No More Learning

Closest to him are early and late Foucault and the heroistically inclined early Heidegger,
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not
he wanted to 'set out' into the German destiny was nothing more than a base camp gone wild. In \Vittgenstein's Tractatus period too, where the author used his well-known disposable ladder, there are traces of the hope that one could climb over the horizontal universe of facts and proceed to the ethical summit through a vertical act. In later Wittgenstein, on the other hand, as well as middle-period Foucault and late Heidegger, there is an unmistakable shift to the horizontaL They perform, each in their own way and for very different reasons, a sort of resignatio ad mediocritatem. The playing of language games, the repeated study of the discourses of earlier power games and the late pietistic waiting for a new sign of being - these are all attitudes in a camp where the path evidently comes to an end, even if the authors have preserved some leftover aspirations to ascent. As far as Binswanger is concerned, it seems to me that he does not develop an opinion of his own on the critical question, instead contenting himself with a reference to the desirability of 'anthropological proportional- ity'. As he sympathized with the late Heidegger on the one hand, but
on the other hand, as a member of the psychiatric mountain rescue corps, attempted to retrieve the 'extravagant', one can consider him one of the outposts of the base camp who, because of their profession, still had some understanding of the dynamics of verticality.
Bourdieu, Thinker of the Last Camp
Among the authors in the second half of the twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu stands out for the problematic merit that in his work, the rejection of any notion of summit expeditions took on dogmatic pro- portions. He is, to put it pointedly, the sociologist of the definitive base camp - and even acted for a while as its intellectual prefect, com- parable in this respect to jiirgen Habermas, whose publications on the theory of communicative action can likewise be read as pamphlets on the overall completion of base camps in flat areas. Bourdieu's appear- ance on the French intellectual scene had taken place in the early 1960s, when the theoretical 'field' - to take up one of its preferred concepts - was almost completely occupied by Marxistically coded forms of social critique. As a temporary assistant to Raymond Aron and a reader of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Alfred Schiitz, he could not fail to see the inadequacies of Marxist approaches, espe- cially in their fatal extrapolations by Lenin and Stalin. If he wished to earn a place in the success field of French critical culture, he would
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HH'5'-""5'" games ment exploitation critique, compensating
sive power through additional efforts in the area of power critique. This could only be achieved by progressing from a theory of direct domination to a logic of domination without dominators. Now it was anonymous and pre-personal agencies that gained the rank of a repressive sovereign. This constellation spawned all the turns and innovations that characterize Bourdieu's variety of 'critical theory' - and, as German readers know, 'critical theory' is a pseudonym for a Marxism abandoned by a faith in the possibility of revolution. In this situation, the theory itself - along with an art that behaves increas- ingly subversively - becomes a substitute for revolution.
The foremost characteristic of Marxist thought was the intro- duction of an anti-idealistic hierarchy of reality. According to this, the base, understood as a political-economical 'praxis', possesses a higher reality content - more power to bring about effects and side effects - than all other 'spheres', which accordingly had to content themselves with the role of a 'superstructure' determined by the base. As this demotion to secondary status concerned the state, the legal system, the educational system and all other articulations of 'culture', the political ontology of the basal made a deep caesura in the tradi- tional ecology of the spirit. The most consistent realization of this approach could be observed in Stalinism, whose modus operandi can be summed up in a simple formula: destruction of the superstructure by connecting it to the base.
Habitus: The Class Within Me
Whoever wanted to found a 'critical theory' after 1945 could, in the light of Stalin's actions, only do so via an alternative understanding of reality as 'praxis'. It was therefore necessary to redefine 'praxis', and to show that it followed different laws from those described in economically bound standard Marxism. This only became feasible by moving the base lower down, and anyone who wanted to go deeper here had to climb down from the level of production processes to that of psychophysical realities. The zeitgeist did its bit to support this intention: from a theory-historical perspective, the rise of the 'body' began in the 1960s, when late Marxism realized how much its survival depended on proving that there was a substitute base. In Germany, the turn took place mostly in the form of studies on the deformed 'subjective factor', while in France, a form of ethnological
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
on
Bourdieu become aware profound
ence between an economy of honour and one of exchange since his investigations, begun in 1958, into the North Algerian agricultural societies of Kabylia; this led him to seek a new answer to the 'base' question.
This is where Bourdieu's most important conceptual innovation, the idea of habitus, comes into play. It undoubtedly constitutes one of the most fruitful tools of contemporary sociology, even though, as I will show, Bourdieu himself only uses it in a very restricted way. The greatest merit of the habit concept is that with its help, an a prima vista satisfying answer is provided to the two insoluble riddles of con- ventional Marxism: firstly, how the so-called base can mirror itself in the so-called superstructure; and secondly, how 'society' infiltrates individuals and keeps itself present within them. The solution is this: through class-specific psychosomatic forms of training, the social lodges itself in the individuals as a disposition at once produced and producing, unfolding an autonomous life that, while open to experi- ence and life-historically active, is ultimately shaped indelibly by the past.
The analogy between habitus and language immediately catches the eye, for it too forms a structured and structuring social reality sedimented in the speakers. The structuralist zeitgeist of the 1960s may have ensured that Bourdieu temporarily engaged with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the matter at hand was thema- tized under the term langue. De facto, Bourdieu invoked an analogy between his concept of habitus and Chomsky's idea of grammar, in so far as one understands the latter as a system of conditioned spon- taneities based on physically rooted deep structures. The possibility of comparison comes on the one hand from class-dependent behavioural dispositions, and on the other hand from grammar-dependent condi- tionings of speech. One could say that the habitus is the first language of the class training performed on me, and, however much individuals might strive for new content and competencies in the course of their lives, they remain shaped by their mother tongue in Bourdieu's eyes - and, because they are shaped, they in turn shape.
Base and Physis, Or: Where Is Society?
The habitus, then, is the somatized class consciousness. It clings to us
like a dialect that never disappears, one that not even Henry Higgins 180
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wealth, displays his wealth at his banquets, members of the old elite recognize the typical slave in him. When Bourdieu, on the other hand, the grand- son of a poor metayer and the son of a postman from Bearn, rose to become a master thinker and dominate the 'field' of academic soci- ology in France, the thought of the ineradicable habitus of his class helped him to allay the suspicion that he had betrayed his origins through his career. From this perspective, the theory of habitus has the inestimable advantage of serving the moral reassurance of its author: even if I wanted to betray my own class, it would be impos- sible, because its absorption into myoId Adam forms the basis of my social being. Aside from that, the theory helps its users in the aca- demic world and the open intellectual market alike to maintain the pretence of critique by providing them with a means of reducing the manifold vertical differentiations of 'society' to the simple matrix of the privileges of power - be they the prerogatives of the male sex or
of capital owners, material or symbolic.
The price Bourdieu had to pay for lowering the base dimension into
the psychophysical structures of the individual was much higher than he himself realized. Firstly, as already hinted, this habitus concept made him forfeit the better means for describing the play of vertical tensions in the numerous disciplinic fields of the social space with suf- ficient accuracy. De facto, Bourdieu's work as a writer is original and fruitful, for example in his analysis of the struggles for distinction and the ethnography of Homo academicus - not primarily through the application of the habitus concept, but rather through the author's intense attention as an outsider to rivalry-based ranking mechanisms where class influences playa certain part, but are not decisive. At his best, Bourdieu writes a satire without laughs about the nouveaux riches and the ambitious; where he thinks most profoundly, he touches on the tragic leftovers of the human condition.
A further weakness of the habitus concept, interpreted thus, is that it cannot grasp the individualized forms of existential self-designs. Bourdieu's analysis necessarily remains within the typical, the pre- personal and the average, as if Homo sociologicus were to have the last word on all matters. In a certain sense, Bourdieu parodies the analysis of the 'they' in Heidegger's Being and Time from an inverted perspective. While human Dasein is, for Heidegger, 'proximally and for the most part' [zunachst und zumeist] subject to the anonymity of the 'they', and only attains authenticity through an act of decisive- ness, the authenticity of existence for Bourdieu lies in the habitus,
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over a more or com- petencies and attributes of distinction This reversal of the 'they' analysis follows almost automatically from agreement with the political ontology of practical thought, which states that the base is more real than the things that are superstructurally added. This would mean that humans are most themselves where their shaping through the habitus pre-empts them - as if the most genuine part of us were our absorbed class. The part of us that is not ourselves is most ourselves. The habitus theory provides a clandestine hybrid of Heidegger and Lukacs by taking from the former the idea of a self dispersed among the 'they', and from the latter the concept of class consciousness. It builds the two figures together in such a way that the pre-conscious class 'in itself' within us becomes our true self. This corresponds to Bourdieu's division of the social space into diverse 'fields' - in which one naturally finds no 'persons', only habitus- controlled agents who are compelled to realize their programmes within the spaces offered by the field.
Whoever considers such suggestions acceptable may ultimately also find it plausible that in Distinction, Bourdieu's most successful book, the passing of aesthetic or culinary judgements of taste constitutes a reproductive medium of 'domination', Word should have got around among sociologists that one can arrive at substantially more precise statements in these matters with a more horizontally than vertically differentiating theory of milieu, combined with an instrument for observing mimetic mechanisms, than with a theory of anonymous domination. As far as the base-superstructure schema as such is con- cerned, it has been refuted too often to merit any further comments. I would add that little effort would be required in order to show that the augmenting element often has no less power over reality than that which it augments - and sometimes even more. If this were not the case, humans would only seemingly be alterable and learning beings.
On the Genius of Habit: Aristotle and Thomas
The decisive weakness of the habitus concept in Bourdieu's version, however, is that it does not depict what it purports to be explain- ing, namely the region of 'habit', in a remotely adequate fashion. In this author's work, the great tradition of philosophical and psycho- physiological reflection on the role of habits in the formation of human existence shrinks to a remainder that is usable for the purpose of a critique of power. Instead of entering the panorama of effec-
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acts
theory la contents narrow
segment of habits that constitute the sediments of the 'class within us' - it cheats its users of the wealth of that to which its name refers. Naturally Bourdieu, who adopted the term from Erwin Panofsky's study Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951, was generally aware of its philosophical history. 96 He knew that the habitus concept in Thomas Aquinas and the hexis concept in Aristotle had to playa substantial part in underpinning the establishment of an ethics within the framework of an aretological anthropology (that is, a theory which portrays human beings as the creatures capable of virtues), but consciously ignored the broad understanding of the habitus doc- trine, restricting himself to those aspects which were suitable for his purposes.
Among the earlier authors one already finds the well-developed figure of habitus as an elastic mechanism of a two-sided, passive- spontaneous quality. The 'force of habit' was understood by the ancients not simply as being overwhelmed by routines, but as a pre- personally based generative principle of action. When the scholas- tics speak of habitus, they do not mean a Janus-headed disposition looking back with one face at the series of similar past acts in which it manifested itself, while the other face looks ahead to the next occa- sions on which it will prove itself anew. The habitus thus constitutes a 'potency' that is formed by earlier acts and 'updates' itself in new ones. Such a concept naturally came in handy for Bourdieu; as a sociologist, he was on the lookout for concepts that place human behaviour in a plausible intermediate position between excessive social determination and unlimited individual spontaneity. However, he only took over those elements of the classical habitus concept that could be integrated into his version of the base, which, as stated above, means the pre-conscious effects of the 'class within us'.
Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, had been con- cerned with explaining the possibility of the 'virtuous within us', or even the 'good within us'. They understood habit, in so far as it is good habit, as an embodied disposition that prepares the actor for virtuous actions - and indeed, in the case of bad habits, for bad deeds, though these are not the focus of their investigation. For the classical thinkers of practical philosophy, hexis and habitus are constantly on call: they are expected to leap up when the occasion arises and carry out the good and valuable as if it were the easiest thing in the world. It can only appear easy, however, if and because sustained practice has eroded the improbability of good in advance. As explanations
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in so as act morally and are determined a state of having and being had, influencing and being influenced, disposing and being disposed, acting and having acted, hexis and habitus are anything but the mere auxiliary concepts of a critical sociology. They are anthro- pological concepts that describe a seemingly mechanical process in terms of insistence and intensification in order to elucidate the incarnation of the mental. They identify man as the animal capable of doing what it is supposed to if one has tended to its ability early enough. At the same time, they see the dispositions already attained growing further into new, heightened forms. 97 Thomas does not need to write any letters about the aesthetic education of the human race to achieve that - conceptual clarifications with instructions on how to
be ready for good are entirely sufficient.
It is, in fact, already possible to read the classical theory of habitus
as a theory of training. Whoever has practised properly overcomes the improbability of good and allows virtue to seem like second nature. Second natures are dispositions of ability that enable humans to stay on their level as artistes of virtus. They perform the near- impossible, the best, as if it were something easy, spontaneous and natural that virtually happens of its own accord. Good, to be sure, is not yet understood as an 'obligation', much less a 'value' depend- ent on my positing and evaluating it. It is the rope stretched out by God on which the artistes of overcoming must walk - and overcom- ing always means passing off the wondrous as the effortless. 98 That is why Jean Genet, in his crypto-Catholically inspired advice for the tightrope walker, recommended always keeping in mind that he owed everything to the rope. 99 Even if we can no longer think about 'good' in the same way, the classical analysis of habitus remains current; it can easily be translated, mutatis mutandis, into the languages of contemporary training psychology, neurocybernetics and pragmatics. With its help, the psychophysical conditions of possibility of correct, appropriate and skilled actions can be explained at a high standard with proximity to their subject. It certainly does not, as the crypto- Marxist interpretation of the 'base' would like, explain how the social enters the body. It rather states how the disposition for carrying out what is good, correct and appropriate can be incorporated into human existence. Allow me to add: 'good', 'correct' and 'appropriate' are names for the extraordinary, to whose nature it belongs to appear in the guise of the normal.
The older theory of habitus thus forms part of a doctrine of incor- poration and in-formation of virtues. It is applied aretology, carried
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out
people, strives towards act. An
of this kind carries its self-reinforcing principle within itself. Its opti- mization is not subject to any limits imposed from without. Even the saints, writes Prosper of Aquitaine, 'always have something left in which they must be able to grow' (superest quo crescere possint). Whoever takes up the habitus theory as formulated by Thomas is already halfway to an interpretation of being human as an artistry of good. This provides an anthropological concept for the effective- ness of inner technologies that subtly articulates the vertical tension inherent in every area of ability. It explains how precisely that which is already carried out fairly successfully feels the pull of something better, and why that which is performed with great skill stands in the attraction field of an even higher skill. The authentic form of the habitus theory describes humans in all discretion as acrobats of virtus - one could also say as carriers of a moral competency that turns into social and artistic power. That is the wide-open door through which the thinkers of the Renaissance only had to pass to transform the saints into the virtuosos.
Homo Bourdivinus: The Other Last Human
By this standard of analysis, Bourdieu's appropriation of the habitus concept seems like a wilful impoverishment. It resembles a regression to an involuntary pre-Socratism in which the division of possessions into tameable passions and formable habits has not yet taken place. Homo bourdivinus is like one possessed by class, riding both having and had in a circle on the broomstick of habitus. He is the human at the base camp who acts as if it were the goal of the expedition. For him, the journey upwards is over before it has begun. This youngest brother of the last human has been drastically shown that whatever distinctions he might acquire are never more than supplements to the habitus, pseudo-vertical differentiations within the camp popu- lation. What Bourdieu calls the class society is a base camp where all ascents take place internally, while ascents to external goals are strictly ruled out. As Bourdieu, like any member of a non-utopian left, secretly knows all too well that the 'classless society' cannot exist for a number of convincing reasons, critique at the base camp is limited to keeping up the appearance of critique - which makes sense as long as gains in distinction in the critical scene can thus be achieved. Hence Bourdieu's successes in the milieu populated by the 'conformists of
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
lOO
say
and
It should hardly be necessary to emphasize here that these objec-
tions should not be mistaken for destructive criticism. Bourdieu's direct and indirect contributions to understanding human practice behaviour are, in some respects, as valuable as Wittgenstein's lan- guage game theory and Foucault's discourse analyses - but, like those projects, the habitus theory in the form propounded by Bourdieu needs to be turned around to release its stimulating potential for a general theory of anthropotechnics. For this, it is enough to disen- tangle the habitus concept, to separate it from the fixation on class phenomena, and restore the wealth of meaning it possessed in the Aristotelian and later the empiricist tradition. It only unfolds its full power, however, when combined with Nietzsche's programme of 'positivizing' asceticisms - this would be the equivalent in today's context of the somewhat inappropriate term used by Nietzsche, that of 'making natural'.
This demands a dissolution of the singular 'habitus' - one head, one habitus - and an uncovering of the multitude of discrete, habitual readinesses to act that accumulate in each individual. This brings to light the unsummarizable plurality of elaborable 'habits', or train- able ability modules, of which real individuals 'consist'. Bourdieu's 'habitus' is the 'ensemble of social relations' well known since the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, which can no longer be thought of as an abstract 'being', but is rather 'inherent' in the individual. Admittedly, even Marx had not conceived this inherence adequately, being even more of a slave to the stereotypes of power critique than Bourdieu. If class-specific aspects manifest themselves in the ensemble of disci- plines and practice complexes that de facto constitute what is con- cretely 'inherent' in the individual, then all the better for us if we have learned from Bourdieu how to decipher them. Privileging this layer of the assimilated as the 'base' is more of a concern for sociologists.
Teaching as a Profession: The Attack on the Inertias
At this stage of our reflections, it can become clear why and with what intention the older tradition turned its attention to such topics as habit, hexis and habitus. The explication of behaviour, the habit- ual, the psychomatically assimilated is, as implied in the references to ethics as First Theory, a partial phenomenon of the process I termed the division of possession into passions and habits. This transforma-
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place pressure were the most significant carriers attack on
existing psychosocial conditions.
One can only grasp the true meaning of the two-thousand-year
molestation of humanity by teachers if one examines the angle from which the knowing attack the not-yet-knowing. Only where the secu- larization of the psyche was on the daily agenda, for individuals and collectives alike, did the inner conditions of inertia among those to be taught become thematic for the teachers. These, as some now began to understand, are responsible for the fact that people cannot simply follow the directions of their new ethical directors without further ado. If the first philosopher-pedagogues spoke obsessively about habits, then, it was in the context of a resistance analysis: its purpose was to show how that already present within humans, namely the hexis, the habitus, the doxa (joined in the eighteenth century by prejudice), hinders or entirely prevents the absorption of the new, the philosophical ethos, the explicit logos, the purified mathesis and the clarified method. 'Habit', both the word and the matter, stands for the factual possession of the psyche by a block of already acquired and more or less irreversibly embodied properties, which also include the resilient mass of opinions dragged along. As long as the block rests inert, the new education cannot begin. That observations of this kind were also collected and documented in the Asian world is demonstrated by the well-known anecdote of the Zen master who, to the amazement of his pupil, poured a cup of tea and did not stop when it was full, rather continuing to pour: this was meant to show that a full spirit cannot be taught anything. The course of study, then, consists in pondering the question of how to empty the cup. Whether one should subsequently fill it anew or cultivate its emptiness, once reached, as a value of its own is another matter.
The early schools are, on the whole, base camps whose board members have impressive peak-scaling ambitions, even if the defini- tions of those peaks are school-specific. Each school spontaneously develops an internal verticality and, sooner or later, a system of levels that produces a 'class' society sui generis - one can still recognize the origin of the term 'class' from non-political gradations quite well here. But the early school, for the time being, retains a natural extroversion. It follows tasks that transcend its system, whether in the qualification of students for professions and offices, supra-curricular perfection in personality forming, illumination or the supremacy of philosophers - or whatever else the great shots in the dark might be called. The late school, by contrast, puts an end to transcendent
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THE OF THE
outside the school. It turns into the base camp
ants only study for shifts of location within the camp -just as it was Bourdieu's primary intuition to describe the games of ambition in class society as pseudo-vertical efforts to acquire more or less illusory gains in distinction.
Identity as the Right to Laziness
The world of pseudo-verticality is the playground of identities. An 'identity', after all, whether presented as personal or collective, can only become attractive and valuable if people wish to distinguish themselves from one another without the licence to set themselves apart hierarchically. In this view, the concept of identity circulat- ing in contemporary sociology forms the generalized counterpart to Bourdieu's doctrine of habitus; with its help, inertia is elevated from a deficiency requiring correction to a phenomenon of value. My iden- tity consists of the complex of my unrevisable personal and cultural inertias. While Sartre claimed: 'The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have',101 the identity owners say: 'I am what has me. ' The reality of my being is guaranteed by the sum of those things that possess me. The identicals take themselves as a ready-made; in the document folder, they step with themselves under the wide roof of values that have a claim to preservation. They introduce themselves as systems of inertia, demanding the latter's ide- alization by ascribing the highest cultural value to the inert deposited within themselves. While the Stoics of antiquity devoted their lives to the goal of erecting within themselves, through constant practice, the statue that crafted its best self from invisible marble, the moderns find themselves as finished inertia sculptures and set themselves up in the park of identities, regardless of whether they prefer the ethnic wing or the individualistic open-air space.
Next to habitus, therefore, identity is the central value of base camp culture - and if identity is augmented by a trauma, there is nothing left to obstruct the idealization of the value core. What is decisive is that the very thought of new heights must be frowned upon - if they were climbed, the deposited stores could lose worth. If and because previous achievements as such are placed under cul- tural protection, any expedition project in the vertical is sacrilege, a mockery of all framed values. In the regime of identities, all energies are de-verticalized and handed over to the filing department. From
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are on
is 'progressive hanging' nor gradation. In horizon of the base camp, each identity is worth every other, Identity thus provides the super-habitus for all those who want to be as their local influences have made them and are content with that. In this way, the identicals ensure that they are out of earshot if the impera- tive 'You must change your life! ' should unexpectedly sound again somewhere.
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CUR HOMO ARTISTA On the Ease of the Impossible
Catapults
In the course of these investigations, we seem to have reached a point at which it would be productive to take stock of the distance covered. It leads, pointedly put, from anecdotal steps to approach the planet of the practising to the emergence of the region we call 'habits' - and then from the appearance of habits to the leaps into the supra-ordinary. This term does not refer to the average improb- ability of nature- and social-historical specializations on the plateau of Mount Improbable, but rather to the above-average improbability that is reached as soon as individual people - whether alone or in the company of co-conspirators - begin to catapult themselves out of the habitus communities to which they initially and mostly belong. Once one has grasped the fatefulness of the abrupt and uncanny secession of the heightened from the inhabitants of the base camps, it becomes evident that cultural theory can only be meaningfully carried out as the description of catapults.
Here we once again see the explicifying movement that we know drives and accompanies the progress of civilizations towards cognitive self-display. Explication breaks up what is found in confused disclos- edness, and augments the aggregate of the already-discovered with further discoveries. In the process, the boundaries between the com- monplace and the unusual are shifted - people increasingly become the creators of self-performed miracles. As anyone would concede, nothing is more obviously natural than for humans to be 'entangled in habits'. Nothing could be less obviously natural, however, than for individuals who, not infrequently, later act as pioneers in ques- tions of world-orientation for their collectives to find themselves in
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a secesSlOn IS movement supra-ordinary can be observed in birthplaces of philosophy, in Greece as well as India and China. Cultural histori- ans associate this process with such phenomena as urbanization and division of labour - which does little to elucidate the matter. What is genuinely thought-provoking is rather the question of how, in the course of this secession, the complex of acquired habits as such could become thematic, and the thought of supra-ordinary things powerful, within individual humans.
However one answers this question, one thing is clear: it is only in this separation that the human in advanced civilization discovers itself as the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, that cannot remain as it was. Difference within humans is now primed as difference between humans. It divides 'societies' into classes of which the theorists of class 'society' know nothing. The upper class com- prises those who hear the imperative that catapults them out of their old life, and the other classes all those who have never heard or seen any trace of it - normally people who are quick to admire, and thus make it clear that higher efforts can exclusively be a matter for the admired, but certainly not the admirers.
This non-political division of classes initiates the history of the inner witness or 'observer'. Swimming in the waters of habitus, dis- courses and language games is one thing; getting out and watching one's fellow humans from the edge as they swim in the habitus pool is another. As soon as this difference develops a language of its own to become a doctrine and life form, those based on the shore distance themselves from the swimmers. When, therefore, the ancient Indians discovered the observer or witness consciousness and equated it with atman, the subjective world principle, they created routes of access to a surplus of attention that simultaneously silences and mobilizes them. And when Heraclitus deems it impossible to step into the same river twice, this may be a passing reference to the irreversible stream of becoming - which is how the dictum is often read, in convenient analogy to 'everything flows'. In reality, the opaque formula reminds us of a deeper irreversibility: whoever steps out of the water can no longer return to the first way of swimming.
With the emergence of consciousness from the habit nature of human behaviour, a boundary is reached that, once visible, must already be overstepped. One cannot discover the habits without adopting a certain distance from them - in other words, without getting into a duel that clarifies who dominates the ring. Not everyone wants to win this fight; conservatives of all periods feign weakness in
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to overcome to to serve its victory as if it were invincible. Others, by contrast, are con- vinced that habits are foreign rulers under which no real life can be lived. This is the position brought to light by Foucault among ancient authors in his late studies on 'self-concern'. 'Concern for oneself' is the attitude of those who have encountered the greatest of all oppo- nents within themselves - the two-headed daimon which, as we saw, keeps humans in a state of possession: on one occasion as an impulse power, that is to say a complex of affects that rise up in me, and on another as an inertial power, that is to say a complex of habits that have sedimented themselves in me. The secularization of the psyche discussed in the same context consists in nothing other than the crea- tion of a new handling art that turns possessions into manipulable dispositions. In this transition, the enchanters disenchant themselves and change into teachers. They are the provocateurs of the future,
who build the catapults for shots into the supra-ordinary.
The Axial Age Effect: The Humanity of Two Speeds
The discovery of both passions and habits forms the psychological counterpart to the long-known process termed 'the discovery of the mind' by philosophers and philologists. Karl Jaspers summarized this complex with the somewhat mysterious title 'Axial Age' and named five places of 'breakthrough': China, India, Persia, Palestine and Greece. These, he states, are the locations in which advanced civilizatory progress in intellectualization took place first of all, and with unforgettable long-range effects. In the period between 800 and 200 Be, people in those cultures took the 'step into the universal' that we continue to this day in everything we do with an authentically civilizatory intention. According to Jaspers, the first outlines of what would later be called 'reason' and 'personality' became visible during that time. Above all, however, it was from that point that the divide between the most heightened individuals and the many grew immeas- urably. Jaspers writes:
What the individual achieves is by no means passed on to all. The gap between the peaks of human potentiality and the crowd became excep- tionally great at that time. Nonetheless, what the individual becomes indirectly changes all. 102
By advancing their exercises on the tightrope of humanization, the extremists introduce the duty for everyone to pass a test in intermedi-
192
to remain in people obtain
watching makes them dizzy.
In reality, the discovery of passions and habits cannot be separated
from the discovery of opinions, for the same interruption that allows humans to step out of the river of emotions and habits also makes them attentive to the sphere of mental routines. This interruption, which signals the entrance of the observer, irreversibly creates new positions concerning the totality of facts, inside as well as outside. Stepping out of the river means abandoning the old security of the habitus in the inherited culture and ceasing to be a growth of the first cultural community. Now the aim must be to found a new world from the shore with new inhabitants.
For this reason, the Axial Age effect is not so much based on a sudden worldwide interest in increased intellectualization; it comes from the gigantic disturbance of habitus that followed the discov- ery, from the shore, of the inertias embodied in humans. The most important cause for this is the inner acceleration triggered by the early cultures of writing. This was responsible for the overtaking of the habitus of the non-writers by the brains of the writers - just as the bodies of ascetics, athletes and acrobats overtake the bodies of everyday humans. The velociferic power103 of writing practice, which entails additional accelerating disciplines, makes the inertia of the old ethos sunk into the average bodies palpable.
Where accelerating prac- tice asserts its effects, cultural evolution becomes divided; the result is a humanity of two speeds.
It is this disturbance that forces the secession of an elite of learn- ing and practising parties from the old commonalities. It leads to the construction of a new heaven over the old earth, and of a new koinon over the old communes. The koinon that must be conquered, that shared realm in which, since the Milesians, the stars, the logos and the polis have supposedly testified to one and the same order, is much too sublime and remote from everyday institutions to be accessible to all. It is from this that the basic paradox of all universalisms develops: a common system for all is set up in which most can only participate in the mode of non-comprehension. The paradigm for this is the division - which has been dominant for three thousand years and partially revised for barely two hundred - of humanity into its literate and non-literate factions. Virtually, after all, everyone could be able to write, but only few do actually write - and those few will unwaver- ingly believe they are writing for everyone else. The same applies to all figures of logical, ethical or medial socialism. Some might call the
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
setting of the universalism trap the intellectual side of the entrance into a class society, though the distinguishing criterion, admittedly, no longer consists in the power of an armed lord over his unarmed servant; it lies rather in the self-arming of the practising individuals against the inertias within themselves - through logic, gymnastics, music and art in general. In this practice-cultural turn, the role models of Axial Age spirituality are constituted: the wise men, the illuminated, the athletes, the gymnosophists, the sacred and profane teachers. It is with figures of this type that the people of advanced civilizations would concern themselves in the subsequent millennia (artists in the modern sense were not initially an issue). They would ensure that culture time became the time of intellectual role models.
Getting to the Other Side: Philosophy as Athletics
To continue the metaphor of stepping out of the river, humans who have accepted the task of explicating the inertia within them find themselves forced by the course of experience to switch to the other side of their self-findings no fewer than three times. By noting how passions are working within them, they understand that they must reach the other side of passion so that they do not simply suffer from the passions, but rather become skilled at suffering. 104 By noting to what extent they are controlled by habits, they immediately under- stand that it would be decisive to cross to the other side of habits so that they are not simply possessed by them, but rather possess them. And by noting that their psyche is populated with confused notions, it occurs to them how desirable it would be to arrive at the other side of the tumult of notions so that they are not simply visited by muddled thoughts, but develop logically stable ideas. Thought begins when the charade of associations ends that is currently being described as a competition of 'memes' for free capacities in the neocortex. This threefold change of sides forms the ethical programme in all activities grouped together by Plato under the invented term 'philosophy'.
The word 'philosophy' undoubtedly contains a hidden allusion to the two most important athletic virtues, which enjoyed almost uni- versal popularity at the time of Plato's intervention. It refers firstly to the aristocratic attitude of 'philotimy', the love of time, that glorious prestige promised to victors in contests, and secondly to 'philopony', the love of panos, namely effort, burden and strain. It is no coinci- dence that the patron saint of athletes was Hercules, the performer of the twelve deeds that were preserved in the collective memory as
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CUR HOMO rlRTISTA
as
Plato would later as of wisdom, gymnasts
and philosophers presented themselves long before them as friends of the toil that makes men into men, and as lovers of the long, hard labour placed between them and victory by the gods. The Cynics in particular later claimed Hercules as their ancestor in order to under- pin their thesis that they alone, the total ascetics among philosophers, were true athletes, while the sportsmen were no more than decadent musclemen chasing after ephemeral successes, without any notion of solid virtue or cosmos-suited reason.
The imperative 'You must change your life! ' thus resounded in ancient Europe from the fifth century Be onwards not only from the countless statues that the Greeks, like people possessed by an unbridled pictorial compulsion, erected in temple precincts and squares as if they wanted to augment the mortal polis-dwellers with a population of statues - presumably to draw attention to the similari- ties between gods and victors. l05 It comes even more from the new knowledge situation, or rather the altered attitude of the knowing to their tasks in life. Changing one's life now means breeding, through inner activations, a practice subject that will eventually be superior to its life of passions, habitus and notions. This means that anyone who takes part in a programme for de-passivizing themselves, and crosses from the side of the merely formed to that of the forming, becomes a subject. The whole complex known as ethics comes from the gesture of conversion to ability. Conversion is not the transition from one belief system to another; the original conversion takes place as an exit from the passivist mode of existence in coincidence with the entrance into the activating mode. 106 It is in the nature of the matter that this activation and the avowal of the practising life come to the same thing.
These observations allow us to grasp more precisely what Nietzsche had seen when he characterized the earth as the ascetic planet in his reflections on The Genealogy ofMorals. Askesis became inescapable from the moment when an avant-garde of observers found themselves compelled to overcome their inner obstacles - more precisely, the three obstacles that faced them in the form of passions, habits and unclear ideas. In view of this compulsion to clarify and practise, this three-obstacle run that appears at the beginning of higher culture, one can justifiably take Nietzsche's statement further and speak of the earth as the acrobatic planet. This phrase would also have the advantage of doing even more justice to Nietzsche's most important moral-philosophical intuition: in seeking with all his might to free the
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
point out
asceticisms of toughening and advancement among the old
gave the starting signal for a strictly artistic interpretation of human facts. If one refrains from the mistaken projection of the Obermensch into the future, it becomes evident what Nietzsche had realized: that, since the entrance of peoples into the phase of advanced civilization, every achiever acrobatically comes under tension.
Asceticism and Acrobatics
Acrobatics is involved whenever the aim is to make the impossible seem simple. It is not enough, therefore, to walk the tightrope and perform the saito mortale at a great height; the acrobat's decisive message lies in the smile with which he bows after the performance. It speaks even more clearly in the nonchalant hand gesture before his exit, the gesture one could take for a greeting to the upper tiers. In reality, it conveys a moral lesson: for our like, that is nothing. Our like - meaning those who have completed the course in impos- sibility, with making an impression as a subsidiary subject. Some of them remain in the arenas and stadiums until the end of their careers, others switch to asketeria and climb religious ladders instead, many retire to the forests and deserts, a further faction tries their hand at the visual and musical arts, and others still speculate on high-ranking civil service, maybe even the highest of all. Plato famously sought to show that the art of governing states can also be learned to perfection, provided the political artistes prepare themselves for the impossible in a forty-year course of study, from the tenth to the fiftieth year of their lives. The ability to rule the state following ideas and not, as is usually the case, simply stumble from one situation to the next like a power clown - this too could, with the necessary will, be refined into a masterfully performed craft. One does not have to be born as a god, like the Pharaoh, to be a practitioner. It is sufficient for an enlightened Greek, with the right tuition, to practise themselves upwards psycho- technically to the pharaonic level.
Nietzsche's insights into the convergence of asceticism and artistry show him in step with the tendencies of the late nineteenth century, which I have described with such key phrases as 'athletic renaissance' and 'de-spiritualization of asceticisms'. If one has perceived these movements, it is easier to see why ascetic feelings of self-concern certainly do not begin from penitent self-humbling. Early practice
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CUR . ARTISTA
intuition one must
other automatisms at all costs. Only thus 'man' come into the focus of those sequences of exercises which change his 'nature' in order to realize his 'nature'. Here he becomes the animal that is condemned to direct, practise and think. Philosophical anthropologists have been wont to say since the start of the twentieth century, with meaningful emphasis, that humans cannot simply live their lives, but must 'lead' them. 107 That is not untrue, and expresses an important insight - though it would be even more valuable if one could explain why there is no other way, and how it is that count- less people, especially in the addiction zones of the West, nonetheless
make more of an unleading and unled impression.
Anthropotechnics: Turning the Power of Repetition Against Repetition
The answer is to be found in the emergence of anthropotechnics during the axial age of practice. As soon as one knows that one is possessed by automated programmes - affects, habits, notions - it is time for possession-breaking measures. Their principle, as already noted, consists in crossing to the other side of repeated events. Since the discovery of repetition itself as the starting point for its own har- nessing, such a crossing has seemed practicable according to precise rules. This discovery was the premiere of anthropotechnic difference.
The explanation for this lies in the double-edged nature of the matter itself: with the power of repetition, one simultaneously grasps the dual nature of repetition as repeated repetition and repeating repetition. This highlights the distinction between active and passive in the subject of repetition with pathos. Now one understands: there is not only the affected, but also the affecting affect; not only prac- tised, but also practising habit; not only imagined, but also imagining notions. Each time, the chance lies in the active present participle: in this form, the activated human is celebrated as one who is autono- mously feeling, practising and imagining in opposition to the felt, the practised and the imagined. In this manner, a subject human gradu- ally sets itself apart from the object human - if it is permissible to use these unsuited, overly modern and cognitively tinged terms here. In the second position, the human stays the same as before - the passive, repeated being overwhelmed without a fight - whereas in the first, it becomes the post-passive, repeating, battle-ready being. Choosing the first path produces the 'educated human', of whom Goethe still
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a one. ! Os
on ascent to is the naiiJete once
belonged to it - together with the twofold attitude towards it: con- tempt for the overcome cliche and homesickness for the unbroken.
The discovery of 'deep-seated' habit as a barely corrigible inertial principle, then, invokes the sum of measures that we still feel and continue today as the most far-reaching innovation of the ancient world: the turn towards the art of education, paideia, which initially means something along the lines of 'art of the child' or 'technique for training boys'. Children could, in fact, only come into view methodi- cally as children after the emergence of habits: as those not yet pos- sessed by habits, they attract the attention of the meanwhile lively instructors. In the twilight of the teachers, which is simultaneously an anthropological twilight, the child changes from a mere burgeoning phenomenon to a protagonist in the drama of upbringing.
One could almost say that before this turn towards 'guidance of boys', children were culturally invisible. Only after the discovery of the region of habit do they gain the privilege of visibility, which can be temporarily diminished - as in medieval Europe - but is never entirely lost. Now the young become objects of a concern that develops into a veritable art: the art of controlling habit formations and building up complex competencies on a base of automatized exercises. The advantage of being a child, however, the relatively unformed nature and openness to influence, comes at the price of a natural disadvan- tage, namely the strong emotionality and spontaneity of the young - the early educators would not have called themselves 'pedagogues', however, had they not believed that they would cope with this in the long run. Here, behind the educator, one recognizes the barely dis- guised figure of the animal tamer - just as there is grooming behind all teaching. That is why the true history of pedagogy also recounts the shared history of children and animals. But when the animal tamer succeeds in training elephants to walk the tightrope, as Pliny describes in his natural history, or to write Greek and Latin words with their trunks, as mentioned by a different author, the pedagogue should provide more than mere training and enable his pupils to recognize and choose their careers from the multitude of possible ones.
Pedagogy as Applied Mechanics
In short: because the inertial quality of the habitual had been explic- itly understood in the twilight of the educators during the first millen-
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CUR HOMO ARTISTA
Be, was
habit in statu in to turn
resistance into a factor of co-operation.
This brings us to the underlying principle of all early anthropo-
technics. Every technical approach to humans - and that is precisely what pedagogy initially is - is based on the primal idea from classical mechanics of placing inertial forces in the service of the attempt to overcome inertia. This notion had its first triumph in the discovery of the lever principle. The smaller force can, if multiplied by the longer distance, move the larger force - a similar idea also underlies the pulley, which was known in antiquity. Meehani? , Greek for 'cunning', therefore means nothing other than outwitting nature with its own means. 109 Pedagogical meehane grows from the considered decision to use habit for its own negation - one could also say it uses the probable as a medium for increasing improbability. One divests habit of its resistance qualities and turns it towards the purpose of achiev- ing otherwise unattainable goals. This succeeds if the pedagogue is capable of gaining the greater pull - that is, getting to the root of conditioning through practising repetitions. From that point, one can say that repetitio est mater studiorum. Small human forces can achieve the impossible if they are multiplied by the longer distance of practice. 110
The discovery of this mechanics triggers the euphoria that shapes the spiritual schools in statu naseendi, in Asia and Europe alike. Hence the high training aims typical of early school and practice systems as found in the esoteric core of Platonism, as also in most forms of Brahmanic training and Taoist alchemy. Naturally, running a school always involves exotericism and preparation for offices. In the hot core of the teaching, however, is the guidance of adepts towards the vertical wall on which to attempt the ascent to the impos- sible. Behind the theses of the school's advertising brochure, which states 'Virtue can be learned', lies an esoteric radicalism that can be summarized in the message 'The divine can be learned' (which is unutterable on Western soil). How - if the ascent to the gods could be mastered through secure methods? If immortality were just a matter of practice? Whoever believes that also thinks, like Plato, the Indian teachers and the immortals of Taoism, that they have a mandate to teach the impossible, albeit never beyond a small circle of suitable initiates. The teaching assignment includes the use of all suitable means for overcoming inertia. How far this goes is shown by the long line of spiritual and athletic extremists who have shaped the image of humanity in previous millennia.
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE Didactic learning for the of
Regardless of whether the early school presented itself exoterically or esoterically, however, it never considered itself the goal of its activ- ity. The maxim of medieval schoolmasters - non scholae sed vitae discimus111 - clearly meant: we are not learning for the base camp; all that counts is the expedition. As strait-laced as this declaration may sound, however, it took on monstrous dimensions in its interpreta- tions. The word vita, on first reading, means no more than proving oneself on the outer front, in professions and offices; everyone involved in the lofty game realized, however, that this was only an initial step. In its deeper design, 'learning for life' was a maxim in favour of the most ambition projects of ascent - projects for which the divine was just high enough.
Such an equation of God and life was suitable for building up the most excessive vertical tension; it forced people to revise radically their conventional notions of the meaning of 'life'. It suddenly became possible to turn the attribute 'living' into a superlative and to multiply the noun 'life' by itself. Whoever says 'life' will sooner or later also say 'life of life'. Then, however, 'learning for life' means learning for pure surplus. In the course of studying the heightened life, one encounters the vita vitalis, which stands vertical in relation to the axis of empirical existence. This dictates the direction for the primary sur- realism: the vertical pull effective in all advanced civilizations, which was given the unfortunate name 'metaphysics' in the West. Perhaps 'metabiotics' would have been a more suitable term, or on Latin soil the word 'supravitalistics' - though one must admit that both words would have deserved to die of sheer ugliness immediately. The term 'metaphysics' kept itself at the top of our curricula until that other terminological monstrosity, the doctrine of 'survival' so central for the moderns, gained the upper hand.
Dying Performance: Death on the Metaphysical Stage
The hardest test for the new subject of the practising power is death, as it is the factor that forces people most strongly into passivity. Whoever challenges death, then, in order to integrate it into the domain of ability, will - if successful - have proved that it is within the realm of the humanly possible to surmount the insurmountable - or become one with the terrible. That is why all exercises directed against the controlling of the soul by intense affects, unexamined
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CUR HOMO ARTlSTA
the
inevitably to measures
the possession of all possessions: the subordination of humans to the power of death. This can occur in two different ways: firstly through an asceticism, which leads to an artificially acquired attitude of being able to die. That is how the philosophical ars moriendi was read, whose primal scene is the death of Socrates, the most momentous dying performance in the Old European world; that is what was dem- onstrated by the Indian ascetics, who went through the art of leaving the body in numerous variations; and this was also demonstrated by the Japanese culture of suicide (seppuku), in which it was always extremely important to part with one's life as soon as there was a danger that it could outlast one's honour. Emancipation from the tyranny of death can also occur through the formulation of a myth that asserts the allegiance of the soul to the kingdom of the living God. In such cases - Egyptian doctrines of the afterlife and Christian Platonism provide the best-known examples - the soul's right of return is secured less through supplementary ascetic efforts than by living life with integrity.
Since the rise of the surrealisms of advanced civilizations, then, the climate on the ascetic planet has been subject to a constant change, something comparable to global warming through ever-increasing moral emissions. This forces the shift from simply 'living one's life' in the current of collective habitus to leading life under the influence of individualizing school powers. This new kind of guidance causes a defamiliarization of existence to the point where notions about the areas of school and life merge into that bizarre dogma that life itself is nothing more than one great pedagogical project that must be learned like an esoteric school subject - and along with life, the art of ending it in exemplary fashion. That is why what the Greeks called eutha- nasia, the art of the beautiful death, forms the secret centre of the acrobatic revolution; it is the rope over an abyss that the practising learn to cross in order to advance from life to meta-life.
Along with the death of Socrates as described by Plato, the Old European tradition has a second thanatologically momentous primal scene in which the emancipation of the intellectually practising from the tyranny of death could be observed at the greatest height: the death of Jesus as described in the gospels. In both passion stories, the emphasis is on the conversion of obligation into ability, an ability that transpires all the more impressively because circumstances impose a twofold passivity on the victims: firstly in the face of the injustice of the death sentence, and secondly in the face of the cruelty of the
the subjugation all subjugations,
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
case it
how man's appropriates external
sian through the fact that he, condemned rightly in formal terms wrongfully in factual terms, adapts the sentence to his own will and co-operates with the procedure imposed on him as if he himself were the organizer of the passion play into which he was forced.
The superordination of the voluntary over the compulsory is most brilliantly embodied by the allegory of the laws that speak to Socrates in the dialogue Crito. The personified laws tell the condemned man something along these lines: 'Everything would suggest, dear Socrates, that you liked it here in Athens more than anywhere else. We, the laws, and this city we rule, were dearly enough for you. You never went on travels, as many people do, to become acquainted with other cities and other laws. You praised the fate of existing under our leadership like no other - even at your trial, you proudly declared that you would rather die than be banished. You had seventy years in which to turn your back on us and this city, but you chose to stay with us. So if you wanted to flee from us now, in the face of the execu- tion we have decreed, how could you ever repeat elsewhere what you never tired of saying here: that man must regard virtue and justice more highly than anything else? Do not, therefore, follow Criton's advice to flee, but rather ours, which is this: stay here and continue your path to its end! ' Thereupon the wise man draws the only pos- sible conclusion for him:
'This is the voice I hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of flutes in the ears of Corybants. That voice prevents me from hearing any other. [. ••JI will follow the will of the gods. '1l2
To What Extent It Is Right for Jesus to Say: 'It Is Finished'
The absorption of external compulsion into the protagonist's own will is also staged powerfully in the Golgotha account in the gospels, and is all the more impressive because an execution in the Roman style is as far as one could imagine from the civilized setting of the Greek art of dying. As far as the subordination of the victim to external acts of compulsion is concerned, the Jesuan passion greatly surpasses that of Socrates, and yet it is there that the transformation of obligation into an inalienable ability was demonstrated to greatest consequence.
The scene of the final moments on the cross is itself loaded with exemplifying energies by the evangelists. While we are told in Mark
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CUR HOMO
a
iug the sponge, Luke 23:46 describes same scene
in latently ability-coloured transitional terms: 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit', et haec dicens expiravit. John 19:30 adds a phrase that belongs fully to the sphere of ability: tetetestai, rendered in Latin as consummatum est, meaning 'It is finished. ' As venerable as these translations may be, they scarcely do justice to the spirit of John's addition. For what John, the Greek apostle, undertakes at this point is no less than an athleticization of the saviour's death - which is why Jesus' last words should be reproduced more in the manner of 'Made it! ' or even 'Mission accomplished! ', even though such a turn of phrase would go against the conventional Christian view of the passion. The goal of the operation is unmistakable: Jesus must be transformed from the chance victim of wilful Judaeo-Roman justice into the fulfiller of a mission dictated by divine providence - and this can only be achieved if his suffering is completely 'sublated' as something foreseen, determined and desired. The same word with which Jesus breathes his last breath on the cross, tetelestai, is used by John shortly beforehand to posit the 'fulfilment' or completion of written predictions through the Golgothan documentation. The decisive point is that Jesus himself recognizes the 'fulfilment' of the mission on the cross and considers it completed (sciens Jesus quia omnia consummata sunt), so his final utterance does indeed contain a scriptural-messianic-athletic statement of achievement.
The acrobatic revolution of Christianity does not end with the conquest of death's passivity demonstrated on the cross. The triumph of ability over non-ability takes place between Good Friday evening and Easter morning - the most pathos-laden of all time spans. In this time, the slain Jesus carried out the most unheard-of act, that of akro bainein into hell- he walked through the underworld on tiptoe. With his resurrection 'on the third day', anti-gravitation celebrates its greatest victory: it is as if Christ, the first among God's acrobats, had got hold of a vertical rope that opened the way for him and his fol- lowers to an absolute vertical previously closed or only sensed mythi- cally. Through his saito vitale, the risen one breaks open the world form characterized by a belief in the supremacy of the fatal interrup- tion. From this moment on, all life is acrobatic, a dance on the rope of faith, which states that life itself is everlasting - and in an irrevocably proclaimed 'from now on'.
Klaus Berger remarks on the Athanasian theology of the evangelist: 'Staring at death is replaced by integration into the line of those who wander beyond death. For even physical death is exceeded; it is merely
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CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
m sequence events. >113 an 'immate- part' in the course things: humanity had to wait a long time
the chance to hear such frivolities - or should one say, such delirious acquittals from the grip of finitude? As soon as such a doctrine is in the world, the psychopolitical ancien regime, the normal depression also known as realism, finds itself in palpable difficulty. The steady continuation of the anti-depressive campaign provokes history: it is subject to the law of the deceleration of the miracle. This results in what Alexander Kluge calls the immense 'time need of revolutions'. 1l4
Death Athletes
The athleticization of the Christian death struggle hinted at by John reaches one of its climaxes during the persecutions of Christians in southern Gaul, initiated by Marcus Aurelius and continued by his successors, which flared up more heavily again around AD 202, under Severus. At this time, the North African Tertullian wrote his con- solatory text Ad Martyros, a highly rhetorically stylized piece, which employs all the tools of ancient ascetology to make the prisoners in the dungeons of Vienne and Lyon aware of the parallels between their situation and that of soldiers before the battle - and even more that of athletes before the agon. The African reminds his Gaulish brothers and sisters, not without a degree of cynicism, that they should actu- ally count themselves lucky to be sitting in a dungeon and awaiting their execution in the arena, as the outside world is a far worse prison for a true Christian.
o blessed, consider yourselves as having been transferred from prison to what we may call a place of safety. lls
This robust comforter's expectations of the martyrs have already become sporting to the point where he expects nothing less than peak performances from his fellow believers. These faith athletes owe it to Christ to provide a great match for their executioners.
You are about to enter a noble contest [bonum agonem] in which the living God [Deus vivus] acts the part of superintendent [agonothetes] and the Holy Spirit is your trainer [xystarches], a contest whose crown is eternity, whose prize is angelic nature, citizenship [politia] in heaven and glory for ever and ever. And so your Master [epistates vester], Jesus Christ, who has anointed you with His Spirit and has brought you to this training ground [scamma], has resolved, before the day of the contest, to take you from a softer way of life to a harsher treat-
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CUR HOMO
n rf'n a rn may be increased. [disciplinaj that they may apply themselves to the building up of their physical strength. [. . . J They are urged on, they are subjected to torturing toils, they are worn out [Coguntur, cruciantur, fatiganturl [. . . JAnd they do this, says the Apostle, to win a perishable crown. We who are about to win an eternal one recognize in the prison our training ground [palaestra], that we may be led forth to the actual contest before the seat of the presid- ing judge [ad stadium tribunalis] well practised [bene exercitati] in all
hardships. 116
Tertullian continues his reflections by reminding the martyrs that profane humans from heathen peoples have defied death and volun- tarily taken the most terrible ordeals upon themselves - like the phil- osopher Heraclitus, who reportedly covered himself in cow dung and burned to death, or Empedocles, who leapt into the flames of Mount Etna. In certain heathen cities, Tertullian tells them, young men have themselves flogged until they bleed, simply to demonstrate how much they are capable of enduring. If these people pay such a high price for mere glass beads, how much easier it should be for Christians to pay the price for the real pearl!
Admittedly, tortured Christians in Roman provincial theatres are anything but the ideal of the philosophical savoir mourir. Even in Tertullian's relentlessly drastic rhetoric, however, one can detect an echo of the agonal ethics which states that through askesis and harsh- ness (sklerotes) towards oneself, even immensely difficult feats can become easy.
Certum Est Quia Impossibile: Only the Impossible Is Certain
Tertullian's dauntless pep talk to the morituri of Lyon reveals the logic of Christian acrobatism with a clarity never attained again. It is the goodwill to carry out the strictly absurd, the boundlessly non- sensical, the completely impossible, that makes theology theology. This alone prevents it from gliding back into an ordinary ontology. In the kingdom of God, what appears in being as a discontinuity is pure continuity. If Christ is risen, then the world in which no one can rise from the dead is refuted. If we never see anyone resurrected here, however, we should switch locations and go where that which does not happen here does happen - being here is good, but being there is better. No self-respecting Christian, according to Tertullian, would
For too, are set apart more
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THE CONQUEST THE arena any
profane people
must epater la bourgeoisie. In the best fighting mood, the author put the matter in a nutshell in his treatise against the Marcionites, On the Flesh ofChrist:
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible. 117
This certum quia impossibile underlies practically everything Europeans have known about vertical matters for the last two thou- sand years. In Simone Weil's superbly exaggerated thesis 'La vie humaine est impossible' - human life is impossible1l8 - we still hear a certainty that is also born of impossibility. What we call the truth is the result of the quarrel between gravitation and anti-gravitation. The Holy Spirit invoked by Christians was that art of wisdom which ensured that the extravagance of martyrs was tempered by the memory of horizontal motifs in their lives. In this sense, the Holy Spirit was the first psychiatrist in Europe - and the early Christians its first patients. Its tasks include defusing religious immune paradoxes, which break open at the moment when the untethered witnesses of faith weaken their physical immunity because they are overly sure of their transcendent immunity.
What happened in the arenas of Roman mass culture, at any rate, was no slave revolt in morality, to recall Nietzsche's prob- lematic theorem once again - it was the outdoing of the gladiators by the martyrs. What took place here was the translation of the physical agones into an athletic insistence on the declaration ego sum Christianus - even if the declarers were thrown to those blond beasts so loved by the Romans, the lions.