No More Learning

This, too, is an art that undergoes transformations. Today, it cannot do its job either in a traditionally rationalist way where reason is well founded and self-limited à la Kant, or in the style of traditional irrationalism where reason is on trial in the name of feeling, will, faith, etc. In view of current ill feelings, it would be touching to swear by the guiding reason of classical Enlightenment or, conversely, take flight into romantic sermons of wholeness. By way of civilizational volcanism (or our existence as a thinking avalanche), too many things are thrown out of joint, too much has missed the mark, been out of tune and disassembled to hope that treatments from the pharmacies of modernity (of all places) could possibly do any good. Today’s critique of reason can only be the research that discovers the grounds of correspondences and non-correspondences. Thus, a radical critique of reason adapts itself to an object that has become uncanny.
If nothing is in tune and nothing fits, if nothing hits the mark and nothing helps, then the time has come for diplomats. Their job is to do something in situations where there is nothing left to do. (In this way, they are, incidentally, the descendants of the priests. ) As technicians of secondary negotiation, they provide a fine print of truth that matches the harsh modern landscape. For professional purposes, they count on the need for the agreed upon to be considered true. Without being plagued by metaphysical scruples, they indulge a secondary notion of truth and correctness that no longer allows itself to agree on what would be primarily and essentially the thing that fits/works/hits the mark/corresponds.
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Partly out of wisdom and partly out of resignation, the philosophy of diplomats is limited to the minimal coordination of dissonant voices and to a loose assembling of what does not correspond as part of a specific interest to get to an agreement. This secondary concept of the truth of diplomats corresponds to the distinctive emergence of a secondary philosophy that has been unmistakable for generations – one that no longer teaches perspectives on life, but has built its operations around current intellectual secondary virtues such as clarity, overview of material, and communicability. Others think that this is a sign that philosophy has recently grown up and abandoned the juvenile vice of thinking about deep questions. And, indeed, philosophers now go to the office in the morning like other officials; they’ve learned how to manage problems that can’t be solved as politely, pragmatically, attentively, and ironically as adults and diplomats are supposed to behave. In fact, the idea of diplomatic unification (with its deliberate understanding of things that it is neither desirable nor enforceable to agree upon) is recommended as a very grown-up practical procedural principle. It replaces convictions with manners – the only case where the term “civilizing process” really fits – and it would be even more likable if it refrained from being right on a grand scale and behaving transcen- dental-diplomatically as a doctrine empowered by truth. After all, the concept of consensus does not need to advertise its validity with great effort; it could quietly lower its theoretical budget and concentrate on diplomatic craft. If it fails to do so, the suspicion arises that the secondary philosophy is not free from being jealous of the overthrown prima philosophia; perhaps it is even homesick for the era of the last established cathedrals. After all, as long as the truth diplomats make lavish efforts towards theory themselves, philosophy as an institution is neither dead nor repealed. It stays alive as long as it surpasses itself. The new division of its business into outbidding activities and diplomatic tasks is the testimony of an unbroken vitality – whereby vitality is to be understood as an ambiguous compliment and wholeness almost as a reproach.
Low Theory
A modern poet who is currently suffering a severe decline in popularity because his left-wing populist overtones do not overlap with today’s tastes offers up a memorable consideration:
By nature I have no ability for metaphysics: to think about everything under the sun and how concepts come together with
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each other is all Greek to me. So I hold to the way of philoso- phizing which is mainly circulated in the lower classes, what people mean when they say, “Go to that one there for advice, he is a philosopher” or, “That one there can draw some distinc- tions. ” When the common people attribute a philosophical attitude to someone, it is almost always an ability to endure something. In a fistfight one distinguishes fighters who are good at taking it and fighters who are good at dishing it out, that is, those who can endure a lot and those who can punch well; and the people understand philosophers, in this sense, as those who can take it; whatever the situation may be. In the following, however, I understand philosophizing as the art of taking it and dishing it out in battle (but otherwise, as I said, to remain in general agreement with the people in what philoso- phizing is supposed to mean). 2
Rarely does someone act so innocently while giving out insights of such consequence. Brecht’s entire break with what he calls metaphysics took place in gesture and skipped over argumentation in a profound and popular way. He apologizes for his inability to conceptualize in order to gain the space for another kind of knowledge. With an easy-to-understand, proletarian cleverness, he uses his lack of understanding as the requirement for a better under- standing. Because we can always be sure that Brecht is not speaking from a place of modesty, we can freely admire his populist cold- bloodedness. The man knows that the world is at war; military units are being deployed everywhere, even in the great theories. Filled with mad hope that his self-preservation between the front lines may also have something to do with truth, he evades the maneuvers of logical Gigantomachy. Like Schwejk, he creates himself out of the dust that rises up when the heroes begin to march. He lets the athletes of reflection let their abilities run riot on the argumentation front and concedes to the metaphysicians their exhausting privilege to take up ever more intricate positions in ever more indecisive struggles with ever greater effort. Is he really just prevented by inability, or has he also been tipped off by an insight? He seems to rely on the possi- bility that a small admission of incompetence sometimes yields as much as the utmost use of great aptitudes. Those who learn about effort through ordinary life experience do understand one thing about philosophy, even if it otherwise remains obscure or irrelevant to them – philosophy comes from effort and leads to effort. In this way, the standoff that is easily perceptible from the outside and hangs over the great metaphysical alternatives can be congenial with the lack of competence for such things. What is free of charge
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discovers commonality with the most expensive things if it is bold enough to trace the effort of ideas back to the idea of effort. This is low theory’s chance. It can rise to Brecht’s heights if it grasps that a senseless effort can only be avoided by a timely inability to execute it. It is part of a popular lifestyle to not fall for one’s own talents. Inability is a special art. If metaphysics is the heroic effort to lift the weight of the world with the power of theory, then the lack of talent for it is not just the avoidance of a justified demand. Oh, the philosophical Schwejk knows very well that he’s been carrying the weight of the world for a long time in his own way, and that he did not have to wait for the effort sermon of the theory capuchins to attain a concept of heaviness.
La chose la mieux partagée du monde
Let us leave the Brechtian Young Hegelianism to rest – together with its eternally bad conscience for never proceeding far enough from theory to praxis. Let us also look past the mannerism of its New Objectivity pugilist morality, with which the sultry nineteenth century transitioned into the cool twentieth. What does make us pay attention is Brecht’s legitimate concern about remaining in agreement with the people about the purpose of philosophizing. Here, the essential thing is not the populist gesture. What matters is a downward movement of thought, dressed in metropolitan- populist clothes. (It also existed in the ethnic costumes that have long since seemed silly to us. ) The way down – this motif is completely inseparable from the impulses of post-metaphysical philosophy in modernity. Abiding by the abject, seeing the world in a perspective from below, anchoring in the banal – thus and similarly do the guiding programs of a thinking that engages in the mundane resound in order to finally grasp the realness of reality in a non-metaphysical way. However, the great rush of philosophy towards everyday life is the opposite of bending the knee before bon sens, which was once claimed to be the most fairly distributed thing in the world. 3 By lifting the banal philosophically to a higher level, it proves to common sense that it does it no good to be so well distributed. For common sense, everyday life remains a prison from which every life that has not resigned itself to it nevertheless dreams itself free. Philosophy, on the other hand, wants to break out of its empty rooms and into the post-metaphysical fullness of human life, and the mundane is thus the promised land of the tangible. There, people can be found as they are – you surprise them in the middle of work (ah, self-generation of the species), during sexual activity,
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while with children and in kitchens, and even in the application of rules of linguistic understanding and in convivial self-indul- gence – weird and wonderful creatures who make full use of their provisions with sets of everyday knowledge. Intoxicated by these discoveries, metaphysics-weary thinking plunges into the depths, which compensate it abundantly for its loss of idealized height. A hermeneutic of the banal blossoms out of these newly discovered depths, explaining to us what an amazing mystery it is if we make the effort to be there.
But the depths themselves know next to nothing of having been discovered by philosophy, and one can be sure that they would not think much of it if they knew. This is what the poet Brecht so surely encounters in his picaresque indifference to philosophical profes- sionalism. He thinks “like the people” because he aims at a point where we are done with philosophical understanding – with “giddy head and light hands,” as our colleague Hofmannsthal says. 4 At the point where the depths have their lowest level and center of gravity, the weight of the world presses down on the individual, and would crush them if they had not learned how to squeeze out from under unbearable weights. By understanding the depths, the mind also understands the burdening nature of reality. One is a philosopher there, where one can endure something. What counts here is “knowledge” as an act of persevering and endurance as a form of understanding. The banal wisdom of the low sees life from the very outset as a nexus of burdens, a web of effort and discomfort. (One does not dare talk about being-in-the-world here; it would sound too luxurious. ) But that is not to say that conscious life first takes blows and carries burdens and in addition possesses an idea of the world as burden and a blow. Rather, the world is made available to us to the extent that it has “made us understand” its weight. In the extremely rudimentary knowledge of everyday life, which in itself is not easy to bear, the development of the real is directly fused with the experience and the understanding of heaviness. That is why the “people” identify philosophers as the takers. The takers are the hermeneuticists of heaviness. When the world “clears” in front of them, it always approaches them as a burden that rests on the shoulders of an ability to understand and endure.
Does philosophy now suffer from an Atlas complex? Does it continue its ambition of understanding everything under the auspices of carrying everything? The brave soldier Schwejk shakes his head wearily. He immediately declares his incompetence as soon as the metaphysical Atlas game is to be played with the world. No ambition, no talent, no time. Like all people who handle heavy weights as part of their job, he relies on a technique of tilt where one
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rolls the loads diagonally and essentially lets them carry themselves. It does not relieve the strain entirely, but it shows us a way to put the burden into the least strenuous relationship with the ground. The effort that remains is still in the top margin of what we must cope with, but without being crushed. The regression into the common- place reaches its destination with these old stonemasons; what is right is what can still be moved. In everyday life, however, everyone knows that the real bearer of the weight of the world is the ground and not the strained human. The gravity of the commonplace sets limits to the wantonness of theory – even if it may always dream of heroic weightlifting that does not let the great burdens of reality rest on the anonymous ground, but places them on the grounds that oppose the world from within the subject. As long as philosophical thinking exists, it also knows the temptation to deal with the weight of the world in a frivolous way. There is a weightlifter in every thinker.
For athletic thinkers, however, the way down is not without pitfalls. They are overqualified for the simple and too highly trained for the obvious. Such incomparable minds as Brecht and Heidegger have this in common. Neither the lyricist with a penchant for boxing matches nor the masterful thinker from the Black Forest can escape the temptation to extol the way down as a climb towards the thing itself. Although not as paved with heroic trivialism as with the early Heidegger, no one will be able to deny that a gestural commonality exists between Brecht’s poetic exploration of the hard, cold, bad, and heavy and Heidegger’s existential-ontological elaboration of the idea of a natural world-concept of the commonplace. Both tread on a post-metaphysical terrain in the broadest sense, where the spirit must befriend its finiteness and corporeality. Yet both are ontologi- cally playing the strong man game, and both are enchanted by their own power: Brecht with his boxer’s morality, which considers giving to be more blessed than taking, Heidegger with his deter- mined vehemence to hermeneutically control even the inaccessible. Both make it clear to posterity what kinds of risks hem the way down – and what opportunities there are to ridicule oneself with a decisive acceptance of the obvious. But maybe it cannot be any different. Perhaps the hermeneutics of banality must succumb to the temptation of dealing with the task of ordinary life in the style of a weightlifter. Perhaps it is true that the discovery of the obvious is really the most grave for us, and perhaps we really do have to engage in the undertaking to exorcize the metaphysical devil using the post-metaphysical Beelzebub. Well then, philosophers – another endeavor for you should you wish to indulge! We will extol the descent as a high-altitude ascent, we will sell bottled water to the
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river and tirelessly defend the thesis that nothing is as incompre- hensible as the obvious. In this way, perhaps a light astonishment at the burdensome life will one day become the most fairly distributed thing in the world.
Geometry as Finesse
Following tradition, relationships that are called reasonable are those that can claim the “blessing of rightness” or proportionality for themselves. These include: adapting means to ends; coordi- nation of instruments to circumstances; orientation of research towards goals; calculation of expenditures with respect to returns; obligation of statements towards what holds true; the development of theses from premises; ordering the focus of expectations towards the expectations of expectations; the mutual recognition of humans as subjects of reasonable abilities . . . with each variation of the principle of reasonableness, new spheres of rightness, justification, appropriateness, harmoniousness, and calculability are accentuated in the cosmos of logic.
But thus far as reasonable thinking becomes aware of itself and feels how astonishing its own emergence from the whole is, it urges itself to say what it has to do with this whole. Hence, philosophy begins with a human enterprise that is more demanding than the construction of pyramids, the installation of irrigation cultures, and the surveying of fields: with the task of presenting the unpresentable and measuring the immeasurable. The philosophical minds of the classical age of metaphysics were geometricians of the immeas- urable. Should anything be true of the rumors that speak of the dawn of a post-metaphysical era, then perhaps it is that the failure of the projects to geometricize the disproportionate is impossible to keep secret. They made use of an ontological feint that has become unrepeatable to us: they assumed a proportionality or correctness in the totality of the proportions themselves. The whole is thought of as a circle with geometric finesse; in more modern terms, as a system – and from there it was only a small feat to “rediscover” the intel- ligible shape of the circle or the system as a whole. This finesse has been unrepeatable since we have known that although phenomena such as the circle and the system occur, it does not mean that the whole is therefore circular or systemic – not even a circle of circles or a system of systems but a turbulence, a fluctuation, a catastrophe, which does not relate to anything but its own singularity. This is why the measuring of the immeasurable ends with fear and trembling. The rulers that reason uses to measure its proprieties do not just
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have a stake in the intelligible forms, the ideas; they are also partici- pants in the disasters that this singular existence has directed onto its unpredictable trajectory. Within the light of reason, there also shines the natural light of catastrophe that advances through us.
Unconcealment and Tolerability
As we know, Heidegger tirelessly insisted on the revelation that the Greek word for truth, aletheia, was composed of the word for the dark, hidden, forgotten, lethe, and its negation. The philosophical genius of the Greeks became apparent to him from this incon- spicuous fact. If the ordinary vocabulary of a people defines truth as the negative of hiddenness and forgetting, we are dealing with a language that effortlessly thinks the most profound thoughts. Heidegger thought that he could expect as much of German, and translated the Greek aletheia with the term “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit). (Although the Humboldtian translation of the word as “overtness” was philologically slightly more correct, it was philosophically significantly inferior. ) If unconcealment belongs to the truth, then its fate falls together with the event through which it becomes unconcealed – with disclosure, arising, revelation (and the opposite event that leads to forgetting and a second concealment). The disclosing revelation through which all that is rational and proportionate is laid open is itself neither rational nor proportionate. The “space” of the true as the unconcealed pops up singularly like an island full of commensurable conditions from an ocean of incommensurability and disproportion. Where humans are, that’s where the forefield of the covertly monstrous can also be found. Their cultures populate a zone that is both paradise and volcano – an ontological Hawaiian and Lanzarote effect. With his term “clearing” (Lichtung), Heidegger, the hesitant heir of European light metaphysics, has reminded us of the eventful rise of a graspable space for proportionalities. Because he not only sees the visible in the clearing, but also visibility, he understands himself not as an Enlightener, but as a seer. While the Enlightener practices a phosphoric light-making praxis and uses light as a tool for illumi- nating the substance, the seer lingers in the “deeds and sufferings of light. ” Imagining is not seeing. For the one who really sees, the eye is an ear of light.
What would Brecht the Enlightener have to say about Heidegger the seer? He would probably make a small distinction. “So far,” he would say, “everything is very simple, even if metaphysical terms are all Greek to someone like me. But even a child gets it that what the
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seer does here corresponds precisely to what takers do in boxing. The seer is a philosopher because he endures something, and he endures something because he is a real man and, besides, it comes from his position. I, however, would like to from now on recognize under seeing both taking and giving in a boxing match. Otherwise, though, as I said, I want to remain in agreement with those who endure something. ”
For the taker, unconcealment does not mean visibility, but toler- ability. For what is to be taken at all moves in the range between what is quite easy to do and what cuts unbearably deep. It’s not so much the limits of illumination and visibility that separate the concealed from the unconcealed, but stress limits, pain limits, toler- ability limits. It is not what one has heard or read about the world that decides one’s understanding of the world, but what one has gone through and endured from it. If one admits that philosophy, as soon as it is dealing with the whole, speaks only in serious puns anyway, then at the critical point one would have to talk not about the clearing, but about the direction. The projects of culture and enlightenment are less about the spread of light and more about the overpowering of burdens. Ever since humans have felt the will to know, they have been interested not so much in elucidation as in alleviation – and it is only because there are elucidations that are also alleviations (or lead to alleviations) that intellect and insight are so popular.
A metaphysical determination of the playing field of all analogies where truths can become apparent to us leads to the original liaison between the recognizable and the tolerable – the lucid and the easy. For endurance is the most authoritative of all ratios to emerge to us out of the disproportionate and intolerable. What should exist for us exists in the realm of the tolerable or not at all. In this sense, all philosophy is algosophy – measurement of the fields of tolerances that are possible for us. Only the moderately heavy, the portable, even the light has the prospect of being incorporated into the corpus of an enduring understanding. From the unbearable, the over-heavy, the exalted, one can only know as much as remains in the traces of remembrance when one has survived it. Perhaps some theologies speak of precisely this when they say that the space for man was opened only by the retreat of God. Only indirect signs remain in our consciousness of the presence of the super-powerful, of the exaggerations, flashes, ecstasies, breakdowns; only footsteps of the heavyweights that limit and warn us. No idea includes the measured in itself, and just as the eye cannot fix the sun or death, so no knowledge holds on to the disproportionate, hardly even finds a name for it – chaos, hell, primal pain, sacred, sublime, being,
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nothingness, Dionysus, Shiva. What we know as rationality is a way to deal with the “real,” which only becomes possible through the mind’s original and unmissable evasion of the incommensurable powers, a way of coping that turns towards the bearable, imagi- nable, well established, agreeable. The agreeable originated in our necessary skirting of the unavoidable. This evasion as a dodging of the overly heavy is the basic effort around which all subjectivities are grouped. Subjectivity can only be lived as the self-imposed effort to remain within the sphere of the tolerable. It recognizes itself in its efforts to preserve itself, and if it lost that effort, it would no longer be subjectivity, but the all-encompassing unity of everything within an utterly alleviated consciousness. That is why pure theory is the ultimate luxury – something for dandies and suicides. Only they have access to the mystery of frivolity – for the alleviation of life until the annihilation of burdens.
Ordinary mortals find life difficult. They remain condemned to the effort to alleviate their burdens to the best of their ability. But the dream of burdenless ease is alive in them, too. They tirelessly strain to make it easier for themselves. Through their combined efforts, the process of civilization becomes an undertaking that brings about involuntary enlightenment. The enlightenment efforts of culture have themselves become the intolerable burden which they were supposed to evade by moving towards the tolerable.
Of the Foolishness to Not be an Animal
But how much does the human being who measures everything, in turn, measure up to the world in which they exist? How does the ontological animal fit into the totality of the other beings? How do beings with the ability to notice coherences cohere with their world? How does the subject who assimilates things with their engineering skills become assimilated to what was there before? How does the being who is gifted with an insight into circumstances fit into the context of all circumstances?
To ask in this way is to reveal the answer in the questions. The human being is the entity who does not fit. Their relationship to relations is disproportionate. It is right for them to not be quite right.
It should not be difficult for anyone who knows the material to hear in these formulations an echo of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s forays to explore the truth about truth. Both have the common insight that humans do not enter the space of truth like actors on an already finished stage, but that they themselves are the stage above which the strangest
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light appears: knowledge. Being a stage is the possibility of having a relationship to relations. This second relationship contains the mystery of the “truth as such,” beyond local correctness. The adventure of not being natural is located in it. The relationship to relations is apparent when humans’ horizontal interwovenness tears into the fabric of the world so that the vertical is revealed with its double meaning of high/ deep. This dimension witnesses the human exodus from biology, the subject’s resignation from symbioses, and humans’ discovery that they do not fit, that they have become disproportionate. As far as they are the disproportionate beings who drop out of their environment in natal precarity, humans become susceptible to the truth question. The sacred word “truth” – which is more ridiculous than anything ordinary as all exalted things are – recalls the promises given to our lives: that the fallen-out being is capable of being included; that the disproportionate exists within proportion; that even the independent can depend on something; that loneliness has a counterpart; that even the unbound can be bound together with something. The question of truth presented us with a bill for the luxury of becoming human. The essence of truth is the foolishness to not be an animal.
Invent Yourself!
High cultures reach their critical phase when individuals are no longer limited by something external to them – when there is no “tutelary nature” to oversee their life-functions. From that point on, self-knowledge becomes a significant topic of the art of life. The view inward is supposed to discover systems that compensate for the loss of earlier synchronies between human and nature. From then on, the hope of reason rests on an “inner law” that provides the right guidance for human beings after their outward separation and isolation. But that hope is deceptive. Those who seek to find order by taking the path towards an interior that no longer has a foothold on the outside become victims of an irony. (One could also say that they become mystics, provided that mystics are the victims of an irony who then agree to the sacrifice and merge with the ironic. )
This irony belies the hope for order with its own driving force.
If reasonable subjects reasonably explore themselves, they ultimately discover not regulative variables but an energetic abyss. Recognizing oneself means not determining an identity, but becoming aware of a disproportionality.
If someone was to believe that the path inward attests to a secret image of the self, they would be proven wrong through self-knowledge.
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What remains of the pathos of reason that should have told us what we are? The imperative of wisdom “Know thyself! ” transforms into the existential motto “Be yourself! ” This is a cavalier ontological motto that allows every relative to be whatever they wish if they just think that being means being from the best family. In the small village of being, this is the local rightness that gives human behavior a benchmark. But aside from its uplifting effect, the phrase “Be yourself! ” is a bit too weak for practical guidance in this area. The cavalier concept of reasonableness does not yet help one get through the adventurous daily routine. Then the advice goes on to say that to be yourself, you must also help yourself and let others help you. From here, we are not too far away from a paramedic concept of reason as first aid, where what is right is that which counters the urgent first. This corresponds most closely to the accidental nature of historical life. But existence consists not only of its accidents but also of its successes. Be yourself thus means “Invent yourself! ” This is answered by the poetic concept of reason where what is right is what agrees to the unique opportunity of life. As René Char says: “Only one perk is given to us together with death: to create art before it comes” (“Nous n’avons qu’une ressource avec la mort: faire de l’art avant elle”). 5
6
AFTER MODERNITY
HAMM [anguished]: What’s happening, what’s happening? CLOV: Something is taking its course.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame1 The Age of the Epilogue
In recent times, the prefix “after” has made a noteworthy career for itself. Hardly any article or feature supplement would be considered up to date without it. In the form of the Latin “post,” more recent cultural criticism is speckled with it; it emits a flair of elegant reflex- ivity; it suggests that something is happening because something else is over; its property includes a consciousness that has seen many worlds come and go, including those that wanted to become a beautiful new one. Used correctly, the prefix pushes the past away as if it were a position that has become untenable. In one sentence, it jumps into a present that can always claim to come after the past. We do not know much of this past, and yet it is a unique feeling to have it be behind us. A small “after” and world ages become outdated. Post-modernity – it has a strange ring to it. Never before did someone give such a cold goodbye to yesterday. With just one prefix, you are ahead of your epoch. What does this tell us?
The career of the prefix “after” suggests that although shocking things happen, we no longer have a conception of history at our disposal that would allow the present to date itself. Since the general impression that history has no road map is spreading, we feel our way forward through a processual no man’s land. The unleashed realities seem to be neither communicable nor predictable – never
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mind the idea of subsuming them under a historico-philosophical schema. And no specific epoch name seems to fit the present either; we can’t even clearly distinguish epochs and trends. You might get the impression that the matter of reality is itself changing and evaporating into something unimaginable.
For this reason, post-modernity cannot be the term for an epoch with any kind of claim to historico-philosophical materiality, but only an index for increases in reflection. But what increases with this reflection is only the sobering effect of contemplation and nothing more. Post-modern reflexivity does not lead to peaks where a self-made and self-satisfied consciousness can look down onto its age, having made the climb. Expansive views, cross-sections, panoramas – who wouldn’t like them, and with them the ecstasy of the broad context, the summit experience that can capture its age in thought? But when thinking goes about its task today, it is not in the mood for summit expeditions – it remains completely post-conceptual and post-culminating, it abstains from the old ascension fantasies that would have us characterize the processes in social and logical reality with progressive-alpine metaphors. Process and progress only have a deceptive rhyme in common, and post-modernity does not set much in store for it. Sure, we continue to advance, but not upward – that is the quintessence of post- progressive reflections on the relationship between mind and time – and this confirms that pre-modern spirits are also to be found in the post-modern hustle and bustle for whom the wheel of fortune makes far more sense as a symbol for historic time than a ladder of progress. Those who live later do not know better – this fact marks the end of the historical experiment that wanted to force the truth to increasingly “stand out” over time. What has really emerged in the course of the experiment is precisely that it is by no means certain that a later knowledge is the better one.
Post-modern feelings of process are not those of people that believe that they are going uphill historically. They are more likely to be the sensations of passers-by on an escalator where you make automatic progress, whether you abide by the rule to stand to the right or to walk to the left. As long as you are on the escalator, it constantly proceeds forward in one direction – but comparing an escalator with the idea of progress would be an overinterpretation, to say the least. The spatial and kinetic metaphors of the Old Enlightenment no longer belong here, and the concept of ascension is also unsuitable for marking location differences on escalators. If one rolls down, the other rolls further up; the distance between the two has no evolutionary purpose and cannot translate into a leading edge for the top-rolling one, even if it seems to be the one that has
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gotten “further” – further to the “height of the age,” whose high position amounts to being here and now, and nothing else.
Ever since progress has become automatic, optimism about the future has transformed into process melancholy. We are no longer driving out of Genoa into modernity; we are rolling on a conveyor belt into the unpredictable. Our own movement hardly counts compared to the total bulk of movement, and the steps that the individual can take on their section of the escalator disappear almost without trace in the rolling whole. Furthermore, although no one knows where the escalator leads, it’s hard to suppress the thought that even the longest conveyor belt must eventually end and throw its passengers off.
Since all this has become entrenched into a modern “order of things,” briefings on the escalator have become a mass necessity. One has to fear that today’s cultural enterprise is no longer much more than the sum of the intellectual hobbies of escalator riders. Even these hobbies are now so imbued with their own automatism that it makes little difference whether someone moves affirmatively or criti- cally on this escalator – indeed, one can even move revolutionarily. There has been no effective difference between the movement of the escalator and the cultural manifestations on it for a long time now, because the field of culture as a market of differences is itself entirely organized like an escalator. Through its motor activity, the things of yesterday are constantly de-actualized; from the gesture of de-actualization itself, a new actuality is launched and already overthrown in its design stage, one volatility chasing the other.
The gesture that corresponds to continuous operations is that of the obituary. It is the dominant form of expression of a culture that lives entirely on the game of current de-actualization; for this reason, the “post” of post-modernism primarily means the “after” of obituary. No form of speech is as adequate to the principle of escalator culture as the obituary, which, in the midst of permanent movement and chronic ambiguity, recalls the last sure fact: the past is not the present. In a time and place where no one can know what will happen tomorrow, it seems almost like a gift that at least the past is over. It thereby provides a criterion that weathers storms. Contemporary culture is a large machine that emits epilogues and creates a hint of orientation in the present by suspending the past. Contemporary brains are at the moment still warm from the iteration of the last epilogic surges – this entire post-Freudian, post- Marxist, post-structuralist, post-metaphysical rhetoric, with which the respective speakers appeared to be at the highest level of possi- bility for fifteen minutes. The more violent the defamation of the past, the sooner a space for new settlements opens up in the present,
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even if it is only an illusion of space. For the citizens of escalators, only the epilogic overtaking of the latest trend can achieve the coveted contemporary ecstasy, without which no modern generation can stand itself. As if under duress, the glance falls backwards – by no means forwards, where the journey of the conveyor belt would show that it leads into hopelessness. We prefer to have modernity behind us rather than the eternity of the escalator in front; to cavort in the post-modern rather than in the purgatory of a unitary civili- zation; to stand at the open grave of the age of progress than before that turn into the future that economic advisors want to talk us into. For contemporary consciousness, death no longer means the “impossibility of having a project,” as Levinas once put it, but the impossibility of giving an excuse. It may be that we do not take it far with such speeches, but with its epilogic genius, the much-maligned post-modernism reaches an optimum of the presently possible mental states in spite of everything. For this is just the way it is – every incoherent dreamer creates programs, but epilogues require a modicum of awareness and a sense of context.
Additionally, the “after” comes from the after of after-school detention,2 where we only too often have to stay to make up the missed lessons of modernity. There are reasons to believe that for a large majority of contemporaries, a substantial modernity has not yet occurred, and that it could only arrive in the form of making up and reviewing. Moreover, a lot of suspect figures can be seen spooking around at the moment, wanting to skip a grade directly into post-modernism from the bushes or the Biedermeier, without getting to know even a little bit of modernity in-between. They will show whether post-modern times might have enough class and forming power to make the new bushmen sit down for detention.
The “after” of after modernism has yet another meaning that extends past that of the epilogue and the obituary. The obituary and the declaration of the death of yesterday are not enough. At least within a dark corner of their consciousness, everyone knows that the automatism of the world process conceals perspectives other than just the “and so on” of the obedient escalator. There is also something catastrophic and unparalleled with which the escalator only has automatism in common, but otherwise propels us forward with a completely different type of movement. We are subjective elements, plugged into a historico-planetary chain reaction that we called “history” in its relatively slow phase and which now seems to be running right to the point of explosion. What we would have to say in view of such threatening things does not seem to be an epilogue, but a prognosis, because we are talking about a catastrophe that has been going on for a long time whose biggest blows are yet
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to come. In truth, this prognosis is the most radical form of eulogy – namely, a prophetic epilogic that obits to us from a location after annihilation, letting us know what will be said about us then. Thus, the current epilogic apocalyptic breaks through the wall of time and, as if from the other side of fate, talks about the events on this side of the wall. This results not only in an anticipatory epilogue on humanity, but also in the very strange sense that the speakers must think of themselves as dead in order to take the point of view from which they will tell the truth. The “after” of post-modernism reveals itself here as the “after” of self-indulgence with which a civilization convinced of its untenability gives itself an account of its prospects. The Enlightenment is completed in the coincidence of prognosis and obituary, culminating in an absolute necrology that overtakes every possible future and now already pronounces doom as the last word of knowledge. That is why the present, which examines its future perspective, is forced to speak of itself in a tragic future tense and deliver its own eulogies ahead of time because there will be no other speakers to do it in due course. Aren’t most animal films today already obituaries to animals, eulogies for entire species? Does anthropology thus turn into a zoology of the necrological animal?
This is where an unforeseen “after” comes into play. It belongs to an awareness that has the aforementioned self-eulogies behind it – at least in the sense that it has heard and understood them and yet cannot stop there. Obviously, even the most routine pessimism is limited to the fact that bad predictions travel faster than bad events. Before they arrive, the observation that we still exist, in spite of everything, remains true. Even premature obituaries do not change the fact that new days are dawning until further notice, as fragile and temporary as all previous ones. The waking spirit sometimes survives the red-hot despair at its own finiteness. Set against a background of downfalls, our stay in the temporary act of the real starts to become strangely cheerful – the worries translucent, the uncertainties self-confident. Perhaps adulthood was never anything other than an encrypted word for what comes after despair. We are still breathing, the sun is still rising, we still learn the most important thing from the day in the main news. The last days are still hidden, the Apocalypse is being put on the shelf for now to join the other unsightly literature, the black tailcoat for humanity’s funeral stays in the closet, the Eschaton shows patience. This post-desperate life resembles carelessness to a tee and differs from blindness only in barely noticeable details. We say post-modernism with a misunder- stood smile, as if we knew that it should be called still-modernism.
If we were to characterize the specific time structure of contem- porary life, we would come up with the concept of an interim that
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is after the prognosis of the worst and before the verification of the predictions by the actual. There is no more appropriate term for such a situation than that of the interim. 3 However, our interim does not have a precise deadline, but leaves the day, hour, and cause of the disaster open. Because of this, life, too, can set itself up and spread out within the extended interim as if it were safe. It is only in the ambiguity of the interim that hope finds its playing field. That is why hope is not a principle, but a secondary product of uncertainty about the bad outcome of history. While hope has become effective as a history-making force, its effects are borrowed from eschatology and the inaccuracy of our knowledge about the limits of the interim. This explains why the word “hope” must not be writ large either now or in the future. Its real place is behind the scenes and its appropriate key is pianissimo. Only Bloch was allowed to raise his voice on the subject of hope because, unbeknownst to him, he wrote its obituary – the only legitimate occasion to transfigure an effect into a principle. Moreover, loud talk about hope is nowadays just cynical fabrication. Those who want to wage aggressive hope campaigns belong in the neighborhood of the leading German columnist who is supposed to have said after Chernobyl: “Life is distasteful. It just keeps going. ” The same can be said of the hope that is rightly claimed to belong to life. The only thing that helps hope in its macabre alliance with this obstinately continuing life is unyielding discretion. In the future, we must place private hopes under confessional secrecy and threaten prison sentences for public hope. Those who actually have hopes should bury them as deep as they can – for they can only be helpful as silent forces. Only as such do they not get mixed up with those series of causes that lead to catastrophe. This is the only way in which they do not contribute to the mobilization of enterprises against one’s better judgment. Only thus will they become forces of life, doing their work behind individuals’ backs and carrying them over the abysses above which the worlds of daylight have been erected.
The Interim – or: The Birth of History from the Spirit of Postponement
The term “interim” not only describes the playing field shared by illusion and hope; it is also reminiscent of the basic shape of Western historical thinking. For what history means in the eminent occidental sense of the word can only be understood from its nature as time limit and interim. An interim can only exist where an event in time strives for a final goal or a final date from which it can be understood as a deadline. These are precisely the basic features
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of the late Jewish and Christian perception of history, which is constitutive of Europe as a phenomenon. Few historians have fully conveyed how a large swath of history has been shaped by the tradition and variation of messianic and eschatological motifs – not only early Western history, but also modern times, including the recent present. But as for the program of a critique of historical reason, which has been open since Mar and Dilthey, there should be no doubt that messianology, as it emerged from the Jewish tradition and made history in its Christian variant, must form its core.
The messianic perception of history is based on the idea that the long march of peoples through the deserts of time must one day come to an end – when the Messiah completes the alienation era and establishes a final kingdom that does not resemble the current world in any way whatsoever. The Christian version of this model became effective at the moment when Jesus accepted the insinuation of his disciples that he was the Messiah and began to preach the presence of the kingdom of God within him. (The two most revealing variants of such a process are provided by Sabbatai Zwi in the seventeenth and Jiddu Krishnamurti in the twentieth century. ) After the disaster of Golgotha, it became clear what explosive power lay in this process. The possibility of Christian messianism was laid out in the unbearable paradox that the Messiah did not prevail as a world king of end-times, but left the scene as a miserable executed criminal. For the first believers, this scandal could only be surmounted with the proclamation of an imminent return of the Lord in all his glory – visible to all, liberating for the faithful, appalling to adversaries. Thus, at the beginning of the Christian concept of history, world time is transformed into a waiting period, which shrinks the horizon to the small span between the crucifixion and the reappearance of the Messiah. It is from this minimum that the later expansions of the horizon had to emanate, and they were due once the waiting for a return became existentially impossible. The first generation of Christians died with a question to which European history would be the answer: How is the absence of the Messiah to be understood? The very next generation had to learn to expect greater time spans and move the Parousia to the time of their grandchildren or great- grandchildren. For them, the question of a Christian’s involvement in the business of this world became pressing – and if not with body and soul, nevertheless with great obligation as it would be commanded if tomorrow the last judgment came and the final kingdom began. It was in the musings of the early Christians that Western history was put on its very strange trajectory. Back then, patience and hope first entered into a historicizing tension with each other. Never before had hope been so elevated to virtue and
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aggrandized into religious psycho-politics. It may be said that the Christian revolution set in motion by Paul intervened more deeply in the experience of time in the Old World than any reform of the imperial calendar could ever have. For Paul, too, the time ahead is a terse interim. But its significance is not that of an inconsequential passage; it is a time with its own dignity insofar as it already stands in the light of salvation by virtue of its message. Consequently, all cosmic and mythical calendars are invalidated.
Even with the caveat of the short interim, existence post Christum stands out as an epoch in its own right and is as differentiated from the pre-messianic life of the Jews as it is from the world of the Greeks and Romans. Paul is presumably the first person to live in a hurry as a matter of principle, because it was important to him to fulfill his universally understood mission in the supposedly short period of time given. For him, the content of the mission lies in the revolutionary newness of every life after Christ. The extent to which the epoch-making power of this turning point extends is demonstrated not least by the fact that the present rumors of a post- modernity would be groundless without the Pauline post-antiquity. Without Paul’s great success, there would be no Christianity as world religion, and without that, no periodization of history whose dissolution moves contemporary minds. Christianity as a historical religion, however, stands and falls with the awareness that the time between the crucifixion and the return of the Messiah participates in an epochal newness and thus possesses an objective redemptive- historical content. If this consciousness had not been effective, the Christian impulse would have been lost in the syncretism of late antiquity after a few generations. The non-return of Christ would have drained the expectation of salvation and deprived the Christian message of any future history-making character. A mystical and symbolist psychotherapeutic would probably have absorbed the Christ legend and dissolved it into a self-redemption theory of an Eastern type. The early history of the church, which represents a single struggle against the gnostic temptation of the individual exit from the real history of salvation, shows how powerful the tendencies to such developments were. Only after centuries of wrangling could the real existing church, as a Catholic one, prevail against the private salvation cults and constitute itself as a political organon of salvation and hope for a new world time. The new era is already developed in the fantastic apostolate of the thirteenth Apostle, who felt expressly called to bring the news of Christ to the peoples of the entire non-Jewish world. In Paul’s person, that which will become the historical content of the new world age is crystallized for the first time: the self-transcendence of Judaism.
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Since then, Christian world time has been substantially an apostolic time – time for the spread of an exuberant and counter-worldly message; time for the (however contradictory) installation of justice and fraternity in a desert world; time for the instilling of hope into decaying souls which the war of life had set on a greedy and desperate trajectory. A considerable need for time becomes apparent for this unprecedented mission, as the Christianization of peoples cannot happen overnight. In the light of the missionary idea, the delayed Parousia can be understood not only as a disappointment, but also as a salvation-bringing postponement of the end. If the story really eats from the apostolic substance, then the end of days must not come before the universalization of the message.
Almost from the very beginning, Christian thinking about time and history thus contains the contrast between an eschatological (short) and an apostolic (long) determination of the interim within itself. 4 While the eschatological motif constantly reminds us of the closeness of Judgment Day, the apostolic motif keeps the story open as a time of spreading salvation over the inhabited earth. In the struggle between these two poles, the tense time structure of the Christian world age attains its profile. This is the sign of revolutionary impatience as well as conservative continuity; the élan of messianic unrest as well as the inertia of the sacramental estab- lishment; the eschatological readiness for the end of days as well as the anti-eschatological engagement with the temporary. Where the motif of the long story rules in mature comprehensiveness, there the apostolic goal-orientedness of time emerges most clearly – for it is only from the point of the successful outcome of the mission that the connection to world history as total salvation event can be made visible. With his apostolic program for the post-ancient world, Paul became not only the founder of the Christian religion, but also the initiator of a “sacred mobilization” that has deployed a large part of the psychological and political energy of Europe over the span of millennia. 5
For the modern phase of the “Christian West,” however, it is characteristic that the eschatological element is increasingly pushed into the background. The idea of history as a time between creation and redemption, or between death and Parousia of the Messiah, loses its plausibility in the demarcated horizon of “modern troubled history. ” “Christian woe” – which no longer even senses its contra- diction in terms – begins to arrange itself in a forwardly open continuum. The burdensome thought of a final end is obscured by the philosophy of infinitely perfectible progress. Thus, from the eighteenth century onwards, Christian ideas against traditional Christianity become paradoxically effective by creating decidedly
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post-Christian or anti-Christian philosophies of history. It is precisely in the decidedly worldly and atheistic wings of the Enlightenment that the messianic impulse, chastened for a millennium, reawakens to radical offensiveness. It becomes world-political violence in Marxism above all and gives a messianic perspective to modern progressive thought – a perspective back onto a beginning from the point of view of an end; the end of the path through the desert of an alienated interim and to the beginning of an era of post-historical fulfillment. It seems that the Christian impulse in modernity reaches a worldly maximum of influence under an atheist, socialist, and humanist incognito. At the same time, it witnesses its irreligious liquidation as well. 6
The present is indeed a time of historical ambiguity. It is typical for it not to be able to decide between religion and irreligion in the same way it can’t decide between the proclamation and revocation of progress. Even though Western civilization has undoubtedly entered a post-Christian age, the departure from the Christian era does not entail a departure from its conception of history and its eschatology. On the contrary, one cannot avoid the impression that the eschato- logical motif of the Judeo-Christian tradition begins to dominate more forcefully in post-Christian times than ever before. The Judeo- Christian apocalyptic lives on in the neo-pagan panic. The end of the Christian world-epoch does not mean that the apocalyptic stress is followed by a new-cosmological sigh of relief. Only in our grand- fathers’ generation could we buy into the vision of becoming the new Greeks; up until the eve of National Socialism, it was seductive to think together with Nietzsche that one could emigrate from Christian decadence to pagan health and sacrifice history for the cosmos. Even if, for most contemporaries, Christianity may only be an unreal citable magnitude, no generation has ever been as distant as today’s from the cosmic cycle of the times. Never has the return from linear history to a cyclical order of things been as unlikely as it is now. Of course, anyone who is reeling on the sloping trajectory of natural devastation would like to find safety in a cosmological post-history where a sovereign timeless existence prevails. Without a doubt, it would be appealing to settle in a post-Paulinian way and without illusory hope as “tremendous” mortals on the maternal earth. But it is clear that this resettlement is not going to happen, because the world process initiated by Christian hope as well as by the Greek epistemes has gotten disastrously out of control. There is no real pleasure in living. There seems to be no room left in our countdown for the desirable large cosmic cycles.
Chatter about post-modernism bursts into this situation. It drives the dilemma that has been latent for over a hundred years, to the
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point where it gets out of hand in an open scandal. As soon as a consciousness comes forward that claims to speak of a post-modern location, modernity is lured out of the reserve by this presumption and forced into the confession that it sees itself as the epoch that no other can follow. Post-modern talk, which at first was only meant to provide a bit of variety, forces modernity to profess to be the end of times, that is, an era that no longer wants to have an interim character, but has crossed over into the enduring presence of an infinitely perfect post-history. For modernity, the mere thought of post-modernism is illegitimate and shocking, because according to its self-image, the successors of modernity must never be anything other than modernity, once again.
The dull escalator feeling now proves to be a symptom of historico-philosophical significance: according to its basic historical feature, the present is already a small-scale end of times, which only has itself in front of it. A “post-modern” epoch can no longer be created, except in the bad sense that shocking regressions or catastrophes could destroy the entire construct of the modern age. Because modernity is already a secret millennium burdened with complexes, seen from within it, only the worst can still lead beyond it.