to favour the austerity of arete over the sweetness of depravity.
Athletic irony pushes the boundaries back into the unbelievable - where there was nobody-can-do-this, there is now I-can. This expansion of the ability horizon also has a direct influence on the general sphere. Even the vulgar curiosity of the audience at athletic and circus performances contains a solidarity with the actors that has anthropologically far-reaching implications. Like the hunger artist, the athletes have a message for the psychologically poorest and the physically weakest that is worth sharing in: the best way to escape from exhaustion is to double the load. Even someone who cannot imagine following this maxim literally should still draw inspiration from it. The theory that there is always room to go higher is one that concerns everyone.
It is in this context that one must assess the future of modern sport. Like a Herculean collective, it is standing at a crossroads. Either the athlete continues to act as a witness to the human ability to take forward steps at the threshold of the impossible - with unforeseeable
417
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
transference effects on all who involve themselves in the appealing spectacle161 - or they continue along the path of self-destruction that is already marked out, where moronic fans shower co-moronic stars with admiration from the very bottom, the former drunk and the latter doped. One might recall in this context that Euripides already considered the athletic scene in the fourth century Be, which had taken on a decadent life of its own, a plague. 'Of all the count- less evils in Greece, none is worse than the race of athletes (athleton genous). ' 162
Against Sexual Need
On the third front, the activists turn their attention towards the ten- sions of sexual drive. As the libido was usually condemned to a long wait in many older cultures, especially those with strictly patriarchal rules for marriage and family relations - decades often passed between the reaching of sexual maturity and possible legalized sexual activity - eros was experienced by countless people as an unliveable dilemma. For so many, the kindest of all the gods thus transpired as the cruell- est. If one yielded to one's urges, one could easily descend into dis- order; if one resisted them, one faced constant torture from within. Thus the despair at sexuality became a constant factor of the unease in civilization. The widespread outlet institutions of prostitution, concubinage, letting off steam with slaves, masturbation, licences for the young etc. alleviated the problem, but did not solve it. The ascetic response to the challenge of the sexual drive was to transform the constant excess of specific pressure into an aspecific elan to strive for higher goals. The procedure for this, to use a more recent term, was sublimation. Plato revealed its schema by describing the ladder on which sensual desire ascends to a spiritual motivation - from one beautiful body to another, and from the plurality of beautiful bodies to the singularity of the beautiful. This ultimately transpired as the side of the good itself that shines in sensuality. In its conventional manifestations, philosophical critique of sexuality merely accuses it of sabotaging the ascent - whether it creates a fixation on frustrating fantasies when it is unfulfilled or, when fulfilled, drains off mental energy and gets caught in the small-scale cycle of tension and relaxa- tion. Monastic critique of sexuality takes a far more direct approach from the outset by virtually demonizing physical desire - but with the same aim: to create perpetual desire and keep it at the necessary tem- perature. What this infinitized desire - which still haunted the shame-
418
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
most cause to is the relapse into that
the return tepid prose. This finitude is dominated by trivial inner states, depression, lack of elan, as well as the banal excess drive that does not lead to any goal-achieving or boosting programmes. The uninspired psyche is unable to feel encompassed by an absolute - this spawns the gloom which the early abbots called abidia, the midday demon that paralyses the monk's soul with indifference to God and everything else. Akedia appears in the list of Seven Deadly Sins as 'sluggishness' or 'sloth', and those who know it well almost fear it more than the queen of all vices, superbia. 163 In modernity, infinite desire separated from humans and migrated to the economic system, which produces its own restlessness, while individuals increasingly discover that they can no longer follow the perverse imperative of always desiring and enjoying more.
Against Domination and Enmity
On the fourth front, the ascetic revolt puts an end to alienation by showing that humans can never be forced to have a master and an enemy. Here too, the method of liberation is a voluntary exaggera- tion of the evil: the ascetic enslaves themselves so radically that no empirical enslavement can touch them any longer. They choose their master in the highest heights to free themselves from all second-class masters. Hence Abraham breaks free of the visible gods by avowing his invisible God; hence the Cynic-Stoic wise man submits to the law of the cosmos, which emancipates him from arbitrary human regula- tions; hence Christ sarcastically recommends giving unto Caesar what is Caesar's, for loyalty belongs to the God of the faithful and the rela- tionship with Caesar can therefore be no more than external. Thus Paul reminds the Romans that they were once slaves of sin, but now, as slaves of righteousness, are free. 164 He even introduces himself in his opening salutation as a chosen slave of God - and for that very reason a free man. Modern references to the 'rule of law' still recall the language of the oldest supremacism, which held that freedom could only exist under the law. Coercion by the highest downgrades all other compulsions to second-order factors. The dominion of the general is a medium of asceticism against the dominion of the con- crete. Consequently, any universalism worth taking seriously presup- poses an ascetic mode of access to the sphere of norms. Anyone who wishes to have universalism without the work of renunciation, as if it
419
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
same time, ascetic emancipates themselves from the compulsion to have an enemy by choosing a universal enemy within, who can only appear in the outside world in second-rate projections. Whoever knows that the devil dwells inside them no longer needs an external malicious partner. Hence the advice to turn the other cheek, and hence the Buddhist caution that the torture victim must not lose sympathy for their torturer. Moral asceticism takes away the enemy's power to make us strike back. Whoever moves beyond the level of reacting to enmity breaks the vicious circle of violence and counter- violence - albeit often at the price of remaining the suffering party.
Moral hyperbole of this kind only draws small audiences in modernity, while the majority once again demands the licence to strike back. The cause of this is primarily the change in the prevail- ing mood: the anti-thymotic psychopolitics of Christianity, which cautioned people for almost two thousand years to conduct an inner inquisition against all stirrings of pride and self-affirmation, no longer has a footing in the 'achieving society' of today. 165 Let us not forget that every advanced legal system implies a scaled-down reproduction of ascetic abstinence from direct governance, because it forces the wronged party to seek redress via the indirect path of a third party's judgement structured as court proceedings.
Against the Necessity of Dying
On the fifth front, the heroes of the ethical distinction attack death by transferring it from the sphere of abstract and fatal necessity into that of personal ability. They abolish the terrorism of nature to which mortals have been subjected since time immemorial. This does not have to go as far as a physicalization of the immortality idea as found in the writings of Paul, then once more of the Russian biocosmists,166 and currently among the American techno-gnostics, whose ambition is to absorb theology into physics. 167 The conversion of necessity into ability presupposes a strong notion of continuum that spans the boundary between life and death - this can be seen in the two great scenes of the art of dying in Old Europe, the death of Socrates and that of Jesus. 168 Through demonstrations of composure in death, the end of life exemplarily changes into a symbolic order with a strong sense of continuum, as if 'crossing over' were no more than a change in the state of matter.
420
cost
EXERCISES IVUSEXERCISES
An
perishment
It equally contradicts the naked killing that pervades Homer's world, which virtually overflows with second-class dead who are left lying on the ground without honour to become food for the dogs and vul- tures, while the incomparable slayer Achilles finds a place in Hellenic memory. The symbolically nurtured death in Christianity extends the memorial function to the saved, who remain unforgotten in a divine memory and thus become immortal. One could describe the work of ascetics on the life-death continuum as an original accumulation of civilizatory energy that allows even the most external compulsion to be embedded in the interior of the symbolic order. A modern trace of this civilization is visible in the growing suicide movement in the West. It has dismantled the metaphysical exuberance of the ascetic art of dying, but works on the meanwhile secure evidence that humans are always entitled to experience their death in culturally tended forms. The sound arguments of contemporary movements advocating a dignified death aim to break up the alliance between a reactionary religion and a progressive technological medicine, which together barely allow more than a higher form of bucket-kicking. Instead, the goal is to make the achievement of ascetic cultures - embedding death in a shared ability - accessible also to non-ascetics.
The Post-Metaphysical legacy of the Metaphysical Revolt
Looking back at the ascetic revolts against the reality principle of the Iron Age permits a clearer definition of what I call the de- spiritualization of asceticisms. It shaped a significant stretch of the path to modernity, in so far as this epoch was characterized by the pragmatic levelling of metaphysical upswings. This process forces the excesses into the arts, as well as the adjustment that Gotthard Gunther terms the transition 'from the truth of thought to the prag- matics of action'. 169 In this sense, modernity constitutes a strong substitute programme for the ethical secession. Its precondition is the demonstration that on the five fronts of the old need, one can still win by other means than those used in battle by the practice heroes of earlier times. This was precisely the motto proclaimed by the pan- sophists of the Renaissance and the pioneers of explorative thought: humans can do anything of their own accord as soon as they want to. They opened the door to the post-miserablist age - which, for the same reason, is also a post-metaphysical one, as it reacts to existential
it is
421
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
answers.
metaphysically means getting the burdens of old
condition with the aid of technology and without extreme ascetic pro- grammes. The only modern-day ascetics whose victories one wishes to be authentic are athletes - whereas the spiritual victors over the old human condition have been stripped of their authority through the culture of suspicion. Anyone who heard a voice from a burning thorn bush after forty days in the desert would be taken for a victim of a psychedelic episode. Anyone who claimed to transcend sexuality without ever having known it could be sure of being diagnosed neu- rotic. And modern observers of religion consider Buddha Amida, who reveals himself to Japanese monks after one hundred nights of sleep deprivation, a local psychosemantic effect.
Because of its egalitarian design, modernity feels compelled to reformulate all truths that were previously accessible only to the few into truths for the many - and neglect whatever is lost in translation. This eliminates the foundation of practical ascetic extremism, but affirms its tendencies in all aspects: it is indeed necessary to set up a strong antithesis to the misery-based definition of reality in the agro- imperial age - if this can now also be articulated by non-metaphysical and non-heroic means, then all the better. Everyone of these transla- tions ensued after the technical caesura of the Modern Age. The prin- ciple of their success is displayed by the fact that during the last three hundred years, an unprecedented civilizatory learning cycle has been active that fundamentally changed the laws of existence from the Iron Age - and continues to change them. At times, this cycle has helped the dream of a return to a Golden Age or a restoration of Paradise to political power, and even if the dream was never going to come true, the dream tendency as such already tells us something about the prevailing mood of the newer era. It was based on the intuition that the principle of reality had become a malleable plasma. Communist maximalism, which would accept nothing short of total renewal, has lost its psychological plausibility; it only lives on indirectly in the weary hatred which ex-radicals and their imitators in the third and fourth generation show towards our more moderate conditions. Nonetheless, the idea of returning to the second best still has great practical charm.
In fact, Europeans and Americans, to use Hesiod's terms, cata- pulted themselves into a renewed Silver Age in the second half of the twentieth century. Within the 'Crystal Palace', they created conditions for the majority that differed not gradually but epochally, or rather aeonically, from everything that had been the case a few centuries
422
EXERCISES AND
US once 1846 ~ epochal date in the history pain. 170 We also emphasize de-agrarianization of economic life, and thus the end of the 'idiocy of rural life'. 171 To the historian, it is beyond doubt that virtually all inhabitants of the Crystal Palace profit, at least in material and infrastructure terms, from unprecedented improvements in living conditions172 - a fact that is augmented and confirmed by the equally unprecedented blossoming of a culture of additional demands. The spiral of resignation from the Iron Age has been reversed and turned into an upward spiral of desire.