No More Learning

Overtired, overwhelmed, devastated, it encounters itself yet again beyond its own limit. There, its stances prove untenable and its promises baseless. The uncanny place in the forest from which the hero on his tree sees nothingness eating itself forward is none other than the place the sight of which is unbearable to the eye of the subject, because it shows that, with all its efforts, the
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subject is literally nothing in the end. Nothingness is the manifestly progressive untenability of the promised, it is the leaching of every- thing that exists into a holding device for stances long recognized as untenable. This is the surge of life fatigue that rolls over the dams of broken promises, making the bodies as heavy as their own burial plates. This nothingness protrudes into the self-experience of the overexerted subject when it comes to the limits of its standing its ground. It is only through the fully endured overload that the subject gets to where it can see through its Great Orthopedics. What no external criticism can tell it, it learns of the symptoms of its own overexertion. Only too late does it understand that it has set up the world as a device for keeping untenable promises, and from then on it finds itself in danger of being slain by the collapse of these buildings that are as enormous as they are unstable. Even greater is the danger of drowning in one’s “adult” stance – that’s Neo-Stoicism – or, at the first regressive liberalization, exploding into murderous disinhibitions – that’s fascism.
In the disintegration of its stances, the subject comprehends how all its self-birthing stances depend on guidelines that elude its independence. In collapse, it approaches the “ground” that underlies all installations. In this approach, it makes acquaintance with what psychiatrists call the chance of depression. The remark that even an upright stance is just a lying down in an unlikely bed corresponds to this. Lying down, however, is another term for the kinetic pattern of serenity: letting oneself be carried. What Heidegger lamented with enormous effort as “forgetting of being” corresponds to a forgetting of letting oneself be carried within the kinetic consciousness, which is a precondition of every rage of self-reliance. However, this forgetting is not an actual forgetting; it springs from the memory of the body in the real episodes where it experienced itself as being not carried, abandoned, forgotten, and imprisoned in its own despair – of the moments in which it accumulated the most unforgettable motivations to stand on its own. But however deep the forgetting of letting oneself be carried and its recoil towards self-uprising, even the most extreme rage of self-birth can make of itself no more than what the first birth has already made of it: a being who always hovers in danger, even if it is a self-created one. The first and second births agree that they bring into the world living beings who, as beings who exert themselves, strive for self-protection, but who, at the end of the day, can achieve nothing better than to accept themselves as the hovering beings that they have always been and still are. This is the chance of depression. You have to get on the ground to learn that it has a double bottom. Those who come from untenable standing to lying down cannot be far from learning that lying down is just another kind of hovering.
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At the turning point between the subject’s extreme self-estab- lishment and its plunge into a carried hovering lies a passage for which Heidegger introduced the ominous word “turn,” a word supposed to form a common denominator for both the giganto- mania of Meßkirch and the history of the European spirit – how could it not if, after millennia of self-forgetfulness, being was in the mood to choose the musings of this man as the stage of its own self-remembrance.
There is nothing to the word “turn” and its religious reverber- ation. What is essential about it is the reference to the movement through which the wave of the subject’s force runs back into itself. This movement would be impossible without the gentle counter- violence of failure. But anyone who speaks of a “turn” thinks of failure not as a mere collapse, not just as entropy, which puts an end to an unlikely state, but as a “sign” from the other side. Those who hear it and look in its direction have already allowed themselves to be turned around and made a movement away from the wrong movement. Such a turnaround is more than a mechanical change of direction, nor does it have anything to do with what the installation technicians of the New Age call switching to “complex thinking. ” The turning process would precisely not be a future- greedy continued muddling under new auspices, but an ontological ebb of subjectivity; but the ebb is not made, it only occurs when the tide changes its mind. If we take the tide as an image for the exertion- that-we-are which we cannot refrain from, it becomes clear that a returning tide kinetically remains a thing of impossibility as long as the waves of exertion have not dissipated of their own accord and been used up. Here, the thrill of the danger into which the project of modernity has led us makes itself palpable on an ontological level: anything less than a change in the meaning of “being” will not suffice for our “salvation. ” Because modernity is in its process nothing other than being-towards-movement, movement towards movement in increasing loops of self-intensification, our survival is tied to a self-withdrawal of the kinetic tidal wave “within us. ” This cannot be changed with external canalization and decelerations. A critical movement can only emerge from the self-absorbing of the mobilization wave if it has thrown itself forward to its critical point. For us, however, it cannot even be considered that such a critical point “exists” – certainly, there “is” no such point in the sense of an external threshold, a “line,” which one only has to cross in order to romp in a neo-positive way of being. If such a point exists and if it actually occurs, then initially it is only so that the mobilizing fury of individual subjects ebbs away – whether it has exhausted itself, it has collapsed through sudden twists, or the élan of the subject has taken
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leave of its expenditure in trivial motor skills in order to instead reach “yogic” or artistic heights. It would be unwise, though, to deny the unpredictable in the emergence of such turning points – as unwise as are the thought patterns that circulate today that directly run from danger to salvation and from a hopeless world situation to a logic of salvation. Even if salvation existed for us, it would not be logical, but cyclical, not the product of necessity, but a gift of opportunity. Those who promise themselves anything more are only making use of auto-hypnotic forces; they mobilize the wonderful ability to deceive themselves as much as they think it necessary to live. But aren’t those days over, when auto-hypnotists were allowed to act like philosophers of history?
Let us presuppose: there is no detectable point of “turnaround” and no necessary and sufficient conditions for it. But there are twists and turns that we cannot create ourselves which place themselves on unpredictable points of the curve of action.
“Turn” could be the title for the subject’s relaxation from its self- birthing overstretches. It would then refer to the transition from a way of being determined to do everything to one serene towards some things. Of course, the transition to serenity itself is something that cannot make a serene impression. In transition, the fragility of the world is exposed. The powers that have piled themselves up in the enframing of civilization breathe a fatal breeze towards us through the membrane of a soft consciousness. Just as the warm Alpine wind draws the mountains to the front of the city limits, serenity exposes the panorama of the world to be pure explosiveness. If there is an active part in the turn, it is one of precaution against the destruc- tiveness that is unleashed in the collapse of untenable positions. The serenity leads not only out of false efforts, but even more so away from the false alleviations of the mobilization processes.
Serenity grows out of the advantage of not having won. It resembles defeat in a fight that would be a disaster to win. Those whom it reels in feel a relaxation from the struggle with the struggle, from the sting of subjectification, which crumbles more into itself the more it tries to raise itself upright. Serenity colors the self- knowledge of the subject who knows what it is like to have tired oneself out on the impossible. While the self-birth of the subject is the eternal agony and, as the engine of history, also represents the grotesque attempt we cannot refrain from to come to a world of our own through our own power, the serene dependence upon our first birth leads to the rediscovery of the inevitable. It could be that this discovery presupposes the odyssey of subjectivity. On a big journey, one tends to spin and wear out stories of self-reliance and self-preservation. Perhaps the inevitable shimmers through the
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thinly woven threads of one’s “own” will, from which the subject drifts away on its way to the exit with fateful force. Wasn’t subjec- tivity the effort to bypass the inevitable? Thus, at the end of its being completely worn out and used up, the subject becomes transparent to itself as an indefensible and at the same time indissoluble fiction – some say in the form of a divine lie. One rubs one’s eyes and becomes acquainted with the inevitable.
Once again, we must return to Heidegger, for it is he who made the remembering of the “inevitable” into an explicit topic. (However, one may suspect that it was not the inevitable that interested him, but “inevitability,” because he was after all a philosopher whom metaphysics held in its grasp, and, as such, has incorrigibly fallen prey to generalities. ) When Heidegger proclaims in one of his most whispering speeches the phrase that people would first have to become “mortals,” he arrives, banished to the classical metaphysical questions, only at the weaker inevitability, at least in comparison with the first and strongest inevitability that people must first become those who are born, those who come into the world. What they have always been the most is what they are the least at the end. Frightened and fascinated by their mortality, they look beyond birth as well as beyond what is most incidental. The cogito of death has stifled even the smallest approach to a cogito of birth – to Heidegger and to this day. 19
But if the age of metaphysics were to really end, it would not be the I-die that must be able to accompany all my ideas, but the I-come-into-the-world. A post-metaphysical devotion of thought to the finite earth cannot be marked by mortality, which forever remains a motive of metaphysical temptation, but must only be marked by the sign of birth. Because it is not enough for people to be born; in order to come into the world, they are condemned to see themselves as arrived beings – beings who cannot yet be ascertained because they have not yet come into the world, and whose every attempt to nevertheless ascertain themselves is doomed. The most radical self-recognition of human beings refers not to the fact that they refuse to recognize that they will die, but to their evasion of the idea “I-was-born” in a panicked flight. No one wants to have been present at the event that brought them to the light of the world. Being born – that only happens to other people. 20
No one, it seems, remembers their entry into the world, though, in terms of the physiology of memory, there is nothing that should prevent us from visualizing even the most archaic event. So here we “are,” and no one knows how. When we start talking about things of this world “in the world,” our sentences begin in the middle, subse- quently, straggling, without direct insight into how we managed to get to where we are.
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But however much we talk and reflect, no talk, no reflection cancels out the fact that our utterances are overtaken by birth and released only by birth. This darkness of birth, which serves as a foil for all knowledge, is not an innocent not-yet-being- acquainted with something new. It is a constitutive not knowing, a darkness as the first intention. The forgetting of birth is a well-established non-knowledge that provides the fundamental effort to self-formation: not to have been there. Only when the subject reaches the limit of its erection efforts can it extract from its exhaustion the otherwise unacceptable and feel its origin in the fright of birth, in the falling out and staying lying down, in the feeling of being too heavy for itself. As soon as the defensive tension of self-birthing crumbles, an inner flow gets under way, trickling old self-knowledge of the first birth into the present. The more presently a life takes place, the lower its amount of effort towards misunderstanding in relation to its birth dowry. On the abyssal ground of the present, the ex-subject can retrospectively comprehend what its “true nature” was: the urge not to have nature; the drive to crush the stepmotherly earth beneath oneself; the tension of getting out of the suffocating, abused downsizing as a motherless self-birther. These energies are what make history. Everything that is considered a subject in this specific sense contributes to the great world text that appears under the title My, Your, His, Our, Their Struggle. It is about miscarriage into a false world and rebirth into a proper one, it is about heroic exodus and crusades through time, missions and time turns, last battles, projects of modernity and the final realms of self-government – however, the “last” chapters are always written by those who have somehow escaped the catastrophes of the subject. Will there be someone to tell of our struggle, too?
Because, following philosophical tradition, we have characterized the path of subjectivity as an odyssey-like cycle into an unfamiliar starting point, the impression could now arise that the simplest things must always and inevitably only emerge at the end of a long expedition. From here, one could infer that the mind has a necessity to go on detours. For the kind of thinking that has come under the metaphysical compulsion to exert itself, this is actually true: the subject’s path to the world has the structure of a detour into the elementary. On it, the inevitable and the self-evident appear last. And as long as philosophy is embroiled in the drama of the subject’s self-birthing efforts, it seems doomed to always opt for the longest detour as the shortest route to things. Where heroes think, there the long road is the only reasonable one; for them, overexertion is the minimum contribution.
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Is there no alternative to this? Do only tired heroes have the final say after returning home from the colonies? Is the inevitable always such that those who avoid it always encounter it at the last minute anyway? No – there is another beginning of conscious life that has not ended up on the long road through history. But this other consciousness has found no forceful advocates – except in marginal literature. Only today, in contrast to heroic thinking, which only admits the self-evident too late and at the last minute, can an unheroic consciousness come into its own, which does not win its insights on a detour across the path of maximal misunderstanding of that which is most simple. Like Hercules at a crossroads, human consciousness has a choice from the beginning between the short and the long way, between the odyssey and the stroll, and even if the choice must first fall on the long route, because self-birthers, who burst with their compulsion to strength, do not know what else to do with themselves other than to overexert themselves, that does not mean our right to take the short way has been denied. This right is known to a hidden tradition, a tradition unaffiliated with any faculties, especially law faculties, to speak nothing of philo- sophical ones. To remind us of this right is the metaphysical-critical purpose of the confrontation between the great thinker Plato and the gutter-level mime artist, Diogenes, as we have learned from Greek anecdote. As a philosopher, the clown shows the philoso- phers that there is an alternative to the spiritual heroic ascent into the life of ideas. Even divine mania has a more popular variation. The other way out of the overexertion is to not enter into it – the enlightened beggar from Sinope has demonstrated how this can be done. From his cynical impulse, discreet and denigrated traces of pre-metaphysical wisdom run through the age of metaphysics and the philosophy of the subject, to become more conspicuous and self-confident again at their twilight. Just as in the uprising period of metaphysics, the other consciousness retreated into pantomime, literature, comedy, and quiescence, so in its time of collapse the voices of wisdom become audible again. They are the voices of the oldest dissidence; they belong to women, children, ecstatics, rogues, inconspicuous people – people who don’t let themselves be persuaded that they were not there when they came into the world. No, they were there. Whatever happens to them meets their amazement. They know in their own way what it means to come out into the uncanny; without a metaphysical fishing net, they balance across everyday cliffs. From them, the down-and-out subject can learn the self-evident that indeed arrives last “before its eyes” and “to its ears. ”
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Eurotaoism
He who stands on tiptoe is not steady. He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
Tao Te Ching, 2421 The Eurotao that can be spoken is not the real Eurotao, etc.
4
THE FUNDAMENTAL AND THE URGENT – OR: THE TAO OF POLITICS
Also a contribution to the answer as to why a credible politics currently does not exist
Difficile est satyram non scribere.
Juvenal, The Satires1
Americans are surely to be envied. If a writer in the United States who was rumored to belong to an alternative movement were invited into political circles to initiate a conversation about opposing world- views (literary supplements might appreciate this), then that writer would bring a manuscript that gloriously displayed the words THE TAO OF POLITICS on its title page, and everyone among those involved would think it perfectly fine for this person to use the tools at their disposal. Even in the choice of words, the message would be clear – Good morning, America, welcome to the New Age where a young Aquarian ease converses with the old fishy severity of reality; the End of World War, the Beginning of Intercontinental Eroticism! – and hardly anyone would take offense at the esoteric wink across the Pacific towards Old China, where, as we know, there are so many sages that only one child per family is allowed in order to stop the rush towards the bosom of enlightenment – it is rumored that these days, only the billionth young Taoist sees the light of day.
Old Europe is having a harder time, and a writer who has discus- sions with politicians has a harder time here, too. There is no trace of transatlantic relaxation and no talk of the Tao of politics. Here, Protestant ethics are still intact; in Bonn, there is a tough negotiation on the matter. Mr Johannes Rau2 will present his political moral doctrine in a forward-looking keynote speech and then the invited author will give his lecture. The organizer has left no doubt as to the
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subject on which he wishes statements to be made: “Of the possibility and difficulties of credibly embodying political principles in everyday operations. ” This is how an officer of the hosting foundation has formulated the impressive problem, and it must be admitted that the question is quite deliberate. Political morality is at stake and how to avoid the mistake of having too much of it – we are in the territory of classical social democracy. The thought of the “embodiment” of principles is ominously surrounded with precautions. One suspects that in the race between the difficulties and the possibilities, the diffi- culties will be at the forefront, but that does not disturb us; we are all adults here. (Klaus Staeck, who is also on the podium, will immedi- ately swear to the party’s capacity for suffering, and Paul Lorenzen, who is sitting in the audience, will afterwards, while on the floor, emphasize his inability to be shocked by anything the author says. 3)
What to do among only adults? At first, nothing remains for me but an escape into confession, and so I unreservedly admit that such subjects make me feel embarrassed or, what is even more frustrating, listless. I would rather be in America. No, staying here, holding our ground, life will make men out of us. Listlessness, who do you think you are – what kind of category is that in the first place? Whatever it may be as a category, it is now above all an acute fact. The assertion that in my case we are dealing with a post-modern listlessness does not help either. As you know, post-modern is what we call the hopelessness that can no longer even be originally formu- lated. Modernity has exhausted all the possibilities of formulating enlightened displeasure with the world, and even condemned us to cite sources when it comes to the most recent annoyances. For generations now, everything has already been said about the incon- gruity between morality and politics; even cynical summaries of the state of affairs have long been part of the classical repertoire. It is not possible to act as if discoveries can be made in these matters. It is already a standard self-interpretation of modernity that the political course of the world is moving ever further away from what is morally correct. After all, I belong to a generation whose philo- sophically formative impressions included Adorno’s thesis that the whole is the false – more formative, however, was Liza Minnelli’s thesis that life is a cabaret. In direct comparison with Adorno’s, Minelli’s theorem seems to have the advantage by seeing irony as something built into the world and does not assume a subject that has brought irony into it. Why still make jokes when we are the joke? It should be mentioned that since 1917 philosophy has only been possible in the form of Dadaism – but after the latter has done its job as far as it is concerned, its trainees have to try to live up to the bloody seriousness of what is no longer to be taken seriously
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using new means. Philosophers of today – what else are they other than experts for the reformulating of jokes back into problems? The embodiment of moral principles in political action? This, too, becomes a philosophical problem on request; only do not forget that today philosophizing means making the effort not to write satire.
After these remarks, you have the right to ask what I was doing at such a serious event. You will not even engage with the sophism that you can only seek what you bring to the table; that is under- standable. But the reference to bringing something is nevertheless legitimate, because what I bring in my luggage is the arch-romantic prejudice that an embarrassment can also be an opportunity. If I here take over the supplementary lecture to Mr Rau’s expositions on political credibility, then a dose of occasionalism is at play – by the way, it is a matter less alien to Mr Rau than one might assume when one considers politics only as a fulfillment of duty towards the fatherland on the energy and pension front. He is, after all, a candidate for chancellor (we write in January 1986; the blue flower of the absolute majority for our candidate’s party still blooms), someone who, in his own way, gathers experience with the genius of opportunity. Aren’t candidacies the poetic periods of political life, simply because, as long as they last, one may not yet commit the sins that are preprogrammed into the prose of administration of office? Candidati, one recalls, was, according to the Roman state ritual, the name of the men dressed in white who indicated a willingness to lose their innocence by putting on an untarnished robe – they were brides of the principle of reality, whose defloration potential has been legendary since those ancient days. In the given case, no one would go so far as to dress the candidate for a political wedding in white since his national political experience is up to date on file; even on the dubious terrain of political morality, no one can define how often someone may have lost their innocence until they can no longer be considered a beginner. Malicious gossip has still not stopped claiming that one can see a dark stain from the emissions of the Ibbenbüren power plant showing through the white candidate robe of Mr Rau, so black that no new integrity can emerge against the accumulated sins. But we are not here to moralize. Perhaps a candidate’s white signals more today than a non-binding ritual – namely the willingness to expose oneself to a change of mind that gives the present moment in world history its philosophical profile.
And that is the code word that gives our intervention its cue. Today, there are not only partisan occasions, but dramatic global reasons to speak of such changes in attitude. The boundless incon- gruity that gapes open between the competences of politics and the requirements of reality give us food for thought. At the moment,
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no one knows how the apocalyptic tendencies of the system could be brought within the range of preventative measures. Politics has turned into a game of blind man’s buff to the highest degree right before our eyes – but because the players hardly ever let themselves be caught, politics cannot take off the blindfold. Everyone can tell that in this children’s game with reality, the danger increases, and if we speak of the principles of politics, we may talk of morality but what we really mean is danger. One aspect of the danger in which we float as both subjects and objects of politics consists not least in the reduction of amoral risks to moral questions to appease the vulnerable. If nothing else, an objection from a philosophical perspective must be directed against it on this forum. A philosophy of the real speaks of reality as dangerousness, and of the fact that danger manifests itself today not least in the dissonance between the fundamental and the urgent. This dissonance will be the topic of what follows.
Should we wish to characterize the dangerousness of the present philosophically, we must choose an offensive diagnosis and realize that the epochal strategy of excluding questions of truth from the political sphere and from the civilizing process (now one’s teeth become loose) has altogether hit a limit. The return of the excluded is being foreshadowed in a series of symptomatic catastrophes. They present a tough bill to the truth-abandoned activism of modernity. If there is a common denominator for the multitude of crises that have fissured contemporary consciousness, it can be found in the open secret that is given away by the catastrophes: the modern myth of praxis is dying and occidental activism is experiencing its twilight of the idols. But we would be underestimating praxis as a principle if we were to see it as governed merely by ideology. If that is all it was, it would never have unleashed its world-moving power. The modern theory-supported and morality-flanked praxis was, after all, able to tease out latent traits of existence into the open and displace seemingly unshakeable structures of reality. The practi- cistic mythos of modernity is nothing less than a universally claimed exegesis of being. It owes its revolutionary assertiveness to the authority of scientific technology; it owes its feats and its psycho- political attractiveness to the advantages of an individualistic ethics of expression whose doctrine is “better to act than to suffer. ” All the mobilizations that shape the face of modernity in the economic, technological, scientific, military, legal, and informational field come together in the phenomenon of practicism. In this particular sense, praxis is really a praxis of change and mobilization; an attack on the given, a will to penetration, dissolution, transformation, and a movement towards increasing mobility. All these mobilizations draw
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their epistemological motives4 from the conceptual Basic Decisions of the metaphysical tradition, and in particular from the younger Enlightenment’s deployment of the difference between light and matter into a relationship between work and substance.
Enlightenment, one might say, is metaphysics of light turned aggressive, organizing itself as an trans-illuminating offensive that advances with unprecedented force across the natural limits of exposure to light up the previously unlit interior of things and make it available. In the name of the Enlightenment, the Old European metaphysics of light moves to a pragmatic stage where the cross- millennial movement evolves from the initial contemplative view of the illuminated to the final irradiation of objects. Irradiation means annihilation – reduction, release, transformation, mobilization. It does not take a genius to see that mobilizations become explo- sions once they pass a certain threshold. To the extent that loud bangs and crashes can currently be heard from all four corners of the world simultaneously, we can no longer hide our doubts about the durability of modernity. The spreading critique of Western practicisim is therefore not an irrationalism, as interested circles proclaim everywhere nowadays. (Some seem to be of the opinion that we must protect praxis from theory. ) No, this criticism soberly challenges us to deal with the hypothesis that all the great risks of the present are based in rationally predictable mobilization disasters.
This preliminary sketch of an alternative “philosophical discourse of the present” remains laconic.
It merely indicates what is at stake in current fundamental reflections. It would be superficial to talk about any partial crisis such as, for example, the loss of political credibility with respect to the population without also providing a more radical general diagnosis. Only by participating in the creation of such diagnostics could the political actors prevent themselves from being bad contemporaries. And this is precisely – let us be honest – what we must consider the vast majority of them to be. This is where the crisis of political credibility originates in the first place. Even the dullest members of the public (to say nothing of the reflective ones) get a disastrous impression from the behavior of the political class insofar as this exhibits nothing more than the most hopeless carrying on, abandoned by all spirits, both good and evil – the uncoiling of a phantom-like, unbroken practicism that is cut off from the development of a more sensible awareness (“out there” in society) of the problem. Credibility, if not that of politics but certainly that of the politician, could therefore only be rehabilitated from this perspective. At the end of the day, it does not matter if this or that politician has a personality type well suited for power, if they belong to this or that party, if they care more about the interests of
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workers than those of bank capital, if they cultivate the community of values with people of good will on church days, if they wrestle for their briefcase with prostitutes in front of New York hotels: these are all pardonable sins or secondary virtues. What it comes down to is whether a politician can qualify as the subject of an advanced awareness of the problem. A politician who could offer this would have fulfilled all suitable requirements and be forgiven for occupa- tional sins. But no one will claim that Bonn and other capitals are teeming with such political light bearers. This cannot be – already because a gap of sensitivity opens up in modern societies where the political class and the problem-sensitive aesthetic subcultures become hopelessly estranged from each other. It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that there is a deadly division of labor between the sensible and the resilient: a division for which deeper reasons are probably responsible than just the draining effect of the political fourteen-hour day. It is probably not organically economi- cally possible to live on the edge (more precisely, to set up one’s office on it) and examine it at the same time. In any case, ever since Walther Rathenau, German politics has not seen another case where political intelligence, aesthetic perceptiveness, capacity for sociological analysis, and philosophical reflection were all united in a high-ranking leader. Despite that, we must not let anything less than the unlikely have validity in this field. To speak credibly about credibility, it is necessary to clarify what its substantial criterion would consist of. When it comes to such matters, lowering one’s expectations from the very beginning would mean rationalizing a bankruptcy that has already taken place.
Below, the topic will be unfolded in three directions or phases. First, we will take up the notorious “credibility gap” that was discovered by political semanticists a few years ago and brought into the discussion – a phenomenon that has probably worked its way both into the vocabulary and the self-perception of political upper echelons with some stubbornness. Following that, we will pursue the philosophical assumptions underlying the idea that principles can be embodied in everyday operations. We end with a few sentences stating that it would be both advisable and due to liquidate the ethics of principles into an ethics of urgency.
Dimensions of the Credibility Gap
A gap and its dimensions? Here it is in cold print, but it should be noted that the obliqueness of the expression has been consciously accepted because it corresponds to the structure of the phenomenon
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itself (insofar as obliqueness is aesthetically homologous to being suspect). Initially, it should be established: the clever term “credi- bility gap” has so easily been able to win a place in political vocabulary in the last few years because they were the years when system-theoretical, marketing-strategic, and theatrical categories overturned the field of moral-political “discourses” without encoun- tering hardly any resistance.
From now on, we not only have to deal with information gaps, energy gaps, the Fulda Gap (preferred gate of entry for Russian armored forces), market gaps, and technology gaps, but also with ethical gaps such as that of credibility or predictability which act as the field of operations of interaction technologies. Whoever embraces this linguistic prescription shows they have understood the basic rule of pragmatism: the management of a problem is to be considered its solution until further notice. Thus, the essential political talent proves to be the ability to make yourself comfortable in a deplorable state of affairs. And if we speak of the “dimensions” of the credibility gap, then deficiency is point-blank positivized: it is no longer a deficit, but a market. From then on, we are no longer to understand the gap as a torn hole in material or as a distance between two parameters – rather, it is an independent phenomenon. This positivization also has an advantageous effect, as it tends to occur with some productive demoralizations. It helps by integrating a critical potential into the very description of the matter from its outset. A kind of resistance forces itself between the substance (politics) and the attribute (credible) that no longer allows smooth connections to emerge. Credible politics would amount to a round square. (At this point, the chin of the correspondent of a Hamburg daily newspaper drops to his chest with discouragement; for him, the morning is lost, for this is not the kind of language that keeps us going. ) To give an example, the most credible policy today is without doubt that of the Iranian Ayatollahs, since the discrepancy between what politicians are and what they do is nowhere else in the world as trivial as it is there. They are by far the most charac- terful, credible politicians of our time. Compared to them, the newer Chinese politics, for example, is almost shockingly unreliable, volatile, and, in a fascinating way, devoid of character.
One can understand, of course, why Western professional politi- cians (who are tired of the chronic doubt being cast on their morality) have originated the fantasy that the credibility gap ought to be closed. For once, they would like to see the currents of approval flow unbroken from the governed to the rulers; they dream of being a pure medium of the people just once in their lives and of embodying a credible, undiluted emanation of common interests.
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They balk at the morally precarious insight that the lack of credi- bility as such is constitutive of the modern concept of politics as a whole. Regardless of their reservations against it, we must insist, based on the law of the matter, that credibility is only possible for modern politics in the form of a disclosure of the stipulations of its incredibility.
Hereto belongs a history lesson. Since the age of absolutism – more precisely, since the regicidal phase of the French Revolution – political rule in the West has been gradually de-sacralized. From that point on, political power has stood less in the light shining from above and more under the pressure of approval from below. Such a change in the very basis of legitimacy has been accompanied by a profound transformation of how power and rule are enacted. It can be recognized in the form of an increasing depersonalization of power, bureaucratization of politics, and prioritizing of decision- making procedures over the acute urgency of problems. In this way, power has become more diffuse and more indirect, on the one hand, and more penetrating and ubiquitous, on the other. These are banalities, but they clarify why it has become difficult to see political events under a transfiguring or some other kind of “higher” light. The secularization of the political has liquidated the reserves of romantic loyalty and patriarchal attachment that may have existed between the authorities and populations in the age of direct rule. As its secular and rational distinguishing feature, modernity does not allow for a sacral-political restoration.
The political realm is now either a sober workplace or a battle- field for those who manage to format their existential passions into practical “interests. ” According to a modern understanding, politics is what remains when passions are excluded and pushed into the religious, aesthetic, and erotic districts of the “private. ” It is only through this drastic modification that people can be turned into political subjects of the modern kind: only when they reduce themselves from beings who have passions to subjects who have interests will they attain the status of political persons. One can assume that the roots of any unease at the “lack of credibility” in politics are to be sought in the anthropological stylization of homo politicus as a modern subject of interest. For the individual can only become a political subject to the extent that they are able to refrain from what gives their existence the “authentic”, the “credible” trait. What modernity calls “the political” only appears by neutralizing what is existentially most important. Emerging from repression, politics must at the same time impose itself as the most important surrogate for that which is most important. It can only succeed insofar as it ensures that nothing else becomes more important than
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politics. For this reason, politics is, as Bismarck claimed, the art of the possible, the art of the next best – its passion is the neutrali- zation of passions. Such a definition of politics as “statesmanship” can be traced back to the absolutist age, when the early modern state began to establish itself as a meta-absolutism of a special kind over the militantly absolutized religious passions and creeds. Where the mortal god, as Hobbes defined the modern state, established his regiment, confessions of faith and passions become neutralized into private matters and should under no permissible circumstances come into question as the causae belli, especially when it comes to civil wars. (One can verify the validity of this rule by the excep- tions of Northern Ireland or Lebanon that prove it – both cases of unsuccessful neutralization of passions and failed politicization or funding of “interests. ”) The political double figure of the sovereign and the subject has been in effect ever since absolutism – it lives on in the legal figure of the citizen, where moments of subjection and sovereignty are made into a kind of self-subjection. The citizen of the state is the political figure in whose “own interest” it is to have political interests and not passions.
It is precisely because passions must be privatized and neutralized in the political culture of modern times that the corresponding political subjects are constitutionally abstract. In this fact, the political achievement of modernity and its greatest weakness become one and the same: although its social systems are built upon abstraction from passions, they are forced to produce a passion for the abstract in a deeply paradoxical way – otherwise, the psychosocial brackets that are supposed to hold the great systems together would immediately break apart. But warming people to the cold will always be a problematic endeavor in the long run. One might get the impression that this is an alchemist piece of art that the anthropological equipment of homo sapiens sapiens has not provided for (but perhaps another sapiens is yet to be added). Exceptions to these paradoxes can be divided into only two groups: those who are engaged in politics as a profession and cannot fail to place any private passions they still might have at the service of the profession as a subjective subsidy; and those who passionately and aggressively engage in acute political issues as laymen. When this happens, passions are no longer private and political scientists speak of “social movements. ” It is not for nothing that this expression has alarming connotations; it reminds us that what is “most important” can return to the political arena at any time. Indeed, social movements prove that the modern reduction of passions to interests is an anthropologically unstable operation that can be thrown into question overnight by so-called “fundamentalist”
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upheavals. Career politicians are naturally suspicious of such funda- mentalism; for the rules of the game in their profession are that people do not have fundamental beliefs but rather principles, not passions but interests, not axioms but options.
Thus, whoever wishes to study the credibility gap where it originally opens up must understand how the modern political subject comes into being through a reduction of the self into the representation of interests and civic self-subjugation. And because individuals would eventually atrophy within such reductions, compensations are vitally important. Within existential jargon, such compensations are called engagements. (Engagement is passion in the form of decision. ) The only paths open to engagement lead either to professionalism or to fundamentalism – both forms of compensation are rightly perceived as something even less credible than what they are supposed to aid in becoming more credible. By categorially dividing the political class into doers and eccentrics, we instinctively identify the two great variants of modern political lack of credibility. The primary dimension of the credibility gap, we claim, is therefore not the so-called “alienation” of politics from the “authentic interests of the population,” as trivial political scientists would have us believe, but the alienation of the population from their passions in favor of those interests that are implanted in them like an artificial heart – and, incidentally, these are almost always the interests in mobilizations. The primary problem is not that institu- tions become independent and separate themselves from the grass roots but that the grass roots separate themselves from themselves in order to participate as political subjects in the mobilization project of the modern age. Therefore, credibility is primarily an issue not of political ethics but of political anthropology. On the other hand, explaining the credibility gap as caused by the alienation between politicians and the population only captures its secondary dimension. No one will deny that this, too, has its pitfalls and can be a source of unease with respect to politics. But compared to the anthropologically consequential transformation of individuals into politically interested subjects, the fact that there can be no purely representational relationship between so-called “mandates” and political offices because the idiosyncrasies of the offices undermine pure representation is a comparatively harmless phenomenon. Since everyone in the political world theater is their own Member of Parliament who tries to represent their own interests, it is to their benefit to have optimal representatives of those interests. But as long as politics is constituted by the exclusion of what is most important, the bland aftertaste of all actions in the spirit of advocacy cannot be eliminated. The people whose interests are represented look into
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a mirror when they look at their representative and self-knowledge comes into play when the person looking back at them does not elicit enthusiasm. With an inimitable mixture of subservient suspicion and gloating disdain, they observe the dealings of the political class that represents their rightful representatives. If politicians are almost always unpopular, it’s not because they are alienated from the people, but because they are the spitting image of them. The people are rarely so deluded as to find themselves popular. If they are at their wits’ end when it comes to themselves, they will vote for those infallibly guaranteed to sink them even deeper into this state. This is precisely what makes up the psycho-political secret of neo-conservative regimes currently predominant in almost the entire Western world. They accurately reflect back the reaction of collective flight into “carry on as usual” where the dumbfounded majorities of interested voters have established themselves. Arm in arm with these majorities, neo-conservatism has opened up an age of political unsavoriness; it has enforced its own inability to be shocked by itself as official etiquette. But its popularity cannot be separated from its simultaneous unpopularity. It finds voter majorities because they find a predictable lack of credibility in it. The public always has the most reasons to consider politicians untrustworthy when they are the way the public wants them to be. As long as they adequately represent the people as they are, politi- cians will be as untrustworthy as the people are. Whoever governs in the name of the people reduces one’s mandate to an indefinable, unstable, fluctuating something that is disinterested in anything but interests; this something periodically lends clear expression to its confusion through general, free, equal, and secret elections. The downfall of people’s representatives is not that they stray too far from the people; rather, it is because they do not distance themselves far enough that they are unable to prioritize their receptivity to what is urgent over their interest in interests. Politics is always too close to the citizens, too close to people who stand next to each other for miles in order to represent themselves optimally – to the right of the inevitable, to the right of death and life.
The Voting Voice and the Body – or: How Politics Participates in the Crisis of Embodiment Metaphysics
When the credibility deficit enters into the self-confidence of the actors, it is perceived as a lack of “embodiment. ” We now know why this cannot be otherwise since political subjects constitute themselves as hollow bodies by subtracting their passions, as it
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were. It is not without reason that the thing that remains after what is most important has been abstracted is called the vote. Those who have gone through politicization retain nothing of themselves other than their vote, which cannot be used to express anything that constitutes the fullness and sting of life. The voice of the vote speaks in rigid monosyllables; it says nothing but yes and no, never talks spontaneously about its life. It reacts to nominations, marks its X on the voting ballot, and remains laconically limited to minimal signs that indicate either agreement or disagreement. The political vote is so closely related to silence that abstention sometimes says more than the casting of a vote, as those who come from people’s democracies know, where voting and approval are synonymous. In contrast, the Western right to opposition is praised with good reason as an enrichment of the political vocabulary in the direction of two syllables. But whether the right to vote expresses itself with one syllable or two, it implies in any case the ambivalent imposition on individuals to reconcile all other strings on the bodily instrument of their existence with its political expression, or to silence them. The more sensible members of the political class have therefore tried to initiate an ethical discourse in order to overcome the aphasia that can no longer be hidden. They have an inkling of how important it would be to repair the destruction of language that follows the political reduction of the fullness of expression to a right to vote. In this predicament, the more thoughtful among the politicians have traditionally received aid from classical intellectuals, who, in their capacity as spokespersons for collective contradictions and life experiences, created an existentially dense language. The political intellectual as embodied in figures of the caliber of Jean-Paul Sartre, Heinrich Böll, or Ernesto Cardenal functioned as a political speech therapist in what seemed to be an elapsed era, waging a highly publi- cized struggle against monosyllabism. It was above all the writers of the Left who tried to inject languages into the public sphere that were meant to be so complex and excessive that even individualized life could recognize itself in them.
At the moment, there is much evidence to suggest that intellec- tuals are withdrawing from this function – perhaps because times are too dire for naïvety. Unquestionably, we are at present experiencing a kind of twilight of the intellectuals; in this twilight, the bell tolls for the experts together with the simultaneous resignation of the moral generalists. The intelligentsia, the contradictory class, draws new demarcation lines on the map of the real. Not even intellectuals still believe in a common denominator between politics and life, and it was their task to publicly delude themselves about it. Already at the beginning of the 1920s, the writer Hugo Ball spoke of a “new
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age of catacombs” that was imminent for the intellectuals. Back then, the ironic break in the political making of the future became apparent to this astute critic of the German zeitgeist. While public life was dominated by simulators of vitality who inflated themselves with new realism, new values, and exclamations of the new ages in the style of oops-we-are-alive and the tone of we-are-the-partners- of-destiny, the life of thinking already knew itself to be condemned to an underground existence. Only by becoming inconspicuous and coming to terms with being regarded with contempt by the makers of the future could it help to ensure that anything worthy of life would survive the century’s winter at all. It is only with great diffi- culty that we can shake off the impression that this situation is being repeated today, only in an even sharper and more globalized form than in the 1920s.
Ever since intelligence has withdrawn and reduced its spoken political contribution to a monosyllablic minimum, politicians have been forced to fend for themselves in their attempts to spiritually revitalize their profession. They must now start using their own resources to turn votes back into languages. Among those who are serious about this, you can recognize the better ones by how difficult they find the task to be. If politicized subjects are no longer just to cast their ballots, but to speak, they must transverse the path of abstraction backward to the existential sources of language. It must be acknowledged that this is an arduous road towards something that is almost impossible. Can automatic answering machines be made to give speeches? Can the disembodied political self, even more barren than the anorexic cogito of Descartes, be so readily induced to speak as if from human life in all its fullness? It is only in this kind of predicament that the recourse to principles becomes suggestive for those affected. Because once they are “personally embodied,” principles seem to remedy the lack of physicality in politics. That is why “principles” act as guarantors of a full person- ality and an identity with a broad foundation within the discourse of these new political morality seekers. Those who “credibly embody” higher principles thus seem to bring something substantive into the political game which emanates not only the monosyllabism of the voting specter but also an incarnate principle, a piece of individual culture. Those who embody principles have tied weights to themselves; they are gifted with a gravity of character that cannot be blown away so easily and provided with a moral chassis that is not so easily deformed. It is striking that only those politicians become popular (as far as it is possible) who are distinguished by a certain well-meaning gravity and, above all, by an earthy weight that is not lightened with insights. It is as if populations did not want to
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lose the overview of what their highest leaders embody. Those who exhibit principles want to make themselves predictable in this way – which is a virtue in a sphere where the production of predictability counts as a confidence-building measure. Without a high degree of embodiment-ready inertia, the desired effect cannot be achieved. But where such principled enthusiasm for embodiment-readiness leads is demonstrated to us by the great men and women of politics who meet in Geneva, Iceland, Vienna, and elsewhere to share their inertia with each other. (This was obviously written before the Washington Treaties of December 1987. 5) They give the impression that political dialogue is just another word for speaking contests between the speech-impaired. Here, the political psychology of the principle of embodiment shows its frightening side, whereby it turns out that we are dealing with not so much a psychological problem as a problem of the logic of power. If the political subject embodies anything at all, it is not so much their own moral principles but the right to exist of their country, party, system, market share. As incarnations of these, politicians’ voices and votes are always those of an armed substantiality and a deadly eloquence. If all competing parties in the political arena firmly embody their principles – and they do so with huge budgets – then the weapons systems are the real bearers of the embodiment of principles. They make our values credible and our strength of character compelling. Thus the politician who best embodies their principles is the one who has installed their convictions on launching pads – on the ground and soon also in the sky.
In view of these reflections on the relationship between voice and body in politics that deviate somewhat from the supposed target, something inevitably needs to be said about the metaphysical premises of the term “embodiment. ” Laying bare these underlying premises evaporates the false sense of harmlessness with which the prevailing political science (in Bonn as well) speaks about principles and their embodiment. One does not immediately realize that this term represents a forgotten concept of Christian Platonism; more precisely, a John-like theologoumenon that has made its way into trivial language games. In the metaphysical tradition, it is said that existence is divided into the high and the low, the fundamental and the incidental, a spiritual and a material sphere. The spiritual sphere is filled with ideas, principles or first causes, divine categories and forces. The material sphere is that of formless matter without any characteristics; it is dark, spiritless, null and void, and must be guided by the higher forces of form. Matter as the substance of form becomes knowable and real only by the light that shines on it; penetrating into the lack of light, light brings forth formed figures
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with attributes out of the amorphous material. The visibility of the visible is based solely on the light that originates in the idea and shines through substance. We encounter the most consequential application of this metaphysical model in the Christology of the Gospel of John where the realization of ideas is interpreted as the flesh of the word, and in turn as the Incarnation of God. The word becomes flesh – this is the basic scheme of the leading ideas of embodiment and realization that have shaped the actions and productions of the West. Even those who still invoke fundamental embodiment in political action today, whether they are aware of it or not, are indebted to the Platonic Gospel. Occasionally, this extends to an openly claimed political imitatio of Christ when some politicians bring themselves into play as the incarnations of the logos, especially in the Protestant world. We must urgently hope that Mr Rau will not build his election campaign and that of his party on a John’s Gospel of credibility – this would not only be wrong in terms of tactics, but above all ontologically suspect. What happens in such cases has recently been available for examination in Jimmy Carter’s US presidency, which has been battered by the conflict between Christology and Machiavellianism. Similar experiences are guaranteed to anyone who enters such office under similar premises. The incarnation from above inevitably leads to demoralization – or martyrdom (two of the most highly underestimated categories by political science, incidentally). Demoralization follows from the predominance of circumstances over principles. Those who consider demoralization to be the greatest evil should not fail to examine the opposite: for where principles are stronger than circumstances – as in ascetic communities, Jacobin subcultures, and totalitarian systems – there, principle enforces its incarnation at the expense of all other lives.
Is it possible for us to think of an alternative to the incarnation of logos or the embodying of the principle? We believe that this is the case. This is becoming increasingly evident in current philosophical thinking, and it is this alternative that gives a perspective of the history of ideas and a logical criterion to the manifold attempts at developing something substantially new in the so-called “alternative cultures. ” In post-metaphysical culture (which would indeed be an alternative), an understanding is beginning to prevail that it is not the word that must become flesh by force if necessary, but that it is enough to create a place where the spontaneous tendencies of the flesh can get a word in edgewise and have their say. It is no longer a question of embodying principles in action in order to thus subject the inert mass to a force of incarnation from above; instead, we are starting to understand (in an increasingly literal way) that the
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life-process’s own momentum is able to shine forth in brilliant self- relation. The concept of embodiment has become caught in the trap of its own violence and is petering away within it – after all, that was the history-making power of metaphysics. But alternative ways of thinking about the body have already changed direction. To express it in a set way: while the logical endpoint of the compulsion to embody principles is a total liquidation of the flesh in favor of the word, endless perspectives on the self-illumination of life emerge within post-metaphysical learning processes. The moralism of thought in the concepts of embodiment is only the appendix of latent necrological metaphysics that drives life towards the point of a deadly realization. Whoever tries decisively enough to think morality and politics from the point of view of the self-relations of intelligent bodies must give up the notion of embodied principles to create space for a self-experience that shines forth in a very different way.
From an Ethics of Principle to an Ethos of the Urgent
In the duel between yourself and the world, act as second to
the world.
Franz Kafka6
According to classical tradition, philosophy is the dialogue of the soul with itself. This assumes that the soul is not unanimous but feels a rupture in itself where the conversation partners of this self- dialogue face each other within the interior. A conversation with ourselves can give us the bizarre yet everyday experience that one part of ourselves gets ahead of us, while another is left behind. This state of tension that constitutes the psychological premise of self-reflection is what colloquial language calls having a conscience. The conscience that makes itself felt is eo ipso a conscience that is in tension with de facto existence. If individuals form a conscience that lets itself be felt, they are ahead of their own reality and can at least occasionally have something that we call a philosophical self-dialogue. Traditionally, the emotional instance that stirs as conscience is perceived as the “innermost voice. ” As that which is my innermost, however, it can only appear because it behaves towards me as if it were something superior to me (although coming “from me”) that precedes my problematic factual essence. Only insofar as I am not only identical to myself, but also superior, am I capable of the kind of self-dialogue where the masterful voice of conscience converses with the babble of affects, calculations, and
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interests. Conscience functions as a cybernetic or hegemonic organ of the soul that relates the real states of conscious life to the highest terms of self-regulation – in short, to moral ideas.
If there is now talk in Bonn about the credible embodiment of principles in politics, then this formulation borrows from the conscience model from classical moral philosophy. It suggests that the political subject can orient itself not only in its intimate self- perception, but also in its worldly actions according to the scheme of self-conversation, a conversation where the individual consciousness is at once both disciple and master. The conscience would then not only be the auto-communicative regulating instance in the individual’s inner dealings with themselves, but also at the same time the seat of a wisdom that is always ahead of all events in the outside world. The belief in political action according to principles makes the bold (and only seemingly conventional) assumption that there is something in the soul which has enabled it in principle to overtake not only itself but also the world “outside. ” Consequently, consciences would not only be the internal instances of individuals but also the regulative entities of their external dealings.
We have to admit that this is a seductive idea because it promises an unwavering superiority of the highest organ of the soul over so-called “reality. ” If valid, it would guarantee the possibility of surpassing not only one’s empirical inner life but also the course of the world as a whole, and thanks to a treasure of eternal principles, it would be ahead of it once and for all. This kind of autonomous conscience of principles would make us invulnerable against the shock of events and protect us from changes of circumstances. As the world rages on outside and spins uncontrollably in the vortices of mobilization, we can retreat into our inner citadel and immunize ourselves against the course of events by observing the universals that are permanently engraved in our reflective conscience.
One can easily see where such noble speculation turns short- sighted – as shortsighted as it must be to attempt a suspension of thinking at the aesthetic stage before the atrocity of analysis has a chance to overwhelm it. If we critically analyze the phenomenon of conscience, it immediately becomes apparent that it cannot possibly be understood as an autonomous, internal, and world-superior magnitude.