No More Learning

We now react to the horror of irreversible movement not with a flight into non-movement but with a flight into the fleeting. Strangely enough, modern immanentism, with its rejection of a hidden world and an after-life, has brought about no solid sense of the here and now, but has rather transformed it into a phantom and mobilized it to the point of evaporation. Heinrich Heine would revoke his most generous verses: ever since heaven has really been left to the angels and sparrows, the earth is becoming more and more unreal. A Dionysian-kinetic nihilism has superseded the metaphysical one. In it, the world is not overcome by way of the eternal, but actually revolutionized and made to disappear through the acceleration of changes. Thus, Old World metaphysics and New World technology seem to agree not to take the transient existences they encounter too seriously but to place them at the disposal of campaigns for conquest and change. In this new functional dynamism, the old Eleatic immobilism possesses its closest ally. The nihilism of transcendence is perpetuated and outbid by that of immanence. One could probably demonstrate that the newly nihilistic mobili- zation prevailed first and with special ferocity in those parts of the world where ancient nihilistic metaphysics and religions had tilled the ground within people’s subjectivities. Seen through this optic, a nihilistic meridian becomes visible which emerged from Old Europe, from Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, and passed through Russia, Japan, and North America. Without a training to overcome the world that lasted thousands of years, there would be no modern evaporation of it. Wherever this training did not take place, modernity implants itself with great difficulty because it has no connectors to latch on to within people’s mentalities. One must experience things in the world as having seen through them to their very “grounds” before developing a taste for making them dance in a kinetic revolution of modernity.
Only now does it become clear what we mean when we ask about the possibility of a second alternative. This question searches for the possibility of a non-nihilistic position of conscious life towards its irreversibility, an attitude that does not counter the death-bound passing of time with either the old nihilism of eternity and substance or the new nihilism of mobilization and change.
What we understood alternative cultures to be were remedies against the inevitable and unbearable grounds for discontent with the world – particularly against the unacceptable transience that adheres to all life which has come under the rule of an idea of time. A non-nihilistic alternative to that which is unacceptable can only
The Other Change 53
stem from a different concept of time. Since the nihilistic image of the world is one that is dominated by Chronos as the passing of time, a non-nihilistic alternative must above all be one that owes nothing to Chronos. This is only possible if a present, lived time reabsorbs an imagined time. Imagined time, I argue, is the ruinous time of mortality. It stretches out between the lead up to the end and the walk backwards to the beginning – these two gestures that open up the imagined space of time’s passing within a subject. But there is no reason why these gestures should compulsively and irreversibly dominate our conscious lives. The present existence is not doomed to rush forward into its imagined end, nor must it cling to the ideas of an origin, a “nature,” or an initial essence. As long as it remains freely movable, it can always bring its occasional fast-forwarded imagining of the end and its momentary recourse to ideas of origin back to the balancing point in the present. Life in the moment thus stays on this side of the compulsion towards metaphysics and outside the curse of history; for neither does it have to encompass the entirety of transitory processes within historical overviews, nor does it feel it necessary to circumvent such ideas towards a concept of a non-moving eternity. The living moment is also not seduced by the suggestive idea of an infinite becoming and passing, where it would be classified as a fleeting point in time. For then, even points in temporal lines and circles would lose their character as moments in time, no longer considered to be the present.
What follows from this? Nothing less than a mildly radical critique of historical existence. If the second alternative culture actually arises from the present as its source, it will reject all of the world’s structures that have been placed in the imagined space of time’s passing: the mythical world of origin, the utopia of the future, the world as historical enterprise, the world as mission and mobilization.
But doesn’t such presentism push aside all that counts as inter- esting about human existence? Does the retraction of imagined time back into the present not dissolve all the excitement that convinced life that it was worth living and carried it out into the adventure of history? Isn’t this alternative presentism a dull, nirvana-like fundamentalism that has to ultimately fade away in an uncreative indifference?
Under the assumptions of representational thinking, these are good questions. However, if these questions do not remain inquiries but become entrenched in theses, their only use will be to illustrate the lack of understanding that this type of thinking has of the essence of presence. Whoever believes that the permanent present amounts to boredom is stubbornly imagining the present as a point
54 The Other Change
in time. In truth, the present does not belong to the concepts of time. Correctly understood, it is a category of movement or drama. The present refers to the kinetic structure through which things that exist become apparent to us as that which enters the space where we encounter it. Presence is movement in the sense of the drama of arrival, emergence, and entrance. The experience of presence is one of the distinctions of human existence, because the very essence of humans is that of arrival and entry par excellence – we are predis- posed to wake up, come out, bring forth, and begin. Presence exists only where humans do, and humans only exist where they are born. Presence is the sting of the unfinished birth.
If people live in ruinous times, they know that they are mortal – creatures for whom it befits to be drifting towards their own ruin at every moment. They have explicitly named themselves as such with melancholy correctness as long as the metaphysical era lasts. But if humans participate in presence, they are the born ones – creatures in whom the movement of birth continues. Presence as a dramatic term thus encompasses a twofold movement: the opening up of the world as arriving-from-without and the subject’s holding-out of itself into the world as the space of arriving. Presence is therefore always accompanied by the awareness of a twofold happiness and a twofold horror. One instance of happiness and terror emanates from the intrusion of external powers and the arrival of unhoped-for gifts, the other from the euphoria and pain of the human exodus itself.
Because it stands in the present, the second alternative is entirely defined by natality. 13 Natal presence cannot contribute to the impulse of running ahead into one’s own death; this is why it differentiates itself in its fundamental movement from the ruinous being-towards- death of the metaphysical or existentialist kind. Presence as a staying in the open arises only through the movement of human birth, and wherever this movement begins, the natal, the present, and the open attain their character in one and the same process. A life of presence realizes that something stands “before it. ” Metaphysics has under- stood the human position that implies this having of something before oneself to be mortality – which is just another way of saying that it interpreted the open “before” us as time; more precisely, as future. The modern interpretation of human existence as “histo- ricity” is also linked to this interpretation. But the result of this historical modeling of the open-before-us is the present world with its steep increases and its reflection in our nervousness – a world that no one would dare to claim as having much time left. It is the privilege of late modern contemporaneity to know that the horizon of the world as history is no longer open. One does not necessarily have to be someone who constantly cries “Woe is me! ” to grasp
The Other Change 55
the end-times claustrophobia that envelops modernity’s inevitable farewell to the progressive-historical filling in of the open.
But if the open before us is neither time nor future, what is it then?
Now the moment has come when I have to say goodbye to my readers. As long as I have the floor to myself, it is not possible to determine what the open is on fair terms. My monologue must seem like a mock-up, blocking the subject with statements about it: what to do? Silence would not be an answer any more than the crossing out of the following sentences would – we uncomfortably recall Heidegger’s clumsily significant crossing out of the word “being. ” In such a situation, all that remains is the retreat of assertions into asociality. From this line on, I march alone; abandoned by tradition and the public, I scribble some sentences onto the blank piece of paper in front of me that speak about the open as if it were a tangible quantity.
The question remains: if the open before us may not be presented as time or future, then what is it?
The most obvious thought is that it is simply the space before us that opens up before our eyes as a field of vision and action. But obviously space is also not the open per se, first, because space as space is filled up by its contents or elements so that we can hardly speak of an open in this case, and, second, because we must not succumb to the danger of thinking of the open as a vacuum that can be filled by the next-best thing that can seep inside to occupy it. What remains, then? If the open is not the time-before-us in the form of future and not the space-before-us in the form of a field of vision and action, then it must be understood as something that already opens up prior to the existence of spatial and temporal orientations. The reassurance of orientation is already secondary.
We notice the fact that we are “standing” in the open by feeling insecure in it. The open allows itself to be recognized by the fact that one “exists” in it. The open would then be the tension or force field that establishes itself around the eccentric human “positionality. ” To be in the open would therefore mean becoming aware of existential ecstasy as innate discomposure. It is in vain that our ecstatic abundance and agony always flees into space and time in order to escape its discontent with itself. The great departures and flights of humanity into historical time and geographical space, however, have led to breathtaking processes in which both become scarce – and to the certainty that if something should still be open today, it is certainly not the geographical horizon or the historical future, but the force fields of present life alone.
These force fields are the home of what modernity calls “art” and the classical tradition refers to as poeisis. Only the activities
56 The Other Change
that produce something in such a way that it “stands” in the open can belong to art. The place of art as poiesis is presence – the natal force field. However, the already very old differentiation between art and technology reminds us that there are radical differences in types of production. While technology emphasizes ability and operates manufacturing as a methodically controlled making available of a product, in poiesis a trace of the natalic proceeding into presence is at work. In fact, both activities have a making character and are based on successful “art” – but they differ from the ground up in their existential content. By bringing something forth – that is, forward into the open – poeisis is the taking up of nature’s produc- tivity through the eccentric human subject. Its poetry continues the forth-bringing giving birth of natural life; indeed, it is poetry only to the extent that it is such a resumption and it can only be such a resumption to the extent that it succeeds at the fundamental gestures of the birth drama: coming-into-the-world and bringing- into-the-world. 14 Poiesis does what it “does right” by placing it “into presence” – not merely turning it out but bringing it forth, putting it out there, into the open and into the public. (Incidentally, this is where an ontopological definition of public as non-uterus emerges: that is, as a space of obstetrical “unconcealments” and as an ontological glacis of what is capable of arriving, so that it is – still incidentally – inevitable to understand public space from the concept of Heideggerian “clearing” as much as Habermasian “enlightenment. ”)
Through poiesis, the spirit gains maternal competencies, even if it happens to be male. This cannot be otherwise, because human productions have to follow the natural process of creation in order to follow nature as old natality into culture as new natality. However, as a new natal process, culture opens its marvelous fan and produces things that would not have occurred to old nature. It is in these risky novel productions that the human creature (stigmatized for its talent for stepping out) invents itself and its worlds. Therefore, poiesis is not a theme of aesthetics as we understand it in the modern era but one of philosophical gynecology, if I may be allowed the expression. Its jump point is the natura naturans that becomes cultural drama within human production and its axiom states that truth is indeed not a woman, but poiesis is a “mother. ” As a doctrine of bringing forth, poietology deals only with the one art in all of the arts: coming-into-the-world or ars nascendi, bringing into the world or ars pariendi, and the serene letting live or ars vivendi.
Needless to say, this is not the approach of the modern “civilizing process. ” (Now that the term has burned through the cheeks, leaving the teeth and jaws horribly visible, as with lepers, it will have to be
The Other Change 57
taken out of circulation. ) This “civilizing process” is expedited by technology’s flight away from the open. It does not bring “forth” its products in the true sense, rather its production mode is a motherless forcing of things that function. With respect to the allocation of resources, technology is a consumption that depletes; with respect to kinetics, it is an aggressive mobilization; with respect to giving birth, it is a breeding of monsters by monsters. If that sounds harsh, then I have struck the right tone; one that is appropriate where technology leads to nothing better than the tearing apart of the great chain of life. If the question remains whether a poietic technology is possible, we would immediately speak differently about it.
The lonely stretch is now behind us and I can look for company again. It is high time that the misleading gestures used to construct this chapter were undone. They concern the order of presentation and counting of alternatives. For architectonic reasons, we had to pretend that we really believed that the second follows the first and that poiesis does not come into play until metaphysics has made its spectacular exit. Of course, that is most definitely not the case. As soon as we think of poiesis, it appears in such a way that we cannot doubt its primacy over metaphysics and technology. Because, if it is that which we claim it to be – the anthropogonic instance that dominates our ars nascendi as the art of coming-into-the-world and bringing-into-the-world – then metaphysics and technology, too, are subordinate extents in the happening of bringing forth and arriving, subordinate admittedly as problem children of natura naturans, as monster children, who not only grow to be too much for their mother but also ultimately challenge her for her reproductive competence.
The chapter did not mislead by reminding us of panic at the beginning and of poiesis at the end. Panicked culture here, poietic technology there; how is that supposed to go together? Obviously, it is not possible nor should it so long as we do not Hegelianize – that is, establish hybrid programs for calculating the incalcu- lable. Pointing to the motif of panic brings to mind the necessity of culturally hemming in what is without measure; doing so with poiesis maps out an intensive taking of measurements of what is actually present. It is likely that we must here – post-dialectically in a demanding sense – reckon with a dual citizenship of human beings and believe them to be capable of the immense as well as the proportional, of ecstasy as well as design. There can be no synthesis of poiesis and panic in the sense of a meta-identity of measure and immeasurability. Excess and pragmatism do not result in a unified whole when put together, even if it is impossible to separate one from the other.
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In the fall of 1985, I had the opportunity to visit Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art on a trip to Asia. In a painting by a Korean artist that was on display there, I found the paradox of contemporary reflections on time and being more lucidly visualized than in hardly any modern Western artwork. The symbol of Yin and Yang was depicted on a large canvas in light pastel shades; the venerable image of a circle made of complementary waves of light and dark, hard and soft, the eternal cipher of polarity and moving harmonization of opposites. However, in this artwork, the circle was disrupted by a flat grey wedge that split the image in two from right to left. It was as if that grey wedge wanted to refute the holistic old Asian world of roundness and completeness. It testified to a catastrophic experience of the world where the one and the other no longer add up to a “higher” unity. It was both disturbing and relieving at the same time to see how the holistic lie was here brought to an end – the split went through the image of the Tao itself. While circle and wedge do come together to create a new and more complex structure, that structure appears before us as something that is forever broken apart, injured, disjointed. Within this structure, neither could the previously harmonious circle incor- porate the aggressive wedge within itself, nor was it possible for the aggressive wedge to completely alienate the two circular halves from each other and make their previous connection unrecognizable; separated, they still remind us that parts can assert their belonging to one another in a disintegrated world. Here and there, a ruined symbol also reveals the structure of something knitted, woven, consonant, netted together. Even after the destruction of the perfect roundness, old links, new links, joints and correlations remain in effect, at least as preliminary sketches of a harmonious life. From these, poiesis can form its resulting qualities. But circle and wedge do not result in a whole just as panic and poiesis do not. As soon as we grasp the common origin of both motifs to be their irreducible obstinacy, the imagined wholeness of old and new metaphysics is foiled. Of the totality of reality it is impossible to say that it is the whole. The paradox of wholeness ruptures all ideas of wholeness since the whole ought to be able to withstand its own disintegration and transgression but cannot. When is wholeness whole? Perhaps when it falls into nothingness as a whole.
3 EUROTAOISM?
Many will find the fact that philosophy is here transformed into a preschool of gynecology to be a severe deviation from the orthodox path. But nothing is so bad that it could not get worse – especially when we set about with heterodox energy to also gynecologize major philosophical topics like “the self,” “autonomy,” “freedom,” “being,” “nothingness. ” How is that supposed to work? Effortlessly: by showing in the very first section that the problem of nihilism must be addressed differently from the way Nietzsche has done it – less heroically, that is; in the second section, by developing the idea that Western metaphysics of the subject was a purely andrologically executed attempt to compensate for the uncanniness of having been born through a power- driven erection of the self, where we will not miss the opportunity to infiltrate the classical definition of philosophy as midwifery of the soul in actually gynecological terms; and in the third section, by explaining the right use of the term “Eurotaoism” – not without bringing the Old Chinese intra-uterine bonhomie into play, which interprets the carryings-on out there as a deadliness in vain.
Nothingness and Historical Consciousness: A Note on the World History of Life Fatigue
The sight of man now makes us tired – what is nihilism today if it is not that? . . . We are tired of man . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality1
Nietzsche’s special position in the history of newer philosophy is constituted by the fact that after him one learns to understand
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the connection between historical thinking and melancholy. This discovery contains the quintessential legacy of the nineteenth century. It is understandable why this century is so poorly regarded by those who came later as one of crooked postures, pompous gestures, and titanic sentimentality. Its major crime, however, is that it left the twentieth century with a paradox that seems more trying than the most hopeless double bind. By bringing up those who are born later to think historically, it infected them with an incurable melancholy. Its historicism destroyed the immune system of naïve life that protects it from seeing itself historically and provided it with a vision of its forlornness in the great realms of time. Just as Pascal shuddered before the eternal silence of infinite space, so the humans of historicism must have felt dejected when faced with the eternal noise of historical epochs. History’s lesson for the present time is that it gives us reasons to despair of it. For this reason, historicity is the philosophical code word for depressiveness – we have known this ever since the young Nietzsche insightfully pointed to the disad- vantage of history for life. One can assume that the generation of romanticists who consisted of witnesses and survivors of the French Revolution already had to suffer through the detrimental side of historical mobilization; for them, the evil of the century lay in the feeling that this historical world was nothing but a graveyard of enthusiasms – all the beautifully begun projects rot within it. Since then, thinking historically means orienting oneself in a situation where life is no longer a match for its own reflectivity. This, too, has been the subject of the European philosophy of alienation since the work of Hegel’s students. Their critique revolves around a structure where life discovers that it is equipped with more morality than vitality, more memory than enterprising spirit, more inhibi- tions than drives. Only historicism makes palpable the nightmare of the past generations that burdens present ones. Aside from a small amount of scholarly happiness, there is hardly a thought within this structure that is not marked by anger at the outcome of history. We constantly succumb to it as into an enormous inhibitory device that imposes itself on us in the form of civilization, education, memory, conscience, lesson plan, capital, objective spirit. In historicism, every life has the feeling of having arrived too late. It finds itself in the position of an heir who realizes only after the fact that the inher- itance that was to make them rich is actually overcharging them and leading them into ruin. Among rebellious spirits, this discovery translates into the furious flight forward. 2
The effect of being ruined by an unprovable and inviolable inher- itance is extraordinarily ironic. We must remember that European historicism first began as an optimistic enterprise of appropriating
Eurotaoism? 61
humanity’s entire past as our prehistory. The heroic optimism of total historical appropriation is primarily linked to the works of Hegel and Marx: Hegel attempted to reclaim the total past of all thinking humans as the property of a self-resonating absolute spirit, while Marx asserted the claim of organizing the entire future as an expression of the essence of a humanity that wades through itself to get to itself. For a long time now, however, the impression has been spreading that these two greatest programs known to recent history both lead to exhaustion in their respective ways. We are just happy if nothing happens to us on our way to work and we cannot even imagine hoping to convert the world into a condominium for our species via our work. To this day, the earth is regarded by ideologues in the succession of Marx as a future single-family house of the working class, while for Hegel, world history is a family tomb in which each skull represents a relative. Both of these massive endeavors fall back into the universal history of fatigue, and in view of both of these last two great Titanisms, it becomes increas- ingly clear that the more historicity reflects on itself, the more it comes under the sign of Saturn. As far as depressive historicism is concerned, the present is characterized only by the fact that it perceives fatigue not only retroactively, but also prospectively. Today, you do not have to be a historian so much as a futurologist to have history come to mind as a patchwork of despair. Nowadays, those who feel like being sad think not so much about what once was but about what the already surprisingly recognizable future will bring. Now that historicism has usurped the future as well, the circle of historicity is closed. World history in the form of an energetic account made on the steps that lead up towards us is no longer easily possible and will heretofore always be sabotaged by counter- narratives that speak of losses and fractures. Thanks to historical enlightenment, the world is now under the eye of a sad science – unable to be romanticized; the best remembrance has the most evil eye. As a result, all history is dis-evangelist – history is bad news.
At this point, the question of nihilism can be introduced. It is obvious that in the declarations of nihilism as they arose barely more than a hundred years ago, the affirmability of life as a whole was called into question. This is directly related to the triumph of historicism and its disenchantment with the temporal world. It creates a cultural situation where life has to see its own history as a process of increasing inhibitions and deformities. Historicism, as an application of enlightenment onto the existence of the enlighteners themselves, dismantles reasons to live and dissolves the vigorous self-invention of local narcissisms in a relativistic way. Therefore, the issue of nihilism must become the focal point of modern cultural
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self-understanding at a time when the victory of inhibitions over impulses, depression over initiatives, comparison of lifestyles over the decision to choose one is almost complete. This is precisely Nietzsche’s moment. He positions his thinking at the lowest point of universal historical decadence on the assumption of having reached a turning point at the same time. He understood that historicism and nihilism are allies insofar as a historical reflection that is thought through to its inevitable end can be about nothing other than the history of an unstoppable nihilistic inhibition of life which enforces itself out of Europe onto the entire world in the name of high religion, morality, and civilization.
For Nietzsche, the history of the Christian West unfolds as that of a slow-moving suicide. In it, life-denying impulses permeate all forms of thought, sensations, arts, and institutions with fearsome thoroughness. The psychological term for this process is the seizure of the power of resentment; the biological term, decadence; the religious term, Christianity; the philosophical term, nihilism. For Nietzsche, the world history of Christian resentment is the story of an immeasurably consequential devaluation of life and world. This devaluation is the aggressive spike in negation that emerges from the feelings of resentment of an already denied, inhibited, mutilated life. In the Christian rejection of the world, a whiff blows over to us of the suicidal depths of Asia. For Nietzsche, Western nihilism is the world history-making enactment of a radical negation of all that he calls the vital “values”; in it, he sees a will to nothingness at work that empowers negative stirrings instead of vital self-affirmations. What our nihilism wants would be nothingness as the highest value. This is a nothingness in the form of an absence of valuing life as worthwhile, an absence of the motivation to exist; in short, a depressed nothingness rooted in the refusal to accept life as it is.
The exploration of motivational nihilism runs through Nietzsche’s entire body of work. With angry lucidity, he works out the mecha- nisms of the inhibited and inhibiting negation that has acquired a theoretical, moral, and psychological monopoly in the modern age. Disguised as Christian mission, philanthropy, and civilizational progress, Western nihilism has gained the power to move the world and bring it down at the same time. Talk of nihilism forced itself upon the waking spirits of the nineteenth century because they understood how powerlessness had established itself as a world power. The inability to reach a comprehending affirmation of life gained favor in institutions that constitute a disguised denial of life. Nihilistic modernity is the world realm of resentment in the form of a will to break life. With this diagnosis, Nietzsche has issued the moral death certificate to the West and its heirs in the East and West.
Eurotaoism? 63
With outrage, he reminded us that the word “world” is a Christian expletive. Seeing the world be dominated by the Christian “no” that was masked itself as post-Christianity, he felt justified in taking the side of denied life and disdaining his age as an era of consummate nihilism. Instead, he taught a Dionysian law of nature – the right of life to follow motivations other than moral ones. His utopia was a heroic positivism by way of which a positive, noble self-affirmation without consequences could dissociate itself from any origin that consisted of poisoned emotions.
All this is well known and only sketched out here as a background for what comes later. Of course, no one will deny the combat value of Nietzsche’s diagnoses, nor cast doubt on the strategic reach of his religion-critical gaze. Nevertheless, in order to talk about the dynamics of nothingness today, we can no longer continue directly in the tradition of Nietzsche’s theorems. Strange as it sounds, his conception of nihilism remains philosophically too innocuous, to the extent that it stops at motivational nothingness and its “overcoming. ”
“We are tired of man . . . ” – this sentence, more than its author knew, succumbs to a process where the increasing effort of human existence triggers a wave of life fatigue. This process also includes Nietzsche’s escape from fatigue into violent affirmations and walks right past the Dionysian revivals as if bored by them. After its misleading upswings, thinking has to come to the decision to perceive its own gravity, fatigue, and vested depression in positive terms. We will show that a meditation on gravity is needed to enliven philosophical talk about nothingness and nihilism. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality and his analysis of the feelings of resentment are not enough to understand gravity. At best, they elucidate the will to nothingness but they fail before the (perhaps more sophisticated? ) task of locating nothingness in a prehistory of negation and in an archeology of life fatigue. Depression as an existential experience of gravity is in the last instance not a psychiatric issue but a philo- sophical one.
Nietzsche himself has occasionally looked beyond the horizon of motivational nihilism. His gaze went furthest in the famous formu- lation that describes modern nihilism as an uncanny guest – the most uncanny of all guests. The metaphor of the guest points to the idea that nothingness is more than just a product or goal of the denial of life by those who live poorly. It suggests that conscious life must, in principle, be prepared for terrible visitors. Human existence itself has an uncanniness to it that does not only then emerge when humans say no to the given. More powerful and older than any yes or no we speak, the uncanny is already present in the medium of that
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yes or no. The eerie guest who haunts the moderns is a descendant of the uncanny where we are always already a guest owing to the sheer fact that we exist. Thus, nothingness is not so much the guest as it is the host. However, Nietzsche was of the opinion that the uncanny comes to us rather than vice versa, and thus lapsed into the heroic key. He led us to believe that “living dangerously” was an ethos of the more noble self and not a common situation that precedes every effort and achievement.
With the reference to the uncanny, a new – say anthropological or fundamental ontological – tone enters into the discussion of nothingness. Now, talk is no longer of motivations and valuations but of the structure of existence into which the imprints of the negative are engraved. At the height of the recent philosophical discussion about existence, it could even have been said that it ended up in nothingness; in other words, in the ungiven and the ungrounded. Such formulations demonstrate the movement that entered the analytics of nothingness during the twentieth century. At the same time, nothingness has made itself an ontologically popular career and has risen to stardom in novels, films, and children’s books. Just how far one can go in this direction is shown by Michael Ende’s fantasy cult fairy tale The Neverending Story, where nothingness turns into something that grows in massiveness by absorbing the most tangible realities. Of course, the book will be accused of translating metaphysics and myth into kitsch, but the level of popularization of metaphysical ideas that it reaches is itself a fact of intellectual history that deserves attention. With Ende, nothingness achieves a concreteness that would make a sworn Heideggerian blanch. For those on whom the book has not made an indelible impression, we will remind them of the passage where the young hero Atreyu encounters three forest spirits on his exodus – strange bark trolls who warn him to continue on his way, for if he were to take the path straight ahead, he would walk directly into nothingness:
A cold shiver ran down his spine at the sight of them. The first, having no legs or haunches, was obliged to walk on his hands. The second had a hole in his chest, so big you could see through it. The third hopped on his right foot, because the whole left half of him was missing, as if he had been cut through the middle. 3
The three characters who are gnawed at by nothingness play a role that myth research refers to as that of the adjuvant, the helper who first appears in a warning function and then to show the way. As Atreyu asks what happened to them, the first answers:
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“The Nothing is spreading. . . . It’s growing and growing, there’s more of it every day, if it’s possible to speak of more nothing. All the others fled from Howling Forest in time, but we didn’t want to leave our home. The Nothing caught us in our sleep and this is what it did to us. ”
“Is it very painful? ” Atreyu asked.
“No,” said the second bark troll, the one with the hole in his chest. “You don’t feel a thing. There’s just something missing. And once it gets hold of you, something more is missing every day. Soon there won’t be anything left of us. ”4
Then Atreyu asks – curious, as all saviors are – where in the forest it had begun, and after hearing the trolls’ answer, he climbs a tall tree to look at the nothingness:
When at last he reached the crown, he turned toward the sunrise. And then he saw it: The tops of the trees nearest him were still green, but the leaves of those farther away seemed to have lost all color; they were gray. A little farther on, the foliage seemed to become strangely transparent, misty, or, better still, unreal. And farther still there was nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a bare stretch, not darkness, not some lighter color; no, it was something the eyes could not bear, something that made you feel you had gone blind. For no eye can bear the sight of utter nothingness. Atreyu held his hand before his face and nearly fell off his branch. He clung tight for a moment, then climbed down as fast as he could. He had seen enough. At last he really understood the horror that was spreading through Fantastica. 5
Rarely does one find such a complete description of “actually present” nothingness. It is only through such a description that we truly see how talk of nothingness has spread within new-metaphysical phantasms as a code word for the horrifying. It gnaws on the characters like an ontological leprosy, turning trees transparent like a metaphysical forest extinction. It is as if the illuminating light operated as a secret agent of nothingness and, as in negative theology – it can ultimately only be spoken of in negations – always in such a way that it is determined by its unbearableness to the human eye. Taken together with the hint that this nothingness raids the forest from “sunrise” on, this brings to the fore the idea that the triumphant march of nothingness could be related to the development of a certain Western metaphysics of light. Ende’s portrait of nothingness is thus not entirely without resemblance to
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the original, and some claim it to have poetic charm. Despite this, it plunges the poor creatures whose job it is to do philosophy into a spirited dilemma. They don’t know whether to pull their hair out from envy at such vividness, or whether they should throw the book into the corner out of anger at such raw concretism. This dilemma can only be brought to an end by discovering another form of visual clarity that takes up the concept with the charms of a children’s book but without assuming a regression in thinking. Is it possible to speak of nothingness in an engaging way without depicting it as a discoloring agent and omnivorous animal?
So let us follow the tracks of nothingness with philosophical means. On our way to a different kind of vividness, we begin to tell of the movements of the children of men that go from the lawful to the appalling and from the domestic into the uncanny. One more step, and we write the opening chapter of a philosophical novel that tells of human birth and the further adventures of the subject. It would not be a philosophical novel if it did not try to claim to be a general autobiography in which all that says “I” has recorded its story. This novel of the subject has a Pantagruelian mix of genres. It combines equal parts of the history of philosophy as well as the ghost story, the heroic epic as well the Picaresque novel, and must also include something of hagiography. It is the novel of birth, written as the prototype for all stories that tell of the excursion, odyssey, heroic path, and education in the labyrinth of the world. We will see how a coming into the world and coming to naught echo each other. As a by-product of this natural history of the uncanny, a summary social history of human over-exertion and a small world history of life fatigue emerges. It is a book of the human being as a questionable child of the world – not a book for children.
The Miscarried Animal and the Self-Birth of the Subject
Man is the great —— in the book of nature.
Jean Paul, “Selections from the Papers to the Devil”6
If we follow the footsteps of the uncanny all the way back to the origin, we encounter the human drama of birth. The way that humans come into the world presumably contains the complete key to the code of the problem of nothingness. If the word “nothing” is supposedly more than a pretext for charlatanism, then it is the indication that for humans it does not suffice to be born in order to arrive in the world: the physical birth of a human is the opposite of a coming-into-the-world; it is the dropping out from all that is
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“familiar,” a plunge into the uncanny, finding yourself exposed in a frightening location. This is true in three ways. First, for the human child, being born means bidding farewell to its intra-uterine life, which is probably the only stage of its reception in the world that has a truly hidden, homey character – provided that the foothills of the predatory outside world do not encroach on it; in any case, the birth exodus into the world is an adventure ride through uncanny forests that render the spookiness of Atreyu’s forest7 rather bourgeois by comparison. Second, coming into the world means arriving in uncertainty – because for humans more than any other beings, the world is something that does not get defined from the outset, that is not a foregone conclusion, but something that has to be deter- mined and established. The place of arrival itself is made uncertain and set in motion by the arrival of the human, that constructive animal; anyone who had the bad idea to fall out of the womb straight into Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, or Cairo will soon have a song to sing about the uncanny life in the thicket of cities. And, third, for humans, giving birth always means getting there way too early and finding oneself in a state that is absolutely unsuitable for a successful arrival in reality, a state of total disorientation, helplessness, and embarrassment. The only thing that helps us in this exposed situation is the fact that in the beginning, the world to which we come is identical, with one small exception, to the mother from whom we come. This small exception is precisely the measure of ontological difference. Because as soon as we are old enough to get to know our mother from the outside, we begin to get to know a “world” that is not our mother. It may be said that the strange difference between mother and non-mother preoccupies humans for the rest of their lives, because they can never quite understand how the world that at first felt like the mother could transform into the world that looks the way we know it to look now – we will not say how, to avoid summoning panic into the room.
If we want to start from a reflected concept of the world, we can no longer seriously claim that humans come into the world via their birth. A nameless something is put in a position of which it cannot promise itself anything certain or good unless it had arrived to a mother and people who promise it a certain and good world. This has a far-reaching consequence for the philosophical concept of the world: the world in which the human newcomer arrives is, by its very nature, nothing more than a promise that the older inhabitants of the world make to the newcomers, a promise predestined to be broken owing to the liability of worldly conditions. With this, the question of nothingness takes on a new form. Nothingness can now either mean that nothing is promised to those who come into the world,
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so that they cannot promise themselves much from their own human existence either, and consequently develop an inclination to return from whence they came, into the womb, to death, into the monist all-nothingness – a motif that has its place in all redemptive religions and all doctrines of all-in-one unity. Or it suggests that nothing will come of the great promises that were made and that none of the expectations of the world that have been roused in us by mothers will be fulfilled in a world as non-mother – a motif that all versions of worldly-wise skepticisms, cynicisms, and nihilisms deal with. The uncanniness of the human coming into the world therefore has its grounds in the unreliability of human promises. Does this stem from individual recklessness, from irresponsibility, from the moods of the unpredictable bipeds? No – it stems from the fact that the world given as a promise has something untenable in itself, or, if tenable, then only with luck and effort. In the uncanny, the unstoppable tendency of promises appeals to us to the point of untenability. That is why our coming-into-the-world has a pull into nothingness from the outset. Even though every birth is also inherently a promise to the world, in every promising birth a succumbing to the untenable is also at play because the promised world is marked by untenability. It even has to be said that a hint of miscarriage adheres to every birth. Humans do not arrive as solid subjects into robust worlds; rather the world emerges for them through the fact that they are born slightly to the side and exposed to the ungiven, the uncanny. Nietzsche only half-formulated this relationship when he spoke of nihilism as the uncanny visitor who haunts modern existence. It is not that an otherwise saddle-proof life receives terrible visits in rare crises – it is already a visit into the uncanny of its own accord. We always run off course, we always drift a little bit further away; in the great chain of being, humans are an open link.
As a living being, the human is therefore a pure problem, a chronic miscarriage. From the outset, there is a gap between each newly born individual and previous life up to that point – this gap opens up each time insofar as the forced displacement that the newly born endure at their arrival reaches into the uncanny. This gap is the space where we experience nothingness as something that can be “present” and into which we have been placed. The world is built into this gap; earth can rise and arrive in it; the ropes of promises stretch across it as people venture out onto them like tightrope walkers.
In the shadow of these considerations, it becomes apparent that the human is not simply a “living being” endowed with reason, but a being who must “lead” their life. Without a way of life, human life is nothing in the double sense, neither life nor human. But
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people have to promise their lives to themselves before they can lead them. As for us, the decisive thing is done under the guidance of life-giving promises, and thus we depend on them from our first to our last day. Without the inflow of affirmations that promise and validate our lives, we cannot keep ourselves alive psychologi- cally or biologically – according to paleoanthropological findings, people who are cut off from all promises die a psychogenic death within forty-eight hours. The human standard of living is always disputed by promises. If human beings are not living beings, but life-leading beings, then the source of a specifically human fragility is here laid bare: the leading of their lives depends on the keeping of promises that tend towards the untenable of their own accord. When mothers take their crying children into their arms and assure them that everything will be ok, they promise them more than can be kept – but they also cannot not promise it to them if they do not wish to let their children sink prematurely into untenability. Each individual learns early enough that the hard shadow of untenable promises falls upon human life and that existence entails not only standards of living and leading a life on the basis of kept promises, but also substandard living and the misleading of life because of promises not kept.
These circumstances help explain why life comes to account for its primary uncanniness only involuntarily and under the utmost duress. It is, after all, the usual point of “accounting” to present life as something predictable, meaningful, familiar, and reliable. The primordial promise of life, philosophically called reason, is to object to the failure to keep promises and to insist that reason delivers what it promises – was reason not at one time also an expression for the influx of auspicious reasons to live for our already ever-endangered existence? That is why reason has the structure of a self-sustaining promise for us, and the invasion of the unreasonable is generally perceived as scandalous and devastating because when the promise of reason is broken, it may seem that there is ultimately nothing to the promises of the world and of life.
These considerations make it clear why an anthropology that has not worked its way through a theory of birth must remain insipid: only philosophy of birth can become so attentive to the abyssal side of human coming-into-the-world that it fuses the term “world” together with the drama of arriving in it. From a birth- philosophical point of view, the human is the being who had the power not to be an animal and to venture out into a world that is only “given” by promise. In this respect, anthropology is nothing more than the science of recklessness – of human beings’ frivolity in establishing ways of life upon promises. Who could deny that the
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Book of History contains a great variety of impostures generated by promises? And who can escape the impression that the people of the highly cultural, that is, promising era have promised themselves something that will probably not be possible to be kept in the long run; that the psychologico-cultural and technical apparatuses that were built to keep the wrong promises are themselves approaching collapse by now in order to keep up with the untenability of what was promised?
Anthropology as a science of such recklessness becomes the central discipline of philosophy as soon as it elaborates a general concept of the subject as a holder of untenable positions. What the subject and what subjectivity is can therefore no longer be adequately grasped with conventional philosophical formulas – it is neither a substrate in the sense of the Greek Hypokeimenon, nor a pure acting or bringing forth in the sense of the modern philosophies of activity, but an ensemble of behaviors that can be grouped around the basic gestures of carrying, making, and keeping. If the world already has the form of a promise for humans in its given condition, then the human being is – insofar as it is “in” the world and has “come” to it – as the subject and receiver of the promise also already its carrier and keeper. Even the famous “self-preservation,” which has been philosophically often determined as the foundational aspiration of subjectivity, is in turn a descendant of that holding by which the world is kept and carried on as a promise through subjective efforts. The fact that modern philosophy has placed its principle in active subjectivity of course already suggests that it has found the courage to embark on a history-making adventure in order to promise itself the utmost from its own actions in the world. What else is the philosophy of subjectivity other than a logical machine that believes it has identified the keeper of all possible promises in the free-thinking and -acting subject? As free-thinking and acting, the human is regarded from the ground up as the self-preserving, auspicious being. As subject, the human is the guarantor of the promises with which the miscarried animal gives itself its world. Only where the subject renders its stabilizing contribution does the world get held up as “given” for human beings. By means of this contribution alone, the arrival of newborns does not immediately lead to a fall into bottomlessness. The subject as self-keeper of the promises given to it delays its fall at a tolerable stage. This delay or holding up is the effort-that-I-am. Subjectivity as an act of self- preservation is therefore not a calm substrate but a self-exertion. It is no coincidence that the philosophies of subjectivity at their highest level lead to theories of work – after all, the term “work” (even after
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its deceptive career at the firm of Hegel and Marx) still preserves a memory of the archaic efforts to keep the promises of the world, and if we know today that the equation of subject and “worker” is based on a productivist short-circuit, there are still good reasons to point out their relationship of origin in terms of subjectivity and exertion.
Funnily enough, the philosophies of the subject have made a lot of fuss about the subject’s spontaneity – people wanted to sniff out the tracks of freedom within it. In truth, the philosophy of the subject is not so much interested in freedom as in the priming of possible outlets for the effort-that-I-am. What is called spontaneity is basically the self-imposed exertion towards effort, which drifts and ferments in the subject as kinetic energy. It is hardly surprising that the freedom-impassioned philosophies of the subject could not uncover the reason for exertion in the subject itself. In all of the talk of activity, spontaneity, obligation, and desire together with the source metaphorical indulgence in the “arising from within oneself,” it was misunderstood that the basic exertion or effort that flows into spontaneity stems from a trace of miscarriage on the human. The human becomes subject only because of and to the extent that it does not come into the world only by leaving its mother’s womb, but has to offer up enormous additional efforts to establish and maintain the world into which it comes. Although subjectivity is, as idealism has taught us, only understandable from the omen of pure activity, this in turn is not a “deed,” neither a Fichtean self-positing nor Sartre’s self-choosing, but rather one with the already exerted effort in contrast to the pre-subjective abandonment into the uncanny, to bring oneself by means of self-birth into the world and gain status in it through one’s own self-stance. A subject is everything that tries to become and be its own world for itself – how? By sticking to itself, its “principles” and its concern for itself. This self-stance has several faces: it appears as abstinence, as a holding oneself to chosen norms, as self-reliance, as self-preservation, as self-justification.
Therefore it is not surprising that the history of the subject has been a history of stances since the very beginning. From the Stoics to existentialism, from the glowing desert saints to the cool young city dwellers, the subject always steps in front of us as a self-composed center of effort, as the active principle of an exerted stance against the sluggish, shapeless, and depressing outside world. Whether the subject holds itself up as an ascetic self by abstaining from all seductive, disruptive, and frightening influences; whether it stands up to the hopeless and untenable world by holding on to the belief in God or godliness; whether it constitutes itself as an autonomous self, sustained by a philosophizing reason, which is,
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in turn, appointed as the self-guardian of its laws; whether it tries to maintain itself as a conqueror of life fatigue in order to make itself heroically and self-extravagantly a gift to the world; whether it knows itself, gloomily resigned to self-acceptance, to be held out into nothingness; whether it rides the waves on the surfboard of its desire in anti-oedipal exhilaration; whether it angrily sticks to the style of its terribly splintered way of writing before sovereignty, and watches from the corners of its eyes as it eludes itself: the subject is always there to give itself a firm foothold in a stance through efforts that resemble a self-birth. Through its inevitably monstrous position, the subject is “spontaneously” condemned to the effort to stabilize its hold by means of its own promises in a world taken over on revocation.
According to their purpose, stances are always expectations of the world’s continued existence and of the keeping of its promises – not least also expectations of the repeatability of once acquired programs. Even those who are committed to the Stoic doctrine of nil admirari and no longer promise themselves anything from the world at least expect that the world will no longer agitate them out of their stance through some kind of a surprise. Then the house of cards of external conditions may by all means collapse as long as one’s stance musters the power to persevere, as long as the subject’s status remains unaffected by the upheavals of external holdings. As self-holder and self-carrier, the subject cannot help but become set on tendentially world-less or at least counter-worldly attitudes – after all, it lives, as we have seen, only on the effort to bring itself forth and outward through a self-birth like the keeping of its own promises or those it has appropriated. Thus, the self-sustaining activity of the subject is inseparable from a certain counter-worldly self-breeding – Foucault would say self-care – which serves a heightened coming-into-the-world.
Nietzsche is more responsible for this than other, newer thinkers. It was he who, in his Genealogy of Morality, elevated the subject’s autogenesis to a philosophical agenda.
To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise – is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? is it not the real problem of humankind? . . . That is precisely what constitutes the long history of the origins of responsibility. That particular task of breeding an animal with the prerogative to promise includes . . . the . .