No More Learning

Such an equation of God and life was suitable for building up the most excessive vertical tension; it forced people to revise radically their conventional notions of the meaning of 'life'. It suddenly became possible to turn the attribute 'living' into a superlative and to multiply the noun 'life' by itself. Whoever says 'life' will sooner or later also say 'life of life'. Then, however, 'learning for life' means learning for pure surplus. In the course of studying the heightened life, one encounters the vita vitalis, which stands vertical in relation to the axis of empirical existence. This dictates the direction for the primary sur- realism: the vertical pull effective in all advanced civilizations, which was given the unfortunate name 'metaphysics' in the West. Perhaps 'metabiotics' would have been a more suitable term, or on Latin soil the word 'supravitalistics' - though one must admit that both words would have deserved to die of sheer ugliness immediately. The term 'metaphysics' kept itself at the top of our curricula until that other terminological monstrosity, the doctrine of 'survival' so central for the moderns, gained the upper hand.
Dying Performance: Death on the Metaphysical Stage
The hardest test for the new subject of the practising power is death, as it is the factor that forces people most strongly into passivity. Whoever challenges death, then, in order to integrate it into the domain of ability, will - if successful - have proved that it is within the realm of the humanly possible to surmount the insurmountable - or become one with the terrible. That is why all exercises directed against the controlling of the soul by intense affects, unexamined
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CUR HOMO ARTlSTA
the
inevitably to measures
the possession of all possessions: the subordination of humans to the power of death. This can occur in two different ways: firstly through an asceticism, which leads to an artificially acquired attitude of being able to die. That is how the philosophical ars moriendi was read, whose primal scene is the death of Socrates, the most momentous dying performance in the Old European world; that is what was dem- onstrated by the Indian ascetics, who went through the art of leaving the body in numerous variations; and this was also demonstrated by the Japanese culture of suicide (seppuku), in which it was always extremely important to part with one's life as soon as there was a danger that it could outlast one's honour. Emancipation from the tyranny of death can also occur through the formulation of a myth that asserts the allegiance of the soul to the kingdom of the living God. In such cases - Egyptian doctrines of the afterlife and Christian Platonism provide the best-known examples - the soul's right of return is secured less through supplementary ascetic efforts than by living life with integrity.
Since the rise of the surrealisms of advanced civilizations, then, the climate on the ascetic planet has been subject to a constant change, something comparable to global warming through ever-increasing moral emissions. This forces the shift from simply 'living one's life' in the current of collective habitus to leading life under the influence of individualizing school powers. This new kind of guidance causes a defamiliarization of existence to the point where notions about the areas of school and life merge into that bizarre dogma that life itself is nothing more than one great pedagogical project that must be learned like an esoteric school subject - and along with life, the art of ending it in exemplary fashion. That is why what the Greeks called eutha- nasia, the art of the beautiful death, forms the secret centre of the acrobatic revolution; it is the rope over an abyss that the practising learn to cross in order to advance from life to meta-life.
Along with the death of Socrates as described by Plato, the Old European tradition has a second thanatologically momentous primal scene in which the emancipation of the intellectually practising from the tyranny of death could be observed at the greatest height: the death of Jesus as described in the gospels. In both passion stories, the emphasis is on the conversion of obligation into ability, an ability that transpires all the more impressively because circumstances impose a twofold passivity on the victims: firstly in the face of the injustice of the death sentence, and secondly in the face of the cruelty of the
the subjugation all subjugations,
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
case it
how man's appropriates external
sian through the fact that he, condemned rightly in formal terms wrongfully in factual terms, adapts the sentence to his own will and co-operates with the procedure imposed on him as if he himself were the organizer of the passion play into which he was forced.
The superordination of the voluntary over the compulsory is most brilliantly embodied by the allegory of the laws that speak to Socrates in the dialogue Crito. The personified laws tell the condemned man something along these lines: 'Everything would suggest, dear Socrates, that you liked it here in Athens more than anywhere else. We, the laws, and this city we rule, were dearly enough for you. You never went on travels, as many people do, to become acquainted with other cities and other laws. You praised the fate of existing under our leadership like no other - even at your trial, you proudly declared that you would rather die than be banished. You had seventy years in which to turn your back on us and this city, but you chose to stay with us. So if you wanted to flee from us now, in the face of the execu- tion we have decreed, how could you ever repeat elsewhere what you never tired of saying here: that man must regard virtue and justice more highly than anything else? Do not, therefore, follow Criton's advice to flee, but rather ours, which is this: stay here and continue your path to its end! ' Thereupon the wise man draws the only pos- sible conclusion for him:
'This is the voice I hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of flutes in the ears of Corybants. That voice prevents me from hearing any other. [. ••JI will follow the will of the gods. '1l2
To What Extent It Is Right for Jesus to Say: 'It Is Finished'
The absorption of external compulsion into the protagonist's own will is also staged powerfully in the Golgotha account in the gospels, and is all the more impressive because an execution in the Roman style is as far as one could imagine from the civilized setting of the Greek art of dying. As far as the subordination of the victim to external acts of compulsion is concerned, the Jesuan passion greatly surpasses that of Socrates, and yet it is there that the transformation of obligation into an inalienable ability was demonstrated to greatest consequence.
The scene of the final moments on the cross is itself loaded with exemplifying energies by the evangelists. While we are told in Mark
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CUR HOMO
a
iug the sponge, Luke 23:46 describes same scene
in latently ability-coloured transitional terms: 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit', et haec dicens expiravit. John 19:30 adds a phrase that belongs fully to the sphere of ability: tetetestai, rendered in Latin as consummatum est, meaning 'It is finished. ' As venerable as these translations may be, they scarcely do justice to the spirit of John's addition. For what John, the Greek apostle, undertakes at this point is no less than an athleticization of the saviour's death - which is why Jesus' last words should be reproduced more in the manner of 'Made it! ' or even 'Mission accomplished! ', even though such a turn of phrase would go against the conventional Christian view of the passion. The goal of the operation is unmistakable: Jesus must be transformed from the chance victim of wilful Judaeo-Roman justice into the fulfiller of a mission dictated by divine providence - and this can only be achieved if his suffering is completely 'sublated' as something foreseen, determined and desired. The same word with which Jesus breathes his last breath on the cross, tetelestai, is used by John shortly beforehand to posit the 'fulfilment' or completion of written predictions through the Golgothan documentation. The decisive point is that Jesus himself recognizes the 'fulfilment' of the mission on the cross and considers it completed (sciens Jesus quia omnia consummata sunt), so his final utterance does indeed contain a scriptural-messianic-athletic statement of achievement.
The acrobatic revolution of Christianity does not end with the conquest of death's passivity demonstrated on the cross. The triumph of ability over non-ability takes place between Good Friday evening and Easter morning - the most pathos-laden of all time spans. In this time, the slain Jesus carried out the most unheard-of act, that of akro bainein into hell- he walked through the underworld on tiptoe. With his resurrection 'on the third day', anti-gravitation celebrates its greatest victory: it is as if Christ, the first among God's acrobats, had got hold of a vertical rope that opened the way for him and his fol- lowers to an absolute vertical previously closed or only sensed mythi- cally. Through his saito vitale, the risen one breaks open the world form characterized by a belief in the supremacy of the fatal interrup- tion. From this moment on, all life is acrobatic, a dance on the rope of faith, which states that life itself is everlasting - and in an irrevocably proclaimed 'from now on'.
Klaus Berger remarks on the Athanasian theology of the evangelist: 'Staring at death is replaced by integration into the line of those who wander beyond death. For even physical death is exceeded; it is merely
203
CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
m sequence events. >113 an 'immate- part' in the course things: humanity had to wait a long time
the chance to hear such frivolities - or should one say, such delirious acquittals from the grip of finitude? As soon as such a doctrine is in the world, the psychopolitical ancien regime, the normal depression also known as realism, finds itself in palpable difficulty. The steady continuation of the anti-depressive campaign provokes history: it is subject to the law of the deceleration of the miracle. This results in what Alexander Kluge calls the immense 'time need of revolutions'. 1l4
Death Athletes
The athleticization of the Christian death struggle hinted at by John reaches one of its climaxes during the persecutions of Christians in southern Gaul, initiated by Marcus Aurelius and continued by his successors, which flared up more heavily again around AD 202, under Severus. At this time, the North African Tertullian wrote his con- solatory text Ad Martyros, a highly rhetorically stylized piece, which employs all the tools of ancient ascetology to make the prisoners in the dungeons of Vienne and Lyon aware of the parallels between their situation and that of soldiers before the battle - and even more that of athletes before the agon. The African reminds his Gaulish brothers and sisters, not without a degree of cynicism, that they should actu- ally count themselves lucky to be sitting in a dungeon and awaiting their execution in the arena, as the outside world is a far worse prison for a true Christian.
o blessed, consider yourselves as having been transferred from prison to what we may call a place of safety. lls
This robust comforter's expectations of the martyrs have already become sporting to the point where he expects nothing less than peak performances from his fellow believers. These faith athletes owe it to Christ to provide a great match for their executioners.
You are about to enter a noble contest [bonum agonem] in which the living God [Deus vivus] acts the part of superintendent [agonothetes] and the Holy Spirit is your trainer [xystarches], a contest whose crown is eternity, whose prize is angelic nature, citizenship [politia] in heaven and glory for ever and ever. And so your Master [epistates vester], Jesus Christ, who has anointed you with His Spirit and has brought you to this training ground [scamma], has resolved, before the day of the contest, to take you from a softer way of life to a harsher treat-
204
CUR HOMO
n rf'n a rn may be increased. [disciplinaj that they may apply themselves to the building up of their physical strength. [. . . J They are urged on, they are subjected to torturing toils, they are worn out [Coguntur, cruciantur, fatiganturl [. . . JAnd they do this, says the Apostle, to win a perishable crown. We who are about to win an eternal one recognize in the prison our training ground [palaestra], that we may be led forth to the actual contest before the seat of the presid- ing judge [ad stadium tribunalis] well practised [bene exercitati] in all
hardships. 116
Tertullian continues his reflections by reminding the martyrs that profane humans from heathen peoples have defied death and volun- tarily taken the most terrible ordeals upon themselves - like the phil- osopher Heraclitus, who reportedly covered himself in cow dung and burned to death, or Empedocles, who leapt into the flames of Mount Etna. In certain heathen cities, Tertullian tells them, young men have themselves flogged until they bleed, simply to demonstrate how much they are capable of enduring. If these people pay such a high price for mere glass beads, how much easier it should be for Christians to pay the price for the real pearl!
Admittedly, tortured Christians in Roman provincial theatres are anything but the ideal of the philosophical savoir mourir. Even in Tertullian's relentlessly drastic rhetoric, however, one can detect an echo of the agonal ethics which states that through askesis and harsh- ness (sklerotes) towards oneself, even immensely difficult feats can become easy.
Certum Est Quia Impossibile: Only the Impossible Is Certain
Tertullian's dauntless pep talk to the morituri of Lyon reveals the logic of Christian acrobatism with a clarity never attained again. It is the goodwill to carry out the strictly absurd, the boundlessly non- sensical, the completely impossible, that makes theology theology. This alone prevents it from gliding back into an ordinary ontology. In the kingdom of God, what appears in being as a discontinuity is pure continuity. If Christ is risen, then the world in which no one can rise from the dead is refuted. If we never see anyone resurrected here, however, we should switch locations and go where that which does not happen here does happen - being here is good, but being there is better. No self-respecting Christian, according to Tertullian, would
For too, are set apart more
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THE CONQUEST THE arena any
profane people
must epater la bourgeoisie. In the best fighting mood, the author put the matter in a nutshell in his treatise against the Marcionites, On the Flesh ofChrist:
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible. 117
This certum quia impossibile underlies practically everything Europeans have known about vertical matters for the last two thou- sand years. In Simone Weil's superbly exaggerated thesis 'La vie humaine est impossible' - human life is impossible1l8 - we still hear a certainty that is also born of impossibility. What we call the truth is the result of the quarrel between gravitation and anti-gravitation. The Holy Spirit invoked by Christians was that art of wisdom which ensured that the extravagance of martyrs was tempered by the memory of horizontal motifs in their lives. In this sense, the Holy Spirit was the first psychiatrist in Europe - and the early Christians its first patients. Its tasks include defusing religious immune paradoxes, which break open at the moment when the untethered witnesses of faith weaken their physical immunity because they are overly sure of their transcendent immunity.
What happened in the arenas of Roman mass culture, at any rate, was no slave revolt in morality, to recall Nietzsche's prob- lematic theorem once again - it was the outdoing of the gladiators by the martyrs. What took place here was the translation of the physical agones into an athletic insistence on the declaration ego sum Christianus - even if the declarers were thrown to those blond beasts so loved by the Romans, the lions. Even if one views martyrdom with suspicion, sensing in it the fundamentalist obstinacy of people who have nothing better to do with their lives than throw them away with the gesture of an irrefutable proof, one must admit that the acts of martyrdom in the era of persecution occasionally have some of the spirit of the original Christian acrobatism. In some old accounts of suffering one can still sense that will to cross over which people had begun to practise in the training camps of the higher life. The will to believe was not yet equated with the will to worldly success, as found in the Puritan varieties of Protestantism and in the most recent metamorphoses of 'American religion'. 119 Its symptom was a boister- ous transvitalism. Wherever it was able to assert itself, the depressive
206
to possible.
CUR
supremacy
worst It was the in anti-gravitation
tragedy, and stretched the rope so tautly between the two states of life that many formed the daredevil plan of venturing a crossing.
Even the fallen tightrope walker from the prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra profited from the tension between the rope ends on this side and the other side. And, although the more recent doctrine states that there is nothing to support life on the shore beyond, one still finds ropes in immanence with sufficient tension to carry the steps of those who cross. It almost looks as though one 'were walking on nothing but air'. They form a support that lacks all qualities of a solid ground - 'and yet it really is possible to walk on it'. 120 Every step on the rope has to be practised ten thousand times, and yet every step up there must be taken as if it were the first. Whoever trains for the rope subjects themselves to a paideia that removes the foundation of all ground habits. Walking on the rope means gathering all that has been in the present. Only then can the imperative 'You must change your life! ' be transformed into daily sequences of exercises. Acrobatic existence de-trivializes life by placing repetition in the service of the unrepeatable. It transforms all steps into first steps, because each one could be the last. It knows only one ethical action: the superversion of all circumstances through the conquest of the improbable.
207
II Exaggeration Procedures
A fervent and diligent man is ready for all things.
It is greater work to resist vices and passions than to sweat in physical
toil. [. . . ]
Watch over yourself, arouse yourself, warn yourself [. . . J.
The more violence you do to yourself, the more progress you will make.
Thomas aKempis, The Imitation of Christ
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, Proverbs ofHell
BACKDROP
Retreats into Unusualness
If one had to summarize the main difference between the modern and ancient worlds and define the two states of the world in the same sentence, it would have to be the following: the modern era is the one that brought about the greatest mobilization of human powers for the sake of work and production, while all those life forms in which the utmost mobilization took place in the name of practice and perfec- tion are ancient. This means that the 'Middle Ages' in Europe, con- trary to their name, do not form an autonomous intermediate phase between antiquity and modernity but rather an unmistakable part of antiquity, even though, in superficial terms, their Christian colour- ing could make them seem post- or even anti-ancient. Because the Christian Middle Ages were far more an era of practice than work, there is no doubt about their status as belonging to the ancient regime from an activity-theoretical perspective. Living in antiquity and not believing in the priority of work or economic life - these are simply two formulations of the same state of affairs. Even the Benedictine labora, which some have occasionally sought to misconstrue as a con- cession to the spirit of work wrested from prayer, actually meant no more than an extension of meditative practice to the material use of one's hands. No monk could grasp the concept of work in the newer sense of the word as long as the monastic rule ensured the symmetry between orare and laborare. Furthermore, one should know that the emphasis on labora in the Benedictine Rule (which, according to tra- dition, came into being upon the founding of the monastery of Monte Cassino between 525 and 529) was a reaction to centuries of observ- ing monastic pathologies: while the moderns compensate for their work-related illnesses with health cures and holidays, monks used work to remedy their contemplation-related ailments.
211
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
The thesis that antiquity was characterized in practical terms by exercise and modernity by work posits both an opposition and an inner connection between the worlds of practice and work, of per- fection and production. This gives the concept of a renaissance a significantly altered meaning. If a phenomenon such as the rebirth of antiquity in a late Christian or post-Christian, or rather a post-work, world genuinely exists, it should make itself felt in the revitalization of the motifs of the practising life. There is no lack of indications for this. What characterizes both regimes is their capacity to inte- grate human powers into effort programmes on the grandest scale; what separates them is the radically divergent orientation of their respective mobilizations. In the one case the energies awakened are completely subordinated to the primacy of the object or product, ultimately even to the abstract product known as profit, or to the aes- thetic fetish, which is exhibited and collected as a 'work'. In the other case, all powers flow into the intensification of the practising subject, which progresses to ever higher levels of a purely performative mode of being in the course of the exercises. What was once called the vita contemplativa to contrast it with the vita activa is, in fact, a vita per- formativa. In its own way, it is as active as the most active life. This does not, however, express itself in the mode of political action that Hannah Arendt, following the trail of Aristotle, wanted to see at the forefront of active life forms,l nor in that of work, production and economy, but rather in the sense of an assimilation by the never-tiring universal or divine being-nothing, which does and suffers more than any finite creature would be capable of doing or suffering. Like those creatures, however, it knows a form of self-enclosed, fulfilling and indestructible calm that, going on the accounts of initiates, in no way resembles the profane calm of exhaustion.
It is no coincidence, of course, that the rediscovery of the prac- tising mode of life began at the very moment when the idolization of work (extending to the imperial German ethos of 'We are all workers') reached its climax. I am speaking here of the last third of the nineteenth century, for which I earlier suggested such ciphers as 'athletic renaissance' and 'de-spiritualization of asceticisms'. These two phrases refer to tendencies that point beyond the era of produc- tivism. Since practice as an activity type - together with aesthetic play - stepped out of the shadow of work, a new ecosystem of activities has been developing in which the absolute precedence of product value is revised in favour of practice values, performance values and experiential values.
No one can be credible as a contemporary today, then, unless
212
BACKDROP
'vU0;~'U IS
Thus the sports has developed into a
with hundreds of secondary worlds, in which self-referential motion, useless play, superfluous exertion and simulated fights celebrate their existence somewhat wilfully, in the clearest possible contrast to the utilitarian objectivism of the working world - no matter how often a dull-witted sociology might claim that sport is merely a training camp for the factory and a preparation for the capitalist ideology of competition. One must admit, however, that those parts of the sporting world closest to the 'circus' in the ancient sense, especially in the vicinity of the Olympic industry and in the professional seg- ments of football and cycling, have meanwhile become subject to a result fetishism that absolutely rivals the compulsive product-oriented thinking of the economic sphere. But what does that mean if, on the other hand, statistics show that in those sports there are ten thousand amateurs or more for every professional?
The tendency towards an exhibition of self-referentially practising acts articulates itself even more clearly in the art scene of the previ- ous century: aesthetic modernity is the era in which the performa- tive separates from the procedures and aims of the working world, erecting countless stages for completely autonomous presentations. The emancipation of art from its work-shaped nature has long since reached the point - in system-immanent terms too - at which the work is merged once more with the self-referential process of practis- ing, or rather with a change in the shape of creative energies. It often no longer stands in the world as an autonomous result, eternally severed from its conditions of birth and transposed to the sphere of pure objectification through the label 'finished', but rather as a prac- tice crystal frozen in the moment - an indication of a drift from one performative state to the next.
On the other hand, such great artists as Rodin have spoken of their activity of constant practising, albeit always geared towards the con- crete product, as the highest form of 'work' - toujours travailler - as if to make it clear that art, despite its self-referentiality, is the most serious and selfless of matters. In doing so they revealed, in their own way, a secret among the old breed of craftsmen and fetish makers, namely that a well-made object is always imbued with the 'soul' of its maker, while he can only master his craft if he is constantly attentive to the voices of the material.
Alongside this, the countless psychotherapeutic systems that unfolded in the course of the twentieth century brought the ancient methods of practising introspection to life again, normally without
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
him,
people but rather meditators or 'regurgitators' initiated the return
from the logic of work to the exercise. When Foucault, by contrast, brought the ancient discourse around 'self-concern' back into the contemporary discussion around 1980, this was a signal to conclude the era of therapeutic ideologies. What has been on the agenda since then is the retrieval of a generalized practice consciousness from the sources of ancient philosophy and modern artistic and bodily praxis. Here and there, people are beginning to comprehend that the thera- peutism of the twentieth century was itself only the cloak for a shift of tendency with epochal traits. Let us recall: the key psychoanalyti- cal term 'work through' is based on the discreet adoption of a Stoic practice principle, namely turning a notion or an affect this way and that in meditation, known in the Greek terminology of the school as anapolein or anap6leisis and in Latin as in animo versare. It is char- acteristic of the modern zeitgeist that sport and meditation are also often presented as 'work'.
The most far-reaching subversion of the faith in work and produc- tion took place on its own terrain when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union prescribed a course of modernization for the still largely agrarian economy of the former Tsarist empire after the October Revolution of 1917. In the course of this upheaval, the motivational foundations for modern employment, the obligation to pay debts in the credit system of property economy and the personal striving for prosperity were so profoundly wrecked that nothing resembling an efficient working culture in the modern sense was able to develop in the entire area. As the criterion of personal advantage was sus- pended a priori, the only options for working Soviets were either the attitude of the voluntary record producer or the self-ironic robot - in both cases, the predication of work on the primacy of the result was undermined and transformed into a more or less self-referential exercise. Essentially, the Soviet economy was an amalgam of a feudal temple economy in which a cynical state clergy absorbed the surplus product and a Gurdjieff group: it is well known that participants in such gatherings work day and night, to the point of exhaustion, on tasks assigned by the group leader, only to witness the product then being destroyed before their eyes - supposedly to further their inner ability to let go. In that sense, we can say that communism carried out a quasi-spiritual exercise with its populations that used the pretext of work while reducing work to absurdity: it exhausted the lives of three generations for the production of a political ornament
214
BACKDROP
one
that are destined to be washed away completion.
In this section, I will reconstruct various defining traits of the explic- itly practising life. Considering the immensity of the material one would have to address here, I will have to content myself with outlines and anecdotal colourings. Following the course taken by the matter itself, I will begin with the separation - visible since antiquity - of the practising from the social continuum of life, and their fixation within an eccentricity requiring systematic consolidation in relation to their previous existence dictated by group pressures and organic inertias. This withdrawal from the collective identity - the practical matrix of every intellectual epochi - is one characteristic of the ascetic modus vivendi stylized in an endearing exaggeration by Helmuth Plessner, who created the doctrine of man's 'eccentric positionality', into a general trait of the human condition - as if all individuals stood beside themselves a priori and had always lived their lives in front of the mirror like actors of everyday life, natural hysterics or public relations managers. One should remember, however, that mirrors, though in use over two thousand years ago in rare cases, only gained wider distribution some two hundred years ago; when the mirror market finally reached saturation a hundred years ago, its omnipres- ence evoked a certain discreet eccentricity in the self-relationships of all men and women. They seduce their users into believing that they had always been reflexively 'beside themselves', whereas, from a his- torical perspective, mirrors only began to play their part as central egotechnic media of the modern, self-image-dependent human truly unmistakably very recently.
In the next section, I will show in what way the inner world of the practising is affected by ideal model forces, and also how the intui- tion of a distant, yet authoritative perfection leads to the build-up of strong vertical tensions. This produces a realm of idea-driven upswings and subtle attractors of which the moderns, generally speaking, only know as much as becomes visible through the carica- tures circulating under the heading 'narcissism'. It yields insights into the temporal forms of an existence subject to the pull of perfection- oriented thinking. The temporal structure of being-unto-completion, whether in its Old European or Asian variations, can provide infor- mation about the power of perfectionism without which one cannot
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
After various historical and systematic remarks on the indispensable figure of the trainer, which, depending on one's region, tradition or whims, is referred to as a master, guru, father, healer, genius, demon, teacher or classic, I shall consider anew the theologically well-examined phenomenon of conversions in order to show how the practising are not infrequently confronted with the difficulty of having to continue their work with a different trainer. Here it tran- spires that many who change subjects or levels had begun training with a wrongly formatted 'god', one that was too unsuccessful - like Wotan, who was eventually outstripped by Christ - or too serious, as could be observed in the modern transition from the eternally suffering Christ to cheerful Fortuna. We shall see why a dismissed trainer always has a good chance of finding a second life in the spir- itual household of their former trainee as an idol, demon or cattivo maestro. This necessitates a revision in the supreme discipline of the sociology of religion, the theory of conversions. I would like to ques- tion the established model of conversion (even if I do not subscribe to Oswald Spengler's thesis that genuine conversions do not exist) by showing that true conversion occurs only upon entering an advanced- civilized discipline of the practising life (which I call secession), while a mere change of discipline or confession - like Paul's leap from Jewish zealotry to apostolic devotion - does not display true conver- sion character.
216
-6-
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
On the Separation of the Practising and Their Soliloquies
Uprooting from the First Life: Spiritual Secessionism
The step into the practising life takes place through ethical distinc- tion. 2 This distinction is made by anyone who dares or is called upon to step out of the river of life and take up residence on the shore. The leaver cultivates a battle-ready attention to their own interior and retains a hostile suspicion towards the new exterior, which had previously stood for the surrounding world as such. All increases of a mental or bodily kind begin with a secession from the ordinary. This is usually accompanied by a forceful rejection of the past - not infrequently assisted by such affects as disgust, regret and complete rejection of the earlier mode of being. What people today, with a reverent turn of phrase, often call 'spirituality' is initially more like a holy perversion than a generally respectable inner praxis. The original awe of spiritual 'values' is always infused with a fear of perversion and a horror in the face of the mysteries of the unnatural, regardless of whether one is dealing with the monstrous performances of Indian fakirs, the petrifaction exercises of the Stoics or the ascension exer- cises of Christian extremists. If even an author as sympathetic towards the Stoa as Horace remarks that Epictetus was atrox - dreadful, gruesome - because of his severity, this tells us more about the climate of ancient spirituality than any esoteric warbling. Did Epictetus not teach, in fact, that when one kisses one's child, one should inwardly call out to it 'You will die tomorrow' in order to train letting go, and offset a pleasant notion with an unpleasant counter-notion? 3 We hear the same hardness in the speeches of Buddha, who encapsulated monastic perfection as follows:
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
He who not for who no who controls who fixed in the heart of whom the funda- mental evils are extinguished, who has thrown hatred from him: him I
a Brahman. 4
To understand the depth of the rupture expressed in the words of the awakened, one must remember that only a few generations earlier, the Brahman's redemption depended entirely on his relatives, or more pre- cisely on his paternal lineage and on the sacrificial arts cultivated by his family. One must therefore always take into account that the extremism found among Stoics, early Christians, Tantrics, Buddhists and other despisers of probability is not an illegitimate supplement invented later by morbid agitators in order to sour an essentially healthy and mild doctrine; in every case, it comes from the sources themselves.
To hear the original language of the radical secession dynamic, it is sufficient to look up Matthew 10:37:
'Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. '
This is the locus classicus of aggressive vertical language in the Western hemisphere, a performative flash of lightning from a sky that causes apocalypses and forces farewells. The economic basis for the break with the first life is revealed in a dialogue recounted in Mark 10:28-30:
Peter said to him, 'We have left everything to follow you! '
'I tell you the truth,' Jesus replied, 'no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much. '
The uprooting must be practised on this foundation until the adept understands that the triviality of earlier life is the most disgusting heresy; reality as such is a plague. Faith in this plague and its govern- ing principle constitutes an immersion in miasma.
Though this be monstrous, yet there is method in it: the seces- sionism of the great transformative ethical systems seeks to assert once and for all that there is no salvation in the first life.
The initial ties transpire as shackles that bind the souls to irredeemable circum- stances. Once the region of possession, fallenness and hopelessness is uncovered, the exorcism of those spirits must stop at nothing. For the radicals, it is not enough to abandon one's village, fields and nets; one's old physical and mental self must also be left behind. For Patanjali, the mythical author of the Yoga Sutras, who is often identi-
218
ECCENTRICITY
same name
BC, ascetic (tapas) preceding evoke a
curative disgust in the contemplator at their own body, urging them to interrupt any contact with the other bodies. s As soon as I see the world as a slough of filth, I am already halfway along the path into the open. The attitude of the correctly practising individual in relation to their earlier existence is described by Hindus as vairagya, which translates as 'detachment' and refers to a mildly disgusted indiffer- ence towards everyday pleasures and concerns.
Graeeo-Roman Stoicism also knows and praises the break with the attachments and aversions of the first life - whoever wants to grow a thick skin to defend against fate must first wean themselves from their natural preference for the pleasant. Nietzsche remarks on this in a quietly parodying tone:
The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to become ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it. 6
Even more importantly than the indifference of the stomach, the aim of Stoic practice is the indifference of the eyes to random sights, of the ears to random sounds and of the spirit to random notions - that extends, as Marcus Aurelius notes in his cautionary aphorisms To Himself, to a fundamental refusal to be surprised by anything.
How ridiculous and how much of a stranger in the universe is he who is surprised at anything which happens in his life. 7
In this maxim, cold-blooded as it was intended to sound, we see a hint of the Stoic's anthropotechnic trick: in his deliberate equation of surprises and injuries, his concern is to immunize himself against the former and simultaneously acquire the necessary level of resistance to the latter.
The Splitting of the Entity through the Crusade Against the Ordinary
Let us reiterate: entering ethical thought means making a difference with one's very own existence that no one had previously made. If there were an accompanying speech act, it would be: '1 herewith exit ordinary reality. ' Secession from the habitual world as the first ethical operation introduces an unknown division into the world. It not only
219
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
humanity
unknowing, who remain in
also inevitably implies a declaration of war by former on the latter. This results in the bloodless war of those who return as authorized teachers against all others, who now learn that they are students - and mostly poor students, lost students, even hopeless cases, unaware that they are playing with damnation: people of yesterday, from a time before the discovery of the great difference. At the same time, all cul- tures that experienced the outbreak of such a logical-ethical civil war have no shortage of mediators seeking to bridge the rupture. They bring those humiliated by the logos, insulted by the Noble Truths and excluded from the curative exercises closer to the party of attackers through sentimental, universalistic formulas of reconciliation - indeed, perhaps the 'great' religions, with their clerical apparatuses, their networks of organized escapism and their world-friendly schools, clinics and welfare services, are nothing but businesses for softening the hurtful overloads let loose by their founders. Wherever universal- isms appear, their grand gestures of embrace provide more or less deceptive reparations for the attack of the radicals. The achievements of minorities, they regularly claim, are not privileges for the few but rather conquests for all. The truth is that universalism can never bring about more than the reformatting of an elect group. Sooner or later, this group expands and assembles a larger ring of new converts and sympathizers around the hard core. It is on such peripheries that the dreams of absolute inclusivity flourish. Viewed as a whole, abstract universalism - like 'man' in Sartre's definition - remains a futile passion, a consolation to the untrained and a phantom to the trained.
Going through with the secession means splitting the world. The operator is the one who, by leaving, cuts the world's surface into two initially irreconcilable regions: the zone of the leavers and that of the stayers. Through this cut, both sides learn first of all that the world, which previously seemed to be common to all people, a many-headed but inseparable and unconfrontable unity, is in truth a separable and confrontable phenomenon. The withdrawal of the ascetic is the knife that makes the cut in the continuum. From that point, the world appears in a completely new light - indeed, perhaps one can only posit the existence of a 'world', in the sense of moral-cosmic reaches for the whole that are coded in advanced-civilized terms, once it has been divided by the new class of deniers and reconstituted at a higher level. The whole, previously a confused multiplicity of forces with a vague basis for unity, now becomes a strained synthesis of the unequal parts produced by the cut. What Heidegger called the 'age
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FIRST ECCENTRICITY
of the world picture' does not begin only with the modern globes and atlases, but already with the visions of cosmos and empire in the Axial Age. A world from which the ethically best flee can no longer be a maternal container for all life forms. Owing to the exodus of the ascetics, meditators and thinkers, it becomes the site of a drama that fundamentally questions its ability to house ethically aroused inhabitants sufficiently: what is this world if the strongest statement about it is a withdrawal from it? The great world theatre deals with the duel between the secessionists and the settled, those who flee from the world and those who remain-in-the-world. Where there is theatre, however, the figure of the observer appears on the scene. If all the world becomes a stage, it is because there are secessionists who claim to be only visitors here, not participants. Pure theory is the reviewing of the world by reserved visitors. Its appearance creates an ethical challenge to the 'prevailing' through an observation from a quasi-transcendental position: these observers seek to describe from the 'edge of the world' what is the case in this amazing venue.
Spaces of Retreat for the Practising
With these observations, I am hinting at a spiritual form of spatial planning that negotiates over deeper borders than those which can be addressed by any geopolitics. The spaces created by the secessionists - we can think for the time being of the hermitages, the monasteries, the academies and other places of ascetic-meditative and philosophical retreat - would, in the better days of cultural Marxism, undoubtedly have been termed mundane bases of the 'spirit of utopia'. As utopias in the precise sense of the word are only narratively evoked images of better worlds that do not exist anywhere in the real world, however, this term is unsuitable to characterize the localities created via seces- sion. Secession produces real spaces. It sets up borders behind which a genuinely different mode of being dictates its will.
Wherever secessionists dwell, the rules of actually existing surreal- ism apply. A monastery, whether at the foot of the Himalayas or on the outskirts of the Nitrian Desert, a few days' walk south of Alexandria, has nothing in common with a dreamt island in the Atlantic Ocean - it is a concrete biotope, populated by heavily tanned surrealists who follow a strict regime. The same applies to the caves of the Egyptian hermits, the forest and mountain refuges of the Indian sannyasins, as well as all other bases of meditative retreat or ascetic death to the world - in paradoxical fashion, even to the airy camps of the Syrian
221
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
Stylites, who, on platforms on the tips of their sacred pillars, staged charades lasting years that were in line with the expression 'to reach for the heavens'. It was a theatre of world-contempt before the eyes of the miracle-hungry masses, who poured from the cities to the desert ruins so that they would finally see something they could not believe.
It therefore seems more plausible to describe the space-forming results of the ethical secession with a term like 'heterotopia', which was coined by Foucault in a little-known lecture he gave in 1967 to an audience of architects, entitled 'Des espaces autres' [Of Other Spaces]. For him, heterotopias are spatial creations of an 'other place' that belong to the network of sites (emplacements) in a particular culture, yet at the same time are not part of the trivial continuum because their inner rules are stubbornly autonomous, often running counter to the logic of the whole. He names cemeteries, monasteries, libraries, high-class brothels, cinemas, colonies and ships as exam- ples of heterotopias. One could easily extend the list by adding such phenomena as sports venues, holiday islands, places of pilgrimage, miracle courts, car parks8 and different kinds of no-go areas. Among the heterotopian spatial inventions of the late twentieth century, the space station is probably one of the most important innovations - it would, furthermore, be easy to show that a specific form of astronaut spirituality has developed there whose repercussions on the inhabit- ants of the earth's surface have yet to be studied. 9
The first real heterotopia is the spatial type that, building on the Heraclitean image of the river into which one never steps twice, I have called the shore. Places with shore qualities can be projected onto all corners of the inhabited earth - de facto, they come about wherever those practising parties who have resolved to secede step out of the river of habits. They constitute the first bridgeheads of eccentricity. Where the flight from the centre declared itself affirmatively, the great theories about the necessity of uprooting for redemption were born, such as the Buddhist doctrine of leaving one's house or the Christian ethos of pilgrimage. In a sutra of the Digha Nikaya (the 'Collection of Longer Discourses'), we are told of Buddha:
But if he go forth from the household life into the houseless state, then he will become a Buddha who removes the veil from the eyes of the world. 10
As far as the Christian topoi of life as peregrinatio and the believer as Homo viator are concerned, these are sufficiently well known today (as well as being refreshed and having their spiritual-touristic value increased by the current pilgrimage trend) for it to be sufficient to
222
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
status quo.
such figures is their secessionist point: as salva- tion is impossible to find in the first socialization, possessed by the old
habitus and living under the idols of the tribe, tradition and theatre - in short, in the life under the spell of the beginnings - whoever realizes this must break with their old solidarities.
Houselessness and pilgrim existence create eccentric spaces through escape; the house-leaver, the pilgrim and the world-stranger con- stantly carry their own desert, their hermitage, their alibi around with them. A stay at the scene of the crime of ordinary life is no longer an option for these noble evaders. Whoever always has their escape space around them, on the other hand, no longer needs to leave physi- cally. The metaphorization of the desert made it possible to temper the extremism of the first secessionaries and introduce a bourgeois variety of retreat for everyman. This trend was supported by the body of edifying literature, especially after the replacement of the weighty codices with the small book, which permitted readers from the four- teenth century onwards to keep their pocket desert to hand wherever they went. 11 In fact, the literary media of the early Modern Age in Europe made a strong practice medium available to laypersons. Open a book, read a line, and your one-minute anachoresis has been real- ized. For years, the book has served the contemplative as a vehicle for withdrawal 'to the country home of the self' . 12
What Helmuth Plessner ascribes to 'man' in general, namely the 'eccentric positionality' of his self-relation, is in reality an effect of the use of egotechnic media in the Modern Age - media which, in the course of a few centuries, equipped virtually every individual with the necessary tools for a mild chronic being-outside-themselves: the prayer formula, the confessional mirror, the novel, the diary, the portrait, the photograph, newspapers and radio media, and not least mirrors on all sides. Provided with this equipment for self-techniques, individuals developed a second attitude towards their first position almost unnoticed. Barely any of the moderns who assert the human right for 'one's own space' are aware of the origin of this demand in a revision of social topology from the distant past.
The Deeper Distinction: Self-Acquisition and World- Relinqu ishment
Nonetheless, the previous references to the division of the world through ethical-ascetic secession prove unsatisfactory for a
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
original
point is the incontestable observation that a series
historically far-reaching separation movements began in a number of advanced civilizations some three thousand years ago; even so, these observations are not adequate to highlight the agent of secession with sufficient clarity. This inadequacy has a methodological reason: it is impossible to explain from a sociological perspective alone how such a split could come about. Essentially, the motor of secessionary events remains untraceable from the outside. Its logical source only becomes evident if one reconstructs the opposition between the ascetics and the rest of the world according to the criteria of an ontological analysis. Only thus can one clarify how the totality of what exists was subject to something resembling a local government reorganization during which the competencies of 'man' for himself and the other things were radically redistributed. Yes, one can say that 'man' emerged from this cosmic reform, and was only thus created as the carrier of a chance at salvation in the first place. 'Man' comes about from the small minority of ascetic extremists who step out from the crowd and claim that they are actually everyone.
The division of the world by the secessionaries thus presupposes a deeper distinction; only through this distinction was the separation of those practising elsewhere from those continuing in the old place able to take on its full radicality. This distinction can be compared to cutting out a figure from a larger picture - or punching a piece of a certain shape out of some rolled-out dough. The primordial difference does indeed result from a form of subtraction where the thinking and practising individual removes themselves from their first surround- ings ethically, logically and ontologically; were this not the case, they could not want to distance themselves physically and affectively too. This self-extraction is based on the distinction between two radically different spheres of influence in the existent: the sphere of influence of my own powers and the sphere of influence of all other powers. At first glance, this must result in a radically asymmetrical, almost self- annihilating division, as my power and my significance, compared to that of all other spheres and powers, are virtually zero.
On the other hand, this distinction assigns a significance to me - though not necessarily a power - that is virtually infinite, because, for the first time, my own sphere is placed as a counterweight to the sphere of the non-own, very much as if to convince me to set myself and what is mine again 'the rest of the world'. Through the ethical division, the minuteness of the own is placed in the difficult situa- tion of having to balance out the monstrous block of the non-own.
224
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
Whatever one chooses to call this event - the invention of the inner human, the entrance into the inner-world illusion, the doubling of the world through introjection, the birth of psychologism from the spirit of the exterior's reification, the meta-cosmic revolution of the soul or the triumph of higher anthropotechnics - its concrete meaning is the invention of the individual through the isolating emphasis of its sphere of influence and experience from that of all other world facts. I shall use the word 'subject' for the agent that cuts itself out and the term 'subjectivism' for the cutting-out as such, without burdening them with loans from German Idealism or memories of Heidegger's critique of modern 'subjectivism'. It is sufficient to take a 'subject', as explained above, as the carrier of exercise sequences. The basic subject-forming exercise of which I will speak in the following is clearly none other than the methodically performed withdrawal from the complex of shared situations one calls 'life' or 'the world'. From now on, 'being in the world' will mean suum tantum curare: to care for what is one's own and nothing else, against all dissipation into the non-own.
By separating my power and its jurisdiction from all other powers and competencies, I open up a narrowly defined sphere of influence in which my ability, my wanting, but above all my mission to shape my own existence ascend, as it were, to autonomous rule. The critical dis- tinction that enables this promotion made its first explicit appearance on Western soil among the Stoics, who, in a perpetual exercise, put all their energy into separating the things that depend on us from those that do not. Own or non-own - this is the question that provides the sharp-edged canon, the yardstick for measuring all circumstances. This cut divides the universe into two areas, from which the opera- tor naturally only chooses their own half, the one that is decisive for themselves. That is why the typical axioms of the Stoics begin with 'It is in your power . . . '
One notorious passage from Epictetus' practice instructions recounts how an apprentice cuts himself out of the world in the workshop of self-acquisition and uncouples himself from the hubbub of daily affairs through conscious de-participation:
As soon as you go out in the morning, examine every man whom you see, every man whom you hear, answer as to a question, What have you seen? A handsome man or woman? Apply the rule. Is this independent of the will, or dependent? Independent. Take it away! What have you seen? A man lamenting over the death of a child. Apply the rule. Death is a thing independent of the will. Take it away! Has the proconsul met you? Apply the rule. What kind of a thing is a proconsul's office? Independent of the will or dependent on it? Independent. Take this
225
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
away also; it does not stand examination; cast it away; it is nothing to you!
If we practised this and exercised ourselves in it daily from morning to night, something indeed would be done. But now we are forthwith caught half asleep by every appearance. 13
'Take it away! ' is the central maxim of the first Methodism. Anthropotechnic work on oneself begins with the evacuation of the interior through a removal of the non-own. We now see what is meant by the image of the ontological 'local government reorganiza- tion' used above: it shows the turn towards that which depends on me and the turn away from everything else. The student of wisdom starts from the intuition that their chance is based on the separation of the two regions of being. The clear distinction between them takes on the greatest significance for what they do or do not do in any given situation.
The first is the region of the own; the Latin Platonists termed it the realm of the 'inner human', and claimed that only there was the truth at home: in interiore homine habitat veritas,14 usually under exclusion of one's own body, while the yogis and gymnosophists of the East incorporated it into the interior. Within my enclave, there is nothing to which I can be indifferent, as I bear responsibility for everything here, down to the smallest details; for me, it is simply a matter of not desiring anything I cannot have and not avoiding any- thing that is meant for me.
The second area encompasses the entire rest of the world, which is suddenly known as the outside, the saeculum, and faces me like an exile populated by random things. What begins thus is the long walk of the soul through an 'outside world' of which no one quite understands any longer why it has receded into the outlandish - namely, because of the ontological separation of the non-own and the congealment of the previously shared encompassing situation into an aggregate of objects that have now become distant and indifferent. In truth, the protagonists of the great secession are doing everything to alienate the world; but they remain incapable of understanding how their own contributions ensure that, in the panorama of sensory per- ception, the 'objects' emerge and an alien entity known as the 'outside world' comes about through the sum of these objects. 1s Marcus Aurelius tell us: 'Matters outside our doors stand there by themselves neither knowing nor telling us anything about themselves. '16 Subject to poor sensuality and meagre materiality, the 'external' truly has
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FIRST ECCENTRICITY
no to stop at entrance to it is good now is serving as an pole to flight and contempt (anachoresis, fuga saeculi, contemptus mundi) - at most, it becomes an object of disintegrative and disenchanting investigations. Perhaps in a later order of things, when the ideal of withdrawal moves to the second row, it will be 'rediscovered' as the target area for care, mission and spiritual conquest. The decisive aspect is that the increas- ing insignificance of the exterior following from the secessionary distinction releases an incredible surplus of self-referentiality in the individual. Channelling this surplus into occupational programmes is the purpose of existence in ethical separation. Indeed: once the outside world has been separated from me and has become distant, I find myself alone and discover myself as a never-ending task.
Birth of the Individual from the Spirit of Recession
What I am discussing here using the category of secession is thus founded on an inner act that, for want of a better term, I shall call 'recession'. This first of all means the withdrawal of each person from the mode of being that is immersed in the riverbed of worldly matters - or, to take up the oft-invoked image once again, an exit from the river of life to take up a position on the shore. Only the recessive self-insulation can give rise to the behavioural complex that Foucault, following on from the Stoic principle of cura sui, calls 'concern for oneself' (souci de soil. This can only develop if the object of concern, the self, has already stepped out of the situational river of social life and established itself as a region sui generis. Where retreat to the self is carried out - whether the practising person burns the bridges behind them, as monks of every kind usually do, or settles into the everyday back-and-forth between self-pole and world-pole, as char- acterizes the sages of the Stoic type - it reinforces the emergence of an enclave in the existent which, remaining within the metaphor, I shall call 'shore subjectivity'.
For millennia, this subjectivity has been fighting from its precari- ous position on the shore of the alienated river for a language that is suited to its confusing self-experience. Its attempts at articulation fluctuate between extremes: spiritual-heroic overcompensation on the one side, where the foreignness of the outside world is meant to be conquered through an alliance between the inner and the divine - as demonstrated by Heraclitus in his triumphant moments and by Indian thinkers during the Upanishad period - and the flight to contrition
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
111 flver
only by a guilt; is the path first trodden by early Judaism before Christianity expanded it into an avenue. Subjectivity withdrawn into itself comes closest to the truth about its situation when it asks questions that seek to get to the bottom of its difficulty in dealing with a whole that has frozen into complexes of external facts. Thus Smen Kierkegaard alias Constantin Constantius, representing a procession of shore subjects from several
millennia, asks:
Where am I? What is the 'world'? What does this word mean? Who has duped me into the whole thing, and now leaves me standing there? 17
The Self in the Enclave
In recession to themselves, humans develop a form of enclave sub- jectivity in which they are primarily and constantly concerned with themselves and their inner conditions. Each human transforms them- selves into a small state for whose inhabitants they must find the right constitution. No one expressed the recession imperative, which calls upon the living to govern their own lives, as clearly as Marcus Aurelius:
From now on keep in mind the retreat into this little territory within yourself. Avoid spasms and tensions above al1. 18
This pinpoints the origin of all imperatives of self-collection, without which the subjectivity of advanced civilization, in so far as it is a product of concentration, could never have assumed its familiar manifestations. At the same time, it is in the nature of things that the micropolis which I am will have to make do with an interim govern- ment for a long time. This polis, after all, is usually taken over by its sale inhabitant in a ruined, almost ungovernable state. Spirituality begins with clean-up work in an inner failed state, a failed soul - it was not by chance that the young Gautama, the later Buddha, began his path to asceticism when he came into contact with the suffering in the world and his youthful worldview crumbled. Or was this collapse merely a pious fiction, and was the root of the later enlightened one's secession in fact the ascetic revolt against the idiocy of the military nobility's way of life? 19
Anyone who considers a modern account more credible than an ancient legend can read how Bernard Enginger (1923-2007), a
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FIRST
young
been morally
concentration camp, found a new spiritual composure through his encounter with Sri Aurobindo and the 'mother' (Mira Richard) - as well as a second name: Satprem. Whoever joins the path of philo- sophical practice, or Dharma, or Christian exercitationes spirituales, does so not in full possession of their self-control, but because they realize a lack thereof - and at once in the hope, supported by actual role models, of one day mastering the art of self-governance (enk- rateia). The Hindu title swami (from Sanskrit svami, 'own' or 'self'; compare Latin suus), which can belong to a chief in profane contexts, refers in its spiritual meaning to the 'master over oneself', the ascetic, who has achieved complete control over his own powers on the path of practice.
In the Microclimate of the Practising Life
Enclaved subjectivity thus constitutes itself as a provisional state in which self-concern comes to power. The practising life form is like an inner protectorate with a temporary government and an introspective supervisory authority. In practical terms, this modus vivendi can only be established through an ascetic pact with a teacher whom one sup- poses already to have achieved ethical reform. 2o In order to keep up the enclaved state, a constant guarding of borders and daily checks for infiltrations from the outside are indispensable. The most dif- ficult part of the withdrawn subject's task is actually to interrupt the stream of information that joins the practising person to their former environment. There are two weak points that must be kept in mind especially here, and present a constant danger: firstly sensory open- ings, and secondly language connections, to the social environment. Without a strict regulation of both crisis areas, any attempt at a vita contemplativa is doomed from the start. On the subject of sensory contacts, more or less all systems of contemplation show how they work at the interruption of the perceptual continuum - they close the visual channels in particular (to say nothing of oral or tactile ones), and prescribe a systematic withdrawal of the practising person from all sensory fronts until complete disaffection has been achieved.
This is where Horace's nil admirarj21 has its basis in life, assuming that life and exercitatio are already synonymous. Seneca occasionally mentions that with time, the sight of an execution should leave us as indifferent as a view of an unprepossessing landscape. Images like the
229
his in a German
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
or 'inner statue', were to
with notions of goals
able to follow on from such advice on progressive apathy. Without a certain acquired heartlessness, spiritual attitudes like apathy, peace of mind or detachment cannot be realized. The ethics of advanced civilizations produces an artificial inhumanity, resulting in an equally artificial benevolence being summoned up to compensate for it. 22
An even more important factor is the removal of the subject from the language stream of the first society, which would keep it shackled to the foreign rule of everyday notions and affects even more firmly than the sensory channels do. That is why all practice communities develop symbolically ventilated microclimates in which the ascetics, meditators and thinkers hear and learn fundamentally different things from those they hear in the village square, the forum or the family. This does not mean that a secret language always needs to develop because of recession, though there is no shortage of such ideas in many spiritual subcultures. 23 Even where the spiritual teachers use the people's language with enlightened simplicity - as is said of Buddha or Jesus - there is an unmistakable tendency towards the development of closed language game circles.
The Rejection of Self-Concern: Consistent Fatalism
The recessive subject can only work out a liveable constitution for itself on two conditions: firstly, it must be filled with the conviction that ethical secession can genuinely open up a zone of successful self- concern activities, and secondly, it must find a mode of staying in dia- logue with itself along the way and enduring itself in its provisional state. That the first of these conditions can by no means be taken for granted, although it has long constituted a form of common sense in practising circles, is demonstrated by the history of fatalistic thought systems. Though spiritual isolation from the life of the people may not be entirely out of the question for their followers - fatalists can be ascetics too - an effective recession would be impossible accord- ing to their views. To them, the division of the world into things that depend on us and those that do not is an illusion: for consistent fatalists, everything is absolutely independent of ourselves, even our own existence, which is pure thrownness by fate. All human striving to break away and be free is doomed to be inconsequential. One may consider this position defiant and gloomy, but it is not without an impressive consistency. 24
230
vivid self-perfection, were
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
on a
philosophy, was the very same Makkhali Gosala who provoked· his contemporary Gautama Buddha to the only noticeably irate polemic known in the latter's lifetime. Buddha recognized in the teachings of his rival the most dangerous provocation of his own system, which was based entirely on the redemptive power of personal effort, and referred to the determinism of the niyati doctrine as a spiritual crime
that lured its followers to their doom. In Gosala's philosophy, the division of the world and the isolation of the recessive subject would be impossible, because no creature, not even the human in search of redemption, is capable of having an original will:
All animals . . . creatures . . . beings . . . souls are without force and power and energy of their own. They are bent this way and that by their fateY
Anyone looking for proof that the Buddhist doctrine, in precise analogy to the Stoic, is based on an ontological 'local government reorganization' that strictly separates what I can achieve from every- thing else can find it in Buddha's polemic against the teachings of Gosala. According to these, every creature automatically proceeds through all the evolutionary stages - the necessary 84,000 incarna- tions, or in other accounts even the same number of mahakalpas or world cycles. Every life form and stage of existence shows through itself how far the process has advanced for it; asceticism can therefore be a consequence of development at best, but never the reason for it. Buddha could certainly not accept this. By attacking Gosala's equa- tion of being and time, or facticity and fate, he secured the space for his opposing doctrine based on the acquisition of redemptive knowl- edge - and thus for the acceleration of liberation. Only thus could he proclaim the elimination of the ontological blockade through insight. Needless to say, Buddha's insistence on the possibility of a more rapid emancipation was in keeping with the spiritual needs of his time. From then on, the time of inner exertion was meant to overtake the sluggish time of the world. Where more advanced civilization begins, people come forward who want to hear that they can do something besides waiting. They look for proof that they are moving themselves, not simply being carried along by the course of things like the rock on the imperceptibly flowing glacier.