No More Learning

Power is not an obstructive supplement to an originally free ability; it is consti- tutive for ability in all its manifestations. It always forms the ground floor above which a free subject moves in. Hence one can describe liberalism as a system of disciplinary checks and balances without glorifying it in the slightest - but without denouncing it either. With the calm severity of a civilization trainer, Foucault states: 'Individuals could certainly not be "liberated" without educating them in a certain way. '68
Language Games, Discourse Games, General Disciplinics
This cleared the way for a General Disciplinics. Foucault had gone a certain distance along this path by newly covering the universe of ancient philosophical asceticisms in a series of meticulous rereadings of mostly Stoic authors - unimpeded by the ubiquitous barriers of critical kitsch, which sees domination in every form of 'self-control', and immediately suspects any discipline in one's way of life of being a self-repression that doubles an external repression. We recall, to name one of the best-known examples, the discrepancies read into the Sirens chapter of the Odyssey by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, where the Greek seafarer becomes a bourgeois with suppressed drives who instantly advances to the pro- totype of the European 'subject'. One thinks back with trepidation to the times in which a younger generation of intellectuals viewed such gaucheries as the non plus ultra of critical thought.
The attraction of Foucault's late writing lies in the undisguised expression of wonder at the regions into which his study of ancient authors led him. He claims the status of a 'philosophical exercise' for his expedition into the history of asceticisms or 'self-techniques':
There is irony in those efforts one makes to alter one's way of looking at things. [. . . JDid mine actually result in a different way of thinking? Perhaps at most they made it possible to go back through what I was
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'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE'
already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. Sure of having travelled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above. 69
The proximity between Wittgenstein's clarification of form and Foucault's philosophical exercise is remarkable. The analogies between the 'language games' and 'truth games' are also unmistak- able. The essential differences between the two thinkers of the prac- tising life, on the other hand, become clear when one compares their interpretations of the stay at the summit of Mount Improbable. While Wittgenstein finds it amazing enough if forms of life can be clarified to the point where existence on a plateau is identical to a stay at a Tibetan mountain monastery, Foucault hurls himself into the role of the mining engineer who, through deep drilling at different points, reveals the height of the mountains and the number of concealed folds within them. For him, the mountain of improbability is an archive, and the most plausible way to inhabit it is by penetrating the old corridors in order to study the physics of the archive. His intuition, admittedly, tells him that the mountain culminates in each individual that inhabits it, which is why the ethics of these studies seeks to make it clear that what looks like a rock mass is in truth an accumulation of respectively singular culminations - even if these do not, for the most part, sense themselves as such. Here the imperative 'You must change your life! ' means: 'You yourself are the mountain of improbability, and as you fold yourself, thus will you tower up. '
The objective parallels between Wittgenstein and Foucault are impressive, even if we leave aside the psychodynamic aspect of the bioi paralleloi of two precocious homosexuals who, after a phase of advanced self-destruction attempts, managed to arrive at a form of self-therapy. To my knowledge, Wittgenstein's note from 1948 - 'I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything important. The industry of the great is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth'70 - has not yet been examined in the light of Foucault's studies on confessional practices. One could easily imagine those lines being written after an encounter between Wittgenstein and Foucault - though Wittgenstein would have felt more disgust than admiration for Foucault's work up to 1975, as he would have found his early and middle style unbearable. But he would probably have read the posthumous writings as the marvels of mannerism-free clarity that they are.
It is in the effective histories of the two thinkers, however, that their kinship is strongest. For both, it was the point of highest imitability
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
success, in cases it
the most suggestive misunderstandability. We have seen how Wittgenstein's language game theory turned into the misdirec- tion of 'ordinary language'; in Foucault's case, it is easy to understand why his discourse theory seemed an easy target for critical conform- ism. People took all those analyses of asylums, clinics, police insti- tutions and prisons for a slightly outlandish form of social critique and lavished praise on its lyrically drugged fastidiousness. None of his readers understood that they were always also ascetic exercises in self-shaping in place of a third suicide attempt, and possibly even the author himself was not always aware of it. His insistence on the anonymity of authorship aimed in the same direction: if no one is there, no one can kill themselves. The bafflement was therefore great when the older Foucault sidestepped with the irony of one who had detached himself, shaking off his critical and subversive followers. Whoever still wanted to remain on his trail after that comforted themselves with the oft-repeated assurance that philosophy is not a discipline, but an activity that 'crosses' disciplines. Thus he offered anarcho-criticistic kitsch - or, to tell the truth, the laziness that likes
to think of itself as a subversive power - a final refuge.
Philosophical Multisport: The Subject as Carrier of Its Exercise Sequences
In reality, he had completed the breakthrough to a conception of philosophy as exercise and trained off the last remnants of excess surrealistic weight. He had realized that aestheticism, activistic Romanticism, constant irony, talk of transgression and subversion- ism are but dreamy and sluggish pursuits that conceal with difficulty a lack of form. He had long since understood: whoever speaks of sub- version and effuses about becoming belongs in the beginners' class. Foucault had turned himself into something of which Nietzsche had provided a first notion in his last 'physiological' notes: the carrier of an intelligence that had become pure muscle, pure initiative. Hence the complete absence of mannerisms in his late style. The replacement of extravagance with manneredness - the secret of his middle period that can be unlocked through Binswanger - had become superfluous.
According to Foucault, philosophy can once more imagine becom- ing what it was before the cognitivist misconception threw it off course: an exercise of existence. As the ethos of the lucid life, it is pure discipline and pure multisport - in its own way, it entails the res-
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'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC
LE'
ancient
group of agones. analogy between forms
to a
sport and of
discourse and knowledge should be taken as literally as possible. The philosophical intelligence practises the discipline that it is primarily in the individual disciplines in which it immerses itself; if need be, even in 'philosophy'. A word of warning about 'crossing': in 99 per cent of cases, it falls prey to beginners' mistakes. There is no meta-discipline, of course - and hence no introduction to philosophy that is not itself the decisive exercise from the outset.
It seems to me that one can only do justice to Foucault by taking his impulse together with that of Pierre de Coubertin. The comple- tion of the renaissance through the return of the athlete around 1900 encompasses the return of the wise man: in the panathlon of intelli- gence, he makes his own contribution to clarifying the form in which that renaissance continues today. Whatever the answer, the term can no longer be reduced to its art-historical and educated middle- class meanings. It indicates an indefinitely far-reaching unleashing of ability and knowledge forms beyond the Old European guild- and estate-based societies. By producing new configurations between con- templation and fitness, the current 'renaissance' enables new festivals on the plateau of the mountain of improbabilities. Anyone who has ever taken part in such a festival knows that neither a 'knowledge society' nor an 'information society' exists, as much as the new mys- tifiers might speak of them. What has constantly been arising since the renaissance is a multi-disciplinary and multi-virtuosic world with expanding limits of ability.
View of an Immense landscape
Once free from the phantom of a 'philosophical activity' beyond discipline and disciplines, one can experience in Foucault's world the moment in which the whole scene is in open view. It can best be described with Wittgenstein's reference to showing his pupils an 'immense landscape which they cannot possibly know',71 It is the inconceivably wide landscape of disciplines; its sum forms the basis for the routines of all cultures and all trainable competencies. Here we have, both de facto and de jure, the 'broadest and longest fact that exists'. The path followed in exemplary fashion by Foucault leads, if pursued far enough, to a General Disciplinics as an encyclopaedia of ability games.
The discourse formations and knowledge games examined by 155
THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
a narrow one paradigmatic energy. The consequences of suggestions will only be appreciated if there is one day a fully worked-out form of General Disciplinics - which would probably take a century to develop. Its implantation would require a suitably contemporary transformation of universities and colleges, both in the structuring of the so-called 'subjects' or 'courses' and in the basic assumptions of academic pedagogy - which, against its better judgement, still clings to the briefcase-and-box theory, where teaching and learning is nothing but transferring knowledge from the professor's briefcase to the students' file boxes, even though it has long been known that learning can only take place through a direct participation in the disciplines. Establishing an academic system with discipline-based content and methods would at once be the only realistic way to coun- teract the atrophy of the educational system, founded on a reformed
idea of the subjects and tasks of a Great House of Knowledge.
In the course of such a rearrangement, the effective geology of the man-made Mount Improbable would come to light. This universitas of disciplines embodies the real cultural science after the dissolution of cultural phantoms into the wealth of competency systems and trainable ability units. The over-discussed question of the subject is reduced to this compact formulation: a subject is someone who is active as the carrier of a sequence of exercises - which, furthermore, means that intermittently popular thought figures such as excess, decentring and the death of the subject are at best parasitic supple- mentary exercises to the qualifying ones; they can be assigned to the
category of advanced mistakes.
In this context, I can only hint very cautiously at what elements might come together in General Disciplinics. This would certainly no longer be a mere theory of discourses, or groups of statements including cor- responding asceticisms and executives. It would integrally encompass the spectrum of ability systems composed of knowledge and practical acts. This spectrum extends from (1) acrobatics and aesthetics, includ- ing the system of art forms and genres - NB: in the post-university House of Knowledge, the studium generale consists of artistry, not philosophy - via (2) athletics (the general study of sporting forms) to (3) rhetoric or sophistry, then (4) therapeutics in all its specialized branches, (5) epistemics (including philosophy), (6) a general study of professions (including the 'applied arts', which are assigned to the field of arts et metiers) and (7) the study of machinistic technologies. It also includes (8) administrativics, which constitutes both the static
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IS MONASTIC
or the
legal as as the encyclopaedia of meditation systems in their dual role as self-techniques and not-self-techniques (the dis- tinction between declared and undeclared meditations comes into play here), (10) ritualistics (as humans, according to Wittgenstein, are ceremonial animals and the ceremonies form trainable behav- ioural modules whose carriers appear as 'peoples' - which is why the linguistic sciences, like the theory of games and 'religions', form a sub-discipline of ritualistics), (11) the study of sexual practices, (12) gastronomics and finally (13) the open list of cultivatable activities, whose openness means the interminability of the discipline-forming and thus subjectification-enabling field itself. One can see from this list that Foucault's interventions touch on fields 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 11. Ordinary philosophers restrict themselves to field 5, with occasional excursions to 8 or 1 and 3, which tells us enough about
Foucault's panathletic qualities.
By way of precaution, I would point out that this first view of the
thirteen-headed monster of disciplinics lacks the phenomena of war and 'religion', which are imposing ones for the everyday conscious- ness. There is a sound methodological reason for this: war is not a discipline of its own but an armed sophistry (a continuation of the art of being right by other means) that incorporates elements of athletics, ritualistics and machine technology. Nor is 'religion' a clearly demar- cated discipline, but rather - as already hinted - an amalgam of rheto- ric, ritualistics and administrativics, with the occasional addition of acrobatics and meditation.
Between Disciplines
Finally, I would like to point out how the question of the 'critical' dimension is inherent in each of the fields and oversteps each one of them: in every single area there is a constant practical crisis that leads to a separation of the right and the wrong in the execution of the discipline - often with immanently controversial results. Hence each individual discipline possesses a vertical tension that is unique to it and only comprehensible from within it. The status of an achiever in a given field does not tell us anything about their ranking in other areas. From a moral-philosophical perspective, it is decisive that the internal differences within a field form the dimension subject to Nietzsche's distinction between good and bad - which also means that there can be bad things within a discipline, but not evil ones.
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THE CONQUEST OF THE L,<fPROBABLE
is a constant
disciplines individuals are remote
these value or frown upon the results of exercises in foreign spheres according to their own standards. Outside observers can find what athletes do unimportant and what jewellers do superfluous without having to worry about whether the athletes or jewellers are the best in their field. External observers are even free to say that it would be better if this or that discipline, or even an entire complex of dis- ciplines, did not exist - indeed, that the existence of some disciplines as such is a reprehensible aberration. Thus early Christians were convinced that gladiatorial fights were evil, even if the fighters were masters of their field, and the whole system of bread and circuses was nothing but a loathsome perversion. These negative assessments prevailed in the long term - which, to my knowledge, no one regrets. The decisive factor in their success was the fact that they precisely introduced alternative disciplines and surrounded these with positive evaluations. Some people today, by contrast, are of the opinion that parliamentary democracy, orthodox medicine or large cities should be abolished, as nothing good can come of them. These critics will not prevail because they do not show what should be done instead. The operative distinction here is between good and eviL What is evil should not be; one cannot improve it, only eliminate it. Just as the first distinction works with a withdrawal of value, the second works with a withdrawal of being.
Clearly only the first distinction is significant for the disciplinicist. For them, the wealth of disciplines itself is Mount Improbable, and one does not criticize mountains - one climbs them or stays at home. Nietzsche was probably the first to understand what conventional moralism is: the criticism of mountains by non-climbers. One can indeed resolve to turn one's back on the 'world' as the epitome of unaffirmable exercises and practise something other than life 'in the world' to the point of perfection - this is precisely what the escapists of late antiquity had in mind. There is, however, a notable difference between early Christians and modern radicals in this respect. The Christian bishops wrote monastic rules for life on other mountains, rules under which people could live for 1,500 years - in some cases to this day. The latter faction, by contrast, reacts to whatever is the case
by standing around and finding it unfair. To them, all mountains are evil.
Foucault had grasped that 'subversion', 'stupidity' and 'unfitness' are three words for the same thing. When two journalists from Les
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'CUL TURE
m 'Does your return to in a weakening of ground on which we
and live? What did you want to destroy? ', his laconic response to the subversion parrots was: '1 did not want to destroy anything! '72 Together with his declaration of 1980 - 'From this point of view all of my investigations rest on a postulate of absolute optimism. [. . •J I say certain things only to the extent to which I see them as capable of permitting the transformation of reality'73 - this rejection of a two-hundred-year folklore of destruction constitutes Foucault's philosophical testament. His response in 1984 was almost literally his last word; a few days after the interview, conducted in late May, he collapsed in his apartment and died three weeks later, on 25 June, at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, whose former functions he had described in his book The History of Madness.
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
On the Demons of Habit and Their Taming Through First Theory
The Cure for Extravagance: Discourse Analysis
Ludwig Binswanger was probably the only psychiatrist who Foucault knew understood, not to say predicted him - in the sense that he found in Binswanger's writings the most important elements for a language of endangered life, both in general and in his own particular case. In those writings he became acquainted with the tragic interpre- tation of verticality, in which the 'extravagance' of existence means being stuck too high up on the existential ladder. It was also clearly from Binswanger that he adopted the reference to Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder (premiered in 1892) - it portrays a manic archi- tect who 'builds higher than he can climb' and ultimately falls to his death from the unliveable height of his tower. 74 Most of all, Foucault owed to Binswanger his early insights into the basic problem of his own existence, which the Heidegger-inspired psychiatrist had summa- rized in space-analytical terms: as a disproportion between width and height - or discourse and flight. This imbalance can, as Binswanger explained in his 1949 essay 'Extravagance', manifest itself either as a manic volatility and rapid digression through ideas in the vols imagi- naires750r as a schizoid scaling of heights that do not stand in any productive relation to the narrowness of the experiential horizon/6 in this sense, extravagance is the disease of the talented youth. The therapy consists of a form of mountain rescue intervention: the aim is to bring the lost climber back to the valley and explain the terrain to them until they feel able to respect the circumstances on their next climb. Understanding those circumstances involves knowing the rela- tion between the difficulty of the slope and the training level of the peak conqueror.
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The First Ethical Distinction in Heraclitus
The earliest reference in the Old European space to a mode of thought that formulates an ethics of the kind touched on above can be found in a collection of fragments attributed to the Ionian proto-philosopher Heraclitus, who lived at the turn from the sixth to the fifth century Be. I am thinking in particular of the equally well-known and enig- matic Fragment 119 quoted by Stobaeus: ethos anthr6po daimon, conventionally translated as 'Man's character is his fate. ' Heidegger famously expressed his dissatisfaction with this trivial translation in the 'Letter on Humanism' addressed to Jean Beaufret in 1946. He accuses it of being thought in modern, not Greek terms - an objec- tion that still applies to the slightly modified, Swabian-tinged version 'Man's particularity is his demon. ' In order to shift things into place, Heidegger feels it necessary to bring out the heavy fundamental- ontological artillery: he treats the seemingly unassuming terms ethos
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
man
possible interest rate, now, over two thousand
years grown into an enormous fortune. In his view, only fun- damental ontology is entitled to make withdrawals from this ancient meaning account, for it alone is capable of thinking pre-Socratically and post-metaphysically at once. I will now show how, as exagger- ated as his suggestion may be, he was not entirely wrong.
Heidegger's Cunning
In order to gain access to the treasure of meaning, Heidegger uses a hermeneutical trick: he brings the ethos daimon statement together with the anecdote, related by Aristotle, in which Heraclitus, the philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor, is visited by a group of hesitant strangers who find him warming himself by the oven and bids them enter with the words 'Here too the gods are present. ' The contextualizing strategy is as simple as it is effective. Just as the oven anecdote is meant to remind us that even in the ordinary, the unusual shines through, that the divine is present even in the most unassum- ing, the fragment to be interpreted seeks to express that the unknown is present in the known and the supra-real in the everyday. Hence the saying, if one translates ethos with 'stay' or 'abode' (which is prob- lematic) and daimon with 'God' (which is probably a little too lofty), would mean: 'Man dwells, in so far as he is man, in the nearness of God. '78
Although I consider this first translation by Heidegger unsuc- cessful, both philologically and philosophically, it has a stimulating element. For living in the nearness of God means discovering a form of vertical neighbourhood in which it is even more important to find a modus vivendi with the resident of the apartment above than with one's next-door neighbour. One can work with this point, even if the rest is unconvincing. But that is not the end of it: Heidegger then makes a second translation suggestion, in which he turns the prob- lematic into the grotesque by augmenting the motif of neighbourhood with that of uncanniness. Now the three little words ethos anthropo daimon supposedly mean: 'The (familiar) abode is for man the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one). '79 If that were truly the meaning of this statement, it would make Heraclitus the most profound commentator on Heidegger's work ever to come from ancient Greece.
Nonetheless, Heidegger did understand one aspect of Heraclitus' 162
SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
sense, and
ciously as 'behaviour' or 'habit', is placed in a state of 'upward'
tension through its combination with the word daimon. Here, instead of thinking of 'the god', it is sufficient to imagine some higher spirit force that could tend equally towards good or evi1. 80 Nor does this power simply border externally on the human ethos complex, for it is capable of overpowering it from within and sucking it up.
What the Dalman Brings About: The Ethical Distinction
If one leaves aside the curious aspects of Heidegger's consideration of Heraclitus, something remains that is more than a mere projec- tion: every complex of human behaviour contains a certain tension between height and depth. It consists, if the image is permissible, in an ontological two-storey structure that is explicitly noted from now on - in so far as one can equate noting with describing. It entails that the lower, the habitual foundation, and the upper, the demonic, are capable of absorbing each other - in both directions, one should note. Firstly, if a bad ethos pulls man cacodaemonically downwards until he keeps the swine company, as Heraclitus tirelessly asserts in a series of drastic animal comparisons - the language game 'man equals swine' evidently runs through from Heraclitus' Ephesus to Wittgenstein's Vienna - or secondly, if a good ethos lifts him up agathodaemonically, so that he approaches the sphere of the divine (theion). This corresponds to the saying of Heraclitus quoted by Celsus (Fragment 78), which states that ordinary human behaviour (ethos anthropeion) has no valid insights (gnomas), whereas that of the gods (theion) does.
No talk, then, of the familiar human 'abode' transcending towards the 'unfamiliar' of its own accord. Heraclitus' opinion is more along these lines: as long as man remains in his average ethos, he has nothing that connects him to the realm above. If it were true that Fragment 119 implicitly adopts any stance concerning the 'place' or 'abode' of humans, it would be this: where we are, the animal confinement of the many to their habits collides with the openness of the few to the logos. This is completely in keeping with the tendency of numerous other statements attributed to Heraclitus, which leave no doubt as to how he, whom tradition portrays as a melancholic and eo ipso a man of distance, judged the forms of life among the masses. That this 'misanthropic' thinker should have stated that 'man' as such in his
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open to as is quite simply unthinkable.
Nonetheless, Heidegger was right to note a fundamental problem- aties of verticality in Heraclitus' use of the word ethos. This does not concern the alleged transcendence of 'man' towards the divine, regard- less of whether one calls it the super-ego, the super-tu or the super-id. Heraclitus was an ethicist, not an anthropologist. The first ethics deals with a difference among humans that first becomes explicit through thought - or perhaps one should call it becoming aware of the logos dimension. Heraclitus' misanthropy is the fanfare that opens the expli- cation. It shows how the difference within each human manifests itself as a difference between humans. If Heraclitus places the many and the few in stark opposition to each other, it is not because his thought is elitist, but rather because he is among the first of those who became specifically aware of the thought that has always been acting unno- ticed within us - and who thus actualized the difference between the thinking, or more precisely those attentive to the logos, and the others, the inattentive ones, in the first place. He could not have done this if he had not first established within himself the predominance of thought over non-thought - or rather of having good sense (sophronein), which Fragment 112 thus terms the greatest virtue (arete megiste).
It is precisely from this gesture, the subordination of non-good sense to good sense, that ethics comes about as First Theory. Consequently, ethics can only take the form of a duel between man and himself - though this duel can be externalized as a provocation of those who evade it. From its first word, the first ethics already deals with the difference between that which is above and that which is below, yet usually strives to reach the top. This 'ethics' as a primary orientation has an immediate 'ontological' sense, provided it contains the thesis 'sophronein exists'. It would be a theoreticistic reduction of this state- ment, however, if it were used to express no more than its proposi- tional content. It is an authoritative, spurring and tonic statement that confronts its addressees with the challenge: 'Give precedence to sophronein! ' The oldest version of the metanoetic imperative already demands that humans distinguish between the upper and the lower within themselves.
Being Superior to Oneself
That the primal ethical directive 'You must change your life! ' becomes acute in the pre-Socratic word sophronein - and with a manifestly
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practice-theoretical tendency - can be explained with reference to a thought formulated by Plato a hundred years after Heraclitus in a greatly admired passage from book four of the Republic (430e-432b), dealing with prudence (sophrosyne) in the individual and in the polis. There, prudence is defined first of all as 'dominance over the desires' (epithymion epikrdteia) - though I cannot say at this point what these 'epithymic' feelings known as 'desires' are, or what is meant by 'dominance'. Then Socrates draws our attention to the peculiarity of the self-relationship to which this refers: if prudence is related or identical to dominance over affects or passions, it manifests an inner asymmetry within humans - a dramatic difference from themselves that can be evaded, but not neutralized. This is demonstrated by the figure of speech that someone is 'stronger than themselves' (kreitto
-hautou) - which is also translated as 'superior to oneself'.
At first glance, Socrates says, such a phrase seems ridiculous, and paradoxical to boot: 'For the man who is master of himself will also,
I presume, be the slave of himself, and the slave will be the master'81 - as both statements are made by the same person. In reality, the laugh- able expression is a symptom of the most serious matter: 'in man himself' (en auto to anthropo) there is evidently a better and a worse side relating to the soul (peri ten psychen). This matter, which is no laughing one, emerges in actu in twofold fashion: in the reflections formulated here and in the life conditions they address. If the part that is by nature (physei) better rules over the worse part, one calls this being stronger than oneself or superiority over oneself and rightly praises it. If the situation is inverted, however, and the worse part - which is also the larger - overpowers the better - which is naturally smaller - one speaks of being weaker than or inferior to oneself, and rebukes it accordingly. The further applications of these reflections result from the maxim of all political psychology: as in the psyche, so in the polis. 82
Two aspects are decisive for an understanding of this philosophy- historically fateful passage. Firstly: Plato here manages to integrate the affect of contempt, which appears in a crudely external way in Heraclitus, into the structure of the psyche, so that contempt becomes a regulative principle of the person and an agent of their self-direction. Whoever is able to feel self-contempt has already mas- tered the decisive aspect. Secondly: Socrates clarifies why the worse part can only take over after 'bad education' - whose criterion lies in leaving untethered (akolaston) something that requires tethering, and, if all were as it should be, could be tethered with ease. If one assumes that, for the Greeks, paideia was an amalgamation of insight
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takeover by the
side unmistakably contains a call for more training, or a lament about
the failure of the current scheme.
Naturally one could, in the style of the sociologizations still cus-
tomary today, raise the objection that Plato's talk of self-superiority was a projection of Greek class structures onto the psyche. Then one could - in the mode of the utopianism that is no longer so common - add that in a classless society, the self-relations of the psyche would be rebuilt into flat hierarchies, or even complete anarchies without any above-below difference to speak of. These objections, however, miss the essence of paideia. The idea of restraint comes from an inter- nalization of the differences between teacher and pupil, or trainer and athlete, possibly also between rider and horse, which have nothing to do with dominance in the usual sense. The relationship between the aristocracy and the rabble only provides a metaphor for these condi- tions, and to take it literally would be to misunderstand the autono- mous laws of figurative speech. In truth, a manifestation of verticality emerges in paideia that cannot be depicted by, let alone reduced to, political dominance. That does not, of course, mean that the matter is automatically understood by its carriers, namely the operators and patients of training.
The basic confusion of Greek ethics, as well as the art of education connected to it, comes from the fact that it never managed to work out the difference between passions and habits with the necessary clarity - which is why it also never dearly articulated the correspond- ing difference between dominance and practice. The consequences are evident in over two millennia of ambiguity in European pedagogy - initially it often suffocated its pupils with authoritarian discipline by treating them as subjects, while later on it increasingly addressed them as false adults and released them from all discipline and practis- ing tension. The fact that pupils are initially and mostly burgeoning athletes - not to say acrobats - who must be brought into shape was, because of the moralistic and political mystification of pedagogy, never pointed out as explicitly as a matter of such import would reqUIre.
For the time being, nothing seems simpler than the thought that exist- ing passions, destructive intensities or obsessions demand restrain- ing - that is, dominance - while habits are not given a priori, but must rather be built up in longer periods of training and practice; they grow through mimetic repetitive behaviour, but turn into a will-
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as
seem, however, the association of these two factors has led to the most diverse confusions throughout the history of ethical thought. One could go so far as to say that along with the asceticisms them- selves, the ambiguities in the understanding of askesis constitute the 'broadest and longest fact that exists' on the 'ascetic planet'. In Europe, asceticisms and their misunderstandings are of more or less equal age - the incomparably more deeply thought-out universe of the Indian asanas simultaneously shows us that this long-lasting confusion is a regional fate, not a universal law. Once this has been grasped, one understands why the emancipation of practice from the compulsive structures of Old European asceticism - as I hinted at the start - may possibly constitute the most important intellectual- historical and body-historical event of the twentieth century.
Between Two Overpowerings: The Possessed Human
If we go back from Plato's reference to the vertical distinction within humans themselves to Heraclitus' aphorism, it is illuminating how the thinker of Ephesus treats the same problem with a logic that is still entirely elementary, almost destitute. Now one sees clearly how this archaic three-word wonder ethos anthropo daimon itself formally demonstrates what it is talking about: the word 'man' stands in the middle between the two all too easily confused ethical factors - habits on the left, passions on the right. Whatever other meanings ethos can have, it unmistakably refers here to that which is habitual, moral and conventional, while the word daimon indicates the higher power, the overpowering and supra-habitual force.
If one accepts these semantic deliberations serving the illumination of the two opaque terms, two new ways of translating Heraclitus' phrase arise. The first would be: 'Among humans, bad habits are the overpowering force. ' The second is: 'New good habits in humans can gain control over the most intense passions. ' Naturally we cannot say which of these Heraclitus had in mind. His logic was archaic, in so far as the archaic is the condensed embodiment of the not-yet-differen- tiated, the pre-confused. While the confused re-entangles alternatives that have already been unfolded, the pre-confused contains not-yet- unfolded alternatives intertwined contracte.
Here there are even fewer words than thoughts that need to be expressed. It therefore remains unsaid or 'folded in' whether the demonic manifests itself in
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paSSIOns may
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
<0"'"11\:U its
the twentieth century: never had the homesickness
intelligentsia for their pre-confused beginnings been so strong. At the same time, this homesickness was never exposed to a stronger temptation to increase confusion by seeking refuge in unsuitable simplifications.
The original ethical confusion in European philosophy manifests itself in two complementary and time-honoured errors that run through the history of reflections on the question of how humans should live: in the first, the restraining of passions is confused with the exorcism of base demons, and in the second, the overcoming of bad habits is confused with illumination through higher spirits. The Stoic and Gnostic movements, with their striving for apathy or a speedy escape to the world above, are representative of the former, and the Platonic and mystical traditions, with their inclination to kill off the flesh or pass over embodied existence, of the latter. That these attrac- tive errors did not become the mainstream is due to the resistance of the pragmatic ethical systems, which were aided by the anonymous wisdom of everyday cultures. Both are sources drawn upon by the legacy of European knowledge about the art of living - as demon- strated most recently by Michel Foucault's late studies. The anti- extremist projects of Aristotelian, Epicurean and sceptic provenance mostly achieved a fruitful balance between vertical passion, that is to say the restraining of desires, and the horizontal effort, namely the imitation and cultivation of good habits. They surveyed the difficult terrain in which the two primary directions of movement, the spread- ings and the ascents, make their demands.
If one reads the ethos-daimon statement directly alongside Socrates' words about the restraining of passions, one understands better the path on which Old European thought found itself confronted with what was termed 'possession' in religious contexts. In its older usage, the word daimon reminds us that being human and being possessed were initially practically the same. Whoever has no daimon has no soul that accompanies, augments and moves them, and whoever lacks such a soul does not exist - they are merely a walking corpse, or at best an anthropomorphic plant. If one now places the terms ethos and daimon so closely together that anthr6po is directly between them, one sees how the human being is fundamentally bound between two forms of possession. Possessed by habits and inertias, it appears under-animated and mechanized; possessed by passions and ideas, it is over-animated and manically overloaded. The form and degree of
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
are tone its on the integration of occupier its own
possession -
The majority of people throughout history have only acknowledged the latter, the psychistic or passionate side of possession (as appar- ent in ancient notions of accompanying demons, invasive demons, personal geniuses and evil spirits in a wealth of images); it observes with concern its negative, de-animation, dispiritedness, depression. The early philosophers, on the other hand, the first gurus and educa- tors, increasingly concentrate, in the morning light of their art, on the second front, the 'habit creature' side of the human condition. One could speak here of the habitual or hexic forms of possession (from Latin habitus, 'habit' and Greek hexis, 'possession, inner property, habit'). It represents possession by a non-spirit, a taking over of humans by the embodied mechanism.
Paideia: Gripping the Roots of Habit
To understand how humanity's dual possession was brought to an end by the ethical-ascetic Enlightenment, one must consider that the history of anthropological and pedagogical thought in Europe was, in the long run, identical to a progressive secularization of the psyche - that is, identical to the conversion of the logic of possession into programmes of discipline. In the course of these programmes, posses- sions of the first type are reformulated as enthusiasms and sorted into advantageous - recall Plato's list of the four good forms of enthusi- asm or madness in Phaedrus83 - and harmful ones. Among the latter, wrath, thirst for fame and greed stand out; in Christian times, these were included among the Seven Deadly Sins. 84 As they are no longer official forms of possession, only their functional successors, they are no longer driven out through exorcism but rather tamed through dis- cipline, using the crudest of methods if need be.
The statements of Aurelius Augustinus, nine hundred years after Heraclitus, can also be placed in this progressing line: in his text On True Religion, he calls on Christians to become 'men' by subduing (subiugare) the 'women' in themselves, these 'blandishments and troubles of desire'85 - a task that faces women in analogous fashion, because they should likewise be man enough 'in Christ' to subju- gate the womanly desires (femineas voluptates) in themselves. Here Augustine still clings firmly to the schema of the Platonic psychagog- ics of affect: dominate that which would otherwise dominate us; gain possession of that which would otherwise possess us. Because
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
the a re- always It is palpable here how the repressive understanding of asceticism, as a dictator- ship over the 'inner nature', begins its triumphal march through the
Christian centuries.
As far as the second type of possession, habit, is concerned, its
secularization leads to the concept of self-education, which includes a discreet self-exorcism: the human being owned by its habits must succeed in reversing the conditions of ownership and taking control of that which has it by having it itself. This applies above all to the bad habits that are to be replaced by good ones. Thus Thomas aKempis, still fully in the tradition of the first educators, writes: 'Habit overcomes habit. '86 In the more radical spiritual practice systems, the demand for a breaking of habitual conditionings is still being expanded to the neutral, even 'good' habits - for example, in the theatre pedagogy of Constantin Stanislavski or the 'Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man' founded in October 1922 in Fontainebleau by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. From the perspective of the radicals, the habitus basis of human existence is, as a whole, no more than a spiritually worthless puppet theatre into which a free ego-soul must be implanted after the fact, and through the great- est effort. If this fails, one experiences an effect in most people that is familiar from many athletes and models: they make a promising visual impression - but if one knocks, no one is at home. According to these doctrines, the adept can only rid themselves of their baggage by subjecting their life to a rigorous practice regime by which they can de-automatize their behaviour in all important dimensions. At the same time, they must re-automatize their newly learned behaviour so that what they want to be or represent becomes second nature.
Thinking and Wakefulness
For Heraclitus, the dark, early, pre-confused one, such differen- tiations and complications are non-existent. In his thought, the passions and habits could stay together in a single class - contained in the dimension of vagueness termed ethos anthropeion (human behaviour) in Fragment 119. On the other side are the supra-human factors: the divine, the fire of reason, the immeasurable psyche and the all-pervading logos. Compared to them, one reads, even the wisest human is a mere ape. One cannot yet speak of any paideia, but there is a statement by Heraclitus (Fragment 116, quoted by Stobaeus) that
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us that essentially all people, including the unnHof'mcd are capable of knowing themselves and having good sense.
Heraclitus enjoys an even greater privilege in being permitted, on the 'intellectual side' of his doctrines, to leave together what would have to be taken apart in a later culture of rationality, and even spread among different disciplines: being awake, having good sense and listen- ing for the logos. Later generations and more distant periods assigned waking - alongside the phenomena of sleep and dream - to psychology and the security services, while good sense was handed over to practi- cal philosophy and ethics, and a receptiveness to the logos to logic, mathematics and structural theories. If there is one strong characteris- tic of the pre-Socratics - assuming they are not simply an invention of modern compilers, for which there are indications - it seems to me that it lies in the pathos-filled equation of waking and thinking.
If one had to say in one sentence what constituted thought in the Ionic era, the answer would be: thinking means being sleepless in Ephesus - sacrificing one's nights in Miletus. One can almost take this literally, as the proximity of the Ionians to the Chaldean tradi- tions of nocturnal celestial observation may also have bred in them a tendency towards intellectual night work; the contempt of the waking for the sleeping belongs to the basic inventory of intellectual athletism. As Heraclitus' fragments tell us, the distinction between diurnal and nocturnal activity is meaningless for waking thought. The waking that is unified with thinking performs the only asceticism that can help the first philosophy get into shape. As waking thought, it is pure discipline - an acrobatics of sleeplessness. If it does not virtually unify the thinker with the ever-wakeful logos, it certainly brings them close together. It is no coincidence that some of Heraclitus' harshest words deal with the dependence of ordinary people on sleep. For him, hoi polloi are none other than the people who do not awaken to the shared (koinon) in the morning, but instead remain in their private world, their dreamy idiocy, as if they had some special knowledge (idian phr6nesin). These are the same who also sleep through reli- gious matters, as it were - they think they are purifying themselves by soiling themselves with blood, 'just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud'P Trapped in their own worlds, people do not hear what the non-sleepers have to say to them. If one speaks to them of the all-pervading logos, they merely shrug their shoulders. They see nothing of the One, even though they are sub- merged in it. They act as if they were seeking God, yet he is standing in front of them.
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Without Waking. Waking East-West Contrasts
Among twentieth-century thinkers, it was Heidegger who first sought to regain the privileges of pre-confused (contract-symbolic) thought through his secession from the 2,500-year philosophical tradition. In his way, he attempted - in opposition to his own time, yet keeping up with it in some respects - to restore philosophical activity to its 'pre- Socratic' state, when a unity of waking and thinking had temporarily been possible. The decline of pre-confused unity had already proved inexorable 2,500 years ago; the rapid progress in the formation of concepts split the basic terms of old into many partial meanings. Not all words survived this development intact - the archaic verb sophronein in particular, 'to be of good sense', the most elegant term of achievement in the ancient world, lost its penetrating energy and intimate appellative effect when it congealed into the noun soph- rosyne, which refers to the virtue of prudence among a group of other virtues. However, Heidegger's interpretation of this process - the freezing of verbs into nouns and the move from event observation to conceptual concoction - as the fate incurred by forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit) contains an unacceptable exaggeration that con- tributes little to overcoming the problematic situation it touches upon.
The asymmetrical decay products of this process led to the far- reaching differences between the culture of rationality, or 'ethics', in the Occident and the Orient. While the Western path, generally speaking, saw the establishment of thinking without waking, devoted to the ideal of science, the Eastern path arrived more at a waking without science, which strove for illuminations without conceptual precision - based on a state store of wisdom figures that more or less belonged to all masters. Heidegger's attempt to circumvent the opposition of scientism and illuminism from a neo-pre-Socratic angle produced a concept of 'thought' that is clearly closer to meditative waking than to the construction or deconstruction of discourses. His late pastoral of being, which is closer to an exercise than a discursive praxis, points to the undertaking of transforming the philosophy of consciousness, after the shake-up of its passage through existential philosophy, into a worldly philosophy of wakefulness. 88 It is fair to assume that man, as the 'guardian of being', is subject to a sleeping ban. It does not become entirely clear in Heidegger's work, however, how the timetable for guarding being is planned. Nor is it easy to see how the guardians receive the night work permit in the laboratories
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of elite research. The bet is as plausible as it is demanding: it is now a matter of carrying out the transformation of thought into a wakeful- ness exercise envisaged by Heidegger without regressing below the level of the modern culture of rationality.
Whether Heidegger himself achieved this is doubtful for a number of reasons. His later doctrine became too much of an idyll amid the monstrous. Before Heidegger, it was only Oswald Spengler who pre- sented a few provisional, but not insignificant sketches for a critique of the rationalist access to the world via a general theory of wakeful- ness; instead of pursuing this, however, he translated it into a specu- lative psychology of advanced civilizations and thus philosophically neutralized it. Furthermore, he distorted his subtle references to the fear-based constitution of wakeful existence - which resurfaced ten years later in Heidegger's inaugural address 'What is Metaphysics? ' of 1929 - through the crudeness of his pragmatic faith in the precedence of 'facts'. 89 Taken as a whole, the philosophy of the twentieth century fails somewhat pitifully in the face of the imperative of a culture of wakefulness. It is not without reason that it lost the majority of its virtual clientele to the psychotherapeutic subcultures in which new, liveable stylizations of the relationship between wakefulness and knowledge had developed, not infrequently to the disapproval of those employed as civil servants to look after theory.
Against the background of theosophical amalgams of traditions from Eastern and Platonic sources, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) developed the most radical doctrine of wakefulness presented in the twentieth century. Distancing himself from his early indoctrinations, he declared that it is always possible to exit the construct of the rational world from one moment to the next and burn all notions in the 'flame of attention'. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Krishnamurti refused to examine the connection between the capac- ity for constant wakefulness in the moment and working on oneself through practice, or the cathartic clarification of the psyche, in detail and to integrate the possible results of such studies into his theory, even though his own history of clarification is among the most dramatic and well-documented examples in the history of spiritual exercises. 9o
After Heidegger, it was above all Foucault who took up the bet and proved in his work how waking and thinking can once more be convincingly connected in a contemporary existential-intellectual project. From the circle of German thinkers who followed on from Heidegger and went to the limits of what was currently possible, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker is the most notable. It was he who probably
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
came closest to the paradoxical ideal of a pre-Socratism at the level of contemporary knowledge. His late central work, Zeit und Wissen [Time and KnowledgeJ91 - possibly the most profound scientific- philosophical book of the late twentieth century - was ignored by the public and colleagues alike, even by those not of the opinion that they were amusing themselves to death.
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On the Base Camps o f the Practising Life
One More Time: Height and Width - Anthropological Proportionality
The preceding reflections on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Heidegger and Heraclitus leave us with a number of observations about the 'anthropological proportion' articulated by Binswanger. It was this Heidegger-inspired pioneer of psychiatric anthropology who elaborated the basic phenomenon of existential directedness into an elemental ethics of space or proportions - especially in his largely overlooked study on Ibsen from 1949. There he explains how human self-realization in ordinary life takes place above all in the polarity of narrowness and width, while the dramas of intellectual and artis- tic self-realization are mostly located in the dimension of depth and height. 92 In both cases one observes life's basic kinetic tendency, of which Goethe noted, 'we humans are dependent on extension and movement'. 93 While existential mobility in the horizontal is domi- nated by a relative symmetry of outward and return journeys, vertical mobility is often characterized by an asymmetry when the descent is not simply a mirror of the ascent, no application of the Heraclitean formula 'The way up and the way down are the same', but rather a fall- I have examined this relationship from the perspective of a key phrase from Binswanger's texts also adopted by Pravu Mazumdar: 'tragic verticality'. Binswanger does not, incidentally, comment on the natural objection that there is also a kind of fall in the horizon- tal, when the step into width becomes a forwards without return, as embodied by the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman.
The tragic asymmetries observed by the psychiatrist in vertical movements do not concern height as such, either in the physical or in
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CONQUEST OF THE
sense. are more to
agent who climbs to a height at which he is unable to move. In
one should assume that the same ability which allows a climber to reach the top would also bring them down again without any trace of 'tragic verticality'. Only if non-ability or non-consideration of the boundary conditions for ability interferes, as with the flight of Icarus, does a fall become likely. Otherwise, the degree of ability is more or less sufficient for the descent as well. The aviation industry, which is certainly a non-Icarian art form, proves this every day, as does disci- plined alpinism. It is only upon advancing into the unmastered and unsecured that the problem of a fall arises - whether the protagonist undertakes something at their own risk for which they lack the tech- nique, or attempts something new that they cannot have mastered by virtue of its untried nature. I shall refrain from elaborating on these reflections with reference to the situations of the artist, the criminal, the dictator and the merchant adventurer; they are all in situations that are unimaginable without an inherent indination to fail- though not without a chance to learn something in the respective situation. With these in mind one can recall the saying, attributed to Oliver Cromwell, that a man never climbs higher than when he does not know where he is going.
At the Base Camp: The Last Humans
Following on from Binswanger's expositions on 'anthropological pro- portionality', we arrive at what I shall call the 'base camp problem'. Once again, Nietzsche must inevitably be considered its inventor. It appears at the moment when Zarathustra, the prophet of human- ity's ascent beyond itself in a way that can no longer be conceived of Platonically, stumbles at the very start of his mission on the fact that the vast majority of people have no interest in becoming more than they are. If one investigates the average direction of their wishes, one finds that they simply want a more comfortable version of what they have. This state of the culture of wishes is where Zarathustra's words about the last human initiate his attack on the audience. His improvised second speech - the first had announced the Obermensch - is meant to describe the most despicable creature under the sun: the human without longing, the final stuffy bourgeois, who has invented happiness and gazes after the passing women while sunbathing by the pool - why else would he be squinting? In his address, however - which one could, incidentally, call the first virtual pop event in the
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history
speak to pride listeners, he the conclusion
have none, and are not interested in regaining Hence the enthusi- astic response from the audience, which, after Zarathustra's failed provocation-therapeutic intervention, is: 'Give us this last human! '94 Zarathustra has no reply to this. From that point on, he divides people into his audience and his friends. The audience consists of those able to ask themselves: 'What is in it for me if I exceed myself? '
Nietzsche's talk of the last human provides the first version of the base camp problem. It appears as soon as it becomes possible to claim programmatically that base camps and summits are the same thing- or, more precisely, when some can argue in all seriousness that the stay at the base camp and its prolongation render any form of summit expedition superfluous. I have already explained indirectly how such understandings of existence on the plateau of Mount Improbable became plausible from the nineteenth century on, both in Darwinism and in Marxism: they follow from the standard interpretation of evo- lutionary theory, where the human being in the status quo embodies the final stage of becoming - with the only unsolved matter being the redistribution of end-stage achievements. This is what is argued in the corresponding social-political programmes. The entire twentieth century is marked by equations of base camp and summit founded on different ideological justifications - from the early proclamations of design for a transformation of everyday life to the total coexistence of life forms in postmodernism. In a related spirit, Analytic Philosophy declared ordinary language the last language, and liberalism termed the amalgam of consumption and insurance the last horizon. It may be that ecologism, which is in the process of becoming the central discourse of the present day, constitutes the extrapolation of this tendency into the twenty-first century through the fact that it has proclaimed ecosystems and species the last natures, thus asserting the inviolability of their present state of development. 95
One could therefore say that the philosophy of the twentieth century, especially in its social-philosophical varieties, offers - for the reasons already hinted at - nothing more than a series of state- ments about the base camp problem. The authors I have quoted also cast their votes on the matter - usually in a both/and form, with an emphasis on the basal side. Of these, Nietzsche is the only one who unconditionally embraced the primacy of the vertical. For him, the only justification for the base camp is as a starting point for expedi- tions to ever higher and more obscure summits. Closest to him are early and late Foucault and the heroistically inclined early Heidegger,
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THE OF THE IMPROBABLE
not
he wanted to 'set out' into the German destiny was nothing more than a base camp gone wild. In \Vittgenstein's Tractatus period too, where the author used his well-known disposable ladder, there are traces of the hope that one could climb over the horizontal universe of facts and proceed to the ethical summit through a vertical act. In later Wittgenstein, on the other hand, as well as middle-period Foucault and late Heidegger, there is an unmistakable shift to the horizontaL They perform, each in their own way and for very different reasons, a sort of resignatio ad mediocritatem. The playing of language games, the repeated study of the discourses of earlier power games and the late pietistic waiting for a new sign of being - these are all attitudes in a camp where the path evidently comes to an end, even if the authors have preserved some leftover aspirations to ascent. As far as Binswanger is concerned, it seems to me that he does not develop an opinion of his own on the critical question, instead contenting himself with a reference to the desirability of 'anthropological proportional- ity'. As he sympathized with the late Heidegger on the one hand, but
on the other hand, as a member of the psychiatric mountain rescue corps, attempted to retrieve the 'extravagant', one can consider him one of the outposts of the base camp who, because of their profession, still had some understanding of the dynamics of verticality.
Bourdieu, Thinker of the Last Camp
Among the authors in the second half of the twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu stands out for the problematic merit that in his work, the rejection of any notion of summit expeditions took on dogmatic pro- portions. He is, to put it pointedly, the sociologist of the definitive base camp - and even acted for a while as its intellectual prefect, com- parable in this respect to jiirgen Habermas, whose publications on the theory of communicative action can likewise be read as pamphlets on the overall completion of base camps in flat areas. Bourdieu's appear- ance on the French intellectual scene had taken place in the early 1960s, when the theoretical 'field' - to take up one of its preferred concepts - was almost completely occupied by Marxistically coded forms of social critique. As a temporary assistant to Raymond Aron and a reader of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Alfred Schiitz, he could not fail to see the inadequacies of Marxist approaches, espe- cially in their fatal extrapolations by Lenin and Stalin. If he wished to earn a place in the success field of French critical culture, he would
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HH'5'-""5'" games ment exploitation critique, compensating
sive power through additional efforts in the area of power critique. This could only be achieved by progressing from a theory of direct domination to a logic of domination without dominators. Now it was anonymous and pre-personal agencies that gained the rank of a repressive sovereign. This constellation spawned all the turns and innovations that characterize Bourdieu's variety of 'critical theory' - and, as German readers know, 'critical theory' is a pseudonym for a Marxism abandoned by a faith in the possibility of revolution. In this situation, the theory itself - along with an art that behaves increas- ingly subversively - becomes a substitute for revolution.
The foremost characteristic of Marxist thought was the intro- duction of an anti-idealistic hierarchy of reality. According to this, the base, understood as a political-economical 'praxis', possesses a higher reality content - more power to bring about effects and side effects - than all other 'spheres', which accordingly had to content themselves with the role of a 'superstructure' determined by the base. As this demotion to secondary status concerned the state, the legal system, the educational system and all other articulations of 'culture', the political ontology of the basal made a deep caesura in the tradi- tional ecology of the spirit. The most consistent realization of this approach could be observed in Stalinism, whose modus operandi can be summed up in a simple formula: destruction of the superstructure by connecting it to the base.
Habitus: The Class Within Me
Whoever wanted to found a 'critical theory' after 1945 could, in the light of Stalin's actions, only do so via an alternative understanding of reality as 'praxis'. It was therefore necessary to redefine 'praxis', and to show that it followed different laws from those described in economically bound standard Marxism. This only became feasible by moving the base lower down, and anyone who wanted to go deeper here had to climb down from the level of production processes to that of psychophysical realities. The zeitgeist did its bit to support this intention: from a theory-historical perspective, the rise of the 'body' began in the 1960s, when late Marxism realized how much its survival depended on proving that there was a substitute base. In Germany, the turn took place mostly in the form of studies on the deformed 'subjective factor', while in France, a form of ethnological
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
on
Bourdieu become aware profound
ence between an economy of honour and one of exchange since his investigations, begun in 1958, into the North Algerian agricultural societies of Kabylia; this led him to seek a new answer to the 'base' question.
This is where Bourdieu's most important conceptual innovation, the idea of habitus, comes into play. It undoubtedly constitutes one of the most fruitful tools of contemporary sociology, even though, as I will show, Bourdieu himself only uses it in a very restricted way. The greatest merit of the habit concept is that with its help, an a prima vista satisfying answer is provided to the two insoluble riddles of con- ventional Marxism: firstly, how the so-called base can mirror itself in the so-called superstructure; and secondly, how 'society' infiltrates individuals and keeps itself present within them. The solution is this: through class-specific psychosomatic forms of training, the social lodges itself in the individuals as a disposition at once produced and producing, unfolding an autonomous life that, while open to experi- ence and life-historically active, is ultimately shaped indelibly by the past.
The analogy between habitus and language immediately catches the eye, for it too forms a structured and structuring social reality sedimented in the speakers. The structuralist zeitgeist of the 1960s may have ensured that Bourdieu temporarily engaged with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the matter at hand was thema- tized under the term langue. De facto, Bourdieu invoked an analogy between his concept of habitus and Chomsky's idea of grammar, in so far as one understands the latter as a system of conditioned spon- taneities based on physically rooted deep structures. The possibility of comparison comes on the one hand from class-dependent behavioural dispositions, and on the other hand from grammar-dependent condi- tionings of speech. One could say that the habitus is the first language of the class training performed on me, and, however much individuals might strive for new content and competencies in the course of their lives, they remain shaped by their mother tongue in Bourdieu's eyes - and, because they are shaped, they in turn shape.
Base and Physis, Or: Where Is Society?
The habitus, then, is the somatized class consciousness. It clings to us
like a dialect that never disappears, one that not even Henry Higgins 180
HABITUS AND INERTIA
wealth, displays his wealth at his banquets, members of the old elite recognize the typical slave in him. When Bourdieu, on the other hand, the grand- son of a poor metayer and the son of a postman from Bearn, rose to become a master thinker and dominate the 'field' of academic soci- ology in France, the thought of the ineradicable habitus of his class helped him to allay the suspicion that he had betrayed his origins through his career. From this perspective, the theory of habitus has the inestimable advantage of serving the moral reassurance of its author: even if I wanted to betray my own class, it would be impos- sible, because its absorption into myoId Adam forms the basis of my social being. Aside from that, the theory helps its users in the aca- demic world and the open intellectual market alike to maintain the pretence of critique by providing them with a means of reducing the manifold vertical differentiations of 'society' to the simple matrix of the privileges of power - be they the prerogatives of the male sex or
of capital owners, material or symbolic.
The price Bourdieu had to pay for lowering the base dimension into
the psychophysical structures of the individual was much higher than he himself realized. Firstly, as already hinted, this habitus concept made him forfeit the better means for describing the play of vertical tensions in the numerous disciplinic fields of the social space with suf- ficient accuracy. De facto, Bourdieu's work as a writer is original and fruitful, for example in his analysis of the struggles for distinction and the ethnography of Homo academicus - not primarily through the application of the habitus concept, but rather through the author's intense attention as an outsider to rivalry-based ranking mechanisms where class influences playa certain part, but are not decisive. At his best, Bourdieu writes a satire without laughs about the nouveaux riches and the ambitious; where he thinks most profoundly, he touches on the tragic leftovers of the human condition.
A further weakness of the habitus concept, interpreted thus, is that it cannot grasp the individualized forms of existential self-designs. Bourdieu's analysis necessarily remains within the typical, the pre- personal and the average, as if Homo sociologicus were to have the last word on all matters. In a certain sense, Bourdieu parodies the analysis of the 'they' in Heidegger's Being and Time from an inverted perspective. While human Dasein is, for Heidegger, 'proximally and for the most part' [zunachst und zumeist] subject to the anonymity of the 'they', and only attains authenticity through an act of decisive- ness, the authenticity of existence for Bourdieu lies in the habitus,
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over a more or com- petencies and attributes of distinction This reversal of the 'they' analysis follows almost automatically from agreement with the political ontology of practical thought, which states that the base is more real than the things that are superstructurally added. This would mean that humans are most themselves where their shaping through the habitus pre-empts them - as if the most genuine part of us were our absorbed class. The part of us that is not ourselves is most ourselves. The habitus theory provides a clandestine hybrid of Heidegger and Lukacs by taking from the former the idea of a self dispersed among the 'they', and from the latter the concept of class consciousness. It builds the two figures together in such a way that the pre-conscious class 'in itself' within us becomes our true self. This corresponds to Bourdieu's division of the social space into diverse 'fields' - in which one naturally finds no 'persons', only habitus- controlled agents who are compelled to realize their programmes within the spaces offered by the field.
Whoever considers such suggestions acceptable may ultimately also find it plausible that in Distinction, Bourdieu's most successful book, the passing of aesthetic or culinary judgements of taste constitutes a reproductive medium of 'domination', Word should have got around among sociologists that one can arrive at substantially more precise statements in these matters with a more horizontally than vertically differentiating theory of milieu, combined with an instrument for observing mimetic mechanisms, than with a theory of anonymous domination. As far as the base-superstructure schema as such is con- cerned, it has been refuted too often to merit any further comments. I would add that little effort would be required in order to show that the augmenting element often has no less power over reality than that which it augments - and sometimes even more. If this were not the case, humans would only seemingly be alterable and learning beings.
On the Genius of Habit: Aristotle and Thomas
The decisive weakness of the habitus concept in Bourdieu's version, however, is that it does not depict what it purports to be explain- ing, namely the region of 'habit', in a remotely adequate fashion. In this author's work, the great tradition of philosophical and psycho- physiological reflection on the role of habits in the formation of human existence shrinks to a remainder that is usable for the purpose of a critique of power. Instead of entering the panorama of effec-
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HABITUS AND INERTIA
acts
theory la contents narrow
segment of habits that constitute the sediments of the 'class within us' - it cheats its users of the wealth of that to which its name refers. Naturally Bourdieu, who adopted the term from Erwin Panofsky's study Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951, was generally aware of its philosophical history. 96 He knew that the habitus concept in Thomas Aquinas and the hexis concept in Aristotle had to playa substantial part in underpinning the establishment of an ethics within the framework of an aretological anthropology (that is, a theory which portrays human beings as the creatures capable of virtues), but consciously ignored the broad understanding of the habitus doc- trine, restricting himself to those aspects which were suitable for his purposes.
Among the earlier authors one already finds the well-developed figure of habitus as an elastic mechanism of a two-sided, passive- spontaneous quality. The 'force of habit' was understood by the ancients not simply as being overwhelmed by routines, but as a pre- personally based generative principle of action. When the scholas- tics speak of habitus, they do not mean a Janus-headed disposition looking back with one face at the series of similar past acts in which it manifested itself, while the other face looks ahead to the next occa- sions on which it will prove itself anew. The habitus thus constitutes a 'potency' that is formed by earlier acts and 'updates' itself in new ones. Such a concept naturally came in handy for Bourdieu; as a sociologist, he was on the lookout for concepts that place human behaviour in a plausible intermediate position between excessive social determination and unlimited individual spontaneity. However, he only took over those elements of the classical habitus concept that could be integrated into his version of the base, which, as stated above, means the pre-conscious effects of the 'class within us'.
Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, had been con- cerned with explaining the possibility of the 'virtuous within us', or even the 'good within us'. They understood habit, in so far as it is good habit, as an embodied disposition that prepares the actor for virtuous actions - and indeed, in the case of bad habits, for bad deeds, though these are not the focus of their investigation. For the classical thinkers of practical philosophy, hexis and habitus are constantly on call: they are expected to leap up when the occasion arises and carry out the good and valuable as if it were the easiest thing in the world. It can only appear easy, however, if and because sustained practice has eroded the improbability of good in advance. As explanations
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
in so as act morally and are determined a state of having and being had, influencing and being influenced, disposing and being disposed, acting and having acted, hexis and habitus are anything but the mere auxiliary concepts of a critical sociology. They are anthro- pological concepts that describe a seemingly mechanical process in terms of insistence and intensification in order to elucidate the incarnation of the mental. They identify man as the animal capable of doing what it is supposed to if one has tended to its ability early enough. At the same time, they see the dispositions already attained growing further into new, heightened forms. 97 Thomas does not need to write any letters about the aesthetic education of the human race to achieve that - conceptual clarifications with instructions on how to
be ready for good are entirely sufficient.
It is, in fact, already possible to read the classical theory of habitus
as a theory of training. Whoever has practised properly overcomes the improbability of good and allows virtue to seem like second nature. Second natures are dispositions of ability that enable humans to stay on their level as artistes of virtus. They perform the near- impossible, the best, as if it were something easy, spontaneous and natural that virtually happens of its own accord. Good, to be sure, is not yet understood as an 'obligation', much less a 'value' depend- ent on my positing and evaluating it. It is the rope stretched out by God on which the artistes of overcoming must walk - and overcom- ing always means passing off the wondrous as the effortless. 98 That is why Jean Genet, in his crypto-Catholically inspired advice for the tightrope walker, recommended always keeping in mind that he owed everything to the rope. 99 Even if we can no longer think about 'good' in the same way, the classical analysis of habitus remains current; it can easily be translated, mutatis mutandis, into the languages of contemporary training psychology, neurocybernetics and pragmatics.