No More Learning

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At the same time, the Paris congress laid down the fundamental aspects of the games and the organization carrying them: the four- year rhythm, which would create a temporal structure for all future times like a new religious calendar; the enlightened dictatorship of the IOC presidency, later consolidated by the election of de Coubertin as president for life; modernism in the definition of sport; equality of dif- ferent sports; exclusion of children; the principle of circulating games; amateurism (which remained controversial, however, and was sus-
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pended in 1976); internationalism and the principle of pax olympica. Furthermore, Athens was chosen as the location of the first games and Paris as that of the second in order to draw sufficient attention to their place of birth and their place of rebirth. Little did those in charge know that the Paris Olympics of 1900 would be the low point in the history of Olympism: they were barely noticed alongside the simultaneous Exposition universelle. The lesson from this was that two world festivals at the same time are not feasible.
The first Olympic Games of the Modern Age were held in Athens a mere two years later, with great ceremony, under the patronage of the king of Greece - as a purely andrological festival, for the enthusiastic baron had a famously low opinion of women's sports; he wanted the female role in the games to be restricted to handing the winner the olive branch or placing the wreath on his head. De Coubertin's failure to establish his taceat mulier in arena was only the first of many in the practical realization of his 'muscle religion'. One of the most far-reaching consequences of the first games was that thanks to the donation of a major patron, the Panathenaic Stadium of Athens, from the time when Greece was a Roman province, could be restored and used again. This initiated the stadium and arena renaissance of the twentieth century, which is still producing ever new event architectures based on ancient primary forms to this day. 96 Even the monks of Mount Athos supposedly contributed money to the Olympic subscription, as if following the revelation that in distant Athens, the modern replicas of their own blurred archetypes were entering the stage again - had the first monks of Eastern Christianity not called themselves the 'athletes of Christ', and joined forces in training camps called asketerfa?
The notable and unforeseen climax of the Athenian games was the first marathon. The idea for this came from the French classical scholar and Hellenophile Michel Breart, who, at the closing banquet of the Sorbonne conference, had praised the establishment of a mara- thon trophy for the first winner in the new discipline. When the victor of the race, a twenty-three-year-old Greek shepherd by the name of Spiridion Louys, entered the shining white marble stadium on 10 Apri11896 wearing the fustanella, the traditional dress (the winning time was given as 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds), a state came about that it would scarcely be adequate to call 'exceptional'. It was as if a new form of energy had been discovered, a form of emotional electricity without which the way of life in the subsequent era would no longer be imaginable. What happened that scorching afternoon in the Panathenaic Stadium at around five o'clock must be classed as
89
new
the moment,
A previously itself to the
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require no proof because they only exist for the duration of their manifestation and are not believed in, but experienced. In that hour a new chapter in the history of enthusiasm was opened - and whoever is unwilling to speak of this history must remain silent about the twentieth century. 97 The Greek crown princes ran the last metres of the race alongside the athlete amid the ecstatic cheering of almost 70,000 people; after he had crossed the finishing line, they carried him aloft before the king, who had stood up from his stadium throne. Had one wanted to prove that a new age of inverted hierarchies had begun, this would have provided the most spectacular evidence. For a moment, an athletic shepherd became king over the king - for the first time, one could witness the majesty, indeed the power of the monarch being transferred to the runner; in later decades, there was even a growing feeling that shepherds and their ilk were striving to rule the country alone. A sustained wave of rapture swept over the whole country; an enthusiastic barber promised to shave the victor for free for the rest of his life. An olive branch and a silver medal were the official marks of honour, and these were followed by a flood of gifts.
It is still unclear how Spiridion Louys acquired the necessary stamina; the shepherd boy had supposedly worked for an officer as a messenger or water-carrier and become accustomed to long distances as a result. In a test run two weeks before the games, he had come fifth. He would hardly ever have encountered the word 'training' until then - I take that as supporting my hypothesis that most varieties of practice behaviour take the form of undeclared asceticisms. 98 For the brothers on Mount Athos, it may have seemed like a confirmation of their intuitions when, not long afterwards, the rumour began to cir- culate that the runner had spent the night prior to the race in prayer before icons - even de Coubertin took this information seriously enough to begin reflecting on the mental and spiritual components of the greatest sporting achievements. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Hermann Unthan and Hans Wurtz, the founder of the games was also convinced that the will ultimately leads to success and victory. De Coubertin therefore made no secret of his aversion to the positiv- ism of sports physicians, who were too 'philistine' in their thinking to grasp the higher dimensions of sport in general and the new move- ment in particular. 99
Pierre de Coubertin believed that what he was invoking under the name of Olympism would amount to no less than a fully valid new
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"Hi~HJ,U. He this view religious of ancient games. During
year existence they had always been held coram deis; in fact, they not only took place before the gods, but also with their approval, perhaps even their participation - in so far as one can interpret the victories of athletes in the stadium and the palaestra as events that never took place without the consent of the divine, and why not their interven- tion too? De Coubertin's yet-to-be-created 'religion of the athlete' did not follow on directly from Greek mythology, however - the founder of the games was too educated not to know that the gods of Hellenism are dead. Its point of departure was the modern art religion of the Wagnerian variety, which had been conceived as a sacred act to reconcile the torn 'society' of the day. As every complete religion has an ordained clergy alongside its dogma and rituals, its embodiment became the function of the athletes. It was they who would adminis- ter the muscular sacraments to the ecstatic masses. This is my body, my struggle, my victory. Thus de Coubertin's Olympic dream unified Romantic Graecophilia, as well as the pedagogical pathos of the nineteenth century, with the aesthetic heathendom of the body cult to form an amalgam that would meet modern standards.
What de Coubertin expected from an effective new 'religion' can be seen in a memoir note on a visit to the Bayreuth Festival. Here he draws parallels between the two seemingly disparate spheres:
Music and sport have always been the most perfect 'isolators', the most fruitful aids to reflection and vision, as well as powerful stimuli, like 'massage of the will', encouraging me to persevere. In fact, after a period of difficulties and perils, all immediate worries were suddenly removed. loo
With the notable word 'isolator', de Coubertin points to the ability of 'religion' to divide reality into ordinary and extraordinary situa- tions. Wherever one finds sport and music, therefore, one also finds religion, in so far as their key characteristic - the effect of transcend- ing everyday life and eliminating worries - is present. If one develops the term 'isolator' further, one arrives at the following statement: that which brings about an exceptional state is religious. For de Coubertin, religion is the attainment of the 'other condition' by sport- ing means - here begins one of the paths leading to event culture. As is customary for threshold states, these means must simultaneously be released and kept under control; the fully developed athletes' religion would have to carry out both tasks. The athletic exercises prepare the exceptional state in the competitions, and the stadium cult steers
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m In Bayreuth, de Coubertin realized once for all why nothing
of a newly founded religion could do justice to his intentions. Like Richard Wagner, he wanted to propel people out of their ordinary lives for a few incommensurable moments before releasing them back into the world transformed, elevated and purified. De Coubertin found an affirmation of his basic position in the esoteric climate of the Wagner festivaL Just as the boldest form of art-religious offer was at home in Bayreuth, the analogous manifestation of sport religion would find its base in Olympism. Comparable to a nineteenth-century Malraux, de Coubertin declared that the twentieth century would be Olympic or would not be at all.
Against this background, one can understand in what sense the success story of the Olympic idea was simultaneously the failure story of de Coubertin's original aims. However one chooses to interpret Olympism, it is clear that it resulted in anything but the triad of sport, religion and art that de Coubertin wanted to transpose from antiquity to the Modern Age. His failure as the founder of a religion can be summed up quite simply: he had called into being a system of exer- cises and disciplines that was perfect for refuting the existence of 'reli- gion' as a separate category of human action and experience. What in fact came about and became ever more solid in its consistency was an organization for the stimulation, guidance, care and management of primarily thymotic (pride- and ambition-based) and secondarily erotic (greed- and libido-based) energies. The former were by no means restricted to the athletes, but were equally present among the newly created functionaries without whom the new cult could not be put into action. For them, the indispensable parasites of sport, this was the start of a golden age, because the Olympic movement spontaneously followed the most important of all organizational secrets: to create as many functions and honorary offices as possible, in order to guarantee the thymotic mobilization of the members and their pragmatic binding to the sublime cause. De Coubertin, who liked to move in old aristocratic circles, had nonetheless realized that modernity is the era of the nouveau riche and the nouveau impor- tant. For the latter in particular, his movement was an ideal field of activity. As well as the ambition-political incentives, greed-related rewards were not neglected; Olympism produced many new fortunes, some resulting from the direct flow of donations from applying cities into the bank accounts of IOC members. The pragmatic foundation for both forms of incentive was provided by the clubs, the natural matrices of sporting exercises and the alliances between trainers and
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the practising; they experienced their most impressive presentation in the competitive games themselves. The time was clearly right for this order of disciplines. If the age belongs to the competitive economy, then competitive sport is the zeitgeist itself.
The overall outcome of de Coubertin's efforts, then, could not have been more ironic: he failed as a religious founder because he exceeded every foreseeable level of success as the initiator of a prac- tice and competition movement. The initiator of the games missed what became the alpha and omega for the next generation function- aries in their further undertakings: the glaringly obvious fact that the Olympic idea would only survive as a secular cult without a serious ideological superstructure. The small elements of fairness-pathos, youth ceremony and internationalism that had to be kept as a matter of form could also be summoned up without a great lifting of souls. Often enough, a mere wink was all that remained of de Coubertin's noble pacifism among his pragmatic heirs. The games had to integrate themselves amid the excesses of mass culture, changing into a profane event machine more resolutely at every repetition. On no account should they present themselves too loftily - least of all with the 'Catholic' or offer-theological trait that characterized de Coubertin's approach. Where higher things could not entirely be avoided, as in the obligatory opening celebration, they would go no further than the ceremonious entrance of the athletes, the hymn, the flame and the appeal to the youth of the world. The post-war games in Antwerp in 1920 featured, for the first time, a separate High Mass in the cathe- dral, with a chilling moment when the names of Olympic icons killed in the war were read out. The Olympic idea never had a chance as a 'heathen' form of a religion of offer from above. Disenchanted into an athletes' summit, it became an irresistible magnet for the masses.
The pragmatic turn did not even demand of its protagonists a betrayal of de Coubertin's vision; it was entirely sufficient not to com- prehend the old man's lofty intentions. Soon no one knew any more what his dream of a religious synthesis of Hellenism and modernity had once meant. It is no exaggeration to say that the Olympic idea tri- umphed because its followers at all levels, from the board members of the IOC to the local dubs, had soon lost any inkling of it - even when tears were flowing at the presentation ceremony. The valiant Willi Daume, who, as long-standing chairman of the German National Olympic Committee, had access to the sources, could only shake his head about the ideational motives of the Olympic cause. Referring to the 'religion of the athlete', he notes in flawless functionaries' prose: 'Here things become slightly confused. 'lOl
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movement
how a can spontaneously regress to the format of its true substance - the anthropotechnic basis, as embodied by a graduated system of exercises and diversified disci- plines, integrated into a superstructure of hierarchized adminstra- tive acts, routinized club relationships and professionalized media representations. None of the structural characteristics of an elabo- rated 'religion' remain except for the hierarchy of functionaries and a system of exercises that, in keeping with their secular nature, are referred to as 'training units'. The only function of the IOC Vatican in
Lausanne is to administer the fact that God is olympically dead too. In this respect, one can say that the 'religion of the athlete' is the only phenomenon in the history of faith that disenchanted itself by its own means - only a few intellectual strains of Protestantism in Europe and the USA have achieved anything comparable. As the non-religion longed for by countless people, the athletic renaissance was able to spread over large parts of the world. Its development shows the change from a zeal into an industry. Small wonder that the young science of sport showed no interest in becoming the theol- ogy of this cult movement, which had barely been founded before its spirit was driven out. But the response among anthropologists was also reserved; to this day, they are interested neither in the artificial tribes of professional athletes nor in the fact that the emergence of the sport functionaries marked the appearance of a new sub-species no
less deserving of attention than Aurignacian man.
There is no stronger example in the twentieth century of the tendency towards a phenomenon I have mentioned several times, namely the de-spiritualization of asceticisms, than the Olympic movement. As far as the opposing tendency is concerned, the worldly appropriation of the spiritual, the Church of Scientology founded by the novelist and DIY psychologist L. Ron Hubbard is just one example among many - but an outstandingly informative one. In the following, I would like to honour the inventor of Dianetics as one of the greatest enlighten- ers of the twentieth century, as he decisively increased our knowledge about the nature of religion, even if largely involuntarily. He earned himself a place in the pantheon of science and technology, as he suc- cessfully performed a psychotechnic experiment whose results were significant for culture as a whole. After Hubbard, it is clear once and for all that the most effective way of showing that religion does not exist is to establish one's own.
Whoever wishes to found a religion can essentially operate on one 94
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO EXIST
of two is many already true one is not among them; now new insights have finally
it possible and necessary to call it into existence. Christianity fol- lowed this schema to set itself apart from Judaism, just as Augustine later did the same in relation to Manichaeism and the Roman cult, and, even later, Mohammed drew the line between Islam and its two monotheistic predecessors. An analogous approach was taken by the Enlightenment thinkers, who wanted to found the 'religion of reason' from the seventeenth century onwards by breaking away from the historical reiigions. 102 Such initiatives seek to draw authority from the progressive disclosure of the truth, which dictates the content for which the suitable form then has to be found. The new content lies in a message that, so the founders believe, holds more salvific power than previously known cults; one can therefore call this type of religion-founding content-religious. Its protagonists are usually naive, in a value-free sense of the word. They think they believe that they believe what they believe. If they are not naive they would like to be, and regret their weakness of faith. The wiser among the weak of faith elevate doubt itself to an organ of faith for an ascetologically plau- sible reason: chronic doubt is the most effective exercise for keeping alive that which is doubted.
The second assumption under which a new religion can be started is that the previous religions are inadequate because they cling too much to their content, whereas in future the concern will rather be to foreground the form or 'mood' of religion. This turn towards the formal side involves a dramatic bifurcation: the first option is for the new religion to be born as a free-floating meta-religion that no longer knows any dogmatic precepts, yet wants to preserve the dimension of the religious 'in itself' bona fide in a content-neutral form - this is roughly what is done by most modern confessionless people, who believe that there might be something after all in the thing they do not believe in. The advantage of this position is that it defuses the tensions between salvific knowledge and secular knowledge, between theology and ethics. Romantic Protestantism had already approached the self- dissolution of positive religion in polyvalent emotional culture, as is evident when Schleiermacher states in his second speech On Religion: 'It is not the person who believes in a Holy Scripture who has reli- gion, but rather he who requires none and could probably make one himself. ' Or the new religion could exclusively take the formal side of religion to convey foreign content. This was the case with Pierre de Coubertin, among others, who wanted to tie the content of sport to the form of religion - with the results discussed above.
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Ifone astep it he>,-,,"c>",C' apparent religion can be employed as a mere vehicle to
alien content mala fide. The 'political theologies', whereby religion is used as a psychosocial support system for state success and which are once more enjoying considerable attention, are the inescapable example of this. To clarify this attitude through examples, one need only think of popes who enlarged the church state while leading their troops, or French cardinals who formed alliances with the Muslim Turks to harm the Christian rulers of Austria. In both distant and recent times, entire peoples and nations have also appeared in the guise of religious communities. The empirical political reality of the twentieth century illustrates to the point of overkill how revolution- ary movements can garnish themselves with messianic trappings, as if the activists had wanted to give the lie to Friedrich Engels's careless claim from 1844 that 'all the possibilities of religion are exhausted'. 103 As soon as the form-religious view becomes radicalized, the abstrac- tion progresses to the point where any content can potentially take on a religioid design if the content provider so desires. Religion then appears as a rhetorical-ritual mode and an immersion procedure that can serve any project - be it political, artistic, industrial, sporting or therapeutic - as a medium of self-distribution. It can very easily be transferred back to old content-based religions. 104
In the following, I will show how Lafayette Ron Hubbard's entre- preneurial and literary-rabulistic genius drew profit from the form- religious principle in its most abstract manifestation during the promotional campaign for a product called 'Dianetics' in 1950, only to convert it soon afterwards into the Scientological 'church' through a religioid upgrading. The starting point for Hubbard's campaign lies in the cultural crisis of the late 1940s, which also marked a period of personal setbacks for the author. At the time, he could presume a market for life counselling and self-help literature with considerable growth potential and a tangle of psychoanalytical, life-philosophical, pastoral, business consulting, psychagogic, religioid, dietary and fitness-psychological motifs. Hubbard's ingenious approach consisted in bringing all these forms of demand together into a single point. He placed himself in the tradition of modern charlatans, taking this word too in a value-free sense, who seek to combat all illnesses with a single medicine - or all problems with one solution. One can observe this habitus in countless concrete forms between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries - from the zero-point thought of modern philoso- phy to the political idea of total revolution. According to the great
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the panacea, universal agent,
out in physical or moral Hasks. As a rule, the distillation produces a simple substance, a final element, or a simple action and a final operation. Whoever has it or is capable of it has and is capable of everything.
Hubbard's product was conceived as a mental panacea and brought onto the agitated life-counselling market. At first glance, his 'Dianetics' of 1950 seemed to be no more than a new method, praised with much ado, to clean the misted windowpanes of our conscious- ness - a product, to be sure, whose already conspicuously high sales in the first year proved that five years after the first atomic bombs fell, a large number of Americans were prepared to follow spiritual and intellectual suggestions for the simplest solution to the world's prob- lems. There was no time left for complicated esoteric systems, the author announced; one had to change the world from the ground up - rapidly enough to make sure that the bomb did not beat everyone to it. 'Survival' had become the watchword of life counselling. It forms the American counterpart to early Christian metanoia in the face of time running out. Against the background of the incipient nuclear arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, 'Dianetics' initi- ated an alternative course of the world - between itself and the world system of war, mental illness and crime. Confronted with such a sce- nario, who would have refused to join the camp of those who claimed self-assuredly that they had the solution to the world's problems?
The solution lies in the name of the method: the word 'Dianetics' supposedly comes from the two Greek components dia (through) and nous (mind) and denotes the science of what happens 'through the mind' - occasionally a word such as dianoua is also named as a source, though unfortunately this does not exist in Greek. One can intuit the point, namely that everything happens through the mind - though the precise sense of 'through' remains unclear. One cannot yet tell how the system reworks the old contrast between mind and matter - 'scientifically' on the surface and gnostically in its deep struc- ture. Dispensing with false modesty, Hubbard's new hyper-method presents itself as the 'modern science of mental health' and promises to offer the simplest solution to all problems that had hitherto seemed insoluble. Like a Californian avatar of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hubbard praises his science of knowledge as ending the era of mere preliminary attempts. While traditional solutions in turn became part of the problems, whether they presented themselves as religions, philosophies, therapies or politics, Dianetics proclaims the solution
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one essence, of whether this is
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to in a clarity. we are
will not up drifting to the problem side again - which is why none but malicious and mentally disturbed people could have any interest in the prevention of Dianetics. This provides, from now on, a new criterion for the rapid diagnosis of psychopathic dispositions: indifference or hostility to the offers of Dianetics. A disproportionate polemic against what Hubbard called 'conventional psychiatry' is a running thread through his entire work - and that of his students. He undoubtedly knew what experts would say about him and his activi- ties. He made them pay dearly for his intuitions. lOS
As far as its actual content goes, Dianetics initially offers no more than a simplified and technified variation on the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis: it merrily replaces Freud's distinction between the systems or field states of conscious/unconscious with Hubbard's distinction between the analytical mind (with its clear memory bank) and the reactive mind (with its pathological memory bank). The latter holds the sum of all problems, while the former offers the solution to all problems. With this starting situation, it seems like the natural task of the analytical mind to clear up the reactive mind until only clear ideas are left. Whoever managed to empty their pathological store would bring about the sale dominion of the analytical mind and could henceforth call themselves 'clear'. All 'processing' follows the maxim that wherever there was a reactive mind, there will now be an analytical one. The task of Dianetic procedures is no less than the production of the clear. They lead clients, regardless of their specific ailments, along inner 'time tracks' and back to the 'engrams' in their pathological memory - often with 'locks' on the pathogenic stores that must first be opened. This takes place on the more or less fantastic assumption that the old engrams can be 'erased' through recall and the 'aberrations' they have caused eliminated - an assump- tion that had already been popularized by psychoanalysis and Alfred Hitchcock in Hubbard's early days, although it never managed to achieve more than pseudo-plausibility.
If this were all there is to say about Hubbard's approach, one could content oneself with the conclusion that Dianetics is a more or less amusing chapter in the epic of the Americanization of psychoa- nalysis. This epic relates how the partisans of ego psychology took advantage of the psychology of the unconscious - or how the healthy soul of the esoteric West Coast triumphed over the morbid psyche of the East Coast. In truth, however, the Dianetics/Scientology episode belongs to a broader intellectual-historical movement that I would like to term the techno-gnostic turn in Western psychology. This is
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a new,
store of mental and spiritual distortive energy comes
from a technology-historical event that must be viewed as the great- est caesura since the implementation of vowel-alphabetical scripts around 700 BC: the advent of computer culture. Its unfolding around the middle of the twentieth century forced a revision of the time- honoured mind-body dichotomy by showing, through the construc- tion of computers or 'mind machines', that many of the phenomena one had previously attributed to the mind-and-soul side of the totality of being in fact belonged on the mechanical-material side. Reflection is a property of matter, not a privilege of human intelligence. Since then, the redistribution of the world under the pressure of the new cybernetic centre has defined the drama of contemporary thought. In this process it becomes clear why idols fall. The philosophy of cyber- netics renders it possible to formulate a general theory of twilights of the gods. 106
The Hubbard phenomenon unmistakably belongs to the turbulences set off by the irruption of cybernetics into the domains of metaphysi- cal classicism. As a contemporary of the first generation of cybernetics and an author of science fiction novels (viewed not entirely unfavour- ably by connoisseurs of the genre), he had the advantage of privileged early access to the new world of inner technologies. One should take care to avoid the fallacy that Hubbard's 'former life' in science fiction was something negative. Gotthard Gunther, still the most significant philosophical commentator on the event of the computer, has argued convincingly that the science fiction novel should be viewed as the laboratory for the philosophy of the technical age - a claim that seems entirely legitimate if one considers the work of authors like Stanislaw Lem and Isaac Asimov, to name only the greatest.
There is every indication that the novelist Hubbard never aban- doned his original genre - he merely expanded it. Showing great consistency, his first step beyond the confines of science fiction led him to Dianetics, which, in its cognitive status, is nothing other than psychology fiction. This is in keeping with the accounts of those close to him that Hubbard wrote his SOO-page book Dianetics in Bayhead, New Jersey, in a mere month - and completely 'off the top of his head', without drawing on any scientific research. The experimental foundation he invokes - 'hundreds of case studies' - is itself part of the invention. This observation casts a retroactive light on the systems of Freud and C. G. Jung; once one has grasped the schema of psychol- ogy fiction in its outlines, one also recognizes its characteristics in the alternative versions.
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step lS movement psychology
into the religion fiction of Scientology. Observing this transition, one witnesses the debut of the religion of the technical age. 107 When the success of Hubbard's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health sent him the message from the real world that applied fiction 'works', he took this as the go-ahead for his ambitions. With the same elan that had carried him towards his first expansion of science fiction's boundaries, he performed the second and opened, after the psychotherapeutic front, the religious one. The response from the real world showed that this time too, it had 'worked' - the religion fiction materialized in a very short time and took the form of an actually existing 'church'. There was an unmistakable element of taking the bull by the horns at work, as Hubbard had reason to fear the reac- tion of the organized medical profession after the disproportionate success of his self-help therapy book. To the extent that the establish- ment denied that his 'magical' methods were in any way effective, and accused him of dealing irresponsibly with the hopes of the suffering, many of them incurable, it seemed natural to flee to the immunity of the religious sphere. Incidentally, it was never a secret in the inner organizational circle of the time that the ecclesiastical camouflage of the new anti-professional healing method was simply a way of mis- leading the tax authorities.
When Hubbard developed the Church of Scientology in 1954, he applied the form-religious strategies: he surrounded the profane content of Dianetics®, and later of Hubbard books, Hubbard speeches, Hubbard counselling techniques etc. , with the apparatus of sacred techniques typically found in religion. Its basis is a founder cult without boundaries: the celebration of the master as the awakener of humanity runs through the entire media sphere of Scientology. It constitutes one of the most airtight systems of self-praise in recent intellectual history - like a space station, it recycles its own system- inherent operating data. This was augmented by a sharp propaganda of urgency, the strategic version of the apocalyptic: it explained to clients that the only choice was between Scientology and suicide. This ensured total immersion in Hubbard's theme park. In addition, the sect created countless internal functional roles such as 'auditors', 'registrars', 'ethics officers', and a wealth of new importances in the form of supervisory and regulatory tasks - the imaginative replicas of a church hierarchy - as well as institutes, business centres, clinics, and even colleges where one could acquire heterodox academic titles, including Doctor of Theology. One can hardly say that no provi-
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sion was made in this far-sighted enterprise for the newly important and those who wanted to join them. Internal communications were refined through the introduction of an insider language whose use gave the divide between members and non-members the desired depth. A system of mutual regulations stabilized the business; the discreet observation of members for an early diagnosis of scepticism rounded off the package of church-imitating measures. The design of the Scientological community was also original: the intention was that each new believer would also be a new customer. One has to go back to the Catholic trading of indulgences in the sixteenth century to find a similarly close and elegant connection between salvific and monetary transactions. lOS
Hubbard already deserves the greatest acknowledgement for these achievements in the recreative reconstruction of the church phenom- enon alone, as his form-religious imitation procedure provided valu- able insight into the general conditions of religion-founding, whether historically grown or currently synthesized. The loss of aura in his artefact of religion clearly did not worry him. What the new church lacked in venerability it balanced out through the carefreeness with which it presented itself as the summit of humanity's quest for truth that had been conquered late, but still in time. Scientological theology candidly allows the religious founders of the past to look up to him, the finisher - Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, but also authors such as Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Bergson and whoever else is entitled to candidacy in the colourful list of precursors. All of them can rejoice that Hubbard has completed what they could only strive for with inadequate means. A certain Dharma is also said to have been very close to the truth in days gone by, supposedly an Asian monk of antiquity. Evil to him who evil thinks - after all, does the New Testament not also contain details that do not stand up to historical criticism? I am not sure one can claim that Hubbard was attempting, with his less successful claims, to show that a complete church should also include signs of its own fallibility.
The question of whether Hubbard wanted to go beyond psychol- ogy fiction and religion fiction and create a form of politics fiction will remain unanswered here. 109 Depending on one's attitude and mood, one can take the corresponding statements by the master - especially the notorious equation of democrats and apes - either as Dadaistic or as pre-fascistic. There is a parodistic quality that runs through the entire spectrum of Scientological themes and leaves nothing that Hubbard ever touched unchanged or untwisted. Whatever sym- bolic traditions he appropriated reappeared as technically repeatable
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images
the production of special effects.
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Hubbard's achievements as a parodist of religion were outstanding, not least as a parodist of the hierarchical principle - recall his amusing 'Operating Thetan', levels one to eight - but also as a parodist of the mystical idea that the soul (now 'Thetan') recognizes God within its innermost self. The insight that fragile psyches can be replaced by high-class Thetan implants would itself have earned Hubbard a Nobel Prize.
Scientology's way of dealing with its apostates is also of great parodistic value - here the classic condemnation of infidels is travestied in the systematic molestation of ex-Thetans. This would be even more comical, were it not for the fact that it meant subjecting their targets to vicious psychological terror. The old missionary cults followed the principle that one wins over the people by converting the king; translated into modern terms, this means that one must first of all court celebrities. 11o
With the help of these techniques, Hubbard managed to establish an intellectual-historical Las Vegas based on quotations without boundaries in a few decades. He led the 'church' into the age of its technical producibility. Unease in the face of this complex of com- promising imitations may be one of the reasons why followers of the 'original religions' prefer to avoid it. The attention of the organs of German intelligence to the ambiguous organization is all the greater, however - in the USA, the FBI had it in their sights for a time. Its suspicious appearance is a consequence of its design, as it almost openly displays its principle of production. This has to be the case, as Scientology offers the model for the form-religious staging of foreign content.
In April 2007, the European Court of Human Rights confirmed the right of Scientology - despite its sometimes dubious, at times even manifestly criminal economic activities111 - to present itself as a religious community. This verdict merits the closest attention, because it is a disturbing indication of the increasing illiteracy of our legal system in 'religious' matters. Despite all appearances, it does not contain any statement about the religious quality of the enterprise; it merely points out the inalienable right of every person to avow a functioning fiction. The judges took the Scientological organization's claim of pursuing spiritual, 'religious' and humanistic goals at face value. On closer inspection, the Strasbourg verdict was no more than a statement by the court about itself, in that it declared questions of parody outside its jurisdiction. A similar logic applies to airport secu-
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
are
to a in hand luggage zone - one cannot, after all, expect them to take such statements anything but literally.
It is thus decreed by the supreme court: in our time, all that is required to be a religion is for a business to claim that it is one. A person with religion in their hand luggage can proceed to the gate. It did not occur to the judges that Jesus himself would not have been able to sue for recognition as a religious founder at the European Court of Human Rights because he did not know the word 'religion'. Nor was the concept of human rights available to Jesus, least of all the inviolable right of modern people to the free cultivation of illu- sions. The Strasbourg judges did not realize how close they were to Hubbard: if he could found a religion, they could allow one. At least the judges - assuming there were no undercover Scientologists among their ranks - attempted to pass judgement in good faith, while Hubbard knowingly built his 'church' on an abyss of ironies. In addition, the Scientology lawyers have been working for decades on transforming the legal systems of their host countries into locations for jurisprudence fiction - with impressive success. Without the taste for lawsuits among American lawyers, whose effects also reach across to Europe, it is clear that Scientology would long have disappeared from the market.
My conclusion from the dispute over the religious status of this psychotechnic group is that it proved once and for all that religion does not exist. If one looks to the heart of the fetish of religion, one exclusively finds anthropotechnic procedures (this applies analo- gously to the second large-scale fetish of the present, 'culture'). The word 'religion', both here and elsewhere, represents two things: inwardly, it is a password to unlock the more yielding zones of the psyche, those in danger of exploitation, and outwardly it is a badge that one shows in order to be admitted to the world of the respectable semblance. In the context of a genetic theory of culture one would call this effect pseudo-transcendence. It comes about as soon as the origins of mental fabrications disappear behind a 'veil of ignorance' and are treated by clients as a venerable legacy. 112 As one can see, a few years are now sufficient to create pseudo-transcendent effects.
In summary, we can say that the indirectly enlightening dynamic of Hubbard's Scientological doctrine, and even more the instructive implications of his organizational art, are connected to the unprece- dented shamelessness of his eclecticism. In this, Hubbard dwarfs even Rudolf Steiner - and God knows Steiner was no shy man. Hubbard's
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
time in as it shows, in its way, 'the
of thought to the pragmatics of action'. 113 All the Hubbard system knows about what was termed the 'spirit' or 'soul' in tradition is that these too must now become sites of survival. In his thought, the principle of survival has pervaded the beyond and subjugated every- thing that was ever viewed as exceeding physical life spiritually or intellectually. Thus Scientology offers pragmatism from beyond for the world here, and vice versa. In so doing, it provides the metaphysi- cal justification of greed for higher positions in the pyramid game of life. In games of this kind, new members always pay the expenses for the rise of the older members. The circumstance that evil is also directly good, that dangerous insight anticipated by Nietzsche, has the chance to unfold fully in such games. This is the foundation of the gnostic irony where everything is merely a game. In Los Angeles, where Scientology is most deeply anchored, this was translated into the thesis that everything is a film relating to earlier films. The main thing is to be in the producers' camp.
If one reduces this 'religion' to its essentials, one finds three irre- ducible complexes, each of which shows a dear connection to the anthropotechnic dimension. Firstly, on the dogmatic side: a tightly organized illusion-practising society whose members are impreg- nated ever more deeply over time with the concepts of the milieu. Then, on the psychotechnic side: a set of training instructions for the exploitation of all chances in the transcendent struggle for survival. If one turns finally to the head of the organization, the last thing one can see is any 'religious founder': before us stands a radically ironic, universally flexible business trainer who will stop at nothing, and demonstrates to his progeny what techniques one requires to survive in the jungle battle of egotisms. This does not mean, incidentally, that the matter does not occasionally have a certain charm. Even well- meaning and not entirely unintelligent people can find a temporary home there, as long as they firmly resolve to keep their doubts at bay - the 'willing suspension of disbelief', to quote Coleridge once again, is always the believers' most intimate contribution to the survival of suspicious constructs. In systemic terms, this confirms the rule that a perverse whole can appropriate the relative integrity of its parts without corrupting them entirely. Without this effect, admittedly, the complete religious history of mankind would be unimaginable.
To dose with an ad personam argument, I would like to note that only three figures in recent intellectual history can be compared to
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Hubbard from a typological perspective: the Marquis de Sade, the pioneer of philosophy fiction, who espoused the release of a sexualized will to power; the Russian faith healer and Bohemian monk Rasputin, whose maxim was 'strength is truth'; and the British occultist Aleister Crowley, who spent his life with experiments in malevolence and narcotic excesses, and claimed to be Satan, the Antichrist, and the beast of the apocalypse whose number is 666. I will not investigate here whether Crowley's games with occult traditions could be taken as a feral version of the rehabilitation of matter - the analogy between black magic and historical materialism is relatively obvious.
In this infernal foursome, the youngest member was surely the most successful. According to Hubbard's eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr, his father was fascinated by Crowley early on. Through one of his pupils, the rocket scientist Jack Parsons of the Californian Institute of Technology, he had come into contact with the notorious Ordo Templi Orientis and been introduced to black-magical ways of think- ing. 114 There he supposedly learned that the will is everything and may do anything. From this school he took away the most secret of the illuminations underpinning his system: anyone can triumph, no one must die. Whoever wants to become God can do so in a few sessions. Hubbard knew at first hand that the beast from the deep was speaking through these words - in free translation: the revenge of matter for three thousand years of misjudgement and resentment. After Crowley's death in 1947, Hubbard supposedly believed that his position was vacant and awaiting a worthy successor.
L. Ron Hubbard Jr, a knowledgeable, albeit not entirely neutral witness, also states that his father, with whom he worked together in all areas during the founding years of the 'church', was a mental and physical wreck from the mid-1960s on, a victim of his own fictions and a casualty of his addiction to drugs and medications. He there- fore withdrew to a luxury yacht to hide from his followers, guiding his company from the high seas for many years. During the last years of his life he was caught in his own trap, lost like a prisoner in an exploding fireworks factory, plagued by hypochondria, overcome by fits of rage and filled with the wish to destroy 'oppressive persons' who dared to criticize his work. He withdrew from the public eye to avoid showing his disciples where his methods could lead.
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The Conquest of the Improbable For an Acrobatic Ethics
'. . . jump through the burning hoop of the world'
Ingeborg Bachmann
PROGRAMME
After the partly narrative, partly analytical introduction to the 'planet of the practising', the terrain of the following investigations should be sufficiently familiar in its rough outlines; now it is time to survey the ascetological field more precisely. This assumes that we keep our dis- tance from the chimeras of 'philosophical anthropology' - regardless of whether it sides with Scheler in attempting to explain 'the human place in the cosmos' or, taking up Blumenberg's trail, resolves to give an accurate perspective on man as the animal that sees itself being seen. I am not saying that someone who sees chimeras has not seen anything. But they only recognize what their method allows them to perceive - the specialist interests in a personified form: the philosophy professor himself, who swings over from the savannah to the seminar as a model for all evolution. And when Scheler says that man is the Catiline of nature, the eternal troublemaker, rerum novarum cupidus, such a perspective even adds a political and criminological colour - one expects Cicero to appear at once and ask the eternal man how long he will continue to abuse our patience.
A material anthropology at the standard of our present knowledge can only be developed in the form of a general anthropotechnology. This describes humans as the creatures that live in the enclosure of disciplines, involuntary and voluntary ones alike1 - from this angle, anarchisms and chronic indisciplines too are simply disciplines in alternative enclosures. The word 'anthropotechnics' points to a uni- verse on which such authors as Arnold Gehlen (with his insistence on the necessity of tying the individual to 'institutions' to avert a descent into wildness), Jacques Lacan (with his espousal of a 'symbolic order', understood in terms of paternal law) and Pierre Bourdieu (with his attentiveness to the basis of class-specific behaviour in the 'habitus')
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THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBflB
course historians also set foot on this some time ago.
Any unwillingness to learn from these authors would be unwise. Anyone who has taken a cue from Nietzsche and started to develop a notion of one of the 'broadest and longest facts that exist', however,
cannot avoid re-examining the entire human field in the light of this General Ascetology. Its object, the implicit and explicit practice behaviour of humans, forms the core of all historically manifest vari- eties of anthropotechnics - and it is questionable whether genetics will ever contribute more than an external modification to this field, which has long been practically constant in its power. If I am arguing for an expansion of the practice zone, I am doing so in the face of the overwhelming evidence that humans - on this side and the other side of 'work and interaction', and on this side and the other side of 'active and observing life' - have an effect on themselves, work on themselves and make examples of themselves.
In the following, I will demonstrate the autoplastic constitution of the essential human facts. Being human means existing in an opera- tively curved space in which actions return to affect the actor, works the worker, communications the communicator, thoughts the thinker and feelings the feeler. All these forms of reaction, I would argue, have an ascetic, that is to say a practising character - although, as stated above, they largely belong to the undeclared and unnoticed asceticisms or the occulted training routines. It is only with the first expressly practising humans that the ascetic circle of existence is explicitly rendered visible. They create the self-referential relation- ships that commit the individual to participating in its own subjecti- fication. They all have authority for us in anthropological questions, whether they are farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, athletes, rhetoricians, circus artistes, rhapsodists, scholars, instrumental vir- tuosos or models.
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The Doctrine of Upward Propagation and the Meaning of IOverl
Marriage from an Evolutionary Perspective
No one who has been willing to follow my deliberations this far should be surprised if I turn once again to Nietzsche, the rediscov- erer of the ascetic field in all its breadth and layers, to provide the first keyword for the elaboration of a practice-anthropological view of the complex of human facts. 2 In the section 'On Children and Marriage' from the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), the new prophet tries his hand at life counselling for higher human beings:
I have a question for you alone, my brother: I cast this question like a sounding-lead into your soul, that I may know how deep it is.
You are young and wish for a child and marriage. But I ask you now: are you a human being with the right to wish for a child?
Are you the victor, the self-compeller, commander of the senses, master of your virtues? Thus I ask you.
Or is it the beast and dire need that speak out of your wish? Or isola- tion? Or discord with yourself?
I would that your victory and your freedom might yearn for a child. Living monuments shall you build to your victory and your liberation.
Over and beyond yourself shall you build. But first you must be built yourself, four-square in body and soul.
Not only onwards shall you propagate yourself, but upwards! May the garden of marriage help you to do so!
A higher body shall you create, a first movement, a self-propelling wheel - a creator shall you create.
Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create the one that is more than those who created it. 3
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
rnL/~T1'" one
evangelizing tone. These are not neo-religious instructions,
directions for the neo-ascetic trainer. In the present case they refer not to physical exercise of a gymnastic or athletic nature, but rather to the sexual diet, or more precisely the inner attitude that should be reached before the natural consequences of human reproductive activity can be affirmed. What Nietzsche's prophetic double presents is no less than a critique of the linear sequence of generations. Thus children who resemble their parents in the status quo are superfluous, or more precisely superfluous replicas of superfluous originals. We shall hear more about the reason for their superfluity shortly.
From the perspective of the new procreation trainer, every marriage must be considered a mesalliance brought about simply by natural automatism or the social mechanics of the desire for children. Because the man, as Nietzsche presumed to know, had thus far been merely a means to a child for the 'real woman', this well-trained female sympa- thizer and duped fulfiller of feminine wishes, must in future be assisted by an adviser who will encourage him to look out for other women - ones on an equal footing who do not want to make the husband 'the maid of a woman', but rather form a partnership for the pursuit of nobler aims. It should not unsettle us that the primary goal of better marital partnerships is defined a few verses later with the later politically and mass-culturally charged term Obermensch (Walter Kaufmann, the man who introduced Zarathustra to an American audience, renders it undauntedly as 'superman'). It would not be the first word from the dictionary of philosophical art nouveau to regain acceptable meanings after a systemic and sporting translation - recall such wilted articles as elan vital, fluidum, giving meaning to the meaningless, the creative pause etc. , which are awakening today to a second, third, nth life thanks to new company plaques. 4
It is not my aim here to examine the relationship between genetics, pedagogy, dietetics and artistry in Nietzsche's call for 'upward propa- gation'. I shall content myself with the observation that the biological part in this project can practically be overlooked alongside the three other elements. There is no 'eugenics' in Nietzsche - despite occa- sional references to 'breeding' - at least no more than is implicit in the recommendation to choose a partner under decent lighting conditions and with one's self-respect intact. Everything else falls under training, discipline, education and self-design - the Obermensch implies not a biological but an artistic, not to sayan acrobatic programme. The only thought-provoking aspect of the marriage recommendations quoted above is the difference between onward and upward propaga-
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don. mere
will no longer in children, as one says, to 'return' in their children. There may be a right to imperfection, but not to triviality.
What Does 'Upwards' Mean? For a Critique of the Vertical
The quoted passage brings into play Nietzsche's speciality, his atten- tiveness to questions of verticality in human matters of values, rank and achievement, to particular effect. It can be taken as the starting point for the central questions of General Ascetology: what is the business of the practising life, and to what end is it pursued? In what sense can we distinguish here between horizontality and verticality, whether the concern is the ascending line from parents to children in particular or the gradation between the levels of the practising life in general? Whence does Nietzsche draw his conviction that the kinetic attribute 'onward' has less value than 'upward'? From what sources does he acquire his knowledge of what above and below mean in such contexts? How can one form of life, one mode of being, be located over another in this field anyway? Where do the criteria for judge- ments of 'over' come from? Are they immanent in circumstances, or are they introduced from without? Why is continuing horizontally no longer the highest goal for Nietzsche - as it is for the majority of seasoned traditionalists in all times and peoples - and what motives underlie his conviction that a continuation of the game of replications is only affirmable and non-trivial if it brings about an enhancement?
It is clear from these questions that we will not advance any further in these reflections on the nature of practice directions without a 'critique of the vertical'. For the pedagogical, athletic, acrobatic, artistic, and ultimately any symbolic or 'culturally' mediated interpretation of the words 'above' and 'over' obviously addresses a second spatial meaning overlying the primary orientations in the physical or geographi- cal space. These two spatial meanings are of the same evolutionary age - indeed, one cannot rule out the possibility that what we are here terming the second meaning should, at least in development- psychological terms, be given priority over the first. The reason for this is not an esoteric one: in its relationship with its mother, every infant experiences a pre-symbolic and supra-spatial Above to which it looks up before it learns to walk. Fathers and grandparents are likewise 'up there', long before the child begins to build towers from blocks and
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
one on as the can over its edifices learn that one always remains superior to self-made constructs. It is sufficient to observe how the highest block returns to its original position on the ground following the collapse. This provides an experience of primitive sovereignty whose develop- ment continues into the games of critique among adults - every decon- struction is a game of little towers with the classics. By contrast, the child cannot similarly overturn the established polar situation with the parents up there and itself down there. At the experiential level, it remains - barring psychotic deregulations - embedded in a stable ver- tical tension, possibly until old age, when it has long since physically outgrown its progenitors. The 'looking up' of children to their parents and adults in general, especially to cultural heroes and transmitters of knowledge, gives rise to a psychosemantic system of co-ordinates with a pronounced vertical dimension. One could almost describe the
world of the early psyche as monarchic.
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche presupposes the decline of the four-
thousand-year empire of monarchies as a fact. The psychopolitical situation in which he wants to make himself useful as a procreation adviser is thus informed not only by the statement 'God is dead', but equally by the assertion 'the king is dead'. While the first claim must be augmented by the supplement 'God remains dead' - this is the novelty in the message of the madman [der Tolle Mensch], whether one hears it as bad news or welcomes it as a gospel - the second, in keeping with the old ritual law, is followed by the proclamation 'Long live the king! ' Nietzsche also yields to this law, but not without raising it to a more abstract level. Though empirical kings have ceased to be impressive and are only 'above' others from the perspective of protocol and the tabloid press, the royal function as such, understood as a pole of attraction to the pure Above, Over and Upwards, remains imaginarily intact in many individuals despite real circumstances, and demands a new interpretation. The replacement of kings with presidents and celebrities does not provide any solution to the task at hand. It deals with the problem on the surface, without even notic- ing the necessity of redefining the pre- of presidency and the pro- of prominent.
The Time of Artistes
Only within the framework of a comprehensive reform in the vertical system, with all its psychosemantic and culture-dynamic aspects, can
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one
death was at once that His the previous human being, and whoever would declare a successor must acknowledge that man, the conventional representative of the 'symbolic species' gov- erned by notions of God, 'remains dead'. 6 If one wanted to follow the ritual law and proclaim a living king under the new conditions, one would have to find a candidate who was neither king or man in the conventional sense. The only suitable being would be one with special traits that placed it outside the horizon of ordinary human existence - a creature sufficiently inhuman or post-human to meet the require- ments of this bizarre line of succession. Going by everything we know about human forms of life in general and Nietzsche's view of them in particular, only a figure from the pandemonium of the human is suitable for this role: the artiste, or more precisely the acrobat. The undermining of the human through the radically artificial began long ago with his emergence - could he be the figure for whom great times are now beginning?
We recall: Zarathustra's first conquest on his way from the moun- tains to the cities was a fallen tightrope walker who said that he was never much more than an animal trained with blows and fodder. If one accepts a first pointer from him towards possible meanings of the provocative word Obermensch, an image forms of a living being that is subjected to constant grooming and physically experiences adaptations to the improbable. Such an Obermensch is closer to ani- mality than the educated bourgeois because of the physical dimension of its art, yet simultaneously closer to an extra-human dimension by virtue of its removal from the everyday sphere through its daily occupational hazards. Someone who balances on the high wire lives from giving the audience a reason to look up. No one would do so without effective attractors: the danger that constantly accompanies the artiste, the embodied bravura that saves him at every step, and the overcoming of impossibility that enables its conqueror to walk between the precipice on the right and the precipice on the left as the ordinary person walks from their front door to the parlour. Thus the Obermensch's other qualities are not important; he brings traits that distinguish him from previous humans in the same way the tightrope walker differed from his audience. Thomas Mann, incidentally, in the chapter on the Parisian circus in his Confessions of Felix Krull, had already put a vehement denial of the artiste's membership of the ordi- nary human race in the mouth of his protagonist. One reads that the trapeze artist Andromache, 'daughter of the air', is neither a woman in the conventional sense of the word nor even a human being at
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
a
voices 'Does anyone in on a
wire or express himself in verse? It's sheer madness. Man or woman? Unquestionably a monster. '7
Initially, the 'uber' [over] in Obermensch refers only to the alti- tude at which his rope is fastened above the heads of the spectators. I do not think it an affront to Nietzsche if we note that beneath the Romantic mask of his most oft-cited idea lies, initially, nothing other than a fantasy of prominence,8 in so far as one takes prominence as the category of people worth seeing - worth seeing according to criteria that remain to be discussed. Whether the protruders and outstanders (Latin prominere, 'to protrude' and eminere, 'to stand out') walk over tightropes, catwalks or red carpets is merely a techni- cal difference. What matters is the position of the monster (from the Latin monere, 'to warn'), in which the skill increased through strict training and its exposition in total visibility are drawn together into a single complex. In this sense prominence, after artistry and in alliance with it, provides the second impulse for the subversion of the human being through a non-human principle. Ultimately, with his hysteroid
Obermensch propaganda, Nietzsche simply ensures the possibility of fastening new ropes overhead that are worth looking up to. The 'over' here refers to the dimension of looking upwards. The human of the 'over' is the artiste who draws our gaze to wherever he is active. For him, being there means being up there. 9
At this point one could raise the objection that the artiste Nietzsche was primarily an evolutionist, even a biologist of the worst kind whose work exemplifies the fatal gesture of his century - the betrayal of the world of the intellect in the name of a naturalism without limits. What else could the desire to 'translate man back into nature' mean? Had Nietzsche not genuinely undergone a dangerous conver- sion that estranged him from his beginnings? Had he not turned away from Schopenhauer, the last thinker of renunciation, to join the camp of Darwin, the master thinker of affirmation through adaptation? Did he not, in fact, push the idea of success in life through adapta- tion further, arriving at the even more dangerous doctrine of success through conquest - with this inversion of the adapting direction entirely following the line of a biologically founded, metabiologically over-elevated concept of power? When Nietzsche, in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra quoted above, lets the prophet say to the city-dwellers in his first speech that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and overman [Obermensch] - a rope over an abyss', are we not hearing, above all else, the voice of the biologist insisting that
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Nature Acrobatics on Mount Improbable
This objection to the artistic-acrobatic understanding of the term Obermensch does not hold up, because the artistic dimension does not conform to the exhausted separation of nature and culture. Evolutionary biology, for its part, only makes sense if viewed as a doctrine of nature's artistry. With Darwin's optics, nature itself is transformed into a circus in which species work their way upwards to the most incredible performances through a never-ending repetition of the simplest procedures known as variation, selection and hered- ity, generally in a co-evolutionary and co-opportunistic manner and in trans-species ensembles - one need only recall the 900 species of figs that exist worldwide: each one of these has its own exclusive species of fig fly that lives in the fruits, and without which none of the fig species could reproduce. lO Among the artiste-like inventions of culture, Nietzsche mentions those equalling the natural work of art 'a woman's breasts', this masterpiece of pre-human evolution- ary artistry that is 'useful and at the same time pleasing',11 Viewed through the opera glasses of evolutionary theory, the thing we call life is nothing other than a vaudeville with an immeasurable wealth of forms in which every branch of artistry, that is to say every species, attempts to perform the feat of all feats: survival. There is no species that has not, like Nietzsche's tightrope walker, made danger its pro- fession in some way. If one hears from natural historians that well over 90 per cent of the countless species that have lived on the earth have died out (for example, 150 of the 9,800 known species of birds in the last few centuries alone), the phrase 'occupational hazards' takes on a non-trivial meaning. From this perspective, biology
becomes historical thanatology.
If, on the other hand, one speaks of current life forms, one must,
especially as a naturalist, be able to recount their success story and illuminate the principles of their continuation - which means saying how they succeeded in staying on the survivors' side to this day, The star biologist Richard Dawkins took on a project of this kind over a decade ago when he recounted, in a popular lecture series at the Royal Institute - broadcast by the BBC under the seemingly child-friendly title Growing Up in the Universe - the history of life and its most imposing success forms. The title of the resulting book, Climbing
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once more
with formulations,12 In this particular case
surpassed his own aims. Natural history - described as a climbing tour in the mountains of improbabilities - directly becomes a nature- artistic affair in which one cannot decide, and fortunately does not have to, whether the ascent of 'Mount Improbable' is car~ied out by the different species or the biologist who studies them. The image of climbing this peak of improbability is itself most likely to be inad- equate, as the rise of species cannot be understood as the conquest of a pre-existing summit. Rather, its development constitutes the folding-out of the mountain to its current altitude. Behind the image of the ascent to the mountain of the improbable lies a deeper figure, namely the emergence of a peak that is raised from the more probable to the more improbable by trivial evolutionary forces. Whether one takes the path to the summit as a climbing or a lifting of the entire rock mass, however, natural history takes on an immanent artiste- like dimension through this observation. 'Survival' is a code word for nature acrobatics. The question of who watches nature perform its feats cannot be answered from a human perspective - the only observer we can point to is the biologist, who enters the theatre of evolution with a delay of hundreds of millions of years.
In the light of these reflections, it would seem logical to relate the 'over' in survival rOberleben] and the 'over' in Obermensch to the dimension of growing improbabilities. 13 While dying out would always be the more probable result of a species's attempts to live, and the stagnation of humans in a final form of human existence would certainly be the more probable end to human history - an end that is not espoused without some self-satisfaction by the proponents of a supposed 'right to imperfection' - survival and over-humanization together embody the tendency towards the rise of the probable to the less probable. A surviving species embodies the current link in a chain of replications that has succeeded in stabilizing its improbability. If one assumes that a stabilized improbability immediately becomes a base for further ascents, this provides the basic principles for an understanding of the evolutionary drift towards the summit of Mount Improbable.
The biologist's reference to peaks of the improbable thus offers an answer to the question posed above as to the meaning of 'upwards' in Zarathustra's command - 'Not only onwards shall you propagate yourself, but upwards! ' - that is plausible in the context of current knowledge.