No More Learning

Candidati, one recalls, was, according to the Roman state ritual, the name of the men dressed in white who indicated a willingness to lose their innocence by putting on an untarnished robe – they were brides of the principle of reality, whose defloration potential has been legendary since those ancient days. In the given case, no one would go so far as to dress the candidate for a political wedding in white since his national political experience is up to date on file; even on the dubious terrain of political morality, no one can define how often someone may have lost their innocence until they can no longer be considered a beginner. Malicious gossip has still not stopped claiming that one can see a dark stain from the emissions of the Ibbenbüren power plant showing through the white candidate robe of Mr Rau, so black that no new integrity can emerge against the accumulated sins. But we are not here to moralize. Perhaps a candidate’s white signals more today than a non-binding ritual – namely the willingness to expose oneself to a change of mind that gives the present moment in world history its philosophical profile.
And that is the code word that gives our intervention its cue. Today, there are not only partisan occasions, but dramatic global reasons to speak of such changes in attitude. The boundless incon- gruity that gapes open between the competences of politics and the requirements of reality give us food for thought. At the moment,
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no one knows how the apocalyptic tendencies of the system could be brought within the range of preventative measures. Politics has turned into a game of blind man’s buff to the highest degree right before our eyes – but because the players hardly ever let themselves be caught, politics cannot take off the blindfold. Everyone can tell that in this children’s game with reality, the danger increases, and if we speak of the principles of politics, we may talk of morality but what we really mean is danger. One aspect of the danger in which we float as both subjects and objects of politics consists not least in the reduction of amoral risks to moral questions to appease the vulnerable. If nothing else, an objection from a philosophical perspective must be directed against it on this forum. A philosophy of the real speaks of reality as dangerousness, and of the fact that danger manifests itself today not least in the dissonance between the fundamental and the urgent. This dissonance will be the topic of what follows.
Should we wish to characterize the dangerousness of the present philosophically, we must choose an offensive diagnosis and realize that the epochal strategy of excluding questions of truth from the political sphere and from the civilizing process (now one’s teeth become loose) has altogether hit a limit. The return of the excluded is being foreshadowed in a series of symptomatic catastrophes. They present a tough bill to the truth-abandoned activism of modernity. If there is a common denominator for the multitude of crises that have fissured contemporary consciousness, it can be found in the open secret that is given away by the catastrophes: the modern myth of praxis is dying and occidental activism is experiencing its twilight of the idols. But we would be underestimating praxis as a principle if we were to see it as governed merely by ideology. If that is all it was, it would never have unleashed its world-moving power. The modern theory-supported and morality-flanked praxis was, after all, able to tease out latent traits of existence into the open and displace seemingly unshakeable structures of reality. The practi- cistic mythos of modernity is nothing less than a universally claimed exegesis of being. It owes its revolutionary assertiveness to the authority of scientific technology; it owes its feats and its psycho- political attractiveness to the advantages of an individualistic ethics of expression whose doctrine is “better to act than to suffer. ” All the mobilizations that shape the face of modernity in the economic, technological, scientific, military, legal, and informational field come together in the phenomenon of practicism. In this particular sense, praxis is really a praxis of change and mobilization; an attack on the given, a will to penetration, dissolution, transformation, and a movement towards increasing mobility. All these mobilizations draw
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their epistemological motives4 from the conceptual Basic Decisions of the metaphysical tradition, and in particular from the younger Enlightenment’s deployment of the difference between light and matter into a relationship between work and substance.
Enlightenment, one might say, is metaphysics of light turned aggressive, organizing itself as an trans-illuminating offensive that advances with unprecedented force across the natural limits of exposure to light up the previously unlit interior of things and make it available. In the name of the Enlightenment, the Old European metaphysics of light moves to a pragmatic stage where the cross- millennial movement evolves from the initial contemplative view of the illuminated to the final irradiation of objects. Irradiation means annihilation – reduction, release, transformation, mobilization. It does not take a genius to see that mobilizations become explo- sions once they pass a certain threshold. To the extent that loud bangs and crashes can currently be heard from all four corners of the world simultaneously, we can no longer hide our doubts about the durability of modernity. The spreading critique of Western practicisim is therefore not an irrationalism, as interested circles proclaim everywhere nowadays. (Some seem to be of the opinion that we must protect praxis from theory. ) No, this criticism soberly challenges us to deal with the hypothesis that all the great risks of the present are based in rationally predictable mobilization disasters.
This preliminary sketch of an alternative “philosophical discourse of the present” remains laconic. It merely indicates what is at stake in current fundamental reflections. It would be superficial to talk about any partial crisis such as, for example, the loss of political credibility with respect to the population without also providing a more radical general diagnosis. Only by participating in the creation of such diagnostics could the political actors prevent themselves from being bad contemporaries. And this is precisely – let us be honest – what we must consider the vast majority of them to be. This is where the crisis of political credibility originates in the first place. Even the dullest members of the public (to say nothing of the reflective ones) get a disastrous impression from the behavior of the political class insofar as this exhibits nothing more than the most hopeless carrying on, abandoned by all spirits, both good and evil – the uncoiling of a phantom-like, unbroken practicism that is cut off from the development of a more sensible awareness (“out there” in society) of the problem. Credibility, if not that of politics but certainly that of the politician, could therefore only be rehabilitated from this perspective. At the end of the day, it does not matter if this or that politician has a personality type well suited for power, if they belong to this or that party, if they care more about the interests of
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workers than those of bank capital, if they cultivate the community of values with people of good will on church days, if they wrestle for their briefcase with prostitutes in front of New York hotels: these are all pardonable sins or secondary virtues. What it comes down to is whether a politician can qualify as the subject of an advanced awareness of the problem. A politician who could offer this would have fulfilled all suitable requirements and be forgiven for occupa- tional sins. But no one will claim that Bonn and other capitals are teeming with such political light bearers. This cannot be – already because a gap of sensitivity opens up in modern societies where the political class and the problem-sensitive aesthetic subcultures become hopelessly estranged from each other. It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that there is a deadly division of labor between the sensible and the resilient: a division for which deeper reasons are probably responsible than just the draining effect of the political fourteen-hour day. It is probably not organically economi- cally possible to live on the edge (more precisely, to set up one’s office on it) and examine it at the same time. In any case, ever since Walther Rathenau, German politics has not seen another case where political intelligence, aesthetic perceptiveness, capacity for sociological analysis, and philosophical reflection were all united in a high-ranking leader. Despite that, we must not let anything less than the unlikely have validity in this field. To speak credibly about credibility, it is necessary to clarify what its substantial criterion would consist of. When it comes to such matters, lowering one’s expectations from the very beginning would mean rationalizing a bankruptcy that has already taken place.
Below, the topic will be unfolded in three directions or phases. First, we will take up the notorious “credibility gap” that was discovered by political semanticists a few years ago and brought into the discussion – a phenomenon that has probably worked its way both into the vocabulary and the self-perception of political upper echelons with some stubbornness. Following that, we will pursue the philosophical assumptions underlying the idea that principles can be embodied in everyday operations. We end with a few sentences stating that it would be both advisable and due to liquidate the ethics of principles into an ethics of urgency.
Dimensions of the Credibility Gap
A gap and its dimensions? Here it is in cold print, but it should be noted that the obliqueness of the expression has been consciously accepted because it corresponds to the structure of the phenomenon
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itself (insofar as obliqueness is aesthetically homologous to being suspect). Initially, it should be established: the clever term “credi- bility gap” has so easily been able to win a place in political vocabulary in the last few years because they were the years when system-theoretical, marketing-strategic, and theatrical categories overturned the field of moral-political “discourses” without encoun- tering hardly any resistance.
From now on, we not only have to deal with information gaps, energy gaps, the Fulda Gap (preferred gate of entry for Russian armored forces), market gaps, and technology gaps, but also with ethical gaps such as that of credibility or predictability which act as the field of operations of interaction technologies. Whoever embraces this linguistic prescription shows they have understood the basic rule of pragmatism: the management of a problem is to be considered its solution until further notice. Thus, the essential political talent proves to be the ability to make yourself comfortable in a deplorable state of affairs. And if we speak of the “dimensions” of the credibility gap, then deficiency is point-blank positivized: it is no longer a deficit, but a market. From then on, we are no longer to understand the gap as a torn hole in material or as a distance between two parameters – rather, it is an independent phenomenon. This positivization also has an advantageous effect, as it tends to occur with some productive demoralizations. It helps by integrating a critical potential into the very description of the matter from its outset. A kind of resistance forces itself between the substance (politics) and the attribute (credible) that no longer allows smooth connections to emerge. Credible politics would amount to a round square. (At this point, the chin of the correspondent of a Hamburg daily newspaper drops to his chest with discouragement; for him, the morning is lost, for this is not the kind of language that keeps us going. ) To give an example, the most credible policy today is without doubt that of the Iranian Ayatollahs, since the discrepancy between what politicians are and what they do is nowhere else in the world as trivial as it is there. They are by far the most charac- terful, credible politicians of our time. Compared to them, the newer Chinese politics, for example, is almost shockingly unreliable, volatile, and, in a fascinating way, devoid of character.
One can understand, of course, why Western professional politi- cians (who are tired of the chronic doubt being cast on their morality) have originated the fantasy that the credibility gap ought to be closed. For once, they would like to see the currents of approval flow unbroken from the governed to the rulers; they dream of being a pure medium of the people just once in their lives and of embodying a credible, undiluted emanation of common interests.
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They balk at the morally precarious insight that the lack of credi- bility as such is constitutive of the modern concept of politics as a whole. Regardless of their reservations against it, we must insist, based on the law of the matter, that credibility is only possible for modern politics in the form of a disclosure of the stipulations of its incredibility.
Hereto belongs a history lesson. Since the age of absolutism – more precisely, since the regicidal phase of the French Revolution – political rule in the West has been gradually de-sacralized. From that point on, political power has stood less in the light shining from above and more under the pressure of approval from below. Such a change in the very basis of legitimacy has been accompanied by a profound transformation of how power and rule are enacted. It can be recognized in the form of an increasing depersonalization of power, bureaucratization of politics, and prioritizing of decision- making procedures over the acute urgency of problems. In this way, power has become more diffuse and more indirect, on the one hand, and more penetrating and ubiquitous, on the other. These are banalities, but they clarify why it has become difficult to see political events under a transfiguring or some other kind of “higher” light. The secularization of the political has liquidated the reserves of romantic loyalty and patriarchal attachment that may have existed between the authorities and populations in the age of direct rule. As its secular and rational distinguishing feature, modernity does not allow for a sacral-political restoration.
The political realm is now either a sober workplace or a battle- field for those who manage to format their existential passions into practical “interests. ” According to a modern understanding, politics is what remains when passions are excluded and pushed into the religious, aesthetic, and erotic districts of the “private. ” It is only through this drastic modification that people can be turned into political subjects of the modern kind: only when they reduce themselves from beings who have passions to subjects who have interests will they attain the status of political persons. One can assume that the roots of any unease at the “lack of credibility” in politics are to be sought in the anthropological stylization of homo politicus as a modern subject of interest. For the individual can only become a political subject to the extent that they are able to refrain from what gives their existence the “authentic”, the “credible” trait. What modernity calls “the political” only appears by neutralizing what is existentially most important. Emerging from repression, politics must at the same time impose itself as the most important surrogate for that which is most important. It can only succeed insofar as it ensures that nothing else becomes more important than
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politics. For this reason, politics is, as Bismarck claimed, the art of the possible, the art of the next best – its passion is the neutrali- zation of passions. Such a definition of politics as “statesmanship” can be traced back to the absolutist age, when the early modern state began to establish itself as a meta-absolutism of a special kind over the militantly absolutized religious passions and creeds. Where the mortal god, as Hobbes defined the modern state, established his regiment, confessions of faith and passions become neutralized into private matters and should under no permissible circumstances come into question as the causae belli, especially when it comes to civil wars. (One can verify the validity of this rule by the excep- tions of Northern Ireland or Lebanon that prove it – both cases of unsuccessful neutralization of passions and failed politicization or funding of “interests. ”) The political double figure of the sovereign and the subject has been in effect ever since absolutism – it lives on in the legal figure of the citizen, where moments of subjection and sovereignty are made into a kind of self-subjection. The citizen of the state is the political figure in whose “own interest” it is to have political interests and not passions.
It is precisely because passions must be privatized and neutralized in the political culture of modern times that the corresponding political subjects are constitutionally abstract. In this fact, the political achievement of modernity and its greatest weakness become one and the same: although its social systems are built upon abstraction from passions, they are forced to produce a passion for the abstract in a deeply paradoxical way – otherwise, the psychosocial brackets that are supposed to hold the great systems together would immediately break apart. But warming people to the cold will always be a problematic endeavor in the long run. One might get the impression that this is an alchemist piece of art that the anthropological equipment of homo sapiens sapiens has not provided for (but perhaps another sapiens is yet to be added). Exceptions to these paradoxes can be divided into only two groups: those who are engaged in politics as a profession and cannot fail to place any private passions they still might have at the service of the profession as a subjective subsidy; and those who passionately and aggressively engage in acute political issues as laymen. When this happens, passions are no longer private and political scientists speak of “social movements. ” It is not for nothing that this expression has alarming connotations; it reminds us that what is “most important” can return to the political arena at any time. Indeed, social movements prove that the modern reduction of passions to interests is an anthropologically unstable operation that can be thrown into question overnight by so-called “fundamentalist”
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upheavals. Career politicians are naturally suspicious of such funda- mentalism; for the rules of the game in their profession are that people do not have fundamental beliefs but rather principles, not passions but interests, not axioms but options.
Thus, whoever wishes to study the credibility gap where it originally opens up must understand how the modern political subject comes into being through a reduction of the self into the representation of interests and civic self-subjugation. And because individuals would eventually atrophy within such reductions, compensations are vitally important. Within existential jargon, such compensations are called engagements. (Engagement is passion in the form of decision. ) The only paths open to engagement lead either to professionalism or to fundamentalism – both forms of compensation are rightly perceived as something even less credible than what they are supposed to aid in becoming more credible. By categorially dividing the political class into doers and eccentrics, we instinctively identify the two great variants of modern political lack of credibility. The primary dimension of the credibility gap, we claim, is therefore not the so-called “alienation” of politics from the “authentic interests of the population,” as trivial political scientists would have us believe, but the alienation of the population from their passions in favor of those interests that are implanted in them like an artificial heart – and, incidentally, these are almost always the interests in mobilizations. The primary problem is not that institu- tions become independent and separate themselves from the grass roots but that the grass roots separate themselves from themselves in order to participate as political subjects in the mobilization project of the modern age. Therefore, credibility is primarily an issue not of political ethics but of political anthropology. On the other hand, explaining the credibility gap as caused by the alienation between politicians and the population only captures its secondary dimension. No one will deny that this, too, has its pitfalls and can be a source of unease with respect to politics. But compared to the anthropologically consequential transformation of individuals into politically interested subjects, the fact that there can be no purely representational relationship between so-called “mandates” and political offices because the idiosyncrasies of the offices undermine pure representation is a comparatively harmless phenomenon. Since everyone in the political world theater is their own Member of Parliament who tries to represent their own interests, it is to their benefit to have optimal representatives of those interests. But as long as politics is constituted by the exclusion of what is most important, the bland aftertaste of all actions in the spirit of advocacy cannot be eliminated. The people whose interests are represented look into
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a mirror when they look at their representative and self-knowledge comes into play when the person looking back at them does not elicit enthusiasm. With an inimitable mixture of subservient suspicion and gloating disdain, they observe the dealings of the political class that represents their rightful representatives. If politicians are almost always unpopular, it’s not because they are alienated from the people, but because they are the spitting image of them. The people are rarely so deluded as to find themselves popular. If they are at their wits’ end when it comes to themselves, they will vote for those infallibly guaranteed to sink them even deeper into this state. This is precisely what makes up the psycho-political secret of neo-conservative regimes currently predominant in almost the entire Western world. They accurately reflect back the reaction of collective flight into “carry on as usual” where the dumbfounded majorities of interested voters have established themselves. Arm in arm with these majorities, neo-conservatism has opened up an age of political unsavoriness; it has enforced its own inability to be shocked by itself as official etiquette. But its popularity cannot be separated from its simultaneous unpopularity. It finds voter majorities because they find a predictable lack of credibility in it. The public always has the most reasons to consider politicians untrustworthy when they are the way the public wants them to be. As long as they adequately represent the people as they are, politi- cians will be as untrustworthy as the people are. Whoever governs in the name of the people reduces one’s mandate to an indefinable, unstable, fluctuating something that is disinterested in anything but interests; this something periodically lends clear expression to its confusion through general, free, equal, and secret elections. The downfall of people’s representatives is not that they stray too far from the people; rather, it is because they do not distance themselves far enough that they are unable to prioritize their receptivity to what is urgent over their interest in interests. Politics is always too close to the citizens, too close to people who stand next to each other for miles in order to represent themselves optimally – to the right of the inevitable, to the right of death and life.
The Voting Voice and the Body – or: How Politics Participates in the Crisis of Embodiment Metaphysics
When the credibility deficit enters into the self-confidence of the actors, it is perceived as a lack of “embodiment. ” We now know why this cannot be otherwise since political subjects constitute themselves as hollow bodies by subtracting their passions, as it
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were. It is not without reason that the thing that remains after what is most important has been abstracted is called the vote. Those who have gone through politicization retain nothing of themselves other than their vote, which cannot be used to express anything that constitutes the fullness and sting of life. The voice of the vote speaks in rigid monosyllables; it says nothing but yes and no, never talks spontaneously about its life. It reacts to nominations, marks its X on the voting ballot, and remains laconically limited to minimal signs that indicate either agreement or disagreement. The political vote is so closely related to silence that abstention sometimes says more than the casting of a vote, as those who come from people’s democracies know, where voting and approval are synonymous. In contrast, the Western right to opposition is praised with good reason as an enrichment of the political vocabulary in the direction of two syllables. But whether the right to vote expresses itself with one syllable or two, it implies in any case the ambivalent imposition on individuals to reconcile all other strings on the bodily instrument of their existence with its political expression, or to silence them. The more sensible members of the political class have therefore tried to initiate an ethical discourse in order to overcome the aphasia that can no longer be hidden. They have an inkling of how important it would be to repair the destruction of language that follows the political reduction of the fullness of expression to a right to vote. In this predicament, the more thoughtful among the politicians have traditionally received aid from classical intellectuals, who, in their capacity as spokespersons for collective contradictions and life experiences, created an existentially dense language. The political intellectual as embodied in figures of the caliber of Jean-Paul Sartre, Heinrich Böll, or Ernesto Cardenal functioned as a political speech therapist in what seemed to be an elapsed era, waging a highly publi- cized struggle against monosyllabism. It was above all the writers of the Left who tried to inject languages into the public sphere that were meant to be so complex and excessive that even individualized life could recognize itself in them.
At the moment, there is much evidence to suggest that intellec- tuals are withdrawing from this function – perhaps because times are too dire for naïvety. Unquestionably, we are at present experiencing a kind of twilight of the intellectuals; in this twilight, the bell tolls for the experts together with the simultaneous resignation of the moral generalists. The intelligentsia, the contradictory class, draws new demarcation lines on the map of the real. Not even intellectuals still believe in a common denominator between politics and life, and it was their task to publicly delude themselves about it. Already at the beginning of the 1920s, the writer Hugo Ball spoke of a “new
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age of catacombs” that was imminent for the intellectuals. Back then, the ironic break in the political making of the future became apparent to this astute critic of the German zeitgeist. While public life was dominated by simulators of vitality who inflated themselves with new realism, new values, and exclamations of the new ages in the style of oops-we-are-alive and the tone of we-are-the-partners- of-destiny, the life of thinking already knew itself to be condemned to an underground existence. Only by becoming inconspicuous and coming to terms with being regarded with contempt by the makers of the future could it help to ensure that anything worthy of life would survive the century’s winter at all. It is only with great diffi- culty that we can shake off the impression that this situation is being repeated today, only in an even sharper and more globalized form than in the 1920s.
Ever since intelligence has withdrawn and reduced its spoken political contribution to a monosyllablic minimum, politicians have been forced to fend for themselves in their attempts to spiritually revitalize their profession. They must now start using their own resources to turn votes back into languages. Among those who are serious about this, you can recognize the better ones by how difficult they find the task to be. If politicized subjects are no longer just to cast their ballots, but to speak, they must transverse the path of abstraction backward to the existential sources of language. It must be acknowledged that this is an arduous road towards something that is almost impossible. Can automatic answering machines be made to give speeches? Can the disembodied political self, even more barren than the anorexic cogito of Descartes, be so readily induced to speak as if from human life in all its fullness? It is only in this kind of predicament that the recourse to principles becomes suggestive for those affected. Because once they are “personally embodied,” principles seem to remedy the lack of physicality in politics. That is why “principles” act as guarantors of a full person- ality and an identity with a broad foundation within the discourse of these new political morality seekers. Those who “credibly embody” higher principles thus seem to bring something substantive into the political game which emanates not only the monosyllabism of the voting specter but also an incarnate principle, a piece of individual culture. Those who embody principles have tied weights to themselves; they are gifted with a gravity of character that cannot be blown away so easily and provided with a moral chassis that is not so easily deformed. It is striking that only those politicians become popular (as far as it is possible) who are distinguished by a certain well-meaning gravity and, above all, by an earthy weight that is not lightened with insights. It is as if populations did not want to
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lose the overview of what their highest leaders embody. Those who exhibit principles want to make themselves predictable in this way – which is a virtue in a sphere where the production of predictability counts as a confidence-building measure. Without a high degree of embodiment-ready inertia, the desired effect cannot be achieved. But where such principled enthusiasm for embodiment-readiness leads is demonstrated to us by the great men and women of politics who meet in Geneva, Iceland, Vienna, and elsewhere to share their inertia with each other. (This was obviously written before the Washington Treaties of December 1987. 5) They give the impression that political dialogue is just another word for speaking contests between the speech-impaired. Here, the political psychology of the principle of embodiment shows its frightening side, whereby it turns out that we are dealing with not so much a psychological problem as a problem of the logic of power. If the political subject embodies anything at all, it is not so much their own moral principles but the right to exist of their country, party, system, market share. As incarnations of these, politicians’ voices and votes are always those of an armed substantiality and a deadly eloquence. If all competing parties in the political arena firmly embody their principles – and they do so with huge budgets – then the weapons systems are the real bearers of the embodiment of principles. They make our values credible and our strength of character compelling. Thus the politician who best embodies their principles is the one who has installed their convictions on launching pads – on the ground and soon also in the sky.
In view of these reflections on the relationship between voice and body in politics that deviate somewhat from the supposed target, something inevitably needs to be said about the metaphysical premises of the term “embodiment. ” Laying bare these underlying premises evaporates the false sense of harmlessness with which the prevailing political science (in Bonn as well) speaks about principles and their embodiment. One does not immediately realize that this term represents a forgotten concept of Christian Platonism; more precisely, a John-like theologoumenon that has made its way into trivial language games. In the metaphysical tradition, it is said that existence is divided into the high and the low, the fundamental and the incidental, a spiritual and a material sphere. The spiritual sphere is filled with ideas, principles or first causes, divine categories and forces. The material sphere is that of formless matter without any characteristics; it is dark, spiritless, null and void, and must be guided by the higher forces of form. Matter as the substance of form becomes knowable and real only by the light that shines on it; penetrating into the lack of light, light brings forth formed figures
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with attributes out of the amorphous material. The visibility of the visible is based solely on the light that originates in the idea and shines through substance. We encounter the most consequential application of this metaphysical model in the Christology of the Gospel of John where the realization of ideas is interpreted as the flesh of the word, and in turn as the Incarnation of God. The word becomes flesh – this is the basic scheme of the leading ideas of embodiment and realization that have shaped the actions and productions of the West. Even those who still invoke fundamental embodiment in political action today, whether they are aware of it or not, are indebted to the Platonic Gospel. Occasionally, this extends to an openly claimed political imitatio of Christ when some politicians bring themselves into play as the incarnations of the logos, especially in the Protestant world. We must urgently hope that Mr Rau will not build his election campaign and that of his party on a John’s Gospel of credibility – this would not only be wrong in terms of tactics, but above all ontologically suspect.
What happens in such cases has recently been available for examination in Jimmy Carter’s US presidency, which has been battered by the conflict between Christology and Machiavellianism. Similar experiences are guaranteed to anyone who enters such office under similar premises. The incarnation from above inevitably leads to demoralization – or martyrdom (two of the most highly underestimated categories by political science, incidentally). Demoralization follows from the predominance of circumstances over principles. Those who consider demoralization to be the greatest evil should not fail to examine the opposite: for where principles are stronger than circumstances – as in ascetic communities, Jacobin subcultures, and totalitarian systems – there, principle enforces its incarnation at the expense of all other lives.
Is it possible for us to think of an alternative to the incarnation of logos or the embodying of the principle? We believe that this is the case. This is becoming increasingly evident in current philosophical thinking, and it is this alternative that gives a perspective of the history of ideas and a logical criterion to the manifold attempts at developing something substantially new in the so-called “alternative cultures. ” In post-metaphysical culture (which would indeed be an alternative), an understanding is beginning to prevail that it is not the word that must become flesh by force if necessary, but that it is enough to create a place where the spontaneous tendencies of the flesh can get a word in edgewise and have their say. It is no longer a question of embodying principles in action in order to thus subject the inert mass to a force of incarnation from above; instead, we are starting to understand (in an increasingly literal way) that the
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life-process’s own momentum is able to shine forth in brilliant self- relation. The concept of embodiment has become caught in the trap of its own violence and is petering away within it – after all, that was the history-making power of metaphysics. But alternative ways of thinking about the body have already changed direction. To express it in a set way: while the logical endpoint of the compulsion to embody principles is a total liquidation of the flesh in favor of the word, endless perspectives on the self-illumination of life emerge within post-metaphysical learning processes. The moralism of thought in the concepts of embodiment is only the appendix of latent necrological metaphysics that drives life towards the point of a deadly realization. Whoever tries decisively enough to think morality and politics from the point of view of the self-relations of intelligent bodies must give up the notion of embodied principles to create space for a self-experience that shines forth in a very different way.
From an Ethics of Principle to an Ethos of the Urgent
In the duel between yourself and the world, act as second to
the world.
Franz Kafka6
According to classical tradition, philosophy is the dialogue of the soul with itself. This assumes that the soul is not unanimous but feels a rupture in itself where the conversation partners of this self- dialogue face each other within the interior. A conversation with ourselves can give us the bizarre yet everyday experience that one part of ourselves gets ahead of us, while another is left behind. This state of tension that constitutes the psychological premise of self-reflection is what colloquial language calls having a conscience. The conscience that makes itself felt is eo ipso a conscience that is in tension with de facto existence. If individuals form a conscience that lets itself be felt, they are ahead of their own reality and can at least occasionally have something that we call a philosophical self-dialogue. Traditionally, the emotional instance that stirs as conscience is perceived as the “innermost voice. ” As that which is my innermost, however, it can only appear because it behaves towards me as if it were something superior to me (although coming “from me”) that precedes my problematic factual essence. Only insofar as I am not only identical to myself, but also superior, am I capable of the kind of self-dialogue where the masterful voice of conscience converses with the babble of affects, calculations, and
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interests. Conscience functions as a cybernetic or hegemonic organ of the soul that relates the real states of conscious life to the highest terms of self-regulation – in short, to moral ideas.
If there is now talk in Bonn about the credible embodiment of principles in politics, then this formulation borrows from the conscience model from classical moral philosophy. It suggests that the political subject can orient itself not only in its intimate self- perception, but also in its worldly actions according to the scheme of self-conversation, a conversation where the individual consciousness is at once both disciple and master. The conscience would then not only be the auto-communicative regulating instance in the individual’s inner dealings with themselves, but also at the same time the seat of a wisdom that is always ahead of all events in the outside world. The belief in political action according to principles makes the bold (and only seemingly conventional) assumption that there is something in the soul which has enabled it in principle to overtake not only itself but also the world “outside. ” Consequently, consciences would not only be the internal instances of individuals but also the regulative entities of their external dealings.
We have to admit that this is a seductive idea because it promises an unwavering superiority of the highest organ of the soul over so-called “reality. ” If valid, it would guarantee the possibility of surpassing not only one’s empirical inner life but also the course of the world as a whole, and thanks to a treasure of eternal principles, it would be ahead of it once and for all. This kind of autonomous conscience of principles would make us invulnerable against the shock of events and protect us from changes of circumstances. As the world rages on outside and spins uncontrollably in the vortices of mobilization, we can retreat into our inner citadel and immunize ourselves against the course of events by observing the universals that are permanently engraved in our reflective conscience.
One can easily see where such noble speculation turns short- sighted – as shortsighted as it must be to attempt a suspension of thinking at the aesthetic stage before the atrocity of analysis has a chance to overwhelm it. If we critically analyze the phenomenon of conscience, it immediately becomes apparent that it cannot possibly be understood as an autonomous, internal, and world-superior magnitude. Admittedly, it may seem through immanent contem- plation that the subject’s fundamental features are forever ahead of any possible inner or worldly event. But we only grasp the decisive fact when we take into account that the appearance of conscience is itself an event “in” the world. This event is anything but random – it is not one coincidence among many others but a dramatic incursion of conscience into the world that turns it into a world for conscience.
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But this occurrence does not render all further remote eventfulness of the world process irrelevant. A world that contains conscience and is known by conscience is precisely thereby more than a sample collection of events that can be dealt with according to principles of conscience. Since we are always first born into the world and cannot assume to be “in-the-world” forever, our world conscience cannot only live off what is innate to us, acquired by us, and brought in by us. To put it as shockingly as it indeed is, consciences are in the first instance not the self-relations of individuals but self-relations of the world, despite the fact that we only consider individuals to be the ontological premises for such world self-relations. The world calls forth differently conscientious individuals at different times if its internal affairs need to regulate problems through the medium of individual consciences.
Such formations of conscience can certainly fail, and they indeed do fail in an overwhelming number of cases. Among other reasons, they fail when individuals do not form any kind of real relationship to the world and refuse to individuate – this is typical in interested parties and people with end-user sentiments for whom individuation must be the exception to the rule. But the formation of conscience as a relationship to the world also fails if individuals fixate on principles to let the urgent run aground on the funda- mental. The keyword here is (yet again) neo-conservatism. What is it other than the mobilization of old principles against new sensibilities? What else does it provide than a cynical desensitizing against the imperative for new forms of conscience that have become crucial in the face of unprecedented dangers? It remains to be seen if social-democratic and socialist parties will take part in such desensitizing under the guise of morality. These have always been the most strongly ambivalent political parties in these matters: on the one hand, because they react relatively sensitively to the development of new practical imperatives – that is part of their tradition and the labor movement itself was such a new imperative; on the other hand, because, with their commitment to fixed principles and defined interests, they are always in danger of confining themselves within a closed camp. In this sense, the political moralism currently raging all over the world is the most guileful form of political blindness because it thinks that being able to be happy with yourself is what it means to be compatible with the world. Of course, these considerations are aimed not at an immoral short-circuit between a hopeless world and unscru- pulous souls, but at the medial fixing of moved consciences in the self-regulation of the world. Even so, we have to conceive of the world as an intelligent and generous process which – who knows
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how – has the opportunity to mean well with itself. Individual consciences would be the intelligent sensors of a world that can use them to heal itself. To be sure, there is no way to do justice to the phenomenon of life without taking into consideration an ontology of Munchausen syndrome. In the context of this syndrome, which is as astonishing as it is successful, new formations of conscience could be interpreted as the self-rescue agencies of the real. They would be the door to opportunity, so to speak, and danger would open it. The rescuing self-mediation of the world presupposes that the voice of conscience is precisely the voice of danger in which the world (through the medium of alert intelligence) sees itself. Only within this function is it still legitimate to speak of conscience. In all other cases, the moralizing conscientiousness that insists on itself creates a lack of conscience in its purest, most vicious form. The Vatican’s stance on issues regarding birth control illustrates how this occurs.
Nowhere else is the interpretation of an ontological self-rescue more magnificently formulated than in the couplet of Hölderlin’s “Patmos” hymn: “Where danger threatens/That which saves from it also grows. ”7 Frequently quoted and rarely understood, this phrase has become the slogan of a salvation philosophy where the development of redemption is both tangibly and vaguely construed as a quantitative mobilization of counterforces. But the growth of what saves from danger is actually to be understood as a reduction – namely, a reduction of rigid subjectivities’ resistance to the urgencies of the world process. What does grow when danger is understood is the subject’s willingness to perceive danger’s ecstatic and medial qualities. Growth of what saves presupposes the responsiveness of individuals to the as yet unspoken imperatives of danger. This is why an increasing attention to danger is the criterion of a politics that strives for a new kind of credibility for reasons that go beyond reputation. If danger is understood as the moment when new consciences are formed, then conscience is no longer just an instance of remembering general principles in the soul’s conversation with itself. In its changed function, conscience is the ear for the urgent. If it merely listened to its own principles, these would be nothing but a cover name for the impenetrability of conscience and the self-gratification of the political conscience carriers. Conscience as ear says nothing – it allows for something to be said to it. There is far too much talk of morality and not enough listening – this is especially true in politics. But to learn how to listen, the actors of political praxis would have to take a step back from the deafening mobilizations that constitute the very catastrophe whose preven- tative measure they claim to be.
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In order to successfully strive for a new kind of credibility, the politician must become the medium of an urgency by which the world process works on consciences by overwhelming, provoking, and shattering them. As far as the embodiment of principles is concerned, the lack of credibility of politics is now its great opportunity.
If political dealings are beginning to seem like a hollow spectacle, it would be a disaster if we plugged these new hollow spaces up with old principles. Very little separates hollowness from being receptivity. Only when the primacy of receptivity also permeates the political world can a politics with an ear towards the inevitable become conceivable. A politics that listens would not be windbagging in the service of interest groups. The medial relationship to the urgent is an ecstasy – in it, individuals constitute of more than just their interests and the world is more than its sorry state of affairs. This presents an intriguing prospect for politicians as well. With a little luck, they could become credible contemporaries if they became the authors and not just the targets of the satire that is sure to be written regardless.
5
PARIS APHORISMS ON RATIONALITY
Philosophes, encore un effort si vous voulez être parisiens!
Jean Maurel, Victor Hugo, philosophe1
All That is Right
Ratio means calculation, measure, proportion, ration, equivalent. Rationality is the principle of perceiving the things that concern us from the point of view of their proportionality, measurability, and predictability. Rationalism is the dogmatic thesis that the measurable, calculable, conceivable, and thinkable essentially constitutes the real itself. Traditional criticism of rationality is the application of ration- ality upon itself and the reflection on the possibilities and limits of equivalents and adequacies in cognition, action, and judgment. Radicalized criticism of rationality objects to the excessiveness of measuring, dividing, and computing, as well as the immoderateness of rationalism in the establishment of criteria and measuring ranges.
In each of these versions of the phenomenon ratio, the idea of truth as relation is at play. It entails the assimilation of thoughts and actions to facts and situations. In order for assimilation to take place, however, dissimilation must have existed beforehand. It is only in a desert of missed marks that we can perceive the oases of convergence. The oasis is a place where things are “right”; it is the privileged place where things that correspond to each other fuse together. Culture is the art of creating oases – places where the cultivation of correspondences is intentionally carried out. Having
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initially begun as an agricultural culture, it owes its existence to the ability to cultivate fields and soils as the “right” habitats for selected plants. Its secret is the correct correspondence of plants and soils, and the right alignment of the action of sowing and harvesting to the seasons. It was only by way of metaphorical seminars that it later spread through other “fields” – until the Cicerone cultura animi emerges from it which is what only then humanists really consider to be culture. Until this “culture as such” materializes as a philosophical way of life, the concepts of the rational, the right, the appropriate, and the corresponding remain scattered into a variety of local practices. The multifaceted economy of small instances of rightness precedes the monoculture of the great truth. But only inconspicuous, unrecorded stories tell of these small economies of the right since they are lost in the seeming ahistoricity of the banal. The truth concepts of everyday life have remained silent in the face of self-evidence; speechless with triviality, the small worlds of pre-metaphysical correspondence are on the margins of philo- sophical interest.
Who remembers that an even older truth function exists than that of the agricultural “tilling” of the soil – the “truth” of hunters and shooters, for whom the right is what hits the mark? The projectile that finds its goal fulfills this type of rightness, which is one of the most fateful that have appeared in the history of rationality – we forget all too easily that the “mark-hitting” accuracy of modern artillery is more consequential for the history of the world today than any adherence to statements or arrival of predictions. Even so, our language has inconspicuously made note of the connection between the function of truth and the ballistic motif. In addition to what hunters and shooters think is right, as a second Archean age, there is a separate rationality of gatherers and seekers, which occurs only when they find what they “can use. ” The discovery you can take with you is what is right, according to the act of gathering. Even in this, modernity is mostly just an unconscious explorer of an archaic truth function, because all its countless expeditions of scientific research are a continuation, with modern means, of the gathering and taking home of the right discoveries – except that for us it is no longer so clear what the discoveries will do to us in the comfort of our own home. For they have escaped the small ratio of seeking and finding and are destroying the old familiar ways of life. These inven- tions and this research are sweeping through the world like a spring tide that is itself still devoid of truth.
In addition to the archaic truth functions of hunter-gatherers – the hitting of the mark and the discovery – the ancient arts and crafts have bequeathed us a wealth of inconspicuous concepts of correspondence
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that establish rules, rations, and appropriateness within local practices. Thus, there is still a concept of truth of pharmacists, where what is right is what helps; a tailor’s concept of truth, where what is right is what fits; a musician’s concept of truth, which is measured by what is in tune; a carpenter’s concept of truth, where what is right is what joins together; a mason’s concept of truth, where what is done right is what stands and holds soundly. In all these fields, people gather experience with sub-truths that are inconspicuously pre-sorted into an equivalence between sentences and circumstances. This incon- spicuousness is at the same time a criterion for the soundness and sensation-free consideration of these sectoral truth functions. It is only because they are already recorded and assumed to be vital that the later effort of the intellect to find perceptive evident equivalences to things also becomes plausible and self-evident. The intellectual obligation to say what is right about reality accurately and appropri- ately subsists from the silent analogy to the manifold ways that the right is proven to be valuable in various equivalent fields. We probably would not know what a wrong statement would be if we did not know what a pair of ill-fitting pants felt like. Some theories are wrong – like some shots that miss their mark – and some assumptions prove to be successful – like shots that hit the bull’s eye, like treatments that help and notes that are in tune. In this way, hitting the mark, discoveries, fusions, fittings, effects, harmonies, cohesions are regional variants of corresponding phenomena that become clear to every life as soon as it gets a bit more acquainted with them. With the gentle violence of the self-evident, they tune and orient all the complex functions of the human mind in the fields of theory, praxis, and art. It is only because the diverse cultures of correspondence and adequation had already inconspicuously prepared the ground that the higher truths of science, metaphysics, ethics, religion, and aesthetics were able to build their imposing buildings on it.
Diplomats as Thinkers in Destitute Times
When Hamlet performs a diagnosis of history and says that time is out of joint, we can now hear the truth-theoretical undertone in that sentence. The permanent crisis of modern times shakes our most elementary feelings for what is right and what is wrong. A quake runs through the mute subcontinents of what is in tune, what fits, what hits the mark and it destabilizes the very foundations of all the known ways that something can be right.
What has an effect is no longer true; what is in tune no longer fits; what hits the mark no longer helps; what lasts no longer holds
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together; and it does not go the way you want it to anymore. If we take a closer look at the matter, we notice that this description of a state of affairs has been “hitting the mark” for centuries, even if the twentieth century makes a special claim on it. Ever since the movements of Sturm und Drang, Idealism, and Romanticism, modernity has been dancing the roundel of missing the mark. For just as long now, the activities of philosophy have been grouped around the new discipline of the “critique of reason. ” It uses its means to respond to the new state of affairs where truth and correctness are no longer what they were ever since modernity unleashed unique kinetic phenomena on earth with the help of technology and driven by the spirit of mobilization – these are phenomena that usher in unknown modes of correspondence and non-correspondence. Whichever image we use to represent the modern kinetics of the world – thinking avalanche or secondary vulcanism – it awakens a radicalized reflection on the conditions of possibility for correctness.
Philosophy in volcanic times inevitably becomes a critique of reason. This, too, is an art that undergoes transformations. Today, it cannot do its job either in a traditionally rationalist way where reason is well founded and self-limited à la Kant, or in the style of traditional irrationalism where reason is on trial in the name of feeling, will, faith, etc. In view of current ill feelings, it would be touching to swear by the guiding reason of classical Enlightenment or, conversely, take flight into romantic sermons of wholeness. By way of civilizational volcanism (or our existence as a thinking avalanche), too many things are thrown out of joint, too much has missed the mark, been out of tune and disassembled to hope that treatments from the pharmacies of modernity (of all places) could possibly do any good. Today’s critique of reason can only be the research that discovers the grounds of correspondences and non-correspondences. Thus, a radical critique of reason adapts itself to an object that has become uncanny.
If nothing is in tune and nothing fits, if nothing hits the mark and nothing helps, then the time has come for diplomats. Their job is to do something in situations where there is nothing left to do. (In this way, they are, incidentally, the descendants of the priests. ) As technicians of secondary negotiation, they provide a fine print of truth that matches the harsh modern landscape. For professional purposes, they count on the need for the agreed upon to be considered true. Without being plagued by metaphysical scruples, they indulge a secondary notion of truth and correctness that no longer allows itself to agree on what would be primarily and essentially the thing that fits/works/hits the mark/corresponds.
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Partly out of wisdom and partly out of resignation, the philosophy of diplomats is limited to the minimal coordination of dissonant voices and to a loose assembling of what does not correspond as part of a specific interest to get to an agreement. This secondary concept of the truth of diplomats corresponds to the distinctive emergence of a secondary philosophy that has been unmistakable for generations – one that no longer teaches perspectives on life, but has built its operations around current intellectual secondary virtues such as clarity, overview of material, and communicability. Others think that this is a sign that philosophy has recently grown up and abandoned the juvenile vice of thinking about deep questions. And, indeed, philosophers now go to the office in the morning like other officials; they’ve learned how to manage problems that can’t be solved as politely, pragmatically, attentively, and ironically as adults and diplomats are supposed to behave. In fact, the idea of diplomatic unification (with its deliberate understanding of things that it is neither desirable nor enforceable to agree upon) is recommended as a very grown-up practical procedural principle. It replaces convictions with manners – the only case where the term “civilizing process” really fits – and it would be even more likable if it refrained from being right on a grand scale and behaving transcen- dental-diplomatically as a doctrine empowered by truth. After all, the concept of consensus does not need to advertise its validity with great effort; it could quietly lower its theoretical budget and concentrate on diplomatic craft. If it fails to do so, the suspicion arises that the secondary philosophy is not free from being jealous of the overthrown prima philosophia; perhaps it is even homesick for the era of the last established cathedrals. After all, as long as the truth diplomats make lavish efforts towards theory themselves, philosophy as an institution is neither dead nor repealed. It stays alive as long as it surpasses itself. The new division of its business into outbidding activities and diplomatic tasks is the testimony of an unbroken vitality – whereby vitality is to be understood as an ambiguous compliment and wholeness almost as a reproach.
Low Theory
A modern poet who is currently suffering a severe decline in popularity because his left-wing populist overtones do not overlap with today’s tastes offers up a memorable consideration:
By nature I have no ability for metaphysics: to think about everything under the sun and how concepts come together with
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each other is all Greek to me. So I hold to the way of philoso- phizing which is mainly circulated in the lower classes, what people mean when they say, “Go to that one there for advice, he is a philosopher” or, “That one there can draw some distinc- tions. ” When the common people attribute a philosophical attitude to someone, it is almost always an ability to endure something. In a fistfight one distinguishes fighters who are good at taking it and fighters who are good at dishing it out, that is, those who can endure a lot and those who can punch well; and the people understand philosophers, in this sense, as those who can take it; whatever the situation may be. In the following, however, I understand philosophizing as the art of taking it and dishing it out in battle (but otherwise, as I said, to remain in general agreement with the people in what philoso- phizing is supposed to mean). 2
Rarely does someone act so innocently while giving out insights of such consequence. Brecht’s entire break with what he calls metaphysics took place in gesture and skipped over argumentation in a profound and popular way. He apologizes for his inability to conceptualize in order to gain the space for another kind of knowledge. With an easy-to-understand, proletarian cleverness, he uses his lack of understanding as the requirement for a better under- standing. Because we can always be sure that Brecht is not speaking from a place of modesty, we can freely admire his populist cold- bloodedness. The man knows that the world is at war; military units are being deployed everywhere, even in the great theories. Filled with mad hope that his self-preservation between the front lines may also have something to do with truth, he evades the maneuvers of logical Gigantomachy. Like Schwejk, he creates himself out of the dust that rises up when the heroes begin to march. He lets the athletes of reflection let their abilities run riot on the argumentation front and concedes to the metaphysicians their exhausting privilege to take up ever more intricate positions in ever more indecisive struggles with ever greater effort. Is he really just prevented by inability, or has he also been tipped off by an insight? He seems to rely on the possi- bility that a small admission of incompetence sometimes yields as much as the utmost use of great aptitudes. Those who learn about effort through ordinary life experience do understand one thing about philosophy, even if it otherwise remains obscure or irrelevant to them – philosophy comes from effort and leads to effort. In this way, the standoff that is easily perceptible from the outside and hangs over the great metaphysical alternatives can be congenial with the lack of competence for such things. What is free of charge
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discovers commonality with the most expensive things if it is bold enough to trace the effort of ideas back to the idea of effort. This is low theory’s chance. It can rise to Brecht’s heights if it grasps that a senseless effort can only be avoided by a timely inability to execute it. It is part of a popular lifestyle to not fall for one’s own talents. Inability is a special art. If metaphysics is the heroic effort to lift the weight of the world with the power of theory, then the lack of talent for it is not just the avoidance of a justified demand. Oh, the philosophical Schwejk knows very well that he’s been carrying the weight of the world for a long time in his own way, and that he did not have to wait for the effort sermon of the theory capuchins to attain a concept of heaviness.
La chose la mieux partagée du monde
Let us leave the Brechtian Young Hegelianism to rest – together with its eternally bad conscience for never proceeding far enough from theory to praxis. Let us also look past the mannerism of its New Objectivity pugilist morality, with which the sultry nineteenth century transitioned into the cool twentieth. What does make us pay attention is Brecht’s legitimate concern about remaining in agreement with the people about the purpose of philosophizing. Here, the essential thing is not the populist gesture. What matters is a downward movement of thought, dressed in metropolitan- populist clothes. (It also existed in the ethnic costumes that have long since seemed silly to us. ) The way down – this motif is completely inseparable from the impulses of post-metaphysical philosophy in modernity. Abiding by the abject, seeing the world in a perspective from below, anchoring in the banal – thus and similarly do the guiding programs of a thinking that engages in the mundane resound in order to finally grasp the realness of reality in a non-metaphysical way. However, the great rush of philosophy towards everyday life is the opposite of bending the knee before bon sens, which was once claimed to be the most fairly distributed thing in the world. 3 By lifting the banal philosophically to a higher level, it proves to common sense that it does it no good to be so well distributed. For common sense, everyday life remains a prison from which every life that has not resigned itself to it nevertheless dreams itself free. Philosophy, on the other hand, wants to break out of its empty rooms and into the post-metaphysical fullness of human life, and the mundane is thus the promised land of the tangible. There, people can be found as they are – you surprise them in the middle of work (ah, self-generation of the species), during sexual activity,
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while with children and in kitchens, and even in the application of rules of linguistic understanding and in convivial self-indul- gence – weird and wonderful creatures who make full use of their provisions with sets of everyday knowledge. Intoxicated by these discoveries, metaphysics-weary thinking plunges into the depths, which compensate it abundantly for its loss of idealized height. A hermeneutic of the banal blossoms out of these newly discovered depths, explaining to us what an amazing mystery it is if we make the effort to be there.
But the depths themselves know next to nothing of having been discovered by philosophy, and one can be sure that they would not think much of it if they knew. This is what the poet Brecht so surely encounters in his picaresque indifference to philosophical profes- sionalism. He thinks “like the people” because he aims at a point where we are done with philosophical understanding – with “giddy head and light hands,” as our colleague Hofmannsthal says. 4 At the point where the depths have their lowest level and center of gravity, the weight of the world presses down on the individual, and would crush them if they had not learned how to squeeze out from under unbearable weights. By understanding the depths, the mind also understands the burdening nature of reality.