No More Learning

" No modern human being can put himself back into a time where the concepts of war and happiness formed a meaningful constellation. For the first listeners of Homer, however, war and happiness are inseparable. The bond between them is founded upon the ancient cult of heroes. We moderns know this cult only within the square brackets of historical education.
For the ancients this heroism was no subtle attitude but the most vital of all possible responses to the facts of life. A world without heroes would have been worth nothing in their view. Such a world would have meant a state in which human beings would have been exposed to the monarchy of nature without any resistance. In such a world, physis would cause everything while human beings would not be capable of anything. The hero, however, is liv- ing proof that acts and deeds are also to be done by human beings as long as divine favor allows for them. The early heroes are celebrated solely as doers of deeds and achievers of acts. Their deeds testify to what is most valuable. They testify to what mortals, then and now, are able to experi- ence: that a clearing of impotence and indifference has been brushed into the bush of natural condition. In accounts of actions, the first happy mes- sage that shines through is: there is more happening under the sun than what one is indifferent to and what always remains the same. Because true actions have been done the accounts of them answer the question, "Why do human beings do something at all rather than nothing? " Human beings do something so that the world will be expanded through something new and worthy of being praised. Because those that accomplished the new were representatives of humankind, even if extraordinary ones, for the rest as well an access to pride and amazement opens up when they hear about the deeds and sufferings of the heroes.
The new, however, may not appear in the form of the news of the day. In order to be legitimate, it has to disguise itself as the prototypical, oldest, and eternally recurring. It also needs to invoke the long anticipated approval of the gods. If the new presents itself in the form of prehistoric events, myth comes into existence. The epic is the more flexible, broader, and more sol- emn form of myth, a form that is fitting for presentation in castles, on vil-
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Only because the terrifying rage of heroes is indispensable may the singer turn to the goddess in order to engage her for twenty-four songs. If this rage, which the goddess is supposed to help to sing to, were not itself of a
lage squares, and in front of early city audiences.
The demand for the hero is the precondition for everything that follows.
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INTRODUCTION
higher nature, the thought to appeal to it would already be an act of blas- phemy. Only because there is a form of rage that is granted from above is it legitimate to involve the gods in the fierce affairs of human beings. Who sings under such premises about rage celebrates a force that frees human beings from vegetative numbness. This force elevates human beings, who are covered by a high, watchful sky. The inhabitants of the earth draw breath since they can imagine that the gods are viewers, taking delight in the mundane comedy.
Understanding these circumstances, which have become distant to us, can be simplified by indicating that according to the conception of the ancients the hero and his singer correspond with each other in an authentic religious bond. Religiosity is human beings' agreement with their nature as mediums. It is generally known that mediate talents travel separate paths. These ways can, however, intersect at important junctures. "Media" plural- ism is thus a fact that reaches back to early conditions of culture. However, at these early times media were not technical instruments but human beings themselves, including their organic and spiritual potential. Just as the singer could be the mouthpiece of a singing force, the hero feels himself the arm of rage, the rage that achieved the noteworthy actions. The larynx of the one and the arm of the other together form a hybrid body. The arm to hold the sword belongs more to the god than to the fighter himself. The god influ- ences the human world through the detour of secondary causes. Of course, the arm to hold the sword also belongs to the singer, to whom the hero, and all his weapons, owe the immortal fame. Hence the connection of god- hero-singer constitutes the first effective media network. In the thousand years after Homer, Achilles is a topic in the Mediterranean time and again. People address Achilles' usefulness for the war-loving muses.
It is not necessary to dwell on the fact that nowadays no one is able to think authentically, perhaps with the exception of some inhabitants of the esoteric highlands where the reenchantment of the world has further pro- gressed. We have not only stopped to judge and feel like the peoples of old, we secretly despise them for remaining "children of their time. " We despise them for remaining captivated by a form of heroism that we can only expe- rience as archaic and unfitting. What could one object to Homer from the vantage point of the present and the conventions of the lowlands? Should one accuse him of violating human rights by conceiving individuals all too directly as media of higher commanding beings? Should one accuse him of disregarding the integrity of victims by celebrating the forces that caused
5
INTRODUCTION
them harm? Or should one accuse him of neutralizing the arbitrary violence of war, of transforming its results immediately into divine judgments? Or would one have to soften the allegation to claim that the god has become a victim of impatience. Would we have to claim that he did not possess the patience to wait until the Sermon on the Mount and that he did not read Seneca's De ira, the exposition of the stoic control of affects, which served as a model for Christian and humanistic ethics?
Within Homer's horizon there is, of course, no point where objections of this kind could successfully gain hold. The song concerning the heroic energy of a warrior, with which the epos of the ancients starts out, elevates rage to the rank of a substance, out of which the world is formed. This requires that we admit that "world" delineates the circle of shapes and scenes of the ancient, Hellenic life of aristocratic warriors during the first millennium before the Christian calendar. One is inclined to think that such a worldview has become obsolete since, at the latest, the time of the Enlightenment. How- ever, to fully reject this image characterized by the priority of struggle will probably be harder for the contemporary realist than the current widespread feeling of pacifism wants to make us believe. Moderns did not fully neglect the task of thinking war. Indeed, this task has for a long time been associ-
3
ated with the male order of cultivation. Students of antiquity have already
been measured against the standard of thinking war. This was the case when the upper class of Rome, together with the other Greek models of culture, imported the epic bellicosity of their teachers. The Roman upper class did not at all forget its own rooted militarism. Similarly, since the Renaissance, generation after generation of the youth of Europe learned about this mili- tarism after the exemplary character of the Greeks had again been set up as a guide in the educational system of the newly formed national states. This had far-reaching consequences. Could it be possible that the so-called world wars of the twentieth century also represented, among other things, repetitions of the Trojan War? They were organized by a group of generals, and didn't the leading generals on both sides of the enemy lines understand themselves as virtually the most excellent of the ancients? Didn't these gen- erals understand themselves as the descendents of the raging Achilles and as bearers of an athletic and patriotic vocation to gain victory and enjoy fame by posterity? 4 The immortal hero dies countless times.
The question of whether Homer, just as after him Heraclitus and much later Hegel, believed that war is the father of all things remains open. It is also uncertain—and probably even unlikely—that Homer, the patriarch of
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INTRODUCTION
the historiography of war and the teacher of Greek to countless generations, possessed a conception of "history" or "civilization. " The only thing that is certain is that the universe of the Iliad is woven completely out of the deeds and sufferings of rage (menis), just as the somewhat younger Odyssey is an exercise in listing the deeds and sufferings of cunningness (metis). Accord- ing to the ancient ontology, the world is the sum total of the battles that take place in it. Epic rage appears like a primary energy to its singer, a primary energy that swells by itself, undeducible, like the storm and the sunlight; it is an active force in quintessential shape. Because this energy can rightly claim the predicate first substance "from itself," it precedes all of its local provoca- tions. The hero and his menis constitute for Homer an inseparable couple. According to this preestablished union, every deduction of rage from its external provocations becomes superfluous. Achilles is wrathful just as the North Pole is icy, Olympus is shrouded by clouds, and Mont Ventoux cir- cled by roaring winds.
Saying this does not deny that the occasion presents a stage for rage. However, the role of these occasions is limited to literally "conjuring up" (hervorrufen) rage without changing its essence. As the force that holds the world together, rage preserves in its essence the unity of substance in the multitude of its eruptions. It exists before all of its manifestations and sur- vives unchangingly its most intensive expenditures. When Achilles perches in his tent and rumbles, when he is hurt, almost paralyzed and angry with his people because the military leader, Agamemnon, has taken from him the beautiful slave, Briseis, a symbolically significant "present of honor," this does not halter his astonishingly raging nature. The capability to suffer from an affront is the mark of a great fighter. Such a fighter does not yet need the virtue of losers, to "let things be. " For Achilles it is satisfactory to know that he is in the right and that Agamemnon owes something to him. This guilt is objective according to ancient Greek culture because the honor of the great fighter is itself more objective or of an authentic nature. If he who is first only in rank takes a reward from someone who is first by force, honor is violated at the highest level. The episode of rage shows the force of Achilles in preparatory standstill. Heroes, too, know times of indecision and times of anger, of being turned within oneself. But a sufficiently strong trigger is enough to ignite again the motor of rage, and the consequences are terrifying and yet fascinating enough to qualify for a record of fighting
worthy of the title "destroyer of cities" and a battle record of twenty-three
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destroyed settlements.
INTRODUCTION
The young favorite of Achilles, Patroclos, who had carelessly worn the armor of his friend on the battleground, was slain by Hector, the spear- head of the Trojans. Shortly after the news concerning this ominous event spreads around the Greek camp, Achilles leaves his tent. His rage has once again united itself with him and dictates from this point on—without inde- terminacy—the direction of his actions. The hero demands a new armor, and the underworld rushes to fulfill his request. The rage that engulfs him does not limit itself to his body: it sparks across far-reaching network of actions that spans the mortal and immortal worlds. Merits takes on the role of an intensely aggressive mediator between immortals and mortals. It com- pels Hephaestus, the god of forging, to produce the finest of new weapons. It grants Thetis, the mother of the hero, wings in order to speedily trans- mit information between the forge of the underworld and the camp of the Greeks above. In the inner circle of its potency, menis prepares the fighter again against his fateful last enemy. It prepares him for the real presence of the fight. It leads him onto the battlefield, to the place determined by provi- dence. At this place rage will flare up highest and reach the highest degree of fulfilling release. In front of the walls of Troy the consummation of rage is the sign that is necessary to remind every witness of the convergence of
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Such a conclusion would be premature because the Homer of the Iliad uses every possible means to extend the dignity of rage. At the decisive moment he emphasizes how explosive the eruption of the wrathful force of Achilles really was. Its suddenness is particularly indispensable as verifica- tion of its higher origin. It is part of the virtue of the hero of early Greece to be ready to become a vessel for the abrupt flow of energy from the gods. Still, we find ourselves in a world whose spiritual constitution is clearly characterized by its mediate dimension. Just as the prophet is a medium in the name of the holy word of protest, the warrior becomes a tool for the force, which gathers in him abruptly in order to break through the world of appearances.
A secularization of affects is still unknown in this order of things. Sec- ularization implies the execution of the program that is present in well- formed European propositions. Through them one imitates in the domain of the real what is provided by syntax: subjects act on objects and force
explosion and truth.
of Achilles but the cunning of Odysseus that wins over the besieged city shows that in the fatal plain of Troy there already had to be a second means to success. Did Homer thus not see a future for pure rage?
Only the fact that in the last instance it is not the rage
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INTRODUCTION
their domination on them. It is unnecessary to state that Homer's world of actions remains far away from such circumstances. It is not the human beings who have their passions, but rather it is the passions that have their human beings. The accusative is still untamable. Given these circumstances, the one God remains of course absent. Theoretical monotheism can only gain power once the philosophers seriously postulate the propositional sub- ject as the world principle. Then the subjects are supposed to have their passions as well. Then the subjects are allowed to postulate themselves as the masters and owners of these passions, which now can be controlled. Until then, spontaneous pluralism reigns, a pluralism in which subjects and objects constantly exchange place.
This blurring of subjects and objects shows that one needs to sing about
rage in the moment when it is alive and active, when it comes over some-
one. It is only this that Homer has in mind when he relates the long siege of
Troy and the fall of the city, which was almost given up, to the mysterious
fighting force of the protagonist. Because of Achilles' rage the Greek course
was condemned to failure. Homer uses the moment of truth in which menis
flows into its bearer; epic memory then only needs to follow the course of
events, which is determined by the high and low forces. It is decisive that the
warrior himself, as soon as sublime rage begins to become effective, experi-
ences a kind of numinous presence. Only because of this presence can the
heroic rage be more than a profane fit when applied to its most gifted tool.
To state it with more pathos: through the surge of rage the god of the battle-
field speaks to the fighter. One understands right away why we rarely hear
two voices in such moments. Forces of this kind are monothematic, at least
at the time of their naive beginnings. They are monothematic because they
take hold of the whole man and demand that their one affect occupy the
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entire stage. In the case of pure rage there is no complex inner life, no hid-
den psychic world, no private secret through which the hero would become understandable to other human beings. Rather, the basic principle is that the inner life of the actor should become wholly manifest and wholly pub- lic. It should become wholly deed and, if possible, wholly song. It is typical of the surging rage that it fully becomes one with its own lavish expression. Under the domination of total expressivity, it is impossible to hold oneself back or worry over self-preservation. Of course there is always "something" for which the fighting takes place. Mainly, however, the struggle serves the goal of revelation: it reveals the fighting energy as such. Strategy, the goal of war, and the rewards surface only later.
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INTRODUCTION
Wherever rage flames up we are dealing with the complete warrior. As
the burning hero enters fully into the fight, the identification of the human
being with his driving forces realizes itself. Common people can only dream
of this in their best moments. They, too, as far as they are used to postpon-
ing things and having to wait, have not completely lost the memory of those
moments of their lives in which the elan of acting seemed to flow directly
out of the circumstances. To use a phrase of Robert Musil, we could call
this becoming one with the pure driving force, the Utopia of a life based
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writers, civil servants, and for later therapists and professors, the virtues of hesitations have become authoritative. He who sits on the bench of virtues usually cannot know what his next task might be. He has to receive council from different perspectives and has to make his decisions based on inter- pretations of the murmur in which no tenor embodies the main voice. For everyday people the evidence of the moment remains out of reach; at best, the crutches of habit will help them. Habit provides solid surrogates of secu- rity, which may be stable but do not allow for the living presence of convic- tion. He who is driven by rage, however, is past the anemic time. Fog arises, yet shapes become more determinate. Now clear lines lead to the object. The enraged attack knows where it wants to hit. The person who is enraged in the highest form "enters the world like the bullet enters the battle. "9
THE THYMOTIC WORLD: PRIDE AND WAR
IT IS BECAUSE OF THE INGENIOUS READING OF HOMER BY THE CLASSICAL philologist Bruno Snell that contemporary reinterpreters of the Iliad have become aware of the specific premodern structure of its epic psychology and plot. In the main chapter of his inspiring book The Discovery of Spirit, which deals with Homer's conception of the human being, he elucidates an important feature of the text: that the epic characters of the oldest epoch of Western writing still lack, to a large degree, the formative characteristics of the classical conception of subjectivity. In particular, they lack reflective inwardness, intimate conversations with themselves, and the ability to make
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on motivation.
For people who settle down, such as farmers, craftsmen, day laborers,
conscientious attempts to control their affects.
the latent conception of a "composite" or "container" personality, which resembles in some respects the image of the postmodern human being with his chronic "dissociative disorders. " Seen from a distance, the early
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Snell discovers in Homer
INTRODUCTION
hero indeed puts one in mind of today's "multiple-personality" disorder. For Homer there does not yet seem to be an inner hegemonic principle, a coherent "I" that is responsible for the unity and self-control of the psy- chic field. Rather the "person" turns out to be a meeting point of affects or partial energies. These energies introduce themselves into their host, the experiencing and acting individual, as visitors from afar. They have come in order to use their host for their own concerns.
The rage of the hero thus may not be understood as an inherent attribute of the structure of his personality. The successful warrior is more than just a character that is exceedingly irritable and aggressive. It does not make much sense to speak of Homeric figures the way school psychologists speak of problematic students. Otherwise Achilles would be presented too quickly
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as a delegate of extravagant parental ambitions.
tray him as the precursor of a psychologically deformed tennis prodigy, but because with Achilles we are still in the domain of this container psychol- ogy, one needs to pay special attention to the basic rule of this spiritual universe: rage, which blazes up in intervals, is an energetic supplement to the heroic psyche, not a mere personal trait or intimate feature. The Greek catchphrase for the "organ" in the chest of both heroes and regular human beings, the organ from which these great upsurges take their departure, is "thymos. " Thymos signifies the impulsive center of the proud self, yet at the same time it also delineates the receptive "sense. " Through this sense the commands of the gods reveal themselves to mortals. The supplementary or "joining" quality of impulses connected to thymos explains, by the way, the lack of any control over the affects of Homer's characters. This is particu- larly strange to us moderns. The hero is a kind of prophet and is assigned the task of actualizing instantaneously the message of his force. The hero accompanies his power in a way similar to how a genius is accompanied by his protege. When the force becomes actualized the protegee has no choice
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but to go along with it.
Even though the hero is not the master and owner of his affects, it would
be a mistake to think that he is only its blind instrument, without any will of his own. Menis belongs to the group of invasive energies. The poetic as well as the philosophical psychology of the Hellenics included these energies and taught that they were to be considered gifts of grace from the divine world. Just as every gifted person is asked from above to carefully administer the gift that has been entrusted to him, the hero, the guardian of rage, also has to create a conscious relationship to this rage. Heidegger, who we can well
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This would falsely por-
INTRODUCTION
imagine to be a thoughtful tourist on the planes of Troy, would probably say: fighting is also thanking.
After the transformation of the Greek psyche from extolling heroic mili- tancy to extolling civic excellence, rage gradually disappears from the list of charismatic affects. Only the more spiritual forms of enthusiasm remain, as in Plato's Phaedrus, in which he presents an overview and list of psyche's beneficial obsessions, primarily medicine, the gift of prophesy, and the enthralled song that is granted by the muse. Beyond this, Plato also intro- duces the novel paradox of enthusiasm, the sober mania of viewing ideas. These ideas are the central reference point of the new science Plato founded, that is, philosophy. Under the influence of this discipline, "manic" psyche, illuminated through logical exercises, once and for all distanced itself from its "menic" beginnings. The exorcism of great rage from culture began.
Since then, the rage of citizens is only a guest that one welcomes within a framework of strict regulations; old-style fury does not fit at all into the urban world. Only on the stage of the Athenian theater of Dionysus is it sometimes presented in its old-fashioned, delusional intensity. One may think of Sophocles' Ajax or Euripides' The Bacchae. However, generally it is presented only to remind mortals of the terrifying freedom of the gods. It serves as a reminder that the gods possess the power to completely destroy whomever they wish. The stoic philosophers, who turn to the civil audience during the following generations, will defend as convincingly as the best Sophists the claim that rage is in the last instance "unnatural" because it
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ity. Indeed, the remaining affects that are useful for the polis are incor- porated into the bourgeois thymos. Thymos survives as "manly courage" (Mannesmut, andreia), without which it is impossible for the practitioner of urban life to assert himself. Rage was also allowed to live a second life as use- ful and "just rage," responsible for protecting its possessors against insults and unwanted impositions. Additionally, it helps citizens to step in for the Good and the Right (or, to put it in a modern idiom, our interests). Without stout-heartedness (Beherztheit)—this is how one should better translate the term thymos nowadays—bourgeois metropolitan life is unthinkable. (This theme is especially interesting for Germans because they produce a new and special form of stout-heartedness after 1945. I mean the often praised civil courage, the meager level of courage for losers.
With this form of courage the joys of democracy were introduced to an otherwise politically timid
objects to the reasonable essence of the human being.
The domestication of rage creates the ancient form of a new masculin-
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INTRODUCTION
population). Moreover, the possibility of friendship between adult males
in a city still depends on thymotic premises. After all, one can only play
one's role as a friend among friends, an equal among equals, if one appreci-
ates in one's fellow citizens the clear presence of universally acknowledged
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virtues.
alter ego, the friend, who distinguishes himself in front of the eyes of the community. To be in good reputation among competing men creates the thymotic fluidity of a self-confident community. Individual thymos appears now as part of a force-field that provides form to the common will. The first philosophical psychology of Europe unfolds itself as a political thymotic within this horizon.
BEYOND EROTICISM
One does not want only to be proud of oneself but also of the
RECENTLY, THE SUSPICION THAT PSYCHOANALYSIS MUST HAVE BEEN mistaken in an important respect about the nature of its objects has become more concrete. This marks a break with the earlier twentieth-century con- ception of psychoanalysis as a form of privileged psychological knowledge. Sporadic objections against the teachings of psychoanalysis, which go back to the early days of the discipline, have today turned into a theoretically supported dismissal. The point of origin of this dismissal does not, though, lie in the endless quarrels concerning whether psychoanalytic theses and results are "scientifically" ascertainable. Rather, the origin of the objec- tions to psychoanalysis consists in the increasingly widening gap between psychic phenomena and academically accepted conceptions—a malaise that has already been discussed for a long time by the creative authors and practitioners of the psychoanalytic movement. It is important to note that chronic doubts about its specific efficacy are not the cause of the resistance to psychoanalysis.
The source of the fundamental misunderstanding to which psychoanal- ysis has succumbed is rooted in its naturalistically concealed cryptophilo- sophical pretense to explain the human condition in its entirety based on the dynamics of libido, that is, from the standpoint of eroticism. This did not necessarily have to lead to a disaster for psychoanalysis, if the legiti- mate interest of therapists in the dimension of eros would have been con- nected with an equally vivid attention to the dimension of thymotic ener- gies. However, psychoanalysis was never willing to turn as much detail and basic interest to dealing with the thymotics of the human being of either
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INTRODUCTION
sex. It did not sufficiently investigate human pride, courage, stouthearted- ness, craving for recognition, drive for justice, sense of dignity and honor, indignation, militant and vengeful energies. Psychoanalysis somewhat condescendingly left phenomena of this kind to the followers of Alfred Adler and other allegedly minor interpreters of the so-called inferiority complexes. If at all, it conceded that pride and ambition can take over con- trol whenever sexual wishes do not get realized adequately. With a little irony, psychoanalysis called this transition of the psyche to a second pro- gram "sublimation"—a fabricated elevation for those in need of it.
For the most part, classical psychoanalysis was not interested in con- sidering the possibility that there might be a second basic force operative in the psychic field. This fact changed only marginally through additional conceptual inventions such as the "death drive" or mythic figures with the name of "destrudo," or primary aggression. The psychology of the self that was added later functioned only as compensation. It is understandable that it always remained a thorn in the eye for the classic Freudians, the partisans of the unconscious.
In conformity with its basic erotodynamic approach, psychoanalysis brought much hatred to light, the other side of love. Psychoanalysis man- aged to show that hating means to be bound by similar laws as loving. Both hating and loving are projections that are subject to a repetitive com- pulsion. Psychoanalysis remained for the most part silent when it came to that form of rage that springs from the striving for success, prestige, self-respect, and their backlashes. The most visible symptom of the delib- erate ignorance that resulted from the analytic paradigm is the theory of narcissism, the second offspring of psychoanalytic doctrine, with which the inconsistencies of the oedipal theorem were supposed to be resolved. It is telling that the narcissism thesis focuses on the human forms of self- affirmation. However, it aims to incorporate this thesis against all plau- sibility into the framework of a second erotic model. It thus takes on the futile effort to deduce the peculiar richness of thymotic phenomena from autoeroticism and its pathogenic fragmentations. Although it formulates a respectable educational program for the psyche, a program that aims at the transformation of the so-called narcissistic state into that of the mature love object, psychoanalysis never considered outlining an analogous edu- cational path for the production of the proud adult, of the fighter and bearer of ambitions. The word "pride" is for most psychoanalysts only an empty entry in the dictionary of the neurotic. They have practically lost
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INTRODUCTION
access to what is designated by the word "pride" because of an exercise in forgetting, an exercise called education.
Narcissus is incapable of helping Oedipus, however. The choice of these mythic models reveals more about the person who made the choice than about the nature of the object. How should it be the case that a young man with a moronic character, someone incapable of differentiating between his mirror image and himself, is supposed to make up for the weaknesses of a man who only gets to know his own father in the moment when he kills him and then, just by accident, bears offspring with his own mother? Both are lovers traveling obscure paths. Both get lost in erotic dependencies to such a degree that it would be difficult to decide which one of them is sup- posed to be the more miserable creature. One could convincingly start a gallery of prototypes of human misery with Oedipus and Narcissus. One would feel sorry for these creatures but not admire them. Their fates, if we trust the teachings of the psychoanalytic school, are supposed to reveal the most powerful patterns for the dramas of everyone's life. It is not difficult to see which tendency is the basis of these "promotions. " Who would make human beings into patients—as people without pride are thus called—can do no better than to elevate such figures as these into emblems of the human condition. In truth their lesson should have consisted of a warning that unadvised and one-sided love easily makes fools out of its subjects. Only when the goal is to portray the human being ab ovo as the "jumping jack" of love is it possible to make the miserable admirer of his own image and the miserable lover of his own mother into paradigms of human existence. One may add, by the way, that the basic contract of psychoanalysis has been undermined by the excessive dispensation of its most successful fictions. From a distance, the cooler youth of our day still knows what was the mat- ter with Narcissus and Oedipus. However, this youth takes only a rather
bored interest in their fate. He does not see in them paradigms of human existence, but only sadly trivial losers.
Anyone interested in the human being as a bearer of proud and self-affir- mative affections should leave unsevered the knots of this tangled, over- extended eroticism. One must probably return to the basic conception of philosophical psychology found in the Greeks, according to which the soul does not only rely on eros and its intentions with regard to the one and the many. Rather, the soul should open itself equally to the impulses of thymos. While eroticism points to ways leading to those "objects" that we lack and whose presence or possession makes us feel complete, thymotics discloses
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INTRODUCTION
ways for human beings to redeem what they possess, to learn what they are able to do, and to see what they want. According to the first psychologists, the human being is quite capable of loving, and this is the case in a twofold sense: he can love according to the high and unifying eros, insofar the soul is marked by the memories of a lost perfection. Second, a human being can love according to the popular and diverting eros, insofar as the soul con- stantly succumbs to a colorful multitude of "desires" or, we could also say, complexes of appetite-attractions. However, one cannot not surrender one- self exclusively to desiring affects. With equal emphasis it needs to be said that one should watch over the demands of thymos, if necessary even at the cost of leaving erotic inclinations unrealized. A person is challenged to pre- serve dignity and self-respect even while earning the respect of others in the light of their high standards. It is this way and could not be different because life requests every individual to step out onto the external stages of existence and expose his powers to prove himself before his peers. This is necessary for one's own personal benefit as well as for the benefit of the community.
If one wants to replace the second determination of the human being with the first one, one evades the need of having an education in both psy- chic dimensions. This leads to a reversal of the energies in one's mental household, which results in damage to the housekeeper. In the past it was possible to observe such reversals mainly in religious orders and subcultures that were crazy about humility, subcultures in which beautiful souls sent one another messages of love. In these ethereal circles the whole thymotic field was sealed off by accusations of pride (superbia), while one at the same time preferred to indulge in the delights of moderation. Honor, ambition, pride, a heightened sense of self-esteem—all of these were concealed behind a thick wall of moral prescriptions and psychological "insights," which all aimed at fencing off and domesticating so-called egoism. The resentment of the self and its inclination to put itself and what it possesses at center stage instead of being happy with subordination—a resentment that was practiced early on in imperial cultures and their religions—has diverted for more than two thousand years the insight that the often criticized egoism actually presents the best human possibilities. Nietzsche was the first mod- ern thinker to provide convincing ideas about how to address this issue.
It is remarkable that contemporary consumerism achieves the same interruption ofpride for the sake of eroticism, an achievement reached with- out altruistic, holistic, or other noble excuses. Consumerism simply buys the interest of dignified human beings by providing material concessions
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INTRODUCTION
and discounts. The initially absolutely implausible construct of the homo oeconomicus thus reaches its goal in the form of the postmodern con- sumer. Anyone who does not know of any other desires or is not supposed to know any other desires than those that, to cite Plato, derive from the erotic or desiring "part of the soul," is a mere consumer. It is not an arbi- trary fact that the instrumentalization of nudity is the leading symptom of the culture of consumption. Nudity always operates out of an orientation toward desiring. At least the clients who are called to desire do not, for the most part, totally lack forces of resistance. They respond to the perva- sive assault on the dignity of their intelligence either with constant irony or with learned indifference.
The costs for a one-sided eroticization are high. In reality, the "darken- ing" of the thymotic dimension makes human behavior incomprehensible. This is a surprising result, considering this darkening could have only been reached through psychological enlightenment. Once one subscribes to this mistaken view, it becomes impossible to understand human beings in situ- ations of tension and struggle. As usual, this failure to understand supposes the failure everywhere, just not in one's own field of vision. The moment that "symptoms" such as pride, indignation, rage, ambition, overzealous self-assertiveness, and acute readiness to fight occur, the member of the thymos-forgetting therapeutic culture retreats into a belief that the aggres- sive people must be victims of a neurotic complex. Therapists, according to this assumption, stand in the tradition of Christian moralists. These mor- alists speak of the natural disease of self-love as soon as thymotic energies begin to openly reveal themselves. Had Europeans not heard about pride— or likewise rage—from the days of the church fathers, when such impulses would have been taken as signs pointing to the abyss for those cast away? Indeed, since the time of Gregory I, pride, also known by the name of super- bia, is at the top of the list of cardinal sins. Almost two centuries earlier St. Augustine had described pride as the matrix for a revolution against the divine. For the church fathers superbia signified a conscious state of not wanting as the Lord wants (an impulse whose more frequent appearance in monks or civil servants seems understandable). To claim that pride is the mother of all vices expresses the conviction that human beings have been created to obey, and every inclination that leads out of hierarchical relation-
15
In Europe one had to wait until the Renaissance and the creation of a
ships could only mean a step toward corruption.
new formation of urban and civic pride before the dominant humilitas 17
INTRODUCTION
psychology, which was inscribed into the bodies and souls of farmers, cler-
ics, and vassals, was at least partially pushed back by a neo-thymotic con-
ception of the human being. It is easy to see that the rise of the nation-state
was a significant cause of reemphasizing and reassigning a leading role to
the affects of achievement. It is not by accident that the masterminds who
helped to prepare the way for the nation-state, most importantly Machia-
velli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Smith, Hamilton, and Hegel, turned their atten-
tion again to the human being as the bearer of valuing passions. They were
particularly interested in the desire for glory, vanity, amour propre, ambi-
tion, and desire for recognition. None of these authors ignored the dan-
gers inherent in these affects, yet most of them made an effort to emphasize
their productive aspects for the sake of humanity's being together. Since the
bourgeoisie likewise articulates its interest in the inherent value of dignity
and, even more, since the entrepreneurial human beings of the bourgeois
age developed a neo-aristocratic conception of an earned form of suc-
16
traditional training in humility is compensated through an aggressive
cess,
demand for opportunities to exhibit one's own power, arts, and amenities in front of an audience.
Thymotics receives a second chance in the modern world under the guise of the concept of the sublime. No wonder that the do-gooder of the present instinctively shies away from the sublime as if he sensed the ancient danger in it. The way in which the modern appreciation of effort is enlisted is even more threatening. The partisans of the tearfully communicative eros lament and defy this allegedly inhumane principle not without a sense for the stra-
17
assertion. Such a psychology needs to do more justice to the psychodynamic conditions of our existence. This presupposes a correction to the erotologi- cally partitioned conception of the human being, which characterizes the horizons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, what is needed is a radical distancing from the ways of conditioning the Western psyche that have deeply engraved us, in the older religious form or in the younger metamorphoses. Most important, we need to distance ourselves from the blatant ideology that results from the Christian anthropology according to which the human being is a sinner, an animal that is sick with pride, one that can only be saved through faithful humility.
Clearly, a movement that would distance itself from these phenomena would not be easy to bring about. Although the phrase "God is dead" is
tegic position they are in.
The task is thus to regain a psychology of self-confidence and self-
18
INTRODUCTION
already looked up by journalists on a regular basis, the theistic resources of humility continue to exist in democratic consensualism without being seriously endangered. It is quite possible to let God die and yet continue to have quasi-god-fearing people. Even if it is the case that most contemporary people have been carried off by antiauthoritarian currents, even if they have learned to express their own need for recognition, from a psychological point of view they continue to depend on a relationship of semi-rebellious obedience with regard to the lord who takes care of them. They demand "respect" and do not want to give up on the advantages of dependence. It would be even harder for them to emancipate themselves from the con- cealed bigotry of psychoanalysis. They continue to believe dogmatically that even the most powerful of human beings cannot be more than a conscious sufferer of his love-sick condition, which goes by the name of neurosis. The future of these illusions is secured by the big coalition: Christianity and psy- choanalysis can successfully defend their claim of outlining the horizon of human knowledge so long as they understand this monopoly as providing a definition for the human condition as characterized by a constitutive lack, a lack that used to be known as "sin. " Whenever lack is in power, the "ethics of indignity" has the word.
Hence, as long as both of these smart systems of bigotry dominate the scene, our understanding of the thymotic dynamic of human existence remains covered up for both individuals and political groups. Thus access to studying the dynamics of self-assertion and rage in psychic and social systems is practically blocked. In this situation we are constantly forced to grasp thymotic phenomena by way of the inappropriate concepts of eroti- cism. Under conditions of such a bigoted blockade, the direct intention never really comes to the fore because it is only possible to approach the facts by way of distorted traits. At least the underlying traits are, in spite of the erotic misconception, never fully covered up. Once we have called this dilemma by its name it becomes clear that it can only be overcome through the underlying conceptual apparatus.
THEORY OF THE PRIDE ENSEMBLE
POLITICAL SCIENCE OR, BETTER, THE ART OF THE PSYCHOPOLITICAL steering of the community, has had to suffer most from the thoroughly practiced but mistaken approach of psychological anthropology in the West. This approach misses a whole set of axioms and concepts that would
19
INTRODUCTION
be appropriate for the nature of its object. What from the vantage point of thymotics is seen unmistakably as the primary condition cannot be pre- sented directly through the detour around available erotodynamic con- cepts. At this point let me mention the six most important principles that can serve as the point of origin for a theory of thymotic unities:
• Political groups are ensembles; they endogenously stand in relationships of thymotic tension
• Political actions are started through a decrease in the tension between cen- ters of ambition
• Political fields are formed through the spontaneous pluralism of auto- affirmative forces; the relationships among these forces change because of interthymotic frictions
• Political opinions are conditioned and steered through symbolic opera- tions that present a sustained relationship to the thymotic emotions of collectives
• Rhetoric, the doctrine of controlling affects in political ensembles, is applied thymotics
• Power struggles within political bodies are always also struggles for priority between thymotically charged, ambitious individuals and their following; the art of the political thus includes the process of compensating losers
If one presupposes a natural pluralism of thymotic power centers, one needs to investigate their relationships according to their specific field regularities. Whenever real force-force relationships are at stake, reference to the self-love of the actors does not help us get further—or if it does, it is only with regard to subordinated aspects. Instead, it needs to be stated first that political units (conventionally understood as peoples and their subgroups) are, from the perspective of systems theory, "metabolic quanti- ties. " They continue to exist only as producing and consuming entities that convert stress and fight with enemies and other entropic factors. It is strik- ing that to the present day, thinkers formed by Christianity and psycho- analysis have trouble admitting that freedom is a concept that only makes sense within the framework of a thymotic conception of the human being. Economists zealously recite the doctrines of the latter thinkers, situating the human being as the consuming animal in the center of their appeals— according to which they only want to see human freedom as the choice of feeding dishes.
20
INTRODUCTION
Through metabolic activities heightened inner achievements in a vital system become stabilized, at the physical as well as at the psychological level. The phenomenon of warm-bloodedness is its most impressive embodiment. With it, the emancipation of the organism from surrounding temperatures was accomplished approximately at the "half-time of evolution"—the bio- logical departure to being able to move freely. Everything depends on one's ability to freely move, an ability that will later be called freedom, with all its different connotations. From a biological perspective, freedom means the ability to actualize the entire potential of the spontaneous movements that are specific to an organism.
The separation of the warm-blooded organism from the primacy of its milieu finds its mental counterpart in the thymotic impulse of the indi- vidual as much as it does so in that of groups. As a moral, warm-blooded animal, the human being is dependent on keeping up a certain internal level of self-esteem. This also initiates a tendency toward disassociating the "organism" from the primacy of the milieu. Whenever proud impulses assert themselves, there arises on the psychological plane an inner-outer gradient on which the inner, self-pole naturally has the higher frequency. If one prefers nontechnical parlance, one can contradict the same con- ception by showing that human beings share an innate sense for the dig- nity of justice. Every political organization of communal life has to honor this intuition.
Part of the business of morally complex systems—that is, cultures—is the self-stimulation of its actors through an elevation of thymotic resources such as pride, ambition, the need for recognition, indignation, and the sense of justice. Units of this kind cultivate throughout the conduct of their lives locally specific values that can lead to the use of universal dialects. Empiri- cal research can convincingly prove how successful ensembles will keep their form through a higher inner frequency—but what is noteworthy, by the way, is their frequently aggressive or provocative style of relating to the environment. The stabilization of self-confidence in such a group is subject to a body of regulations, which more recent theory of culture has called "decorum. "18 In a victorious culture, decorum is understandably measured according to the polemic values to which it owes its previous successes. This is the reason for the close liaison between pride and victory in societies that have emerged out of successful battles. Groups that are moved by the dynamics of pride often enjoy being disliked by their neighbors and rivals so long as this provides strength for their feeling of sovereignty.
21
INTRODUCTION
As soon as the stage of initial ignorance among various metabolic col- lectives has passed, that is, once the mutual unwillingness to recognize one another has lost its innocence, they inevitably enter a situation of being forced to compare themselves and to establish a relationship. This leads to the discovery of a dimension that can be called, in a broad sense, for- eign politics. As a consequence of their becoming a reality for one another, the collectives begin to understand one another as coexisting quantities. Through this consciousness of coexistence foreigners are experienced as chronic stress factors, and a society's relationship to them needs to be con- verted into institutions—usually this takes the form of conflict prepara- tion or diplomatic efforts. From this point onward, each group reflects its own desire for being seen as valuable in the manifest recognition of the others. The poisons of neighborhood slowly seep into these mutually relating ensembles. Hegel discussed this form of moral reflection with the influential concept of recognition. He thus anticipates a powerful source of satisfaction or fantasies of satisfaction. That he at the same time named the origin of countless irritations becomes evident from the nature of the subject matter. On the field of the struggle for recognition, the human being becomes a surreal animal that risks its life for a colored scrap, a flag, a chalice.
Recognition would be better described anew as primarily a matter of interthymotic relationships. What contemporary social philosophy dis- cussed with varying success under the heading "intersubjectivity" often means just the opposition and the interplay of thymotic centers of tension. Where common intersubjectivism is used to present the transactions among actors in psychoanalytic and thus ultimately erotodynamic concepts, from now on it is more advisable to move on to a thymotologic theory of mutual effects and actions of multiple ambition agencies. Although ambitions can be modified by way of erotic affects, taken for themselves they originate in an idiosyncratic center of impulsiveness and can only be understood from the perspective of this center.
GREEK PREMISES, MODERN STRUGGLES: THE THEORY OF THYMOS
FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF SUCH PHENOMENA IT IS USEFUL, as I have already indicated, to go back to the far-sighted formulations in the philosophical psychology of the Greeks. Thanks to the studies of the neo-
22
INTRODUCTION
classical Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss and his school (which have largely
and unjustly been claimed by political neoconservatives in the United
States), it is again today possible to pay attention to the bipolar dynamics of
the human psyche acknowledged and investigated by the great Greek think-
ers. Strauss created a situation in which we become aware, apart from Plato
the erotologist and author of the Symposium, of Plato the psychologist of
19
mos of great psychological richness and extensive political importance. The impressive achievement of Plato's interpretation of thymos consists in a per- son's ability to be infuriated. This turn against oneself can come about when a person does not live up to the expectations that would have to be satisfied in order for that person not to lose self-respect. Plato's discovery thus con- sists in pointing out the moral significance of intense self-disrespect. This manifests itself in a twofold way: First, it expresses itself in shame, an affec- tive, all-encompassing mood that completely fills the subject. Second, this rage-drenched self-reproach takes on the form of an inner appeal to one- self. The act of being dissatisfied with oneself proves to the thinker that the human being has an inert, even if only obscure idea of what is appropriate, of what is just and worthy of praise. When not living up to this idea, a part of the soul, that is, thymos, lodges an appeal. With this turn to self-refusal the adventure of independence begins. Only he who is able to disapprove of himself is able to control himself.
The Socratic-Platonic conception of thymos presents a milestone on the way to the moral domestication of rage. It is situated halfway between wor- ship of quasi-divine Homeric menis and the stoic dismissal of wrathful and intensive impulses. Thanks to Plato's theory of thymos, civil and militant impulses receive the right to remain in the philosopher's city. Because the polis that is governed by reason also needs the military, which is introduced here as the group of guardians, civilized thymos is allowed to remain within the city walls in the spirit of protection. Plato insists upon the recognition of protective virtues as powers that constitute society in many different ways. Still, in the late dialogue Politicus, which deals with the skills required for statesmanship, the well-known allegory of the weavers underlines the necessity of creating the spiritual web of the "state" by interlacing prudent disposition and courageous attitude.
Aristotle also mentions the advantages of rage. His evaluation of this affect is surprisingly positive, at least insofar as it is coupled with courage.
self-respect.
In book 4 of the Republic, Plato presents an outline of a theory of thy-
23
INTRODUCTION
Legitimate rage still has an "ear for reason,"20 even if it often storms off like an overly hasty servant who does not listen until the end of his orders. It becomes a vice only if it appears together with a lack of abstinence, that is, when it leads to excess. "Rage is necessary. Nothing can be achieved with- out it. Nothing can be achieved when it does not fulfill the soul and ani- mate courage. One should, to be sure, not make it into a leader. Rather one should only take it to be a comrade-in-arms. "21
Given that the thymos that has been conditioned by civilization is the
22
psychological location of what Hegel depicted as a striving for recognition, it becomes clear why the lack of recognition by relevant others excites rage. If one demands recognition from a specific opponent, one stages a moral test. If the other who is addressed rejects this test, she needs to deal with the rage of the challenger, who feels disrespected. Rage occurs first when the recognition from the other is denied (which leads to extroverted rage). However, rage also flourishes if I deny recognition to myself in light of my value ideas (so that I have reason to be angry with myself). According to Stoic philosophy, which situated the struggle for recognition fully inside the human psyche, the wise person is supposed to be satisfied with self-respect, first, because the individual in no way has control of the judgment of the other and, second, because she who is knowledgeable will strive to keep her- self free from all that does not depend on herself.
Usually the thymotic impulse is connected to the wish to find one's self- worth resonating in the other. This desire could easily be an instruction manual for teaching oneself to become unhappy, one with a universal suc- cess rate if it were not for those dispersed cases of successful mutual recog- nition. Lacan probably said what is necessary concerning the profound idea that there is a grounding mirroring process, even though his models, prob- ably unjustly, situate early infantile conditions at the center of investigation. In reality, life in front of the mirror is more of a children's disease.