No More Learning

They abandoned the established repetition sequences and replaced them with different sequences, different attitudes - not arbitrarily different, but rather redemptively different ones. Where the original distinction between high and beneficial life forms on the one hand and hopelessly ordi- nary ones on the other hand makes its cut, it does so in the mode of a neuro-ethical programming that turns the entire old system against itself. Here there are initially no intermediate forms. Body and soul reach the other shore together - or not at all. 'The whole man must move at once. '
The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philoso- phers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehen- sive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodelled, the world of thoughts
404
EXERCISES AND
up,
rises up as a new construction on
favourable repetition.
A first enlightenment came about when the spiritual teachers
showed that humans are not so much possessed by demons as con- trolled by automatisms. They are not assailed by evil spirits, but by routines and inertias that force them to the ground and deform them. What impair their reason are not chance errors and occasional errors of perception - it is the eternal recurrence of the cliches that render true thought and free perception impossible. Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit: he recognized everyday opinion, the doxa, the pestilence that does not kill, but does occasionally poison entire communities. Empty phrases that have sunk down into the body produce 'characters'. They mould humans into living caricatures of averageness and turn them into incarnated platitudes. Because existence in the ethical distinction begins with the annihilation of empty phrases, it inevitably leads to the nega- tion of characters. Part of the charm of free humans is that one can see in them the caricature they might have become. Whoever sought to eradicate it would be the human without qualities, free for an absence of judgement, character and taste. Such a person would, like Monsieur Teste, state: 'La betise n'est pas mon fort. ' [Stupidity is not my strong suit. ] They would be the human who had killed the mari- onette inside them. The transformation occurs through mental de- automatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools to empty the cliche depot - a procedure that usually takes longer than a major psychoanalysis. Pythagoras sup- posedly demanded a five-year silence of his pupils at the beginning of their studies. Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: 'Every char- acteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. '144 The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.
This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the
405
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
lmmerse
costly is, now, point.
matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form. It results from an awkward discov- ery: there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour. The first ethicists faced the decision between a life in the usually unnoticed iron chains of involuntarily acquired habits and an existence on the ethereal chain of freely accepted discipline. The most erroneous possible conclusion one could draw from this is that the appearance of genuine practising awareness concerned purely the active. Let the sadhus torture themselves in their lonely forests with complicated breathing exercises; let the Stylites feel closer to heaven on their absurd pillars, and let the philosophers sell their second coats and sleep on the ground - the average mortals will cling nonethe- less to the opinion that these extravagant distortions of the ordinary are meaningless for them, the business of a sacred-perverse private meeting between the incomprehensible God and his artiste followers. Whoever is unable to participate can continue in their old habitus, which, though not perfect, seems good enough for everyday life.
The Creature that Cannot Practise
In reality, the secession of the practising places the entire ecosystem of human behaviour on an altered foundation. Like all acts of ren- dering things explicit, the appearance of the early practice systems brought about a radical modification of the respective area - that is, of the whole field of psychophysically conditioned actions. Explicit exercises, whether the asanas of the Indian yogis, the Stoics' experi- ments with letting go of the non-own, or the exercitationes spiritu- ales of Christian climbers on the heavenly ladder, cast a shadow on everything that lies opposite them on the implicit side: this is no less than the world of old Adam, the gigantic universe of unilluminated conventionalities. The shadow zone encompasses the area dominated by repetitions of an undeclared practice character. We can leave open the question of whether the psychoanalytical insult to humans claimed by Freud - triggered by the purportedly unwelcome discovery that the ego is not the master of its own house - ever really existed. There is certainly no doubt about the reality of the behaviouristic insult to humans, which could equally be called the ascetological one. It follows from the observation that 99. 9 per cent of our existence comprises repetitions, mostly of a strictly mechanical nature. The
406
EXERCISES AND MlSEXERClSES
IS to one IS original plenty others. If one to more
self-examination, one finds oneself in the psychosomatic engine room of one's own existence, where there is nothing to be gained from the usual flattery of spontaneity; and freedom theorists would do better to stay upstairs.
In this investigation, one advances into a non-psychoanalytical unconscious encompassing everything belonging to normally athe- matic rhythms, rules and rituals - regardless of whether it stems from collective patterns or idiosyncratic specializations. In this area, everything is higher mechanics, including intimate illusions of non- mechanics and unconditioned being-for-oneself. The sum of these mechanics produces the surprise space of personality, in which surprising events are actually very rare. Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted.
Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practise implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot practise - if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being's dispo- sition towards the next repetition. Just as Mr K. is always preparing his next mistake, humans as a whole are constantly taking the neces- sary steps to ensure that they will remain as they have been up until this minute. Whatever is not repeated sufficiently often atrophies - this is familiar from everyday observations, for example when the musculature of static limbs begins to degenerate after a few days, as if concluding from its temporary disuse that it has become superflu- ous. In truth, one should probably also keep the non-use of organs, programmes and competencies for exercises in steady decline. Just as there are implicit fitness programmes, there are also implicit unfitness programmes. That is why Seneca warns his pupil: 'A single winter relaxed Hannibal's fibre. '145 Other states of weakening may follow years of neglecting-work. 146
From this it follows that even a simple maintenance of bodily - or rather neurophysical - form can only be comprehended as an effect of undeclared training. This comprises routines whereby the stand- ard movements of an organ complex are, through inconspicuous procedures, employed often enough to stabilize the complex at its current fitness status. The self-activations of organisms in sequences of undeclared practice programmes, sequences that constantly have to be run through anew, culminate in a mute autopoiesis: the element
407
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
training programmes. The nocturnal actlVltleS of the brain, part of which one experiences as dreams, are probably first and foremost back-up processes for the self-programme in its state prior to the last waking
phase. The self is a storm of repetition sequences beneath the roof of the skull.
Personal identity, then, offers no indication of a mental essence or inert form; it rather shows the active overcoming of a probability of decline. Whoever remains identical to themselves thus confirms themselves as a functioning expert system specializing in constant self-renewal. For surprise-friendly creatures of the Homo sapiens type, even triviality is not futile. It can only be attained through a con- stant cultivation of identity whose most important aid is inward and outward self-re-trivialization. Re-trivialization is the operation that enables organisms capable of learning to treat something new as if they had never encountered it - whether by equating it mechanically with something familiar or by openly denying its didactic value. Thus the new, initially and mostly, has no chance of integration into the apparatus of operating gestures and ideas because it is assigned either to the familiar or to the insignificant. 147
If, in turn, the neolatric culture of modernity posits meaning in the new per se, this causes a brightening of the global learning climate; the price of this is a historically unprecedented will to be dazzled that gives unlimited credit to illusions of the new. Even manifest stupid- ity, incidentally, cannot be taken as a simple datum: it is acquired through long training in learning-avoidance operations. Only after a persistent series of self-knockouts by the intelligence can a habitus of reliable mindlessness become stable - and even this can be undone at any time through a relapse into non-stupidity. Conversely, every learning-theoretical romanticism should be viewed sceptically, even if it appears under classical names. Aristotle was speaking as a roman- tic when he stated in the first line of his Metaphysics: 'All humans strive for knowledge by nature. ' In fact, every striving for knowledge - understood by Aristotle above all as primary visual enjoyment - encounters its limits as soon as something new appears that one does not want to see. Such things are usually sights that are irreconcilable with the imperative of preserving identity. Then the much-lauded thirst for knowledge among humans turns in a flash into the art of not having seen or heard anything.
The ethical distinction not only uncovers the hidden practice char- acter of ordinary life; it also reveals the gulf between the previous
408
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
existence in the accustomed and the metanoetic life forms that must be newly chosen. This distinction demands cruelty towards oneself and others; it leads to overload in its most naked state. We hear its original voice when Jesus says: 'Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. '148 'Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple. '149 'I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. '150 The blade of distinction is the apocalypse that takes place now or never.
The Re·Exercising of All Exercises
Just as a person's unexpected suicide calls their entire social environ- ment into question, an individual's conversion to philosophy or their entrance into an ethical group problematizes the modus vivendi of all those with whom they had previously lived under the same roof - bound by the same customs, impregnated with the same habits, entangled in the same stories. Every conversion implies the speech act: 'I herewith leave the shared reality', or at least the statement of intent, 'I wish to leave the continuum of the false and harmful. ' To do this, the adept does not need to board the ship that would take them to the island of Utopia. The destinations are often only a few hours' travel from the hopeless villages or a day's walk from the agitated city. Whoever seeks out these heterotopias knows that once they arrive there, they will have to undertake far longer inner than outer journeys.
If an applicant is taken up into a community of the practising, their further life consists in the systematic revaluation of values. The Cynics called this procedure 'defacing the coin' (paracharattein to nom;sma), which also means 'changing one's customs'. Thus a counterfeiter's metaphor provides the keyword in the history of higher morals. The ethical mints are training camps for the ethos in need of remoulding. For the cynics of the fourth century Be, this meant renouncing all forms of behaviour based on arbitrary human rules and henceforth listening only to the physis. These unabashed dissidents were prob- ably the only wise men to believe that one could do such a thing in the middle of the city - provided one could find a vacant barrel. The other adepts of ethical difference knew very well that it is best to turn one's back on one's usual abode. As ethos and topos belong together, a different ethos calls for a different residence - one can only return to the origin if one is so deeply rooted in the new place and the changed habitus that there is no risk of relapsing into the old one. Until one
409
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
llH,aUH a spacein
many - ton pollan 151 - bounce
the better knowledge of few. Among the early Greek Christians, one openly named a remote training centre after the activities that went on there: asketeria, or sometimes hesychasteria, a place for exercises in silence. The Indian word ashram, still in frequent use today, refers to the 'place of exertion'. Sannyasin, on the other hand, the Indian name for the world-abstinent, literally means 'one who has cast off all things' - including the ties to a profane abode. It is said that the Indian wise man Tota Puri (c. 1815-75), Ramakrishna's teacher, who bore the epithet 'the naked' (nagka), never wore clothes, never slept under a roof and never stayed in one place for more than three days in his entire life. For Nietzsche, only a generation younger than the evasive Indian, the other place was Sils Maria, at the foot of mountains that are mirrored in the severe smoothness of Lake Silvaplana, 'six thousand feet beyond man and time'.
The ethical distinction brings about the catastrophe of habits. It exposes humans as beings that grow accustomed to anything. 'Virtue' is one possibility of habituation among others. Humans are equally able, however, to make the worst their own until it seems incontest- ably self-evident. Any inhabitant of a somewhat freer country today who looks at conditions in overt dictatorships will find ample evi- dence of this, whether in the daily news or in the archives. One has to have seen a Nuremberg Rally, a Moscow parade on 1 Mayor a mass gymnastic performance in Pyongyang to have an idea of how far an attachment to the abhorrent can extend. From the perspective of the Greek asketeria, the Indian ashram or the Upper Egyptian hermitage, however, the entire empirical world of humans was already nothing but a corrupt training camp early on, one in which comprehensive wrongness exercises were performed day and night - under the guid- ance of semi-lucid kings with the rank of gods, pseudo-knowledgeable elders and gloomily severe priests who only knew how to pass on conventional rules and idle rituals: they translated external necessi- ties into holy customs, which they then defended like holy necessities. The rest is 'culture' - in so far as this means the copier that guarantees the self-preservation of the convention complex (in newer jargon: a memeplex) through the transference of prevailing patterns from one generation to the next and the one after that.
All moral philosophy is superficial, then, if it is not based on a distinction between habits. Even a Critique of Practical Reason relies on unguaranteed conditions as long as the most important
410
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISE<,
not can
even out of bad habits, under what circumstances do they succeed in finding a new rooting in good ones? Kant's well- known argument from the text on peace, that even 'a race of devils', if it has a modicum of sense, must find a passable modus vivendi by establishing a legal order uncannily similar to a civil constitution, is flawed because he fails to understand anti-moral gravitation: 'being a devil' - whether poor or evil is unclear - is only a metaphor for an actor's trapped state within an ignorant habitus, and it is precisely the undoing of this that Kant makes too easy for himself in his appeal. 152 The Kantian devils are merchants who know how much they can go too far, well-behaved egotists who have attended their rational choice seminars. A true race of devils embodies a collective of fatal- ists where de-disciplining has reached the fundamentalist level. They do not merely live in the squalid cellars of St Petersburg; they are at home in every dead-end banlieue and every chronic battle zone. In such circumstances, individuals are convinced that nothing is more normal than the hell they have provided for one another as long as anyone can remember. No devil without its circle, and no hell without the circle made of circles. Whoever grows accustomed to hell becomes immune to the call to change their life - even if it is in their own interests. The meaning of own interests is already trapped by running in the harmful circle. Under such conditions, it is almost irrelevant what instructions one gives the inmates of these personal circuli vitiosi to bring them to their senses, for failure is certain what- ever one does: one should neither hope for any results from the inner 'moral improvement of man', which Kant too wisely abandoned, nor from the external 'mechanism of nature working through the self- seeking propensities of man',153 whose reciprocal neutralization the philosopher considered a way to achieve at least an enforced peace. Experience shows that peace between inhabitants of infernal circles comes not from a mutual tempering of 'self-seeking propensities', but from concrete asymmetries. These can result from one-sided exhaus- tion or a resounding victory by one party. That is why systemicists
say that the one of the tools of evil is the inability to win.
The Source of Bad Habits: On the Metaphysics of the Iron Age
Before we settle the matter of whether humans can be uprooted from bad habits, and if so, by what method, we should recapitulate
411
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
how they were able to take root in them in the first place. Instead of unde malum? we now ask: unde mala habitudo? The classical moral- theological answers exist as catalogues of vices, of which the seven- part list by Gregory the Great from the late sixth century enjoyed the greatest success. 154
These state that bad habitus is the consequence of an evil decision, born of leisure and encouraged by arrogance. Some mythical answers go deeper, looking beyond the individual and relating bad habits to the necessity of inhabiting a barren world. If this were a culture- historical investigation, a passage on the natural history of need and its translation into the human sphere would have to follow here. In our context, it is sufficient to note that the earliest articulations of the difficulty of being a human date from the era of Mesopotamian and Mediterranean empires. One finds anonymous authors speaking for the first time of an unease in the world that points beyond any unease in culture. Hs
Instructive statements about the genesis of negative habitualiza- tions are provided by the two great myths about the human condition that mark the beginnings of the ancient Western civilizatory complex: on the Judaeo-Christian side the biblical tale of the expulsion of the first human couple from Paradise, and on the Graeco-Roman side the doctrine of the Golden Age - which, owing to a dark causality of deterioration, had led to the present Iron Age via the intermediate stages of the Silver and Bronze Ages. Both narratives share the inten- tion of explaining the normality of the bad; what sets them clearly apart from each other is the means they use to achieve this. The former explains the stay of post-Paradise humanity in a chronically unsatisfying reality using a moral catastrophe model known as the Fall of Man; the latter attributes the difficulties of the human race to a law of destiny that defines the present as the third stage of decay in a providential worsening process. While the moralistic model explains the unfavourable status quo as a consequence of overstepping a single boundary, the myth of the Ages of Man needs three descending steps to interpret mankind's unbalanced state as a result of the adverse conditions of the Iron Age.
I will not linger on the conclusion that the fatalistic interpretation far exceeds the moralistic one in terms of contemplative breath and historico-philosophical substance, whereas the moralistic version has a stronger personal effect on addressees due to its invasive tendency. From a systemic perspective, the biblical account contains a signifi- cant element of 'moral insanity', as it twists the knife even deeper into
412
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
the chronically burdened humans in order to read their situation as an inherited debt and well~deserved punishment. At the same time, there is a certain psychagogical prudence in the culpabilistic arrangement, for humans, as empirical findings show, become substantially more resistant to suffering when they are presented with a clear sense of 'what for' - or, failing that, at least a 'why' and a 'from where'. The Christian reception of the tale describing the expulsion from Paradise produced a civilization whose members cannot experience hardship without thinking they deserve it. We regularly display our willingness to take the blame for our suffering, as if making a contribution to a semantic health insurance - in fact, what was viewed as a commit~ ment to the Christian 'religion' was often no more than our manda~ tory contribution to this guilt system.
In the present context, however, what concerns us is the shared dedication of the Jewish and Graeco~Roman narratives to interpret- ing the situation of humans in the world as a permanent stay in a malign milieu. The point of departure for both is the evidence that human existence in its present manifestation is fundamentally a being-in-need - including the necessity of adapting to need. Together they support the complementary evidence that the current state of affairs can only be understood as a fall from an originally completely different state. The chronic misery only appears as a consequence of epochal deteriorations, whether gradual and repetition~based or singular and catastrophic. In both cases, habitualized misery is experienced differentially: in the real domain it contrasts with the modus vivendi of happy individuals, who are still better off than most others, and in the imaginary domain with the notions of times in which things were better for everyone. This difference provides the matrix for the search for the other condition. 'Where life itself is a withdrawal treatment, it provides fertile ground for addiction. '156 The connection between addiction and search is explained by etymolo~ gists and psychologists. 1s7
Realism, Scarcity, Alienation
According to the oldest behavioural theories, adaptation to a chroni~ cally inappropriate climate creates a habitus that could, in a non~ philosophical sense, be termed realism; it is best described as a reinforced perseverance under chronic pressure. In the biblical account the emphasis is placed on holding out in a bowed state - 'by the sweat of your brow' under the constraints of agriculture - while
413
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
to lead an existence in
and corrupt neighbours. The most important results of banishment, according to the Book of Genesis, are the curse of work and the hardship of birth, and in Hesiod's version the chronically unreliable nature of social relationships and the perversion of neighbour-ethical norms. ISS
Both models contain rudimentary social philosophies and elemen- tary hermeneutics of need that can be mapped onto modern theories of alienation: according to the former, the fall from the paradisaic non-working world to the sphere of forced work through the trau- matic advent of scarcity. The necessity of living in a milieu of scarcity results from humanity's primal guilt: no one who has sinned will ever get enough. Because of an unforgivable transgression, the primal habitus of enduring in the face of constant lack is burned into the notion of the world entertained by man, the supposedly 'deficient being'. 159 It constitutes a primary disciplining elevated to a prevailing mood. From this follow primal resignation, which leads to realism as an inner regulator of hardness, and primal escapism, which postulates the establishment of imaginary wealth enclaves.
This places the stranger in the role of the one who dramatizes scar- city by threatening to consume that on which my survival and the self-assertion of my group depend. The first stranger is the master on whom I have become dependent and who keeps me alive, but takes away every surplus that would improve my lot if I could keep it; he is my exploiter and my rescuer at once. The second stranger is the enemy, who takes until there is nothing left. One is alienated, then, if one has a master and an enemy - regardless of whether, as in psy- chopolitical set pieces, one joins forces with the master against the enemy in an emergency or with the enemy against the master - as can be observed in the dissolution of loyalties in palace revolts, rebellions and revolutionary wars.
What Sartre writes in his investigations of alienated 'praxis' on the 'man of scarcity' (l'homme de la rarete)160 is, in essence, merely an exegesis of the biblical expulsion myth, read through a Hegelian conceptual grid. Scarcity imposes the impossibility of coexistence on the collective. Sartre locates this infernal existential one dimension too deep to reconcile it with the Marxist concept of exploitation; likewise, he places competition and mutual reification through the evil 'gaze' in such depths that no reconciliation or befriending could ever overcome them, either inside or outside the sphere of scarcity. Thus he not only fails to see the possible productivity of competi-
414
EXERCISES MISEXERcrSES
through modern property economy. project recuperating Marxism by enriching it with existentialist motifs was thus doomed to miss the mark from the outset. The deepest source of Sartre's failure, however, is not his pandering to the internally flawed critique of political economy; it is rather his philosophical equation of the human being with the epicentre of nothingness. It is where he draws most resolutely on metaphysical jargon that he becomes most remote from the present state of human knowledge. The human being is not negativity, but rather the point of difference between repetitions.
Hesiod emphasizes the disintegration of social cohesion in his state- ments on the Iron Age. What strikes him most is that the habitus of disloyalty predominates in the current race of humans, even among relatives and apparent friends. The 'natural' parameters of good and bad, honour and dishonour etc. , all seem to have been inverted in the Iron Age. From a culture-historical perspective, this shows a pragmatic general climate in which populations with a rural char- acter are obliged to learn unaccustomed urban-strategic life forms. In this change, individuals must learn to switch from mentality to success; they are forced to exchange recognition from their relatives and neighbourhoods for recognition from public markets and power cliques. They have to abandon the intuitive sense of right and wrong they have developed and become accustomed to the primacy of insti- tutionalized court procedure. Together these adjustments amount to a change of habitus that followers of older values, like the farmer- poet Hesiod, could only view as training for a world gone wrong. I shall add in passing that the Koran, despite coming into existence twelve hundred years later, shares several aspects of Hesiod's world- view as described in Works and Days. Here the farmer's distrust of the incomprehensible new world of traffic has grown into the desert- dweller's apocalyptic hatred of large cities, which were impenetrable for the old mindset. Here, what some call prophetism is the fiery form of saying no to heightened complexity.
The Ascetic Suspension of Alienation: The Five Fronts
These considerations enable us to define the consequences of the ethical distinction more precisely: it aims for the systematic weaning of the subject from the reality effects of the Iron Age. Contrary to one's first impression, it questions the finality of the post-paradisaic condition. To separate the practising individual from the dominant
415
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
reality bloc, the ascetic revolt consistently attacks its opponent's strongest point. The great weaning process, as the history of asceti- cisms shows, is directed at the five main fronts of need: material scar- city, the burden character of existence, sexual drive, alienation and the involuntary nature of death. In these fields, the early explicitly practising life proves that it is possible to compensate for even the most widespread existential deformations - albeit at a price that leads most to accept the ills instead. It is not only the fear of something after death, as Hamlet says, 'that makes calamity of so long life'; even more, it is the hesitation before breaking out of a well-rehearsed and accepted misery. Given the choice between acquired deforma- tion through reality and the feared deformations through asceticism practised lege artis, the majority has always chosen the former. They preferred to wait for a comfortable revolution that, so they were told, would come as an 'event'. People have always recoiled from the inconvenient realization that nothing happens unless one brings it about oneself.
Against Hunger
Historical evidence shows that the earliest asceticisms developed on the poverty front: the ancient Indian practice masters were probably the first to discover the principle of voluntary withdrawal that, one could say, takes the subject to the other side of suffering. As early as the earliest Brahmans, an extremism of abstinence came about, driven by the fantastic belief that the metabolism is but one of the illusions with which Maya, the sensuous veil maker, makes fools of humans. By expanding abstinence from food to a somatic-spiritual technique, they transformed hunger into a voluntary act of fasting; they turned a humiliating passivity into an ascetic action. The dis- empowerment of hunger led directly to the emancipation from the compulsion to work. Whoever chooses abstinence exits the producing life and knows only exercises. The early cultures of beggar monks in Asia and Europe prove that for their fellow humans, the spectacle of the spirit's superiority to the minimized body was worth a sacrifice: alms were the entrance fee for the theatre of spiritual triumphs.
One could say that those who made donations to the monks were falling for priestly deception, but the psychological reality was very differ- ent. The ancient beggar economy belongs to the realm of the search for autonomy, even for the poorest of the poor: someone who has almost nothing, yet shares the most frugal meal with someone else,
416
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
m
case Francis of Assisi, the appears in the relationship of courtly love to Lady Poverty - some Europeans, perhaps not the most morally insensitive, are impressed to this day by this transformation of a misery factor into a gallant allegory. Let us note that the old workers' movement in Europe still knew something
~about the first rebellion against the tyranny of need. Whether starving or eating: solidarity . . .
Against Overtaxing
The second expansion of the autonomy zone is due to the early ath- letes and their forerunners in the military nobility. They found a way to disable the law of permanent overtaxing to which the great major- ity of people in class societies submit. While the normal response to chronic strain is a mixture of hardenings and little escapes that wear individuals down sooner or later, warriors and athletes develop the opposite response: they gain degrees of freedom from the burden character of existence by consistently outdoing the difficult through the even more difficult. They show that a state of great effort is no sufficient reason not to make an even greater effort. The image of Hercules at the crossroads is the primal ethical scene of Europe: this ultimate hero of being-able-to-do-something embodies the rule that one becomes human by choosing the difficult path. For this, it is nec- essary to favour the austerity of arete over the sweetness of depravity.
Athletic irony pushes the boundaries back into the unbelievable - where there was nobody-can-do-this, there is now I-can. This expansion of the ability horizon also has a direct influence on the general sphere. Even the vulgar curiosity of the audience at athletic and circus performances contains a solidarity with the actors that has anthropologically far-reaching implications. Like the hunger artist, the athletes have a message for the psychologically poorest and the physically weakest that is worth sharing in: the best way to escape from exhaustion is to double the load. Even someone who cannot imagine following this maxim literally should still draw inspiration from it. The theory that there is always room to go higher is one that concerns everyone.
It is in this context that one must assess the future of modern sport. Like a Herculean collective, it is standing at a crossroads. Either the athlete continues to act as a witness to the human ability to take forward steps at the threshold of the impossible - with unforeseeable
417
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
transference effects on all who involve themselves in the appealing spectacle161 - or they continue along the path of self-destruction that is already marked out, where moronic fans shower co-moronic stars with admiration from the very bottom, the former drunk and the latter doped. One might recall in this context that Euripides already considered the athletic scene in the fourth century Be, which had taken on a decadent life of its own, a plague. 'Of all the count- less evils in Greece, none is worse than the race of athletes (athleton genous). ' 162
Against Sexual Need
On the third front, the activists turn their attention towards the ten- sions of sexual drive. As the libido was usually condemned to a long wait in many older cultures, especially those with strictly patriarchal rules for marriage and family relations - decades often passed between the reaching of sexual maturity and possible legalized sexual activity - eros was experienced by countless people as an unliveable dilemma. For so many, the kindest of all the gods thus transpired as the cruell- est. If one yielded to one's urges, one could easily descend into dis- order; if one resisted them, one faced constant torture from within. Thus the despair at sexuality became a constant factor of the unease in civilization. The widespread outlet institutions of prostitution, concubinage, letting off steam with slaves, masturbation, licences for the young etc. alleviated the problem, but did not solve it. The ascetic response to the challenge of the sexual drive was to transform the constant excess of specific pressure into an aspecific elan to strive for higher goals. The procedure for this, to use a more recent term, was sublimation. Plato revealed its schema by describing the ladder on which sensual desire ascends to a spiritual motivation - from one beautiful body to another, and from the plurality of beautiful bodies to the singularity of the beautiful. This ultimately transpired as the side of the good itself that shines in sensuality. In its conventional manifestations, philosophical critique of sexuality merely accuses it of sabotaging the ascent - whether it creates a fixation on frustrating fantasies when it is unfulfilled or, when fulfilled, drains off mental energy and gets caught in the small-scale cycle of tension and relaxa- tion. Monastic critique of sexuality takes a far more direct approach from the outset by virtually demonizing physical desire - but with the same aim: to create perpetual desire and keep it at the necessary tem- perature. What this infinitized desire - which still haunted the shame-
418
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
most cause to is the relapse into that
the return tepid prose. This finitude is dominated by trivial inner states, depression, lack of elan, as well as the banal excess drive that does not lead to any goal-achieving or boosting programmes. The uninspired psyche is unable to feel encompassed by an absolute - this spawns the gloom which the early abbots called abidia, the midday demon that paralyses the monk's soul with indifference to God and everything else. Akedia appears in the list of Seven Deadly Sins as 'sluggishness' or 'sloth', and those who know it well almost fear it more than the queen of all vices, superbia. 163 In modernity, infinite desire separated from humans and migrated to the economic system, which produces its own restlessness, while individuals increasingly discover that they can no longer follow the perverse imperative of always desiring and enjoying more.
Against Domination and Enmity
On the fourth front, the ascetic revolt puts an end to alienation by showing that humans can never be forced to have a master and an enemy. Here too, the method of liberation is a voluntary exaggera- tion of the evil: the ascetic enslaves themselves so radically that no empirical enslavement can touch them any longer. They choose their master in the highest heights to free themselves from all second-class masters. Hence Abraham breaks free of the visible gods by avowing his invisible God; hence the Cynic-Stoic wise man submits to the law of the cosmos, which emancipates him from arbitrary human regula- tions; hence Christ sarcastically recommends giving unto Caesar what is Caesar's, for loyalty belongs to the God of the faithful and the rela- tionship with Caesar can therefore be no more than external. Thus Paul reminds the Romans that they were once slaves of sin, but now, as slaves of righteousness, are free. 164 He even introduces himself in his opening salutation as a chosen slave of God - and for that very reason a free man. Modern references to the 'rule of law' still recall the language of the oldest supremacism, which held that freedom could only exist under the law. Coercion by the highest downgrades all other compulsions to second-order factors. The dominion of the general is a medium of asceticism against the dominion of the con- crete. Consequently, any universalism worth taking seriously presup- poses an ascetic mode of access to the sphere of norms. Anyone who wishes to have universalism without the work of renunciation, as if it
419
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
same time, ascetic emancipates themselves from the compulsion to have an enemy by choosing a universal enemy within, who can only appear in the outside world in second-rate projections. Whoever knows that the devil dwells inside them no longer needs an external malicious partner. Hence the advice to turn the other cheek, and hence the Buddhist caution that the torture victim must not lose sympathy for their torturer. Moral asceticism takes away the enemy's power to make us strike back. Whoever moves beyond the level of reacting to enmity breaks the vicious circle of violence and counter- violence - albeit often at the price of remaining the suffering party.
Moral hyperbole of this kind only draws small audiences in modernity, while the majority once again demands the licence to strike back. The cause of this is primarily the change in the prevail- ing mood: the anti-thymotic psychopolitics of Christianity, which cautioned people for almost two thousand years to conduct an inner inquisition against all stirrings of pride and self-affirmation, no longer has a footing in the 'achieving society' of today. 165 Let us not forget that every advanced legal system implies a scaled-down reproduction of ascetic abstinence from direct governance, because it forces the wronged party to seek redress via the indirect path of a third party's judgement structured as court proceedings.
Against the Necessity of Dying
On the fifth front, the heroes of the ethical distinction attack death by transferring it from the sphere of abstract and fatal necessity into that of personal ability. They abolish the terrorism of nature to which mortals have been subjected since time immemorial. This does not have to go as far as a physicalization of the immortality idea as found in the writings of Paul, then once more of the Russian biocosmists,166 and currently among the American techno-gnostics, whose ambition is to absorb theology into physics. 167 The conversion of necessity into ability presupposes a strong notion of continuum that spans the boundary between life and death - this can be seen in the two great scenes of the art of dying in Old Europe, the death of Socrates and that of Jesus. 168 Through demonstrations of composure in death, the end of life exemplarily changes into a symbolic order with a strong sense of continuum, as if 'crossing over' were no more than a change in the state of matter.
420
cost
EXERCISES IVUSEXERCISES
An
perishment
It equally contradicts the naked killing that pervades Homer's world, which virtually overflows with second-class dead who are left lying on the ground without honour to become food for the dogs and vul- tures, while the incomparable slayer Achilles finds a place in Hellenic memory. The symbolically nurtured death in Christianity extends the memorial function to the saved, who remain unforgotten in a divine memory and thus become immortal. One could describe the work of ascetics on the life-death continuum as an original accumulation of civilizatory energy that allows even the most external compulsion to be embedded in the interior of the symbolic order. A modern trace of this civilization is visible in the growing suicide movement in the West. It has dismantled the metaphysical exuberance of the ascetic art of dying, but works on the meanwhile secure evidence that humans are always entitled to experience their death in culturally tended forms. The sound arguments of contemporary movements advocating a dignified death aim to break up the alliance between a reactionary religion and a progressive technological medicine, which together barely allow more than a higher form of bucket-kicking. Instead, the goal is to make the achievement of ascetic cultures - embedding death in a shared ability - accessible also to non-ascetics.
The Post-Metaphysical legacy of the Metaphysical Revolt
Looking back at the ascetic revolts against the reality principle of the Iron Age permits a clearer definition of what I call the de- spiritualization of asceticisms. It shaped a significant stretch of the path to modernity, in so far as this epoch was characterized by the pragmatic levelling of metaphysical upswings. This process forces the excesses into the arts, as well as the adjustment that Gotthard Gunther terms the transition 'from the truth of thought to the prag- matics of action'. 169 In this sense, modernity constitutes a strong substitute programme for the ethical secession. Its precondition is the demonstration that on the five fronts of the old need, one can still win by other means than those used in battle by the practice heroes of earlier times. This was precisely the motto proclaimed by the pan- sophists of the Renaissance and the pioneers of explorative thought: humans can do anything of their own accord as soon as they want to. They opened the door to the post-miserablist age - which, for the same reason, is also a post-metaphysical one, as it reacts to existential
it is
421
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
answers.
metaphysically means getting the burdens of old
condition with the aid of technology and without extreme ascetic pro- grammes. The only modern-day ascetics whose victories one wishes to be authentic are athletes - whereas the spiritual victors over the old human condition have been stripped of their authority through the culture of suspicion. Anyone who heard a voice from a burning thorn bush after forty days in the desert would be taken for a victim of a psychedelic episode. Anyone who claimed to transcend sexuality without ever having known it could be sure of being diagnosed neu- rotic. And modern observers of religion consider Buddha Amida, who reveals himself to Japanese monks after one hundred nights of sleep deprivation, a local psychosemantic effect.
Because of its egalitarian design, modernity feels compelled to reformulate all truths that were previously accessible only to the few into truths for the many - and neglect whatever is lost in translation. This eliminates the foundation of practical ascetic extremism, but affirms its tendencies in all aspects: it is indeed necessary to set up a strong antithesis to the misery-based definition of reality in the agro- imperial age - if this can now also be articulated by non-metaphysical and non-heroic means, then all the better. Everyone of these transla- tions ensued after the technical caesura of the Modern Age. The prin- ciple of their success is displayed by the fact that during the last three hundred years, an unprecedented civilizatory learning cycle has been active that fundamentally changed the laws of existence from the Iron Age - and continues to change them. At times, this cycle has helped the dream of a return to a Golden Age or a restoration of Paradise to political power, and even if the dream was never going to come true, the dream tendency as such already tells us something about the prevailing mood of the newer era. It was based on the intuition that the principle of reality had become a malleable plasma. Communist maximalism, which would accept nothing short of total renewal, has lost its psychological plausibility; it only lives on indirectly in the weary hatred which ex-radicals and their imitators in the third and fourth generation show towards our more moderate conditions. Nonetheless, the idea of returning to the second best still has great practical charm.
In fact, Europeans and Americans, to use Hesiod's terms, cata- pulted themselves into a renewed Silver Age in the second half of the twentieth century. Within the 'Crystal Palace', they created conditions for the majority that differed not gradually but epochally, or rather aeonically, from everything that had been the case a few centuries
422
EXERCISES AND
US once 1846 ~ epochal date in the history pain. 170 We also emphasize de-agrarianization of economic life, and thus the end of the 'idiocy of rural life'. 171 To the historian, it is beyond doubt that virtually all inhabitants of the Crystal Palace profit, at least in material and infrastructure terms, from unprecedented improvements in living conditions172 - a fact that is augmented and confirmed by the equally unprecedented blossoming of a culture of additional demands. The spiral of resignation from the Iron Age has been reversed and turned into an upward spiral of desire. In this situation, philosophy loses its mandate to rise beyond the static world of need that, as the theoreti- cal wing of the ethical distinction, it administered for two thousand years. It changes into a consultant to assist in explaining the advan- tage of no longer living in the Iron Age. It becomes a translation agency for transforming heroic knowledge into civil knowledge. It stands surety for the esoteric remainder with its own assets.
In Defence of the Second Silver Age
It was Richard Rorty who promoted this translation work most coherently and appealingly in the last decades - appealingly prima- rily because, despite his Dewey-inspired advocacy for the priority of democracy over philosophy, he made no secret of his sympathy for the exaggerations of heroic thought (which he also called roman- tic or inspiring thought). What places the American Rorty in the better traditions of European Baroque philosophy and the British- French-German Enlightenment is his unshakeable fidelity to the idea of world improvement, a fidelity that finds its most old-fashioned and stimulating manifestation in his book on the improvement of America. 173 Rorty was, next to Hans Jonas, the only thinker of the last half-century from whom one could learn why a philosopher with an understanding of the times must have the courage to strive for simplicity: only in a jargon-free language can one discuss with one's contemporaries why we, as members of modern civilization, may not have entered a Golden Age, but should not still view ourselves as citi- zens of the Iron Age either. When discussing this subject, philosophy and non-philosophy become one, and historico-philosophical theo- ries and everyday intuitions merge into one another. The grandilo- quent conservatives, who continue to cultivate the idiom of the Iron Age as if nothing had happened, must be challenged in a language of the middle. 174 The same tone must be used to counter the far left
423
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
ideologies still virulent at a local level, which, out of disappointment at the failed return to the Golden Age, do everything in their power to smear the Silver Age as a farce. Only in such a conversation could the reasonable element in the claims of the 'end of history' after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which are presented somewhat exagger- atedly and rejected even more exaggeratedly, be reiterated. 175 The end of history is a metaphor for the disablement of the dominant reality principle of the Iron Age following non-heroic measures against the five needs. These include the industrial-political switch from scarcity to oversupply; the division of labour between the top achievers and the moderately working in business and sport; the general deregula- tion of sexuality; the transition to a mass culture without masters and a politics of co-operation without enemies; and attempts towards a post-heroic thanatology.
None of these measures are flawless; not one of them can move entirely beyond the level of lesser evils, and in some aspects they are even perceived as greater evils of a new type. That is why countless inhabitants of the second Silver Age, which does not understand itself, tend towards a defamation of this new state. What we call post- modernity is largely no more than the medial exploitation of unease at the second best - including all the risks that go with luxury pes- simisms. The fateful question is whether one succeeds in stabilizing the standards of the episodically materialized Silver Age, or whether a regression is imminent to an Iron Age of whose currentness both old and new realists are convinced -- not least considering the fact that over two thirds of the human race have never left it. Such a regression would not be fate, but rather a consequence of wilful reactions to the paradoxes of existence in the subpar.
The decision about the further course of events depends on whether the learning context of modernity can get through all technical, political, economic, cultural, epistemological and sanitary crises and be expanded into a sufficiently stable continuum of improvement knowledge and optimization ability. How little this continuum can
be taken for granted is evident in the fact that the history of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced an endless series of rebellions initiated by hostility to civilization and anti-technical ressentiment, regardless of whether these came about in the name of faith, the soul, life, art, national character, cultural identity or diver- sity of species. These outbursts constituted terminations of training that did grave damage to modernity fitness - and the danger of new terminations has not passed, as the omnipresence of far left, far right, conservative and ecological fundamentalisms proves. The 'discourse
424
EXERCISES MISEXERCISES
not one - a con- stant its agenda and against wrong cur- ricula. Every generation must choose between escapisms and forms capable of becoming traditions. To ensure even the possibility of an effective learning continuum, an intensive filtering of contemporary idea production is indispensable - a task once entrusted to 'critique', which has been entirely gutted in the meantime. Critique is replaced by an affirmative theory of civilization, supported by a General
Immunology. 176
Canon-Work in Modernity
More than any form of civilization before it, modernity relies on sorting out what deserves to be passed on and foreshortening mala- daptive developments - even if the necessary warnings are perceived by the protagonists of a current generation that basks in expressive malformations as oppressive infringements. Being allowed to bask in short-lived maladaptations, incidentally, is a significant factor in the appeal of modern life forms. It defines their aroma of freedom and lack of consequences; it liberates the present from the burden of creat- ing role models - it is no coincidence that modernity is the Eldorado of youth movements. Its greatest temptation is to abolish the future on the pretext of being the future. Whoever restricts themselves to 'single-age' ways of life does not have to worry about conveying role models in multi-age processes. 177 As self-evidently maladaptive forms also tend towards reproduction under liberal conditions, and go on to haunt subsequent generations, it is important for the civilizatory process to musealize such variants as soon as possible - at the latest, one generation after the resignation of the protagonists. 178
In truth, one of the most important functions of the modern cul- tural archive is to render superfluous the index of forbidden books and works of art, which has meanwhile become counterproductive. The archive reverently preserves all important and interesting errors, all projects with no future and all unrepeatable departures forever. 179 Its collections are recruited from strictly outside of the canon in which the real generational process continues to work. Otherwise, preser- vation in museums runs the risk of being confused with setting an example for successors - which is, incidentally, the favourite mistake of contemporary artists: following the end of the museoclastic move- ments, they view the public museum as a collection of normative works and fail to recognize its new function as the final destination
425
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
is to say as a depository up nor repeated. They
the function of private collections, which is ultimately merely to withdraw pseudo-transcendent works from circulation. In addition, the paralysis afflicting the humanities today stems from the fact that its protagonists have, for the most part, settled into the archive as free-floating observers - Rorty slightly contemptuously calls them 'detached cosmopolitan spectators' - and left all programmatic work on the crafting of a civilizatory code with a future to chance and fanaticism.
Malign Repetitions I: The Culture of Camps
Following on from these observations, I shall point out a few mala- daptation phenomena that shaped the civilizatory process of the twentieth century. From today's perspective, they should be read as symptoms of the triumph of malign repetition in recent sequences of traditions, and therefore constitute emergencies for an intervening science of 'culture'. I shall begin - continuing from the reflections of the previous section - with the culture of political murder in the pseudo-metanoetic politics of the twentieth century; then deal with the weakening of the imitative factor in contemporary pedagogy; and finally address the illusory rejection of imitation in modern aesthetics.
As far as the externalization of metanoia in the revolutionary politics of the twentieth century goes, there is little to add to the earlier deliberations on the biopolitics of Bolshevism. The attempt to force, by political-technical measures for large collectives, what could previously barely be achieved even through extreme ascetic exercises by highly motivated individuals inevitably led to a politics of absolute means. Because the elimination of sluggish fellow humans seemed a logical choice as the means of all means for projects with this level of ambition, the first half of the twentieth century saw the birth of the most historically unheard-of form of a maladaptive culture: the culture of camps. 180 It served repression on the pretext of re-education, extermination on the pretext of work, and finally eradi- cation without any pretext. One initially hesitates to apply the term
'culture' to such phenomena. If one considers the scale of the camp worlds, however, their ideological premises, the logistical efforts they demanded, their personnel requirements, their moral implications, their habitus-forming effects and their mental side effects among those running the camps,181 the word 'culture' cannot be avoided,
426
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
even
ties. Although one tends, initially, to assume
prospects of transmission for camp norms must have been poor, it is undisputed that during most of the twentieth century, there was an entrepreneurial culture of internment, selection and elimination that survived for longer than one would ever have believed possible, either on moral or on culture-theoretical premises. Crime organized by the revolutionary party state reached the Weberian stage in the Soviet Union and China - in the sense of a transition from a state of emergency to bureaucratization. A maladaptive reversal with such long-term effects can also be observed in the life forms of the Parisian miracle courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those counter-worlds of thieves, beggars and gypsies immortalized in novels of the nineteenth century - above all Victor Hugo's The Hunchback ofNotre-Dame. In these too, something resembling a stable-perverse counter-culture had come into being with unduly high chances of continuance. It constituted a parallel culture of the metropolitan poor that had been born out of need. The long-term camp culture of the twentieth century, on the other hand, was exclusively the work of pseudo-metanoetic states that invoked the French Revolution and took over the Jacobin sanctification of terror.
The birth date of modern exterminism as an entrepreneurial form and an institution can be precisely determined: 5 September 1918, when Lenin's decrees on Red Terror stated expressly that one must incarcerate the enemies of the Soviet system in concentration camps and eliminate them step by step. This approach, intended as provi- sional in the first years, was maintained on a massive scale well into the 1950s, and in smaller forms until the 1980s - finally in collabora- tion with Soviet psychiatry, which was based on the axiom that dis- satisfaction with the life forms of actual socialism was a symptom of severe mental illness.
The facts speak a clear language: the world of Nazi camps lasted for just under twelve years, those of the Soviet Union almost seventy years, and those of Maoism at least forty years - with a protracted aftermath in the prison system under the authoritarian capitalism of present-day China. This means that Soviet exterminism could spread its copies as far as a third generation, and in the case of Maoism a second, whose effects are still felt today: the system of laogai - literally 'reform through labour' - affected over fifty million people and wiped out over a third of these. We owe a debt of gratitude to anti-fascism of all stripes for the insistence with which it denounced the hyper-maladaptive atrocities of the Nazi state - the Holocaust,
427
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
that German synthesis of amok and routine. What remains notable is the asymmetry of 'coming to terms with' the past: 'anti-fascists' of Soviet and Maoist dispositions have always evaded the question of why they showed so much more discretion when it came to the excesses in their own history, which were quantitatively even greater. To this day, knowledge of its true proportions is anything but widespread - despite Solzhenitsyn, despite Jung Chang, and despite The Black Book of Communism. While the denial of Nazi crimes is rightly treated as a punishable crime in some countries, the atrocities of the Marxist archipelago are still considered peccadilloes of history in some circles.
We learn from this that lies do not always have short legs. If mal- adaptation forms on such a scale are able to develop a second and third generation, their legs are rather longer than those of ordinary lies; it is worth pondering what enabled them to become so long. This concerns not only the autonomous creation of laws in dictato- rial state formations, which tend to become retreats into abnormal- ity, but also the foundations of modernism: with its advent, the gulf between demoralizing success and legitimate exemplariness known from older cultural stages opened up with unprecedented virulence. If a thinker of Sartre's calibre resolved to keep silent about the facts of the Soviet camp world well into the 1950s despite knowing of its origins, its dimensions and its consequences, and even went so far as denouncing Western critics of the camps - including Albert Camus- as mendacious lackeys of the bourgeoisie, it is evident that the great- est maladaptive anomaly in the political history of humanity cast its shadow on the power of judgement of eminent intellectuals. The most culture-theoretically relevant information lies in the dates: Sartre's vow of silence accompanied the transition of Soviet camp culture to the third generation. He supported the perverse change of a 'measure' into an institution. If one acknowledges this irrefutable meaning or secondary meaning in Sartre's reference to his 'companionship' with socialism, it is undeniable that in his person, which seemed to embody the moral oracle of his generation, the archetype of the false teacher had entered the stage - though cultivators of the critical memory prefer to discuss it with reference to the person of Heidegger. Heidegger may have been a false teacher against modernity in some respects; the later Sartre was in all respects the false teacher in favour of modernity. 182 Only in the context of a strict musealization can one refer to authors of this calibre to distinguish between greatness and exemplarity.
428
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES
Malign Repetitions School
As far as the decline practice culture and awareness of pUnes in the pedagogy of the second half of the twentieth century are concerned, this forms the most recent chapter in the long history of antagonistic co-operation between the modern state and the modern school. I have shown how the liaison and the contradiction between state semantics and school semantics in Europe from the seventeenth century on, if not earlier, inevitably led to chronic tensions between the internally differentiated 'subsystems'. If the state's traditional request to the school to produce usable citizens is translated by the latter into an order to develop autonomous personalities, constant friction is preordained - as creative dysfunction on the one hand, and as a source of chronic disappointment on the other. Generally speak- ing, one can say that bourgeois advanced civilization emerged from the surpluses of school humanism via the state education mission. 183 One can virtually speak of a felix culpa on the part of the older bourgeois education system: it gave its more talented pupils infinitely more cultural motifs than they would ever be able to use in their civil functions. In this context, it may be productive to note that some of the greatest phenomena of spiritual surplus in recent intellectual history - Johann Gottlieb Fichte as the reinventor of the theory of alienation and Friedrich Nietzsche as the modernizer of the Christian superhuman idea - passed through the same school, the Thuringian Pforta near Naumburg, which was known in its time as one of the strictest secondary schools in Germany: Fichte from 1774 to 1780184 and Nietzsche from 1856 to 1864. It is hardly necessary to explain how the Tubingen seminary over-fulfilled its training mission with the pupils H6lderlin, Hegel and Schelling. The question of what the pupil Karl Marx, who graduated in 1835, owed to his formative years at the gymnasium in Trier, the former Jesuit Trinity College, has been answered with rather modest information by revolutionary historiography. 185
In the most recent phase of school history, the creative malad- aptation of the classical school has been perverted into a malign maladaptation that can be called modern in so far as it resulted from an epoch-typical disturbance of role model functions and the accom- panying decline in practice consciousness. In the wake of this, school approaches a point of twofold implosion at which it produces neither citizens nor personalities. It heads towards a state beyond conformi- zation and production of surpluses that bypasses all aspects of direct usefulness and indirect creation of consequences. Year after year,
429
THE EXERCiSES OF THE MODERNS
to got out is increasingly evident, without any blame whatsoever being attached to individual teachers or students. The two are joined in an ecumene of disorienta- tion scarcely paralleled in history - unless one wishes to point to the long night of education between the collapse of the Roman school system in the fifth century and the rebirth of a Christian-humanist school culture in the wake of the Alcuinic-Carolingian reforms during
the eighth century.
To diagnose the malaise, one would have to show in detail how
the current school takes part in the process that Niklas Luhmann calls the differentiation of subsystems. Differentiation means the establishment of strictly self-referentially organized structures within a subsystem or 'praxis field' - in evolution-theoretical terms, the institutionalization of selfishness. Luhmann's ingenious impulse was to show how growth in the performance capacity of subystems in modern 'society' - whether in politics, business, law, science, art, the church, sport, pedagogy or the health system - depends on a constant increase in its self-referentiality, to the point of its transition into a state of complete self-referential closure. In moral-theoretical terms, this implies the remoulding of selfishness at the subsystemic level into a regional virtue. For 'social' critique, this means that helpless protest against the cynicism of power is replaced by system enlightenment - that is to say, a clarification of enlightenment.
The systemically conditioned revaluation of values presupposes the de-demonization of self-preference that one can observe in the texts of the European moralists between the seventeenth and nine- teenth centuries. 186 It is hardly surprising, then, that one encounters a neutralized perversion at the centre of every subsystem. It is not only the offensive deviation of the 'blasphemer' from the moral norm that appears perverse, but far more the openness of the admis- sion that the subordinated system is ultimately only concerned with itself, not its possible mandates in a larger framework. 187 Thus there is a close connection between cynicism and perversion - cynicism, after all, as enlightened false consciousness, speaks the truth about the false, provided that it helps immorality to become blatant. This
breakthrough to blatancy - the aletheia of systems - first occurred in the field of politics, when Machiavelli disclosed the autonomous laws of political action and recommended its emancipation - long considered scandalous - from general morality. This was followed by economic theory after the advent of mechanical production in the late eighteenth century. Early liberals like Mandeville and Adam
430
EXERCISES MISEXERCISES
comes
"'H'~"'Y' openly recognized that was to
profits for its managers so that they could service their loans, make new investments and cover salary costs. In short: within the system, 'social' factors can only be taken into account via calculations of side effects. The argument that business is of most use to the social envi- ronment when it concentrates on what it does best, namely generat- ing profits, is correct across the board - and yet it does not manage to acquire more than a vague plausibility, for the evident success of the one side is accompanied by growing evidence to the contrary: the selfishness of the economic system ignores too many other interests, whether one describes these as the interests of the whole or not.
The remaining subsystems are naturally forced far more strongly to hide their selfishness and justify themselves with the aid of vague holistic rhetoric. I8s This does not alter their factual development into 'selfish systems'. Each of them produces so-called experts who explain to the rest why things have to go the known way They have to make it clear to the sceptical audience why the all-tao-visible self- interest of the subsystem is outweighed by its usefulness for all. But one can still not imagine a health system openly stating that it pri- marily serves its own self-reproduction. Nor has one heard any utter- ances from churches to the effect that their only goal is to preserve the churches, even though open speech is considered a virtue among the clergy. There is even less reason to expect the school system's one day becoming sufficiently perverse to declare that its only task is to keep itself running somehow, in order to ensure that its profiteers - teachers and administrative employees - have secure positions and solid privileges.
Where one cannot expect confessions, one must rely on diagnoses. Diagnoses remould perversions into structural problems. It is obvious that the problem of today's school system is not only that it is no longer able to fulfil the state mission to breed citizens because the definition of the goal has become too blurred amid the demands of the current professional world; it is even clearer in the abandonment of its humanistic and artistic surplus in favour of devoting itself to a more or less de-spirited industry of pseudo-scientifically founded didactic routines.