No More Learning

The second assumption under which a new religion can be started is that the previous religions are inadequate because they cling too much to their content, whereas in future the concern will rather be to foreground the form or 'mood' of religion. This turn towards the formal side involves a dramatic bifurcation: the first option is for the new religion to be born as a free-floating meta-religion that no longer knows any dogmatic precepts, yet wants to preserve the dimension of the religious 'in itself' bona fide in a content-neutral form - this is roughly what is done by most modern confessionless people, who believe that there might be something after all in the thing they do not believe in. The advantage of this position is that it defuses the tensions between salvific knowledge and secular knowledge, between theology and ethics. Romantic Protestantism had already approached the self- dissolution of positive religion in polyvalent emotional culture, as is evident when Schleiermacher states in his second speech On Religion: 'It is not the person who believes in a Holy Scripture who has reli- gion, but rather he who requires none and could probably make one himself. ' Or the new religion could exclusively take the formal side of religion to convey foreign content. This was the case with Pierre de Coubertin, among others, who wanted to tie the content of sport to the form of religion - with the results discussed above.
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
Ifone astep it he>,-,,"c>",C' apparent religion can be employed as a mere vehicle to
alien content mala fide. The 'political theologies', whereby religion is used as a psychosocial support system for state success and which are once more enjoying considerable attention, are the inescapable example of this. To clarify this attitude through examples, one need only think of popes who enlarged the church state while leading their troops, or French cardinals who formed alliances with the Muslim Turks to harm the Christian rulers of Austria. In both distant and recent times, entire peoples and nations have also appeared in the guise of religious communities. The empirical political reality of the twentieth century illustrates to the point of overkill how revolution- ary movements can garnish themselves with messianic trappings, as if the activists had wanted to give the lie to Friedrich Engels's careless claim from 1844 that 'all the possibilities of religion are exhausted'. 103 As soon as the form-religious view becomes radicalized, the abstrac- tion progresses to the point where any content can potentially take on a religioid design if the content provider so desires. Religion then appears as a rhetorical-ritual mode and an immersion procedure that can serve any project - be it political, artistic, industrial, sporting or therapeutic - as a medium of self-distribution. It can very easily be transferred back to old content-based religions. 104
In the following, I will show how Lafayette Ron Hubbard's entre- preneurial and literary-rabulistic genius drew profit from the form- religious principle in its most abstract manifestation during the promotional campaign for a product called 'Dianetics' in 1950, only to convert it soon afterwards into the Scientological 'church' through a religioid upgrading. The starting point for Hubbard's campaign lies in the cultural crisis of the late 1940s, which also marked a period of personal setbacks for the author. At the time, he could presume a market for life counselling and self-help literature with considerable growth potential and a tangle of psychoanalytical, life-philosophical, pastoral, business consulting, psychagogic, religioid, dietary and fitness-psychological motifs. Hubbard's ingenious approach consisted in bringing all these forms of demand together into a single point. He placed himself in the tradition of modern charlatans, taking this word too in a value-free sense, who seek to combat all illnesses with a single medicine - or all problems with one solution. One can observe this habitus in countless concrete forms between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries - from the zero-point thought of modern philoso- phy to the political idea of total revolution. According to the great
96
TRANSITION: RELIGlONS EXIST art arts to
the panacea, universal agent,
out in physical or moral Hasks. As a rule, the distillation produces a simple substance, a final element, or a simple action and a final operation. Whoever has it or is capable of it has and is capable of everything.
Hubbard's product was conceived as a mental panacea and brought onto the agitated life-counselling market. At first glance, his 'Dianetics' of 1950 seemed to be no more than a new method, praised with much ado, to clean the misted windowpanes of our conscious- ness - a product, to be sure, whose already conspicuously high sales in the first year proved that five years after the first atomic bombs fell, a large number of Americans were prepared to follow spiritual and intellectual suggestions for the simplest solution to the world's prob- lems. There was no time left for complicated esoteric systems, the author announced; one had to change the world from the ground up - rapidly enough to make sure that the bomb did not beat everyone to it. 'Survival' had become the watchword of life counselling. It forms the American counterpart to early Christian metanoia in the face of time running out. Against the background of the incipient nuclear arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, 'Dianetics' initi- ated an alternative course of the world - between itself and the world system of war, mental illness and crime. Confronted with such a sce- nario, who would have refused to join the camp of those who claimed self-assuredly that they had the solution to the world's problems?
The solution lies in the name of the method: the word 'Dianetics' supposedly comes from the two Greek components dia (through) and nous (mind) and denotes the science of what happens 'through the mind' - occasionally a word such as dianoua is also named as a source, though unfortunately this does not exist in Greek. One can intuit the point, namely that everything happens through the mind - though the precise sense of 'through' remains unclear. One cannot yet tell how the system reworks the old contrast between mind and matter - 'scientifically' on the surface and gnostically in its deep struc- ture. Dispensing with false modesty, Hubbard's new hyper-method presents itself as the 'modern science of mental health' and promises to offer the simplest solution to all problems that had hitherto seemed insoluble. Like a Californian avatar of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hubbard praises his science of knowledge as ending the era of mere preliminary attempts. While traditional solutions in turn became part of the problems, whether they presented themselves as religions, philosophies, therapies or politics, Dianetics proclaims the solution
97
one essence, of whether this is
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
to in a clarity. we are
will not up drifting to the problem side again - which is why none but malicious and mentally disturbed people could have any interest in the prevention of Dianetics. This provides, from now on, a new criterion for the rapid diagnosis of psychopathic dispositions: indifference or hostility to the offers of Dianetics. A disproportionate polemic against what Hubbard called 'conventional psychiatry' is a running thread through his entire work - and that of his students. He undoubtedly knew what experts would say about him and his activi- ties. He made them pay dearly for his intuitions. lOS
As far as its actual content goes, Dianetics initially offers no more than a simplified and technified variation on the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis: it merrily replaces Freud's distinction between the systems or field states of conscious/unconscious with Hubbard's distinction between the analytical mind (with its clear memory bank) and the reactive mind (with its pathological memory bank). The latter holds the sum of all problems, while the former offers the solution to all problems. With this starting situation, it seems like the natural task of the analytical mind to clear up the reactive mind until only clear ideas are left. Whoever managed to empty their pathological store would bring about the sale dominion of the analytical mind and could henceforth call themselves 'clear'. All 'processing' follows the maxim that wherever there was a reactive mind, there will now be an analytical one. The task of Dianetic procedures is no less than the production of the clear. They lead clients, regardless of their specific ailments, along inner 'time tracks' and back to the 'engrams' in their pathological memory - often with 'locks' on the pathogenic stores that must first be opened. This takes place on the more or less fantastic assumption that the old engrams can be 'erased' through recall and the 'aberrations' they have caused eliminated - an assump- tion that had already been popularized by psychoanalysis and Alfred Hitchcock in Hubbard's early days, although it never managed to achieve more than pseudo-plausibility.
If this were all there is to say about Hubbard's approach, one could content oneself with the conclusion that Dianetics is a more or less amusing chapter in the epic of the Americanization of psychoa- nalysis. This epic relates how the partisans of ego psychology took advantage of the psychology of the unconscious - or how the healthy soul of the esoteric West Coast triumphed over the morbid psyche of the East Coast. In truth, however, the Dianetics/Scientology episode belongs to a broader intellectual-historical movement that I would like to term the techno-gnostic turn in Western psychology. This is
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS NOT EXIST
a new,
store of mental and spiritual distortive energy comes
from a technology-historical event that must be viewed as the great- est caesura since the implementation of vowel-alphabetical scripts around 700 BC: the advent of computer culture. Its unfolding around the middle of the twentieth century forced a revision of the time- honoured mind-body dichotomy by showing, through the construc- tion of computers or 'mind machines', that many of the phenomena one had previously attributed to the mind-and-soul side of the totality of being in fact belonged on the mechanical-material side. Reflection is a property of matter, not a privilege of human intelligence. Since then, the redistribution of the world under the pressure of the new cybernetic centre has defined the drama of contemporary thought. In this process it becomes clear why idols fall. The philosophy of cyber- netics renders it possible to formulate a general theory of twilights of the gods. 106
The Hubbard phenomenon unmistakably belongs to the turbulences set off by the irruption of cybernetics into the domains of metaphysi- cal classicism. As a contemporary of the first generation of cybernetics and an author of science fiction novels (viewed not entirely unfavour- ably by connoisseurs of the genre), he had the advantage of privileged early access to the new world of inner technologies. One should take care to avoid the fallacy that Hubbard's 'former life' in science fiction was something negative. Gotthard Gunther, still the most significant philosophical commentator on the event of the computer, has argued convincingly that the science fiction novel should be viewed as the laboratory for the philosophy of the technical age - a claim that seems entirely legitimate if one considers the work of authors like Stanislaw Lem and Isaac Asimov, to name only the greatest.
There is every indication that the novelist Hubbard never aban- doned his original genre - he merely expanded it. Showing great consistency, his first step beyond the confines of science fiction led him to Dianetics, which, in its cognitive status, is nothing other than psychology fiction. This is in keeping with the accounts of those close to him that Hubbard wrote his SOO-page book Dianetics in Bayhead, New Jersey, in a mere month - and completely 'off the top of his head', without drawing on any scientific research. The experimental foundation he invokes - 'hundreds of case studies' - is itself part of the invention. This observation casts a retroactive light on the systems of Freud and C. G. Jung; once one has grasped the schema of psychol- ogy fiction in its outlines, one also recognizes its characteristics in the alternative versions.
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THE PLANET OF THE PIV\CTISING
step lS movement psychology
into the religion fiction of Scientology. Observing this transition, one witnesses the debut of the religion of the technical age. 107 When the success of Hubbard's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health sent him the message from the real world that applied fiction 'works', he took this as the go-ahead for his ambitions. With the same elan that had carried him towards his first expansion of science fiction's boundaries, he performed the second and opened, after the psychotherapeutic front, the religious one. The response from the real world showed that this time too, it had 'worked' - the religion fiction materialized in a very short time and took the form of an actually existing 'church'. There was an unmistakable element of taking the bull by the horns at work, as Hubbard had reason to fear the reac- tion of the organized medical profession after the disproportionate success of his self-help therapy book. To the extent that the establish- ment denied that his 'magical' methods were in any way effective, and accused him of dealing irresponsibly with the hopes of the suffering, many of them incurable, it seemed natural to flee to the immunity of the religious sphere. Incidentally, it was never a secret in the inner organizational circle of the time that the ecclesiastical camouflage of the new anti-professional healing method was simply a way of mis- leading the tax authorities.
When Hubbard developed the Church of Scientology in 1954, he applied the form-religious strategies: he surrounded the profane content of Dianetics®, and later of Hubbard books, Hubbard speeches, Hubbard counselling techniques etc. , with the apparatus of sacred techniques typically found in religion. Its basis is a founder cult without boundaries: the celebration of the master as the awakener of humanity runs through the entire media sphere of Scientology. It constitutes one of the most airtight systems of self-praise in recent intellectual history - like a space station, it recycles its own system- inherent operating data. This was augmented by a sharp propaganda of urgency, the strategic version of the apocalyptic: it explained to clients that the only choice was between Scientology and suicide. This ensured total immersion in Hubbard's theme park. In addition, the sect created countless internal functional roles such as 'auditors', 'registrars', 'ethics officers', and a wealth of new importances in the form of supervisory and regulatory tasks - the imaginative replicas of a church hierarchy - as well as institutes, business centres, clinics, and even colleges where one could acquire heterodox academic titles, including Doctor of Theology. One can hardly say that no provi-
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
sion was made in this far-sighted enterprise for the newly important and those who wanted to join them. Internal communications were refined through the introduction of an insider language whose use gave the divide between members and non-members the desired depth. A system of mutual regulations stabilized the business; the discreet observation of members for an early diagnosis of scepticism rounded off the package of church-imitating measures. The design of the Scientological community was also original: the intention was that each new believer would also be a new customer. One has to go back to the Catholic trading of indulgences in the sixteenth century to find a similarly close and elegant connection between salvific and monetary transactions. lOS
Hubbard already deserves the greatest acknowledgement for these achievements in the recreative reconstruction of the church phenom- enon alone, as his form-religious imitation procedure provided valu- able insight into the general conditions of religion-founding, whether historically grown or currently synthesized. The loss of aura in his artefact of religion clearly did not worry him. What the new church lacked in venerability it balanced out through the carefreeness with which it presented itself as the summit of humanity's quest for truth that had been conquered late, but still in time. Scientological theology candidly allows the religious founders of the past to look up to him, the finisher - Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, but also authors such as Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Bergson and whoever else is entitled to candidacy in the colourful list of precursors. All of them can rejoice that Hubbard has completed what they could only strive for with inadequate means. A certain Dharma is also said to have been very close to the truth in days gone by, supposedly an Asian monk of antiquity. Evil to him who evil thinks - after all, does the New Testament not also contain details that do not stand up to historical criticism? I am not sure one can claim that Hubbard was attempting, with his less successful claims, to show that a complete church should also include signs of its own fallibility.
The question of whether Hubbard wanted to go beyond psychol- ogy fiction and religion fiction and create a form of politics fiction will remain unanswered here. 109 Depending on one's attitude and mood, one can take the corresponding statements by the master - especially the notorious equation of democrats and apes - either as Dadaistic or as pre-fascistic. There is a parodistic quality that runs through the entire spectrum of Scientological themes and leaves nothing that Hubbard ever touched unchanged or untwisted. Whatever sym- bolic traditions he appropriated reappeared as technically repeatable
101
images
the production of special effects.
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
Hubbard's achievements as a parodist of religion were outstanding, not least as a parodist of the hierarchical principle - recall his amusing 'Operating Thetan', levels one to eight - but also as a parodist of the mystical idea that the soul (now 'Thetan') recognizes God within its innermost self. The insight that fragile psyches can be replaced by high-class Thetan implants would itself have earned Hubbard a Nobel Prize. Scientology's way of dealing with its apostates is also of great parodistic value - here the classic condemnation of infidels is travestied in the systematic molestation of ex-Thetans. This would be even more comical, were it not for the fact that it meant subjecting their targets to vicious psychological terror. The old missionary cults followed the principle that one wins over the people by converting the king; translated into modern terms, this means that one must first of all court celebrities. 11o
With the help of these techniques, Hubbard managed to establish an intellectual-historical Las Vegas based on quotations without boundaries in a few decades. He led the 'church' into the age of its technical producibility. Unease in the face of this complex of com- promising imitations may be one of the reasons why followers of the 'original religions' prefer to avoid it. The attention of the organs of German intelligence to the ambiguous organization is all the greater, however - in the USA, the FBI had it in their sights for a time. Its suspicious appearance is a consequence of its design, as it almost openly displays its principle of production. This has to be the case, as Scientology offers the model for the form-religious staging of foreign content.
In April 2007, the European Court of Human Rights confirmed the right of Scientology - despite its sometimes dubious, at times even manifestly criminal economic activities111 - to present itself as a religious community. This verdict merits the closest attention, because it is a disturbing indication of the increasing illiteracy of our legal system in 'religious' matters. Despite all appearances, it does not contain any statement about the religious quality of the enterprise; it merely points out the inalienable right of every person to avow a functioning fiction. The judges took the Scientological organization's claim of pursuing spiritual, 'religious' and humanistic goals at face value. On closer inspection, the Strasbourg verdict was no more than a statement by the court about itself, in that it declared questions of parody outside its jurisdiction. A similar logic applies to airport secu-
102
to
TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
are
to a in hand luggage zone - one cannot, after all, expect them to take such statements anything but literally.
It is thus decreed by the supreme court: in our time, all that is required to be a religion is for a business to claim that it is one. A person with religion in their hand luggage can proceed to the gate. It did not occur to the judges that Jesus himself would not have been able to sue for recognition as a religious founder at the European Court of Human Rights because he did not know the word 'religion'. Nor was the concept of human rights available to Jesus, least of all the inviolable right of modern people to the free cultivation of illu- sions. The Strasbourg judges did not realize how close they were to Hubbard: if he could found a religion, they could allow one. At least the judges - assuming there were no undercover Scientologists among their ranks - attempted to pass judgement in good faith, while Hubbard knowingly built his 'church' on an abyss of ironies. In addition, the Scientology lawyers have been working for decades on transforming the legal systems of their host countries into locations for jurisprudence fiction - with impressive success. Without the taste for lawsuits among American lawyers, whose effects also reach across to Europe, it is clear that Scientology would long have disappeared from the market.
My conclusion from the dispute over the religious status of this psychotechnic group is that it proved once and for all that religion does not exist. If one looks to the heart of the fetish of religion, one exclusively finds anthropotechnic procedures (this applies analo- gously to the second large-scale fetish of the present, 'culture'). The word 'religion', both here and elsewhere, represents two things: inwardly, it is a password to unlock the more yielding zones of the psyche, those in danger of exploitation, and outwardly it is a badge that one shows in order to be admitted to the world of the respectable semblance. In the context of a genetic theory of culture one would call this effect pseudo-transcendence. It comes about as soon as the origins of mental fabrications disappear behind a 'veil of ignorance' and are treated by clients as a venerable legacy. 112 As one can see, a few years are now sufficient to create pseudo-transcendent effects.
In summary, we can say that the indirectly enlightening dynamic of Hubbard's Scientological doctrine, and even more the instructive implications of his organizational art, are connected to the unprece- dented shamelessness of his eclecticism. In this, Hubbard dwarfs even Rudolf Steiner - and God knows Steiner was no shy man. Hubbard's
103
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
time in as it shows, in its way, 'the
of thought to the pragmatics of action'. 113 All the Hubbard system knows about what was termed the 'spirit' or 'soul' in tradition is that these too must now become sites of survival. In his thought, the principle of survival has pervaded the beyond and subjugated every- thing that was ever viewed as exceeding physical life spiritually or intellectually. Thus Scientology offers pragmatism from beyond for the world here, and vice versa. In so doing, it provides the metaphysi- cal justification of greed for higher positions in the pyramid game of life. In games of this kind, new members always pay the expenses for the rise of the older members. The circumstance that evil is also directly good, that dangerous insight anticipated by Nietzsche, has the chance to unfold fully in such games. This is the foundation of the gnostic irony where everything is merely a game. In Los Angeles, where Scientology is most deeply anchored, this was translated into the thesis that everything is a film relating to earlier films. The main thing is to be in the producers' camp.
If one reduces this 'religion' to its essentials, one finds three irre- ducible complexes, each of which shows a dear connection to the anthropotechnic dimension. Firstly, on the dogmatic side: a tightly organized illusion-practising society whose members are impreg- nated ever more deeply over time with the concepts of the milieu. Then, on the psychotechnic side: a set of training instructions for the exploitation of all chances in the transcendent struggle for survival. If one turns finally to the head of the organization, the last thing one can see is any 'religious founder': before us stands a radically ironic, universally flexible business trainer who will stop at nothing, and demonstrates to his progeny what techniques one requires to survive in the jungle battle of egotisms. This does not mean, incidentally, that the matter does not occasionally have a certain charm. Even well- meaning and not entirely unintelligent people can find a temporary home there, as long as they firmly resolve to keep their doubts at bay - the 'willing suspension of disbelief', to quote Coleridge once again, is always the believers' most intimate contribution to the survival of suspicious constructs. In systemic terms, this confirms the rule that a perverse whole can appropriate the relative integrity of its parts without corrupting them entirely. Without this effect, admittedly, the complete religious history of mankind would be unimaginable.
To dose with an ad personam argument, I would like to note that only three figures in recent intellectual history can be compared to
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
Hubbard from a typological perspective: the Marquis de Sade, the pioneer of philosophy fiction, who espoused the release of a sexualized will to power; the Russian faith healer and Bohemian monk Rasputin, whose maxim was 'strength is truth'; and the British occultist Aleister Crowley, who spent his life with experiments in malevolence and narcotic excesses, and claimed to be Satan, the Antichrist, and the beast of the apocalypse whose number is 666. I will not investigate here whether Crowley's games with occult traditions could be taken as a feral version of the rehabilitation of matter - the analogy between black magic and historical materialism is relatively obvious.
In this infernal foursome, the youngest member was surely the most successful. According to Hubbard's eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr, his father was fascinated by Crowley early on. Through one of his pupils, the rocket scientist Jack Parsons of the Californian Institute of Technology, he had come into contact with the notorious Ordo Templi Orientis and been introduced to black-magical ways of think- ing. 114 There he supposedly learned that the will is everything and may do anything. From this school he took away the most secret of the illuminations underpinning his system: anyone can triumph, no one must die. Whoever wants to become God can do so in a few sessions. Hubbard knew at first hand that the beast from the deep was speaking through these words - in free translation: the revenge of matter for three thousand years of misjudgement and resentment. After Crowley's death in 1947, Hubbard supposedly believed that his position was vacant and awaiting a worthy successor.
L. Ron Hubbard Jr, a knowledgeable, albeit not entirely neutral witness, also states that his father, with whom he worked together in all areas during the founding years of the 'church', was a mental and physical wreck from the mid-1960s on, a victim of his own fictions and a casualty of his addiction to drugs and medications. He there- fore withdrew to a luxury yacht to hide from his followers, guiding his company from the high seas for many years. During the last years of his life he was caught in his own trap, lost like a prisoner in an exploding fireworks factory, plagued by hypochondria, overcome by fits of rage and filled with the wish to destroy 'oppressive persons' who dared to criticize his work. He withdrew from the public eye to avoid showing his disciples where his methods could lead.
105
The Conquest of the Improbable For an Acrobatic Ethics
'. . . jump through the burning hoop of the world'
Ingeborg Bachmann
PROGRAMME
After the partly narrative, partly analytical introduction to the 'planet of the practising', the terrain of the following investigations should be sufficiently familiar in its rough outlines; now it is time to survey the ascetological field more precisely. This assumes that we keep our dis- tance from the chimeras of 'philosophical anthropology' - regardless of whether it sides with Scheler in attempting to explain 'the human place in the cosmos' or, taking up Blumenberg's trail, resolves to give an accurate perspective on man as the animal that sees itself being seen. I am not saying that someone who sees chimeras has not seen anything. But they only recognize what their method allows them to perceive - the specialist interests in a personified form: the philosophy professor himself, who swings over from the savannah to the seminar as a model for all evolution. And when Scheler says that man is the Catiline of nature, the eternal troublemaker, rerum novarum cupidus, such a perspective even adds a political and criminological colour - one expects Cicero to appear at once and ask the eternal man how long he will continue to abuse our patience.
A material anthropology at the standard of our present knowledge can only be developed in the form of a general anthropotechnology. This describes humans as the creatures that live in the enclosure of disciplines, involuntary and voluntary ones alike1 - from this angle, anarchisms and chronic indisciplines too are simply disciplines in alternative enclosures. The word 'anthropotechnics' points to a uni- verse on which such authors as Arnold Gehlen (with his insistence on the necessity of tying the individual to 'institutions' to avert a descent into wildness), Jacques Lacan (with his espousal of a 'symbolic order', understood in terms of paternal law) and Pierre Bourdieu (with his attentiveness to the basis of class-specific behaviour in the 'habitus')
109
THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBflB
course historians also set foot on this some time ago.
Any unwillingness to learn from these authors would be unwise. Anyone who has taken a cue from Nietzsche and started to develop a notion of one of the 'broadest and longest facts that exist', however,
cannot avoid re-examining the entire human field in the light of this General Ascetology. Its object, the implicit and explicit practice behaviour of humans, forms the core of all historically manifest vari- eties of anthropotechnics - and it is questionable whether genetics will ever contribute more than an external modification to this field, which has long been practically constant in its power. If I am arguing for an expansion of the practice zone, I am doing so in the face of the overwhelming evidence that humans - on this side and the other side of 'work and interaction', and on this side and the other side of 'active and observing life' - have an effect on themselves, work on themselves and make examples of themselves.
In the following, I will demonstrate the autoplastic constitution of the essential human facts. Being human means existing in an opera- tively curved space in which actions return to affect the actor, works the worker, communications the communicator, thoughts the thinker and feelings the feeler. All these forms of reaction, I would argue, have an ascetic, that is to say a practising character - although, as stated above, they largely belong to the undeclared and unnoticed asceticisms or the occulted training routines. It is only with the first expressly practising humans that the ascetic circle of existence is explicitly rendered visible. They create the self-referential relation- ships that commit the individual to participating in its own subjecti- fication. They all have authority for us in anthropological questions, whether they are farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, athletes, rhetoricians, circus artistes, rhapsodists, scholars, instrumental vir- tuosos or models.
110
HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY
The Doctrine of Upward Propagation and the Meaning of IOverl
Marriage from an Evolutionary Perspective
No one who has been willing to follow my deliberations this far should be surprised if I turn once again to Nietzsche, the rediscov- erer of the ascetic field in all its breadth and layers, to provide the first keyword for the elaboration of a practice-anthropological view of the complex of human facts. 2 In the section 'On Children and Marriage' from the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), the new prophet tries his hand at life counselling for higher human beings:
I have a question for you alone, my brother: I cast this question like a sounding-lead into your soul, that I may know how deep it is.
You are young and wish for a child and marriage. But I ask you now: are you a human being with the right to wish for a child?
Are you the victor, the self-compeller, commander of the senses, master of your virtues? Thus I ask you.
Or is it the beast and dire need that speak out of your wish? Or isola- tion? Or discord with yourself?
I would that your victory and your freedom might yearn for a child. Living monuments shall you build to your victory and your liberation.
Over and beyond yourself shall you build. But first you must be built yourself, four-square in body and soul.
Not only onwards shall you propagate yourself, but upwards! May the garden of marriage help you to do so!
A higher body shall you create, a first movement, a self-propelling wheel - a creator shall you create.
Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create the one that is more than those who created it. 3
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
rnL/~T1'" one
evangelizing tone. These are not neo-religious instructions,
directions for the neo-ascetic trainer. In the present case they refer not to physical exercise of a gymnastic or athletic nature, but rather to the sexual diet, or more precisely the inner attitude that should be reached before the natural consequences of human reproductive activity can be affirmed. What Nietzsche's prophetic double presents is no less than a critique of the linear sequence of generations. Thus children who resemble their parents in the status quo are superfluous, or more precisely superfluous replicas of superfluous originals. We shall hear more about the reason for their superfluity shortly.
From the perspective of the new procreation trainer, every marriage must be considered a mesalliance brought about simply by natural automatism or the social mechanics of the desire for children. Because the man, as Nietzsche presumed to know, had thus far been merely a means to a child for the 'real woman', this well-trained female sympa- thizer and duped fulfiller of feminine wishes, must in future be assisted by an adviser who will encourage him to look out for other women - ones on an equal footing who do not want to make the husband 'the maid of a woman', but rather form a partnership for the pursuit of nobler aims. It should not unsettle us that the primary goal of better marital partnerships is defined a few verses later with the later politically and mass-culturally charged term Obermensch (Walter Kaufmann, the man who introduced Zarathustra to an American audience, renders it undauntedly as 'superman'). It would not be the first word from the dictionary of philosophical art nouveau to regain acceptable meanings after a systemic and sporting translation - recall such wilted articles as elan vital, fluidum, giving meaning to the meaningless, the creative pause etc. , which are awakening today to a second, third, nth life thanks to new company plaques. 4
It is not my aim here to examine the relationship between genetics, pedagogy, dietetics and artistry in Nietzsche's call for 'upward propa- gation'. I shall content myself with the observation that the biological part in this project can practically be overlooked alongside the three other elements. There is no 'eugenics' in Nietzsche - despite occa- sional references to 'breeding' - at least no more than is implicit in the recommendation to choose a partner under decent lighting conditions and with one's self-respect intact. Everything else falls under training, discipline, education and self-design - the Obermensch implies not a biological but an artistic, not to sayan acrobatic programme. The only thought-provoking aspect of the marriage recommendations quoted above is the difference between onward and upward propaga-
112
[-lEIGHT
don. mere
will no longer in children, as one says, to 'return' in their children. There may be a right to imperfection, but not to triviality.
What Does 'Upwards' Mean? For a Critique of the Vertical
The quoted passage brings into play Nietzsche's speciality, his atten- tiveness to questions of verticality in human matters of values, rank and achievement, to particular effect. It can be taken as the starting point for the central questions of General Ascetology: what is the business of the practising life, and to what end is it pursued? In what sense can we distinguish here between horizontality and verticality, whether the concern is the ascending line from parents to children in particular or the gradation between the levels of the practising life in general? Whence does Nietzsche draw his conviction that the kinetic attribute 'onward' has less value than 'upward'? From what sources does he acquire his knowledge of what above and below mean in such contexts? How can one form of life, one mode of being, be located over another in this field anyway? Where do the criteria for judge- ments of 'over' come from? Are they immanent in circumstances, or are they introduced from without? Why is continuing horizontally no longer the highest goal for Nietzsche - as it is for the majority of seasoned traditionalists in all times and peoples - and what motives underlie his conviction that a continuation of the game of replications is only affirmable and non-trivial if it brings about an enhancement?
It is clear from these questions that we will not advance any further in these reflections on the nature of practice directions without a 'critique of the vertical'. For the pedagogical, athletic, acrobatic, artistic, and ultimately any symbolic or 'culturally' mediated interpretation of the words 'above' and 'over' obviously addresses a second spatial meaning overlying the primary orientations in the physical or geographi- cal space. These two spatial meanings are of the same evolutionary age - indeed, one cannot rule out the possibility that what we are here terming the second meaning should, at least in development- psychological terms, be given priority over the first. The reason for this is not an esoteric one: in its relationship with its mother, every infant experiences a pre-symbolic and supra-spatial Above to which it looks up before it learns to walk. Fathers and grandparents are likewise 'up there', long before the child begins to build towers from blocks and
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
one on as the can over its edifices learn that one always remains superior to self-made constructs. It is sufficient to observe how the highest block returns to its original position on the ground following the collapse. This provides an experience of primitive sovereignty whose develop- ment continues into the games of critique among adults - every decon- struction is a game of little towers with the classics. By contrast, the child cannot similarly overturn the established polar situation with the parents up there and itself down there. At the experiential level, it remains - barring psychotic deregulations - embedded in a stable ver- tical tension, possibly until old age, when it has long since physically outgrown its progenitors. The 'looking up' of children to their parents and adults in general, especially to cultural heroes and transmitters of knowledge, gives rise to a psychosemantic system of co-ordinates with a pronounced vertical dimension. One could almost describe the
world of the early psyche as monarchic.
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche presupposes the decline of the four-
thousand-year empire of monarchies as a fact. The psychopolitical situation in which he wants to make himself useful as a procreation adviser is thus informed not only by the statement 'God is dead', but equally by the assertion 'the king is dead'. While the first claim must be augmented by the supplement 'God remains dead' - this is the novelty in the message of the madman [der Tolle Mensch], whether one hears it as bad news or welcomes it as a gospel - the second, in keeping with the old ritual law, is followed by the proclamation 'Long live the king! ' Nietzsche also yields to this law, but not without raising it to a more abstract level. Though empirical kings have ceased to be impressive and are only 'above' others from the perspective of protocol and the tabloid press, the royal function as such, understood as a pole of attraction to the pure Above, Over and Upwards, remains imaginarily intact in many individuals despite real circumstances, and demands a new interpretation. The replacement of kings with presidents and celebrities does not provide any solution to the task at hand. It deals with the problem on the surface, without even notic- ing the necessity of redefining the pre- of presidency and the pro- of prominent.
The Time of Artistes
Only within the framework of a comprehensive reform in the vertical system, with all its psychosemantic and culture-dynamic aspects, can
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one
death was at once that His the previous human being, and whoever would declare a successor must acknowledge that man, the conventional representative of the 'symbolic species' gov- erned by notions of God, 'remains dead'. 6 If one wanted to follow the ritual law and proclaim a living king under the new conditions, one would have to find a candidate who was neither king or man in the conventional sense. The only suitable being would be one with special traits that placed it outside the horizon of ordinary human existence - a creature sufficiently inhuman or post-human to meet the require- ments of this bizarre line of succession. Going by everything we know about human forms of life in general and Nietzsche's view of them in particular, only a figure from the pandemonium of the human is suitable for this role: the artiste, or more precisely the acrobat. The undermining of the human through the radically artificial began long ago with his emergence - could he be the figure for whom great times are now beginning?
We recall: Zarathustra's first conquest on his way from the moun- tains to the cities was a fallen tightrope walker who said that he was never much more than an animal trained with blows and fodder. If one accepts a first pointer from him towards possible meanings of the provocative word Obermensch, an image forms of a living being that is subjected to constant grooming and physically experiences adaptations to the improbable. Such an Obermensch is closer to ani- mality than the educated bourgeois because of the physical dimension of its art, yet simultaneously closer to an extra-human dimension by virtue of its removal from the everyday sphere through its daily occupational hazards. Someone who balances on the high wire lives from giving the audience a reason to look up. No one would do so without effective attractors: the danger that constantly accompanies the artiste, the embodied bravura that saves him at every step, and the overcoming of impossibility that enables its conqueror to walk between the precipice on the right and the precipice on the left as the ordinary person walks from their front door to the parlour. Thus the Obermensch's other qualities are not important; he brings traits that distinguish him from previous humans in the same way the tightrope walker differed from his audience. Thomas Mann, incidentally, in the chapter on the Parisian circus in his Confessions of Felix Krull, had already put a vehement denial of the artiste's membership of the ordi- nary human race in the mouth of his protagonist. One reads that the trapeze artist Andromache, 'daughter of the air', is neither a woman in the conventional sense of the word nor even a human being at
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a
voices 'Does anyone in on a
wire or express himself in verse? It's sheer madness. Man or woman? Unquestionably a monster. '7
Initially, the 'uber' [over] in Obermensch refers only to the alti- tude at which his rope is fastened above the heads of the spectators. I do not think it an affront to Nietzsche if we note that beneath the Romantic mask of his most oft-cited idea lies, initially, nothing other than a fantasy of prominence,8 in so far as one takes prominence as the category of people worth seeing - worth seeing according to criteria that remain to be discussed. Whether the protruders and outstanders (Latin prominere, 'to protrude' and eminere, 'to stand out') walk over tightropes, catwalks or red carpets is merely a techni- cal difference. What matters is the position of the monster (from the Latin monere, 'to warn'), in which the skill increased through strict training and its exposition in total visibility are drawn together into a single complex. In this sense prominence, after artistry and in alliance with it, provides the second impulse for the subversion of the human being through a non-human principle. Ultimately, with his hysteroid
Obermensch propaganda, Nietzsche simply ensures the possibility of fastening new ropes overhead that are worth looking up to. The 'over' here refers to the dimension of looking upwards. The human of the 'over' is the artiste who draws our gaze to wherever he is active. For him, being there means being up there. 9
At this point one could raise the objection that the artiste Nietzsche was primarily an evolutionist, even a biologist of the worst kind whose work exemplifies the fatal gesture of his century - the betrayal of the world of the intellect in the name of a naturalism without limits. What else could the desire to 'translate man back into nature' mean? Had Nietzsche not genuinely undergone a dangerous conver- sion that estranged him from his beginnings? Had he not turned away from Schopenhauer, the last thinker of renunciation, to join the camp of Darwin, the master thinker of affirmation through adaptation? Did he not, in fact, push the idea of success in life through adapta- tion further, arriving at the even more dangerous doctrine of success through conquest - with this inversion of the adapting direction entirely following the line of a biologically founded, metabiologically over-elevated concept of power? When Nietzsche, in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra quoted above, lets the prophet say to the city-dwellers in his first speech that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and overman [Obermensch] - a rope over an abyss', are we not hearing, above all else, the voice of the biologist insisting that
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on
not
HEIGHT
Nature Acrobatics on Mount Improbable
This objection to the artistic-acrobatic understanding of the term Obermensch does not hold up, because the artistic dimension does not conform to the exhausted separation of nature and culture. Evolutionary biology, for its part, only makes sense if viewed as a doctrine of nature's artistry. With Darwin's optics, nature itself is transformed into a circus in which species work their way upwards to the most incredible performances through a never-ending repetition of the simplest procedures known as variation, selection and hered- ity, generally in a co-evolutionary and co-opportunistic manner and in trans-species ensembles - one need only recall the 900 species of figs that exist worldwide: each one of these has its own exclusive species of fig fly that lives in the fruits, and without which none of the fig species could reproduce. lO Among the artiste-like inventions of culture, Nietzsche mentions those equalling the natural work of art 'a woman's breasts', this masterpiece of pre-human evolution- ary artistry that is 'useful and at the same time pleasing',11 Viewed through the opera glasses of evolutionary theory, the thing we call life is nothing other than a vaudeville with an immeasurable wealth of forms in which every branch of artistry, that is to say every species, attempts to perform the feat of all feats: survival. There is no species that has not, like Nietzsche's tightrope walker, made danger its pro- fession in some way. If one hears from natural historians that well over 90 per cent of the countless species that have lived on the earth have died out (for example, 150 of the 9,800 known species of birds in the last few centuries alone), the phrase 'occupational hazards' takes on a non-trivial meaning. From this perspective, biology
becomes historical thanatology.
If, on the other hand, one speaks of current life forms, one must,
especially as a naturalist, be able to recount their success story and illuminate the principles of their continuation - which means saying how they succeeded in staying on the survivors' side to this day, The star biologist Richard Dawkins took on a project of this kind over a decade ago when he recounted, in a popular lecture series at the Royal Institute - broadcast by the BBC under the seemingly child-friendly title Growing Up in the Universe - the history of life and its most imposing success forms. The title of the resulting book, Climbing
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THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
once more
with formulations,12 In this particular case
surpassed his own aims. Natural history - described as a climbing tour in the mountains of improbabilities - directly becomes a nature- artistic affair in which one cannot decide, and fortunately does not have to, whether the ascent of 'Mount Improbable' is car~ied out by the different species or the biologist who studies them. The image of climbing this peak of improbability is itself most likely to be inad- equate, as the rise of species cannot be understood as the conquest of a pre-existing summit. Rather, its development constitutes the folding-out of the mountain to its current altitude. Behind the image of the ascent to the mountain of the improbable lies a deeper figure, namely the emergence of a peak that is raised from the more probable to the more improbable by trivial evolutionary forces. Whether one takes the path to the summit as a climbing or a lifting of the entire rock mass, however, natural history takes on an immanent artiste- like dimension through this observation. 'Survival' is a code word for nature acrobatics. The question of who watches nature perform its feats cannot be answered from a human perspective - the only observer we can point to is the biologist, who enters the theatre of evolution with a delay of hundreds of millions of years.
In the light of these reflections, it would seem logical to relate the 'over' in survival rOberleben] and the 'over' in Obermensch to the dimension of growing improbabilities. 13 While dying out would always be the more probable result of a species's attempts to live, and the stagnation of humans in a final form of human existence would certainly be the more probable end to human history - an end that is not espoused without some self-satisfaction by the proponents of a supposed 'right to imperfection' - survival and over-humanization together embody the tendency towards the rise of the probable to the less probable. A surviving species embodies the current link in a chain of replications that has succeeded in stabilizing its improbability. If one assumes that a stabilized improbability immediately becomes a base for further ascents, this provides the basic principles for an understanding of the evolutionary drift towards the summit of Mount Improbable.
The biologist's reference to peaks of the improbable thus offers an answer to the question posed above as to the meaning of 'upwards' in Zarathustra's command - 'Not only onwards shall you propagate yourself, but upwards! ' - that is plausible in the context of current knowledge. This response assumes that evolution as such always moves 'upwards', in the sense that it establishes a continuum of life
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at
is not a planned progress, course; as a move~
ment towards increasing complexity, it is an unmistakably directed process. The contrast between 'onwards' and 'upwards' disappears of its own accord in the succession of generations, because, when viewed diachronically over extended periods, all species that seem to embody stable final forms transpire as momentary states within a genetic drift that is unpredictable in its details, but points 'upwards' overall. The global drift in the fitness current shows an increase in those species rewarded with survival, and it is precisely this tendency - that the current runs uphill counter-intuitively - that Dawkins illustrates with the image of climbing the heights of the improbable.
the evolutionary high ground cannot be approached hastily. Even the most difficult problems can be solved, and even the most precipitous heights can be scaled, if only a slow, gradual, step-by-step pathway can be found. 14
This pathway is sought by the 'selfish' genes, which are simultane- ously passed onwards and upwards in the constant reality test of species life.
Nietzsche's 'artiste metaphysics' can follow on effortlessly from the tenets of Darwinist biology. In terms of their improbability, natural species and 'cultures' - the latter defined as tradition-capable human groups with a high training and skill factor - are phenomena along the same spectrum. In the natural history of artificiality, the nature-culture threshold does not constitute any particularly notable . . ::aesura; at most, it is a hump in a curve which rises more rapidly from that point on. The only privilege of culture in relation to nature is its ability to speed up evolution as a climbing tour on Mount Improbable. In the transition from genetic to symbolic or 'cultural' evolution, the shaping process accelerates to the point at which humans become aware of the appearance of the new in their own lifetime. IS From that point, humans adopt a stance on their own capacity for innovation - and, until recently, almost always one of rejection.
Primary Conservatism and Neophilia
During the last forty thousand years of human evolution, the stand- ard reaction to the increased conspicuity of additional improbability was, as far as one can see, an unconditionally defensive one. On their habitual surfaces, all old cultures, extending back to their
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
seem a presum- ably because the task of transferring their conscious content, their symbolic and technical conventions to subsequent generations with consistent intensity already taxes them to the limits of their capacity. Cultures as such are consistently based on the fundamental contradic- tion between the acquired neophilic attitude of Homo sapiens and the - at first - inevitably neophobic constitution of their rule apparatuses. Because the reproduction of their ritual and cognitive content is its first and only concern, its path through the ages is massively neoclastic - the shattering of the new in general precedes the iconoclasms in par- ticular by many millennia. For every Cataline, every rerum novarum cupidus, there are ten thousand preservers of the old like Cato. As even the most stable cultures are constantly infiltrated by symbolic and technical innovations, however, whether inventions of their own or infections through contact with the arts of neighbouring cultures, they employ the trick of camouflaging the novelty of what has been newly absorbed, adapting the elements integrated nolens volens to the store of their own oldest material as if they had always belonged to their domestic cosmos. Such an integration of the new into the archaic is one of the primary functions of mythical thought: making experienced improbabilities, whether events or innovations, invisible as such and backdating the invasive, unignorable new to the 'origin'. The preference of metaphysics for the substantial and its resentment towards the accidental are unmistakably still offshoots of the mythi- cal thought form.
One cannot emphasize enough how significantly the later positiviza- tion of the new that began in Europe in the fifteenth century impacted the mental ecosystems of threshold peoples. 16 It amounts to the revalu- ation of all values, because it turned the oldest civilizatory paradox - that neophilic individuals lived in neophobic social structures - on its head. Over the centuries, it forced most people into an involuntarily neophobic position from which they were scarcely able to keep up with the ecstasy of innovation in the surrounding civilization. This change breaks with the majesty of the old and transfers the kingly function to those who bring the new. Now, whoever calls out 'Long live the king! ' must be referring to innovators, authors and multipliers of the cultural patrimonium. Only because the Modern Age opened the era of neo- latry was Nietzsche able to risk pushing this trend even further and suggesting radically modified rules for procreation. While procreation had previously always been dictated by the reproducing side, and its criterion for success was the return of the old in the younger, the child
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was now to take priority - which it achieves when, as Nietzsche unam- biguously states, it becomes the one that is more than the two who created it. Those who oppose this are the last humans.
Artiste Metaphysics
The evolutionary preconditions for this turn can be clearly named, even if the consequences remain unforeseeable: they lie in the neo- Iatric valuations of the European Renaissance, which ultimately go back to the reinterpretation of the Christian Trinity in favour of the creative spirit and the shifting of the imitatio Christi to the imitatio Parris Spiritusque. Against this background, Nietzsche did not have to do much more than tear away the husks of convention from the cult of the new, which was already fully developed in his time, and embrace the dogma of innovation without limits. He was one of the first who was able to perceive Mount Improbable emerging from the mist. At the same moment he realized the relativity of height, for he observed that even high mountain ridges seem flat when one stands and walks on them. Only thus could he arrive at the opinion that the mountain of evolution was not yet high enough - he wanted to place a second mountain on the first, and a third on the second. Accordingly he wrote: 'fewer and fewer climb with me on ever higher mountains - I build a mountain range from ever more sacred moun- tains'. 17 Above every mountain range of results, there is a mountain range of tasks to be unfolded upwards. Only erecting new steep faces can compensate for the flattening out of the mountain resulting from the habit of living on it.
One must realize how much Nietzsche is speaking here as an artist: the desire to push improbability further to a mountain range of mountain ranges articulates the highest level to which an artiste's confession can advance. Only the artistic will to transform the future into a space of unlimited art-elevating chances enables us to under- stand the core of the procreation rule: 'a creator shall you create [. . . ] a self-propelling wheel, a first movement'. This rule contains no less than Nietzsche's theology after the death of God: there will continue to be a God and gods, but only humanity-immanent ones, and only to the extent that there are creators who follow on from what has been achieved in order to go higher, faster and further. Such creators never work ex nihilo, of course, contrary to a scholastic misconcep- tion; they take up results of earlier work and feed them into the process once again. Creation is a resumption of the first movement,
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return into or
'self-propelling wheel' moves itself'
formulation brings into play the better form of scholasticism, where the from-within-itself constitutes the kinetic dimension of the in-itself and the for-itself.
The creator follows a metaphysical assignment: if life itself is already a vibrating mountain of improbabilities, one can only prove an affirmation by piling that mountain up even higher. That is why upward procreation is meant to create a creator. By producing addi- tional increasers of the improbable, one acclaims the dynamic of improbability increase as a whole. Hence the demand for a human being who has overcome their own obstacles in life and is free of resentment towards creativity. Only such a person would no longer take themselves - let alone their ancestors - as a yardstick for the becoming of the next generation. Only they could affirm without neo- phobic reflexes the idea that the cultural mountain range of improba- bility must, in future, be unfolded a level higher with each generation; they would not turn their own imperfection into an obligation for their descendants. They would rather die out than return unchanged. They understand and welcome the fact that according to the law of the normalization of the improbable, earlier peaks present themselves as mere hills or plains in the perception of later generations. One also finds this law among parasitic and flattened-out forms - in the law of increasing jadedness on the art market, for example, or the escalation trends in the hardcore erotic sector.
For the 'creative' (a word that died a heat death in less than a century) person, the comparative - in the form Indo-Germanic languages place in their speakers' mouths - is more than simply a grammatical function. The elementary triads big - bigger - biggest, bonus - melior - optimus, or potens - potentior - potentissimus give a primitive impression of life's graduated acts of enhancement. One need only undo the theological blockage of the superlative in order to understand that the maxima have always left room for increase, even when they are secured with nee-pius-ultra fences. It is the very cultural process of life that presents what was great yesterday as smaller, and passes off the greater of earlier times as normality only a short time later. It transforms the insurmountable difficulties of yes- terday into paths on which, soon afterwards, even the untrained will advance with ease. For those who have lost faith in the omnipotence of obstacles - and what was classical ontology if not a faith in large- scale obstacles? - the previous state is the base camp for the next outing. From that point on, the acrobatic path is the only viable one.
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Making Asceticism Natural
On closer inspection, what people sought to call Nietzsche's 'biologism' - and 'biologism', as some diagnosticians of imperialism suppose, is the mystified form of capitalist competition - transpires as a generalized acrobatism: a doctrine of the processual incorporation of the nearly impossible. This has less to do with economy than with an amalgam of artistry, artistedom, training science, dietology and ascetology. This combination explains the programmatic statement entrusted to a notebook by the author of The Genealogy ofMorals in the autumn of 1887:
I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening. 18
The existence of tomorrow's humans is thus to be based entirely on practice and mobility, including a gymnastics of the will and tests of courage for one's own powers. Nietzsche even envisages a training for moral virtues in which one can prove one's 'strength in being able to keep one's word'. 19
For the philosophical acrobat, making asceticism 'natural' involves basing anti-naturalism on nature - which means that the body must always be taken along, from the bottoms to the tops of the acrobatic figures. When the artistes of the Chinese State Circus show in one of their pyramid stunts how five, six or seven artistes climb up one another such that the uppermost is standing on the shoulders of countless others lower down, and he then performs a one-handed handstand while, to top it all, balancing glasses of water on a tray placed on the sole of his left foot - then philosophers too should realize (assuming they go to the circus) what Nietzsche observed with such pathos: that there is no less corporeality involved at the highest point than in the middle or at the bottom,20 It is also clear how the acrobatic figure provides its own commentary on the topos 'mind over matter'. Artistedom is the somatization of the improbable.
Nothing More Monstrous than Man: Existence at High Altitude
This viewpoint is not entirely contemporary. It is foreshadowed in older bodies of wisdom literature - in the European context, prob- ably most decisively in the oft-discussed choral song from Antigone by Sophocles, in which 'man' is described as the most wondrous
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THE
beings,
as Holderlin
most monstrous
it strikingly,
tiously. He is a danger-seeking monster of disturbance that slanders the status quo and leaves nothing as it was: as a seafarer who explores the most perilous zones of the sea; as a desecrator of the holy soil who weakens it with his plough; as a bird-catcher who lays out treacher- ous nets; as an extravagant big-game hunter in the mountains; as a state-builder and lawmaker; as a doctor who pushes back suffering - in all of these, then, an artiste: 'Skilful beyond expectation are the contrivances of his art' - at a loss only before the inevitability ofdeath. With such a nature, arrogance is to be expected - the acrobat's pride over the heads of the crowd, and hubris outside of the common rules. Sophocles has a splendid word for this disposition towards immodera- tion: dpo/is, 'cityless', overstepping the polis, 'apolitical' in the sense of a sacrilegious non-participation in the citizen's religion of golden mediocrity - one cannot help thinking of the Athenian model monster, the over-gifted Alcibiades, who danced on more than one tightrope. 22
Sophocles here brings up a principle by which the subversion of humanity comes from within humans themselves: it was convention- ally termed 'hubris'. This interpretation is short-sighted, not to say bigoted, because it remains compulsively bound to a praise of the middle - even if the meson, as the ancients viewed it, was something quite different from what the word means today. The advantage of this reading, at least, is that it brings up the vertical tension that is inseparable from human existence - even if it is only by defining humans as beings endangered by a harmful height. The Old European critique of hubris thus represents the basic form of what was known in the twentieth century as 'height psychology'. In modernity, admit- tedly, hubris has changed its approach: it no longer appears as self- elevation, but rather as the presumption of a lowness to which, on closer consideration, no one can lay claim.
Max Scheler arrived at the phrase 'height psychology' in the 1920s to express his dissatisfaction with the psychology of the unconscious propagated by Freud, Jung and others and, for a time, known as 'depth psychology'. In Scheler's view, it explained humans one-sidedly 'downwards', oriented towards the mental mechanism, whether drive-theoretically or neuro-theoretically underpinned. 23 He believed that the psychologies of modernity excessively biologized humans, underestimating or entirely neglecting their involvement in a register of metabiological realities, the sphere of intellectual and spiritual 'values'. The word Geist - denoting both the spirit and the mind - is taken by Scheler as indicating the partial release of humans from the absolutism
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once
! ion', after simply meant an access to objects while retaining
one's organic shackles. Humans project into this 'other world', the spiritual or metabiological (some authors caU it 'bionegative') zone of values, by attempting to reach the more-than-natural by natural means. Under Nietzsche's influence, Scheler had understood that the body must be taken along in the transition to the higher register; this distinguishes him favourably from spiritualists and dualists.
He also knew this: the task faced by modern height psychology is the opposite of that dictated to its Old European precursors. While the ancients had to bring 'extravagant' back to the meson, the healthy middle, the moderns have to remind their contemporaries of the region of height as such, assuming these are humans of the type who feel most comfortable at the average level and below. Left to their own devices, they chronically excuse themselves downwards, and prefer to follow models which prove that downhill paths are more likely to be successful than steep climbs. The modern human being can therefore only be 'sub'verted from a height, from the overground. The hidden overground, however, lies - and this is new - more in artistedom than in 'religion', in that 'religions', as hinted above, can be co-opted much more easily for artistic purposes (with their branches of asceticism, ritualism, ceremonialism) than vice versa. Artistedom is subversion from above, it superverts the 'existing'. The subversive, or rather superversive, principle lies not in the 'height' of haughtiness, the hyper of hybris or the super of superbia; it is con- cealed in the 'aero' of acrobatics.
The word 'acrobatics' refers to the Greek term for walking on tiptoe (from akros, 'high, uppermost' and bainein, 'to go, walk').