No More Learning

such figures is their secessionist point: as salva- tion is impossible to find in the first socialization, possessed by the old
habitus and living under the idols of the tribe, tradition and theatre - in short, in the life under the spell of the beginnings - whoever realizes this must break with their old solidarities.
Houselessness and pilgrim existence create eccentric spaces through escape; the house-leaver, the pilgrim and the world-stranger con- stantly carry their own desert, their hermitage, their alibi around with them. A stay at the scene of the crime of ordinary life is no longer an option for these noble evaders. Whoever always has their escape space around them, on the other hand, no longer needs to leave physi- cally. The metaphorization of the desert made it possible to temper the extremism of the first secessionaries and introduce a bourgeois variety of retreat for everyman. This trend was supported by the body of edifying literature, especially after the replacement of the weighty codices with the small book, which permitted readers from the four- teenth century onwards to keep their pocket desert to hand wherever they went. 11 In fact, the literary media of the early Modern Age in Europe made a strong practice medium available to laypersons. Open a book, read a line, and your one-minute anachoresis has been real- ized. For years, the book has served the contemplative as a vehicle for withdrawal 'to the country home of the self' . 12
What Helmuth Plessner ascribes to 'man' in general, namely the 'eccentric positionality' of his self-relation, is in reality an effect of the use of egotechnic media in the Modern Age - media which, in the course of a few centuries, equipped virtually every individual with the necessary tools for a mild chronic being-outside-themselves: the prayer formula, the confessional mirror, the novel, the diary, the portrait, the photograph, newspapers and radio media, and not least mirrors on all sides. Provided with this equipment for self-techniques, individuals developed a second attitude towards their first position almost unnoticed. Barely any of the moderns who assert the human right for 'one's own space' are aware of the origin of this demand in a revision of social topology from the distant past.
The Deeper Distinction: Self-Acquisition and World- Relinqu ishment
Nonetheless, the previous references to the division of the world through ethical-ascetic secession prove unsatisfactory for a
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
original
point is the incontestable observation that a series
historically far-reaching separation movements began in a number of advanced civilizations some three thousand years ago; even so, these observations are not adequate to highlight the agent of secession with sufficient clarity. This inadequacy has a methodological reason: it is impossible to explain from a sociological perspective alone how such a split could come about. Essentially, the motor of secessionary events remains untraceable from the outside. Its logical source only becomes evident if one reconstructs the opposition between the ascetics and the rest of the world according to the criteria of an ontological analysis. Only thus can one clarify how the totality of what exists was subject to something resembling a local government reorganization during which the competencies of 'man' for himself and the other things were radically redistributed. Yes, one can say that 'man' emerged from this cosmic reform, and was only thus created as the carrier of a chance at salvation in the first place. 'Man' comes about from the small minority of ascetic extremists who step out from the crowd and claim that they are actually everyone.
The division of the world by the secessionaries thus presupposes a deeper distinction; only through this distinction was the separation of those practising elsewhere from those continuing in the old place able to take on its full radicality. This distinction can be compared to cutting out a figure from a larger picture - or punching a piece of a certain shape out of some rolled-out dough. The primordial difference does indeed result from a form of subtraction where the thinking and practising individual removes themselves from their first surround- ings ethically, logically and ontologically; were this not the case, they could not want to distance themselves physically and affectively too. This self-extraction is based on the distinction between two radically different spheres of influence in the existent: the sphere of influence of my own powers and the sphere of influence of all other powers. At first glance, this must result in a radically asymmetrical, almost self- annihilating division, as my power and my significance, compared to that of all other spheres and powers, are virtually zero.
On the other hand, this distinction assigns a significance to me - though not necessarily a power - that is virtually infinite, because, for the first time, my own sphere is placed as a counterweight to the sphere of the non-own, very much as if to convince me to set myself and what is mine again 'the rest of the world'. Through the ethical division, the minuteness of the own is placed in the difficult situa- tion of having to balance out the monstrous block of the non-own.
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FIRST ECCENTRICITY
Whatever one chooses to call this event - the invention of the inner human, the entrance into the inner-world illusion, the doubling of the world through introjection, the birth of psychologism from the spirit of the exterior's reification, the meta-cosmic revolution of the soul or the triumph of higher anthropotechnics - its concrete meaning is the invention of the individual through the isolating emphasis of its sphere of influence and experience from that of all other world facts. I shall use the word 'subject' for the agent that cuts itself out and the term 'subjectivism' for the cutting-out as such, without burdening them with loans from German Idealism or memories of Heidegger's critique of modern 'subjectivism'. It is sufficient to take a 'subject', as explained above, as the carrier of exercise sequences. The basic subject-forming exercise of which I will speak in the following is clearly none other than the methodically performed withdrawal from the complex of shared situations one calls 'life' or 'the world'. From now on, 'being in the world' will mean suum tantum curare: to care for what is one's own and nothing else, against all dissipation into the non-own.
By separating my power and its jurisdiction from all other powers and competencies, I open up a narrowly defined sphere of influence in which my ability, my wanting, but above all my mission to shape my own existence ascend, as it were, to autonomous rule. The critical dis- tinction that enables this promotion made its first explicit appearance on Western soil among the Stoics, who, in a perpetual exercise, put all their energy into separating the things that depend on us from those that do not. Own or non-own - this is the question that provides the sharp-edged canon, the yardstick for measuring all circumstances. This cut divides the universe into two areas, from which the opera- tor naturally only chooses their own half, the one that is decisive for themselves. That is why the typical axioms of the Stoics begin with 'It is in your power . . . '
One notorious passage from Epictetus' practice instructions recounts how an apprentice cuts himself out of the world in the workshop of self-acquisition and uncouples himself from the hubbub of daily affairs through conscious de-participation:
As soon as you go out in the morning, examine every man whom you see, every man whom you hear, answer as to a question, What have you seen? A handsome man or woman? Apply the rule. Is this independent of the will, or dependent? Independent. Take it away! What have you seen? A man lamenting over the death of a child. Apply the rule. Death is a thing independent of the will. Take it away! Has the proconsul met you? Apply the rule. What kind of a thing is a proconsul's office? Independent of the will or dependent on it? Independent. Take this
225
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
away also; it does not stand examination; cast it away; it is nothing to you!
If we practised this and exercised ourselves in it daily from morning to night, something indeed would be done. But now we are forthwith caught half asleep by every appearance. 13
'Take it away! ' is the central maxim of the first Methodism. Anthropotechnic work on oneself begins with the evacuation of the interior through a removal of the non-own. We now see what is meant by the image of the ontological 'local government reorganiza- tion' used above: it shows the turn towards that which depends on me and the turn away from everything else. The student of wisdom starts from the intuition that their chance is based on the separation of the two regions of being. The clear distinction between them takes on the greatest significance for what they do or do not do in any given situation.
The first is the region of the own; the Latin Platonists termed it the realm of the 'inner human', and claimed that only there was the truth at home: in interiore homine habitat veritas,14 usually under exclusion of one's own body, while the yogis and gymnosophists of the East incorporated it into the interior. Within my enclave, there is nothing to which I can be indifferent, as I bear responsibility for everything here, down to the smallest details; for me, it is simply a matter of not desiring anything I cannot have and not avoiding any- thing that is meant for me.
The second area encompasses the entire rest of the world, which is suddenly known as the outside, the saeculum, and faces me like an exile populated by random things. What begins thus is the long walk of the soul through an 'outside world' of which no one quite understands any longer why it has receded into the outlandish - namely, because of the ontological separation of the non-own and the congealment of the previously shared encompassing situation into an aggregate of objects that have now become distant and indifferent. In truth, the protagonists of the great secession are doing everything to alienate the world; but they remain incapable of understanding how their own contributions ensure that, in the panorama of sensory per- ception, the 'objects' emerge and an alien entity known as the 'outside world' comes about through the sum of these objects. 1s Marcus Aurelius tell us: 'Matters outside our doors stand there by themselves neither knowing nor telling us anything about themselves. '16 Subject to poor sensuality and meagre materiality, the 'external' truly has
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FIRST ECCENTRICITY
no to stop at entrance to it is good now is serving as an pole to flight and contempt (anachoresis, fuga saeculi, contemptus mundi) - at most, it becomes an object of disintegrative and disenchanting investigations. Perhaps in a later order of things, when the ideal of withdrawal moves to the second row, it will be 'rediscovered' as the target area for care, mission and spiritual conquest. The decisive aspect is that the increas- ing insignificance of the exterior following from the secessionary distinction releases an incredible surplus of self-referentiality in the individual. Channelling this surplus into occupational programmes is the purpose of existence in ethical separation. Indeed: once the outside world has been separated from me and has become distant, I find myself alone and discover myself as a never-ending task.
Birth of the Individual from the Spirit of Recession
What I am discussing here using the category of secession is thus founded on an inner act that, for want of a better term, I shall call 'recession'. This first of all means the withdrawal of each person from the mode of being that is immersed in the riverbed of worldly matters - or, to take up the oft-invoked image once again, an exit from the river of life to take up a position on the shore. Only the recessive self-insulation can give rise to the behavioural complex that Foucault, following on from the Stoic principle of cura sui, calls 'concern for oneself' (souci de soil. This can only develop if the object of concern, the self, has already stepped out of the situational river of social life and established itself as a region sui generis. Where retreat to the self is carried out - whether the practising person burns the bridges behind them, as monks of every kind usually do, or settles into the everyday back-and-forth between self-pole and world-pole, as char- acterizes the sages of the Stoic type - it reinforces the emergence of an enclave in the existent which, remaining within the metaphor, I shall call 'shore subjectivity'.
For millennia, this subjectivity has been fighting from its precari- ous position on the shore of the alienated river for a language that is suited to its confusing self-experience. Its attempts at articulation fluctuate between extremes: spiritual-heroic overcompensation on the one side, where the foreignness of the outside world is meant to be conquered through an alliance between the inner and the divine - as demonstrated by Heraclitus in his triumphant moments and by Indian thinkers during the Upanishad period - and the flight to contrition
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
111 flver
only by a guilt; is the path first trodden by early Judaism before Christianity expanded it into an avenue. Subjectivity withdrawn into itself comes closest to the truth about its situation when it asks questions that seek to get to the bottom of its difficulty in dealing with a whole that has frozen into complexes of external facts. Thus Smen Kierkegaard alias Constantin Constantius, representing a procession of shore subjects from several
millennia, asks:
Where am I? What is the 'world'? What does this word mean? Who has duped me into the whole thing, and now leaves me standing there? 17
The Self in the Enclave
In recession to themselves, humans develop a form of enclave sub- jectivity in which they are primarily and constantly concerned with themselves and their inner conditions. Each human transforms them- selves into a small state for whose inhabitants they must find the right constitution. No one expressed the recession imperative, which calls upon the living to govern their own lives, as clearly as Marcus Aurelius:
From now on keep in mind the retreat into this little territory within yourself. Avoid spasms and tensions above al1. 18
This pinpoints the origin of all imperatives of self-collection, without which the subjectivity of advanced civilization, in so far as it is a product of concentration, could never have assumed its familiar manifestations. At the same time, it is in the nature of things that the micropolis which I am will have to make do with an interim govern- ment for a long time. This polis, after all, is usually taken over by its sale inhabitant in a ruined, almost ungovernable state. Spirituality begins with clean-up work in an inner failed state, a failed soul - it was not by chance that the young Gautama, the later Buddha, began his path to asceticism when he came into contact with the suffering in the world and his youthful worldview crumbled. Or was this collapse merely a pious fiction, and was the root of the later enlightened one's secession in fact the ascetic revolt against the idiocy of the military nobility's way of life? 19
Anyone who considers a modern account more credible than an ancient legend can read how Bernard Enginger (1923-2007), a
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FIRST
young
been morally
concentration camp, found a new spiritual composure through his encounter with Sri Aurobindo and the 'mother' (Mira Richard) - as well as a second name: Satprem. Whoever joins the path of philo- sophical practice, or Dharma, or Christian exercitationes spirituales, does so not in full possession of their self-control, but because they realize a lack thereof - and at once in the hope, supported by actual role models, of one day mastering the art of self-governance (enk- rateia). The Hindu title swami (from Sanskrit svami, 'own' or 'self'; compare Latin suus), which can belong to a chief in profane contexts, refers in its spiritual meaning to the 'master over oneself', the ascetic, who has achieved complete control over his own powers on the path of practice.
In the Microclimate of the Practising Life
Enclaved subjectivity thus constitutes itself as a provisional state in which self-concern comes to power. The practising life form is like an inner protectorate with a temporary government and an introspective supervisory authority. In practical terms, this modus vivendi can only be established through an ascetic pact with a teacher whom one sup- poses already to have achieved ethical reform. 2o In order to keep up the enclaved state, a constant guarding of borders and daily checks for infiltrations from the outside are indispensable. The most dif- ficult part of the withdrawn subject's task is actually to interrupt the stream of information that joins the practising person to their former environment. There are two weak points that must be kept in mind especially here, and present a constant danger: firstly sensory open- ings, and secondly language connections, to the social environment. Without a strict regulation of both crisis areas, any attempt at a vita contemplativa is doomed from the start. On the subject of sensory contacts, more or less all systems of contemplation show how they work at the interruption of the perceptual continuum - they close the visual channels in particular (to say nothing of oral or tactile ones), and prescribe a systematic withdrawal of the practising person from all sensory fronts until complete disaffection has been achieved.
This is where Horace's nil admirarj21 has its basis in life, assuming that life and exercitatio are already synonymous. Seneca occasionally mentions that with time, the sight of an execution should leave us as indifferent as a view of an unprepossessing landscape. Images like the
229
his in a German
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
or 'inner statue', were to
with notions of goals
able to follow on from such advice on progressive apathy. Without a certain acquired heartlessness, spiritual attitudes like apathy, peace of mind or detachment cannot be realized. The ethics of advanced civilizations produces an artificial inhumanity, resulting in an equally artificial benevolence being summoned up to compensate for it. 22
An even more important factor is the removal of the subject from the language stream of the first society, which would keep it shackled to the foreign rule of everyday notions and affects even more firmly than the sensory channels do. That is why all practice communities develop symbolically ventilated microclimates in which the ascetics, meditators and thinkers hear and learn fundamentally different things from those they hear in the village square, the forum or the family. This does not mean that a secret language always needs to develop because of recession, though there is no shortage of such ideas in many spiritual subcultures. 23 Even where the spiritual teachers use the people's language with enlightened simplicity - as is said of Buddha or Jesus - there is an unmistakable tendency towards the development of closed language game circles.
The Rejection of Self-Concern: Consistent Fatalism
The recessive subject can only work out a liveable constitution for itself on two conditions: firstly, it must be filled with the conviction that ethical secession can genuinely open up a zone of successful self- concern activities, and secondly, it must find a mode of staying in dia- logue with itself along the way and enduring itself in its provisional state. That the first of these conditions can by no means be taken for granted, although it has long constituted a form of common sense in practising circles, is demonstrated by the history of fatalistic thought systems. Though spiritual isolation from the life of the people may not be entirely out of the question for their followers - fatalists can be ascetics too - an effective recession would be impossible accord- ing to their views. To them, the division of the world into things that depend on us and those that do not is an illusion: for consistent fatalists, everything is absolutely independent of ourselves, even our own existence, which is pure thrownness by fate. All human striving to break away and be free is doomed to be inconsequential. One may consider this position defiant and gloomy, but it is not without an impressive consistency. 24
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vivid self-perfection, were
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
on a
philosophy, was the very same Makkhali Gosala who provoked· his contemporary Gautama Buddha to the only noticeably irate polemic known in the latter's lifetime. Buddha recognized in the teachings of his rival the most dangerous provocation of his own system, which was based entirely on the redemptive power of personal effort, and referred to the determinism of the niyati doctrine as a spiritual crime
that lured its followers to their doom. In Gosala's philosophy, the division of the world and the isolation of the recessive subject would be impossible, because no creature, not even the human in search of redemption, is capable of having an original will:
All animals . . . creatures . . . beings . . . souls are without force and power and energy of their own. They are bent this way and that by their fateY
Anyone looking for proof that the Buddhist doctrine, in precise analogy to the Stoic, is based on an ontological 'local government reorganization' that strictly separates what I can achieve from every- thing else can find it in Buddha's polemic against the teachings of Gosala. According to these, every creature automatically proceeds through all the evolutionary stages - the necessary 84,000 incarna- tions, or in other accounts even the same number of mahakalpas or world cycles. Every life form and stage of existence shows through itself how far the process has advanced for it; asceticism can therefore be a consequence of development at best, but never the reason for it. Buddha could certainly not accept this. By attacking Gosala's equa- tion of being and time, or facticity and fate, he secured the space for his opposing doctrine based on the acquisition of redemptive knowl- edge - and thus for the acceleration of liberation. Only thus could he proclaim the elimination of the ontological blockade through insight. Needless to say, Buddha's insistence on the possibility of a more rapid emancipation was in keeping with the spiritual needs of his time. From then on, the time of inner exertion was meant to overtake the sluggish time of the world. Where more advanced civilization begins, people come forward who want to hear that they can do something besides waiting. They look for proof that they are moving themselves, not simply being carried along by the course of things like the rock on the imperceptibly flowing glacier. 26
The doctrine of rigorous determinism must have offered its adepts a seductive gratification, for it lasted for almost two thousand years in the ascetic Ajivika movement before dying out in the fourteenth
231
of niyati
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDliRES
are a sort
shown that there is nothing they can do - aside from accepting what is the case and watching things take their course. The asceticism of Gosala's companions consisted in keeping up their strike against all feelings of desire or ability for a lifetime; the general Indian rejection of the phantoms of the ego may have helped them in this. One notes with a degree of amazement that ancient India provided the setting for the appearance of the first positivists.
Solitude Techniques: Speak to Yourself!
The second of the aforementioned preconditions for existence in recessive subjectification, the regulation of language, must be strictly applied and constantly reaffirmed, as the adept can only sustain their efforts on the path to self-governance if there is a constant flow of sta- bilizing information from the closed language game circle of salvific and practice knowledge. This requirement is fulfilled through the establishment of a methodically regulated praxis of conversation with oneself. Here, incidentally, one can easily show how and why the practising life, contrary to what popular cliches about the mystical or supra-rational quality of spiritual processes might suggest, depends very significantly on rhetorical phenomena that have been turned inwards, and that a cessation of the endo-rhetorical functions - aside from such rare states of meditative trance as samadhi - brings about the end of spiritual life as such. What is known as 'mysticism' is, for the most part, an endo-rhetorical praxis in which the rare moments without speaking have the function of fuelling endless words about the wonders of the unspeakable.
From the universe of endo-rhetorical methods - which are aug- mented in theistic practice systems by prayers, ritual recitations, monologies (one-word litanies) and magical evocations, which do not concern us here - I shall highlight three types without which the existence of recessively stabilized practice carriers would be incon- ceivable. Thomas Macho's concept of 'solitude techniques' can be applied to all these forms of speech; the term refers to procedures whereby humans learn to keep themselves company in retreat. 27 With their help, the recessively isolated manage, as shown by the history of hermits and countless other secessionaries, not to experience their more or less rigid self-exclusion from the world as banishment. Instead, they mould their anachoresis into a salvatory concentration
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are
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
consists, as in the 'self-doubling' of the contemplator. It offers an indispensable stratagem for all who are halfway along the practice path: it shows them a way to be in good company after withdrawing from the world - at least, in better company than would be available to the withdrawn individual if they
remained alone with themselves undoubled.
Self-doubling only makes sense if it does not produce two symmet-
ric halves - then the contemplator would encounter their own identi- cal twin, who would confront them again with their muddled state in a superfluous act of mirroring. Those who practise successfully rely without exception on an asymmetrical self-doubling in which the inner other has the association of a superior parmer, comparable to a genius or an angel, who stays close to its charge like a spiritual monitor and gives them the certainty of being constantly seen, exam- ined and strictly assessed, but also supported in case of a crisis. While loneliness makes the conventional depressive sink into the abyss of their insignificance, the well~organized hermit can profit from a privi- lege of notability, as their noble observer - Seneca sometimes calls it their custos, guardian - constantly supplies them with the feeling of having a good companion, in fact the best, albeit while under strict supervision. In the Benedictine Rule, the friars were reminded that a monk must know that he is watched (respici) by God at every moment, that he must take into account that his every action is wit- nessed from a divine observation point (ab aspectu divinitatis videri) and constantly relayed upwards (renuntiari) by the angels. 28
This plausibly shows how recessive subjectivity can develop into a forum for intense dialogues, even passionate duels between the self and its intimate other. As the Great Other only gains a clearer pres- ence through retreat from the multiplicity of daily themes - a proce- dure from which psychoanalysis and related therapeutic techniques also profited in the twentieth century - the withdrawn individual gains mental intensity by isolating themselves monothematically. They learn from their inner other who they themselves are meant to be, and their daily self-examination tells them what state they are in. One must admit, however, that in this arrangement they remain a split subject for the meantime - they live as a solitary, perhaps not quite coram Deo, but under the gaze of the master or angel whom they fear disappointing. At this level of concern for oneself, one cannot yet speak of any unification with the Great Other or a dissolution of the duality between real and ideal self, as taught in Neoplatonism and the Indian schools of non-duality.
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
Endo-Rhetoric and Disgust Exercises
There are essentially three forms of speech that can be given at the inner forum as part of the recessive subject's psychogymnastic exer- cises: firstly, separation speeches, which are devoted to reinforcing the recession; then training speeches, with which the practising person seeks to improve their spiritual immune situation; and finally vision speeches, which enable the contemplator to direct their gaze at the whole and to the heights - and from imaginary heights back down to the depths.
Speeches of the first type are especially important for the stabili- zation of the recession, as they fight the practising person's inclina- tion to regress to the experiential mode of the worldlings. It is clear enough that the position of exclusive self-concern is existentially far more improbable, and thus in far greater need of cultivation, than the formerly practised lifestyle of unspoilt participative pluralism, where individuals were allowed to unburden themselves via group drift, collective curiosity and mediocre diversion. Heidegger, follow- ing Kierkegaard's example of a philosophical insulting of the audi- ence,29 famously described the modus essendi of this form of self in his analysis of the 'they' in Being and Time: everyone is the other, and no one is themselves. He went in search of a path to authenticity that would no longer lead through a withdrawal to the enclave, but rather through a renewed participation in the historic 'event' that is elevated to the call of being. As long as the spiritual call to withdrawal applies, however, nothing must be fought more ardently than the constantly reappearing inclination to find ordinary life with its little refuges and communitary anaesthetics attractive. Whoever starts dreaming of the joys of ordinariness again after their withdrawal is spiritually lost. That the primitive truth of existence in normal situations, the par- ticipative embeddedness in natural and co-personal circumstances (as post-metaphysical spherological analysis explains with comprehen- sive descriptions), must be sacrificed is part of the price of life under increased vertical tension. This context demands the denaturing of normality and the transformation of the improbable into second
nature.
Attacks of homesickness for the lost normality can be remedied
through endo-rhetorical exercises from the angle of disgust arousal. They are effective because they fight the root causes of the temptation to find, on occasion, the external world left behind attractive. Thus Marcus Aurelius notes:
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FIRST ECCENTRICITY
bath seems you of sweat, scummy is every part of life and every kind of
This shows in a highly suggestive manner how the genesis of the external also includes ethical and affective distancing mechanisms. Sensory disgust arousal is assisted by disillusioning and disenchanting analysis:
Altogether, human affairs must be regarded as ephemeral, and of little worth: yesterday sperm, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. 31
In this context, ancient atom theories find their moral place: they show how all phenomenal life is based on momentary groupings of particles. In the long run, only the spiritual soul can confront the vanitas of the particle flurries. One need hardly point out how much Buddhism owes to the use of the atomic theory, and more generally to the analytics of the composite - and how strongly the obligatory motifs of disgust arousal and disillusionment affected it. The doctrine of the not-self (anatman) so characteristic of Buddhism likewise has less of a theoretical than an aversive purpose: it persuades its adepts to accept that even if there were such a thing as the self or the soul, these would be dissoluble - which is meant to put us off the whole thing from the start.
The contemplation of organic metamorphoses goes a step further:
Observe every object and realize that it is already being dissolved and in process of change, and, as it were, coming to be from decay or disper- sion, and how each is born, in a sense, to die. 32
In this context one can appreciate Ovid's achievement, the poetic retrieval of transformative phenomena. It was the honour of poetry to protect the space of normality from devastation by a disillusion- ing analysis that had got out of control. In addition, there is a wealth of self-admonitions intended to render any affective attachment to the non-own impossible through constant exercises in separation and disaffection - recall Epictetus' suggestion to parents not to kiss their child without bearing in mind that death could take it away from them the very next day. The practising person had to have such maxims of self-admonition and self-training 'to hand' day and night, like a spiritual first aid box - in the terminology of the school, such mentally handy material was called the procheiron, and whoever still speaks today of having some thing or other 'ready' is quoting the conventions of a lost practice culture from a distance.
235
with can
of Hinduism, Buddhism,
Christianity, spiritual Islam and others. We are all familiar with images of Indian sadhus meditating next to pyres on cremation grounds (shmashfma). For the notorious Aghori, who fall into a trance state while sitting on corpses, the cemetery symbolizes 'the totality of psychomental life, fed by consciousness of the "1"'. 3-' Shaivite extremists insist on eating and drinking from the skulls of Brahmans - and noisily bearing witness to it. One can easily imagine what they say to themselves in their inner monologues on the charnel ground: 'You must transcend all this. ' Those with a Catholic upbring- ing will remember the Ignatian exercises, which constitute one great rhetorically structured persuasion of the meditator to participate in the passion of Christ and turn away from the recklessness of worldly life. In the Protestant camp, in Puritanism, the believer's day is struc- tured by admonitions to withdraw from worldly temptations. Most people are familiar with the ominous processions in Shi'ite Iran, where grown men walk through the streets of their cities lamenting and bleeding, striking their heads with broad knives amid monoto- nously tormenting monologues to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn.
There is no need to list examples for the methods of immunization and training speeches, or for vision and worldview speeches directed at one's own intellect. The two are closely connected, as the striving for a transvital self-securing beyond death aims directly for the highest- level symbolic immune system. In Stoic doctrines, this is presented as the totality of nature: dissolving into it must be viewed as the highest form of integration, even if it is accompanied by the disintegration of that conglomerate of atoms which I provisionally think of as my body. In Christianity, by contrast, death is understood as a transition from this life to eternal life. In those spheres dominated by the idea of karma, the final immunity is attained by disabling the guilt-driven causal impetus; thus only a life that had completely ceased to produce suffering would be safe from the repercussions of those products.
In this sense, Nirvana refers less to a place than to a state in which all injury and contamination by the effects of being has ceased.
To consider such ideas of dissolution, transition and final immobi- lization existentially plausible, the practising would constantly have to call to mind their own finitude and endo-rhetorically anticipate its sublation into absolute immunity in keeping with the conventions of their cultural area. In doing so, they speak to themselves from the
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PROCEDURES
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
to as if were no others. subjectivity always private tuition from the universe, from God, from Nirvana. The three absolutes would be bad teachers if they did not encourage their students to view the impossi- ble as if it were close enough to touch; but they would be equally bad if they did not occasionally threaten to end the tuition if there were no
clear improvements in performance.
The practising life is thus a continuum of self-persuasive acts.
Without these, nothing whatsoever can happen among the practising, not even those who have devoted themselves to a largely non-verbal mode of practising, as is the case in the majority of Asian school systems. Many doctrines incessantly emphasize the vast difference between the desired inner states and the rational level with its linguis- tic reference points. Nonetheless, the cult of non-verbalizable states drifts towards an endless stream of speeches on stages and nuances of ascent. All exercises, be they of a Yogic, athletic, philosophical or musical kind, can only take place if carried by endo-rhetorical proc- esses in which acts of self-admonition, self-testing and self-evaluation ~ in line with the criteria of the respective school tradition - play a decisive part, and with constant reference to the masters who have already reached the goal. Were this not the case, recessively isolated subjectivity would return to its diffuse initial situation in a very short time, mingling once more with uncultivated conditions.
The Inner Witness
One of the particularities of enclaved subjectivity, as noted above, is the technique of self-division that made anachoresis grow into the borderline case of an inwardly withdrawn art of being in good company. A deeper self-analysis by the withdrawn subject, however, shows that the doubling of the practising person to yield the observed self and the observed Great Other cannot be the final state. The dyadic relation between the recessively isolated soul and its inner partner transpires as a figure predicated on an anonymous consciousness underlying both poles. The dialogue between the ego that subjects itself to the exercise and its mentor, who supervises it, also includes the inner witness, which is always already present at the exchange of the two as a third factor. The discovery of the mental space's triadic structure simultaneously initiates the integration or transfusion of the Great Other into the ego. For it would always be hopelessly ahead of the dyad's ego pole if there were not some bridging third element,
237
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
that field-shaped witness consciousness which spreads itself neutrally across the poles of the inner dyad.
Through continuous practice under the gaze of the Great Other, the pathological ego of the anachoretic beginner, who can initially only be a nuisance, a source of suffering and a quasi-external object to themselves, increasingly gains a share in the presence of the witness. It is this presence that is reinforced in the meditative exercises of the adepts. The autoplastic effect of practising ensures that the witness consciousness ingrains itself ever more deeply in the contemplator'S bodily memory. By increasingly liberating itself from its pathological traits and de-reifying or de-objectifying itself (which comes to the same thing), the initial ego gets the unconditional presence of the witness on its side. With time, therefore, it can shed the pathological habitus of being seen by the Great Other. Among the advanced, this extends to the point where it might seem to them as if their first ego had died off and been replaced by a self that is at once supra-personal and more native.
One thing, at any rate, is certain: only a strengthening of the witness can bring about the integration of the meditator and prevent their regression into possession by the Great Other. The history of fanaticisms shows that such regressions are the order of the day in 'religions'. Fanaticism makes the triadic field implode - with the pathological ego eliminating the witness by directly appropriating the position of the Great Other in order to act in its name. In the light of this diagnosis, it becomes clear how far our claim is valid that 'religion' is nothing but a misunderstood mental practice system, and often a psychodynamically derailed one based on half-price asceti- cism, where beginner's mistakes and aspects of pathological subjec- tivity are elevated to the essence of the matter. The two expansionist monotheisms are naturally most at risk from such fanaticism, in so far as they do not make their quality as practice systems sufficiently clear to their adepts. They often present themselves on the didactic surface as a purely confessional matter, thus opening the door to pathogenic error: then desertion from the failed ego formation leads straight into possession by the Great Other. Whenever one sees monotheis- tic populism at work, it is another case of a mental practice system concealing its true character: once again, a training programme has passed itself off as a 'religion'. Then it is hardly surprising if agitation outstrips introversion. Indeed, one can wonder whether the modern effect known as 'religion' perhaps ensues only when an ethical prac- tice programme is turned to the purpose of collective identity forma- tion; in this way, spiritual exercise changes from a demanding form of
238
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
Inquisition Against the Ego
In the same context, we can expound a common trait of all practice systems developed from the position of recessive subjectification - I am thinking of the ubiquitous, dramatic warning to apprentices to avoid the temptation that comes from an excessive ego relation. One could almost speak of a worldwide inquisition common to the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern monotheisms as well as the Indian and East Asian systems. Since the emergence of ambitious forms of existential acrobat- ics, there are notably unanimous warnings in East and West alike of the danger that humans could get stuck to their ego - or 'little I', as some call it - and thus fail to take their true place in both the cosmic hier- archies and their own social contexts. The global spiritual conspiracy against the ego is not without a certain irony, as it stems from the same movements that spawned the ego phenomenon in the first place. If there has ever been an ego that made itself the measure of all things, there can be no doubt that it was first and foremost in the radius of the egotechnic procedures described here - and only secondarily on the side of the world-people who fall prey to games of power and prestige.
The oft-cited ego is itself the shadow of enclavement - and plausibly enough, it steps into view because, after the ontological local govern- ment reorganization, the excluded self as such becomes conspicuous. As soon as the recessively isolated subject turns around, it becomes aware of its shadow - which falls, understandably enough, on the entire 'rest of the world'. If this is noted, it is inevitable that the indi- vidual will be shocked and accuse itself of casting such a monstrous shadow. As soon as priests and master teachers seize this observation, the accusation is passed on to all mortals - even the majority of poor devils to whom it has not even occurred to have an ego.
As far as the ordinary vanity of mortals is concerned, something that is so eye-catching for spiritual persons, it is generally not an indication of an increased ego relation, but rather of the possession of individuals by collective idols and their more or less naive efforts to become like them. In reality, the phenomenally conspicuous 'egotism' of world-people shows an overwhelming of the psyche through an illusory image of the other - which is why it is usually simply a mis- understood form of invasive altruism, an obsessive need to shine in the eyes of their parents or the tribal elders.
239
as
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
are
trast, conceal actual practice
are founded on endavement - extending all the way to systems of 'subjective idealism'. Small wonder that they could only flourish under the protection of the archaic class order - most obviously in ancient India, where the tendency to flee from social restraints took on epidemic proportions early on, and could only be calmed through the integration of spiritual withdrawal into the normal course of life, as a form of retirement. Thus it was part of the standard Brahman's career that the married father or the mother of a family, once they had fulfilled their duties as students and parents, prepared in the third phase of their life for 'withdrawal to the woods' (vanaprastha), then finally leading the life of a wandering beggar (bhikshu).
In Christian times, the evasions of recessive subjectivity had to be balanced out with strong communitary counterweights, in particular the obligatory exercises in humility, whose basal paradox - reaching the top through degradation - is all too familiar. It was therefore indispensable for the internal stabilization of spiritual egotisms that they resolutely, even fanatically deny being such programmes from the start. One identifiable symptom of this denial is the beggar's exist- ence, which became characteristic in both the East and the West of the antisocial or 'houseless' ways of life. In this historic compromise between withdrawal from the world of humans and participation in its surpluses, the radically practising had found the suitable form to persuade themselves that their methodical isolation was in fact a mode of living in the humblest possible way.
Entirely in keeping with this, the cutting-out of the inner region from the continuum of the existent marks the beginning of a pathos- laden compensation programme against both spiritual and profane egotism, without making ethical secession credible or even merely tolerable either for itself or in social terms. In short: the recessive subject has scarcely been successfully excluded and elevated to its exceptional ontological status before it becomes the object of a tire- less propaganda of humility and self-abdication. Here one should no longer imagine that before which it humbles itself - the divine, the universe, the whole, the universal monad of life, nothingness, etc. - in the meanwhile problematic form of the external. The great humility- demanding entity can now only appear from the side of the self: as a god from within, a cosmos from within, as a not-self from within.
Hence the typical two-stage structure of subjectivity in the advanced-civilized space. In this structure, an everyday and illusory Little Ego must be set apart from a true and real Great Ego, and it
240
FIRST
~rH"n"'r is meant to
still has any significance, it is as
a parable of the power of the all-causing monad of life, as a source of transcendental metaphors of strength and a sparring partner of the soul, which wants to test how many things already leave it indifferent - thus there were monks who enjoyed boasting that they could spend an entire night lying next to a young woman without being tempted. As soon as the psyche has followed the imperative to change its life by embarking on recession to itself, it hears the corrective command to change the change. Successes in the striving to become holy must therefore not penetrate too far into the self-awareness of the holy, otherwise they lose their exemplary role for others. The paradox of this position is systematically obscured everywhere: that the holy man must not know about his own situation, even though he is the first who should know. Holiness seems attainable only at the price of mental shallowness, as it is incompatible with self-reflective individuality - a trait that, as a remark by Luhmann states, the saint shares with the hero of the modern novel. 34
Rehabilitating Egotism
I shall conclude these reflections on the original emergence of the practice space through the secessionary movements and the recessive withdrawal of the subject as a practice carrier with a recollection of Nietzsche's efforts towards a rehabilitation of egotism after millennia of denigration. These drew above all on two critical observations that were frequently ignored in the history of the inquisition against the ego: firstly, that criticism of egotism was highly premature for most people, because they were not yet faced with the task of forming an ego that could cast a negative shadow in the first place. Secondly, that even among those who had developed an ego by recessively taking over themselves, this certainly did not always merit the humbling imposed on them by the agents of the anti-egotism inquisition.
This inquisition, as we now understand, means nothing other than an indispensable measure for darkening the basal paradox that the saint must not know that they are a saint, or, technically speaking, that the old-style religious 'virtuoso' - to use Schleiermacher's fatal term - remains condemned to conceal their virtuosity from them- selves. Perhaps the right hand should not know what the left is doing - but the brain that knows what the left hand is doing has always also been aware of the right hand's activities.
241
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
Nonetheless, the saints could be plagued by the demon of self- reference without noticing its presence. This is revealed by a passage from Thomas of Celano's second life of St Francis (1246/7). In this account the young man, still 'unconverted', was imprisoned after a skirmish between the citizens of Assisi and Perugia and predicted his future in an exalted tone to his depressed fellow inmates: he himself was not downcast, for he knew that he would 'yet be venerated as a saint throughout the whole world'. 35 We note in passing that to avoid further evidence of such spiritual career reverie, the stigmati- zation with the wounds of the Lord, following St Francis of Assisi's great example, was the only tolerable form of pretension to holiness during one's lifetime, because it bypassed the self-awareness of the candidate, as it were, and presented the status of sanctification as an objective passion fact. The question of the stigmatized party's own contribution to producing the sacred marks has always remained taboo within pious circles. 36
As soon as one understands that the subject itself is nothing other than the carrier of its own exercise sequences - on the passive side an aggregate of individuated habitus effects, and on the active a centre of competencies that plays on the keyboard of callable dispositions - one can join Nietzsche in calmly admitting what was unspeakable for millennia: egotism is often merely the despicable pseudonym of the best human possibilities. What, by the light of the humilitas hys- teria, resembles a sinfully exaggerated self-relation is usually no more than the natural price of concentrating on a rare achievement. How else should the virtuoso reach and maintain their level if not through the ability to evaluate themselves and the state of their art soundly? Only where the self-relation keeps running idly can one speak of an out-of-control exercise. In such cases one should speak of an aber- ration rather than a sin, a malformation rather than a malicious act. Something that theological authors considered a major factor, namely the desire to be evil purely for the sake of it - including the oft-cited Augustinian incurvatio in seipsum - is presumably as rare as perfect holiness. Where people supposed egotism, and accordingly con- demned it in brief malediction procedures, closer inspection shows the matrix of the most exceptional virtues. Once this is revealed, it is the turn of the humble to explain what they think of the outstanding.
242
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories
In the Time of Completion
The remoulding of humans as carriers of explicit practice programmes in the more advanced civilizations not only leads to the eccentric self- relation of existence in spiritual enclaves. It also imposes a radically altered sense of time and the future on the practising. In reality, the adventure of advanced civilizations consists in lifting an existential time out of the cosmic, universally shared time. Only in this frame- work can one call upon humans to cross over from the even years of being into the dramatic situation of a project time. The acceleration whereby existence frees itself from the inertias of the course of the world is characteristic of existential time. Whoever takes the step into the practising life wants to be faster than the whole - whether they seek liberation still 'in this life' or still aim for 'heavenly exalta- tion' (exaltatio caelestis) in vita presente. If even Benedict of Nursia, the master of Western monasticism, spoke of a rapid ascent to God, this was not indicative of his personal impetuousness. He was acting entirely in keeping with the rules of life in the time of the spiritual project. His instructions for a holy life followed on consistently from the apocalyptic 'soon' (mox)37 and the apostolic 'quickly' (velociter}. 38 Because recessively isolated existence itself constitutes an anti-inertia programme, its elan is always ahead of the general evolution. Existing and hurrying (festinare) are the same thing, just as the coercion to hurry and the will to perfection belong together. 39 This is where the seemingly patient East and the manifestly impa- tient West converge. Just as Buddha advises his followers to lead this life as if it were the last, the Christian doctrine, bringing together Jewish and Mediterranean thought, convinces its adepts that this life
243
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
is the only one they will ever have, and each day a part of the last chance.
I have attempted elsewhere to show how the longing for justice and alleviation of suffering in the first pre-Christian millennium led to the establishment of a temporal structure with a new tension, marked by the purpose of delayed revenge. 40 This temporal connection ensues because the pain of injustice suffered produces an individual and cul- tural memory that does everything in its power to inflict an equivalent punitive pain on those responsible. This leads to an existentialized time with a clear retributive finality. As not everyone who suffers injustice is in a position to gain satisfaction by their own actions, however, a large part of the retributive energy must be passed upwards and managed by a divine economy of balancing out suffering. This results in the moralized conceptions of world time in Christianity and Hinduism. In the former system, world time is compressed into the relatively short span between creation and the impending Final Judgement, where wrongful deeds will return to their perpetrators; in the latter, the stored mass of injustice itself propels the karmic process, which, like a permanent martial law, ensures that the moral balance of each individual's deeds expresses itself in that life during its early embodiments. In both cases, the lifetimes can be integrated more or less plausibly into the process of moralized world time.
In the following, I shall explain how this derivation of existential time from retributive tension, or from the transcendentally heightened demand for suffering to be balanced out, must be augmented by a second derivation from practice tension, or from the anticipation of completion. This is only possible if one can show the existence of a clear finality running through the entire lifetime of the practising. This condition is unmistakably fulfilled by the classical forms of the practis- ing life. Just as the time of revenge is structured by anticipation of the fulfilled moment in which pain catches up with the one who caused it, the time of practising is structured through the imaginary anticipation of the arrival of the practising at their distant practice goal - be it vir- tuosity, illumination or alignment with the highest good. The tempo- ral form of the practising life also inalienably includes the more or less situationally or concretely envisaged fantasies of arrival without which no beginner could set off on their path, and no advanced adept remain on course. If one can describe the temporal structure of a life subject to retributive intentions as a being-unto-revenge, the temporal mode of the practising life is a being-unto-the-goal - or directly a being-to-
244
THE COMPLETE
THE
It
draws closer to them, is usually only explained to advanced adepts.
Movedness by the Goal
One characteristic of the structure of the practising and zealous life in its initial phase is the ability to be moved by its goal-image from any distance. It provides the most vivid example of what is listed as the fourth causal type in Aristotle's doctrine of causes (after material, formal and efficient causes) - the final cause (causa (inalis): while the other causae 'carry' the effect or push it along in front of itself, as it were, the final causality has the property of contributing to the effect in question through a pulling tension acting from above or in front. By this logic, goals resemble magnets, which irresistibly draw in suit- able objects located within their radius of attraction. The only way to imagine this is that the goal is, in some opaque way, already planted within the body that is drawn towards it - whether through what Aristotle called entelecheia (which literally means 'inward purpose- fulness' and refers to being moved a priori), native to all organisms, or because a creature capable of desire is, at a given moment, shown a goal it did not previously know about, or of which it was not con- sciously aware, towards which it subsequently strives like a goal that can never be abandoned.
This second form of goal-directedness, this phenomenon of being moved by a goal recognition a posteriori, implies the activation of a latent ideal of perfection or the promise of an irresistible prize in case of victory - comparable to the athlon fought over by Greek ath- letes. What Christian martyrs called the wreath of victory, stephanos (also a crown, and later a bishop's mitre), constitutes such a reward. Nowhere is the predication of one's own behaviour on a motivating prize expressed more clearly than in the well-known athletic meta- phors of St Paul, who, referring to his later apostolic vigour, writes in 1 Corinthians 9:26:
Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air.
Here Christian determination is connected with remarkable direct- ness to the athletic focus on success. This does not mean that Paul was
a a
ancient sense of
- hence the Greek word skop6s, which emphasizes the recognizability of the 'target' from afar. The irony of the goals, namely that they lose concreteness as one
245
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
especially familiar with the customs of the athletic world; he simply adopted the athlon motif in order to explain to his fellow believers the unusual notion of an immortal winner's prize as vividly as possible.
Concerning the Difference Between a Wise Man and an Apostle
What counts is the fact that the apostle himself is not speaking from the position of one who has achieved the goal, but from that of a practising person halfway there - or, in modern terms, someone committed - who is almost as far away from the goal as those to whom he turns as spiritual mentors. This makes him testify all the more emphatically to the significance of being moved by the idea of the goal. What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the exist- ence of the anticipator towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy to the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect. This is precisely what Paul is referring to in his exhortation to the Corinthian readers of his first letter: 'Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ' (1 Cor. 11:1). The speaker's imitation- worthiness here lies not in the successes he has achieved, but rather in his movedness by the goal. Whoever imitates such an imitator of Christ is running behind a runner. 41
This approach outlines the minimum for a culture of practice. It implies the elementary three-step structure without which there can be no organized guidance of practising beginners towards higher goals. The leader of the field is naturally the one who has fully reached the goal, the perfect one: in this case the God-man, Christ in person, 'belief' in whose perfection is already equivalent to faith in his relative imitability - as believing and anticipating, as noted above, mean the same thing in this context. The paradox of pedagogy in advanced civilizations, namely that it teaches the imitation of the inimitable, is discussed at greater length below. 42 In the middle of the field, here and everywhere else, one finds the figure of the advanced adept - in this case the apostle - who places himself as a first-degree successor in front of the main field, consisting of beginners and sec- ond-degree imitators, in this case the spiritually frail members of the young community in Corinth, who require guidance and inspire the apostle through their neediness.
246
THE COMPLETE AND THE ! NCOMPLETE
matters is
the simplest hierarchy, a project is to realized in actually lived time. The things lying on top of one another in the illustration are projected onto the time axis, after which the beginner's position can be identified with the Now, the advanced position with the Later and the position of perfection with the Finally. From now on, onwards and upwards mean the same thing. One can say that encompassing practice histories are not only teleologically directed; they also show a latently eschatological structure. In this field, imaginary goals and last things show a tendency to merge. As soon as the practising person is concerned not simply with the learn- ing of an art or craft as a process that can be concluded with the attainment of mastery, but rather with the existential art in which life as a whole strives for elevation and transfiguration, death and perfection inevitably come into contact. This trait is shared by paths of spiritual practice in the most diverse cultures; what sets them apart from one another are the codings of the highest and last, the modes of approach, the number of steps to complete, and the shaping of the different degrees of harshness against which the advanced must fight. The being-unto-death that the young Heidegger sought to attribute purely to the thrown Dasein's awareness of finitude had been known to apprentices of withdrawal since time immemorial - though they admittedly understood it as a being-to-completion. Consistently, their existential was not thrownness; that, as we know, is only true of those who cling to the world. Their existence was entirely centred on being drawn to the highest.
Paul's call for the Corinthians to be his imitators, just as he imitated Christ, makes it clear how the formation of stages is controlled from the middle. The middle is what lies below the perfect and ahead of the beginnings. Unlike in the Indian world, however, where the licence to teach is made dependent on the master's own complete realization, Stoicism and Christianity know the phenomenon of the imperfect teacher, who overrides his weaknesses by incorporating them into his teachings. To the extent that Paul felt able to teach virtues he himself did not possess, he could only present himself to fellow believers as a role model in the sense of a particular committed 'runner'. This indi- cates less, as is sometimes claimed, a proximity to the thought forms of Greek sports - something that he, as an educated zealot, must have loathed - than his talent for transforming himself into his addressees when writing. So here, speaking to Greeks, he experimentally became a Greek, just as he became a Roman when he needed to speak to Romans. It was, furthermore, quite clear to him that the perfection
247
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
vital for goal magnetism could not come from his own person, only from the great model he himself was emulating - which is why he carried out his magisterium as a stand-in, in the name of the one who would really have been authorized to teach, had he still been willing and able to act in praesentia after the resurrection. Paul was painfully aware of his lack of personal charisma, and he was always aware that his slight appearance made little impression on others. Logically enough, he therefore shifted his claim to authority to hysterical apos- tolic speech acts from afar. He was able to incorporate such addresses uncontradicted into his letters of instruction, which are dated to th. e years between AD 48 and 60.
In analogous fashion, Seneca discovered the position of the advanced adept as a literarily fruitful starting point for a philosophical lecture- ship, and likewise distinguished himself from AD 62 onwards as a writer of instructive epistles. Formally, these were addressed to a certain Lucilius, a younger man of uncertain personal profile who had resolved to devote his life to philosophical exercises, but they were aimed beyond him at a larger audience from the start. In formal terms, Seneca approached his own role as an apostolic orator by speaking up as the intermediary of a doctrine of completion; he too drew on halfway experiences to initiate the beginner into the exerci- tationes spirituales of the school and attract a wider audience at the same time. He knew that he was still on the way to perfection, with a substantial distance still ahead. Nonetheless, his advanced degree of maturity allowed him to speak with authority about the highest good, which lay beyond his present status. Thus he asked, 'What can augment the complete? ', directly giving the answer himself: 'Nothing - unless that which it augmented was not perfect. ' 'The ability to improve is a sign of something imperfect. '43 If growth suggests imper- fection, then reduction does so all the more.
Death Exam: Wisdom Teaching as Training for the Theatre of Cruelty
Seneca's concept of wisdom as a goal of perfection is infused in its every fibre with the Roman principle of reality, which understands the reality of the real as the harshness of life. Thus education to reality always meant preparation for an examination in tolerating cruelties. While Roman power is exerted as a collaboration with fate, Roman wisdom can only be proved as an unwavering resistance to the power
248
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
that people through No culture was so skilled at turning terror into theatre and placing the taking of life at the centre of public rituals. Where else could one observe such a unity of enter-
tainment and massacre?
Where one conceives the world after the image of a theatre of
cruelty, the wise man can only be presented on such a stage as an actor. No simulations are permitted on this stage, as the games appear realer than life itself. While life is only cruel on occasion, the Roman arena elevates cruelty to a central principle and a routine, extending to the actual butchery in the sand and the genuine tortures at the ramp. On a world stage of this type, there is only one difference that makes a difference: that between the standing, who will still be upright at the end, and the falling, who stay fallen. 44 Consequently, wisdom can only be invoked here with the image of standing upright - if there was ever a substance prior to Hegel that needed to be devel- oped as a subject, it is the one that presented itself in the figure of the Stoic seer. This is why Seneca says that it is not surprising if someone who is not tested goes about their life quietly; what is amazing is when 'someone stands up (extolli) while everyone allows themselves to be kept down (deprimuntur), and stays standing while everyone is lying on the ground: ibi stare ubi omnes iacent'. 45 The only risk posed by torture is that it could break the organ of upright stance, namely the spirit. The completely wise man, however, is the epitome of intransigence: 'He stands there upright under any given load. Nothing makes him smaller, nothing that has to be carried displeases him [. . . ] he knows that he lives to carry a burden. '46
Like Paul, Seneca requires a solid embodiment of perfection in an exemplary individual for the credibility of his message, even though he cannot point - like the apostle - to a master of constancy whose stabilitas extended beyond death. Thus the author contents himself with invoking the ideal, which would still be equally binding for us if there had never been a perfect sage. The Stoics' victories over death require the participation of the practising person in a different mode of perfection: they aim for a non-Christian savoir mourir. Their appeal is directed at a summum bonum that resides in the developed human mind (mens). As long as this mind has not worked its way to complete self-confidence, it continues to know uncertainty and fleet- ingness (volutatio). If it is perfect, it enters a lasting state of immobile solidity (immota stabilitas)47 - and in the Roman context, as noted above, stabilitas always means resistance to torture in the death exam. In this criterion alone lies the difference between a completely
249
EXAGGERA TION l'ROCEDURES
an
BU. ""'-"" one itwas
look back on decades of serious philosophical practice. Even after so long a time, however, he was forced to admit that he had so far only been able to talk himself (suadere) into believing what was best for him; in all those years, he did not manage to achieve a complete per- suasion (persuasio). And even successful self-persuasion would still, as he knew, not have brought him to his goal, for this would only be achieved when his wisdom teaching had become completely ingrained in him and available (parata) in any situation, even the most adverse. It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.
Seneca's testimony not only offers an insight into the endo- rhetorical procedures of Latin Stoicism; it also shows an incipient theory of stages, with the typical three-stage structure comprising the beginners, the advanced and the perfect - though the peak of the final stage is hidden by clouds. As usual, the operative essential is in the middle, for only here can work on the assimilation of the improbable take place.
Seneca the teacher is charming enough to take his own imperfec- tion together with that of his student. Hence the admonition to both: 'More than we have overcome so far still lies before us, but the most important factor in advancing is the will to advance. ' The way is long, for what we want to win are not victories in the Persian Wars, but vic- tories over the forces that have defeated the greatest peoples: greed, ambition and fear of death. 48
Elsewhere (especially in letters 72 and 75), Seneca develops the outline for a five-stage pyramid by dividing the advanced adepts in the middle zone (medii) into three groups and levels (gradus): those who are finding their feet like convalescents; those who have already made significant progress (profectus), though there is still a long way to the highest level (multum desit a summa); and the third kind (tertium genus), for whose members complete wisdom is already within reach (in ictu) - 'they are not yet on dry ground, but have reached the harbour' (nondum in sicco, iam in portu). With each level of ascent, the practising person comes closer to the summum bonum, of which it is said that our desire inevitably pauses before it, 'for there is no other place above the highest' (quia ultra summum non est 10cus),49 The higher the ascent to perfection, the more stable one's anchoring in a final immunity.
In its doctrine of the final goals of life, Stoic theology adopts ele- 250
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOM1'LETE
ments in
in the noetic sphere, take part in
practice purely concerns the task of turning listless sharing into clear co-ownership and minimizing the proportion of the corruptible in relation to the non-corruptible. The chance for humans is the trans- formation of an unstable methexis (share) into a stable hexis (pos- session, habit). They are meant not only to touch the higher sphere occasionally, but to settle there firmly and irreversibly. How this can be achieved is explained through the conventional circle of perfection: we could never perfect ourselves without already having a share in perfection; indeed, we could not even want to approach the summum bonum were it not already within us as a target image, albeit only darkened and broken. The purpose of all practice is to break this breaking, to clear the darkening, and to correct the deviation of the perfect into the imperfect that has been imposed by fate.
Curriculum Vitae a Priori
The wise man, then, is not an artist with visions of something new, but rather a conservator in search of the original state. The restora- tion of a concealed archetype is his passion. Whether the conserva- tion succeeds is another matter, as Western apprentices of the cura sui have only a fraction of the resources known in the Orient at their disposal - they must seek redemption primarily in the automatiza- tion ensured by countless repetitions that are meant to ingrain the improbable habitus of inner peace in the bodily memory.