No More Learning

Inherent in the great worldviews of antiquity was the intention of showing mortals how they could live in harmony with the 'universe', even and especially when that whole showed them its baffling side, its lack of consideration for individuals. What one called the wisdom of the ancients was essentially a tragic holism, a self-integration within the great whole, that could not be achieved without heroism. Nietzsche's planet would become the place whose inhabitants, especially the male ones, would carry the weight of the world anew without self-pity - in keeping with the Stoic maxim that
35
THE PLANET OF PRACTISING
is to keep
Some not much later in Heidegger's doctrine
concern, at whose call mortals must adjust to the burden character of Dasein (after 1918, the mortals were primarily the wounded and non-fallen, who were meant to keep themselves ready for other forms of death on other fronts). Under no circumstances could the earth remain an institution in which the ressentiment programmes of the sick and the compensation-claiming skills of the insulted determined the climate.
In his differentiation between asceticisms, Nietzsche posited a dear divide between the priestly varieties on the one side, illuminated by his vicious gaze, and the disciplinary rules of intellectual workers, philosophers and artists as well as the exercises of warriors and ath- letes on the other side. If the former are concerned with what one might call a pathogogical asceticism - an artful self-violation among an elite of sufferers that empowers them to lead other sufferers and induce the healthy to become co-sick - the latter only impose their regulations on themselves because they see them as a means of reach- ing their optimum as thinkers and creators of works. What Nietzsche calls the 'pathos of distance'11 is devoted entirely to the division of asceticisms. Its intention is to 'keep the missions separate' and set the exercises whereby those who are successful, good and healthy can become more successful, good and healthy apart from those which enable resolute failures, the malicious and the sick to place them- selves on pedestals and pulpits - whether for the sake of perversely acquired feelings of superiority or to distract themselves from their tormenting interest in their own sickness and failure. 12 Needless to say, the opposition of healthy and sick should not be taken as purely medical: it serves as the central distinction in an ethics that gives a life with the 'first movement' ('be a self-propelling wheel! ' [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]) priority over a life dominated by inhibited movement.
The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance appar- ent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modi- fied the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiqu- ity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra- epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap for-
36
cosmos.
REMOTE VIEW OF THE PLANET
manner m torso Apollo to the same cultural that Nietzsche was pursuing when pushed his reflections on the establishment of the priestly, 'bio- negative', spiritualistic asceticisms to the point where the paradoxical struggle of the suffering life against itself became apparent. In discov- ering the ascetological foundations of higher human forms of life, he assigned a new meaning to 'morality'. The power of the practice layer in human behaviour is sufficiently broad to span the contrast between
affirmative and denying 'moralities'.
Let us emphasize once again: this disclosure of 'one of the broad-
est and longest facts that exist' concerns not only the self-tormenting approaches to shaping one's self-dealings; it encompasses all varieties of 'concern for oneself' as well as all forms of concern for adaptation to the highest. Aside from that, the jurisdiction of ascetology, under- stood as a general theory of practising, doctrine of habit and germinal discipline of anthropotechnics, does not end with the phenomena of advanced civilization and the spectacular results of mental or somatic vertical ascent (leading into the most diverse forms of virtuosity); it closes every vital continuum, every series of habits, every lived suc- cession, including the seemingly most formless drifting and the most advanced neglect and exhaustion.
One cannot deny a marked one-sidedness in Nietzsche's late writ- ings: he did not pursue the positive side of his ascetological discover- ies with the same emphasis as that he displayed in his explorations of the morbid pole - undoubtedly because of a stronger inclina- tion towards examining the therapeutic purpose of negative ascetic ideals than the athletic, dietological, aesthetic and also 'biopolitical' purpose of positive practice programmes. Throughout his life, he was sufficiently sick to be interested in possibilities of overcoming sickness in a meaningful way, and sufficiently lucid to reject the traditional attempts to bestow meaning upon the senseless. That is why he exhib- ited a combination of reluctant respect for the attainment of ascetic ideals in the history of mankind to date and reluctance to draw on them himself. In Nietzsche's case, this fluctuation between an appre- ciation of self-coercive behaviour and scepticism towards the idealis- tic extravagances of such praxes led to a new attentiveness towards the behavioural area of asceticism, practice and self-treatment as a whole. It is the re-description of this in terms of a general theory of anthropotechnics that is now called for.
There are three points to bear in mind that make the discovery of the 'ascetic planet' as far-reaching as it is problematic. Firstly: Nietzsche's
37
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
new view of the ascetic dimension only become possible in a time when the asceticisms were becoming post-spiritually somatized, while the manifestations of spirituality were moving in a post-ascetic, non-disciplined and informal direction. The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically powerful. Its counterpart is the informalization of spirituality - accompanied by its commercialization in the corre- sponding subcultures. The threshold values for these two tendencies provide the intellectual landmarks for the twentieth century: the first tendency is represented by sport, which has become a metaphor for achievement as such, and the second by popular music, that devotio postmoderna which covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency.
Secondly: on the ascetic planet, once discovered as such, the dif- ference between those who make something or a great deal of them- selves and those who make little or nothing of themselves becomes increasingly conspicuous. This is a difference that does not fit into any time or any ethics. In the monotheistic age, God was viewed as the one who causes and does everything, and hence humans were not entitled to make something, let alone a great deal, of themselves. In humanistic epochs, by contrast, man is considered the being respon- sible for causing and doing everything - but consequently no longer has the right to make little or nothing of himself. Whether people now make nothing or much of themselves, they commit - according to traditional forms of logic - an inexplicable and unpardonable error. There is always a surplus of differences that cannot be integrated into any of the prescribed systems of life-interpretation. In a world that belongs to God, human beings make too much of themselves as soon as they raise their heads; in a world that belongs to humans, they repeatedly make too little of themselves. The possibility that the inequality between humans might be due to their asceticisms, their different stances towards the challenges of the practising life - this idea has never been formulated in the history of investigations into the ultimate causes of difference between humans. If one follows this trail, it opens up perspectives that, being unthought-of, are literally unheard-of.
And finally: if the athletic and somatic renaissance means that de- spiritualized asceticisms are once more possible, desirable and vitally plausible, then Nietzsche's agitated question at the end of his text The Genealogy ofMorals, namely where human life can find its bear-
38
REMOTE THE
answers
is the medium that
contains a gradient between more and less. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is sup- posedly dead is irrelevant in this context. With or without God, each person will only get as far as their form carries them.
Naturally 'God', during the time of his effective cultural represen- tation, was the most convincing attractor for those forms of life and practice which strove 'towards Him' - and this towards-Him was identical to 'upwards'. Nietzsche's concern to preserve vertical tension after the death of God proves how seriously he took his task as the 'last metaphysician', without overlooking the comical aspect of his mission. He had found his great role as a witness to the verti- cal dimension without God. The fact that he did not have to fear any rivals during his lifetime confirms that his choice was right. His aim of keeping the space above the dead free was a passion that remained understandable to more than a few fellow sufferers in the twentieth century; this accounts for the continued and infectious identification of many readers today with Nietzsche's existence and its unliveable contradictions. Here, for once, the epithet 'tragic' is appropriate. The theomorphism of his inner life withstood his own exercises in God- destruction. The author of The Gay Science was aware of how pious even he still was. At the same time, he already understood the rules in force on the ascetic planet well enough to realize that all ascents start from the base camp of ordinary life. His questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climb- ing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.
39
ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
Unthan's Lesson
That life can involve the need to move forwards in spite of obstacles is one of the basic experiences shared by the group of people whom, with a carefree clarity, one formerly called 'cripples', before younger and supposedly more humane, understanding and respectful spirits of the age renamed them the handicapped, those with special needs, the problem children, and finally simply 'human beings'Y If, in the fol- lowing chapter, I persist in using the old term, which has meanwhile come to seem tactless, it is purely because it had its traditional place in the vocabulary of the time that I am recalling in these explorations. Abandoning it for the sake of sensitivity, and perhaps merely over- sensitivity, would cause a system of indispensable observations and insights to disappear. In the following, I would like to demonstrate the unusual convergence of human and cripple in the discourses of the generation after Nietzsche in order to gain further insights into the structural change of human motives for improvement in recent times. Here it will transpire to what extent references to the human being in the twentieth century are rooted in cripple-anthropological prem- ises - and how cripple anthropology changes spontaneously into an anthropology of defiance. In the latter, humans appear as the animals that must move forwards because they are obstructed by something.
The reference to rooting provides the cue, albeit indirectly, for the reflections with which I shall continue the explorations on the planet of the practising stimulated by Nietzsche - and, in a sense, also the contemplations on torsos introduced by Rilke. In 1925, two years before Heidegger's Being and Time, three years before Scheler's The Human Place in the Cosmos, the Stuttgart publisher Lutz' Memoirenbibliothek printed a book with the simultaneously amusing and shocking title Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem
40
ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern [The Pediscript: Notes from the Life of an Armless Man, with 30 Illustrations]. It was 'penned' by Carl Hermann Dnthan, who was born in East Prussia in 1848 and died in 1929 - in truth, it was written on a typewriter whose keys were pressed using a stylus held with the foot. Dnthan unquestionably deserves a place in the pantheon of reluctant virtuosos of existence. He belongs to those who managed to make a great deal of themselves, even though his starting conditions suggested that he would almost certainly make little or nothing of himself. At the age of six or seven the boy, born without arms, discovered by chance the possibility of playing on a violin fastened to a box on the ground. With a mixture
, of naiiJete and tenacity, he devoted himself to improving the method he had discovered for playing the violin with his feet. The right foot played the part of the left hand, fingering the notes, while the left foot moved the bow.
The young man pursued his exercises with such determination that after attending secondary school in Konigsberg, he was accepted as a student at the Leipzig Conservatory. There, mastering an enor- mous practice workload, he reached a notable level of virtuosity. He expanded his repertoire, soon also including showpieces of the highest difficulty. Naturally the handicapped man's violin playing would never have attracted such attention far and wide if it had been carried out in the usual form, without the element of acrobatic improbability. Before long, a vaudeville entrepreneur showed interest in Dnthan. In 1868, still a minor, he began to go on concert tours, which, after stops in rural towns, took him to the European capitals, and later even across the ocean. He performed in Vienna, where he was introduced to the conductors Johann Strauss and Michael Zierer. In Munich he impressed the Hungaro-Bavarian military band leader and waltz king Josef Gungl by playing Gungl's brand new composi- tion, the 'Hydropathen-Walzer'; he was especially flabbergasted by Dnthan's execution of double stops with his toes. After a concert at the 'overcrowded grand ballroom' in Budapest, he was reportedly congratulated on his virtuosic performance by Franz Liszt, who had been sitting in the first row. He patted him 'on the cheek and shoulder' and expressed his appreciation. Dnthan notes on this incident: 'What was it that made me doubt the authenticity of his enthusiasm? Why did it seem so artificial? '14 One can see: in this note, Dnthan, who was already over seventy by the time he wrote Das Pediskript, was not simply touching on imponderabilities in relationships between older and younger virtuosos. Those questions, written down half a century after the scene they describe took place, were significant as
41
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
a symptom: they reminded the author of a distant time when the illusion that he could be taken seriously as a musician, not merely a curiosity, was still intact. Even fifty years later, the author still felt the cold breeze of disillusionment in Liszt's paternally sympathetic gesture; Liszt, a former prodigy himself, knew from experience what kind of life awaits virtuosos of any kind. So he would have known all the better what future lay before a young man who was to travel the world as a victor over a quirk of nature.
There is a widespread cliche among biographers: that their hero, who often has to go through arduous early years first, 'conquers the world for himself'. In his mode of self-presentation, Unthan takes up this figure by following each anecdote with another and recounting the saga of his successful years as a drawn-out travelogue, moving from city to city and continent to continent. He tells the story of a long life in constant motion: on Cunard steamers, on trains, in hotels of every category, in prestigious concert halls and dingy establish- ments. He probably spent the majority of his career on dubious vaudeville stages, from which he would blow the baffled audience kisses with his feet at the end of his performances. 1S The dominant sound in Unthan's public life seems to have been the cheering and applause of those surprised by his presentations. Unthan's 'notes', which can neither be called an autobiography nor memoirs - the closest category would be that of curiosities - are written in a lan- guage at once naive and sentimental, full of stock phrases, echoing the diction of the factual account in the mid-nineteenth century; one can imagine the author's tongue in the corner of his mouth while writing.
On every page of Das Pediskript, Unthan demonstrates his convic- tion that the success of his life is revealed through an overflowing col- lection of picturesque situations he has experienced. Unthan lays out his treasures like a travel writer of the bourgeois age - his first concert, his first bicycle, his first disappointment. These are accompanied by a host of bizarre observations: a bullfight in which the bull impaled several toreros; a sword-swallower who injured his throat with an umbrella; garishly made-up females of all ages in Havana in 1873, with 'an odour of decay hovering over everything', with dancing negresses: 'We saw the most forbidden things imaginable'; a lizard- eating event in Mexico; 'sold out' in Valparaiso, with the recollection that 'the sun slowly sank into the still ocean. As if it were finding it difficult to leave . . . ' Seven hours of brisk swimming 'without turning on my back', and heavy sunburn as a result; his encounter with an armless portrait painter in Dusseldorf, a comrade in fate who painted with one leg - 'there was no end to the questions and answers', 'he
42
was
But most our on
ONL Y CRIPI'LES WILL SURVIVE
deep matters nonetheless. ' His mother's death: was a
inside me, though I did not and do not know what it was praying'.
Appearances in the Orient, where people are more distinctive: 'a list
of my most striking experiences alone would fill entire volumes'.
Disappointment at the Holy Sepulchre, where 'the most degenerate
riffraff' appeared to have gathered; arrest in Cairo, nicotine poison-
ing in Vienna, rifle shooting with his feet in St Petersburg, in the
presence of Tsar Alexander III, guest appearance in Managua - 'the
city of Leon bore the character of decline'; a comet over Cuba; par-
ticipation in a film entitled Mann ohne Arme [Man Without Arms).
On board the Elbe to New York as a fellow passenger of Gerhart
Hauptmann, who has a brief conversation with the artiste. Then the
New World: 'Americans show a stimulating understanding in the face
of the extraordinary. ' '''You're the happiest person I know", said a
man they called John D. "And what about you, with your money, Mr
Rockefeller? ", 1asked him. "All my money can't buy your zest for life
",
Das Pediskript could be read as a sort of 'life-philosophical per- formance', using the latter word in its popular sense. Dnthan steps before his audiences in the posture of an artiste whose special virtuos- ity on the violin, and later with the rifle and the trumpet, is embedded in an overall virtuosity, an exercise in the art of living that pervades all aspects of life - it is no coincidence that the picture section of the book primarily shows the author carrying out such everyday actions as opening doors and putting on his hat.
Hone wanted to translate Dnthan's more general intuitions into a theoretical diction, his position would have to be defined as a vitalis- tically tinged 'cripple existentialism'. According to this, the disabled person has the chance to grasp their thrownness into disability as the starting point of a comprehensive self-choice. This applies not only to the basic auto-therapeutic attitude as expressed by Nietzsche in Ecco Homo, in the second section under the heading 'Why 1 Am So Wise': 'I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again. ' Dnthan's choice applies to his own future. He places the following words in the mouth of the twenty-one-year-old who felt he had been released into inde- pendence: 'I will seize myself with an iron first to get everything out of myself. '16 He interprets his disability as a school for the will. 'Anyone who is forced from birth to depend on their own experiments and is not prevented from performing them [. . . ) will develop a will [. . . ) the drive towards independence [. . . Jconstantly stimulates further experiments. '17
43
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
consequence IS
a rigorous prohibition of melancholy. Unthan's aversion to every
form of pity recalls similar statements in Nietzsche's moral philoso- phy. Only constant pain, for example, might be capable of wearing down someone handicapped: 'All other obstacles are defeated by the will, which forges ahead into the sunshine. '18 The 'sunny attitude to life' of the cripple who was able to develop freely leads, we are told, to a 'higher percentage of zest for life' than is the case for a 'fully able person'. 19
Unthan ends his account with a summary in which he presents his confession:
I do not feel lacking in any way compared to a fully able person [. . . J I have never found anyone with whom, taking all conditions into account, I would have wanted to exchange places. I have certainly struggled, even more with myself than with my surroundings, but I would not give up those exquisite pleasures of the soul, which came about precisely through the struggles caused by my armlessness, for anything in the world. 20
So it is ultimately only a matter of giving the cripple a chance to develop freely: this thesis is the culmination of Unthan's moral intuitions, which fluctuate between the urge for emancipation and the longing to participate. This free development should not be mis- taken for a licence to aesthetic excesses, as called for in the Bohemian ideologies appearing at the same time. Allowing the cripple 'enough light and air in his development'21 rather means giving him a chance to participate in normality. For the handicapped person, this reverses the relationship between bourgeois and artistes. Unlike bourgeois rebels against the ordinary, he cannot dream of following the people in the green caravan. 22 If he wants to be an artist, it is in order to be a bourgeois. For him, artistry is the quintessence of bourgeois work, and earning a living through it is what gives him a sense of pride. On one occasion, the author remarks that he would not want to receive a fur coat for the winter as a gift from a noble sir, as Walther von der Vogelweide did: 'I would rather earn the fur coat with my feet. '23
At the ethical core of Unthan's cripple existentialism one discov- ers the paradox of a normality for the non-normal. What makes this existentialist in the stricter sense of the word is a group of three motifs whose development only took place in the twentieth century: firstly, the figure of self-choice, whereby the subject makes something out of that which was made out of it; secondly, the socia-ontological constraints affecting anyone who exists under 'the gaze of the other'
44
ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
- this produces the impulse of freedom, the stimulus to assert oneself against the confining power coming from the foreign eye; and finally the temptation of insincerity, with which the subject casts its freedom away to play the role of a thing among things, an in-itself, a natural fact.
From the perspective of French existentialism, Dnthan did everything right. He chooses himself, he asserts himself against the enslaving pity of the others, and remains the perpetrator of his own life rather than becoming a collaborator with the allegedly dominant circumstances. But the reason he does everything right - perhaps more right than can be expressed in any philosophical jargon - cannot be sufficiently illuminated with the thinking methods found left of the Rhine. The inadequacy of the French approach lies in the fact that the existential- ism which developed in France after 1940 formulated a philosophy for the politically handicapped (in this particular case, for the people of an occupied country), while in Germany and Austria, the last third of the nineteenth century had seen the growth of a vitalistic- therapeutically coloured philosophy for the physically and mentally handicapped, namely neurotics and cripples, that charged itself up with political, social-philosophical and anthropological ideas after 1918. While the occupation taught the French to associate existence (and existential truth) with resistance and freedom in the under- ground, Germans and Austrians had begun two generations earlier to equate existence (and existential truth) with defiance and compensa- tory acts. Thus the drama of 'continental philosophy' - to draw this once on the laughable classification of content-oriented thought by formalists across the water - in the first half of the twentieth century can only be understood if one bears in mind the contrasts and syner- gies between the older and more comprehensive Central European existentialism of defiance and the younger, more politically restricted Western European existentialism of resistance. The first goes back to pre-Revolution times, for example the work of Max Stirner, and continues - after its culmination in Nietzsche - until the systems of Freud, Adler and the later compensation theorists who became active in Germany; the second, as noted above, took shape under the 1940-4 occupation, with a history extending back via the revanchism of the Third Republic to the anger collection movements among the losers of the French Revolution, that is to say the early socialists and com- munists. Once one has understood the German model, one will easily recognize it in its caricatured forms left of the Rhine. What circulated on the Rive Gauche after 1944 as the doctrine of the Anti was the
45
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
political adaptation of German cripple existentialism, whose adher- ents were committed to the ethics of the Nonetheless.
Unthan undoubtedly belongs to the earlier defiance-existentialist movement. Because of the special nature of his circumstances, however, he was not fully subsumed under this tendency. What sets him apart is a special form of 'living nonetheless' that isolates him from the heroistic mainstream and brings him into the company of artistes. His heroism is that of a striving for normality. Part of this is the willingness to be not simply an involuntary curiosity, but a voluntary one. One could therefore define his position as that of a vaudeville existentialist. Its starting point is the cunning of fate that commands him to make an artistic virtue out of an anomalous neces- sity. Driven along by strong initial paradoxes, the vaudeville existen- tialist searches for a way to achieve a form of 'decent exhibitionism'. For him, normality is to become the reward for abnormality. In order to be at peace with himself, he must therefore develop a form of life in which his pathological oddity is transformed into the precondition for a successful assimilation. Hence the 'armless fiddler', as Unthan was known on American stages, could under no circumstances perform as a mere cripple, as was the custom in the European circus and even more in the freakshows across the Atlantic. He had to present himself as the victor over his disability and beat the gawking industry at its own game.
The achievement of this success confirms Unthan's unusual posi- tion, which is once more occupied by various outstanding artists today. By managing to develop the paradoxes of their mode of exist- ence, the handicapped can become convincing teachers of the human condition - practising beings of a particular category with a message for practising beings in general. What Unthan conquered for himself was the possibility of becoming, as a cripple virtuoso, a subject that can be beheld and admired to the same extent as it can be exhibited and gawked at - exhibited primarily by the impresarios and circus directors often mentioned, seldom favourably, in Das Pediskript, stared at by an audience whose curiosity often gives way to moved enthusiasm within a short time. When the existentialism of defiance is heightened into its vaudeville form, we see the emergence of the cripple artiste who has chosen himself as a self-exhibitable human. In the race against the voyeuristic curiosity of the normal, which must constantly be won anew, his self-exhibition pre-empts mere sensa- tion. For him, the dichotomy between life and art no longer exists. His life is nothing other than the hard-won art of doing normal things
46
CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
one's as as less
things as playing the violin with one's and dividing pencils in the middle through a gunshot triggered with the foot. The virtuoso of the ability to be normal can rarely indulge in the luxury of depres- sive moods. Living in the Nonetheless imposes an ostentatious zest for life on those who are determined to succeed. The fact that things may be different on the inside is no one's business. The land of smiles
is inhabited by cripple artistes.
I would add that Hugo Ball, the co-founder of Dadaism and co-
initiator of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, was, alongside Franz Kafka, the most significant German-language vaudeville exis- tentialist, both in his Dadaist phase and in his Catholic period. In his 1918 novel Flametti oder: Vom Dandysmus der Armen [Flametti, Or, The Dandyism of the Poor] he assembles a pandemonium of mar- ginal figures from the sideshow and circus milieu and has a speaker declare that these people are truer humans than the ordinary citizens who seemingly manage to keep to the middle. The vaudeville people know more about 'real life' because they are those who have been thrown to the margins, the fallen and the battered. These 'jostled humans' are perhaps the only ones who still exist authentically. In a time when normal people have devoted themselves to madness, they remember - as broken as they are - the better possibilities of being human. They are the non-archaic torsos who keep themselves in shape for unknown tasks. Thanks to them, the circus becomes an invisible church. In a world of fellow travellers complicit in the col- lective self-deception, the circus performers are the only ones who are not swindlers - someone walking the tightrope cannot pretend for a moment. A little later, Ball stumbles on the trail of a sacred acrobatics to which he erected a monument in strictly stylized, neo-Catholically aroused studies: Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei Heiligenleben [Byzantine Christianity: Three Saints' Lives] (1923). It is dedicated to three heroes of the early Eastern church: John Climacus, Dionysius the Areopagite and Simeon Stylites, and constitutes one of the central works from the twilight of the ascetological age.
This brings us to a new development in our account of the phenomenon of practising. By investigating the forms of life among the disabled, a class of practising persons comes into view among the inhabitants of the ascetic star where more particular motives gain the upper hand. They do not follow their asceticisms for God's sake - or if they do, like Ignatius of Loyola, who was crippled by cannon fire, it is because Christ impresses them as a model for the neutralization of their defect.
47
THE PLANET
h ~ not reason
by the of the Jesuit order as captain all who
visibly handicapped, however, only formed a marginal group among the ranks of the holy self-tormentors whom Nietzsche saw marching through the centuries like hoarse choirs of pilgrims. They are not sick in the usual sense of the word, though Nietzsche did voice the sus- picion that they were psychologically ilL Incidentally, both psychoa- nalysis and the official cripple pedagogy of the 1920s found among the disabled a propensity for envy complexes towards the able-bodied - the very thing from which Unthan insists he never suffered in the slightest. For them, leading a practising life is a response to the stimulus that lies in the concrete disability; it provides the incentive of inhibition that sometimes provokes an artiste's answer. As Unthan notes, one must grant the handicapped 'freedom' in the form of 'light and air' in their development, until the blow suffered has been over- ridden by self-will and integrated into a life project. Thus, through the phenomenon of inhibited and handicapped life, General Ascetology now faces its trial by fire.
Now it remains to show how an entire system of insights into the laws of defiant existence emerged from the analytics of inhibitions. This requires an excursion into the catacombs of intellectual history. The most significant document of the existentialism of defiance is in fact of German origin; it is simultaneously the manifesto of the earlier discipline of cripple anthropology, completely forgotten in the philo- sophical and pedagogical fields. I am referring to the book Zerbrecht die Kriicken [Break the Crutches] by Hans Wurtz, the Nietzsche- inspired initiator of state-run special education, a work that appeared in the early 1930s without eliciting the slightest reaction - for reasons we shall discuss shortly. The book is not mentioned in any history of philosophy, it is not covered in any anthropological textbook,24 and its existence is unknown even among Nietzsche experts - even though Nietzscheans, be they academic or not, would have every reason to examine the reception of Nietzsche's ideas among cripple pedagogues before and after 1918. One cannot possibly gain an adequate under- standing of Nietzsche, however, without contemplating the effects and echoes of his work among cripples and their spokesmen.
The reason for the book's oblivion lies above all in the political implications of its subject - and the time of its publication. Appearing in 1932, a work with the title Break the Crutches was not timely in Germany - not because the idea of breaking crutches would have been unpopular, however, but rather because the motto of the title attracted too many sympathizers, though they were admittedly not
48
ONL Y CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
rare its complete
Probleme der Menschheit.
Schicksalsstiefkinder ailer Zeiten in Wort und BUd (Break the Crutches: Cripple Problems of Mankind. The Stepchildren of Fate from All Times in Words and Images], published in Leipzig in 1932 by Leopold Voss. The author, who was born in the Holsteinish town of Heide in 1875 and died in Berlin in 1958, was orphaned early on and began his career as a primary school teacher in Hamburg-Altona, then Berlin-Tegel. From 1911 onwards he worked as educational inspector at the Oskar-Helene Home in Berlin- Zehlendorf, which had previously been the sanatorium and school for cripples in Berlin-Brandenburg. Under the young idealist's direc- tion, this institution became a state-funded Mecca of cripple care and gained an international reputation. Together with Konrad Biesalski, an orthopaedist, Hans Wurtz turned the Zehlendorf institution into a focus for this new form of philosophical practice. The Wurtz- Biesalski cripple institution maintained its position as a stronghold of the existentialism of defiance for two decades, before new directors with Nazi ties adapted it to the party line. Here Nietzsche's ideas on the equivalence of life and the will to power were to be put to the test in daily dealings with the handicapped.
In the Reichstag elections in July 1932, the NSDAP had won 37. 3 per cent of votes, making it the largest parliamentary group in the Reichstag by some distance. The vociferous party was met with strong support among the newly disabled from the First World W ar- an estimated 2. 7 million in Germany alone. As far as the motto 'break the crutches' is concerned, then, Wurtz should have received a favour- able response - the widespread desire in Germany at the time was that people would be able to live without the irksome auxiliary construc- tions of the care system - on a small and a large, even the largest, scale. The hour of moved emotions had struck. Only someone who could credibly promise the abolition of prevailing disability systems could appear as the leader of a movement with a significant number of followers. The prospect of a crutchless existence appeared on the horizon and became a guiding image for all who felt insulted, handi- capped and confined by their circumstances. The hour of people's anarchisms had arrived.
Since its beginnings, anarchy had been the philosophy of the Without. It sought to make its audience realize how many tools one finds in the modern order of things that can be dispensed with if one only believes in a life without masters or domination: without the state (the political crutch), without capitalism (the economic crutch),
49
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
(the naggmg con- science (the Judaeo-Christian crutch the soul) and without mar- riage (the crutch on which sexuality hobbles through the years). In the context of the Weimar Republic, this meant above all without the Treaty of Versailles, which had become a fetter causing increasing anger. Beyond this, many at the time even wanted to dispense with democracy: many contemporaries considered it no more than a way for the people to be ridiculed by their own representatives - so why not bring in the populists and tryout ridiculing the people's repre- sentatives instead? Breaking crutches was in the process of becoming the heart of revolutionary politics - indeed the motor of up-to-date revolutionary ontology. Beyond politics and everyday life, the call was heard for a revolt against everything that disturbs us through its mere existence. The crutch-weary wanted to shake off no less than the yoke of the real. All politics was transformed into politics for the handicapped in turmoil. Whoever wanted to channel the general anger at the 'given' and 'prevailing' circumstances could be sure that the majority of their contemporaries were prepared to recognize, in all manifestations of the institutional, crutches that were waiting to be broken. The twentieth century belongs to the people's fronts
against auxiliary constructions.
Naturally the NSDAP could never appear openly under the sign
of the cripple problem that needed to be solved, even though it was essentially nothing other than a militant response to the question of cripples and crutches. The party resolved the contradiction it embod- ied by placing the dangerous subject of lives that were 'unworthy of life' [lebensunwertes Leben] on its programme: with this gesture it succeeded in radically externalizing its innermost motive. Otherwise, the movement's leaders would have had to out themselves as crippled leaders of cripples, as the disabled special needs educator Otto Perl did around the same time. They would have had to disclose what competencies and delegation structures made them eligible to stand at the forefront of the national revolution: Hitler as an emotional cripple who sought to merge with the people's community in ecstatic moments, Goebbels as a clubfooted man longing to walk across elegant floors, and Goring as a drug addict who saw Nazi rule as a chance for him and his co-junkies to have a massive party - they could all have told the people about their struggles, their dreams and their great Nonetheless. The inopportunity of such confessions is obvious enough, to say nothing of their psychological improbability. 'Movements' of this type live off the fact that their primum mobile remains in latency. The political space in those years was undeniably
50
CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
steeped not
Ludwig the disability II a central
cal focus for a wider audience in his biography of 1925. The public sphere was echoing with questions about giving meaning to a handi- capped existence - and the compatibility of power and disability. Can the handicapped be allowed to come to power? What is power in any case, if it can be attained by the handicapped? What happens to us if the handicapped are already in power? Nietzsche's meditations from the 1880s, seemingly removed from the real world, had become part of the fiery nucleus of politics within a short time. Hans Wurtz skilfully updated Nietzsche'S perspectives by showing how disability, with the right 'schooling', can lead to a surplus of will to success in life.
'The material has been collected without any prejudice', we are told in the introduction to his book, which offers an encyclopaedic over- view of practically all significant cultural figures with known disabili- ties in Europe. Wurtz thus also mentions his contemporary Joseph Goebbels in his summaries and charts on the human history of the cripple problem: he lists the Nazi propagandist twice in the category of clubfooted cripples, where he did not a priori have to fare badly alongside figures such as Lord Byron - once in the list of nations,25 and once in the list of functions, with the classification 'revolutionary politician'. 26 Thanks to the cripple educator Wurtz, the chief agitator of the NSDAP is mentioned in a Who's Who of humanity containing almost five hundred names, featuring the great and greatest, as well as figures like Unthan, whom Wurtz lists together with numerous comrades in fate in the broadly represented category 'show cripples and cripple virtuosos',27
What the protagonists of this work shared was the ability to make the philosophy of the Nonetheless a reality. That Wurtz's lists feature persons such as Jesus, who recent findings suggested was 'crippled by ugliness', and Wilhelm II - who had a crippled arm, but within whom there was also a 'cripple psychopath',28 like the handicapped doll inside the handicapped doll - shows the magnitude and the explosiveness of this problem complex. Naming such great figures illustrated the theory, leading from the philosophy of life to that of spirit, that disabled persons can transcend their afflictions and anchor themselves in the realm of transpersonal values. 29 In fact, Wilhelm had more than plainly neurotic political decisions to answer for; he had also developed stage sets for the Bayreuth Festival and attempted various other transitions into the objective. As for Jesus' break- through from the sphere of his assumed handicaps to the spiritual
51
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
into
of occidental In Max Scheler's philosophy of
which Wurtz presumably did not know, there was a parallel attempt to show the autonomous rules of the value sphere in relation to its 'basis' in the tensions of life. Wurtz calls the epitome of action that leads to the transpersonal 'work' - we understand that this word is only one of the pseudonyms under which the phenomenon of practis- ing continues to emerge.
'Overcome inhibition is the mother of all unfolded [. . . ] move- ment. '30 According to Wurtz, the movement here termed 'unfolded' is not simply compensatory, but in fact overcompensatory movement: the reaction exceeds the stimulus. With this, the author had formulated a theorem whose ambit extends to asymmetrical movement complexes of all kinds - organic and intellectual, mental and political- even if he restricted himself in his book to demonstrating his thesis using the phe- nomenon of physical disability. These applications were demanding enough: through intensive collaboration based on scientific research, he insisted, German doctors, educators and pastors should unite in the 'goal-setting collective for cripple elevation' [Zielsetzungsgemeinschaft der Kruppelhebung]. As high as he aimed, however, Wurtz remained unaware of the political potential of his reflections. Certainly he had stated in general terms that surplus energy from overcoming obstacles turns into a dynamic forwards thrust: 'the lame Ignatius of Loyola and Gotz von Berlichingen were always on the move' ,31 as were the restless epileptics 5t Paul and Caesar. And there is no shortage of references to the 'short, crooked-necked Alexander the Great' and the equally 'crooked-necked', 'short, mongoloid-ugly Lenin', as well as the 'small and hip-lame' Rosa Luxemburg. 32
And yet: for Wurtz, the cripple-psychological universals of 'sorrow and defiance' retain a purely individual-psychological meaning. A radical political change like the volkisch socialism of 1933, however, which boasted above all of bringing movement, attack and revolution - what was this if not an external application of the law of compensa- tion? If overcome inhibition is the mother of all unfolded movement, which 'maternal urges' form the origin of the inclination towards self- aggrandizement through celebration and terror? What does it mean to go to the 'mothers' if the word describes the product of inhibition and overcoming? If overcompensation for disability transpired as the secret of success, should one conclude that most people are not suf- ficiently disabled? These questions may be rhetorical, but they none- theless show one thing: the path to a great theory of compensation is paved with awkwardnesses. 33
52
ONL Y CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
As far as Goebbels is concerned, he was obviously not interested in the progress of this clarification. He showed little enthusiasm about his acceptance into the pantheon of the handicapped. Being listed alongside great figures such as Kierkegaard, Lichtenberg, Kant, Schleiermacher, Leopardi, Lamartine, Victor Hugo and Schopenhauer, to name only a few, did not induce him to out himself. Making his psyche available to science during his lifetime would probably have been the last thing he was considering. Nor would the central orthopaedic principle of the institute in Zehlendorf have appealed to him: 'The stump is the best prosthesis. ' In Wurtz's four- group classification - growth cripples (anomalies of size), deformity cripples, latentcripples (incorrect posture) and ugliness cripples (dis- figurement) - he would undoubtedly have had had to join the second, perhaps also the fourth, as well as the subgroup 'complex cripples',34 which leads over into the psychological field.
Goebbels had other plans: supposedly, all copies of Zerbrecht die Kriicken not yet in distribution were confiscated on his orders. The further course of history speaks for itself. Not long after January 1933, Wurtz was denounced at his own institute as an enemy of the people; his critics suddenly claimed to have discovered in him an arm- chair communist and philo-Semite. Owing to a well-timed accusation of abuse of office and embezzlement of donations, he was dismissed without notice and without any claim to a pension; allegedly he had used some of the donations received by the society for the promo- tion of the Oskar-Helene Home for the publication of Zerbrecht die Kriicken - as if the book were merely the author's private matter, unconnected to the work of the institution he co-directed.
It is not difficult to recognize in the allegations against Wurtz a con- flict between the institution's fieldworkers and the publishing alpha leader. His accusers, ambitious colleagues, took over leading posi- tions following his removal - as if to make it clear that a successful revolution cares for its children rather than devouring them. Wurtz remained naive enough to believe that he could prove his innocence under the prevailing conditions. He therefore returned to Germany from exile in Prague for his trial, at the end of which a Berlin court gave him a suspended sentence of one year's imprisonment. He sub- sequently left Germany, finding refuge in Austria until the end of the war. In 1947 he achieved complete legal and professional rehabilita- tion. He was buried in July 1958 in the Berlin-Dahlem Waldfriedhof [forest cemetery].
It is instructive for our further reflections to examine the connec- tions between Nietzsche's efforts towards the analytics of the will and
53
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
on
referred to other to illustrate his axioms - which, in case
the younger in relation to the older, indeed occurred. From the per- spective of the Berlin disability expert, Nietzsche offers an example of his concept of 'overcome inhibition'. He classifies the philosopher, without whose ideas his own work would scarcely be imagina- ble, somewhat cold-bloodedly as the 'psychopathically handicapped growth cripple Nietzsche'. 35 At least the latter, he admits - through a combination of the laws of compensation, great talent and hard work on himself - managed to overcome his handicap partially, which is why his work should be acknowledged as an attempt to cross over into the trans-pathological sphere of values.
Reversing the perspective produces a more complex picture. Nietzsche would recognize in the special needs educator from Berlin the phenomenon of the pupil, which he viewed with some suspicion, and about which we need only say here that they frequently display the weaknesses of their masters, and in compromising magnifications, rather than their virtues. A second glance would show what concrete form the priestly syndrome attacked by Nietzsche took in Wurtz's case. The main characteristic of this phenomenon is the tendency, found among the stronger sick, to assume leadership of a following composed of weak existences. The literature I have consulted does not mention any disability on Wurtz's own part, so it remains unclear whether Nietzsche's diagnoses of the dynamics of the priestly-ascetic ideal apply in the personal case of his emulator. The style of Wurtz's publications, which culminate in hymns to 'victorious fighters for life',36 certainly suggests a spokesman syndrome; the manner in which he is ignited by his own mission would support this. The proximity to the priestly type reveals itself in Wurtz's quasi-imperial taste for bringing increasingly large parts of mankind into his jurisdiction. Here the usual dynamic of the alpha leader becomes visible: for Nietzsche, an unmistakable manifestation of the will to power.
Nonetheless, everything we know today suggests that for Wurtz, his work at the Oskar-Helene Home in Berlin was the focal point of his commitment. Outside observers are in no position to ques- tion the seriousness of his lifelong dedication to the welfare of his patients - even if his authoritarian approach is less appealing today, and, at least on paper, one would sooner sympathize with the self- determination model of the alternative special needs educator Otto PerlY For its educational inspector, the Berlin institution addition- ally served as the pulpit from which he announced his suggestions for solving the riddle of mankind to a somewhat reluctant audience.
54
ONL Y CRiPPLES WILL SURVIVE
modal
you you want you must do - you should be able to
want and you are able, assuming there is someone at your side who wants you to want. The last variation is particularly significant: it defines not only the figure of the will-trainer for the handicapped, but in fact the trainer's function as such. My trainer is the one who wants me to want - he embodies the voice that can say to me: 'You must change your life! '38
The phenomenon of caring for the handicapped in the spirit of a phi- losophy of the will that urges cripples to work on themselves belongs unmistakably within the radius of the major event described above: the de-spiritualization of asceticisms characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its counterpart on the 'religious' side is the de-heroization of priesthood, temporarily offset from the 19205 onwards by the over-elevation of the sacred that was typical of the renouveau catholique and the pious branch of phenomenology - with delayed effects that can be identified among such authors as the ecolo- gist Carl Amery and that para-Catholic phenomenon of elegance, Martin Mosebach.
While insisting on the jargon of heroism as an educator of the will, Wurtz ironically overlooked the pioneering element in the turn of the ascetological era to which his work belongs. For all his heroistic suggestion, it is his pragmatic focus on a programme for toughening up the disabled and inhibited that is decisive. His pseudo-priestly manner should not be taken at face value. Behind it lies a phe- nomenon foreshadowed in Nietzsche's dietological theses: I shall call it the emergence of the general training consciousness from the particular case of education for the sick and disabled. Training naturally involves, alongside the trainee and the training programme, the trainer - it is this seminal figure that gained a profile under the late Wilhelminian, life-philosophical and will-philosophical attire of Wurtz's declarations.
With the appearance of the trainer figure - or, more precisely, its reappearance after its co-downfall with the decline of ancient ath- letic culture - the somatic and athletic renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century entered its concentrated phase. It would not be insulting to call Hans Wurtz an imperial trainer of the handicapped - the Trapattoni of cripples, as it were. 39 He stands in a line of trainer- authors extending back to Max Stirner, author of The Ego and Its Own (1845). Needless to say, Wurtz, with his sure instinct for team
55
you can
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
tion as trainer of own Stimer was one
to realize that the metaphysically overweight do not cut a fine figure on the playing field of existence. The removal of ideological rafters in people's heads that he recommended in his book was already nothing other than an explicit mental fitness programme. With regard to this patriarch of egotism, Wurtz managed to formulate a generalization of considerable scope: 'In keeping with his psychological structure, the cripple Stimer sees all other people as unconscious and invol- untary fighters for the value of the ego. '40 For Wurtz, this confirms his initial assumption: being aware of one's uniqueness and being a 'fighter for life' converge. Today one would phrase it more carefully: disabilities lead not infrequently to sensitizations, and these can bring about increased efforts - which, under favourable conditions, result in greater life achievements. While Stirner's uniqueness remained trapped within neurosis, as Wurtz regretfully points out, construc- tive work with the handicapped should aim 'to free the problematic cripple to become a person of character'. 41 We would no longer for- mulate it in this way today, whether speaking about pre-Revolution philosophers or other problematic natures.
The hypothesis that the special educator, in his practical and moral-philosophical profile, embodies one of the first instances of the modern trainer can be substantiated through numerous of the author's own statements. In Wurtz's case it is clear: the trainer is the timely partner in non-metaphysical vertical tensions, which give the trainee's life a secure sense of above and below. He is responsi- ble for ensuring that 'medically prescribed exercises give this ability (acquired by the client) a rooting in his powers', so that 'his will to survive also finds a concrete basis'. 42 With a clarity that would be an asset to an analytic philosophy of sport, Wurtz declares at the training-theoretically decisive point, referring to the disabled person:
His will thus gives his life an inner gradient if he compares his earlier state of powerlessness with the abilities he has triumphantly acquired, and measures the success he has already achieved against the goal of his regimen. His striving gains a forward drive. Overcoming the earlier sense of powerlessness is simultaneously an ethical victory [. . . J. The carefully mediating character of the education must not be burdened with a fear of excessive strain. [. . . JWe therefore demand a life-affirm- ing attitude in those who educate the handless [. . . ]. 43
There cannot be many statements in recent literature that encapsulate the post-metaphysical transformation of vertical tension - that is, of the inherent awareness of vital asymmetry - so explicitly. For this
56
ONL Y CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
gain in explication one has to take a few heroistic phrases in one's stride; in their content, however, they are simply the mask of the athletic renaissance. One can, incidentally, also observe the de-heroi- zation of the trainer's role in the sporting history of the twentieth century. There is, however, a counter-movement in the field of sport - analogous to the developments in the religious field - that could be called the renouveau athletique: here the extreme athlete is raised aloft as the spiritually empty counterpart of the saint.
The philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century ignored the contributions of special education - but nonetheless arrived at related observations from similar conceptual points of departure. With its own means, the anthropology of the ordinary person forged a path to an even more general disability awareness than the special needs educators could have dreamt of - its practical conclusions, however, were diametrically opposed to those of heroic cripple didactics. Its maxim: do not break the crutches under any circumstances! One can already hear this warning in Viennese psychoanalysis, when Freud describes man as a 'prosthetic God' who could not survive without the support of civilizatory provisions for existence. With his Oedipus legend, one might add, Freud managed to incorporate the male half of humanity into the family of clubfeet while diagnosing the female half with genital crippledom in the form of inborn penislessness. One hears the warning call even more loudly in Arnold Gehlen's doctrine of supportive institutions, which states that the delusional boundless- ness of unleashed subjectivity can only be saved from itself through a protective framework of transpersonal forms. Here the crutches reappear as the institutions, and their significance becomes all the greater because the anarchists of the twentieth century - on the left and the right - had called rather too successfully for their destruction. Gehlen was extremely concerned when he witnessed the emergence of a new Without movement among the young people of the West in the 1960s. In his anthropological justification of institutions one finds a culmination of the anti-Rousseauism of the twentieth century, con- densed in the warning that human beings always have much more to lose than their chains. He asks whether all political culture does not begin with the distinction between chains and crutches. This advoca- tion of existence with compulsory crutches reaches its most dramatic form in the statements of biological palaeoanthropology in the work of Louis Bolk and Adolf Portmann: according to them, Homo sapiens is constitutively a cripple of premature birth, a creature condemned to eternal immaturity that, because of this condition (which biologists
57
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
retention IS I n incubators
These highly generalized statements of modern anthropology present a functional explication of the holistic pathos that was char- acteristic of older cultures - those cultures that insisted intransigently on the priority of tradition and custom (the established incubator) over the whims of individuals eager for innovation. Every orthodoxy, whether it draws its validity from religion or from being venerable and ancient, is a system for preventing mutations of the structures that ensure stability. In this sense, the ancientness of the ancients is self-validating. While a tradition, as long as it appears old enough, provides evidence of its viability and its compatibility with other stock elements, a new idea and its subjective deviation must first prove their repeatability - assuming they are interested in doing so. In the anti- mutation traditionalist systems, however, the presupposition is that even permitting the attempt to prove the usability of something new is never worthwhile. Periods with a greater openness for innovation, on the other hand, rely on the observation that even after far-reaching moral revaluations and technical innovations, a sufficient number of stabilizations are still possible in order to redirect our modus vivendi towards a more pleasant state. But the innovations must always be assessed in terms of their agreement with the need for stability in care systems for premature birth cripples (commonly known as cultures).
Wherever humans appear, their crippledom has preceded them: this insight was the chorus of philosophical discussions on the human being in the previous century, regardless of whether, as in psycho- analysis, one speaks of humans as cripples of helplessness who can only hobble towards their goals;45 or, like Bolk and Gehlen, views them as neotenic cripples whose chronic immaturity can only be balanced out by rigid cultural capsules; or, like Plessner, as eccen- tric cripples chronically standing beside themselves and observing their lives; or, like Sartre and Blumenberg, as visibility cripples who must spend their lives coming to terms with the disadvantage of being seen.
Beyond these forms of constitutive crippledom, historically acquired variants also come into view - most of all, if one believes Edmund Husserl, among modern Europeans. In their effects to achieve the intellectual conquest of reality, they have fallen into two dangerously misguided positions of enormous dimensions - in almost pathograph- ical formulations, he calls them physicalist objectivism and transcen- dental subjectivism. 46 Both are modes of thinking being-in-the-world that amount to comprehensive misreadings of the world and reality.
58
ONL Y CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
constitutes smce
one reaches an ironic conclusion: to laboriously acquired mis- conditionings, we chronically confuse the first world with the second world of physicists, philosophers and psychologists. The ageing Husserl had adopted this precarious view of the civilized European as a cripple of world-misreading from his renegade pupil Heidegger, for whom man begins in most cases as a cripple of inauthenticity - and ends in the same state, unless he is lucky enough to happen upon a trainer who will put his orthopaedic data of existence in order. Among the acquired disabilities, the neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz recently uncovered a new one, habitual irony: it robs the ironist of the ability to be fulfilled in shared situations. Here the focus of investigation shifts to a crippledom of distance, emerging from an impairment of the capacity for participation through the compulsion to chronic elegance. And indeed, the role of irony in the history of reality-misreadings has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged.
The implications of these observations are as diverse as the diag- noses themselves. They have one thing in common, however: if humans are cripples, without exception and in different ways, then each one of them, in their own particular way, has good reason to understand their existence as an incentive for corrective exercises.
We recall that in Wurtz's schema of crippledoms, short persons were classified as 'growth cripples'. In later times, the same people were termed 'disabled in terms of growth'. When it even became offensive to speak of 'disability', the small became those who have different abilities in terms of their format. In the 1980s, politically correct Americans found the most up-to-date name for people who often have to look upwards: 'vertically challenged people'. This turn of phrase cannot be admired enough. It constitutes a terminological creation that outgrew its inventors without their even noticing what they had achieved. We can laugh at this formulation twice: once at the correct preciousness of its authors and once at ourselves. We have every right and reason to laugh, for we have an absolute majority in the assembly of those who are challenged by verticality. The formula has been valid since we began to practise learning to live - and, as I am seeking to show, one can neither not practise nor not learn to live. Even being a poor student must first be learned.
In short, people had to speak about the handicapped, the differ- ently constituted, to stumble on a phrase that expresses the general constitution of beings under vertical tension. 'You must change your life! ' means, as we saw in Rilke's torso poem: you must pay attention
59
PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
mner
yOU! It is not walking upright that it
is rather the incipient awareness of the inner gradient that causes humans to do so.
60
LAST HUNGER ART Kafka's Artistes
The inclination of anthropologists to seek the truth about Homo sapiens among the handicapped, typical of our time, is mirrored widely in the literature of modernity. Our reference to the armless violinist Unthan demonstrates that in certain cases, it is only one step from the existentialism of the handicapped to that of acrobats. It now remains to show why the transition from the condition of the disa- bled to acrobatism was not merely an idiosyncrasy among marginal figures, as Unthan developed in reaction to his innate stimulus, or as evident in Hugo Ball, author of the biographies of Christian ascet- ics, when he attempted to transcend the spiritual deformations of the World War era by 'fleeing from the time'. This revolt against the century brought him into the company of the hermits who had fled their own time 1500 years earlier.
In the following I shall discuss, initially using a literary model and later in a psychological and sociological context, how acrobatism became an increasingly far-reaching aspect of modern reflection on the human condition: this occurred when, following the trail of the ubiquitous Nietzsche, peopled discovered in man the unfixed, unleashed animal that is condemned to perform tricks. This shift of view to the acrobat brought to light a further aspect of the epochal turn that I would describe as a trend towards the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. We have adopted Nietzsche's identification of the ascetological twilight, and assured ourselves that the desirable decline of repressive ascetic ideals by no means occasions the disappear- ance of the positive practising life. It may only be the twilight of the ascetics, as which understand the turn of the twentieth century, that reveals - retrospectively and very differently illuminated - the three- thousand-year empire of metaphysically motivated asceticisms in its
61
THE PRACTISING
IS to support
humans will find ascetics, and whoever observes "''''-'-'''. . '
acrobats.
To substantialize this suspicion, whose earliest formulations go
back to the morality-archaeological digs of the other Schliemann, I would like to call Kafka as a witness of the time. Considering his research approach, it is natural to suppose that he had already absorbed the impulse coming from Nietzsche early in life, and internalized it to such a degree that he forgot the origin of his inter- rogations - which is why Kafka's work contains virtually no explicit references to the author of The Genealogy of Morals. He further developed the impulses in the direction of a progressive lowering of the heroic tone, while simultaneously reinforcing the awareness of the universal ascetic and acrobatic dimension of human existence.
To mark the moment at which Nietzsche passed the baton on to Kafka, I point to the well-known tightrope episode in the sixth part of the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra takes the acrobat as his first pupil after the latter's ultimately fatal fall - or, if not as his pupil, then at least his first kindred spirit among the people of the plains. He consoles the dying man by enlightening him as to why he has nothing more to fear - no devil will come for him to sour his life after death. Upon this, the acrobat gratefully replies that merely losing his life is no great loss:
'I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by being dealt blows and meagre morsels. '47
This statement constitutes the first confession of acrobatic existential- ism. The minimalistic assertion is tied inseparably to Zarathustra's response, which holds up a noble mirror to the victim of this accident:
'Not so,' said Zarathustra. 'You have made danger your calling: there is nothing in that to despise. Now your calling has brought you down: therefore will I bury you with my own hands. '48
The point of this dialogue cannot be missed. It has the meaning of a primal scene, as it describes the constitution of a new type of communio: no longer a people of God, but travelling people; not a community of saints, but one of acrobats; not paying contributors to an insured society, but members of an organization of those living dangerously. The animating element of this - for the time being - invisible church is the pneuma of affirmed danger.