No More Learning

Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.
The reference to the pluralism of central distinctions is not meant only to draw attention to the multifarious 'cultures' or 'scenes'. Such a pluralism of central distinctions also implies an explanation of how, in the history of 'cultures', especially in their more intense and crea- tive phases, there could be superimpositions and mixtures of initially separate areas, reversals of values and intersections of disciplines - phenomena, then, that underlie the forms of spirituality and sophis- tication still attractive today. It is because the central distinctions can migrate from their original field and settle successfully in foreign
13
INTRODUCTION: ON THE ANTHROPOTECHNIC TURN
highest possibilities human
a non-economic definition of wealth, a non-aristocratic definition of the noble, a non-athletic definition of high achievement, a non- dominatory definition of 'above', a non-ascetic definition of perfec- tion, a non-military definition of bravery and a non-bigoted definition of wisdom and fidelity.
To conclude these preparatory remarks, I would like to say a few words on the partiality of the present book and warn of a misunder- standing that could easily occur. The following investigations take their own result as the point of departure: they testify to the realiza- tion that there are objects which do not permit their commentator a complete epoche, no withdrawal into disinterestedness, even if the project is theory - which presupposes an abstinence from prejudices, caprices and zealous obsessions. We are dealing here with an object that does not leave its analyst alone; it would not be appropriate to the topic if the author were to remain entirely behind the fence of non- intentionality. The matter itself entangles its adepts in an inescapable self-referentiality by presenting them with the practising - the 'ascetic', form-demanding and habit-forming - character of their own behav- iour. In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them! 'J8 Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial.
The same applies to the phenomenon of vertical tensions, without which no purposeful practising is possible. With reference to ten- sions of this kind, the theorist will do nothing to fend off their bias - aside from the usual willingness to clarify that which causes it. Anthropological study understands an affection by the matter itself as a sign of its philosophical orientation. In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of special- ists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the com- prehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights.
14
easily occur. It fact at present a large number of people \'\'ith 'religious' interests are taking part in a large-scale anti-naturalistic mobilization that seeks to fend off the alleged and genuine interventions of the reductive sciences in the hallowed regions of what is experienced and qualitatively felt. It is immediately clear how the arguments against naturalism serve an early epistemological defence of the facts of faith. Whoever transfers what they experience to an inner fortress that cannot be conquered by the scientistic Saracens of today or tomorrow can, initially at least, believe they have done enough to place these delicate treasures under philosophical protection. This at least secures the conditions of the possibility of religiosity, if not the actual tenets of faith. The criticism levelled at naturalists - represented mostly by assertive neurologists today - rightly on the whole, concerns the tendency, conditioned by their field, to view the facts of consciousness in functional distortion and external reflection, without being able to do justice to the irre- solvable single-mindedness of the ideational elements that appear in
the first-person perspective.
To those who deal with these thought figures,19 I would like to say
that at their core, the following investigations serve neither natural- istic nor functionalistic interests, although I consider it desirable to keep open the possibility of drawing on the results of such research from the 'spirit side' too - especially under the aforementioned immunological aspect. If my intention leads to a defamiliarization or, at times, a provocative re-description of the objects of analysis, it is not because external systems of logic are applied to them - as one can observe when neuroscientists talk about Christology20 or geneticists discuss the DNA of monotheists. 21 The defamiliarization resulting from my theoretical exercises, if it is perceived as such, rests entirely on internal translations by which the internal anthropotech- nic languages are made explicit in the spiritual systems themselves. What I refer to here as 'internal languages' are, as can be shown, already contained in the countless 'religiously' or ethically coded practice systems, so making them explicit does not cause any foreign infiltration. With their help, the things inherently expressed by the holy texts and time-honoured rules are restated in a closely connected alternative language. Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.
15
TURN
The Planet of the Practising
THE COMMAND FROM THE STONE
Rilke's Experience
I will first of all present an aesthetic example to explain the phenom- enon of vertical tensions and their meaning for the reorientation of the confused existence of modern humans: the well-known sonnet 'Archaic Torso of Apollo', which opens the cycle New Poems: The Other Part from 1908. Beginning with a poetic text seems apposite because - aside from the fact that the title of this book is taken from it - its assignment to the artistic field makes it less likely to provoke those anti-authoritarian reflexes which follow almost compulsively from any encounter with statements made dogmatically or from above - 'what does "above" mean anyway! ' The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose. 'l Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them.
Rilke's 'Torso' is particularly suited to posing the question of the source of authority, as it constitutes an experiment about allowing oneself to be told something. As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau- like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the 'priority of the object'. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object
19
THE PRACTISiNG
masters, In case to
thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.
In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter. When, and only when, being contracts in privileged things and turns to us via these things can we hope to escape the increasing randomness, both aesthetically and philosophically. In the face of the galloping inflation of chatter, it was inevitable that such a hope would draw in numerous artists and people of 'spirit' around 1900. In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing- poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to cred- ible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.
It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speak- ing once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden], to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger. This underlies the complicity between the speaking thing and Rilke's poetry - just as, only a few years later, Heidegger's things would conspire with the 'legend' of a con- templative philosophy that no longer wants to be a mere scholastic discipline.
These somewhat accelerated remarks outline a framework in which we can attempt a brief reading of the 'Torso' poem. I am assuming that the torso mentioned in the sonnet is meant to embody a 'thing' in the eminent sense of the word, precisely because it is merely the
20
THE COMMAND
THE STONE
a
that his stay in Rodin's workshops
accounts
him modern sculp-
We
ture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. 2 The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the break- through in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO
We never knew his head and all the light that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a gas lamp dimmed in which his gaze, lit long ago,
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile run through the slight twist of the loins toward that centre where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt under the shoulders' transparent plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts' fur
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. 3
Whoever absorbs anything vaguely concrete upon first reading has understood this much: the poem is dealing with perfection - a per- fection that seems all the more binding and mysterious because it is the perfection of a fragment. It is reasonable to suppose that this work was also an expression of thanks to Rodin, his master in his Paris days, for the concept of the autonomous torso, which he had encountered in his workshop. The reason for the existence of the per- fection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses - inde- pendently of its material carrier's mutilation - the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message.
Rilke's torso can be experienced as the bearer of the attribute 'perfect' because it brings along something that permits it to snub
21
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
a gesture is one modernity's turn against the principle
nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expecta- tions. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autono- mous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifi- cally explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their tum: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection. A hundred years after Rilke pointed to this, we probably understand it better even than his own contemporaries, as our perceptual capac- ity has been numbed and plundered by the chatter of flawless bodies more than in any preceding generation.
These observations will have made it clear how the phenomenon of being spoken to from above embodies itself in an aesthetic con- struct. To understand an appeal experience of this kind, it is not necessary to address the assumption, accepted by Rilke, that the torso he describes was once the statue of a god - of Apollo, the curators of the day believed. One cannot entirely rule out an element of art nouveau-esque reverence for education in the poet's experience of the sculpture; it is said that Rilke encountered the poem's real-life model during a visit to the Louvre, and as far as we know, it would have been a piece from the classical period of Greek sculpture rather than an archaic work of art. What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiques collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontol- ogy outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent author- ity, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a
22
THE FROM THE STONE
can no
anythingto us- assuming not openlyH-"_"VUl"
thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.
We are approaching the critical point: the final two lines have always captivated readers. They awaken feelings of significance that virtually unhinge the entire lyric construct - as if it were merely the path towards a climax for which the rest is laid out. And indeed, the two closing sentences - 'for there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life. ' - almost began an independent career, imprinting themselves on the memories of the educated in general, not only Rilke admirers and poetry fanatics. I admit: on this particu- lar occasion, I am inclined to agree with the need to take lines out of their context, not least because the popular taste for the beautiful places sometimes contains a valid judgement on authentic moments of climax. One does not need to be an enthusiast to understand why those dosing lines have developed a life of their own. In their digni- fied brevity and mystical simplicity, they radiate an art-evangelical energy that can scarcely be found in any other passage from recent language art.
At first glance, the initial statement seems the more enigmatic one. Whoever understands or accepts it, or allows it to apply in the lyric context - which amounts to the same in this case - is immediately affected by an almost hypnotic suggestion. By seeking to 'under- stand', one gives credit to a turn of phrase that reverses the everyday relationship between the seer and the seen. That I see the torso with its stout shoulders and stumps is one aspect; that I dreamily add the missing parts - the head, the arms, the legs and the genitals - in my mind and associatively animate them is a further aspect. If need be, I can even follow Rilke's suggestion and imagine a smile extending from an invisible mouth to vanished genitals. A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it - indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it.
The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is 'religiosity', understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects.
23
THE THE PRiiCTISING
ifI
stone - numerous 'places' that amount to eyes and see me,
I am performing an operation with a micro-religious quality - and which, once understood, one will recognize at all levels of macro- religiously developed systems as the primary module of a 'pious' inner action. In the position where the object usually appears, never looking back because it is an object, I now 'recognize' a subject with the ability to look and return gazes. Thus, as a hypothetical believer, I accept the insinuation of a subject that dwells inside the respective place, and wait to see what this pliable development will make of me. (We note: even the 'deepest' or most virtuosic piety cannot achieve more than habitualized insinuations. ) I receive the reward for my willingness to participate in the object-subject reversal in the form of a private illumination - in the present case, as an aesthetic movedness. The torso, which has no place that does not see me, likewise does not impose itself - it exposes itself. It exposes itself by testing whether I will recognize it as a seer. Acknowledging it as a seer essentially means 'believing' in it, where believing, as noted above, refers to the inner operations that are necessary to conceive of the vital principle in the stone as a sender of discrete addressed energies. If I somehow succeed in this, I am also able to take the glow of subjectivity away from the stone. I tentatively accept the way it stands there in exemplary radi- ance, and receive the starlike eruption of its surplus of authority and soul.
It is only in this context that the name of the depicted has any significance. What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of completeness. Rather, as the poem's title implies, he stands for something much older, something rising from prehistoric sources. He symbolizes a divine magma in which something of the first order- ing force, as old as the world itself, becomes manifest. There is no doubt that memories of Rodin and his cyclopian work ethic had an effect on Rilke here. During his work with the great artist, he expe- rienced what it means to work on the surfaces of bodies until they are nothing but a fabric of carefully shaped, luminous, almost seeing 'places'. 4 A few years earlier, he had written of Rodin's sculptures that 'there were endless places, and none of them did not have something happening in them'. s Each place is a point at which Apollo, the god of forms and surfaces, makes a visually intense and haptically palpa- ble compromise with his older opponent Dionysus, the god of urges and currents. That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation
thereare- on
24
THE COMMAND FROM THE STONE
of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens 'like wild beasts' fur': Rilke had read his Nietzsche. Here we encounter the second micro-religious or proto-musical module: the notorious 'this stands for that', 'the one appears in the other' or 'the deep layer is present in the surface' - figures without which no religious discourse would ever have come about. They tell us that religiosity is a form of hermeneutical flexibility and can be trained.
'For there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life. ' It remains to be shown why the second sentence, which seemingly requires no interpretation, is actually far more enigmatic than the first. It is not only its lack of preparation, its suddenness that is mysterious. 'You must change your life' - these words seem to come from a sphere in which no objections can be raised. Nor can we establish from where they are spoken; only their verticality is beyond doubt. It is unclear whether this dictum shoots straight up from the ground to stand in my way like a pillar, or falls from the sky to transform the road before me into an abyss, such that my next step should already belong to the changed life that has been demanded. It is not enough to say that Rilke retranslated ethics in an aestheticizing fashion into a succinct, cyclopian, archaic-brutal form. He discovered a stone that embodies the torso of 'religion', ethics and asceticism as such: a construct that exudes a call from above, reduced to the pure command, the unconditional instruction, the illuminated utter- ance of being that can be understood - and which only speaks in the imperative.
If one wished to transfer all the teachings of the papyrus religions, the parchment religions, the stylus and quill religions, the calligraphic and typographical, all order rules and sect programmes, all instruc- tions for meditation and doctrines of stages, and all training pro- grammes and dietologies into a single workshop where they would be summarized in a final act of editing: their utmost concentrate would express nothing other than what the poet sees emanating from the archaic torso of Apollo in a moment of translucidity.
'You must change your life! ' - this is the imperative that exceeds the options of hypothetical and categorical. It is the absolute imperative - the quintessential metanoetic command. It provides the keyword for revolution in the second person singular. It defines life as a slope from its higher to its lower forms. I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living prop- erly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me 'You must'. It is the authority of a different life in this
25
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
on me is it is my innermost not-yet. In my most con- scious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary. If you do indeed subsequently change your life, what you are doing is no different from what you desire with your whole will as soon as you feel how a
vertical tension that is valid for you unhinges your life.
As well as this ethical-revolutionary reading, there are also some- what more concrete and psychologically accessible interpretations of the torso poem. There is no need to limit our commentary to lofty
art-philosophical and being-philosophical positions; the experience of authority that binds the poet for a moment to the ancient statue can perhaps be reconstructed more plausibly on a more sensual, aestheti- cally comprehensible leveL This raises the somatic, or, more precisely, the auto-erotic and masculine-athletic, impressions of the sculpture, which must have provoked in the poet (who, in the language of his time, was a neurasthenic and a weak-bodied introvert) an empathetic experience of the antipodal mode of being that is native to strong 'body people'. This is in keeping with a fact that did not escape Rilke, namely that, in the immeasurably rich statue culture of the ancient Greeks, there was a dominant system of physical and mental kinship between gods and athletes in which resemblance could reach the level of identity. A god was always a form of sportsman too, and the sportsman - especially the one celebrated in a hymn of praise and crowned with a laurel wreath - was always also a god of sorts. Hence the athlete's body, which unifies beauty and discipline into a calm readiness for action, offers itself as one of the most understandable and convincing manifestations of authority.
The authoritative body of the god-athlete has an immediate effect on the viewer through its exemplarity. It too says concisely: 'You must change your life! ', and in so doing simultaneously shows what model this change should follow. It displays how being and being exem- plary converge. Every classical statue was a petrified or bronze-cast teaching permit in ethical matters. What was known as Platonism, an otherwise rather un-Greek affair, could only find its home in Greece because the so-called ideas had already established themselves in the form of statues. Platonic love was already widely anchored in society some time before Plato, as a training affect in exercises between the somatically perfect and the beginners, and this eros worked in both directions - from the model to his emulators and from the desirer to his model. Now, I certainly do not wish to posit any narcissistic rela- tionship between Rilke and a fragment of ancient Greek art exhibited
26
THE COMMAND FROM THE STONE
m Louvre It is
that author sonnet saw some radiance of
letic vitalism and the muscular theology of the wrestlers in the palaes- tra in the real torso he viewed. The difference of vitality between the elevated and profane bodies must have spoken to him directly, even when faced with a mere relic of idealized masculinity.
With this way of feeling, the poet would have been no more or less than a sensitive contemporary of the late renaissance in Europe, which reached a critical stage around 1900. Its defining trait is the return of the athlete as the key figure of ancient somatic idealism. With this, the process of post-Christian cultural reorganization that had begun around 1400 as a philological and artistic Renaissance entered its mass-cultural phase. Its foremost characteristic is sport, and it can never be emphasized too much how deeply it affected the ethos of the moderns. The restarting of the Olympics (and the excessive popularization of soccer in Europe and South America) marked the beginning of its triumph, whose end is barely in sight, unless one interprets the current doping corruption as the indication of an imminent breakdown - though no one can say at present what might replace athletism. The cult of sport that exploded around 1900 possesses an outstanding intellectual-historical, or rather ethical- historical and asceticism-historical, significance, as it demonstrates an epochal change of emphasis in practice behaviour - a transformation best described as a re-somatization or a de-spiritualization of asceti- cisms. In this respect, sport is the most explicit realization of Young Hegelianism, the philosophical movement whose motto was 'the resurrection of the flesh in this life'. Of the two great ideas of the nine- teenth century, socialism and somatism, it was clearly only the latter that could be widely established, and one need not be a prophet to assert that the twenty-first century will belong to it completely, even more than the twentieth.
After all we have said, it does not seem inappropriate to suggest that Rilke had some participation in the somatic and athletic renais- sance, even though his connection was obviously indirect and medi- ated by artefacts, namely the category of 'things' discussed above. Rilke certainly made no secret of feeling stimulated by Nietzsche, and he equally - in the 'Letter of the Young Worker'6 - took up the timely cause of reclaiming sexuality from the crippling tradition of Christian 'renunciation of instincts'.
The presence of the athletic mana in the torso, still shining and licensed to teach, contains an element of orientational energy that I
27
THE PLANET OF THE
term - even
authority'. In capacity
weaklings of the body and of life with
sport-ethical nature. The statement 'You
now be heard as the refrain of a language
part of a new rhetorical genre: the coach discourse, their changing- room lecture to a weakly performing team. Whoever speaks to teams must address each individual player as if speaking to them alone. Such speeches cannot be tolerated in company, but they are constitu- tive for teams.
Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, demonstrate to us that achievement - excellence, arete, virtu - has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours! Above all: only grant the suspicion that sport is a pastime for the most stupid as much space as it deserves, do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further in your customary state of self- neglect, distrust the philistine in yourself who thinks you are just fine as you are! Hear the voice from the stone, do not resist the call to get in shape! Seize the chance to train with a god!
28
- 'trainer it addresses present-day words of an unmistakably must change your life! ' can of getting in shape. It forms
-2-
REMOTE VIEW OF THE ASCETIC PLANET
Nietzsche's Antiquity Project
The term 'late renaissance', which I have suggested to characterize the still inadequately understood sport cult phenomenon that appeared after 1900, proves helpful in dating Nietzsche's intervention in the midst of the discourses of the Enlightenment as it changed into modernity. In truth, any attempt to understand Nietzsche must begin with a reflection on his date. With this thinker, it is not sufficient to cast a glance at his dates of birth and death in order to know when he was living and thinking. One of the enormities of this author is the impossibility of identifying him as a child of his time. Naturally it is easy to point to the aspects of his work that are typical of the time. One can show how, as an artist, he made the transition from Biedermeier-weakened Romanticism to a late Romantically tinged modernity; as a publicist, the leap from Wagnerism to a prophetic elitism; as a thinker, the change of position from symbolist late idealism to perspectival naturalism - or, expressed in names, from Schopenhauer to Darwin. If only the aspects of Nietzsche that were indebted to his epoch were significant, the reception of his work would not have lasted beyond 1914 - the turning point from which the moderns, once and for all, had other concerns; and as early as 1927, Heidegger was already elevating these 'other concerns' to the level of concern [Sorge] itself, concern sans phrase.
In truth, Nietzsche's impulses only began to unfold in that age of 'other concerns', and there is no end to this work of unfolding in sight. The author of The Genealogy of Morals is the most philosophically observant contemporary of the processes referred to with the concept of the 'somatic or athletic renaissance' introduced above. In order to gain a suitable idea of their thrust and their pull, it is indispensable to reread his writings on the art of living, which pose the question of
29
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
true existence strong reasons.
One can believe without further investigation the claim
the author occasionally thought of himself as someone from the Renaissance who had ended up in the wrong period. What is relevant in our context is not the sense of an elective past, or some homesick- ness for a bygone golden age for art and uncompromising methods. The decisive aspect is rather the fact that Nietzsche was himself an actor in a genuine renaissance, and that the only reason he did not identify himself accordingly is that his notion of renaissance was too dependent on art-historical conventions. It is not for nothing that the young Nietzsche was one of the most intensive readers of Jacob Burckhardt's epoch-morphological masterpiece Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), a work in which the historian gathered together several centuries' worth of culture to form a single giant mural. Stepping back from this huge picture, the art-recipient of the late nineteenth century had no choice but to long for times past and project himself into a suitable part of the painting. Everything suggests that Nietzsche was no stranger to such exercises. He may have transported himself to the army camp of Castruccio Castracani to experience heroic vitalism up close, or gone for a walk along the Lungotevere, dreaming of becoming a Cesare Borgia of philosophy.
Nonetheless, it would have sufficed for the wanderer of Sils Maria to abandon the art-historically confined notion of renaissance and advance to a process-theoretical one; then he would inevitably have reached the conclusion that the age of 'rebirth' had by no means ended with the artistic and cultural events of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries.
From a processual perspective, Nietzsche would have recognized himself at the current pivot of an advancing renais- sance that was in the process of outgrowing its educated middle-class definitions. Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their sec- retaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'7), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no
30
VIEW OF ASCETIC PLANET
or an m century, an epochal passion, an inescapable pro
Hence one must beware of the false conclusion that the topic of the 'life reform', which was in the air from the Romantics and early socialists on, though it only reached its charismatic peak after 1900, was a mere sectarian quirk - with the 'reform houses's as an endear- ingly old-fashioned relic. The life reform is rather the renaissance pro- gramme itself, transferred from bourgeois art history to the arena of battles for the true modus vivendi of the moderns. Placing Nietzsche in this arena means dating him correctly, for the time being.
This expansion of the renaissance zone is no more than a first step, however. If one left it at that, one would only have re-dated Nietzsche semi-correctly at best. One would certainly have done him justice by assimilating his present into a past of his choosing; as far as his more radical 'chronopolitics' is concerned, however, his striving to break out of the Modern Age as such, one would not really be taking him seriously. This attempt to break out is what holds the far greater provocation and the far more potent food for thought. Dealing with it also demands more than the re-dating suggestion that has been common for some time, which posits that Nietzsche belongs not to modernity but to postmodernity, as one of its founding fathers. Nietzsche's position cannot be defined in terms of a choice between modern and postmodern - in fact, it does not even show up on this field. Nietzsche's departure to a period that suited him did not, as some would have it, take him into an era 'after modernity', what- ever that might mean. What he envisaged was not a modernization of modernity, no progress beyond the time of progress. Nor did he, by any means, break up the one historical narrative into several, as seemed plausible to critical minds working on the self-investigation of the Enlightenment during the late twentieth century. Nietzsche was concerned with a radical allochrony, a fundamental other-timeliness in the midst of the present.
His true date is therefore antiquity - and, because antiquity can only exist in modern times as repetition, neo-antiquity. The neo- ancient antiquity in which Nietzsche locates himself is not meant as a mere programme, something that could be placed on the agenda to meet the needs of today. An arranged antiquity would go against Nietzsche's intentions, as its reservation on the daily agenda would itself be an unwelcome act of modernism. Agendas provide the forms of work that modernity uses to arrange its steps on the timeline to the future, whether one interprets them as a meaningful or empty forward motion. What Nietzsche had in mind was not a repetition
31
OF THE PRACTISING
on
more than a few years ago; the question of whether rotate
in decades or millennia was of no consequence to him. His concept of allochrony - initially introduced shyly as 'untimeliness', then later radicalized to an exit from modernity - is based on the idea, as sug- gestive as it is fantastic, that antiquity has no need of repetitions enacted in subsequent periods, because it 'essentially' returns con- stantly on its own strength. In other words, antiquity - or the ancient - is not an overcome phase of cultural development that is only rep- resented in the collective memory and can be summoned by the wil- fulness of education. It is rather a kind of constant present - a depth time, a nature time, a time of being - that continues underneath the theatre of memory and innovation that occupies cultural time. If one could show how recurrence defeats repetition and the circle makes a fool of the line, this would not only demonstrate an understanding of the point of Nietzsche's decisive self-dating; it would also fulfil the precondition for any judgement on whether, and in what sense, Nietzsche is our contemporary, and whether, and to what extent, we are or wish to be his contemporaries.
This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian definitions of life and forms of life. From Nietzsche's perspective, it is not a matter of imitating ancient patterns, but rather - before all revivals of specific content - of revealing antiquity as a mode of non-historical, non- forward-directed, non-progressive time. This calls for no less than the suspension of Christian cultural time, whether it is envisaged as an apocalyptic acceleration of the end or a patient pilgrimage through the world - or as a church-politically prudent combination of both modes. It goes without saying that enlightened cultural time, the time of progress and the time of capital are also affected by this suspension.
Only in this context is there any point in re-examining Nietzsche's overexcited confrontation of Christianity. From today's perspective, it is a somewhat unpleasant chapter to which one only returns because the reasons for doing so are stronger than the reservations. One could pass over it as an episode of fin-de-siecie neurosis, not least out of sympathy for the author, were it not simultaneously the vehicle for Nietzsche's most valuable and enduring insights. The anti-Christian polemic shows its productive side if one transfers it to the context of Nietzsche's 'antiquity project', which, as we have seen, is devoted to a
32
V1£\'\;7 OF THE PLANET
'u v " u . . . . " . . . . return era (and an schema antiquity-Middle Ages-Modem Age). Wanting to go back to a time before Christianity here means situating oneself prior to a modus vivendi whose binding nature has meanwhile been undone and now only seems effective in inauthentic adaptations, culturally Christian translations and pity-ethical (as well as pity-polit- ical, including self-pity-political) re-stylizations. In leaping back to before the cultural period of Christianity, he is by no means espous- ing its humanistic reform - this had been the programme of compro-
mise in Modem Age Europe, which created the enormous hybrid of 'Christian humanism' through centuries of literary, pedagogical and philanthropic work - from Erasmus to T. S. Eliot, from Comenius to Montessori, and from Ignatius to Albert Schweitzer. What occupies him does not concern the conditions of the possibility of an amalgam, but rather the preconditions for a radical break with the system of half-measures. In Nietzsche's usage, the word 'Christianity' does not even refer primarily to the religion; using it like a code word, he is thinking more of a particular religio-metaphysically influenced dispo- sition, an ascetically (in the penitent and self-denying sense) defined attitude to the world, an unfortunate form of life deferral, focus on the hereafter and quarrel with secular facts - in The Antichrist, Nietzsche inveighed against all this with the fury of a man who wanted to bring the pillars of the Western religious tradition, and hence also of his own existence, crashing down.
All this can be used to support my thesis, which connects these reflections to the subject of the book: in his role as the protago- nist and medium of a differently understood antiquity, Nietzsche becomes the discoverer of ascetic cultures in their immeasurable his- torical extension. Here it is relevant to observe that the word dskesis (alongside the word meiete, which is also the name of a muse) simply means 'exercise' or 'training' in ancient Greek. In the wake of his new division of ascetic opinion, Nietzsche not only stumbles upon the fundamental meaning of the practising life for the development of styles of existence or 'cultures'. He puts his finger on what he sees as the decisive separation for all moralities, namely into the asceticisms of the healthy and those of the sick, though he does not show any reservations about presenting the antithesis with an almost caricatu- ral harshness. The healthy - a word that has long been subjected to countless deconstructions9 - are those who, because they are healthy, want to grow through good asceticisms; and the sick are those who, because they are sick, plot revenge with bad asceticisms.
This can only be called a hair-raising simplification of the situation. 33
emancipation
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
Nonetheless, one has to admit: hammering home these arguments does bring something to light that must be acknowledged as one of the greatest discoveries of intellectual history. Nietzsche is no more or less than the Schliemann of asceticisms. In the midst of the excavation sites, surrounded by the psychopathic rubble of millennia and the ruins of morbid palaces, he was completely right to assume the triumphant expression of a discoverer. We know today that he had dug in the right place; what he dug up, however - to continue the metaphor - was not Homer's Troy, but a later layer. And a large number of the asceticisms to which he referred polemically were precisely not expressions of life- denial and metaphysical servility; it was rather a matter of heroism in a spiritual disguise. Nietzsche's occasional misinterpretations cannot detract from the value of his discovery. With his find, Nietzsche stands fatally - in the best sense of the word - at the start of modern, non- spiritualistic ascetologies along with their physio- and psychotechnic annexes, with dietologies and self-referential trainings, and hence all the forms of self-referential practising and working on one's own vital form that I bring together in the term 'anthropotechnics'.
The significance of the impulse coming from Nietzsche's new view of ascetic phenomena can hardly be overestimated. By shifting himself to a 'supra-epochal' antiquity that waits beneath every medieval and modern non-antiquity, and under every future, he attained the neces- sary level of eccentricity to cast a glance, as if from without, at his own time and others. His alternative self-dating allowed him to leap out of the present, giving him the necessary eyesight to encompass the continuum of advanced civilizations, the three-thousand-year empire of mental exercises, self-trainings, self-elevations and self-Iowerings - in short, the universe of metaphysically coded vertical tension - in an unprecedented synopsis.
Here we should quote especially those sections from Nietzsche's central morality-critical work The Genealogy of Morals that deal with their subject in a diction of Olympian clarity. In the decisive passage he discusses the practice forms of that life-denial or world- weariness which, according to Nietzsche, exemplifies the morphologi- cal circle of sick asceticisms in general.
The ascetic [of the priestly-sick type] treats life as a wrong path on which one must walk backwards till one comes to the place where it starts; or he treats it as an error which one may, nay must, refute by action: for he demands that he should be followed; he enforces, where he can, his valuation of existence. What does this mean? Such a mon- strous valuation is not an exceptional care, or a curiosity recorded in human history: it is one of the broadest and longest facts that exist.
34
REMOTE VIEW OF THE PLANET
from the vantage of distant star the letters our life would lead to the conclusion the earth was the truly ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant, and repul. sive crearures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting - presumably their one and only pleasure. 1o
With this note, Nietzsche presents himself as the pioneer of a new human science that one could describe as a planetary science of culture. Its method consists in observing our heavenly body using 'photographs' of cultural formations as if from a great altitude. Through the new image-producing abstractions, the life of the earth- lings is searched for more general patterns - with asceticism coming to light as a historically developed structure that Nietzsche quite legitimately calls one of 'the broadest and longest facts that exist'. These 'facts' demand a suitable cartography and a corresponding geography and basic science. That is all the genealogy of morals seeks to be. The new science of the origins of moral systems (and eo ipso of morally governed forms of life and practice) is the first manifestation of General Ascetology. It begins the explication history of religions and systems of ethics as anthropotechnic praxes.
We must not let ourselves be distracted by the fact that, in this passage, Nietzsche is referring exclusively to the asceticisms of the sick and their priestly minders. The ascetic planet he sights is the planet of the practising as a whole, the planet of advanced-civilized humans, the planet of those who have begun to give their existence forms and contents under vertical tensions in countless programmes of effort, some more and some less strictly coded. When Nietzsche speaks of the ascetic planet, it is not because he would rather have been born on a more relaxed star. His antiquity-instinct tells him that every heavenly body worth inhabiting must - correctly understood - be an ascetic planet inhabited by the practising, the aspiring and the virtuosos. What is antiquity for him but the code word for the age in which humans had to become strong enough for a sacred-imperial image of the whole? Inherent in the great worldviews of antiquity was the intention of showing mortals how they could live in harmony with the 'universe', even and especially when that whole showed them its baffling side, its lack of consideration for individuals. What one called the wisdom of the ancients was essentially a tragic holism, a self-integration within the great whole, that could not be achieved without heroism. Nietzsche's planet would become the place whose inhabitants, especially the male ones, would carry the weight of the world anew without self-pity - in keeping with the Stoic maxim that
35
THE PLANET OF PRACTISING
is to keep
Some not much later in Heidegger's doctrine
concern, at whose call mortals must adjust to the burden character of Dasein (after 1918, the mortals were primarily the wounded and non-fallen, who were meant to keep themselves ready for other forms of death on other fronts). Under no circumstances could the earth remain an institution in which the ressentiment programmes of the sick and the compensation-claiming skills of the insulted determined the climate.
In his differentiation between asceticisms, Nietzsche posited a dear divide between the priestly varieties on the one side, illuminated by his vicious gaze, and the disciplinary rules of intellectual workers, philosophers and artists as well as the exercises of warriors and ath- letes on the other side. If the former are concerned with what one might call a pathogogical asceticism - an artful self-violation among an elite of sufferers that empowers them to lead other sufferers and induce the healthy to become co-sick - the latter only impose their regulations on themselves because they see them as a means of reach- ing their optimum as thinkers and creators of works. What Nietzsche calls the 'pathos of distance'11 is devoted entirely to the division of asceticisms. Its intention is to 'keep the missions separate' and set the exercises whereby those who are successful, good and healthy can become more successful, good and healthy apart from those which enable resolute failures, the malicious and the sick to place them- selves on pedestals and pulpits - whether for the sake of perversely acquired feelings of superiority or to distract themselves from their tormenting interest in their own sickness and failure. 12 Needless to say, the opposition of healthy and sick should not be taken as purely medical: it serves as the central distinction in an ethics that gives a life with the 'first movement' ('be a self-propelling wheel! ' [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]) priority over a life dominated by inhibited movement.
The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance appar- ent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modi- fied the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiqu- ity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra- epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap for-
36
cosmos.
REMOTE VIEW OF THE PLANET
manner m torso Apollo to the same cultural that Nietzsche was pursuing when pushed his reflections on the establishment of the priestly, 'bio- negative', spiritualistic asceticisms to the point where the paradoxical struggle of the suffering life against itself became apparent. In discov- ering the ascetological foundations of higher human forms of life, he assigned a new meaning to 'morality'. The power of the practice layer in human behaviour is sufficiently broad to span the contrast between
affirmative and denying 'moralities'.
Let us emphasize once again: this disclosure of 'one of the broad-
est and longest facts that exist' concerns not only the self-tormenting approaches to shaping one's self-dealings; it encompasses all varieties of 'concern for oneself' as well as all forms of concern for adaptation to the highest. Aside from that, the jurisdiction of ascetology, under- stood as a general theory of practising, doctrine of habit and germinal discipline of anthropotechnics, does not end with the phenomena of advanced civilization and the spectacular results of mental or somatic vertical ascent (leading into the most diverse forms of virtuosity); it closes every vital continuum, every series of habits, every lived suc- cession, including the seemingly most formless drifting and the most advanced neglect and exhaustion.
One cannot deny a marked one-sidedness in Nietzsche's late writ- ings: he did not pursue the positive side of his ascetological discover- ies with the same emphasis as that he displayed in his explorations of the morbid pole - undoubtedly because of a stronger inclina- tion towards examining the therapeutic purpose of negative ascetic ideals than the athletic, dietological, aesthetic and also 'biopolitical' purpose of positive practice programmes. Throughout his life, he was sufficiently sick to be interested in possibilities of overcoming sickness in a meaningful way, and sufficiently lucid to reject the traditional attempts to bestow meaning upon the senseless. That is why he exhib- ited a combination of reluctant respect for the attainment of ascetic ideals in the history of mankind to date and reluctance to draw on them himself. In Nietzsche's case, this fluctuation between an appre- ciation of self-coercive behaviour and scepticism towards the idealis- tic extravagances of such praxes led to a new attentiveness towards the behavioural area of asceticism, practice and self-treatment as a whole. It is the re-description of this in terms of a general theory of anthropotechnics that is now called for.
There are three points to bear in mind that make the discovery of the 'ascetic planet' as far-reaching as it is problematic. Firstly: Nietzsche's
37
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
new view of the ascetic dimension only become possible in a time when the asceticisms were becoming post-spiritually somatized, while the manifestations of spirituality were moving in a post-ascetic, non-disciplined and informal direction. The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically powerful. Its counterpart is the informalization of spirituality - accompanied by its commercialization in the corre- sponding subcultures. The threshold values for these two tendencies provide the intellectual landmarks for the twentieth century: the first tendency is represented by sport, which has become a metaphor for achievement as such, and the second by popular music, that devotio postmoderna which covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency.
Secondly: on the ascetic planet, once discovered as such, the dif- ference between those who make something or a great deal of them- selves and those who make little or nothing of themselves becomes increasingly conspicuous. This is a difference that does not fit into any time or any ethics. In the monotheistic age, God was viewed as the one who causes and does everything, and hence humans were not entitled to make something, let alone a great deal, of themselves. In humanistic epochs, by contrast, man is considered the being respon- sible for causing and doing everything - but consequently no longer has the right to make little or nothing of himself. Whether people now make nothing or much of themselves, they commit - according to traditional forms of logic - an inexplicable and unpardonable error. There is always a surplus of differences that cannot be integrated into any of the prescribed systems of life-interpretation. In a world that belongs to God, human beings make too much of themselves as soon as they raise their heads; in a world that belongs to humans, they repeatedly make too little of themselves. The possibility that the inequality between humans might be due to their asceticisms, their different stances towards the challenges of the practising life - this idea has never been formulated in the history of investigations into the ultimate causes of difference between humans. If one follows this trail, it opens up perspectives that, being unthought-of, are literally unheard-of.
And finally: if the athletic and somatic renaissance means that de- spiritualized asceticisms are once more possible, desirable and vitally plausible, then Nietzsche's agitated question at the end of his text The Genealogy ofMorals, namely where human life can find its bear-
38
REMOTE THE
answers
is the medium that
contains a gradient between more and less. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is sup- posedly dead is irrelevant in this context. With or without God, each person will only get as far as their form carries them.
Naturally 'God', during the time of his effective cultural represen- tation, was the most convincing attractor for those forms of life and practice which strove 'towards Him' - and this towards-Him was identical to 'upwards'. Nietzsche's concern to preserve vertical tension after the death of God proves how seriously he took his task as the 'last metaphysician', without overlooking the comical aspect of his mission. He had found his great role as a witness to the verti- cal dimension without God. The fact that he did not have to fear any rivals during his lifetime confirms that his choice was right. His aim of keeping the space above the dead free was a passion that remained understandable to more than a few fellow sufferers in the twentieth century; this accounts for the continued and infectious identification of many readers today with Nietzsche's existence and its unliveable contradictions. Here, for once, the epithet 'tragic' is appropriate. The theomorphism of his inner life withstood his own exercises in God- destruction. The author of The Gay Science was aware of how pious even he still was. At the same time, he already understood the rules in force on the ascetic planet well enough to realize that all ascents start from the base camp of ordinary life. His questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climb- ing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.
39
ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
Unthan's Lesson
That life can involve the need to move forwards in spite of obstacles is one of the basic experiences shared by the group of people whom, with a carefree clarity, one formerly called 'cripples', before younger and supposedly more humane, understanding and respectful spirits of the age renamed them the handicapped, those with special needs, the problem children, and finally simply 'human beings'Y If, in the fol- lowing chapter, I persist in using the old term, which has meanwhile come to seem tactless, it is purely because it had its traditional place in the vocabulary of the time that I am recalling in these explorations. Abandoning it for the sake of sensitivity, and perhaps merely over- sensitivity, would cause a system of indispensable observations and insights to disappear. In the following, I would like to demonstrate the unusual convergence of human and cripple in the discourses of the generation after Nietzsche in order to gain further insights into the structural change of human motives for improvement in recent times. Here it will transpire to what extent references to the human being in the twentieth century are rooted in cripple-anthropological prem- ises - and how cripple anthropology changes spontaneously into an anthropology of defiance. In the latter, humans appear as the animals that must move forwards because they are obstructed by something.
The reference to rooting provides the cue, albeit indirectly, for the reflections with which I shall continue the explorations on the planet of the practising stimulated by Nietzsche - and, in a sense, also the contemplations on torsos introduced by Rilke. In 1925, two years before Heidegger's Being and Time, three years before Scheler's The Human Place in the Cosmos, the Stuttgart publisher Lutz' Memoirenbibliothek printed a book with the simultaneously amusing and shocking title Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem
40
ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern [The Pediscript: Notes from the Life of an Armless Man, with 30 Illustrations]. It was 'penned' by Carl Hermann Dnthan, who was born in East Prussia in 1848 and died in 1929 - in truth, it was written on a typewriter whose keys were pressed using a stylus held with the foot. Dnthan unquestionably deserves a place in the pantheon of reluctant virtuosos of existence. He belongs to those who managed to make a great deal of themselves, even though his starting conditions suggested that he would almost certainly make little or nothing of himself. At the age of six or seven the boy, born without arms, discovered by chance the possibility of playing on a violin fastened to a box on the ground. With a mixture
, of naiiJete and tenacity, he devoted himself to improving the method he had discovered for playing the violin with his feet. The right foot played the part of the left hand, fingering the notes, while the left foot moved the bow.
The young man pursued his exercises with such determination that after attending secondary school in Konigsberg, he was accepted as a student at the Leipzig Conservatory. There, mastering an enor- mous practice workload, he reached a notable level of virtuosity. He expanded his repertoire, soon also including showpieces of the highest difficulty. Naturally the handicapped man's violin playing would never have attracted such attention far and wide if it had been carried out in the usual form, without the element of acrobatic improbability. Before long, a vaudeville entrepreneur showed interest in Dnthan. In 1868, still a minor, he began to go on concert tours, which, after stops in rural towns, took him to the European capitals, and later even across the ocean. He performed in Vienna, where he was introduced to the conductors Johann Strauss and Michael Zierer. In Munich he impressed the Hungaro-Bavarian military band leader and waltz king Josef Gungl by playing Gungl's brand new composi- tion, the 'Hydropathen-Walzer'; he was especially flabbergasted by Dnthan's execution of double stops with his toes. After a concert at the 'overcrowded grand ballroom' in Budapest, he was reportedly congratulated on his virtuosic performance by Franz Liszt, who had been sitting in the first row. He patted him 'on the cheek and shoulder' and expressed his appreciation. Dnthan notes on this incident: 'What was it that made me doubt the authenticity of his enthusiasm? Why did it seem so artificial? '14 One can see: in this note, Dnthan, who was already over seventy by the time he wrote Das Pediskript, was not simply touching on imponderabilities in relationships between older and younger virtuosos. Those questions, written down half a century after the scene they describe took place, were significant as
41
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
a symptom: they reminded the author of a distant time when the illusion that he could be taken seriously as a musician, not merely a curiosity, was still intact. Even fifty years later, the author still felt the cold breeze of disillusionment in Liszt's paternally sympathetic gesture; Liszt, a former prodigy himself, knew from experience what kind of life awaits virtuosos of any kind. So he would have known all the better what future lay before a young man who was to travel the world as a victor over a quirk of nature.
There is a widespread cliche among biographers: that their hero, who often has to go through arduous early years first, 'conquers the world for himself'. In his mode of self-presentation, Unthan takes up this figure by following each anecdote with another and recounting the saga of his successful years as a drawn-out travelogue, moving from city to city and continent to continent. He tells the story of a long life in constant motion: on Cunard steamers, on trains, in hotels of every category, in prestigious concert halls and dingy establish- ments. He probably spent the majority of his career on dubious vaudeville stages, from which he would blow the baffled audience kisses with his feet at the end of his performances. 1S The dominant sound in Unthan's public life seems to have been the cheering and applause of those surprised by his presentations. Unthan's 'notes', which can neither be called an autobiography nor memoirs - the closest category would be that of curiosities - are written in a lan- guage at once naive and sentimental, full of stock phrases, echoing the diction of the factual account in the mid-nineteenth century; one can imagine the author's tongue in the corner of his mouth while writing.
On every page of Das Pediskript, Unthan demonstrates his convic- tion that the success of his life is revealed through an overflowing col- lection of picturesque situations he has experienced. Unthan lays out his treasures like a travel writer of the bourgeois age - his first concert, his first bicycle, his first disappointment. These are accompanied by a host of bizarre observations: a bullfight in which the bull impaled several toreros; a sword-swallower who injured his throat with an umbrella; garishly made-up females of all ages in Havana in 1873, with 'an odour of decay hovering over everything', with dancing negresses: 'We saw the most forbidden things imaginable'; a lizard- eating event in Mexico; 'sold out' in Valparaiso, with the recollection that 'the sun slowly sank into the still ocean. As if it were finding it difficult to leave . . . ' Seven hours of brisk swimming 'without turning on my back', and heavy sunburn as a result; his encounter with an armless portrait painter in Dusseldorf, a comrade in fate who painted with one leg - 'there was no end to the questions and answers', 'he
42
was
But most our on
ONL Y CRIPI'LES WILL SURVIVE
deep matters nonetheless. ' His mother's death: was a
inside me, though I did not and do not know what it was praying'.
Appearances in the Orient, where people are more distinctive: 'a list
of my most striking experiences alone would fill entire volumes'.
Disappointment at the Holy Sepulchre, where 'the most degenerate
riffraff' appeared to have gathered; arrest in Cairo, nicotine poison-
ing in Vienna, rifle shooting with his feet in St Petersburg, in the
presence of Tsar Alexander III, guest appearance in Managua - 'the
city of Leon bore the character of decline'; a comet over Cuba; par-
ticipation in a film entitled Mann ohne Arme [Man Without Arms).
On board the Elbe to New York as a fellow passenger of Gerhart
Hauptmann, who has a brief conversation with the artiste. Then the
New World: 'Americans show a stimulating understanding in the face
of the extraordinary. ' '''You're the happiest person I know", said a
man they called John D. "And what about you, with your money, Mr
Rockefeller? ", 1asked him. "All my money can't buy your zest for life
",
Das Pediskript could be read as a sort of 'life-philosophical per- formance', using the latter word in its popular sense. Dnthan steps before his audiences in the posture of an artiste whose special virtuos- ity on the violin, and later with the rifle and the trumpet, is embedded in an overall virtuosity, an exercise in the art of living that pervades all aspects of life - it is no coincidence that the picture section of the book primarily shows the author carrying out such everyday actions as opening doors and putting on his hat.
Hone wanted to translate Dnthan's more general intuitions into a theoretical diction, his position would have to be defined as a vitalis- tically tinged 'cripple existentialism'. According to this, the disabled person has the chance to grasp their thrownness into disability as the starting point of a comprehensive self-choice. This applies not only to the basic auto-therapeutic attitude as expressed by Nietzsche in Ecco Homo, in the second section under the heading 'Why 1 Am So Wise': 'I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again. ' Dnthan's choice applies to his own future. He places the following words in the mouth of the twenty-one-year-old who felt he had been released into inde- pendence: 'I will seize myself with an iron first to get everything out of myself. '16 He interprets his disability as a school for the will. 'Anyone who is forced from birth to depend on their own experiments and is not prevented from performing them [. . . ) will develop a will [. . .