No More Learning

The theological phantasm involuntarily steps in front of the imageless presence of the all-encompassing soul in the individual soul. Removing such super- impositions and burning up the residues of pathological individual- ity from earlier life and current childhood in the 'flame of attention' is the declared purpose of all the spiritual techniques developed on Indian soil; gaining an adequate sense of their wealth of forms, peaks and nuances in extenso is an almost equally futile undertaking for Indians and non-Indians alike.
The beginnings of Indian anthropotechnics refer back to an archaic mental and psychagogic process that can be traced to the pre- Aryan period. It is no coincidence that one of the oldest names for the ascetic is shramana, 'the toiler' - a word that directly recalls the Greek ponos and the athletes who prided themselves on their philoponia. Supposedly the word ashramas, which is traced to the
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THE COMPLETE AND
INCOMPLETE
to
forest hermits; this also seems to be the origin of the term 'ashram',
which originally denoted a hermitage, an ascetic's place of practice, before branching out to all manner of venues for meditative retreat, including the monastery-like settlements in the vicinity of a spiritual teacher. The parallels with the phenomenon of Christian eremitism are plain to see - and the affinity between athletic-somatic practice and Yogic and spiritual self-concern is obvious. The reverence shown towards silence both in India (where the holy man is known as the muni, meaning 'silent man') and in the Egyptian deserts points in the same direction. In both centres of asceticism, people had understood that any form of ordinary speech amounted to a profanation that entangled the soul once more in the very thing from which their with- drawal was meant to free them.
A brief glance at the vocabulary with which those contemplators had articulated their spiritual goals since ancient times already shows how radically Indian spirituality is based on the elaboration of seces- sion motifs. The four basic terms of spiritual life - mok~a, apavarga, nirvrtti and nivrtti - all belong to the verbal field of withdrawal, turning away, disappearance, desisting and expiry, each with an extensive apparatus of anthropotechnic procedures responsible for the assimilation of recessive qualities. Without further commentary, I shall follow Heinrich Zimmer's overview of the semantic fields of the highest goal-related words:
Moksa, from the root muc, 'to loose, set free, let go, release, liberate, deliver; to leave, abandon, quit', means 'liberation, escape, freedom, release; rescue, deliverance; final emancipation of the soul'. Apavarga, from the verb apavrj, 'to avert, destroy, dissipate; tear off, pull out, take out', means 'throwing, discharging (a missile), abandonment; comple- tion, end; and the fulfilment, or accomplishment of an action'. Nirvrtti is 'disappearance, destruction, rest, tranquillity, completion, accom- plishment, liberation from worldly existence, satisfaction, happiness, bliss'; and nivrtti: 'cessation, termination, disappearance; abstinence from activity or work; leaving off, desisting from, resignation; discon- tinuance of worldly acts or emotions; quietism, separation from the world; rest, repose, felicity'. 76
If one wishes to follow the development of Indian practice cultures from the perspective of high abstractions, one should ask here too in what mode the original ascetic secession and the development of cultures of recessive subjectification took place. The fates of Indian anthropotechnics only differ very fundamentally from their Western
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
is more or as a family
and therefore does not initially need to acquired through an indi- vidualized reaction to the absolute imperative. The answer to the call 'You must change your life! ' is inherent in the Brahmanic life as such, which in its sum represents nothing other than a collective secession. In essence, it is the implantation of a caste of god-men, or rather man-gods, amidst and above the non-Brahmanic populations. From this point of view, the oldest Brahmanic existence promises a quiet growth into a firmly established structure of hereditary superhuman- ity. Just as one could define the ordinary Westerner as 'so politic a state of evil',77 to use a Shakespearean phrase, which does not permit the influx of a single virtue, then the modus vivendi of the Brahmanic man-god could be described as a stable republic of unaugmentable merits.
The Secret of the Second Secession: Karma-Darkening and Striving for liberation
Even in such a culture, however, the question of the personal appro- priation of the legacy arises - especially in the time of social change, when the first individualization began in the early cities. Just as being born into a priestly house did not automatically solve the spiritual problems experienced by the sons of Protestant vicars, descent from a Brahman family could not remove all the uncertainties of life that might accompany the existence of a Brahman's progeny. The indi- vidualization of a sense of class superiority demanded by this can, according to the logic of the matter, only be achieved through an addi- tional secession of the single member from the seceded group. This necessity of a second secession was the evolutionary motor of ancient Indian culture. Its initial paradox was that it alleged a seemingly unsurpassable peak as the starting point for further differentiations. Consequently, the only dimension of Brahmanic existence suitable for heightening and surpassing was the area of negative statements on life and the world. Certainly the earliest Brahmans were already familiar with a degree of world-distance; this came from the emphasis on the ecstatic departure from the world of senses - praised since time immemorial as the royal road to experiencing the final reality - but the priestly and familial ties affecting the heads of Brahmanic house- holds, together with their divine self-assurance, set palpable limits to an actually realized flight from the world. If members of the younger
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THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE
generations aspired to a deeper appropriation of the ecstatic legacy, they were directed almost automatically towards the radicalization of withdrawal - not only in the second half of life, after fulfilling one's Brahmanic procreative duties and passing on the divine secret to one's descendants, but in the first, discarding the procreative urge and ignoring the previously unassailable passing on of the holy fire from father to son. It is above all through this - more than through the oppressive real plight that had always affected India - that the pessimistic blurring of judgement concerning the totality of existence was able to gain the upper hand.
Only in this context can one make sense of the otherwise barely explicable opening of Indian culture to the wheel of rebirths, an image still unknown to the Vedic singers. The mysterious success of the doctrine of rebirth can only be appreciated if one views it as the means chosen by the ascetics to advance the necessary darkening of the worldview in the spirit of the second secession. It provides the ontological foundation for the asceticism of the early leavers; only this asceticism could have an interest in describing the universe as a trap for the soul, a penal and illusionistic institution in which those who are conceived and born are all reconceived and reborn beings who move forward from one imprisonment to the next. From this perspective, the doctrine of rebirths not only articulates a sublime metaphysics of self-propagating guilt - in this sense the functional equivalent of the Egyptian-Christian judgement myths, and hence to an extent a vehicle for metaphysicized ressentiment - but is also the conditio sine qua non for the secession of a class of young profes- sional ascetics. These rebels adopted the chronic resistance to the curse of procreation once it occurred to them to understand it directly as the procreation of the curse. From that point on, the reality of the real could not be defined alone by the misery that humans synchroni- cally inflict upon one another; it equally asserted itself diachronically as a proliferation of stored guilt. Henceforth, the great watchword 'liberation' (mok~a) referred less to the possibility of following on from the original ecstasy; instead, it changed into the password for the flight from impure and hopeless being.
One can see how liberation had to mutate into a phenomenon of longue duree under such conditions. As such, it was not yet suitable to be heightened into an existential project - for 'existential' is always synonymous with 'manageable in this life'. As long as individuals wander on the long tracks of karmic time, the pilgrimage to liberation is dominated by inert rhythms. Although, after the infiltration by the doctrine of rebirth, all substantial time was recognized as a time of
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
of individual - it was of
Buddha that sought to exceed the limits of the inert karmic machine and ensure its standstill in this life. What is decisive, however, is that Indian asceticism, like that of the Christian desert, ultimately knows only individual-purgatorial tests and individual-eschatological salva- tions. If it were capable of conceiving something resembling a world salvation time, it would perhaps be most feasible under the image of a thick rope of countless karmic threads with varying length, colour and purity. India's immunity to temptation by the idea of a history common to all stems from the fact that its culture of meditation had already dissolved the phantom of a universally shared world time into millions of invidualized salvation histories early on - an opera- tion that would only present itself to the socia-holistically enchanted Europeans, mutatis mutandis, through the post-Enlightenment of the twentieth century. Though it was deeply perfectionist, and in this sense historicist, it never occurred to Indian culture to acknowledge collective perfections as serious options. Its indifference to the ideas of progressive salvation politics was repaid by Western ideologues with the label 'ahistorical',
Against this background, one can understand the mounting nega- tivism that took over Indian spirituality from the days of the early Vedic man-gods onwards, finally maturing into the complete systems of mutually reflected world- and life-denial during the generation of Buddha and Mahavira (in the fourth century Be, according to recent dating). At the time of these great teachers, the impulse of ascetic secession had long spread to the other castes and infected them with the spirit of radical negation - certainly always against the back- ground of the old, generally Indian concern for purifying sequences of acts and touches. Naturally such evaluations are always based on an element of authentic existential disposition. One does not need to deny the distress of the young Siddhartha upon his first departures from his father'S palace, when he first saw the ills of the world in the shape of the sick, the old and the dead with his own eyes, nor his fasci- nation with the ascetic, whom he supposedly met last when he left the palace by the north gate, and whose sight pulled Siddhartha onto the path of redemption. We must be allowed to surmise, however, that he saw the ascetic first, and that this encounter indicated to him the necessity of liberating oneself from sickness, age and death. No prince outside of legend would ever think of relating the sight of poor or sick people to himself. Only someone whose interest in asceticism had
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THE COMPLETE THE INCOMPLETE
1S
in favour, would in a way. A
son does not ask for vaccines against the ills of existence; he is inter- ested in a fight where victory seems nobler than a royal inheritance. The great systems of pessimism are less concerned with idiosyncratic tendencies coming from the existential disposition of the protagonists than with the laws of second-degree ethical secession, or the break with worldly life from the non-Brahmanic position. For ascetics who had chosen this gesture, the path to the negativization of existence was the only one still open.
These circumstances are expressed in all varieties of Indian perfec- tion projects in post-Vedic periods. The highest goal- the unification with absolute reality, whether this was taken as the final self or not-self (in a systemically defamiliarized version: the striving for total immu- nity in being or nothingness) - is fixed a priori, and it is correspond- ingly stereotypical to state that people should go to whatever lengths necessary to attain it. It is therefore more than justified to speak of 'Eastern teleology'. Where such a high level of goal-awareness, even supremacist frenzy, belongs to the basic characteristics of a practice culture, it is inevitable that there will be greatly differing notions of these goals.
The Slow and Fast Paths
The fundamental division of Indian thought in terms of the concep- tion of final goals was summed up most plainly by Mysore Hiriyanna: 'So far as the nature of the goal of life is concerned, the Indian systems may be divided into two classes - those which conceive of it merely as one of absolute freedom from misery and those which take it as one of bliss also. '78 (The author makes no mention of the altruistic turn in Mahayana Buddhism, presumably because he views the elevation of sympathy to one of the highest goals in life as an element that is foreign to the basic Indian tendency. ) In general, one can probably say that the more developed the motifs of world-denial and release from the compulsion to be are in a practice system, the more decisively it espouses the former option (which corresponds typologically to Stoic apatheia), while the world- and life-affirming movements naturally tend more towards a culmination of asceti- cism in a divine, even supra-divine rapture. Similarly, the affinity of negatively redemptive systems with a quick solution that can still be attained in this life is just as plausible as the compatibility between
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
of progress in rooms of reincarnation.
With regard to the temporal profiles of practising life, no other system displays such extreme variations as Buddhism: wherever it mingles with traditions of archaic shamanic magic, as in Tibet, it reaches excesses of ascetic negativity that are unmatched in the world - here the salvific impatience of early Buddhism lost virtually all influence, while the fatalism of rebirth triumphantly returned, infused with the darkest manifestations of a life-swallowing sacrifi- cial mentality. Even the most extreme contemplators, including those entombed alive and other athletes of self-elimination, are here faced with the prospect of numerous returns. Even with the harshest of asceticism, then, progress can only take place in small steps. At the other end of the scale are the reflections, typical of Zen Buddhism, on the question of whether enlightenment comes suddenly and soon, or gradually and late. Concerning this, the Chinese master Huineng (638-713) tells us in the Platform Sutra: 'Good friends, in the Dharma there is no sudden or gradual, but among people some are keen and others dull. '79 The question left unanswered by this remark, however, is whether the detachment takes place in minutes or decades. But regardless of whether a school of Zen Buddhism favours the sudden or the gradual line, the movement as a whole, due to its basic thera- peutic and atheoretical attitude, proves sufficiently impatient to be attractive for the spiritual aspirations of Western people, who only know life as a finale.
It would be futile to examine the procedural details of Indian self-technologies in the present context - firstly, because this subject would open up an ocean of differentiations whose exploration would require more time and energy than any interested mortal has at their disposal, and secondly, because almost every technical term in this field poses virtually insurmountable semantic difficulties for Western observers. What nonetheless seems familiar about the Indian practice doctrines is the fact that they too, like their Western counterparts, are almost universally arranged in step-based systems. Among these, the eight angas or 'limbs' from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, to name only one example, have acquired a particular reputation: (1) the tamings (yama), (2). the disciplines (niyama), (3). the body positions (asana), (4) breath control (pranayama), (5) the withdrawal of the senses from objects (pratyahara), (6) concentration (dharana), (7) medita- tion (dhyana), (8) enstatic trance (samadhi}. 80 As in all systems of progressive habitualization, the dispositions acquired in the earlier steps - especially the first two, which amount to a moral propae-
268
THE COMPLETE AND THE lNCOMPLETE
an course in
the higher-level exercises, providing the base that can, and should, remain athematic in actu.
Analogous ascents are known from Buddhist self-technology as expounded in the Potthapada Sutta. 81 This nine-step itinerary of the spirit into Nirvana leads via the four elementary jhana or medita- tions (purification, concentration, emptying, purity), as well as the four higher samapatti or 'attainings', up to the final state, which is described as stasis in absolutely empty enstasy. 82 Naturally the law of escalation is visible in Indian step systems, which are prone to exag- geration at any time; according to this law, any formulation of a final step, however high, can be taken further through additional ordeals, iterations and increases in abstraction without anyone being able to say by some criteria - perhaps not verifiable, but at least utterable ones - whether any concrete content can be assigned to the addition- ally invented degrees of height. In Mongolian Lamaism, samadhi, which admittedly only nominally recalls the legendary final stage of Indian immersion exercises, is divided into 116 steps - an employment programme for numerous very full reincarnations. 83 One is inclined to suspect that some of the perfect grew too bored of perfection to put their hands in their lap after attaining it. Just as the Western world knows the horror of unemployment (the sociological name for depression), the Eastern knows that of an absence of practice. So what could be more natural than to raise the level of transfiguration? Nothing seems simpler than to 'reach' a Nirvana-and-a-half after Nirvana. Another motive for the inflation of perfections is undoubt- edly to be found in the psychodynamic instability of the final states; Western monastic literature also had a few things to say about this in the categories of 'temptation', 'testing' and 'relapse'.
As far as the semantic side of Indian practice terminology is con- cerned, its complications go far beyond the familiar discrepancy between perception and communication. The world of meditation- induced states is a broad country, or rather a galaxy with unsecured routes and uncertain borders. Whoever travels through it can never be sure whether other travellers have seen or visited the same stars in the same Milky Ways. Though the masters insist that they have reliable maps for the expanses of the meditative space, only con- tradictory things have been heard about their art of map-reading. We would be falling prey to mystification if we assumed that the routes to completion allIed to the same goal. In fact, meditation - in a comparable way to dreams - opens up a sphere of unobservable
269
- are to
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
as
tion, one dependent on secondary reports
modifications after the fact. In addition, it is characteristic of mystical states that their carriers privilege silence as a form of communication. It would certainly be a mistake to conclude that silence indicates illu- mination. In terms of sheer non-communicability, any dim-wittedness can compete with an ascent to the third heaven.
Perhaps the misfortune of Indian spirituality was that it detached the culture of inner states too early and too willingly from the sphere of expression - this suggests that it was overcome by the immunitary imperative, vulgo by 'religion', which, as we have seen, one encoun- ters wherever the interest in final insurance sabotages the affective and aesthetic charging of penultimate things. One can imagine how the alternative to this might have been when listening to classical Indian music: here one finds the most suggestive analogy to the chro- matics of illuminations, in that it develops entirely from a dynamic of moods, swellings, cataracts and calmings. Though there are no concrete notations for the artificially produced inner states of ascet- ics, it seems clear that they contain manifold endospheres that remain as inaccessible for us as the dreams of strangers. We would know absolutely nothing about them if we were not ourselves capable of dreaming and gliding between the musical keys of mental life.
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-8 MASTER GAMES
Trainers as Guarantors o f the A r t o f Exaggeration
Cura and Cu/tura
In its least muddled definition, the term 'culture' refers to groom- ing systems for the transmission of regionally essential cognitive and moral principles to subsequent generations. Because this transmission is always the source of serious intelligence work, all actually successful cultures sufficiently capable of reproduction develop a form of central ontological organ that passes judgement on the vital or non-vital status of 'things' - six thousand feet beyond the philosophical distinction between the substantial and the accidental. Thus 'things' are always already matters for negotiation in the forum of survival intelligence - in a related sense, Bruno Latour presented a groundbreaking refor- mulation of the 'thing' concept for the agenda of a world of plural parliaments. 84 In this organ, which in earlier times was consistently administered presbyterocratically - in councils of elders - and in more recent times with democratic tendencies - that is, drawing on a mixture of institutional intelligence, expert opinion and popular opinion - resides an unspecialized 'totipotente' power of judgement that attends to its duties long before the separation of reality fields into ethical, polit- ical and aesthetic. For the sake of calibration with reality, it presides over the two most important categories of practical reason: the judge- ments of emergency and priority. That is to say, it recognizes states of emergency and decides on the order in which the most important things should be taken care of. The fact that fallibility is one of its working conditions in no way devalues the activity of this power of judgement.
The 'cultivation' dimension of cultura here refers to the concern for the eternal return of the similar in subsequent generations. Where
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
cura concern appear, serve the purpose of similarity. Similarity demands that the members a population always behave in such a way that the sum of acts in the group can produce a sufficient number of similar juniors. Whoever behaves in an unconcerned or non-cultivating fashion here permits uncontrolled growth that will more often seem decadent than origi- naL In this context, we should once again recall the basic neophobic mentality of older cultures. 85 The wonder of later, liberally opened civilizations can be expressly defined against this background: it is the possibility for a given population to have become sufficiently sure of its reproductive capability, its didactic techniques and the attractive- ness of its mode of life to be able to afford to dispense with the long- standing suppression of unwelcome variation and instead embrace the new, hazardous habitus of a broad tolerance for variation. This leads to the typical late cultural problems that occupy us daily today - they grow from the non-peaceable coexistence of variation-hostile and variation-friendly groups within a civilizatorily asynchronous state population.
Stabilized Improbability: The Erection of Models
Against this background, the appearance of early advanced civiliza- tions seems all the more amazing. To define them, I shall fall back on my reflections on the stabilization of high vertical tensions in seces- sionarily isolated groups. On the basis of these, advanced civilization means nothing other than a system for the reproduction of hyperbolic or acrobatic functions in spaces of retreat for elites - whose general form appears in an ethics of stabilized improbability. Hence the acrobat, both in the literal and in the figurative sense of the word, takes centre stage as the carrier of a long-term near-impossibility - at the expense, incidentally, of the conventional equation of aristoc- racy and elite. It was Nietzsche who first noted that true aristocracy reveals itself in the way that, in the spiritual leader, the 'tremendous impossibility' of the task is translated into a refined bodily posture. 86
We know, admittedly, that the stabilization of extreme improb- abilities can generally only take place via the erection of models. Understandably, these are not only intra-familially transferable, but must be passed on via the collective imaginary, that is to say through the mental practice and ranking systems of a culture (short cuts only exist in milieus where family and advanced civilization coincide: among Brahmans and rabbis, and in Protestant vicarages). When
272
types of and sporting agon -
heroes of the battlefield, the god-men in the forests and the reddish dust of field tracks, the saints of the desert and the monastery, and the athletes in the palaestra, the stadium and the arena. They all still have some of the aura of their predecessors, the miracle men of archaic times, the wizards and magical diplomats who negotiated with the powers and the demons: they had been the first to captivate those around them as rebels against the block of reality. It was only much later that artists were added to this list, each one of them a miracle maker in their own genre, and thus a blasphemer against the principle of impossibility.
With these figures, the roles and spaces of stabilized improbability in advanced civilization are sketched out sufficiently clearly. Once they are established, it is necessary to explain the modes in which the translation of the improbable and unrepeatable into the prob- able and repeatable - and thus the setting-up of the original field of tuition - can take place in each individual area. Initially, only one thing is certain here: what would be called 'school' in later times was at first less of a pedagogical than a thaumaturgical phenomenon. First the miracle, then education; hence the close link between ethics and artistry. When Plato and Aristotle assure us that philosophy begins with amazement (thaumazein), they are just managing to grasp the very end of an order in which all higher achievements were measured in relation to the unbelievable; it was only much later that half-price trivializations and imitations would be able to dictate the agenda. At first, certainly, the introduction to the improbable has nothing to do with guiding children; it is directed at adults who realize halfway through their lives that ordinary human existence is no longer enough. The beginning was not education but seduction by the amazing. The effects that move humans to secede come purely from the school of wonder.
Paradoxes and Passions: The Genesis of the Inner World through Chronic Overstraining
Advanced civilization, then, is by no means what Oswald Spengler claimed, namely the result from the encounter between a landscape and a group soul- or the amalgam of a climate and its trauma. Nor, however, is it simply 'richness in problems', to quote Egon Friedell's witty definition of culture in the sense of education. Rather, each
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
is rooted in its ownership a made capable of transmission. It stems from
naivete with which the basal paradox embodies itself in its early stages. The naivete of early advanced civilizations is cruel to the extent that it enforces its demand for the enabling of the impossi- ble against its adepts. Only once such hard starting paradoxes have relaxed to form problems can they be enjoyed like riches and col- lected like educational objects. In their early states, paradoxes are suffered as passions rather than experienced as treasures.
Let us say clearly where the basic paradox of all advanced civi- lization lies: it follows from its orientation towards hyperbolic or acrobatic excesses, which are always viewed on the assumption that they are only suitable for imitation or normalization. By elevat- ing exceptional achievements to conventions, advanced civilizations create a pathogenic tension, a form of chronic altitude sickness to which sufficiently intelligent participants in the paradoxical game can only respond with the development of an internal space of evasion and simulation, and thus a 'soul', a ba, a psyche, an atman - or, more generally speaking, an inner world that is permanently reflexively unsettled.
The soul emerges as the entity in which the impossible must be called to mind like a possibility that constantly has to be considered. 'Soul', in the sense of a microcosmic or inner-world organ for doubling the existent as a whole, is by no means a timeless entity in which the being-for-oneself of humans from all times and peoples manifests itself. It only comes about as the symptom of an over-stimulation by an inescapable paradox - a demand that can neither be met nor ignored. The 'human interior' then ceases to be merely the transit space for 'upsurging' affects, something one can still observe clearly in the Homeric view of thym6s, for example;87 nor is it any longer simply the reception hall for the visits of demons, dreams and 'ideas'. It is more like a chronic inflammation of the self-perception, provoked by the imposition that the desire of the individual should align itself with examples that cannot possibly be imitated. The paradoxical inflammation and the stabilized for-oneself are the same age. Conversely, advanced-civilized ethics only becomes attractive by learning to advertise itself with the highest fascinations, with the physically and morally wonderful. The wonderful is the smile of the impossible.
It is only through the transformation of the unbelievable into the exemplary that the working climate of advanced civilization can
274
MASTER GAMES
it
become for precisely through inimitable achievements. As soon as the akro bainein, the gaze-commanding walk on the rope over the abyss, moves from the physical field to the moral, the paradox comes into play: vertical ten- sions of the most exuberant kind come about through the elevation of
the inimitable to the status of the exemplary.
Twilight of the Trainers
Against this background, the figure of the trainer can be explained as the one who leads the way into improbability. In systemic terms, they have the task of making invisible the paradox of advanced civiliza- tion, where precisely that which is impossible to imitate is employed as an incentive to the most intense imitation. Here the strategy pre- sented by Edgar Allan Poe in 'The Purloined Letter', where the most visible surface provides the best hiding-place, proves effective. It is characteristic of the heroic-holy-athletic complex that it conceals its seduction to the impossible under an elaborate legendary noise: first and foremost, this purely serves the purpose of making the contradic- tory nature of its message - which is immediately noticeable to the calm observer - invisible and inaudible through overexposure and overemphasis. Its second function is to mobilize the mimetic instincts, which cannot tolerate praise for virtues in others that are suppos- edly lacking in one's own existence. Aretological propaganda fulfils its purpose if, when faced with the question: 'What does the other person have that I supposedly do not? ', it provokes the answer: 'We will see! ' Admiration is the great vehicle of jealousy, which tolerates no absolute preferential treatment - and if there is one thing that goes profoundly against its nature, it is the private ownership of triumphs over impossibility accumulated by a supposedly inimitable other. The early attempts to scale the heights of improbability, therefore, are by no means psychodynamically helpless. All explicit advanced civiliza- tions fuel themselves with a mimetic mobilization whose intention is no less than the dispossession of the model. Here too, silence is the first working condition: just as undisturbed 'cultural activity' pre- cludes any exposure of its basal paradox, the driving forces of emula- tion also remain unconfessable.
Only on these premises can one consider the performances of the first trainers with the necessary scenographic attentiveness. Initially, the
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EXAGGE~! \TION PROCEDURES
are self-mirabilization,
tion into the actually existing monstrosity. They radiate numinous aura that surrounds the highest magisteria. Because the teaching itself is embodied by teachers in their mirabilic otherness at this stage, they display a new form of authority - it is no longer the gravity of the elders, but rather the luminosity of the pure exception that seduces as soon as it is seen and felt. This results in the new, distinguished pedagogical tone: 'I am the way and the truth and the life';88 'I and the Father are one';89 '1 am I, but also the other. [. . . ] I am devoid of honour and dishonour, I am without attributes, I am Shiva, I am free from duality and non-duality, I am free from the pairs (of opposites). I am he. '90 A corona of pupils soon gathers around the firstborn of the unheard-of, seeking to embody the privilege of emanating directly from the exception.
The first round of the transference experiment had already seen the appearance of a phenomenon that accompanies all foundings of schools as an almost tragic shadow: the separation of the suitable from the unsuitable. The efficient spiritual trainer not only develops the prudence of the ancient doctor, who stays away from incurable cases; they also develop the specific perception unique to the fisher of men, who senses those with a natural affinity with the spirit of the teaching among the merely interested. In scholastic times they would be called talented, in the bourgeois era gifted - and, for understand- able reasons, the abstractly universalistic ressentiment would one day be up in arms about the concept of 'talent' as SUCh. 91 It is not only old Manto who loves those who desire the impossible;92 everyone who embodies advanced-civilized elan does so. What is more important than loving the one who desires the absurd, however, is picking them out from the countless cases in which it would be a waste of effort to attempt a nurturing of the eros of the impossible within an individual. Like Charon, the ferryman of the underworld who conveys a Faust lusting after Helena, all the great trainers accompany those students who will not cease desiring on their way 'across'.
Ten Types of Teacher
In the following, I shall sketch five types of spiritual trainer of which each, in their own way, fulfils the task of giving exaggerations that are prima vista unliveable and aim to give the supra-real the semblance of feasibility and liveability. First comes the guru of the
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MASTER GAMES
master
the apostle or abbot as imitatores next
philosopher as a witness to the search for truth, and finally the sophist as a polytechnician of the ars vivendi. It should scarcely be necessary to explain why each of these types embodies a variety of teaching licence at the enthusiastic faculty of our anthropological polytechnic. Going through these even more quickly, I shall assign to these figures an analogous five-member set of pragmatic or artistic trainers - the athletic trainer, the master of a craft or virtuosic artistic feat, the academic professor, the mundane teacher and the Enlightenment author. It is clear enough why one should expect shallower and more anonymous forms of vertical tension from the start among this group of certified teachers: they are all involved in the popularization and standardization of mirabile effects and, in one way or other, already on the way to what modernity - after the triumphant initial suc- cesses of general alphabetization - would later make its cause under the catchword of 'general education'. Nonetheless, these teachers also purvey a notion of peak performance, albeit one that requires increasing justification: democracy, they implicitly state, is not as such a valid reason to do away with all forms of vertical tension. They remain in effect, though in an altered mode - even if only for the power-ecological reason that even in a world with a strictly egalitar- ian constitution, not everyone will be able to do everything, let alone do everything equally well.
The Guru
The first in this list is the figure of the Indian guru - a name that is rarely used without irony in the contemporary Western context, as if one wanted to denote a person who gives their followers opportunity to overestimate them, and presumably not without succumbing to self-overestimation first. Naturally this habitual irony tells us abso- lutely nothing about Indian conditions, but a great deal about the anti-authoritarian change of mentality among Westerners in general, and about the decline in the standing of their teaching professions in particular. It reveals the scepticism that has been epidemic in the Old World for some time towards the notion that any mortal could have more insight than another into the basic conditions of the world and life - not merely in the sense of a coincidentally greater knowledge based on longer experience, but thanks to a deeper penetration of the concealed structures of existence. Just as the concept of the master is
277
EXAGGERA TION
PROCEDURES
maestro
- so any higher
practically lost all credit. When Martin Heidegger occasionally used the expression 'master of reading and living' to describe Meister Eckhart, the archaic tone was already unmistakable at the time. In doing so, he was going very palpably against the newer consensus that the discipline of life is under no circumstances open to mastery.
The scandal of the guru function is easy to pinpoint: it implies a mode of teaching and learning based on an initiation, and thus a crossing-over to the sphere of sacred or non-public knowledge - it is precisely this aspect that makes the guru-centred study model of ancient India unacceptable for the modern learning culture of the Occident. We have introductions to this or that area of knowledge to offer, but do not allow any initiations - quite aside from the fact that enlightenment is not envisaged as the conclusion to a course of study. We also presuppose among our students the continuity of person from school enrolment to matriculation to graduation, while learning with a guru entails two discontinuous aspects: one at the initiation into the modus essendi of the pupil, which implies a form of symbolic death, and the other upon the prospective attainment of the highest goal, which Indian convention describes as the insight - gained psy- chosomatically and via certain states - into the identity of the indi- vidual soul and the world soul. This shows how the dramaturgical form of initiatic learning, beyond its trimming through the narrative form of a step-based life, is nested in a schema of rebirth - which is why its goal must be sought not so much in a qualification as in a transformation.
For Western sensibilities, the convivial or virtually promiscuous constitution of the Indian master-pupil relationship is even more scandalous than the initiatic alliance that accompanies it. As a rule, devotion to a master in a stationary Brahmanic context implied joining his household, usually for a period that could scarcely be shorter than twelve years - this was usually the time required merely to memorize the Vedic texts whose internalization was expected of adepts, regardless of which practical exercises (asanas) were used to carry out the psychophysical work of transformation. This household element of the master-pupil relationship implied an openly psycho- feudal dependency. Here the pupil not only had to receive knowledge from the master, but also to fulfil various servant duties - hence the Sanskrit name antevasin: 'the one who accompanies the guru and waits upon him'. More often, the pupil is referred to as a shisia or
278
one
in existential matters has
at master' - a
that to memory a invention of the universal anthropotechnic device of the Modern Age, namely the school desk. From an attitude-historical perspective, incidentally, modernity is synonymous with a dependence on chairs or other seating furniture, and eo ipso the dying-out of the ability to sit on the
floor without feeling burdened by one's own body. 93
The true meaning of the guru-centred learning model, admittedly, does not consist in the cosy homely aspects, which from a distance recall the life forms of medieval craftsmen's households in Europe.
Hence also the threat of terrible consequences for any pupil who dared embark on an affair with the master's wife - although this does not seem entirely outlandish given the informal situation of courtly love: a noble lady and a lowly aspirant in the closest proximity, sepa- rated by a strong taboo and with the attention of each drawn to the other. Its purpose only reveals itself when one takes into considera- tion the psychodynamic aspect of the master-pupil relationship: this is, after all, no less than a contract for the regulation of a hyperbolic transaction. As soon as the guru takes an antevasin or chela into his following, he has implicitly made a form of perfecting contract with him. This means a simultaneously metaphysical and pragmatic alli- ance with the goal of advancing at least a few steps along the path to actually existing impossibility, or even of realizing the magnum opus as such: deification in one's lifetime and transformation into the jivanmukti, the one who is saved here and now. The guru and his student thus enter an alliance perhaps not of life and death, but
certainly of life and hyper-life.
Viewed by the light of recent occidental psychological knowledge,
this singular relationship is a magnetopathic or psychoanalytical rapport - that is to say a stabilized state of emergency in the soul field where the master makes himself available for the most intense idealiza- tions on the part of the pupil. In contrast to the magnetistic or psycho- analytical situation, however, where, in accordance with the prevailing norms of sobriety, the long-term goal is the dissolution of an idealizing transference, the guru-antevasin relationship aims not for the end, but rather for the clarifying amplification of that idealization - and at once an identificatory intensification that, if carried out in an orthodox and proper fashion, should be driven forwards into the supra-pictorial, pre-objective and pre-personal register. From the guru's point of view, the pupil's idealizing anticipations are not wrong because they aim too high; rather, the pupil is only condemned to a form of indispensable error in the sense that he cannot yet know how much higher the real
279
GAMES
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
are
Such references to the hyperbolic dimension in the transforma- tion contract between masters and pupils cannot, of course, refute scepticism towards the guru-centred form of studying. It is therefore anything but coincidental that a large part of Western writings, but also of the growing native literature on the guru phenomenon - not infrequently penned by disconcerted psychiatrists, committed social psychologists and nervous sect advisers94 - is devoted to the problem of false masters and the psychological abuse of those dependent on them. The authors consistently postulate the reinforcement of quality control for products on the religious markets. They usually view the situation as if the process of globalization had also cast the spiritual world market into a state of upheaval. Just as some dangerous patho- gens today profit from the facilitation of worldwide travel, the memes of the 'God delusion' can also spread more easily beyond the borders of their source regions. Even more disturbing is the impression that psychosis has got carried away, and is now aiming to change its status from a classified illness to a misunderstood form of fitness. Most provocative of all, admittedly, is the epidemic of mystical amoralism which, thanks to the missionary successes of Hinduizing masters, began to spread through the overly receptive Western hemisphere. The virus, which has nestled in correspondingly arranged classes since then, consists in the dangerous realization that lack of conscience and illumination are, from a certain point of view, identical.
The truth is most probably that the world of enlightenment games too has been affected by mediatization, and the appearance of per- formance talents among the teachers of well-tempered impossibility was only a matter of time. No guru's life from the last decades dem- onstrates this shift more clearly than that of the Indian enlightenment preacher and sect founder Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-90), alias Osho, who, despite his controversial status, constitutes - along with Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo Gosh - the fourth figure of Indian spirituality in the twentieth century whose aura emanated across the world. His exceptional standing is clearest in the adoption of Western performance techniques among the forms
IS
Nonetheless, identification is the most important resource that is available for use in transformative work - which is why one part of the craft of guru pedagogy is to keep the fire of the beginner's illusion burning for as long as possible. That an institutionalized art of the impossible cannot be judged by the standards of Western trivial ontology, with the corresponding psychological constructs of normal- ity, is understandable enough.
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MASTER GAMES
of spiritual instruction, which were otherwise steeped in pious routine. Like a Duchamp of the spiritual field, he transformed all the relevant traditions into religious playthings and mystical ready-mades. It was not least a testament to his lucidity that, at the pinnacle of his success, he turned himself into a ready-made and, showing a clear awareness of the change in the zeitgeist, distanced himself from his Hinduizing past. As he recognized just in time, this past was tied too strongly to the mentality wave of Euro-American post-1968 romanticism. In assuming the Japanese-tinged name Osho in 1989 - 'the joke is over' - he quick-wittedly connected to the recently developed neo-liberal, Buddhophile mood in the West and invented a label for himself with a promising future. This gesture announced that in the field of guru- centred anthropotechnics too, the age of re-branding had begun.
The Buddhist Master
As far as the Buddhist varieties of the teacher's image are concerned, they took part in two evolutionary shifts that profoundly modified the meaning of teaching: in ancient times in the change of emphasis from the elitist self-redemptive art of the Hinayana (Small Vehicle) to the compassionate populism of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle), and in more recent times the epochal shift from a position of radical world- and life-denial to one of fundamental world- and life-affirmation. The most important information about the profile of the first teacher on the path of the new teaching probably comes from the enlighten- ment legend itself, as told in its Sri Lankan version: in this account, the awakened one waited under the Bodhi Tree for seven days in silence, untouched by everything around him, and 'experienced the joyful feeling of awakening'; he then arose and immersed himself in his detachment for another seven days under a different tree, then the same again under a third tree. The message of the tale is unmistak- able: what took place here is beyond all teaching. No path with sign- posts leads to such a goal; the event rendered the attempt to produce it obsolete. The bond between truth and method was broken.
Nonetheless, this episode and Buddha's later decision to act as a teacher formed the point of departure for the most widely ramified scholastic phenomenon in the history of civilization. The teaching grows from the paradoxical act of breaking a silence in full awareness of the fact that the spoken words can never be taken merely at their propositional value, but predominantly as therapeutic directives. The pronouncements of the spiritual teacher are 'indirect messages' of
281
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
power, Buddhism to sow the incommunicable and unfolded into one the most loquacious move-
ments in global spiritual culture.
In its first half-millennium, it remained the only thing its starting
framework would have allowed: a matter for the few, who would nonetheless, under Indian and Indo-Chinese conditions, inevitably become numerous. Though, viewed from a distance, the Buddhist trainers, abbots of monasteries and advisers of those seeking help seemed merely to embody the continuation of the guru system by slightly different means, closer inspection reveals that they were in many respects the opposite. They entered the stage of intellectual history as a movement of therapists who, in keeping with their healing mission, were not concerned so much with the transmission of a religious doctrine, an esoteric worldview or a mystical visionary art. What they had in mind was purely to do away with the condi- tions of suffering - resolutely beginning with one's own entanglement in the mental processes that create suffering. By taking the salvific motif dominant throughout North India since 500 Be to the extreme, they infiltrated - feeling the zeitgeist fully on their side - the caste- based foundations of Brahmanism and its metaphysical 'superstruc- ture', Only in terms of the central civilizatory tendency, namely that towards a progressive internalization and subtilization of the sacrifice, can Buddhism also be considered an evolutionary unfold- ing of late Brahmanic potentials. While older times were dominated by the equivalence of the human and the sacrifice,95 the sacrifice was now shifted entirely inwards - and ultimately, it would appear as if nothing had been sacrificed at all; for when humans relinquish the things to which they cling, they part with something that was never substantially their property in any case. One could see this as an inter- nalization of conventional ascetic nudism, where it is not the body that walks in a garment of air - as practised by the Digambara - but rather the soul that paradoxically reveals its non-being in nakedness.
Admittedly, a number of Buddha's pupils only a few generations after his death fell prey to the most extreme fetishism in their inter- pretation of the monastic rule - the first significant schism, as is well known, took place partly as a result of an embittered debate between abbots over such questions as whether a monk is permitted to store salt in a buffalo horn - which amounted to a violation of the rules for storing food - or whether a monk's sleeping mat is allowed to have loose threads - which would have broken the rule concerning the size of mat. 96 Disputes of a philosophical kind also led to schisms in
282
MASTER
a
" ',," . H L '_ V U 'classical schools' took shape, each one
numerous subgroups and sectarian fringes which, in keeping with the universal laws of narcissism, pursued conflicts over the smallest differences,
I shall restrict myself here to the question of how Buddhist masters and pupils deal with their contracts about the impossible. Essentially, all the motifs that we know from the relationship between the guru and his disciple return here, complicated by the increase in negativ- ity that characterizes Buddhist teaching in comparison to Brahmanic doctrine. While the guru can act as an accomplice to the pupil's projection for much of the time, the Buddhist teacher has the duty of distracting the projection from his person and deflecting it to the Dharma, the redemptive doctrine, in keeping with the principle of the not-self. The fulfilment of the impossibility contract here gains an additional dimension of crypticism, as the school workload requires that the adepts break even more profoundly with their folk- ontological intuitions.
In schematic terms, one could say that the guru initiates the student into the simple counter-intuitive truth that the great self of the world and the small ego-self are identical - a realization that undoubtedly presupposes intense modifications on the follower's part. The Buddhist teacher, on the other hand, is faced with the difficulty of making a doubly counter-intuitive truth seem plausible to the pupil: the identity of world-nat-self and private not-self. The execution of this equation is synonymous with enlightenment more buddhistico. By its nature, it demands a form of tuition in which students are constantly thrown back to the self-referential nature of their search. They have to learn to find the liberating nothingness in themselves, and then to see through the world as a nothingness and finally recognize the two nothingnesses as one and the same. Every encounter should give them an opportunity to bid farewell. Where others settle and gather themselves, they must learn to give away and move on. Hence the abundant use of paradoxes that can be observed among many Buddhist teachers. While religious orthodoxies show their interest ex officio in dissolving paradoxes and making their doctrine reasonable - the most recent example being the much-noted Regensburg speech by Benedict XVI - one often recog- nizes Buddhist instruction - assuming it has not itself been corrupted in a religioid fashion - by its efforts to push its paradoxical character to the threshold of self-refutation, not infrequently to the point where the Dharma is termed a mere mirage. 97 Verbal paradoxes are all pro- jections of the basic ascetic paradox whereby one conveys to the adept
283
master's
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
the message that there is 'nothing to attain' - but that to understand this, they must first of all sit in meditation for ten years, ideally for fourteen hours a day.
Alongside the paradox, the most striking stylistic means of recent Buddhism is probably the tautology, especially its Japanese varieties, which are often palatable to the contemporary individualism of the West - though probably only because we tend to confuse the tautolo- gies of negativism in the doctrine of the not-self with those of our positivism. A rose is a rose: in the occidental context, this celebrates monovalence - or one could call it the idiocy of being - in which the intellect rests. That this cherry blossom is this cherry blossom, on the other hand, means that a manifestation of weak nothingness, a pink transience, comes into momentary contact with a transient eye, another manifestation of weak nothingness, both against the back- ground of strong nothingness.
Intermezzo: The Critique of Illumination
I shall note in parentheses why the concept of illumination has lost its meaning for European philosophers of modernity. In typological terms, only two philosophically notable forms of illumination have become known: on the one side the illumination of the 'substance'- ontological or spirit-ontological type as present in the Hindu systems, as well as in Platonism and its Christian derivatives. Here, the equa- tion of the world soul and the individual soul, or the infinite and the finite intellect, takes place in a varyingly thorough fashion. On the other side, we encounter enlightenment of the Nirvanological type, as known from Buddhist traditions. Here, the essential identity of the selflessness of the world and the absence of a substantial soul is 'real- ized' in the individual.
Modern analysis has decisive objections to both of these patterns: in the case of the first variant, the problem is that it ascribes more intelligence and soul to the world than is its due. As far as the inor- ganic sphere is concerned, its share in the mental and intellectual capacity was judged very reservedly. But the organic world too, going on everything one sees of it, is more a battlefield of confusedly distributed life-will points than a reason-animated whole. If people were able to ascribe to it something resembling a comprehensive ani- mation, it was only by means of a transparent projection. This was achieved by taking out a loan from the self-evident animation of the animal-noetic sphere and passing this on - multiplied by the value
284
MASTER
-to In ancient and Europe are partners in an
who
stand each other blindly: as far as the soul is concerned, both of them have always wanted too much, and incur massive expenses to keep alive the welcome confusion of totality with animation by the world soul. On the other side, one sees how Buddhism, starting from the partly plausible selflessness and soullessness of the world machine, which it takes for granted thanks to its sober view of the game of con- stitutions and dissolutions, postulates the selflessness and soullessness of the human interior. This looks like a complementary fallacy; in the same way one borrowed soul from human self-experience to lend it to the 'cosmos' without sufficient securities in the first case, one borrows not-selfness from the 'outside' world in the second case in order to transfer it to the human self-relationship at the risk of losing its most precious quality, finite animation, and inducing it to speculations in which it can only lose - assuming there are no gains elsewhere, such as high ethical sensitizations, to compensate for the losses. I shall con- clude this digression by noting that for a contemporary philosophical psychology, the only path that remains is the middle one, equidistant from the Hindu and Buddhist over-non-animation; it would therefore advise neither a leap into being nor a leap into nothingness. Instead of promoting self-sacrifice on one side or the other, it argues for the connection between effort and self-experience. This alliance opens up the paths of increase and transformation on which the moderns seek
their optimizations.
The Apostle
Against such a background, it is not difficult to make the third figure of spiritual trainerdom, which is responsible for the Christian trans- mission of the impossible to ever new generations of adepts, under- standable. Its basic form is that of apostolic succession, in which the art of immortality coded as 'faith' is passed on. As illustrated above with the example of Paul, no illumination need be presupposed for this; the result of movedness and commitment is sufficient. The two highest forms of the imitatio Christi are on the one hand martyrdom, which was understood by its observers as a direct transition into the kingdom of God (which is why, according to some authors, martyrs were exempted from any form of further purification in the beyond), and on the other hand the Christomorphic transformation of man that was meant to lead to the point where the logos and caritas take
285
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
Ages, St Francis
was resolve to unify the two extremes of imitatio in his person, which could only be achieved by equating life in utter poverty with
the martyr's agon. 98
The general form of the Christian imitatio contract can be seen in
the choice of apostolic existence as such, which is always based in some wayan a change of subjects. Its schema was defined by Paul in the statement from Galatians 2:20: 'I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. ' This identifies the imitatio as a two-sided relationship in which one can distinguish between an imitatio subiectiva and an imitatio obiectiva. Via subjective imitation, the imitator refers to Christ himself, or to a first-degree imitator of Christ, such as a martyr or miracle-working saint. By imitating the inimitable, the Christian zealot can himself become an object of imitation by third parties. In the position of the imitable imitator, he follows the call to be exemplary and subordinates his own existence to the formal law of exemplary life. It is in this sense that Eugippus, in the introduc- tion to his Vita Sancti Severini - the life of the fifth-century saint from Mautern an der Donau, in the Austrian Krems district - quotes Peter's command to his deacons: 'Be an example to the flock' (forma estote gregi), as well as Paul's instruction to Timothy: 'Be an example to the faithful' (forma esto fidelibus); in the original Greek, forma is replaced by typos. Hence the Christian teacher is destined not only to be an imitator of Christ himself, but also to take the position of the imitable and make himself available to the communities of believers as a 'formant', a shaping 'type'. Hence the dictum: a Christian is one who makes others Christians. The secular duplicates of this cliche lead to the theses that only those who guide others to education are themselves educated, and that only those who spread enlightenment can be called enlightened. Through the two-sided imitatio, apostolic succession takes on the form of a pyramid game, in which each partic- ipant is at once imitator and imitated - except for the simple believers at the base, who only imitate without being imitated; it is their pre- rogative to fund the advanced with material contributions. They are naturally furthest from the tip of the pyramid, where the advanced jostle one another in the art of the impossible. Among these, next to the declared saints and miracle workers, one also finds the 'type' of abbot, of which the Benedictine Rule states that he has taken over the duty of guiding souls (animas regere), and must one day give account for his wards in fear and trembling. The statesmanship of the monas- tic director, we read, consists in doing the right thing at the right time,
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MA. STER GAMES
The Philosopher
If we now cast a glance at the fourth trainer figure in our list, repre- sented by the philosopher, we are immediately struck by its fragmen- tation into the erotic, statuary and gnostic types. As Pierre Hadot has shown very eloquently, Socrates embodies the first of these, Marcus Aurelius the second - and, if anyone were suitable to represent the third type alongside these, it would be Plotin, the master of logical ascents above the physical world. We are also indebted to Hadot for a clear reconstruction of the Socratic procedure as seduction in the service of the ideal: by feigning, with a responsible irony, love for his pupil, he gains the latter's love in return - and proceeds to direct it from his person to the insight as such. loO He himself can only love 'upwards', and wishes to teach this way of loving as the only truth- ful one. While the students train with the master, the master trains with the agathon. By conveying a love for the love for the absolute, he resembles - from a distance - certain psychoanalysts who seek to liberate their patients world-immanently to their insane love. Hence: 'Love your symptom as yourself',lOl and: 'Never retreat from its desire' (Lacan). The erotic imitatio philosophi could only be stimu- lated to the extent that the master represented a sufficiently impressive typos of philosophical life. In this sense, one could speak of the birth of philosophy from the spirit of performance - the death of Socrates wholly confirms this diagnosis. 102 Whereas modern aesthetic per- formance generally remains as self-referential as it is inconsequential, and scarcely encourages imitation,103 the classical form aims entirely for the exemplary. Nietzsche was still able to say that a master only takes himself seriously with regard to his pupils.
The contours of philosophical mimesis come to light even more clearly among the statuary philosophers, who largely identified them- selves with the Stoic movement - Seneca usually calls them simply 'our people'. They embody that type of practical philosophy in the ancient style which made the greatest impression on the public: the figure of the ascetic sage who, against the background of an ontol- ogy of world-divinity, works on equating the ability to live with the ability to die. It was in Stoicism, after all, that the metaphorical equation of philosophical concern for oneself and sculptural work on the inner statue enabled a veritable training consciousness to
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
only half in jest, a copyright on the intellectual progress pupil - he even tells him to his face: meum opus es, 'you are my work'. 10S Hence the pupil is doing nothing wrong in offering himself to the teacher as a 'great gift' (ingens munus). 106 At the same time, he reminds his student of the principle that teachers are not our masters, but leaders (non domini nostri sed duces). 107 The Stoic teachers hardly ever permit doubts as to the necessity of studying with a master, even though one can feel the beginnings of the idea of internalizing the master principle clearly within reach. log This could be taken up by more modern schools, which declared the external master merely a temporary augmenter of
the inner one.
The Sophist as Universally Able
It may seem bewildering to conclude this summary overview of trainer figures in the field of the elan of impossibility with that of the Sophist. This confusion is easily removed as soon as one calls to mind that the Sophists, going on their achievements and their own self-image, were by no means simply the intellectual lightweights portrayed in the Platonic counter-propaganda. If one leaves aside the caricatures, it transpires that sophistry, in its essence, was an artistry of knowledge - one could even sayan artistic doctrine of knowing everything and being capable of anything, without which the attractiveness of the philosophical life form in antiquity could not be so readily explained. As contradictory as it might sound: by seeking to make the impossible teachable - far beyond the Socratic-Platonic promise to capture virtue (arete) within a school framework - it produced, as far as Western tradition is concerned, the first comprehensive science of training in the narrower sense of the word. It did this by consistently relating the processual side of upbringing (paideia) and tuition (didaskalia) to the form of training (dskesis and melete). It thus pointed energetically to a principle of progress: the gradualness of increases in achievement, as well as the imperceptible yet effective growth into the more improb- able habitus. Because they viewed learning more as being shaped through interaction and repetitive practice than an active mental grasping of the material, the Sophists were probably the first to place an emphasis on early education in order to ensure the naturalization of the improbable from childhood onwards.
All ability is thus trapped in a circle of diligence: one only does 288
MASTER GAJvlES
what one is one
repeats. In this analysis, - that one
towards an active formation of habit - the agent of increase in the praxis of repetition, namely the only recently discovered network of neuro-rhetorical rules, remains unacknowledged, and is only drawn upon implicitly. For the time being, all didactics is summed up by the admonition: 'Practise, practise, practise! ' - a slogan whose echo one still hears in Lenin's 'learn, learn and learn again', and to which even Rodin's sublime toujours travailler responds from afar. Sophist theory can therefore only constitute a practising praxis of think- ing and imagining. The paradigm of an ability wholly embedded in constant practice is the mother tongue, which we could not master if we had not always been in a seemingly obvious and natural, but in truth quite miraculous circle of ability and application, practice and improvement. This can serve to demonstrate the miracle that is intended to become the school subject: everyone has always spoken in some way or other, but only the Sophist makes an art of his speech like no other - about everything, in every situation, always well and mostly victoriously. That is why it is necessary to climb, with the right teacher, from within the mother tongue to the all-encompassing tongue.
The nub of the Sophist learning model is demonstrated in the Sophist's leap from language competency to general life competency, even applied omniscience. Through the constant company of an artist of ability, the speaking and living master of his school, who knows everything because he speaks about everything, and can in fact do anything that belongs to the higher ability to live, the practising of universal ability increasingly rubs off on the adept, until he too is ready to enter public life as a pan-technically shaped individual who knows everything and can do anything. The things that cannot be anticipated by practice alone, the situative imponderabilities, are heard by the true man of skill in the spirit of the moment (kairos), and even this balancing on the tip of the favourable moment can, within limits, be trained.
In its own way, then, Sophistic education goes beyond the physical - its concept of 'metaphysics' is unmistakably a form of artistry. Sophistic artistry formulates the existential antithesis of helpless- ness. The cultivation of never-helpless individuals is the goal of all such paideia. Nothing comes closer to the practical ideal of the polis citizen, and even more the polis politician, than the image of a human who is always in training and knows how to help themselves in any situation. This is why, if we look closely, we always enjoy watching
289
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
news
and same reason, wen-built effectively
delivered speech always concerns us. It reminds us of the humanly possible in the closest proximity. While the untrained human falls silent in their lack of means, the Sophistic teacher shows the trained adept how to find the words to overcome suffering due to amechania, lack of means and helplessness, in any situation. 109
As much as this education places the emphasis on gradual growth into artistic superiority to all challenges, it is equally a performative, indeed a theatrical matter. Nowhere is this clearer than in an anec- dote about Gorgias: one day he came to the theatre in Athens, which was fully booked, ready to improvise a random speech, and boldly called out to the audience: 'Name any subject! ' (probdllete). l1o To understand the meaning of this appearance, one must realize that Gorgias acted very self-confidently, but in no way inappropriately, as he was genuinely willing and able to give a sample of his pan-sophical and pan-rhetorical skill in any given situation. It was with a similar gesture that until the end of the eighteenth century, some pianists would appear and elaborate spontaneous dissertations in notes for their audiences on random 'themes', like sophists at the piano - in this sense, the young Mozart was one of the great sophists in music history, albeit one who largely called out his own themes, assum- ing he did not leave this to the librettist. Franz Liszt too, the inven- tor of the solo piano recital (1839), was still wont to improvise on spontaneously chosen themes before a large audience. For the piano sophists, the nature of their profession and the manner of its exercise meant that all learning had to be wholly embedded in the praxis of practice. l1 1 As far as the magic of the pan-sophical and pan-technic habitus cultivated by the Sophists is concerned, it extended very much further than one would think after Plato's defensive battles against the challenge of their position. It was Aristotle, no less, who did the Sophists' pretensions the honour of taking their aim of saying some- thing about everything at face value - in this sense, he was more an imitator of Gorgias than Plato. He paid tribute to his own teacher by replacing the pan-rhetorical habitus by the pan-epistemic one.
I shall conclude these observations by noting that the Sophistic idea of universal ability experienced an unexpected resurrection in the twen- tieth century - in the form of the deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida. This, in its basic procedure, is nothing other than a reinstate- ment of sophistic omniscience in the form of omni-commentary or immanent omni-refutation. As we know, the key to the Sophistic art
290
MASTER GAMES
m
speaker forge
entire theory, and subsequently employing the technique of rebuttal (antilegein) - this, as Plato showed, was also the method of Socrates. Antilegein starts from the foundation of knowing-equally-well - which is already secured through the other's exposition, though often only borrowed from it - and directly ascends to the level of knowing- better. This is always simple to attain if one considers how easily one can prove the inevitable existence of weak points in the first text; such passages can be found almost effortlessly, even in the discourses of the masters, by recalling the selection that underlies every decisive thesis. It seems that Gorgias, the all-knowing, and Socrates, the all- not-knowing, were reunited in Derrida to launch a neo-acrobatic form of sophistic knowledge art, or a philosophistical sophism that required constant practice and existed only in practice. It was as good as certain that a new academic reaction would resist this.
The Profane Trainer: The Man Who Wants Me to Want
It is only a short way from the figure of the noble sophist - which, for the reasons detailed above, I wanted to place closer to the spiritual-artistic teachers than the pragmatic ones - to the second group of trainers. I will speak briefly here of such teachers who concern themselves with passing on more specialized techniques and praxis-related complexes of abilities. It is an obvious choice to begin with the athletic trainer, as this embodies the most striking figure in the field of technically transmittable improbability. Like every trainer, the athletic one has a supportive procedure best described as the tech- nique of interlocking motivation. While every athlete has a decent portion of will to success of their own accord, it is nonetheless the trainer's duty to implant in this will a second will - their own, which heightens the first and helps it to rise above its crises. Through the alteration of the willing will by such a willed will, the athlete can be carried to heights of achievement that could never have been reached without the interlocking of the two wills. Athletism, then, is the original practice field of harnessed spontaneity that later - in a mono- theistic context - bore such strange fruit as the scholastic discussions on free or unfree will (de libero vel servo arbitrio). This problem was solved on the sports field long before philosophers entangled them- selves in it. Theologians who, seeking to penetrate the mystery of the contradiction between human freedom and divine omnipotence, teach
with a an speech, even an
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EXAGGERA TlON PROCEDURES
want wants us to want, no longer in doing so, they a successor to the athletic trainer. The definition of the trainer is that they want the athlete to want what they, the trainer, want for them. 112 Needless to say, the athlete is meant to want something that is not entirely
impossible, but fairly improbable: an unbroken series of victories. 113
The Master Craftsman and the Two Natures of the Work of Art
The second type in the pragmatic field is embodied by the crafts- man, or, philosophically put, one in command of a professional- everyday teehne. With aptitudes of this type, one no longer sees once they have been routinized and trivialized (and on Greek soil, even 'Philistinized') that every single one of them came from a slow, cumu- lative revolt against helplessness, a quiet rebellion against the forlorn- ness, lack of means and lack of cunning for which the Greeks coined the profound word and spirit name Amechania - absence of meehane, lack of tricks and true, of leverage and tools. In this sense, all crafts- manship constitutes a collective and anonymous counterpart to one of the twelve labours of Hercules, these pan-technic acts of heroism whose unmistakable purpose was to prove that it is in man's nature - or a demigod's, in this case - to master seemingly insurmountable tasks. Whoever has no interest in craftsmen should therefore be equally silent about heroes. From the perspective of the ability to do something, heroes, craftsmen and finally also politicians belong much closer together than the Old European doctrines of action, which were usually aristocratically inclined, were able to recognize - even Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1957/8), admirable in all other respects, paid far too great a tribute to traditional distortions by pushing the activity of making, let alone of mere working, rather grossly into the second and third positions, far behind action, that is to say the political behaviour of humans.
In the light of this, it had to be considered not merely a great aca- demic, but in fact intellectual-historical deed when Richard Sennett recently attempted to liberate the crafts from the disdain they were shown by philosophical theory, and restore to these fundamental, yet unnoticed factors their due rank among the phenomena of the vita aetiva. 114 The principle of craft is based on the coincidence of production and practice - finally recognizing this again is what makes Sennett's venture on activity-theoretical terrain so significant.
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MASTER GAMES
eo ipso
its lack of originality. a presupposes
one can give repetition, much maligned in modernity, a new mark of honour. Anyone who attempts this must prove the reconcilability of the repetitive-mechanical and the personal-spontaneous - an under- taking that leads directly to a praise of individually embodied memo- ries, and thus what one could, quoting Nietzsche, call 'incorporation' [Einverleibung], or, invoking Ravaisson, the system of acquired abilities.
Anyone who remembers the curriculum of the older craft profes- sions knows that no one is born a master. According to this cur- riculum, an apprentice had to be initiated into the techniques of his profession for at least seven years before he could take the final examination. After this, the journeyman perfected his art for another five to ten years, and only after twelve to eighteen years of teaching and practising could he consider the production of his final master- piece. According to an old rule of thumb, at least ten thousand hours of practising 'praxis' are required to become a decent craftsman or a reasonable musician;115 if one includes higher levels of mastery, one can safely double or even triple that number. Until recently, what we call 'genius' merely referred to cases in which these average practice times were spectacularly shortened - recall musical child prodigies: the music history of the last three centuries would be barely conceiv- able without them. In the end, a genius-aesthetic plague befell entire populations of artists who were anything but Wunderkinder, yet wanted to push this shortening as far as the complete omission of practice.
The phenomenon of craftsmanly mastery is of paradigmatic signifi- cance for an understanding of both the ancient and the modern vita activa, as it marks the beginning of the process whereby the artistic mirabile became commonplace. Whether the craft is ship-building - a discipline Plato enjoys weaving into his discussion of the nature of techne - surgery, pottery or goldsmithery (Sennett, as a critic of the modern fragmentation of abilities and demoralization of mere job work, is especially fond of the last of these116), the respective crafts- men are producers of artifices that overstep the circle of natural things in varyingly conspicuous ways. Because of their standardized, serial and everyday character, these works of 'art' have mostly ceased to be an object of admiration, though that does not stop their production from requiring a substantial amount of practice, experience, care and vigilance. This activity in the field of an anonymized and degraded artificiality provides the ideal conditions for a type of production
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
on
tion. It stimulates a in agent
and expands their competence to perform this very work to the same extent that they immerse themselves in the production of the object or effect. 1 17
This explains why every conscientiously performed work of crafts- manship can be of spiritual surplus value. When, in the European cities of the late Middle Ages, a massive wave of lay religiosity devel- oped that would culminate in the devotio moderna of the fourteenth century and the Reformation of the early sixteenth century, this was scarcely connected to the supposed affinity between capitalism and Protestantism of which Max Weber had made too much in his well- known study, and far more to the blatant analogies between monastic exercises and those found in the workshops. The practising work of the crafts - the Parisian Livre des metiers listed over one hundred and fifty guild-based artisan 'professions' as early as 1268118 - had to produce a type of personality that would become increasingly aware of its potential spiritual equality with professional clerics. Just as ora et [abora had long been the rule for most monks, the more up-to-date maxim labora et ora presented itself urgently to the secular brothers of artisanallife. There are also many sources documenting direct moves of individual craftsmen from monastic workshops to urban ones, meaning that the transfer of the spiritual habitus - the self-moulding of the actor in regular, vigilant activity - to the larger artisanal milieu could even take place by the shortest route on occasion. In this sense, the workshops are not simply the places where pure 'equipment' [Zeug] is called into existence; they are at once plantations for a form of subjectivity suspended between production and contemplation, mints for self-assuredly pious singularities. Occasionally this spark flies back into the religious field, as with the British Methodists, who applied the craft of devout enthusiasm to their own psyche. ll9
From here, it is only a short way to the secession of the arts from the crafts - that most activity-theoretically relevant spectacle of the Modern Age before the onset of the one even greater drama: the crys- tallization of modern 'labour as such, labour sans phrase',120 the labour without qualities in which Marx found the systemic definition of the proletarian condition as an illusion-free self-sale of the univer- sally available 'commodity of labour power'. 121 Like all secessions, this one too serves the purpose of a heightened subjectification, in this case the boosting of the craftsman's ability to that of the artist. What distinguishes art from craftsmanship is its resolve to display the ability to art as such in the piece of work (opus). Sennett illustrates
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MASTER
Benvenuto
Saiiera, 1540-3), which he crafted for Francis I in over three years of work. Such objects no longer tolerate everyday use; they force the user to yield to the compulsion to admire that is fashioned into them.
It was only after protracted dogmatic quarrelling that the two natures of the work of art were laid down with the appropriate clarity: wholly craft or wholly mirabile. With the one side each work remains the creation of the profession through and through, and with the other it testifies to the irruption of the supra-artisanal into the workshop. The two natures exist unmixed alongside each other and are recognized through different receptive capacities. All the upgrad- ings of both the master status and the concept of the masterpiece that have animated discussions about art and artists since the Renaissance are connected to this. Just as art means the re-conquest of the wonder- ful from the position of the workshops, the artist's existence implies restoring the creative, almost godly competency within the workshop - with the side effect that for almost half a millennium, Europeans have been subject to a constant inner mission by theologians of crea- tivity and their critical deacons, though also a slightly later Arian122 or humanistic-materialistic counter-mission whose message is that even the greatest works of art are no more than higher products - that is to say, simulations of something higher - and even the greatest artists are only human.