No More Learning

It would be a theoreticistic reduction of this state- ment, however, if it were used to express no more than its proposi- tional content. It is an authoritative, spurring and tonic statement that confronts its addressees with the challenge: 'Give precedence to sophronein! ' The oldest version of the metanoetic imperative already demands that humans distinguish between the upper and the lower within themselves.
Being Superior to Oneself
That the primal ethical directive 'You must change your life! ' becomes acute in the pre-Socratic word sophronein - and with a manifestly
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
practice-theoretical tendency - can be explained with reference to a thought formulated by Plato a hundred years after Heraclitus in a greatly admired passage from book four of the Republic (430e-432b), dealing with prudence (sophrosyne) in the individual and in the polis. There, prudence is defined first of all as 'dominance over the desires' (epithymion epikrdteia) - though I cannot say at this point what these 'epithymic' feelings known as 'desires' are, or what is meant by 'dominance'. Then Socrates draws our attention to the peculiarity of the self-relationship to which this refers: if prudence is related or identical to dominance over affects or passions, it manifests an inner asymmetry within humans - a dramatic difference from themselves that can be evaded, but not neutralized. This is demonstrated by the figure of speech that someone is 'stronger than themselves' (kreitto
-hautou) - which is also translated as 'superior to oneself'.
At first glance, Socrates says, such a phrase seems ridiculous, and paradoxical to boot: 'For the man who is master of himself will also,
I presume, be the slave of himself, and the slave will be the master'81 - as both statements are made by the same person. In reality, the laugh- able expression is a symptom of the most serious matter: 'in man himself' (en auto to anthropo) there is evidently a better and a worse side relating to the soul (peri ten psychen). This matter, which is no laughing one, emerges in actu in twofold fashion: in the reflections formulated here and in the life conditions they address. If the part that is by nature (physei) better rules over the worse part, one calls this being stronger than oneself or superiority over oneself and rightly praises it. If the situation is inverted, however, and the worse part - which is also the larger - overpowers the better - which is naturally smaller - one speaks of being weaker than or inferior to oneself, and rebukes it accordingly. The further applications of these reflections result from the maxim of all political psychology: as in the psyche, so in the polis. 82
Two aspects are decisive for an understanding of this philosophy- historically fateful passage. Firstly: Plato here manages to integrate the affect of contempt, which appears in a crudely external way in Heraclitus, into the structure of the psyche, so that contempt becomes a regulative principle of the person and an agent of their self-direction. Whoever is able to feel self-contempt has already mas- tered the decisive aspect. Secondly: Socrates clarifies why the worse part can only take over after 'bad education' - whose criterion lies in leaving untethered (akolaston) something that requires tethering, and, if all were as it should be, could be tethered with ease. If one assumes that, for the Greeks, paideia was an amalgamation of insight
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THE CONQUEST O f THE IMPROBABLE
takeover by the
side unmistakably contains a call for more training, or a lament about
the failure of the current scheme.
Naturally one could, in the style of the sociologizations still cus-
tomary today, raise the objection that Plato's talk of self-superiority was a projection of Greek class structures onto the psyche. Then one could - in the mode of the utopianism that is no longer so common - add that in a classless society, the self-relations of the psyche would be rebuilt into flat hierarchies, or even complete anarchies without any above-below difference to speak of. These objections, however, miss the essence of paideia. The idea of restraint comes from an inter- nalization of the differences between teacher and pupil, or trainer and athlete, possibly also between rider and horse, which have nothing to do with dominance in the usual sense. The relationship between the aristocracy and the rabble only provides a metaphor for these condi- tions, and to take it literally would be to misunderstand the autono- mous laws of figurative speech. In truth, a manifestation of verticality emerges in paideia that cannot be depicted by, let alone reduced to, political dominance. That does not, of course, mean that the matter is automatically understood by its carriers, namely the operators and patients of training.
The basic confusion of Greek ethics, as well as the art of education connected to it, comes from the fact that it never managed to work out the difference between passions and habits with the necessary clarity - which is why it also never dearly articulated the correspond- ing difference between dominance and practice. The consequences are evident in over two millennia of ambiguity in European pedagogy - initially it often suffocated its pupils with authoritarian discipline by treating them as subjects, while later on it increasingly addressed them as false adults and released them from all discipline and practis- ing tension. The fact that pupils are initially and mostly burgeoning athletes - not to say acrobats - who must be brought into shape was, because of the moralistic and political mystification of pedagogy, never pointed out as explicitly as a matter of such import would reqUIre.
For the time being, nothing seems simpler than the thought that exist- ing passions, destructive intensities or obsessions demand restrain- ing - that is, dominance - while habits are not given a priori, but must rather be built up in longer periods of training and practice; they grow through mimetic repetitive behaviour, but turn into a will-
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
as
seem, however, the association of these two factors has led to the most diverse confusions throughout the history of ethical thought. One could go so far as to say that along with the asceticisms them- selves, the ambiguities in the understanding of askesis constitute the 'broadest and longest fact that exists' on the 'ascetic planet'. In Europe, asceticisms and their misunderstandings are of more or less equal age - the incomparably more deeply thought-out universe of the Indian asanas simultaneously shows us that this long-lasting confusion is a regional fate, not a universal law. Once this has been grasped, one understands why the emancipation of practice from the compulsive structures of Old European asceticism - as I hinted at the start - may possibly constitute the most important intellectual- historical and body-historical event of the twentieth century.
Between Two Overpowerings: The Possessed Human
If we go back from Plato's reference to the vertical distinction within humans themselves to Heraclitus' aphorism, it is illuminating how the thinker of Ephesus treats the same problem with a logic that is still entirely elementary, almost destitute. Now one sees clearly how this archaic three-word wonder ethos anthropo daimon itself formally demonstrates what it is talking about: the word 'man' stands in the middle between the two all too easily confused ethical factors - habits on the left, passions on the right. Whatever other meanings ethos can have, it unmistakably refers here to that which is habitual, moral and conventional, while the word daimon indicates the higher power, the overpowering and supra-habitual force.
If one accepts these semantic deliberations serving the illumination of the two opaque terms, two new ways of translating Heraclitus' phrase arise. The first would be: 'Among humans, bad habits are the overpowering force. ' The second is: 'New good habits in humans can gain control over the most intense passions. ' Naturally we cannot say which of these Heraclitus had in mind. His logic was archaic, in so far as the archaic is the condensed embodiment of the not-yet-differen- tiated, the pre-confused. While the confused re-entangles alternatives that have already been unfolded, the pre-confused contains not-yet- unfolded alternatives intertwined contracte. Here there are even fewer words than thoughts that need to be expressed. It therefore remains unsaid or 'folded in' whether the demonic manifests itself in
167
paSSIOns may
THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
<0"'"11\:U its
the twentieth century: never had the homesickness
intelligentsia for their pre-confused beginnings been so strong. At the same time, this homesickness was never exposed to a stronger temptation to increase confusion by seeking refuge in unsuitable simplifications.
The original ethical confusion in European philosophy manifests itself in two complementary and time-honoured errors that run through the history of reflections on the question of how humans should live: in the first, the restraining of passions is confused with the exorcism of base demons, and in the second, the overcoming of bad habits is confused with illumination through higher spirits. The Stoic and Gnostic movements, with their striving for apathy or a speedy escape to the world above, are representative of the former, and the Platonic and mystical traditions, with their inclination to kill off the flesh or pass over embodied existence, of the latter. That these attrac- tive errors did not become the mainstream is due to the resistance of the pragmatic ethical systems, which were aided by the anonymous wisdom of everyday cultures. Both are sources drawn upon by the legacy of European knowledge about the art of living - as demon- strated most recently by Michel Foucault's late studies. The anti- extremist projects of Aristotelian, Epicurean and sceptic provenance mostly achieved a fruitful balance between vertical passion, that is to say the restraining of desires, and the horizontal effort, namely the imitation and cultivation of good habits. They surveyed the difficult terrain in which the two primary directions of movement, the spread- ings and the ascents, make their demands.
If one reads the ethos-daimon statement directly alongside Socrates' words about the restraining of passions, one understands better the path on which Old European thought found itself confronted with what was termed 'possession' in religious contexts. In its older usage, the word daimon reminds us that being human and being possessed were initially practically the same. Whoever has no daimon has no soul that accompanies, augments and moves them, and whoever lacks such a soul does not exist - they are merely a walking corpse, or at best an anthropomorphic plant. If one now places the terms ethos and daimon so closely together that anthr6po is directly between them, one sees how the human being is fundamentally bound between two forms of possession. Possessed by habits and inertias, it appears under-animated and mechanized; possessed by passions and ideas, it is over-animated and manically overloaded. The form and degree of
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
are tone its on the integration of occupier its own
possession -
The majority of people throughout history have only acknowledged the latter, the psychistic or passionate side of possession (as appar- ent in ancient notions of accompanying demons, invasive demons, personal geniuses and evil spirits in a wealth of images); it observes with concern its negative, de-animation, dispiritedness, depression. The early philosophers, on the other hand, the first gurus and educa- tors, increasingly concentrate, in the morning light of their art, on the second front, the 'habit creature' side of the human condition. One could speak here of the habitual or hexic forms of possession (from Latin habitus, 'habit' and Greek hexis, 'possession, inner property, habit'). It represents possession by a non-spirit, a taking over of humans by the embodied mechanism.
Paideia: Gripping the Roots of Habit
To understand how humanity's dual possession was brought to an end by the ethical-ascetic Enlightenment, one must consider that the history of anthropological and pedagogical thought in Europe was, in the long run, identical to a progressive secularization of the psyche - that is, identical to the conversion of the logic of possession into programmes of discipline. In the course of these programmes, posses- sions of the first type are reformulated as enthusiasms and sorted into advantageous - recall Plato's list of the four good forms of enthusi- asm or madness in Phaedrus83 - and harmful ones. Among the latter, wrath, thirst for fame and greed stand out; in Christian times, these were included among the Seven Deadly Sins. 84 As they are no longer official forms of possession, only their functional successors, they are no longer driven out through exorcism but rather tamed through dis- cipline, using the crudest of methods if need be.
The statements of Aurelius Augustinus, nine hundred years after Heraclitus, can also be placed in this progressing line: in his text On True Religion, he calls on Christians to become 'men' by subduing (subiugare) the 'women' in themselves, these 'blandishments and troubles of desire'85 - a task that faces women in analogous fashion, because they should likewise be man enough 'in Christ' to subju- gate the womanly desires (femineas voluptates) in themselves. Here Augustine still clings firmly to the schema of the Platonic psychagog- ics of affect: dominate that which would otherwise dominate us; gain possession of that which would otherwise possess us. Because
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
the a re- always It is palpable here how the repressive understanding of asceticism, as a dictator- ship over the 'inner nature', begins its triumphal march through the
Christian centuries.
As far as the second type of possession, habit, is concerned, its
secularization leads to the concept of self-education, which includes a discreet self-exorcism: the human being owned by its habits must succeed in reversing the conditions of ownership and taking control of that which has it by having it itself. This applies above all to the bad habits that are to be replaced by good ones. Thus Thomas aKempis, still fully in the tradition of the first educators, writes: 'Habit overcomes habit. '86 In the more radical spiritual practice systems, the demand for a breaking of habitual conditionings is still being expanded to the neutral, even 'good' habits - for example, in the theatre pedagogy of Constantin Stanislavski or the 'Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man' founded in October 1922 in Fontainebleau by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. From the perspective of the radicals, the habitus basis of human existence is, as a whole, no more than a spiritually worthless puppet theatre into which a free ego-soul must be implanted after the fact, and through the great- est effort. If this fails, one experiences an effect in most people that is familiar from many athletes and models: they make a promising visual impression - but if one knocks, no one is at home. According to these doctrines, the adept can only rid themselves of their baggage by subjecting their life to a rigorous practice regime by which they can de-automatize their behaviour in all important dimensions. At the same time, they must re-automatize their newly learned behaviour so that what they want to be or represent becomes second nature.
Thinking and Wakefulness
For Heraclitus, the dark, early, pre-confused one, such differen- tiations and complications are non-existent. In his thought, the passions and habits could stay together in a single class - contained in the dimension of vagueness termed ethos anthropeion (human behaviour) in Fragment 119. On the other side are the supra-human factors: the divine, the fire of reason, the immeasurable psyche and the all-pervading logos. Compared to them, one reads, even the wisest human is a mere ape. One cannot yet speak of any paideia, but there is a statement by Heraclitus (Fragment 116, quoted by Stobaeus) that
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
us that essentially all people, including the unnHof'mcd are capable of knowing themselves and having good sense.
Heraclitus enjoys an even greater privilege in being permitted, on the 'intellectual side' of his doctrines, to leave together what would have to be taken apart in a later culture of rationality, and even spread among different disciplines: being awake, having good sense and listen- ing for the logos. Later generations and more distant periods assigned waking - alongside the phenomena of sleep and dream - to psychology and the security services, while good sense was handed over to practi- cal philosophy and ethics, and a receptiveness to the logos to logic, mathematics and structural theories. If there is one strong characteris- tic of the pre-Socratics - assuming they are not simply an invention of modern compilers, for which there are indications - it seems to me that it lies in the pathos-filled equation of waking and thinking.
If one had to say in one sentence what constituted thought in the Ionic era, the answer would be: thinking means being sleepless in Ephesus - sacrificing one's nights in Miletus. One can almost take this literally, as the proximity of the Ionians to the Chaldean tradi- tions of nocturnal celestial observation may also have bred in them a tendency towards intellectual night work; the contempt of the waking for the sleeping belongs to the basic inventory of intellectual athletism. As Heraclitus' fragments tell us, the distinction between diurnal and nocturnal activity is meaningless for waking thought. The waking that is unified with thinking performs the only asceticism that can help the first philosophy get into shape. As waking thought, it is pure discipline - an acrobatics of sleeplessness. If it does not virtually unify the thinker with the ever-wakeful logos, it certainly brings them close together. It is no coincidence that some of Heraclitus' harshest words deal with the dependence of ordinary people on sleep. For him, hoi polloi are none other than the people who do not awaken to the shared (koinon) in the morning, but instead remain in their private world, their dreamy idiocy, as if they had some special knowledge (idian phr6nesin). These are the same who also sleep through reli- gious matters, as it were - they think they are purifying themselves by soiling themselves with blood, 'just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud'P Trapped in their own worlds, people do not hear what the non-sleepers have to say to them. If one speaks to them of the all-pervading logos, they merely shrug their shoulders. They see nothing of the One, even though they are sub- merged in it. They act as if they were seeking God, yet he is standing in front of them.
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THE CONQUEST THE IMPROBABLE
Without Waking. Waking East-West Contrasts
Among twentieth-century thinkers, it was Heidegger who first sought to regain the privileges of pre-confused (contract-symbolic) thought through his secession from the 2,500-year philosophical tradition. In his way, he attempted - in opposition to his own time, yet keeping up with it in some respects - to restore philosophical activity to its 'pre- Socratic' state, when a unity of waking and thinking had temporarily been possible. The decline of pre-confused unity had already proved inexorable 2,500 years ago; the rapid progress in the formation of concepts split the basic terms of old into many partial meanings. Not all words survived this development intact - the archaic verb sophronein in particular, 'to be of good sense', the most elegant term of achievement in the ancient world, lost its penetrating energy and intimate appellative effect when it congealed into the noun soph- rosyne, which refers to the virtue of prudence among a group of other virtues. However, Heidegger's interpretation of this process - the freezing of verbs into nouns and the move from event observation to conceptual concoction - as the fate incurred by forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit) contains an unacceptable exaggeration that con- tributes little to overcoming the problematic situation it touches upon.
The asymmetrical decay products of this process led to the far- reaching differences between the culture of rationality, or 'ethics', in the Occident and the Orient. While the Western path, generally speaking, saw the establishment of thinking without waking, devoted to the ideal of science, the Eastern path arrived more at a waking without science, which strove for illuminations without conceptual precision - based on a state store of wisdom figures that more or less belonged to all masters. Heidegger's attempt to circumvent the opposition of scientism and illuminism from a neo-pre-Socratic angle produced a concept of 'thought' that is clearly closer to meditative waking than to the construction or deconstruction of discourses. His late pastoral of being, which is closer to an exercise than a discursive praxis, points to the undertaking of transforming the philosophy of consciousness, after the shake-up of its passage through existential philosophy, into a worldly philosophy of wakefulness. 88 It is fair to assume that man, as the 'guardian of being', is subject to a sleeping ban. It does not become entirely clear in Heidegger's work, however, how the timetable for guarding being is planned. Nor is it easy to see how the guardians receive the night work permit in the laboratories
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SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS
of elite research. The bet is as plausible as it is demanding: it is now a matter of carrying out the transformation of thought into a wakeful- ness exercise envisaged by Heidegger without regressing below the level of the modern culture of rationality.
Whether Heidegger himself achieved this is doubtful for a number of reasons. His later doctrine became too much of an idyll amid the monstrous. Before Heidegger, it was only Oswald Spengler who pre- sented a few provisional, but not insignificant sketches for a critique of the rationalist access to the world via a general theory of wakeful- ness; instead of pursuing this, however, he translated it into a specu- lative psychology of advanced civilizations and thus philosophically neutralized it. Furthermore, he distorted his subtle references to the fear-based constitution of wakeful existence - which resurfaced ten years later in Heidegger's inaugural address 'What is Metaphysics? ' of 1929 - through the crudeness of his pragmatic faith in the precedence of 'facts'. 89 Taken as a whole, the philosophy of the twentieth century fails somewhat pitifully in the face of the imperative of a culture of wakefulness. It is not without reason that it lost the majority of its virtual clientele to the psychotherapeutic subcultures in which new, liveable stylizations of the relationship between wakefulness and knowledge had developed, not infrequently to the disapproval of those employed as civil servants to look after theory.
Against the background of theosophical amalgams of traditions from Eastern and Platonic sources, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) developed the most radical doctrine of wakefulness presented in the twentieth century. Distancing himself from his early indoctrinations, he declared that it is always possible to exit the construct of the rational world from one moment to the next and burn all notions in the 'flame of attention'. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Krishnamurti refused to examine the connection between the capac- ity for constant wakefulness in the moment and working on oneself through practice, or the cathartic clarification of the psyche, in detail and to integrate the possible results of such studies into his theory, even though his own history of clarification is among the most dramatic and well-documented examples in the history of spiritual exercises. 9o
After Heidegger, it was above all Foucault who took up the bet and proved in his work how waking and thinking can once more be convincingly connected in a contemporary existential-intellectual project. From the circle of German thinkers who followed on from Heidegger and went to the limits of what was currently possible, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker is the most notable. It was he who probably
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
came closest to the paradoxical ideal of a pre-Socratism at the level of contemporary knowledge. His late central work, Zeit und Wissen [Time and KnowledgeJ91 - possibly the most profound scientific- philosophical book of the late twentieth century - was ignored by the public and colleagues alike, even by those not of the opinion that they were amusing themselves to death.
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HABITUS AND INERTIA
On the Base Camps o f the Practising Life
One More Time: Height and Width - Anthropological Proportionality
The preceding reflections on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Heidegger and Heraclitus leave us with a number of observations about the 'anthropological proportion' articulated by Binswanger. It was this Heidegger-inspired pioneer of psychiatric anthropology who elaborated the basic phenomenon of existential directedness into an elemental ethics of space or proportions - especially in his largely overlooked study on Ibsen from 1949. There he explains how human self-realization in ordinary life takes place above all in the polarity of narrowness and width, while the dramas of intellectual and artis- tic self-realization are mostly located in the dimension of depth and height. 92 In both cases one observes life's basic kinetic tendency, of which Goethe noted, 'we humans are dependent on extension and movement'. 93 While existential mobility in the horizontal is domi- nated by a relative symmetry of outward and return journeys, vertical mobility is often characterized by an asymmetry when the descent is not simply a mirror of the ascent, no application of the Heraclitean formula 'The way up and the way down are the same', but rather a fall- I have examined this relationship from the perspective of a key phrase from Binswanger's texts also adopted by Pravu Mazumdar: 'tragic verticality'. Binswanger does not, incidentally, comment on the natural objection that there is also a kind of fall in the horizon- tal, when the step into width becomes a forwards without return, as embodied by the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman.
The tragic asymmetries observed by the psychiatrist in vertical movements do not concern height as such, either in the physical or in
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CONQUEST OF THE
sense. are more to
agent who climbs to a height at which he is unable to move. In
one should assume that the same ability which allows a climber to reach the top would also bring them down again without any trace of 'tragic verticality'. Only if non-ability or non-consideration of the boundary conditions for ability interferes, as with the flight of Icarus, does a fall become likely. Otherwise, the degree of ability is more or less sufficient for the descent as well. The aviation industry, which is certainly a non-Icarian art form, proves this every day, as does disci- plined alpinism. It is only upon advancing into the unmastered and unsecured that the problem of a fall arises - whether the protagonist undertakes something at their own risk for which they lack the tech- nique, or attempts something new that they cannot have mastered by virtue of its untried nature. I shall refrain from elaborating on these reflections with reference to the situations of the artist, the criminal, the dictator and the merchant adventurer; they are all in situations that are unimaginable without an inherent indination to fail- though not without a chance to learn something in the respective situation. With these in mind one can recall the saying, attributed to Oliver Cromwell, that a man never climbs higher than when he does not know where he is going.
At the Base Camp: The Last Humans
Following on from Binswanger's expositions on 'anthropological pro- portionality', we arrive at what I shall call the 'base camp problem'. Once again, Nietzsche must inevitably be considered its inventor. It appears at the moment when Zarathustra, the prophet of human- ity's ascent beyond itself in a way that can no longer be conceived of Platonically, stumbles at the very start of his mission on the fact that the vast majority of people have no interest in becoming more than they are. If one investigates the average direction of their wishes, one finds that they simply want a more comfortable version of what they have. This state of the culture of wishes is where Zarathustra's words about the last human initiate his attack on the audience. His improvised second speech - the first had announced the Obermensch - is meant to describe the most despicable creature under the sun: the human without longing, the final stuffy bourgeois, who has invented happiness and gazes after the passing women while sunbathing by the pool - why else would he be squinting? In his address, however - which one could, incidentally, call the first virtual pop event in the
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HABITUS
history
speak to pride listeners, he the conclusion
have none, and are not interested in regaining Hence the enthusi- astic response from the audience, which, after Zarathustra's failed provocation-therapeutic intervention, is: 'Give us this last human! '94 Zarathustra has no reply to this. From that point on, he divides people into his audience and his friends. The audience consists of those able to ask themselves: 'What is in it for me if I exceed myself? '
Nietzsche's talk of the last human provides the first version of the base camp problem. It appears as soon as it becomes possible to claim programmatically that base camps and summits are the same thing- or, more precisely, when some can argue in all seriousness that the stay at the base camp and its prolongation render any form of summit expedition superfluous. I have already explained indirectly how such understandings of existence on the plateau of Mount Improbable became plausible from the nineteenth century on, both in Darwinism and in Marxism: they follow from the standard interpretation of evo- lutionary theory, where the human being in the status quo embodies the final stage of becoming - with the only unsolved matter being the redistribution of end-stage achievements. This is what is argued in the corresponding social-political programmes. The entire twentieth century is marked by equations of base camp and summit founded on different ideological justifications - from the early proclamations of design for a transformation of everyday life to the total coexistence of life forms in postmodernism. In a related spirit, Analytic Philosophy declared ordinary language the last language, and liberalism termed the amalgam of consumption and insurance the last horizon. It may be that ecologism, which is in the process of becoming the central discourse of the present day, constitutes the extrapolation of this tendency into the twenty-first century through the fact that it has proclaimed ecosystems and species the last natures, thus asserting the inviolability of their present state of development. 95
One could therefore say that the philosophy of the twentieth century, especially in its social-philosophical varieties, offers - for the reasons already hinted at - nothing more than a series of state- ments about the base camp problem. The authors I have quoted also cast their votes on the matter - usually in a both/and form, with an emphasis on the basal side. Of these, Nietzsche is the only one who unconditionally embraced the primacy of the vertical. For him, the only justification for the base camp is as a starting point for expedi- tions to ever higher and more obscure summits. Closest to him are early and late Foucault and the heroistically inclined early Heidegger,
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THE OF THE IMPROBABLE
not
he wanted to 'set out' into the German destiny was nothing more than a base camp gone wild. In \Vittgenstein's Tractatus period too, where the author used his well-known disposable ladder, there are traces of the hope that one could climb over the horizontal universe of facts and proceed to the ethical summit through a vertical act. In later Wittgenstein, on the other hand, as well as middle-period Foucault and late Heidegger, there is an unmistakable shift to the horizontaL They perform, each in their own way and for very different reasons, a sort of resignatio ad mediocritatem. The playing of language games, the repeated study of the discourses of earlier power games and the late pietistic waiting for a new sign of being - these are all attitudes in a camp where the path evidently comes to an end, even if the authors have preserved some leftover aspirations to ascent. As far as Binswanger is concerned, it seems to me that he does not develop an opinion of his own on the critical question, instead contenting himself with a reference to the desirability of 'anthropological proportional- ity'. As he sympathized with the late Heidegger on the one hand, but
on the other hand, as a member of the psychiatric mountain rescue corps, attempted to retrieve the 'extravagant', one can consider him one of the outposts of the base camp who, because of their profession, still had some understanding of the dynamics of verticality.
Bourdieu, Thinker of the Last Camp
Among the authors in the second half of the twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu stands out for the problematic merit that in his work, the rejection of any notion of summit expeditions took on dogmatic pro- portions. He is, to put it pointedly, the sociologist of the definitive base camp - and even acted for a while as its intellectual prefect, com- parable in this respect to jiirgen Habermas, whose publications on the theory of communicative action can likewise be read as pamphlets on the overall completion of base camps in flat areas. Bourdieu's appear- ance on the French intellectual scene had taken place in the early 1960s, when the theoretical 'field' - to take up one of its preferred concepts - was almost completely occupied by Marxistically coded forms of social critique. As a temporary assistant to Raymond Aron and a reader of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Alfred Schiitz, he could not fail to see the inadequacies of Marxist approaches, espe- cially in their fatal extrapolations by Lenin and Stalin. If he wished to earn a place in the success field of French critical culture, he would
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HABITUS INERTIA
HH'5'-""5'" games ment exploitation critique, compensating
sive power through additional efforts in the area of power critique. This could only be achieved by progressing from a theory of direct domination to a logic of domination without dominators. Now it was anonymous and pre-personal agencies that gained the rank of a repressive sovereign. This constellation spawned all the turns and innovations that characterize Bourdieu's variety of 'critical theory' - and, as German readers know, 'critical theory' is a pseudonym for a Marxism abandoned by a faith in the possibility of revolution. In this situation, the theory itself - along with an art that behaves increas- ingly subversively - becomes a substitute for revolution.
The foremost characteristic of Marxist thought was the intro- duction of an anti-idealistic hierarchy of reality. According to this, the base, understood as a political-economical 'praxis', possesses a higher reality content - more power to bring about effects and side effects - than all other 'spheres', which accordingly had to content themselves with the role of a 'superstructure' determined by the base. As this demotion to secondary status concerned the state, the legal system, the educational system and all other articulations of 'culture', the political ontology of the basal made a deep caesura in the tradi- tional ecology of the spirit. The most consistent realization of this approach could be observed in Stalinism, whose modus operandi can be summed up in a simple formula: destruction of the superstructure by connecting it to the base.
Habitus: The Class Within Me
Whoever wanted to found a 'critical theory' after 1945 could, in the light of Stalin's actions, only do so via an alternative understanding of reality as 'praxis'. It was therefore necessary to redefine 'praxis', and to show that it followed different laws from those described in economically bound standard Marxism. This only became feasible by moving the base lower down, and anyone who wanted to go deeper here had to climb down from the level of production processes to that of psychophysical realities. The zeitgeist did its bit to support this intention: from a theory-historical perspective, the rise of the 'body' began in the 1960s, when late Marxism realized how much its survival depended on proving that there was a substitute base. In Germany, the turn took place mostly in the form of studies on the deformed 'subjective factor', while in France, a form of ethnological
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
on
Bourdieu become aware profound
ence between an economy of honour and one of exchange since his investigations, begun in 1958, into the North Algerian agricultural societies of Kabylia; this led him to seek a new answer to the 'base' question.
This is where Bourdieu's most important conceptual innovation, the idea of habitus, comes into play. It undoubtedly constitutes one of the most fruitful tools of contemporary sociology, even though, as I will show, Bourdieu himself only uses it in a very restricted way. The greatest merit of the habit concept is that with its help, an a prima vista satisfying answer is provided to the two insoluble riddles of con- ventional Marxism: firstly, how the so-called base can mirror itself in the so-called superstructure; and secondly, how 'society' infiltrates individuals and keeps itself present within them. The solution is this: through class-specific psychosomatic forms of training, the social lodges itself in the individuals as a disposition at once produced and producing, unfolding an autonomous life that, while open to experi- ence and life-historically active, is ultimately shaped indelibly by the past.
The analogy between habitus and language immediately catches the eye, for it too forms a structured and structuring social reality sedimented in the speakers. The structuralist zeitgeist of the 1960s may have ensured that Bourdieu temporarily engaged with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the matter at hand was thema- tized under the term langue. De facto, Bourdieu invoked an analogy between his concept of habitus and Chomsky's idea of grammar, in so far as one understands the latter as a system of conditioned spon- taneities based on physically rooted deep structures. The possibility of comparison comes on the one hand from class-dependent behavioural dispositions, and on the other hand from grammar-dependent condi- tionings of speech. One could say that the habitus is the first language of the class training performed on me, and, however much individuals might strive for new content and competencies in the course of their lives, they remain shaped by their mother tongue in Bourdieu's eyes - and, because they are shaped, they in turn shape.
Base and Physis, Or: Where Is Society?
The habitus, then, is the somatized class consciousness. It clings to us
like a dialect that never disappears, one that not even Henry Higgins 180
HABITUS AND INERTIA
wealth, displays his wealth at his banquets, members of the old elite recognize the typical slave in him. When Bourdieu, on the other hand, the grand- son of a poor metayer and the son of a postman from Bearn, rose to become a master thinker and dominate the 'field' of academic soci- ology in France, the thought of the ineradicable habitus of his class helped him to allay the suspicion that he had betrayed his origins through his career. From this perspective, the theory of habitus has the inestimable advantage of serving the moral reassurance of its author: even if I wanted to betray my own class, it would be impos- sible, because its absorption into myoId Adam forms the basis of my social being. Aside from that, the theory helps its users in the aca- demic world and the open intellectual market alike to maintain the pretence of critique by providing them with a means of reducing the manifold vertical differentiations of 'society' to the simple matrix of the privileges of power - be they the prerogatives of the male sex or
of capital owners, material or symbolic.
The price Bourdieu had to pay for lowering the base dimension into
the psychophysical structures of the individual was much higher than he himself realized. Firstly, as already hinted, this habitus concept made him forfeit the better means for describing the play of vertical tensions in the numerous disciplinic fields of the social space with suf- ficient accuracy.
De facto, Bourdieu's work as a writer is original and fruitful, for example in his analysis of the struggles for distinction and the ethnography of Homo academicus - not primarily through the application of the habitus concept, but rather through the author's intense attention as an outsider to rivalry-based ranking mechanisms where class influences playa certain part, but are not decisive. At his best, Bourdieu writes a satire without laughs about the nouveaux riches and the ambitious; where he thinks most profoundly, he touches on the tragic leftovers of the human condition.
A further weakness of the habitus concept, interpreted thus, is that it cannot grasp the individualized forms of existential self-designs. Bourdieu's analysis necessarily remains within the typical, the pre- personal and the average, as if Homo sociologicus were to have the last word on all matters. In a certain sense, Bourdieu parodies the analysis of the 'they' in Heidegger's Being and Time from an inverted perspective. While human Dasein is, for Heidegger, 'proximally and for the most part' [zunachst und zumeist] subject to the anonymity of the 'they', and only attains authenticity through an act of decisive- ness, the authenticity of existence for Bourdieu lies in the habitus,
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over a more or com- petencies and attributes of distinction This reversal of the 'they' analysis follows almost automatically from agreement with the political ontology of practical thought, which states that the base is more real than the things that are superstructurally added. This would mean that humans are most themselves where their shaping through the habitus pre-empts them - as if the most genuine part of us were our absorbed class. The part of us that is not ourselves is most ourselves. The habitus theory provides a clandestine hybrid of Heidegger and Lukacs by taking from the former the idea of a self dispersed among the 'they', and from the latter the concept of class consciousness. It builds the two figures together in such a way that the pre-conscious class 'in itself' within us becomes our true self. This corresponds to Bourdieu's division of the social space into diverse 'fields' - in which one naturally finds no 'persons', only habitus- controlled agents who are compelled to realize their programmes within the spaces offered by the field.
Whoever considers such suggestions acceptable may ultimately also find it plausible that in Distinction, Bourdieu's most successful book, the passing of aesthetic or culinary judgements of taste constitutes a reproductive medium of 'domination', Word should have got around among sociologists that one can arrive at substantially more precise statements in these matters with a more horizontally than vertically differentiating theory of milieu, combined with an instrument for observing mimetic mechanisms, than with a theory of anonymous domination. As far as the base-superstructure schema as such is con- cerned, it has been refuted too often to merit any further comments. I would add that little effort would be required in order to show that the augmenting element often has no less power over reality than that which it augments - and sometimes even more. If this were not the case, humans would only seemingly be alterable and learning beings.
On the Genius of Habit: Aristotle and Thomas
The decisive weakness of the habitus concept in Bourdieu's version, however, is that it does not depict what it purports to be explain- ing, namely the region of 'habit', in a remotely adequate fashion. In this author's work, the great tradition of philosophical and psycho- physiological reflection on the role of habits in the formation of human existence shrinks to a remainder that is usable for the purpose of a critique of power. Instead of entering the panorama of effec-
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acts
theory la contents narrow
segment of habits that constitute the sediments of the 'class within us' - it cheats its users of the wealth of that to which its name refers. Naturally Bourdieu, who adopted the term from Erwin Panofsky's study Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951, was generally aware of its philosophical history. 96 He knew that the habitus concept in Thomas Aquinas and the hexis concept in Aristotle had to playa substantial part in underpinning the establishment of an ethics within the framework of an aretological anthropology (that is, a theory which portrays human beings as the creatures capable of virtues), but consciously ignored the broad understanding of the habitus doc- trine, restricting himself to those aspects which were suitable for his purposes.
Among the earlier authors one already finds the well-developed figure of habitus as an elastic mechanism of a two-sided, passive- spontaneous quality. The 'force of habit' was understood by the ancients not simply as being overwhelmed by routines, but as a pre- personally based generative principle of action. When the scholas- tics speak of habitus, they do not mean a Janus-headed disposition looking back with one face at the series of similar past acts in which it manifested itself, while the other face looks ahead to the next occa- sions on which it will prove itself anew. The habitus thus constitutes a 'potency' that is formed by earlier acts and 'updates' itself in new ones. Such a concept naturally came in handy for Bourdieu; as a sociologist, he was on the lookout for concepts that place human behaviour in a plausible intermediate position between excessive social determination and unlimited individual spontaneity. However, he only took over those elements of the classical habitus concept that could be integrated into his version of the base, which, as stated above, means the pre-conscious effects of the 'class within us'.
Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, had been con- cerned with explaining the possibility of the 'virtuous within us', or even the 'good within us'. They understood habit, in so far as it is good habit, as an embodied disposition that prepares the actor for virtuous actions - and indeed, in the case of bad habits, for bad deeds, though these are not the focus of their investigation. For the classical thinkers of practical philosophy, hexis and habitus are constantly on call: they are expected to leap up when the occasion arises and carry out the good and valuable as if it were the easiest thing in the world. It can only appear easy, however, if and because sustained practice has eroded the improbability of good in advance. As explanations
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in so as act morally and are determined a state of having and being had, influencing and being influenced, disposing and being disposed, acting and having acted, hexis and habitus are anything but the mere auxiliary concepts of a critical sociology. They are anthro- pological concepts that describe a seemingly mechanical process in terms of insistence and intensification in order to elucidate the incarnation of the mental. They identify man as the animal capable of doing what it is supposed to if one has tended to its ability early enough. At the same time, they see the dispositions already attained growing further into new, heightened forms. 97 Thomas does not need to write any letters about the aesthetic education of the human race to achieve that - conceptual clarifications with instructions on how to
be ready for good are entirely sufficient.
It is, in fact, already possible to read the classical theory of habitus
as a theory of training. Whoever has practised properly overcomes the improbability of good and allows virtue to seem like second nature. Second natures are dispositions of ability that enable humans to stay on their level as artistes of virtus. They perform the near- impossible, the best, as if it were something easy, spontaneous and natural that virtually happens of its own accord. Good, to be sure, is not yet understood as an 'obligation', much less a 'value' depend- ent on my positing and evaluating it. It is the rope stretched out by God on which the artistes of overcoming must walk - and overcom- ing always means passing off the wondrous as the effortless. 98 That is why Jean Genet, in his crypto-Catholically inspired advice for the tightrope walker, recommended always keeping in mind that he owed everything to the rope. 99 Even if we can no longer think about 'good' in the same way, the classical analysis of habitus remains current; it can easily be translated, mutatis mutandis, into the languages of contemporary training psychology, neurocybernetics and pragmatics. With its help, the psychophysical conditions of possibility of correct, appropriate and skilled actions can be explained at a high standard with proximity to their subject. It certainly does not, as the crypto- Marxist interpretation of the 'base' would like, explain how the social enters the body. It rather states how the disposition for carrying out what is good, correct and appropriate can be incorporated into human existence. Allow me to add: 'good', 'correct' and 'appropriate' are names for the extraordinary, to whose nature it belongs to appear in the guise of the normal.
The older theory of habitus thus forms part of a doctrine of incor- poration and in-formation of virtues. It is applied aretology, carried
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out
people, strives towards act. An
of this kind carries its self-reinforcing principle within itself. Its opti- mization is not subject to any limits imposed from without. Even the saints, writes Prosper of Aquitaine, 'always have something left in which they must be able to grow' (superest quo crescere possint). Whoever takes up the habitus theory as formulated by Thomas is already halfway to an interpretation of being human as an artistry of good. This provides an anthropological concept for the effective- ness of inner technologies that subtly articulates the vertical tension inherent in every area of ability. It explains how precisely that which is already carried out fairly successfully feels the pull of something better, and why that which is performed with great skill stands in the attraction field of an even higher skill. The authentic form of the habitus theory describes humans in all discretion as acrobats of virtus - one could also say as carriers of a moral competency that turns into social and artistic power. That is the wide-open door through which the thinkers of the Renaissance only had to pass to transform the saints into the virtuosos.
Homo Bourdivinus: The Other Last Human
By this standard of analysis, Bourdieu's appropriation of the habitus concept seems like a wilful impoverishment. It resembles a regression to an involuntary pre-Socratism in which the division of possessions into tameable passions and formable habits has not yet taken place. Homo bourdivinus is like one possessed by class, riding both having and had in a circle on the broomstick of habitus. He is the human at the base camp who acts as if it were the goal of the expedition. For him, the journey upwards is over before it has begun. This youngest brother of the last human has been drastically shown that whatever distinctions he might acquire are never more than supplements to the habitus, pseudo-vertical differentiations within the camp popu- lation. What Bourdieu calls the class society is a base camp where all ascents take place internally, while ascents to external goals are strictly ruled out. As Bourdieu, like any member of a non-utopian left, secretly knows all too well that the 'classless society' cannot exist for a number of convincing reasons, critique at the base camp is limited to keeping up the appearance of critique - which makes sense as long as gains in distinction in the critical scene can thus be achieved. Hence Bourdieu's successes in the milieu populated by the 'conformists of
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
lOO
say
and
It should hardly be necessary to emphasize here that these objec-
tions should not be mistaken for destructive criticism. Bourdieu's direct and indirect contributions to understanding human practice behaviour are, in some respects, as valuable as Wittgenstein's lan- guage game theory and Foucault's discourse analyses - but, like those projects, the habitus theory in the form propounded by Bourdieu needs to be turned around to release its stimulating potential for a general theory of anthropotechnics. For this, it is enough to disen- tangle the habitus concept, to separate it from the fixation on class phenomena, and restore the wealth of meaning it possessed in the Aristotelian and later the empiricist tradition. It only unfolds its full power, however, when combined with Nietzsche's programme of 'positivizing' asceticisms - this would be the equivalent in today's context of the somewhat inappropriate term used by Nietzsche, that of 'making natural'.
This demands a dissolution of the singular 'habitus' - one head, one habitus - and an uncovering of the multitude of discrete, habitual readinesses to act that accumulate in each individual. This brings to light the unsummarizable plurality of elaborable 'habits', or train- able ability modules, of which real individuals 'consist'. Bourdieu's 'habitus' is the 'ensemble of social relations' well known since the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, which can no longer be thought of as an abstract 'being', but is rather 'inherent' in the individual. Admittedly, even Marx had not conceived this inherence adequately, being even more of a slave to the stereotypes of power critique than Bourdieu. If class-specific aspects manifest themselves in the ensemble of disci- plines and practice complexes that de facto constitute what is con- cretely 'inherent' in the individual, then all the better for us if we have learned from Bourdieu how to decipher them. Privileging this layer of the assimilated as the 'base' is more of a concern for sociologists.
Teaching as a Profession: The Attack on the Inertias
At this stage of our reflections, it can become clear why and with what intention the older tradition turned its attention to such topics as habit, hexis and habitus. The explication of behaviour, the habit- ual, the psychomatically assimilated is, as implied in the references to ethics as First Theory, a partial phenomenon of the process I termed the division of possession into passions and habits. This transforma-
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place pressure were the most significant carriers attack on
existing psychosocial conditions.
One can only grasp the true meaning of the two-thousand-year
molestation of humanity by teachers if one examines the angle from which the knowing attack the not-yet-knowing. Only where the secu- larization of the psyche was on the daily agenda, for individuals and collectives alike, did the inner conditions of inertia among those to be taught become thematic for the teachers. These, as some now began to understand, are responsible for the fact that people cannot simply follow the directions of their new ethical directors without further ado. If the first philosopher-pedagogues spoke obsessively about habits, then, it was in the context of a resistance analysis: its purpose was to show how that already present within humans, namely the hexis, the habitus, the doxa (joined in the eighteenth century by prejudice), hinders or entirely prevents the absorption of the new, the philosophical ethos, the explicit logos, the purified mathesis and the clarified method. 'Habit', both the word and the matter, stands for the factual possession of the psyche by a block of already acquired and more or less irreversibly embodied properties, which also include the resilient mass of opinions dragged along. As long as the block rests inert, the new education cannot begin. That observations of this kind were also collected and documented in the Asian world is demonstrated by the well-known anecdote of the Zen master who, to the amazement of his pupil, poured a cup of tea and did not stop when it was full, rather continuing to pour: this was meant to show that a full spirit cannot be taught anything. The course of study, then, consists in pondering the question of how to empty the cup. Whether one should subsequently fill it anew or cultivate its emptiness, once reached, as a value of its own is another matter.
The early schools are, on the whole, base camps whose board members have impressive peak-scaling ambitions, even if the defini- tions of those peaks are school-specific. Each school spontaneously develops an internal verticality and, sooner or later, a system of levels that produces a 'class' society sui generis - one can still recognize the origin of the term 'class' from non-political gradations quite well here. But the early school, for the time being, retains a natural extroversion. It follows tasks that transcend its system, whether in the qualification of students for professions and offices, supra-curricular perfection in personality forming, illumination or the supremacy of philosophers - or whatever else the great shots in the dark might be called. The late school, by contrast, puts an end to transcendent
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THE OF THE
outside the school. It turns into the base camp
ants only study for shifts of location within the camp -just as it was Bourdieu's primary intuition to describe the games of ambition in class society as pseudo-vertical efforts to acquire more or less illusory gains in distinction.
Identity as the Right to Laziness
The world of pseudo-verticality is the playground of identities. An 'identity', after all, whether presented as personal or collective, can only become attractive and valuable if people wish to distinguish themselves from one another without the licence to set themselves apart hierarchically. In this view, the concept of identity circulat- ing in contemporary sociology forms the generalized counterpart to Bourdieu's doctrine of habitus; with its help, inertia is elevated from a deficiency requiring correction to a phenomenon of value. My iden- tity consists of the complex of my unrevisable personal and cultural inertias. While Sartre claimed: 'The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have',101 the identity owners say: 'I am what has me. ' The reality of my being is guaranteed by the sum of those things that possess me. The identicals take themselves as a ready-made; in the document folder, they step with themselves under the wide roof of values that have a claim to preservation. They introduce themselves as systems of inertia, demanding the latter's ide- alization by ascribing the highest cultural value to the inert deposited within themselves. While the Stoics of antiquity devoted their lives to the goal of erecting within themselves, through constant practice, the statue that crafted its best self from invisible marble, the moderns find themselves as finished inertia sculptures and set themselves up in the park of identities, regardless of whether they prefer the ethnic wing or the individualistic open-air space.
Next to habitus, therefore, identity is the central value of base camp culture - and if identity is augmented by a trauma, there is nothing left to obstruct the idealization of the value core. What is decisive is that the very thought of new heights must be frowned upon - if they were climbed, the deposited stores could lose worth. If and because previous achievements as such are placed under cul- tural protection, any expedition project in the vertical is sacrilege, a mockery of all framed values. In the regime of identities, all energies are de-verticalized and handed over to the filing department. From
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are on
is 'progressive hanging' nor gradation. In horizon of the base camp, each identity is worth every other, Identity thus provides the super-habitus for all those who want to be as their local influences have made them and are content with that. In this way, the identicals ensure that they are out of earshot if the impera- tive 'You must change your life! ' should unexpectedly sound again somewhere.
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CUR HOMO ARTISTA On the Ease of the Impossible
Catapults
In the course of these investigations, we seem to have reached a point at which it would be productive to take stock of the distance covered. It leads, pointedly put, from anecdotal steps to approach the planet of the practising to the emergence of the region we call 'habits' - and then from the appearance of habits to the leaps into the supra-ordinary. This term does not refer to the average improb- ability of nature- and social-historical specializations on the plateau of Mount Improbable, but rather to the above-average improbability that is reached as soon as individual people - whether alone or in the company of co-conspirators - begin to catapult themselves out of the habitus communities to which they initially and mostly belong. Once one has grasped the fatefulness of the abrupt and uncanny secession of the heightened from the inhabitants of the base camps, it becomes evident that cultural theory can only be meaningfully carried out as the description of catapults.
Here we once again see the explicifying movement that we know drives and accompanies the progress of civilizations towards cognitive self-display. Explication breaks up what is found in confused disclos- edness, and augments the aggregate of the already-discovered with further discoveries. In the process, the boundaries between the com- monplace and the unusual are shifted - people increasingly become the creators of self-performed miracles. As anyone would concede, nothing is more obviously natural than for humans to be 'entangled in habits'. Nothing could be less obviously natural, however, than for individuals who, not infrequently, later act as pioneers in ques- tions of world-orientation for their collectives to find themselves in
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CUR HOMO ARTISTA
a secesSlOn IS movement supra-ordinary can be observed in birthplaces of philosophy, in Greece as well as India and China. Cultural histori- ans associate this process with such phenomena as urbanization and division of labour - which does little to elucidate the matter. What is genuinely thought-provoking is rather the question of how, in the course of this secession, the complex of acquired habits as such could become thematic, and the thought of supra-ordinary things powerful, within individual humans.
However one answers this question, one thing is clear: it is only in this separation that the human in advanced civilization discovers itself as the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, that cannot remain as it was. Difference within humans is now primed as difference between humans. It divides 'societies' into classes of which the theorists of class 'society' know nothing. The upper class com- prises those who hear the imperative that catapults them out of their old life, and the other classes all those who have never heard or seen any trace of it - normally people who are quick to admire, and thus make it clear that higher efforts can exclusively be a matter for the admired, but certainly not the admirers.
This non-political division of classes initiates the history of the inner witness or 'observer'. Swimming in the waters of habitus, dis- courses and language games is one thing; getting out and watching one's fellow humans from the edge as they swim in the habitus pool is another. As soon as this difference develops a language of its own to become a doctrine and life form, those based on the shore distance themselves from the swimmers. When, therefore, the ancient Indians discovered the observer or witness consciousness and equated it with atman, the subjective world principle, they created routes of access to a surplus of attention that simultaneously silences and mobilizes them. And when Heraclitus deems it impossible to step into the same river twice, this may be a passing reference to the irreversible stream of becoming - which is how the dictum is often read, in convenient analogy to 'everything flows'. In reality, the opaque formula reminds us of a deeper irreversibility: whoever steps out of the water can no longer return to the first way of swimming.
With the emergence of consciousness from the habit nature of human behaviour, a boundary is reached that, once visible, must already be overstepped. One cannot discover the habits without adopting a certain distance from them - in other words, without getting into a duel that clarifies who dominates the ring. Not everyone wants to win this fight; conservatives of all periods feign weakness in
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to overcome to to serve its victory as if it were invincible. Others, by contrast, are con- vinced that habits are foreign rulers under which no real life can be lived. This is the position brought to light by Foucault among ancient authors in his late studies on 'self-concern'. 'Concern for oneself' is the attitude of those who have encountered the greatest of all oppo- nents within themselves - the two-headed daimon which, as we saw, keeps humans in a state of possession: on one occasion as an impulse power, that is to say a complex of affects that rise up in me, and on another as an inertial power, that is to say a complex of habits that have sedimented themselves in me. The secularization of the psyche discussed in the same context consists in nothing other than the crea- tion of a new handling art that turns possessions into manipulable dispositions. In this transition, the enchanters disenchant themselves and change into teachers. They are the provocateurs of the future,
who build the catapults for shots into the supra-ordinary.
The Axial Age Effect: The Humanity of Two Speeds
The discovery of both passions and habits forms the psychological counterpart to the long-known process termed 'the discovery of the mind' by philosophers and philologists. Karl Jaspers summarized this complex with the somewhat mysterious title 'Axial Age' and named five places of 'breakthrough': China, India, Persia, Palestine and Greece. These, he states, are the locations in which advanced civilizatory progress in intellectualization took place first of all, and with unforgettable long-range effects. In the period between 800 and 200 Be, people in those cultures took the 'step into the universal' that we continue to this day in everything we do with an authentically civilizatory intention. According to Jaspers, the first outlines of what would later be called 'reason' and 'personality' became visible during that time. Above all, however, it was from that point that the divide between the most heightened individuals and the many grew immeas- urably. Jaspers writes:
What the individual achieves is by no means passed on to all. The gap between the peaks of human potentiality and the crowd became excep- tionally great at that time. Nonetheless, what the individual becomes indirectly changes all. 102
By advancing their exercises on the tightrope of humanization, the extremists introduce the duty for everyone to pass a test in intermedi-
192
to remain in people obtain
watching makes them dizzy.
In reality, the discovery of passions and habits cannot be separated
from the discovery of opinions, for the same interruption that allows humans to step out of the river of emotions and habits also makes them attentive to the sphere of mental routines. This interruption, which signals the entrance of the observer, irreversibly creates new positions concerning the totality of facts, inside as well as outside. Stepping out of the river means abandoning the old security of the habitus in the inherited culture and ceasing to be a growth of the first cultural community. Now the aim must be to found a new world from the shore with new inhabitants.
For this reason, the Axial Age effect is not so much based on a sudden worldwide interest in increased intellectualization; it comes from the gigantic disturbance of habitus that followed the discov- ery, from the shore, of the inertias embodied in humans. The most important cause for this is the inner acceleration triggered by the early cultures of writing. This was responsible for the overtaking of the habitus of the non-writers by the brains of the writers - just as the bodies of ascetics, athletes and acrobats overtake the bodies of everyday humans. The velociferic power103 of writing practice, which entails additional accelerating disciplines, makes the inertia of the old ethos sunk into the average bodies palpable. Where accelerating prac- tice asserts its effects, cultural evolution becomes divided; the result is a humanity of two speeds.
It is this disturbance that forces the secession of an elite of learn- ing and practising parties from the old commonalities. It leads to the construction of a new heaven over the old earth, and of a new koinon over the old communes. The koinon that must be conquered, that shared realm in which, since the Milesians, the stars, the logos and the polis have supposedly testified to one and the same order, is much too sublime and remote from everyday institutions to be accessible to all. It is from this that the basic paradox of all universalisms develops: a common system for all is set up in which most can only participate in the mode of non-comprehension. The paradigm for this is the division - which has been dominant for three thousand years and partially revised for barely two hundred - of humanity into its literate and non-literate factions. Virtually, after all, everyone could be able to write, but only few do actually write - and those few will unwaver- ingly believe they are writing for everyone else. The same applies to all figures of logical, ethical or medial socialism. Some might call the
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
setting of the universalism trap the intellectual side of the entrance into a class society, though the distinguishing criterion, admittedly, no longer consists in the power of an armed lord over his unarmed servant; it lies rather in the self-arming of the practising individuals against the inertias within themselves - through logic, gymnastics, music and art in general. In this practice-cultural turn, the role models of Axial Age spirituality are constituted: the wise men, the illuminated, the athletes, the gymnosophists, the sacred and profane teachers. It is with figures of this type that the people of advanced civilizations would concern themselves in the subsequent millennia (artists in the modern sense were not initially an issue). They would ensure that culture time became the time of intellectual role models.
Getting to the Other Side: Philosophy as Athletics
To continue the metaphor of stepping out of the river, humans who have accepted the task of explicating the inertia within them find themselves forced by the course of experience to switch to the other side of their self-findings no fewer than three times. By noting how passions are working within them, they understand that they must reach the other side of passion so that they do not simply suffer from the passions, but rather become skilled at suffering. 104 By noting to what extent they are controlled by habits, they immediately under- stand that it would be decisive to cross to the other side of habits so that they are not simply possessed by them, but rather possess them. And by noting that their psyche is populated with confused notions, it occurs to them how desirable it would be to arrive at the other side of the tumult of notions so that they are not simply visited by muddled thoughts, but develop logically stable ideas. Thought begins when the charade of associations ends that is currently being described as a competition of 'memes' for free capacities in the neocortex. This threefold change of sides forms the ethical programme in all activities grouped together by Plato under the invented term 'philosophy'.
The word 'philosophy' undoubtedly contains a hidden allusion to the two most important athletic virtues, which enjoyed almost uni- versal popularity at the time of Plato's intervention. It refers firstly to the aristocratic attitude of 'philotimy', the love of time, that glorious prestige promised to victors in contests, and secondly to 'philopony', the love of panos, namely effort, burden and strain. It is no coinci- dence that the patron saint of athletes was Hercules, the performer of the twelve deeds that were preserved in the collective memory as
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as
Plato would later as of wisdom, gymnasts
and philosophers presented themselves long before them as friends of the toil that makes men into men, and as lovers of the long, hard labour placed between them and victory by the gods. The Cynics in particular later claimed Hercules as their ancestor in order to under- pin their thesis that they alone, the total ascetics among philosophers, were true athletes, while the sportsmen were no more than decadent musclemen chasing after ephemeral successes, without any notion of solid virtue or cosmos-suited reason.
The imperative 'You must change your life! ' thus resounded in ancient Europe from the fifth century Be onwards not only from the countless statues that the Greeks, like people possessed by an unbridled pictorial compulsion, erected in temple precincts and squares as if they wanted to augment the mortal polis-dwellers with a population of statues - presumably to draw attention to the similari- ties between gods and victors. l05 It comes even more from the new knowledge situation, or rather the altered attitude of the knowing to their tasks in life. Changing one's life now means breeding, through inner activations, a practice subject that will eventually be superior to its life of passions, habitus and notions. This means that anyone who takes part in a programme for de-passivizing themselves, and crosses from the side of the merely formed to that of the forming, becomes a subject. The whole complex known as ethics comes from the gesture of conversion to ability. Conversion is not the transition from one belief system to another; the original conversion takes place as an exit from the passivist mode of existence in coincidence with the entrance into the activating mode. 106 It is in the nature of the matter that this activation and the avowal of the practising life come to the same thing.
These observations allow us to grasp more precisely what Nietzsche had seen when he characterized the earth as the ascetic planet in his reflections on The Genealogy ofMorals. Askesis became inescapable from the moment when an avant-garde of observers found themselves compelled to overcome their inner obstacles - more precisely, the three obstacles that faced them in the form of passions, habits and unclear ideas. In view of this compulsion to clarify and practise, this three-obstacle run that appears at the beginning of higher culture, one can justifiably take Nietzsche's statement further and speak of the earth as the acrobatic planet. This phrase would also have the advantage of doing even more justice to Nietzsche's most important moral-philosophical intuition: in seeking with all his might to free the
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
point out
asceticisms of toughening and advancement among the old
gave the starting signal for a strictly artistic interpretation of human facts. If one refrains from the mistaken projection of the Obermensch into the future, it becomes evident what Nietzsche had realized: that, since the entrance of peoples into the phase of advanced civilization, every achiever acrobatically comes under tension.
Asceticism and Acrobatics
Acrobatics is involved whenever the aim is to make the impossible seem simple. It is not enough, therefore, to walk the tightrope and perform the saito mortale at a great height; the acrobat's decisive message lies in the smile with which he bows after the performance. It speaks even more clearly in the nonchalant hand gesture before his exit, the gesture one could take for a greeting to the upper tiers. In reality, it conveys a moral lesson: for our like, that is nothing. Our like - meaning those who have completed the course in impos- sibility, with making an impression as a subsidiary subject. Some of them remain in the arenas and stadiums until the end of their careers, others switch to asketeria and climb religious ladders instead, many retire to the forests and deserts, a further faction tries their hand at the visual and musical arts, and others still speculate on high-ranking civil service, maybe even the highest of all. Plato famously sought to show that the art of governing states can also be learned to perfection, provided the political artistes prepare themselves for the impossible in a forty-year course of study, from the tenth to the fiftieth year of their lives.