No More Learning

First comes the guru of the
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master
the apostle or abbot as imitatores next
philosopher as a witness to the search for truth, and finally the sophist as a polytechnician of the ars vivendi. It should scarcely be necessary to explain why each of these types embodies a variety of teaching licence at the enthusiastic faculty of our anthropological polytechnic. Going through these even more quickly, I shall assign to these figures an analogous five-member set of pragmatic or artistic trainers - the athletic trainer, the master of a craft or virtuosic artistic feat, the academic professor, the mundane teacher and the Enlightenment author. It is clear enough why one should expect shallower and more anonymous forms of vertical tension from the start among this group of certified teachers: they are all involved in the popularization and standardization of mirabile effects and, in one way or other, already on the way to what modernity - after the triumphant initial suc- cesses of general alphabetization - would later make its cause under the catchword of 'general education'. Nonetheless, these teachers also purvey a notion of peak performance, albeit one that requires increasing justification: democracy, they implicitly state, is not as such a valid reason to do away with all forms of vertical tension. They remain in effect, though in an altered mode - even if only for the power-ecological reason that even in a world with a strictly egalitar- ian constitution, not everyone will be able to do everything, let alone do everything equally well.
The Guru
The first in this list is the figure of the Indian guru - a name that is rarely used without irony in the contemporary Western context, as if one wanted to denote a person who gives their followers opportunity to overestimate them, and presumably not without succumbing to self-overestimation first. Naturally this habitual irony tells us abso- lutely nothing about Indian conditions, but a great deal about the anti-authoritarian change of mentality among Westerners in general, and about the decline in the standing of their teaching professions in particular. It reveals the scepticism that has been epidemic in the Old World for some time towards the notion that any mortal could have more insight than another into the basic conditions of the world and life - not merely in the sense of a coincidentally greater knowledge based on longer experience, but thanks to a deeper penetration of the concealed structures of existence. Just as the concept of the master is
277
EXAGGERA TION
PROCEDURES
maestro
- so any higher
practically lost all credit. When Martin Heidegger occasionally used the expression 'master of reading and living' to describe Meister Eckhart, the archaic tone was already unmistakable at the time. In doing so, he was going very palpably against the newer consensus that the discipline of life is under no circumstances open to mastery.
The scandal of the guru function is easy to pinpoint: it implies a mode of teaching and learning based on an initiation, and thus a crossing-over to the sphere of sacred or non-public knowledge - it is precisely this aspect that makes the guru-centred study model of ancient India unacceptable for the modern learning culture of the Occident. We have introductions to this or that area of knowledge to offer, but do not allow any initiations - quite aside from the fact that enlightenment is not envisaged as the conclusion to a course of study. We also presuppose among our students the continuity of person from school enrolment to matriculation to graduation, while learning with a guru entails two discontinuous aspects: one at the initiation into the modus essendi of the pupil, which implies a form of symbolic death, and the other upon the prospective attainment of the highest goal, which Indian convention describes as the insight - gained psy- chosomatically and via certain states - into the identity of the indi- vidual soul and the world soul. This shows how the dramaturgical form of initiatic learning, beyond its trimming through the narrative form of a step-based life, is nested in a schema of rebirth - which is why its goal must be sought not so much in a qualification as in a transformation.
For Western sensibilities, the convivial or virtually promiscuous constitution of the Indian master-pupil relationship is even more scandalous than the initiatic alliance that accompanies it. As a rule, devotion to a master in a stationary Brahmanic context implied joining his household, usually for a period that could scarcely be shorter than twelve years - this was usually the time required merely to memorize the Vedic texts whose internalization was expected of adepts, regardless of which practical exercises (asanas) were used to carry out the psychophysical work of transformation. This household element of the master-pupil relationship implied an openly psycho- feudal dependency. Here the pupil not only had to receive knowledge from the master, but also to fulfil various servant duties - hence the Sanskrit name antevasin: 'the one who accompanies the guru and waits upon him'. More often, the pupil is referred to as a shisia or
278
one
in existential matters has
at master' - a
that to memory a invention of the universal anthropotechnic device of the Modern Age, namely the school desk. From an attitude-historical perspective, incidentally, modernity is synonymous with a dependence on chairs or other seating furniture, and eo ipso the dying-out of the ability to sit on the
floor without feeling burdened by one's own body. 93
The true meaning of the guru-centred learning model, admittedly, does not consist in the cosy homely aspects, which from a distance recall the life forms of medieval craftsmen's households in Europe. Hence also the threat of terrible consequences for any pupil who dared embark on an affair with the master's wife - although this does not seem entirely outlandish given the informal situation of courtly love: a noble lady and a lowly aspirant in the closest proximity, sepa- rated by a strong taboo and with the attention of each drawn to the other. Its purpose only reveals itself when one takes into considera- tion the psychodynamic aspect of the master-pupil relationship: this is, after all, no less than a contract for the regulation of a hyperbolic transaction. As soon as the guru takes an antevasin or chela into his following, he has implicitly made a form of perfecting contract with him. This means a simultaneously metaphysical and pragmatic alli- ance with the goal of advancing at least a few steps along the path to actually existing impossibility, or even of realizing the magnum opus as such: deification in one's lifetime and transformation into the jivanmukti, the one who is saved here and now. The guru and his student thus enter an alliance perhaps not of life and death, but
certainly of life and hyper-life.
Viewed by the light of recent occidental psychological knowledge,
this singular relationship is a magnetopathic or psychoanalytical rapport - that is to say a stabilized state of emergency in the soul field where the master makes himself available for the most intense idealiza- tions on the part of the pupil. In contrast to the magnetistic or psycho- analytical situation, however, where, in accordance with the prevailing norms of sobriety, the long-term goal is the dissolution of an idealizing transference, the guru-antevasin relationship aims not for the end, but rather for the clarifying amplification of that idealization - and at once an identificatory intensification that, if carried out in an orthodox and proper fashion, should be driven forwards into the supra-pictorial, pre-objective and pre-personal register. From the guru's point of view, the pupil's idealizing anticipations are not wrong because they aim too high; rather, the pupil is only condemned to a form of indispensable error in the sense that he cannot yet know how much higher the real
279
GAMES
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
are
Such references to the hyperbolic dimension in the transforma- tion contract between masters and pupils cannot, of course, refute scepticism towards the guru-centred form of studying. It is therefore anything but coincidental that a large part of Western writings, but also of the growing native literature on the guru phenomenon - not infrequently penned by disconcerted psychiatrists, committed social psychologists and nervous sect advisers94 - is devoted to the problem of false masters and the psychological abuse of those dependent on them. The authors consistently postulate the reinforcement of quality control for products on the religious markets. They usually view the situation as if the process of globalization had also cast the spiritual world market into a state of upheaval. Just as some dangerous patho- gens today profit from the facilitation of worldwide travel, the memes of the 'God delusion' can also spread more easily beyond the borders of their source regions. Even more disturbing is the impression that psychosis has got carried away, and is now aiming to change its status from a classified illness to a misunderstood form of fitness. Most provocative of all, admittedly, is the epidemic of mystical amoralism which, thanks to the missionary successes of Hinduizing masters, began to spread through the overly receptive Western hemisphere. The virus, which has nestled in correspondingly arranged classes since then, consists in the dangerous realization that lack of conscience and illumination are, from a certain point of view, identical.
The truth is most probably that the world of enlightenment games too has been affected by mediatization, and the appearance of per- formance talents among the teachers of well-tempered impossibility was only a matter of time. No guru's life from the last decades dem- onstrates this shift more clearly than that of the Indian enlightenment preacher and sect founder Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-90), alias Osho, who, despite his controversial status, constitutes - along with Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo Gosh - the fourth figure of Indian spirituality in the twentieth century whose aura emanated across the world. His exceptional standing is clearest in the adoption of Western performance techniques among the forms
IS
Nonetheless, identification is the most important resource that is available for use in transformative work - which is why one part of the craft of guru pedagogy is to keep the fire of the beginner's illusion burning for as long as possible. That an institutionalized art of the impossible cannot be judged by the standards of Western trivial ontology, with the corresponding psychological constructs of normal- ity, is understandable enough.
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of spiritual instruction, which were otherwise steeped in pious routine. Like a Duchamp of the spiritual field, he transformed all the relevant traditions into religious playthings and mystical ready-mades. It was not least a testament to his lucidity that, at the pinnacle of his success, he turned himself into a ready-made and, showing a clear awareness of the change in the zeitgeist, distanced himself from his Hinduizing past. As he recognized just in time, this past was tied too strongly to the mentality wave of Euro-American post-1968 romanticism. In assuming the Japanese-tinged name Osho in 1989 - 'the joke is over' - he quick-wittedly connected to the recently developed neo-liberal, Buddhophile mood in the West and invented a label for himself with a promising future. This gesture announced that in the field of guru- centred anthropotechnics too, the age of re-branding had begun.
The Buddhist Master
As far as the Buddhist varieties of the teacher's image are concerned, they took part in two evolutionary shifts that profoundly modified the meaning of teaching: in ancient times in the change of emphasis from the elitist self-redemptive art of the Hinayana (Small Vehicle) to the compassionate populism of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle), and in more recent times the epochal shift from a position of radical world- and life-denial to one of fundamental world- and life-affirmation. The most important information about the profile of the first teacher on the path of the new teaching probably comes from the enlighten- ment legend itself, as told in its Sri Lankan version: in this account, the awakened one waited under the Bodhi Tree for seven days in silence, untouched by everything around him, and 'experienced the joyful feeling of awakening'; he then arose and immersed himself in his detachment for another seven days under a different tree, then the same again under a third tree. The message of the tale is unmistak- able: what took place here is beyond all teaching. No path with sign- posts leads to such a goal; the event rendered the attempt to produce it obsolete. The bond between truth and method was broken.
Nonetheless, this episode and Buddha's later decision to act as a teacher formed the point of departure for the most widely ramified scholastic phenomenon in the history of civilization. The teaching grows from the paradoxical act of breaking a silence in full awareness of the fact that the spoken words can never be taken merely at their propositional value, but predominantly as therapeutic directives. The pronouncements of the spiritual teacher are 'indirect messages' of
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power, Buddhism to sow the incommunicable and unfolded into one the most loquacious move-
ments in global spiritual culture.
In its first half-millennium, it remained the only thing its starting
framework would have allowed: a matter for the few, who would nonetheless, under Indian and Indo-Chinese conditions, inevitably become numerous. Though, viewed from a distance, the Buddhist trainers, abbots of monasteries and advisers of those seeking help seemed merely to embody the continuation of the guru system by slightly different means, closer inspection reveals that they were in many respects the opposite. They entered the stage of intellectual history as a movement of therapists who, in keeping with their healing mission, were not concerned so much with the transmission of a religious doctrine, an esoteric worldview or a mystical visionary art. What they had in mind was purely to do away with the condi- tions of suffering - resolutely beginning with one's own entanglement in the mental processes that create suffering. By taking the salvific motif dominant throughout North India since 500 Be to the extreme, they infiltrated - feeling the zeitgeist fully on their side - the caste- based foundations of Brahmanism and its metaphysical 'superstruc- ture', Only in terms of the central civilizatory tendency, namely that towards a progressive internalization and subtilization of the sacrifice, can Buddhism also be considered an evolutionary unfold- ing of late Brahmanic potentials. While older times were dominated by the equivalence of the human and the sacrifice,95 the sacrifice was now shifted entirely inwards - and ultimately, it would appear as if nothing had been sacrificed at all; for when humans relinquish the things to which they cling, they part with something that was never substantially their property in any case. One could see this as an inter- nalization of conventional ascetic nudism, where it is not the body that walks in a garment of air - as practised by the Digambara - but rather the soul that paradoxically reveals its non-being in nakedness.
Admittedly, a number of Buddha's pupils only a few generations after his death fell prey to the most extreme fetishism in their inter- pretation of the monastic rule - the first significant schism, as is well known, took place partly as a result of an embittered debate between abbots over such questions as whether a monk is permitted to store salt in a buffalo horn - which amounted to a violation of the rules for storing food - or whether a monk's sleeping mat is allowed to have loose threads - which would have broken the rule concerning the size of mat. 96 Disputes of a philosophical kind also led to schisms in
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MASTER
a
" ',," . H L '_ V U 'classical schools' took shape, each one
numerous subgroups and sectarian fringes which, in keeping with the universal laws of narcissism, pursued conflicts over the smallest differences,
I shall restrict myself here to the question of how Buddhist masters and pupils deal with their contracts about the impossible. Essentially, all the motifs that we know from the relationship between the guru and his disciple return here, complicated by the increase in negativ- ity that characterizes Buddhist teaching in comparison to Brahmanic doctrine. While the guru can act as an accomplice to the pupil's projection for much of the time, the Buddhist teacher has the duty of distracting the projection from his person and deflecting it to the Dharma, the redemptive doctrine, in keeping with the principle of the not-self. The fulfilment of the impossibility contract here gains an additional dimension of crypticism, as the school workload requires that the adepts break even more profoundly with their folk- ontological intuitions.
In schematic terms, one could say that the guru initiates the student into the simple counter-intuitive truth that the great self of the world and the small ego-self are identical - a realization that undoubtedly presupposes intense modifications on the follower's part. The Buddhist teacher, on the other hand, is faced with the difficulty of making a doubly counter-intuitive truth seem plausible to the pupil: the identity of world-nat-self and private not-self. The execution of this equation is synonymous with enlightenment more buddhistico. By its nature, it demands a form of tuition in which students are constantly thrown back to the self-referential nature of their search. They have to learn to find the liberating nothingness in themselves, and then to see through the world as a nothingness and finally recognize the two nothingnesses as one and the same. Every encounter should give them an opportunity to bid farewell. Where others settle and gather themselves, they must learn to give away and move on. Hence the abundant use of paradoxes that can be observed among many Buddhist teachers. While religious orthodoxies show their interest ex officio in dissolving paradoxes and making their doctrine reasonable - the most recent example being the much-noted Regensburg speech by Benedict XVI - one often recog- nizes Buddhist instruction - assuming it has not itself been corrupted in a religioid fashion - by its efforts to push its paradoxical character to the threshold of self-refutation, not infrequently to the point where the Dharma is termed a mere mirage. 97 Verbal paradoxes are all pro- jections of the basic ascetic paradox whereby one conveys to the adept
283
master's
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
the message that there is 'nothing to attain' - but that to understand this, they must first of all sit in meditation for ten years, ideally for fourteen hours a day.
Alongside the paradox, the most striking stylistic means of recent Buddhism is probably the tautology, especially its Japanese varieties, which are often palatable to the contemporary individualism of the West - though probably only because we tend to confuse the tautolo- gies of negativism in the doctrine of the not-self with those of our positivism. A rose is a rose: in the occidental context, this celebrates monovalence - or one could call it the idiocy of being - in which the intellect rests. That this cherry blossom is this cherry blossom, on the other hand, means that a manifestation of weak nothingness, a pink transience, comes into momentary contact with a transient eye, another manifestation of weak nothingness, both against the back- ground of strong nothingness.
Intermezzo: The Critique of Illumination
I shall note in parentheses why the concept of illumination has lost its meaning for European philosophers of modernity. In typological terms, only two philosophically notable forms of illumination have become known: on the one side the illumination of the 'substance'- ontological or spirit-ontological type as present in the Hindu systems, as well as in Platonism and its Christian derivatives. Here, the equa- tion of the world soul and the individual soul, or the infinite and the finite intellect, takes place in a varyingly thorough fashion. On the other side, we encounter enlightenment of the Nirvanological type, as known from Buddhist traditions. Here, the essential identity of the selflessness of the world and the absence of a substantial soul is 'real- ized' in the individual.
Modern analysis has decisive objections to both of these patterns: in the case of the first variant, the problem is that it ascribes more intelligence and soul to the world than is its due. As far as the inor- ganic sphere is concerned, its share in the mental and intellectual capacity was judged very reservedly. But the organic world too, going on everything one sees of it, is more a battlefield of confusedly distributed life-will points than a reason-animated whole. If people were able to ascribe to it something resembling a comprehensive ani- mation, it was only by means of a transparent projection. This was achieved by taking out a loan from the self-evident animation of the animal-noetic sphere and passing this on - multiplied by the value
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MASTER
-to In ancient and Europe are partners in an
who
stand each other blindly: as far as the soul is concerned, both of them have always wanted too much, and incur massive expenses to keep alive the welcome confusion of totality with animation by the world soul. On the other side, one sees how Buddhism, starting from the partly plausible selflessness and soullessness of the world machine, which it takes for granted thanks to its sober view of the game of con- stitutions and dissolutions, postulates the selflessness and soullessness of the human interior. This looks like a complementary fallacy; in the same way one borrowed soul from human self-experience to lend it to the 'cosmos' without sufficient securities in the first case, one borrows not-selfness from the 'outside' world in the second case in order to transfer it to the human self-relationship at the risk of losing its most precious quality, finite animation, and inducing it to speculations in which it can only lose - assuming there are no gains elsewhere, such as high ethical sensitizations, to compensate for the losses. I shall con- clude this digression by noting that for a contemporary philosophical psychology, the only path that remains is the middle one, equidistant from the Hindu and Buddhist over-non-animation; it would therefore advise neither a leap into being nor a leap into nothingness. Instead of promoting self-sacrifice on one side or the other, it argues for the connection between effort and self-experience. This alliance opens up the paths of increase and transformation on which the moderns seek
their optimizations.
The Apostle
Against such a background, it is not difficult to make the third figure of spiritual trainerdom, which is responsible for the Christian trans- mission of the impossible to ever new generations of adepts, under- standable. Its basic form is that of apostolic succession, in which the art of immortality coded as 'faith' is passed on. As illustrated above with the example of Paul, no illumination need be presupposed for this; the result of movedness and commitment is sufficient. The two highest forms of the imitatio Christi are on the one hand martyrdom, which was understood by its observers as a direct transition into the kingdom of God (which is why, according to some authors, martyrs were exempted from any form of further purification in the beyond), and on the other hand the Christomorphic transformation of man that was meant to lead to the point where the logos and caritas take
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
Ages, St Francis
was resolve to unify the two extremes of imitatio in his person, which could only be achieved by equating life in utter poverty with
the martyr's agon. 98
The general form of the Christian imitatio contract can be seen in
the choice of apostolic existence as such, which is always based in some wayan a change of subjects. Its schema was defined by Paul in the statement from Galatians 2:20: 'I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. ' This identifies the imitatio as a two-sided relationship in which one can distinguish between an imitatio subiectiva and an imitatio obiectiva. Via subjective imitation, the imitator refers to Christ himself, or to a first-degree imitator of Christ, such as a martyr or miracle-working saint. By imitating the inimitable, the Christian zealot can himself become an object of imitation by third parties. In the position of the imitable imitator, he follows the call to be exemplary and subordinates his own existence to the formal law of exemplary life. It is in this sense that Eugippus, in the introduc- tion to his Vita Sancti Severini - the life of the fifth-century saint from Mautern an der Donau, in the Austrian Krems district - quotes Peter's command to his deacons: 'Be an example to the flock' (forma estote gregi), as well as Paul's instruction to Timothy: 'Be an example to the faithful' (forma esto fidelibus); in the original Greek, forma is replaced by typos. Hence the Christian teacher is destined not only to be an imitator of Christ himself, but also to take the position of the imitable and make himself available to the communities of believers as a 'formant', a shaping 'type'. Hence the dictum: a Christian is one who makes others Christians. The secular duplicates of this cliche lead to the theses that only those who guide others to education are themselves educated, and that only those who spread enlightenment can be called enlightened. Through the two-sided imitatio, apostolic succession takes on the form of a pyramid game, in which each partic- ipant is at once imitator and imitated - except for the simple believers at the base, who only imitate without being imitated; it is their pre- rogative to fund the advanced with material contributions. They are naturally furthest from the tip of the pyramid, where the advanced jostle one another in the art of the impossible. Among these, next to the declared saints and miracle workers, one also finds the 'type' of abbot, of which the Benedictine Rule states that he has taken over the duty of guiding souls (animas regere), and must one day give account for his wards in fear and trembling. The statesmanship of the monas- tic director, we read, consists in doing the right thing at the right time,
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The Philosopher
If we now cast a glance at the fourth trainer figure in our list, repre- sented by the philosopher, we are immediately struck by its fragmen- tation into the erotic, statuary and gnostic types. As Pierre Hadot has shown very eloquently, Socrates embodies the first of these, Marcus Aurelius the second - and, if anyone were suitable to represent the third type alongside these, it would be Plotin, the master of logical ascents above the physical world. We are also indebted to Hadot for a clear reconstruction of the Socratic procedure as seduction in the service of the ideal: by feigning, with a responsible irony, love for his pupil, he gains the latter's love in return - and proceeds to direct it from his person to the insight as such. loO He himself can only love 'upwards', and wishes to teach this way of loving as the only truth- ful one. While the students train with the master, the master trains with the agathon. By conveying a love for the love for the absolute, he resembles - from a distance - certain psychoanalysts who seek to liberate their patients world-immanently to their insane love. Hence: 'Love your symptom as yourself',lOl and: 'Never retreat from its desire' (Lacan). The erotic imitatio philosophi could only be stimu- lated to the extent that the master represented a sufficiently impressive typos of philosophical life. In this sense, one could speak of the birth of philosophy from the spirit of performance - the death of Socrates wholly confirms this diagnosis. 102 Whereas modern aesthetic per- formance generally remains as self-referential as it is inconsequential, and scarcely encourages imitation,103 the classical form aims entirely for the exemplary. Nietzsche was still able to say that a master only takes himself seriously with regard to his pupils.
The contours of philosophical mimesis come to light even more clearly among the statuary philosophers, who largely identified them- selves with the Stoic movement - Seneca usually calls them simply 'our people'. They embody that type of practical philosophy in the ancient style which made the greatest impression on the public: the figure of the ascetic sage who, against the background of an ontol- ogy of world-divinity, works on equating the ability to live with the ability to die. It was in Stoicism, after all, that the metaphorical equation of philosophical concern for oneself and sculptural work on the inner statue enabled a veritable training consciousness to
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
only half in jest, a copyright on the intellectual progress pupil - he even tells him to his face: meum opus es, 'you are my work'. 10S Hence the pupil is doing nothing wrong in offering himself to the teacher as a 'great gift' (ingens munus). 106 At the same time, he reminds his student of the principle that teachers are not our masters, but leaders (non domini nostri sed duces). 107 The Stoic teachers hardly ever permit doubts as to the necessity of studying with a master, even though one can feel the beginnings of the idea of internalizing the master principle clearly within reach. log This could be taken up by more modern schools, which declared the external master merely a temporary augmenter of
the inner one.
The Sophist as Universally Able
It may seem bewildering to conclude this summary overview of trainer figures in the field of the elan of impossibility with that of the Sophist. This confusion is easily removed as soon as one calls to mind that the Sophists, going on their achievements and their own self-image, were by no means simply the intellectual lightweights portrayed in the Platonic counter-propaganda. If one leaves aside the caricatures, it transpires that sophistry, in its essence, was an artistry of knowledge - one could even sayan artistic doctrine of knowing everything and being capable of anything, without which the attractiveness of the philosophical life form in antiquity could not be so readily explained. As contradictory as it might sound: by seeking to make the impossible teachable - far beyond the Socratic-Platonic promise to capture virtue (arete) within a school framework - it produced, as far as Western tradition is concerned, the first comprehensive science of training in the narrower sense of the word. It did this by consistently relating the processual side of upbringing (paideia) and tuition (didaskalia) to the form of training (dskesis and melete). It thus pointed energetically to a principle of progress: the gradualness of increases in achievement, as well as the imperceptible yet effective growth into the more improb- able habitus. Because they viewed learning more as being shaped through interaction and repetitive practice than an active mental grasping of the material, the Sophists were probably the first to place an emphasis on early education in order to ensure the naturalization of the improbable from childhood onwards.
All ability is thus trapped in a circle of diligence: one only does 288
MASTER GAJvlES
what one is one
repeats. In this analysis, - that one
towards an active formation of habit - the agent of increase in the praxis of repetition, namely the only recently discovered network of neuro-rhetorical rules, remains unacknowledged, and is only drawn upon implicitly. For the time being, all didactics is summed up by the admonition: 'Practise, practise, practise! ' - a slogan whose echo one still hears in Lenin's 'learn, learn and learn again', and to which even Rodin's sublime toujours travailler responds from afar. Sophist theory can therefore only constitute a practising praxis of think- ing and imagining. The paradigm of an ability wholly embedded in constant practice is the mother tongue, which we could not master if we had not always been in a seemingly obvious and natural, but in truth quite miraculous circle of ability and application, practice and improvement. This can serve to demonstrate the miracle that is intended to become the school subject: everyone has always spoken in some way or other, but only the Sophist makes an art of his speech like no other - about everything, in every situation, always well and mostly victoriously. That is why it is necessary to climb, with the right teacher, from within the mother tongue to the all-encompassing tongue.
The nub of the Sophist learning model is demonstrated in the Sophist's leap from language competency to general life competency, even applied omniscience. Through the constant company of an artist of ability, the speaking and living master of his school, who knows everything because he speaks about everything, and can in fact do anything that belongs to the higher ability to live, the practising of universal ability increasingly rubs off on the adept, until he too is ready to enter public life as a pan-technically shaped individual who knows everything and can do anything. The things that cannot be anticipated by practice alone, the situative imponderabilities, are heard by the true man of skill in the spirit of the moment (kairos), and even this balancing on the tip of the favourable moment can, within limits, be trained.
In its own way, then, Sophistic education goes beyond the physical - its concept of 'metaphysics' is unmistakably a form of artistry. Sophistic artistry formulates the existential antithesis of helpless- ness. The cultivation of never-helpless individuals is the goal of all such paideia. Nothing comes closer to the practical ideal of the polis citizen, and even more the polis politician, than the image of a human who is always in training and knows how to help themselves in any situation. This is why, if we look closely, we always enjoy watching
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news
and same reason, wen-built effectively
delivered speech always concerns us. It reminds us of the humanly possible in the closest proximity. While the untrained human falls silent in their lack of means, the Sophistic teacher shows the trained adept how to find the words to overcome suffering due to amechania, lack of means and helplessness, in any situation. 109
As much as this education places the emphasis on gradual growth into artistic superiority to all challenges, it is equally a performative, indeed a theatrical matter. Nowhere is this clearer than in an anec- dote about Gorgias: one day he came to the theatre in Athens, which was fully booked, ready to improvise a random speech, and boldly called out to the audience: 'Name any subject! ' (probdllete). l1o To understand the meaning of this appearance, one must realize that Gorgias acted very self-confidently, but in no way inappropriately, as he was genuinely willing and able to give a sample of his pan-sophical and pan-rhetorical skill in any given situation. It was with a similar gesture that until the end of the eighteenth century, some pianists would appear and elaborate spontaneous dissertations in notes for their audiences on random 'themes', like sophists at the piano - in this sense, the young Mozart was one of the great sophists in music history, albeit one who largely called out his own themes, assum- ing he did not leave this to the librettist. Franz Liszt too, the inven- tor of the solo piano recital (1839), was still wont to improvise on spontaneously chosen themes before a large audience. For the piano sophists, the nature of their profession and the manner of its exercise meant that all learning had to be wholly embedded in the praxis of practice. l1 1 As far as the magic of the pan-sophical and pan-technic habitus cultivated by the Sophists is concerned, it extended very much further than one would think after Plato's defensive battles against the challenge of their position. It was Aristotle, no less, who did the Sophists' pretensions the honour of taking their aim of saying some- thing about everything at face value - in this sense, he was more an imitator of Gorgias than Plato. He paid tribute to his own teacher by replacing the pan-rhetorical habitus by the pan-epistemic one.
I shall conclude these observations by noting that the Sophistic idea of universal ability experienced an unexpected resurrection in the twen- tieth century - in the form of the deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida. This, in its basic procedure, is nothing other than a reinstate- ment of sophistic omniscience in the form of omni-commentary or immanent omni-refutation. As we know, the key to the Sophistic art
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m
speaker forge
entire theory, and subsequently employing the technique of rebuttal (antilegein) - this, as Plato showed, was also the method of Socrates. Antilegein starts from the foundation of knowing-equally-well - which is already secured through the other's exposition, though often only borrowed from it - and directly ascends to the level of knowing- better. This is always simple to attain if one considers how easily one can prove the inevitable existence of weak points in the first text; such passages can be found almost effortlessly, even in the discourses of the masters, by recalling the selection that underlies every decisive thesis. It seems that Gorgias, the all-knowing, and Socrates, the all- not-knowing, were reunited in Derrida to launch a neo-acrobatic form of sophistic knowledge art, or a philosophistical sophism that required constant practice and existed only in practice. It was as good as certain that a new academic reaction would resist this.
The Profane Trainer: The Man Who Wants Me to Want
It is only a short way from the figure of the noble sophist - which, for the reasons detailed above, I wanted to place closer to the spiritual-artistic teachers than the pragmatic ones - to the second group of trainers. I will speak briefly here of such teachers who concern themselves with passing on more specialized techniques and praxis-related complexes of abilities. It is an obvious choice to begin with the athletic trainer, as this embodies the most striking figure in the field of technically transmittable improbability. Like every trainer, the athletic one has a supportive procedure best described as the tech- nique of interlocking motivation. While every athlete has a decent portion of will to success of their own accord, it is nonetheless the trainer's duty to implant in this will a second will - their own, which heightens the first and helps it to rise above its crises. Through the alteration of the willing will by such a willed will, the athlete can be carried to heights of achievement that could never have been reached without the interlocking of the two wills. Athletism, then, is the original practice field of harnessed spontaneity that later - in a mono- theistic context - bore such strange fruit as the scholastic discussions on free or unfree will (de libero vel servo arbitrio). This problem was solved on the sports field long before philosophers entangled them- selves in it. Theologians who, seeking to penetrate the mystery of the contradiction between human freedom and divine omnipotence, teach
with a an speech, even an
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want wants us to want, no longer in doing so, they a successor to the athletic trainer. The definition of the trainer is that they want the athlete to want what they, the trainer, want for them. 112 Needless to say, the athlete is meant to want something that is not entirely
impossible, but fairly improbable: an unbroken series of victories. 113
The Master Craftsman and the Two Natures of the Work of Art
The second type in the pragmatic field is embodied by the crafts- man, or, philosophically put, one in command of a professional- everyday teehne. With aptitudes of this type, one no longer sees once they have been routinized and trivialized (and on Greek soil, even 'Philistinized') that every single one of them came from a slow, cumu- lative revolt against helplessness, a quiet rebellion against the forlorn- ness, lack of means and lack of cunning for which the Greeks coined the profound word and spirit name Amechania - absence of meehane, lack of tricks and true, of leverage and tools. In this sense, all crafts- manship constitutes a collective and anonymous counterpart to one of the twelve labours of Hercules, these pan-technic acts of heroism whose unmistakable purpose was to prove that it is in man's nature - or a demigod's, in this case - to master seemingly insurmountable tasks. Whoever has no interest in craftsmen should therefore be equally silent about heroes. From the perspective of the ability to do something, heroes, craftsmen and finally also politicians belong much closer together than the Old European doctrines of action, which were usually aristocratically inclined, were able to recognize - even Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1957/8), admirable in all other respects, paid far too great a tribute to traditional distortions by pushing the activity of making, let alone of mere working, rather grossly into the second and third positions, far behind action, that is to say the political behaviour of humans.
In the light of this, it had to be considered not merely a great aca- demic, but in fact intellectual-historical deed when Richard Sennett recently attempted to liberate the crafts from the disdain they were shown by philosophical theory, and restore to these fundamental, yet unnoticed factors their due rank among the phenomena of the vita aetiva. 114 The principle of craft is based on the coincidence of production and practice - finally recognizing this again is what makes Sennett's venture on activity-theoretical terrain so significant.
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eo ipso
its lack of originality. a presupposes
one can give repetition, much maligned in modernity, a new mark of honour. Anyone who attempts this must prove the reconcilability of the repetitive-mechanical and the personal-spontaneous - an under- taking that leads directly to a praise of individually embodied memo- ries, and thus what one could, quoting Nietzsche, call 'incorporation' [Einverleibung], or, invoking Ravaisson, the system of acquired abilities.
Anyone who remembers the curriculum of the older craft profes- sions knows that no one is born a master. According to this cur- riculum, an apprentice had to be initiated into the techniques of his profession for at least seven years before he could take the final examination. After this, the journeyman perfected his art for another five to ten years, and only after twelve to eighteen years of teaching and practising could he consider the production of his final master- piece. According to an old rule of thumb, at least ten thousand hours of practising 'praxis' are required to become a decent craftsman or a reasonable musician;115 if one includes higher levels of mastery, one can safely double or even triple that number.
Until recently, what we call 'genius' merely referred to cases in which these average practice times were spectacularly shortened - recall musical child prodigies: the music history of the last three centuries would be barely conceiv- able without them. In the end, a genius-aesthetic plague befell entire populations of artists who were anything but Wunderkinder, yet wanted to push this shortening as far as the complete omission of practice.
The phenomenon of craftsmanly mastery is of paradigmatic signifi- cance for an understanding of both the ancient and the modern vita activa, as it marks the beginning of the process whereby the artistic mirabile became commonplace. Whether the craft is ship-building - a discipline Plato enjoys weaving into his discussion of the nature of techne - surgery, pottery or goldsmithery (Sennett, as a critic of the modern fragmentation of abilities and demoralization of mere job work, is especially fond of the last of these116), the respective crafts- men are producers of artifices that overstep the circle of natural things in varyingly conspicuous ways. Because of their standardized, serial and everyday character, these works of 'art' have mostly ceased to be an object of admiration, though that does not stop their production from requiring a substantial amount of practice, experience, care and vigilance. This activity in the field of an anonymized and degraded artificiality provides the ideal conditions for a type of production
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on
tion. It stimulates a in agent
and expands their competence to perform this very work to the same extent that they immerse themselves in the production of the object or effect. 1 17
This explains why every conscientiously performed work of crafts- manship can be of spiritual surplus value. When, in the European cities of the late Middle Ages, a massive wave of lay religiosity devel- oped that would culminate in the devotio moderna of the fourteenth century and the Reformation of the early sixteenth century, this was scarcely connected to the supposed affinity between capitalism and Protestantism of which Max Weber had made too much in his well- known study, and far more to the blatant analogies between monastic exercises and those found in the workshops. The practising work of the crafts - the Parisian Livre des metiers listed over one hundred and fifty guild-based artisan 'professions' as early as 1268118 - had to produce a type of personality that would become increasingly aware of its potential spiritual equality with professional clerics. Just as ora et [abora had long been the rule for most monks, the more up-to-date maxim labora et ora presented itself urgently to the secular brothers of artisanallife. There are also many sources documenting direct moves of individual craftsmen from monastic workshops to urban ones, meaning that the transfer of the spiritual habitus - the self-moulding of the actor in regular, vigilant activity - to the larger artisanal milieu could even take place by the shortest route on occasion. In this sense, the workshops are not simply the places where pure 'equipment' [Zeug] is called into existence; they are at once plantations for a form of subjectivity suspended between production and contemplation, mints for self-assuredly pious singularities. Occasionally this spark flies back into the religious field, as with the British Methodists, who applied the craft of devout enthusiasm to their own psyche. ll9
From here, it is only a short way to the secession of the arts from the crafts - that most activity-theoretically relevant spectacle of the Modern Age before the onset of the one even greater drama: the crys- tallization of modern 'labour as such, labour sans phrase',120 the labour without qualities in which Marx found the systemic definition of the proletarian condition as an illusion-free self-sale of the univer- sally available 'commodity of labour power'. 121 Like all secessions, this one too serves the purpose of a heightened subjectification, in this case the boosting of the craftsman's ability to that of the artist. What distinguishes art from craftsmanship is its resolve to display the ability to art as such in the piece of work (opus). Sennett illustrates
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MASTER
Benvenuto
Saiiera, 1540-3), which he crafted for Francis I in over three years of work. Such objects no longer tolerate everyday use; they force the user to yield to the compulsion to admire that is fashioned into them.
It was only after protracted dogmatic quarrelling that the two natures of the work of art were laid down with the appropriate clarity: wholly craft or wholly mirabile. With the one side each work remains the creation of the profession through and through, and with the other it testifies to the irruption of the supra-artisanal into the workshop. The two natures exist unmixed alongside each other and are recognized through different receptive capacities. All the upgrad- ings of both the master status and the concept of the masterpiece that have animated discussions about art and artists since the Renaissance are connected to this. Just as art means the re-conquest of the wonder- ful from the position of the workshops, the artist's existence implies restoring the creative, almost godly competency within the workshop - with the side effect that for almost half a millennium, Europeans have been subject to a constant inner mission by theologians of crea- tivity and their critical deacons, though also a slightly later Arian122 or humanistic-materialistic counter-mission whose message is that even the greatest works of art are no more than higher products - that is to say, simulations of something higher - and even the greatest artists are only human.
Professors, Teachers, Writers
I shall conclude this overview with a summary description of the three remaining types of pragmatic teaching licence: the university profes- sors, the teachers at the primary and secondary schools of modern nations, and finally Enlightenment writers and politico-culturally committed journalists. From a historical perspective, these authorized teachers and speakers are largely involved in a drama that could be described as the progressive self-abolition of the privilege of educa- tion, or the democratization of the elites. In a process drawn out over several centuries, many of them - never without opposing tendencies complicating and deflecting the course of the development - devoted themselves increasingly explicitly to the aim of rendering the trainer obsolete through the training. They reinforce the depersonalizing tendency of toughening exercises by shifting the emphasis from the person of the teacher to the learning field (the faculty, the school, the
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
most
easier to identify retrospectively as early as Gutenberg's time, even in the age of manuscripts.
If one looks back at the figure of the Old European professor, one immediately notices that he was never meant to be, nor ever wanted to be, more than a character mask of his subject, and how little he was initially expected to make any original contribution to the advancement of his science. Until recently, an original professor was a contradiction in terms - and still is today, essentially, except that the contradictions now have slightly better living conditions, especially in the humanities, where teachers are allowed to speak not only professorially, but also (within limits) enthusiastically and expressively. The name 'professor' already indicates the vocation to reproduce and pass on whatever the state of the art required, and if the bearer of such a title received an honorarium from the state, it was in acknowledgement of the energetic unoriginality with which he was able to teach his subject as a whole. Professors belong to an economy of ordinated secular knowledge in which the professorial chair is strictly superior to its holder, just as, at the next highest level, the priority of the faculty over the chair is never in doubt. The faculty is the impersonal self of a discipline, whereas the individual professors act de facto and de jure as mere personifications of a teaching and learning process that has long been supra-personally institutionalized. If the chairholders can look back on qualification processes of twenty to thirty years, they constitute the average in their discipline. In their totality they form a collective subject that, at the start of the Modern Age, was given - not without reason - the title res publica litteraria, the scholars' republic. 123 To explain the nature of its task, one would first have to point to the expanded reproduction of cognitive capitals with which academic life concerns itself. One would perhaps have to emphasize even more that this res publica ultimately constituted a crypto-Platonic political body: the replacement of the simple pyramid of the 'philosophers' kingdom' with the complex polyhedron of the 'philosophers' republic'. The former sought to guide a city that would have been governable via a completed science of principles against the background of a static nature; the latter is based on the self- administration of a polity exposed, both in terms of principles and nature, to an unforeseeable dynamization.
If one is prepared to understand the faculty, the university and the scholars' republic as collectivizations, anonymizations and perfections of the master function - and this means judging the 'Enlightenment'
296
phenomenon
MASTER GAMES
one can trainer
namely writers and journalists. They carry toughening process on which the res publica of the knowing is based to the respective wider levels - first into the classrooms, from which tomortow's literate indi- viduals capable of judgement and action will emerge, and then into the public media that serve the communication among today's society of the knowing. From this perspective, the teachers are character masks of the school system, just as journalists are personifications of the press - so they too, if they wanted to see themselves in that way, would serve a positive dynamic of collectivization that sought to expand a particular quality to the level of 'society' as a whole, a quality long believed to be afforded only to the few: that of mastery, be it the solving of a factual problem or the art of living as such. But as long as the collectivization of mastery - in philosophical terms, the self-determination of 'society' (as if 'society' could possess a self) - does not take place, individuals would do well to continue practising as if they were the first who will reach the goal.
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CHANGE OF TRAINER AND
REVOLUTION
On Conversions and Opportunistic Turns
The Science of Reversal
To conclude this investigation into the structure of orthodox retreats to the practising and artistically heightened life, I shall cast a brief glance at a phenomenon without which the ascetic radicalisms discussed here would remain a mystery: I mean those moments of existential concentration, self-collection and reversal that, from a religion-historical perspective, one calls conversions. It should be clear by now that these certainly cannot be considered merely 'reli- gious' events. Rather, they belong to the overall inventory of ascetic behaviour from the recessive position - that is to say from the stance that develops in response to the absolute imperative. They take on a 'religious' semblance through the combination of practising or radical-ethical behaviour with the language games of the sacrifice, regardless of whether one performs these outwardly or inwardly. Sacrifices of the first kind have always been made with blood and fire, and those of the second kind as the renunciation of the will and transformation of desires. 124 While sacrificial thinking supplies the symbolic code for operations of violent exchange, the practising life as such provides the foundation for all civilizations, especially those based on internalized forms of sacrifice.
In the following, I shall cast a second glance at the processes that I have described in terms of secession and recession, detachment from the social environment and withdrawal into oneself. Dealing more closely with the phenomena, it now transpires that these categories are not adequate for identifying the first ethical movement. The spokesmen of the great ascetic caesura were never content to label their behaviour
298
TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
as mere as a retreat
or an evasion of real, even though own statements intent do not lack such turns of phrase - recall such widespread distancing metaphors as flight from the world (fuga mundi), flight from the times (fuga saeculi), passionlessness (apdtheia), detachment (vairagya) or refuge in the Dharma path. The last great symbol of distance of this type is the 'Angel of History' in Walter Benjamin's interpretation, which backs away step by step from the flood of disasters, its eyes fixed in disbelief on the world scene. The concern of the most resolute secessionaries is not simply a fascinated retreat from a reality that no longer invites participation, but rather a complete reversal - a turn away from the superficially manifest, which means a turn towards something that is better, true and real on a higher level.
What I would like to sketch here cannot be more than a small prelimi- nary study towards the general science of reversal that was insepara- bly bound to the older radicalisms of the practising life. Only through this doctrine of philosophical and ascetic conversion do secessionary and recessive operations gain an object and a direction, and it is no secret that even modern revolutionary teachings still constitute the more distant derivatives of the oldest statements on beneficial turns and salvatory changes of direction. This means that there is a move- ment of all movements without which the concept of truth, according to this tradition of thought, cannot be adequately conceived. 125
This movement, which is not only retreat but also turning, was first accounted for in the ancient occidental tradition by Plato. In his account, the critical movement initially appears as a purely cognitive act meant to lead from the corrupt sensible world to the incorruptible world of the spirit. To carry it out, a change of sight from the dark to the light is required, a change that cannot take place 'without turning the whole body' (holo to somati). 126 This marks the first explicit reference to the motif of the integral turn. Analogously, the same faculty must 'be wheeled round, in company with the entire soul' (hole te psyche), from seeing to becoming, until one has learned to pay attention only to the eternally existent, and to prefer and endure the brightest part (phanotaton) thereof: the sun of good. Needless to say, the 'turned' soul takes the whole human being with it in its subtle movement. This redirection of sight and existence must not occur by chance and merely once, however, but be developed into a veritable 'art of turning around' (techne periagoges), or an asceticism of complete existential reversal. This is based on the assumption that those to be turned have their full cognitive apparatus, but that this is
299
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
mostly III a
posture. philosopher this from own experi-
ence, for has discovered the cave's exit. He understands what it means to have turned himself around and ventured outside. What he has achieved should not, he feels, be impossible for his fellow humans. Never is he, the first orthopaedist of the spirit, more gener- ous and more of a stranger to the world than when, as here, he pro- jects his own character onto others.
All Education Is Conversion
The implications of these seemingly harmless reflections are literally monstrous: they constitute no less than the first sketch for a doc- trine of subversion which holds that pedagogy more platonico must virtually be defined as an integral science of revolution. The licence to teach in this field is acquired thus: an individual pioneer of the new way of seeing escapes from the collective cave into the open, and subsequently - initially with inevitable reluctance, overcoming himself - feels ready to descend once more to the wrongly directed in the shadow cinema and explain to them how to access these lib- erations. In this sense, Platonic pedagogy is a pure art of conversion - revolutionary orthopaedics. Purely because the philosopher is already a 'convert', one who has been turned around and the first of his kind, can he make it his task to pass on the turn to others. If he simply remained enlightened on his own behalf, he could bask in his private happiness; if he is seized by concern for the state, however, he must abandon privatism and seek to share his illumination with the many.
Pierre Hadot calmly encapsulates the surplus flowing from radical reversal: 'All education is conversion. '127 One must add: all conver- sion is subversion. In the instruction to this movement lies an inex- haustible 'revolutionary' potential, at least as long as it does not content itself with individual reversal. At the start, after all- because of the strict parallelism between the psyche and the polis - it always had to be concerned with the universalization of turning, and sought to include virtually all members of the commune it meant to reform in the other way of living. It was only the later philosophical schools - the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists - that made private tuition a central concern. For them it became a sign of wisdom to content oneself with the conversion of individuals and give up on the incorrigible many - hence their belief that there is no wisdom
300
OF TRAINER AND
no certain consent 'cruelty life'. abandoned plan to reform souls and the state at once - not only because they no longer wanted to believe in the parallelism between the two factors, but also because they began to recognize in the state that cold monster which, they were
convinced, could not possibly be the valid analogue of the soul. There were good reasons for the timing of the individualistic retreat from Plato's over-enthusiasm, from this excess of missionary zeal that denizens of the Modern Age would term 'utopian'. The doctrine of periagoge, the turning around of the soul (which was later often combined with the term epistrophe), was in fact the first explicit version of the absolute imperative 'You must change your life! ', framed in the exhortation to turn one's entire being towards the spir- itual side. This imperative was first formulated in a holistic variation that led to numerous severe misunderstandings. In its deep structure, the Platonic doctrine of learning by the sun of truth had remained an occulted sacrificial theory - related in this respect to the ascetic systems appearing in Asia at the same time - as the turning around of the soul could ultimately only be defined as a relinquishment of the particular in favour of the general. 128 The consequence was that this version of the absolute imperative was affected by two profoundly misconstruable factors. The first was the verb, in that 'change' here meant something along the lines of 'sacrifice oneself to the general', and the second lay in the possessive pronoun, in that the adepts were secretly dispossessed of 'their' lives, which were instead handed over to the true whole that was yet to he created. You are in the world for the sake of the whole, not vice versa - this is the correspond- ing admonition in Plato's Nomoi. 'We do not belong to ourselves', we are still told today in traditions of this type. This is the origin of anthropotechnic tendencies that pervert the absolute imperative by reading 'life' instead of 'your life' - though here, on the terrain of antiquity, the word 'life' admittedly has more political than bioscien- tific implications. Compared to this, the apolitical spiritual systems of late antiquity were absolutely right to insist that individuals should be taken seriously as individuals. Only for that reason had they been concerned to initiate them into the craft of life, concern for oneself, lege artis. Like an ancient anticipation of the modern restriction of the right to arrest (the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act of 1679), they undo the individual's helplessness before the whole and assert its inalienable claim to a self-determined life, even if, as prisoners of reality, they are forced to accept certain curtailments of their right to
freedom.
301
EXAGGER. <\TION PROCEDURES
followers put the idea of universal conversion back on the agenda of modernity, with the known consequences - predominantly bloody consequences that, taken as a whole, go back to the amalgamation of the Graeco-Germanic philosophy of liberation and the ideas of the French Revolution. I will show in chapter 11 how his amalgam led to an anthropotechnics that was intended to help produce the New Human Being, this time as the product of a political conversion that did not rule out the rebuilding of the body - and still, questionably enough, in line with holistic concepts of 'society', where it is only ever a small step from the over-elevation of the whole to the sacrifice of the part.
The Catastrophe Before Damascus
In the meantime, the motif of reversal - which had initially been primarily the domain of political theory and the philosophical art of living - had been monopolized by religious interpretations. Their paradigm was the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, com- mented upon countless times. There are two accounts of this defining moment in the Acts of the Apostles: once in autobiographical form as part of Paul's defence speech before the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 22), and once in the third person (Acts 9). Both versions emphasize that Paul was 'turned around' through the event on the road to Damascus, transformed from a persecutor of Christians to an envoy of Christianity. In the personalized version, the story is as follows:
'About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, "Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me? "
'''Who are you, Lord? " I asked.
"'1 am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting," he replied. My companions saw the light, but they did not understand the voice of him who was speaking to me.
'''What shall I do, Lord? " I asked.
'''Get up," the Lord said, "and go into Damascus. There you will be told all that you have been assigned to do. '" (Acts 22:6-10)
The third-person account of the same events, which is located near the beginning of the acta apostolorum, contains only one substantial variation: it emphasizes that the companions stood by speechless because they heard the voice, but saw no one (Acts 9:7).
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TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
IS even we are light years away Platonic reflections on the
of the soul and its guidance from the cave of collective sensory illu- sions. There is no reference to the concerns of Greek rationalism or the turn towards the sun of truth. The light that dazzles the zealot on the road to Damascus is a mixture of midday demon and hallucina- tion. The story is already set firmly on the terrain of a magical concep- tion of the world (Spengler even assigned it to the atmospheric space of the 'Arabian' cultural soul) whose mood is defined by apocalyptic expectation, salvation panic and a miracle-hungry supra-naturalistic hermeneutics. Most of all, it displays the spirit of a zealotry that is ready to leave for any destination, and which barely seems to care whether it heats up in one direction or another. Placed against the background of the philosophical concept of conversio or epistrophe, Paul's experience is by no means a conversion, which would have completely changed his personal habitus. Nor was it for a moment a realization, but rather the encounter with a divine voice that has no qualms about manifesting itself in this world. Taken as a whole, what happened to Paul is no more than the 'reprogramming' of a zealot in the precise sense of the world. The term is justified because the 'oper- ating system' of Paul's personality could continue to be used more or less unchanged after the reversal, but now freed up for an extraordi- nary theological creativity.
The conversion of Paul therefore belongs in an entirely different category of 'turnings' that display an apostolic-zealotic character, not an ethical-'revolutionary' one. The theological tradition provides the term metdnoia for this, whose general tendency is best formulated as 'change of heart', with 'penitence' as the heightened Christian form. 129 From a psychodynamic perspective, the term belongs in the force field of the inner collection that seems appropriate before or after great events - whether after a personal or political defeat that forces a re-evaluation of one's decorum, one's guiding maxims in life,13° or in anticipation of an imminent event that is apocalyptically foreshadowed. Metanoia is above all a panic phenomenon, in that it goes hand in hand with the gesture of pulling oneself together in a crisis and getting serious before the looming end. It is no coincidence that the era of the European Reformation, which was swarming with people who wanted to get serious, was another heyday of the dark belief in astral influence and the fear of end times. The modus oper- at1di of metanoia is not the turning around of the personality, but rather the collection and heeding of the long-known, which, for lack of an immediate occasion, one had previously avoided examining in
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EXAGGERA TION
PROCEDURES
full depth.
Jewish dissidents
ample opportunity to understand that they essentially had the more coherent interpretation of the tradition already, and that they were the ones who had given the messianic element of Jewish doctrine the most exciting of all possible readings.
What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, then, was a meta- noetic episode that led to a reorganization of consciousness from the perspective of a newly formed centre of the highest conviction. This constitutes a process that William James, in the chapters devoted to 'conversions' in his classic Gifford Lectures of 1901 ('The Varieties of Religious Experience'), sought to interpret using a suggestive general schema: in the subliminal consciousness of the subject, a new epicen- tric personality core prepares itself and merges with the hot spot of operative self-awareness at an opportune moment, bringing about an intense transformative experience. 131 The application of this model to the case of Paul immediately yields a consistent picture; in practice- theoretical terms, he had already 'trained with the opponent' for some time. His exercises in hostility towards the Jesuans had put him in suf- ficient form to cross over to the position of his previous adversary at the right moment. He had long formed a clear, albeit still unwelcome idea of this adversary's strengths on the pre-conscious level. In this context, it seems significant that in the 'autobiographical' version of the scene on the road to Damascus, he already addresses the speaker who calls him from above as 'Lord' (kyrie), even before he has identi- fied himself as the Jesus he had been persecuting. Everything would suggest that his second person was waiting for this interjection.
From this point of view, Paul was not a convert, let alone a 'revo- lutionary', as is claimed in recent neo-Jacobin interpretations of the Pauline phenomenon,132 but rather an opportunist - in the sense of Machiavelli's theory of opportunity - who, in spite of himself, had long since recognized the high spiritual chances of the new doctrine he had initially fought. He had understood, at first intuitively and later explicitly, that only a messiah who genuinely came could help the politically hopeless and intellectually stagnating Judaism of his time to escape from its rut. Naturally he had never remotely intended to found or set in motion 'universalism', or even a subjective varia- tion thereof; he simply applied himself to reformatting an elect group (much like the professional revolutionary of the Leninist cast, who were always more elitist exterminists than inclusion-friendly univer- salists, and like the no-longer-numerous successors of Robespierre in France). It is characteristic of 'conversions' of this type that they
304
pursumg Jesuan sect, would have had
OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION
occur more t o an pre-consciously recognized a completely new doctrine - James quotes extensively from the accounts of heavy drinkers who, through a form of religious self-collection (usually in a Protestant environment with strong conversion stereotypes), had managed to ally themselves with their existing, but previously powerless better judgement and thus distance themselves from their addiction.
There Is No Conversion: The Augustinian Paradigm
In this context we have an opportunity to re-evaluate Oswald Spengler's strong thesis that essentially, conversions do not exist - only re-occupations of vacant positions in the fixed structures of a culture's field of options. 133 The basal soul atmosphere of an advanced-civilized complex remains identical through all superficial changes of confession, he argues, and what seems like a U-turn from the outside can, in reality, never be more than an ultimately arbitrary variation (albeit occasionally a far-reaching one for present and future generations) within a clearly demarcated space of possibility. Hence in spiritual matters too, the saying applies: plus (4 change, plus c'est la meme chose.
The suggestiveness of this claim can best be explained using the example of the second conversion hero in Christian tradition, Aurelius Augustinus, who, in his Confessions, famously stylized the entire story of his youth as a protracted hesitation before his 'con- version' in 386. In his case, Spengler's theorem seems supremely plausible. One can easily use his life story - like those of countless analogous confession-changers and serious-getters - to show that no trace of a 'conversion' ever took place in the deep structure of his personality. Rather, within an age-old orientation towards the world above, he simply changed addresses, or the Great Other, the transcendent trainer, several times - from Manichaeism to Platonism, from Platonism to philosophical Christianity, from philosophical Christianity to a theocentrically darkened cult of submission. He was no anomaly in this; as early as the second century AD, 'conversions' to philosophy had taken place among the educated members of the Roman ecumenical community, and these were organically continued in adoptions of Christianity - in the case of Justin the Martyr, for example, the Catholic patron saint of philosophers.
At no point in these multiple rebuildings of his edifice of convic- tions did Augustine go through a complete epistrophe; he simply
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
m beginnings bit by he attained a personally con- densed and completely embodiable form of ascetic rejection of 'this world'. Nor did the famous 'take up and read' [toile lege] contain any new discovery, merely a reminder of familiar motifs that had ripened within his 'epicentric personality' for the inner takeover. Thus, in ideal-typical purity, he embodied the qualities of the 'sick soul' or the depressively 'divided self', of which William James showed how, not infrequently, it also achieves the collection of its powers in a gradual
or sudden unification without any religious turn. 134 In psychological terms, what converts have often described as the effect of grace mani- fests itself above all as a personal energy gain as a result of increased integration. Such integration takes place when the entire system of mental drives is subordinated to a unified perspective of purpose. It is due to this effect that all partial forces now work together under the direction of a previously latent new centre of conviction. Such a 'united' subject experiences itself as simultaneously called-upon and moved: the movebo effect135 manifests itself in it with twice the strength. In the case of Augustine, the 'unification' seemed to have been reached at the moment when he achieved the concentra- tion of all partial energies in the gesture of Christian-Platonic self- abandonment. The candidate's long hesitation, furthermore, proves that during his time, a complete conversion to Christianity had to be undertaken as an entrance into a training camp surrounded by ascetic horrors, the Byzantine asketeria or the Western monasterium. It was thus never purely a matter of the 'faith' so often invoked by Paul, but rather the total subordination of the person to the harsh practice law of the imitatio with fatal results - or the monastic metaphorization thereof. It seems only consistent, then, if the initial eutonic balance
between philosophy and religion in Augustine's early writings gave way in time to his bleaker late theology.
The originality of Augustine's 'conversion' is only evident in the determination with which the convert managed to elevate his trans- formation to the exemplary level. His Confessions are the first model of Christian performance literature - the transformation of a life story into a lesson in grace. What helped Augustine most to carry out this performative turn was his Christian radicalization of the Platonic doctrine of the psyche's original malposition. In Augustine's vision, what Plato had described merely as the factual fixation of those trapped in the cave on the shadow play on the cave walls - in neutral terms: the priority of empirically oriented perception over reflective insight among worldlings - is immediately declared a consequence of
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sm: a creature turned away creator, to origin. From that point on, sinful egotism governs all actions, as life in perversion always means idolizing the things one should be using (sensual and worldly things) and using the things one should honour (spiritual and godly things). 136 The perverted creature, according to Augustine, cannot perform the complementary reversal to undo the resulting metaphysical damage by its own strength - it would remain incur- ably fixed in its fallen position, its abandonment of origin, if God Himself did not accommodate it in the person of Christ and enable its re-converSlOn.
Spengler was certainly exaggerating when he rejected the possibil- ity of conversion within a given culture out of hand, but there were good reasons for his objection, as the vast majority of actual conver- sions take place not in the mode of an epistrophic total reversal, but of a transition to a more or less natural alternative; ultimately, a truly radical change only occurs upon taking the advanced-civilized path as such, which trains mortals for the high forms of vertical tension by injecting them with the madness of longing for the impossible.
Seneca defines the individual-revolutionary character of this turn late on, but clearly, when he declares: Desinamus quo voluimus velie! 'Let us cease wanting what we previously wanted! '137 The will to want differently sets in motion the permanently tense concern for the new, unaccustomed and improbable stance. One could say something similar about the doctrine of Epicurus, which, in its way, meant practising the break with the vulgar modus vivendi. Because wisdom implies emancipation from the mistaken faith in the predominance of Tyche or Fortuna, it aims for a radical departure from ordinary concerns: where there was fear of the gods, there shall now be fear- lessness. This already heralds the Enlightenment - the conversion of the spirit to a use of one's own life without religious intimidation. Religiously encoded conversions, on the other hand, usually only display the character of a switch to an alternative cult system with rearranged compulsions. This process can generally be imagined as a shallow operation - even the striking inversion figure 'Burn what you worshipped and worship what you burned' in no way makes the pro- cedure more inward; it merely formulates the directive to give Christ the ritual attentions previously reserved for Wotan, or whatever forest, wind and mountain gods one used to follow. With numerous other religiously coded conversions too, one observes most of all the metanoetic shifts of emphasis within a heavily prestructured field.
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one can conversio. From a distance,
Freudian maxim 'Where there was id, there shall be ego' reveals its membership in the group of metanoetic practices where the change of living habits is accompanied by a change of subject, that is to say a reallocation of the guiding figure to the place of the Great Other. Here the id corresponds typologically to the murky category of demonic possession, and the ego to monotheistic brightening.
Conversion as Change of Trainer: St Francis and Ignatius
From a practice-theoretical perspective, conversions of the meta- noetic type amount to a change of trainer, as the converts generally submit not only to an altered moral regime - and eo ipso a new Great Other - but also a new practice plan. The personality structure as such, however, is usually kept throughout the change. Thus the long- habitualized zealotry of Paul 'after Damascus' was reassigned from Pharisaic to Jesuan principles - and subsequently expanded with Christological supplements of his own making. Certainly it makes a difference whether one trains with Gamaliel, the rabbinical teacher, or with Jesus, the resurrected. One would be doing an injustice to the people's apostle if one reduced the opus Christi he set in motion exclusively to its zealotic element. In submitting to Christian doc- trine in the matter of love (agape or caritas), Paul had experienced a notable expansion of his personality. And the success story of Christianity would simply be unthinkable without Paul's stretching of the horizon of chosenness (which, as noted above, must not be confused with universalism).
The metanoetic forms of reversal would consistently prove the most far-reaching for the further development of Christianity as the most important practice field and habitus generator in the transitional space between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Alongside these, the real initiatic sacrament - baptism - remained a momentary and external matter. An effective remoulding of human beings does not depend on a singular gesture; it can only succeed as a result of lasting self-curatorial efforts. The interpretation of baptism as rebirth lends the act a symbolic depth that does not have any adequate correlate in terms of internalization.
The extent to which Christian metanoia amounts to a change of practice system and trainer figure is shown not least by the two
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most popular conversion legends of the high Middle Ages and early Modern Age: those of St Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola. If one examines the turn of the young Francis, it was anything but a sudden leap into the Christian camp. In a certain sense, the youth had long been prepared for the later turn, whose immediate cause was the well-known conflict of authority with his father, since internalizing a robust form of knightly idealism and an elegant, quasi-Proven~al rhetoric of courtly love - commentators often refer in this context to his mother's French descent. It was when Francis seemingly turned 'against his own origins' in his spectacular renunciation of paternal authority that he began to consolidate them all the more. In the symbolic area, it was only a small step from the noble dames of trou- badour poetry to the 'Lady Poverty' whom he now served, and simi- larly, the elegant upper-class Platonism underlying the courtly cult of ladies and honour (which had visibly affected the middle classes of Assisi) was not far from the people's Platonism offered by late ancient and medieval Christianity.
Once again, the novelty lies purely in the decision - in the focus on the one thing that collects individual power where 'there is need'. The young Francis was unmistakably seized by the zeitgeist: the Christianity of the early urban period was looking for a superstar. With the role of poverty's troubadour, he had found a position that allowed him to transpose the imitatio Christi into an allegory of courtly love. By learning to draw sweetness from bitterness, he gained leeway for the release of mental energy to compensate for the constant depression of the coming centuries: the growing scandal of involuntary poverty in an era that was increasingly devoting itself to wealth. By practising self-denial for the sake of Lady Poverty, he created surplus powers from the weakest point - albeit at a price that already made his contemporaries shudder. He paid this price in the form of a triumphant self-chastisement that would not rest until total imitation, the emulation of the crucified through the duplication of his wounds, had been achieved. Thomas of Celano put his finger on the critical point: 'Nothing else could spring up in that soil, since from the first that wonderful cross claimed it for its own.