No More Learning

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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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-
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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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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. The ability to rule the state following ideas and not, as is usually the case, simply stumble from one situation to the next like a power clown - this too could, with the necessary will, be refined into a masterfully performed craft. One does not have to be born as a god, like the Pharaoh, to be a practitioner. It is sufficient for an enlightened Greek, with the right tuition, to practise themselves upwards psycho- technically to the pharaonic level.
Nietzsche's insights into the convergence of asceticism and artistry show him in step with the tendencies of the late nineteenth century, which I have described with such key phrases as 'athletic renaissance' and 'de-spiritualization of asceticisms'. If one has perceived these movements, it is easier to see why ascetic feelings of self-concern certainly do not begin from penitent self-humbling. Early practice
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intuition one must
other automatisms at all costs. Only thus 'man' come into the focus of those sequences of exercises which change his 'nature' in order to realize his 'nature'. Here he becomes the animal that is condemned to direct, practise and think. Philosophical anthropologists have been wont to say since the start of the twentieth century, with meaningful emphasis, that humans cannot simply live their lives, but must 'lead' them. 107 That is not untrue, and expresses an important insight - though it would be even more valuable if one could explain why there is no other way, and how it is that count- less people, especially in the addiction zones of the West, nonetheless
make more of an unleading and unled impression.
Anthropotechnics: Turning the Power of Repetition Against Repetition
The answer is to be found in the emergence of anthropotechnics during the axial age of practice. As soon as one knows that one is possessed by automated programmes - affects, habits, notions - it is time for possession-breaking measures. Their principle, as already noted, consists in crossing to the other side of repeated events. Since the discovery of repetition itself as the starting point for its own har- nessing, such a crossing has seemed practicable according to precise rules. This discovery was the premiere of anthropotechnic difference.
The explanation for this lies in the double-edged nature of the matter itself: with the power of repetition, one simultaneously grasps the dual nature of repetition as repeated repetition and repeating repetition. This highlights the distinction between active and passive in the subject of repetition with pathos. Now one understands: there is not only the affected, but also the affecting affect; not only prac- tised, but also practising habit; not only imagined, but also imagining notions. Each time, the chance lies in the active present participle: in this form, the activated human is celebrated as one who is autono- mously feeling, practising and imagining in opposition to the felt, the practised and the imagined. In this manner, a subject human gradu- ally sets itself apart from the object human - if it is permissible to use these unsuited, overly modern and cognitively tinged terms here. In the second position, the human stays the same as before - the passive, repeated being overwhelmed without a fight - whereas in the first, it becomes the post-passive, repeating, battle-ready being. Choosing the first path produces the 'educated human', of whom Goethe still
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a one. ! Os
on ascent to is the naiiJete once
belonged to it - together with the twofold attitude towards it: con- tempt for the overcome cliche and homesickness for the unbroken.
The discovery of 'deep-seated' habit as a barely corrigible inertial principle, then, invokes the sum of measures that we still feel and continue today as the most far-reaching innovation of the ancient world: the turn towards the art of education, paideia, which initially means something along the lines of 'art of the child' or 'technique for training boys'. Children could, in fact, only come into view methodi- cally as children after the emergence of habits: as those not yet pos- sessed by habits, they attract the attention of the meanwhile lively instructors. In the twilight of the teachers, which is simultaneously an anthropological twilight, the child changes from a mere burgeoning phenomenon to a protagonist in the drama of upbringing.
One could almost say that before this turn towards 'guidance of boys', children were culturally invisible. Only after the discovery of the region of habit do they gain the privilege of visibility, which can be temporarily diminished - as in medieval Europe - but is never entirely lost. Now the young become objects of a concern that develops into a veritable art: the art of controlling habit formations and building up complex competencies on a base of automatized exercises. The advantage of being a child, however, the relatively unformed nature and openness to influence, comes at the price of a natural disadvan- tage, namely the strong emotionality and spontaneity of the young - the early educators would not have called themselves 'pedagogues', however, had they not believed that they would cope with this in the long run. Here, behind the educator, one recognizes the barely dis- guised figure of the animal tamer - just as there is grooming behind all teaching. That is why the true history of pedagogy also recounts the shared history of children and animals. But when the animal tamer succeeds in training elephants to walk the tightrope, as Pliny describes in his natural history, or to write Greek and Latin words with their trunks, as mentioned by a different author, the pedagogue should provide more than mere training and enable his pupils to recognize and choose their careers from the multitude of possible ones.
Pedagogy as Applied Mechanics
In short: because the inertial quality of the habitual had been explic- itly understood in the twilight of the educators during the first millen-
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Be, was
habit in statu in to turn
resistance into a factor of co-operation.
This brings us to the underlying principle of all early anthropo-
technics. Every technical approach to humans - and that is precisely what pedagogy initially is - is based on the primal idea from classical mechanics of placing inertial forces in the service of the attempt to overcome inertia. This notion had its first triumph in the discovery of the lever principle. The smaller force can, if multiplied by the longer distance, move the larger force - a similar idea also underlies the pulley, which was known in antiquity. Meehani? , Greek for 'cunning', therefore means nothing other than outwitting nature with its own means. 109 Pedagogical meehane grows from the considered decision to use habit for its own negation - one could also say it uses the probable as a medium for increasing improbability. One divests habit of its resistance qualities and turns it towards the purpose of achiev- ing otherwise unattainable goals. This succeeds if the pedagogue is capable of gaining the greater pull - that is, getting to the root of conditioning through practising repetitions. From that point, one can say that repetitio est mater studiorum. Small human forces can achieve the impossible if they are multiplied by the longer distance of practice. 110
The discovery of this mechanics triggers the euphoria that shapes the spiritual schools in statu naseendi, in Asia and Europe alike. Hence the high training aims typical of early school and practice systems as found in the esoteric core of Platonism, as also in most forms of Brahmanic training and Taoist alchemy. Naturally, running a school always involves exotericism and preparation for offices. In the hot core of the teaching, however, is the guidance of adepts towards the vertical wall on which to attempt the ascent to the impos- sible. Behind the theses of the school's advertising brochure, which states 'Virtue can be learned', lies an esoteric radicalism that can be summarized in the message 'The divine can be learned' (which is unutterable on Western soil). How - if the ascent to the gods could be mastered through secure methods? If immortality were just a matter of practice? Whoever believes that also thinks, like Plato, the Indian teachers and the immortals of Taoism, that they have a mandate to teach the impossible, albeit never beyond a small circle of suitable initiates. The teaching assignment includes the use of all suitable means for overcoming inertia. How far this goes is shown by the long line of spiritual and athletic extremists who have shaped the image of humanity in previous millennia.
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE Didactic learning for the of
Regardless of whether the early school presented itself exoterically or esoterically, however, it never considered itself the goal of its activ- ity. The maxim of medieval schoolmasters - non scholae sed vitae discimus111 - clearly meant: we are not learning for the base camp; all that counts is the expedition. As strait-laced as this declaration may sound, however, it took on monstrous dimensions in its interpreta- tions. The word vita, on first reading, means no more than proving oneself on the outer front, in professions and offices; everyone involved in the lofty game realized, however, that this was only an initial step. In its deeper design, 'learning for life' was a maxim in favour of the most ambition projects of ascent - projects for which the divine was just high enough.
Such an equation of God and life was suitable for building up the most excessive vertical tension; it forced people to revise radically their conventional notions of the meaning of 'life'. It suddenly became possible to turn the attribute 'living' into a superlative and to multiply the noun 'life' by itself. Whoever says 'life' will sooner or later also say 'life of life'. Then, however, 'learning for life' means learning for pure surplus. In the course of studying the heightened life, one encounters the vita vitalis, which stands vertical in relation to the axis of empirical existence. This dictates the direction for the primary sur- realism: the vertical pull effective in all advanced civilizations, which was given the unfortunate name 'metaphysics' in the West. Perhaps 'metabiotics' would have been a more suitable term, or on Latin soil the word 'supravitalistics' - though one must admit that both words would have deserved to die of sheer ugliness immediately. The term 'metaphysics' kept itself at the top of our curricula until that other terminological monstrosity, the doctrine of 'survival' so central for the moderns, gained the upper hand.
Dying Performance: Death on the Metaphysical Stage
The hardest test for the new subject of the practising power is death, as it is the factor that forces people most strongly into passivity. Whoever challenges death, then, in order to integrate it into the domain of ability, will - if successful - have proved that it is within the realm of the humanly possible to surmount the insurmountable - or become one with the terrible. That is why all exercises directed against the controlling of the soul by intense affects, unexamined
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the
inevitably to measures
the possession of all possessions: the subordination of humans to the power of death. This can occur in two different ways: firstly through an asceticism, which leads to an artificially acquired attitude of being able to die. That is how the philosophical ars moriendi was read, whose primal scene is the death of Socrates, the most momentous dying performance in the Old European world; that is what was dem- onstrated by the Indian ascetics, who went through the art of leaving the body in numerous variations; and this was also demonstrated by the Japanese culture of suicide (seppuku), in which it was always extremely important to part with one's life as soon as there was a danger that it could outlast one's honour. Emancipation from the tyranny of death can also occur through the formulation of a myth that asserts the allegiance of the soul to the kingdom of the living God. In such cases - Egyptian doctrines of the afterlife and Christian Platonism provide the best-known examples - the soul's right of return is secured less through supplementary ascetic efforts than by living life with integrity.
Since the rise of the surrealisms of advanced civilizations, then, the climate on the ascetic planet has been subject to a constant change, something comparable to global warming through ever-increasing moral emissions. This forces the shift from simply 'living one's life' in the current of collective habitus to leading life under the influence of individualizing school powers. This new kind of guidance causes a defamiliarization of existence to the point where notions about the areas of school and life merge into that bizarre dogma that life itself is nothing more than one great pedagogical project that must be learned like an esoteric school subject - and along with life, the art of ending it in exemplary fashion. That is why what the Greeks called eutha- nasia, the art of the beautiful death, forms the secret centre of the acrobatic revolution; it is the rope over an abyss that the practising learn to cross in order to advance from life to meta-life.
Along with the death of Socrates as described by Plato, the Old European tradition has a second thanatologically momentous primal scene in which the emancipation of the intellectually practising from the tyranny of death could be observed at the greatest height: the death of Jesus as described in the gospels. In both passion stories, the emphasis is on the conversion of obligation into ability, an ability that transpires all the more impressively because circumstances impose a twofold passivity on the victims: firstly in the face of the injustice of the death sentence, and secondly in the face of the cruelty of the
the subjugation all subjugations,
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THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
case it
how man's appropriates external
sian through the fact that he, condemned rightly in formal terms wrongfully in factual terms, adapts the sentence to his own will and co-operates with the procedure imposed on him as if he himself were the organizer of the passion play into which he was forced.
The superordination of the voluntary over the compulsory is most brilliantly embodied by the allegory of the laws that speak to Socrates in the dialogue Crito. The personified laws tell the condemned man something along these lines: 'Everything would suggest, dear Socrates, that you liked it here in Athens more than anywhere else. We, the laws, and this city we rule, were dearly enough for you. You never went on travels, as many people do, to become acquainted with other cities and other laws. You praised the fate of existing under our leadership like no other - even at your trial, you proudly declared that you would rather die than be banished. You had seventy years in which to turn your back on us and this city, but you chose to stay with us. So if you wanted to flee from us now, in the face of the execu- tion we have decreed, how could you ever repeat elsewhere what you never tired of saying here: that man must regard virtue and justice more highly than anything else? Do not, therefore, follow Criton's advice to flee, but rather ours, which is this: stay here and continue your path to its end! ' Thereupon the wise man draws the only pos- sible conclusion for him:
'This is the voice I hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of flutes in the ears of Corybants. That voice prevents me from hearing any other. [. ••JI will follow the will of the gods.
'1l2
To What Extent It Is Right for Jesus to Say: 'It Is Finished'
The absorption of external compulsion into the protagonist's own will is also staged powerfully in the Golgotha account in the gospels, and is all the more impressive because an execution in the Roman style is as far as one could imagine from the civilized setting of the Greek art of dying. As far as the subordination of the victim to external acts of compulsion is concerned, the Jesuan passion greatly surpasses that of Socrates, and yet it is there that the transformation of obligation into an inalienable ability was demonstrated to greatest consequence.
The scene of the final moments on the cross is itself loaded with exemplifying energies by the evangelists. While we are told in Mark
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a
iug the sponge, Luke 23:46 describes same scene
in latently ability-coloured transitional terms: 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit', et haec dicens expiravit. John 19:30 adds a phrase that belongs fully to the sphere of ability: tetetestai, rendered in Latin as consummatum est, meaning 'It is finished. ' As venerable as these translations may be, they scarcely do justice to the spirit of John's addition. For what John, the Greek apostle, undertakes at this point is no less than an athleticization of the saviour's death - which is why Jesus' last words should be reproduced more in the manner of 'Made it! ' or even 'Mission accomplished! ', even though such a turn of phrase would go against the conventional Christian view of the passion. The goal of the operation is unmistakable: Jesus must be transformed from the chance victim of wilful Judaeo-Roman justice into the fulfiller of a mission dictated by divine providence - and this can only be achieved if his suffering is completely 'sublated' as something foreseen, determined and desired. The same word with which Jesus breathes his last breath on the cross, tetelestai, is used by John shortly beforehand to posit the 'fulfilment' or completion of written predictions through the Golgothan documentation. The decisive point is that Jesus himself recognizes the 'fulfilment' of the mission on the cross and considers it completed (sciens Jesus quia omnia consummata sunt), so his final utterance does indeed contain a scriptural-messianic-athletic statement of achievement.
The acrobatic revolution of Christianity does not end with the conquest of death's passivity demonstrated on the cross. The triumph of ability over non-ability takes place between Good Friday evening and Easter morning - the most pathos-laden of all time spans. In this time, the slain Jesus carried out the most unheard-of act, that of akro bainein into hell- he walked through the underworld on tiptoe. With his resurrection 'on the third day', anti-gravitation celebrates its greatest victory: it is as if Christ, the first among God's acrobats, had got hold of a vertical rope that opened the way for him and his fol- lowers to an absolute vertical previously closed or only sensed mythi- cally. Through his saito vitale, the risen one breaks open the world form characterized by a belief in the supremacy of the fatal interrup- tion. From this moment on, all life is acrobatic, a dance on the rope of faith, which states that life itself is everlasting - and in an irrevocably proclaimed 'from now on'.
Klaus Berger remarks on the Athanasian theology of the evangelist: 'Staring at death is replaced by integration into the line of those who wander beyond death. For even physical death is exceeded; it is merely
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CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
m sequence events. >113 an 'immate- part' in the course things: humanity had to wait a long time
the chance to hear such frivolities - or should one say, such delirious acquittals from the grip of finitude? As soon as such a doctrine is in the world, the psychopolitical ancien regime, the normal depression also known as realism, finds itself in palpable difficulty. The steady continuation of the anti-depressive campaign provokes history: it is subject to the law of the deceleration of the miracle. This results in what Alexander Kluge calls the immense 'time need of revolutions'. 1l4
Death Athletes
The athleticization of the Christian death struggle hinted at by John reaches one of its climaxes during the persecutions of Christians in southern Gaul, initiated by Marcus Aurelius and continued by his successors, which flared up more heavily again around AD 202, under Severus. At this time, the North African Tertullian wrote his con- solatory text Ad Martyros, a highly rhetorically stylized piece, which employs all the tools of ancient ascetology to make the prisoners in the dungeons of Vienne and Lyon aware of the parallels between their situation and that of soldiers before the battle - and even more that of athletes before the agon. The African reminds his Gaulish brothers and sisters, not without a degree of cynicism, that they should actu- ally count themselves lucky to be sitting in a dungeon and awaiting their execution in the arena, as the outside world is a far worse prison for a true Christian.
o blessed, consider yourselves as having been transferred from prison to what we may call a place of safety. lls
This robust comforter's expectations of the martyrs have already become sporting to the point where he expects nothing less than peak performances from his fellow believers. These faith athletes owe it to Christ to provide a great match for their executioners.
You are about to enter a noble contest [bonum agonem] in which the living God [Deus vivus] acts the part of superintendent [agonothetes] and the Holy Spirit is your trainer [xystarches], a contest whose crown is eternity, whose prize is angelic nature, citizenship [politia] in heaven and glory for ever and ever. And so your Master [epistates vester], Jesus Christ, who has anointed you with His Spirit and has brought you to this training ground [scamma], has resolved, before the day of the contest, to take you from a softer way of life to a harsher treat-
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CUR HOMO
n rf'n a rn may be increased. [disciplinaj that they may apply themselves to the building up of their physical strength. [. . . J They are urged on, they are subjected to torturing toils, they are worn out [Coguntur, cruciantur, fatiganturl [. . . JAnd they do this, says the Apostle, to win a perishable crown. We who are about to win an eternal one recognize in the prison our training ground [palaestra], that we may be led forth to the actual contest before the seat of the presid- ing judge [ad stadium tribunalis] well practised [bene exercitati] in all
hardships. 116
Tertullian continues his reflections by reminding the martyrs that profane humans from heathen peoples have defied death and volun- tarily taken the most terrible ordeals upon themselves - like the phil- osopher Heraclitus, who reportedly covered himself in cow dung and burned to death, or Empedocles, who leapt into the flames of Mount Etna. In certain heathen cities, Tertullian tells them, young men have themselves flogged until they bleed, simply to demonstrate how much they are capable of enduring. If these people pay such a high price for mere glass beads, how much easier it should be for Christians to pay the price for the real pearl!
Admittedly, tortured Christians in Roman provincial theatres are anything but the ideal of the philosophical savoir mourir. Even in Tertullian's relentlessly drastic rhetoric, however, one can detect an echo of the agonal ethics which states that through askesis and harsh- ness (sklerotes) towards oneself, even immensely difficult feats can become easy.
Certum Est Quia Impossibile: Only the Impossible Is Certain
Tertullian's dauntless pep talk to the morituri of Lyon reveals the logic of Christian acrobatism with a clarity never attained again. It is the goodwill to carry out the strictly absurd, the boundlessly non- sensical, the completely impossible, that makes theology theology. This alone prevents it from gliding back into an ordinary ontology. In the kingdom of God, what appears in being as a discontinuity is pure continuity. If Christ is risen, then the world in which no one can rise from the dead is refuted. If we never see anyone resurrected here, however, we should switch locations and go where that which does not happen here does happen - being here is good, but being there is better. No self-respecting Christian, according to Tertullian, would
For too, are set apart more
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THE CONQUEST THE arena any
profane people
must epater la bourgeoisie. In the best fighting mood, the author put the matter in a nutshell in his treatise against the Marcionites, On the Flesh ofChrist:
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible. 117
This certum quia impossibile underlies practically everything Europeans have known about vertical matters for the last two thou- sand years. In Simone Weil's superbly exaggerated thesis 'La vie humaine est impossible' - human life is impossible1l8 - we still hear a certainty that is also born of impossibility. What we call the truth is the result of the quarrel between gravitation and anti-gravitation. The Holy Spirit invoked by Christians was that art of wisdom which ensured that the extravagance of martyrs was tempered by the memory of horizontal motifs in their lives. In this sense, the Holy Spirit was the first psychiatrist in Europe - and the early Christians its first patients. Its tasks include defusing religious immune paradoxes, which break open at the moment when the untethered witnesses of faith weaken their physical immunity because they are overly sure of their transcendent immunity.
What happened in the arenas of Roman mass culture, at any rate, was no slave revolt in morality, to recall Nietzsche's prob- lematic theorem once again - it was the outdoing of the gladiators by the martyrs. What took place here was the translation of the physical agones into an athletic insistence on the declaration ego sum Christianus - even if the declarers were thrown to those blond beasts so loved by the Romans, the lions. Even if one views martyrdom with suspicion, sensing in it the fundamentalist obstinacy of people who have nothing better to do with their lives than throw them away with the gesture of an irrefutable proof, one must admit that the acts of martyrdom in the era of persecution occasionally have some of the spirit of the original Christian acrobatism. In some old accounts of suffering one can still sense that will to cross over which people had begun to practise in the training camps of the higher life. The will to believe was not yet equated with the will to worldly success, as found in the Puritan varieties of Protestantism and in the most recent metamorphoses of 'American religion'. 119 Its symptom was a boister- ous transvitalism. Wherever it was able to assert itself, the depressive
206
to possible.
CUR
supremacy
worst It was the in anti-gravitation
tragedy, and stretched the rope so tautly between the two states of life that many formed the daredevil plan of venturing a crossing.
Even the fallen tightrope walker from the prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra profited from the tension between the rope ends on this side and the other side. And, although the more recent doctrine states that there is nothing to support life on the shore beyond, one still finds ropes in immanence with sufficient tension to carry the steps of those who cross. It almost looks as though one 'were walking on nothing but air'. They form a support that lacks all qualities of a solid ground - 'and yet it really is possible to walk on it'. 120 Every step on the rope has to be practised ten thousand times, and yet every step up there must be taken as if it were the first. Whoever trains for the rope subjects themselves to a paideia that removes the foundation of all ground habits. Walking on the rope means gathering all that has been in the present. Only then can the imperative 'You must change your life! ' be transformed into daily sequences of exercises. Acrobatic existence de-trivializes life by placing repetition in the service of the unrepeatable. It transforms all steps into first steps, because each one could be the last. It knows only one ethical action: the superversion of all circumstances through the conquest of the improbable.
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II Exaggeration Procedures
A fervent and diligent man is ready for all things.
It is greater work to resist vices and passions than to sweat in physical
toil. [. . . ]
Watch over yourself, arouse yourself, warn yourself [. . . J.
The more violence you do to yourself, the more progress you will make.
Thomas aKempis, The Imitation of Christ
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, Proverbs ofHell
BACKDROP
Retreats into Unusualness
If one had to summarize the main difference between the modern and ancient worlds and define the two states of the world in the same sentence, it would have to be the following: the modern era is the one that brought about the greatest mobilization of human powers for the sake of work and production, while all those life forms in which the utmost mobilization took place in the name of practice and perfec- tion are ancient. This means that the 'Middle Ages' in Europe, con- trary to their name, do not form an autonomous intermediate phase between antiquity and modernity but rather an unmistakable part of antiquity, even though, in superficial terms, their Christian colour- ing could make them seem post- or even anti-ancient. Because the Christian Middle Ages were far more an era of practice than work, there is no doubt about their status as belonging to the ancient regime from an activity-theoretical perspective. Living in antiquity and not believing in the priority of work or economic life - these are simply two formulations of the same state of affairs. Even the Benedictine labora, which some have occasionally sought to misconstrue as a con- cession to the spirit of work wrested from prayer, actually meant no more than an extension of meditative practice to the material use of one's hands. No monk could grasp the concept of work in the newer sense of the word as long as the monastic rule ensured the symmetry between orare and laborare. Furthermore, one should know that the emphasis on labora in the Benedictine Rule (which, according to tra- dition, came into being upon the founding of the monastery of Monte Cassino between 525 and 529) was a reaction to centuries of observ- ing monastic pathologies: while the moderns compensate for their work-related illnesses with health cures and holidays, monks used work to remedy their contemplation-related ailments.
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EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
The thesis that antiquity was characterized in practical terms by exercise and modernity by work posits both an opposition and an inner connection between the worlds of practice and work, of per- fection and production. This gives the concept of a renaissance a significantly altered meaning. If a phenomenon such as the rebirth of antiquity in a late Christian or post-Christian, or rather a post-work, world genuinely exists, it should make itself felt in the revitalization of the motifs of the practising life. There is no lack of indications for this. What characterizes both regimes is their capacity to inte- grate human powers into effort programmes on the grandest scale; what separates them is the radically divergent orientation of their respective mobilizations. In the one case the energies awakened are completely subordinated to the primacy of the object or product, ultimately even to the abstract product known as profit, or to the aes- thetic fetish, which is exhibited and collected as a 'work'. In the other case, all powers flow into the intensification of the practising subject, which progresses to ever higher levels of a purely performative mode of being in the course of the exercises. What was once called the vita contemplativa to contrast it with the vita activa is, in fact, a vita per- formativa. In its own way, it is as active as the most active life. This does not, however, express itself in the mode of political action that Hannah Arendt, following the trail of Aristotle, wanted to see at the forefront of active life forms,l nor in that of work, production and economy, but rather in the sense of an assimilation by the never-tiring universal or divine being-nothing, which does and suffers more than any finite creature would be capable of doing or suffering. Like those creatures, however, it knows a form of self-enclosed, fulfilling and indestructible calm that, going on the accounts of initiates, in no way resembles the profane calm of exhaustion.
It is no coincidence, of course, that the rediscovery of the prac- tising mode of life began at the very moment when the idolization of work (extending to the imperial German ethos of 'We are all workers') reached its climax. I am speaking here of the last third of the nineteenth century, for which I earlier suggested such ciphers as 'athletic renaissance' and 'de-spiritualization of asceticisms'. These two phrases refer to tendencies that point beyond the era of produc- tivism. Since practice as an activity type - together with aesthetic play - stepped out of the shadow of work, a new ecosystem of activities has been developing in which the absolute precedence of product value is revised in favour of practice values, performance values and experiential values.
No one can be credible as a contemporary today, then, unless
212
BACKDROP
'vU0;~'U IS
Thus the sports has developed into a
with hundreds of secondary worlds, in which self-referential motion, useless play, superfluous exertion and simulated fights celebrate their existence somewhat wilfully, in the clearest possible contrast to the utilitarian objectivism of the working world - no matter how often a dull-witted sociology might claim that sport is merely a training camp for the factory and a preparation for the capitalist ideology of competition. One must admit, however, that those parts of the sporting world closest to the 'circus' in the ancient sense, especially in the vicinity of the Olympic industry and in the professional seg- ments of football and cycling, have meanwhile become subject to a result fetishism that absolutely rivals the compulsive product-oriented thinking of the economic sphere. But what does that mean if, on the other hand, statistics show that in those sports there are ten thousand amateurs or more for every professional?
The tendency towards an exhibition of self-referentially practising acts articulates itself even more clearly in the art scene of the previ- ous century: aesthetic modernity is the era in which the performa- tive separates from the procedures and aims of the working world, erecting countless stages for completely autonomous presentations. The emancipation of art from its work-shaped nature has long since reached the point - in system-immanent terms too - at which the work is merged once more with the self-referential process of practis- ing, or rather with a change in the shape of creative energies. It often no longer stands in the world as an autonomous result, eternally severed from its conditions of birth and transposed to the sphere of pure objectification through the label 'finished', but rather as a prac- tice crystal frozen in the moment - an indication of a drift from one performative state to the next.
On the other hand, such great artists as Rodin have spoken of their activity of constant practising, albeit always geared towards the con- crete product, as the highest form of 'work' - toujours travailler - as if to make it clear that art, despite its self-referentiality, is the most serious and selfless of matters. In doing so they revealed, in their own way, a secret among the old breed of craftsmen and fetish makers, namely that a well-made object is always imbued with the 'soul' of its maker, while he can only master his craft if he is constantly attentive to the voices of the material.
Alongside this, the countless psychotherapeutic systems that unfolded in the course of the twentieth century brought the ancient methods of practising introspection to life again, normally without
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EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
him,
people but rather meditators or 'regurgitators' initiated the return
from the logic of work to the exercise. When Foucault, by contrast, brought the ancient discourse around 'self-concern' back into the contemporary discussion around 1980, this was a signal to conclude the era of therapeutic ideologies. What has been on the agenda since then is the retrieval of a generalized practice consciousness from the sources of ancient philosophy and modern artistic and bodily praxis. Here and there, people are beginning to comprehend that the thera- peutism of the twentieth century was itself only the cloak for a shift of tendency with epochal traits. Let us recall: the key psychoanalyti- cal term 'work through' is based on the discreet adoption of a Stoic practice principle, namely turning a notion or an affect this way and that in meditation, known in the Greek terminology of the school as anapolein or anap6leisis and in Latin as in animo versare. It is char- acteristic of the modern zeitgeist that sport and meditation are also often presented as 'work'.
The most far-reaching subversion of the faith in work and produc- tion took place on its own terrain when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union prescribed a course of modernization for the still largely agrarian economy of the former Tsarist empire after the October Revolution of 1917. In the course of this upheaval, the motivational foundations for modern employment, the obligation to pay debts in the credit system of property economy and the personal striving for prosperity were so profoundly wrecked that nothing resembling an efficient working culture in the modern sense was able to develop in the entire area. As the criterion of personal advantage was sus- pended a priori, the only options for working Soviets were either the attitude of the voluntary record producer or the self-ironic robot - in both cases, the predication of work on the primacy of the result was undermined and transformed into a more or less self-referential exercise. Essentially, the Soviet economy was an amalgam of a feudal temple economy in which a cynical state clergy absorbed the surplus product and a Gurdjieff group: it is well known that participants in such gatherings work day and night, to the point of exhaustion, on tasks assigned by the group leader, only to witness the product then being destroyed before their eyes - supposedly to further their inner ability to let go. In that sense, we can say that communism carried out a quasi-spiritual exercise with its populations that used the pretext of work while reducing work to absurdity: it exhausted the lives of three generations for the production of a political ornament
214
BACKDROP
one
that are destined to be washed away completion.
In this section, I will reconstruct various defining traits of the explic- itly practising life. Considering the immensity of the material one would have to address here, I will have to content myself with outlines and anecdotal colourings. Following the course taken by the matter itself, I will begin with the separation - visible since antiquity - of the practising from the social continuum of life, and their fixation within an eccentricity requiring systematic consolidation in relation to their previous existence dictated by group pressures and organic inertias. This withdrawal from the collective identity - the practical matrix of every intellectual epochi - is one characteristic of the ascetic modus vivendi stylized in an endearing exaggeration by Helmuth Plessner, who created the doctrine of man's 'eccentric positionality', into a general trait of the human condition - as if all individuals stood beside themselves a priori and had always lived their lives in front of the mirror like actors of everyday life, natural hysterics or public relations managers. One should remember, however, that mirrors, though in use over two thousand years ago in rare cases, only gained wider distribution some two hundred years ago; when the mirror market finally reached saturation a hundred years ago, its omnipres- ence evoked a certain discreet eccentricity in the self-relationships of all men and women. They seduce their users into believing that they had always been reflexively 'beside themselves', whereas, from a his- torical perspective, mirrors only began to play their part as central egotechnic media of the modern, self-image-dependent human truly unmistakably very recently.
In the next section, I will show in what way the inner world of the practising is affected by ideal model forces, and also how the intui- tion of a distant, yet authoritative perfection leads to the build-up of strong vertical tensions. This produces a realm of idea-driven upswings and subtle attractors of which the moderns, generally speaking, only know as much as becomes visible through the carica- tures circulating under the heading 'narcissism'. It yields insights into the temporal forms of an existence subject to the pull of perfection- oriented thinking. The temporal structure of being-unto-completion, whether in its Old European or Asian variations, can provide infor- mation about the power of perfectionism without which one cannot
215
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
After various historical and systematic remarks on the indispensable figure of the trainer, which, depending on one's region, tradition or whims, is referred to as a master, guru, father, healer, genius, demon, teacher or classic, I shall consider anew the theologically well-examined phenomenon of conversions in order to show how the practising are not infrequently confronted with the difficulty of having to continue their work with a different trainer. Here it tran- spires that many who change subjects or levels had begun training with a wrongly formatted 'god', one that was too unsuccessful - like Wotan, who was eventually outstripped by Christ - or too serious, as could be observed in the modern transition from the eternally suffering Christ to cheerful Fortuna. We shall see why a dismissed trainer always has a good chance of finding a second life in the spir- itual household of their former trainee as an idol, demon or cattivo maestro. This necessitates a revision in the supreme discipline of the sociology of religion, the theory of conversions. I would like to ques- tion the established model of conversion (even if I do not subscribe to Oswald Spengler's thesis that genuine conversions do not exist) by showing that true conversion occurs only upon entering an advanced- civilized discipline of the practising life (which I call secession), while a mere change of discipline or confession - like Paul's leap from Jewish zealotry to apostolic devotion - does not display true conver- sion character.
216
-6-
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
On the Separation of the Practising and Their Soliloquies
Uprooting from the First Life: Spiritual Secessionism
The step into the practising life takes place through ethical distinc- tion. 2 This distinction is made by anyone who dares or is called upon to step out of the river of life and take up residence on the shore. The leaver cultivates a battle-ready attention to their own interior and retains a hostile suspicion towards the new exterior, which had previously stood for the surrounding world as such. All increases of a mental or bodily kind begin with a secession from the ordinary. This is usually accompanied by a forceful rejection of the past - not infrequently assisted by such affects as disgust, regret and complete rejection of the earlier mode of being. What people today, with a reverent turn of phrase, often call 'spirituality' is initially more like a holy perversion than a generally respectable inner praxis. The original awe of spiritual 'values' is always infused with a fear of perversion and a horror in the face of the mysteries of the unnatural, regardless of whether one is dealing with the monstrous performances of Indian fakirs, the petrifaction exercises of the Stoics or the ascension exer- cises of Christian extremists. If even an author as sympathetic towards the Stoa as Horace remarks that Epictetus was atrox - dreadful, gruesome - because of his severity, this tells us more about the climate of ancient spirituality than any esoteric warbling. Did Epictetus not teach, in fact, that when one kisses one's child, one should inwardly call out to it 'You will die tomorrow' in order to train letting go, and offset a pleasant notion with an unpleasant counter-notion? 3 We hear the same hardness in the speeches of Buddha, who encapsulated monastic perfection as follows:
217
EXAGGERA TION PROCEDURES
He who not for who no who controls who fixed in the heart of whom the funda- mental evils are extinguished, who has thrown hatred from him: him I
a Brahman. 4
To understand the depth of the rupture expressed in the words of the awakened, one must remember that only a few generations earlier, the Brahman's redemption depended entirely on his relatives, or more pre- cisely on his paternal lineage and on the sacrificial arts cultivated by his family. One must therefore always take into account that the extremism found among Stoics, early Christians, Tantrics, Buddhists and other despisers of probability is not an illegitimate supplement invented later by morbid agitators in order to sour an essentially healthy and mild doctrine; in every case, it comes from the sources themselves.
To hear the original language of the radical secession dynamic, it is sufficient to look up Matthew 10:37:
'Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. '
This is the locus classicus of aggressive vertical language in the Western hemisphere, a performative flash of lightning from a sky that causes apocalypses and forces farewells. The economic basis for the break with the first life is revealed in a dialogue recounted in Mark 10:28-30:
Peter said to him, 'We have left everything to follow you! '
'I tell you the truth,' Jesus replied, 'no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much. '
The uprooting must be practised on this foundation until the adept understands that the triviality of earlier life is the most disgusting heresy; reality as such is a plague. Faith in this plague and its govern- ing principle constitutes an immersion in miasma.
Though this be monstrous, yet there is method in it: the seces- sionism of the great transformative ethical systems seeks to assert once and for all that there is no salvation in the first life. The initial ties transpire as shackles that bind the souls to irredeemable circum- stances. Once the region of possession, fallenness and hopelessness is uncovered, the exorcism of those spirits must stop at nothing. For the radicals, it is not enough to abandon one's village, fields and nets; one's old physical and mental self must also be left behind. For Patanjali, the mythical author of the Yoga Sutras, who is often identi-
218
ECCENTRICITY
same name
BC, ascetic (tapas) preceding evoke a
curative disgust in the contemplator at their own body, urging them to interrupt any contact with the other bodies. s As soon as I see the world as a slough of filth, I am already halfway along the path into the open. The attitude of the correctly practising individual in relation to their earlier existence is described by Hindus as vairagya, which translates as 'detachment' and refers to a mildly disgusted indiffer- ence towards everyday pleasures and concerns.
Graeeo-Roman Stoicism also knows and praises the break with the attachments and aversions of the first life - whoever wants to grow a thick skin to defend against fate must first wean themselves from their natural preference for the pleasant. Nietzsche remarks on this in a quietly parodying tone:
The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to become ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it. 6
Even more importantly than the indifference of the stomach, the aim of Stoic practice is the indifference of the eyes to random sights, of the ears to random sounds and of the spirit to random notions - that extends, as Marcus Aurelius notes in his cautionary aphorisms To Himself, to a fundamental refusal to be surprised by anything.
How ridiculous and how much of a stranger in the universe is he who is surprised at anything which happens in his life. 7
In this maxim, cold-blooded as it was intended to sound, we see a hint of the Stoic's anthropotechnic trick: in his deliberate equation of surprises and injuries, his concern is to immunize himself against the former and simultaneously acquire the necessary level of resistance to the latter.
The Splitting of the Entity through the Crusade Against the Ordinary
Let us reiterate: entering ethical thought means making a difference with one's very own existence that no one had previously made. If there were an accompanying speech act, it would be: '1 herewith exit ordinary reality. ' Secession from the habitual world as the first ethical operation introduces an unknown division into the world. It not only
219
EXAGGERATION PROCEDURES
humanity
unknowing, who remain in
also inevitably implies a declaration of war by former on the latter. This results in the bloodless war of those who return as authorized teachers against all others, who now learn that they are students - and mostly poor students, lost students, even hopeless cases, unaware that they are playing with damnation: people of yesterday, from a time before the discovery of the great difference. At the same time, all cul- tures that experienced the outbreak of such a logical-ethical civil war have no shortage of mediators seeking to bridge the rupture. They bring those humiliated by the logos, insulted by the Noble Truths and excluded from the curative exercises closer to the party of attackers through sentimental, universalistic formulas of reconciliation - indeed, perhaps the 'great' religions, with their clerical apparatuses, their networks of organized escapism and their world-friendly schools, clinics and welfare services, are nothing but businesses for softening the hurtful overloads let loose by their founders. Wherever universal- isms appear, their grand gestures of embrace provide more or less deceptive reparations for the attack of the radicals. The achievements of minorities, they regularly claim, are not privileges for the few but rather conquests for all. The truth is that universalism can never bring about more than the reformatting of an elect group. Sooner or later, this group expands and assembles a larger ring of new converts and sympathizers around the hard core. It is on such peripheries that the dreams of absolute inclusivity flourish. Viewed as a whole, abstract universalism - like 'man' in Sartre's definition - remains a futile passion, a consolation to the untrained and a phantom to the trained.
Going through with the secession means splitting the world. The operator is the one who, by leaving, cuts the world's surface into two initially irreconcilable regions: the zone of the leavers and that of the stayers. Through this cut, both sides learn first of all that the world, which previously seemed to be common to all people, a many-headed but inseparable and unconfrontable unity, is in truth a separable and confrontable phenomenon. The withdrawal of the ascetic is the knife that makes the cut in the continuum. From that point, the world appears in a completely new light - indeed, perhaps one can only posit the existence of a 'world', in the sense of moral-cosmic reaches for the whole that are coded in advanced-civilized terms, once it has been divided by the new class of deniers and reconstituted at a higher level. The whole, previously a confused multiplicity of forces with a vague basis for unity, now becomes a strained synthesis of the unequal parts produced by the cut. What Heidegger called the 'age
220
FIRST ECCENTRICITY
of the world picture' does not begin only with the modern globes and atlases, but already with the visions of cosmos and empire in the Axial Age. A world from which the ethically best flee can no longer be a maternal container for all life forms. Owing to the exodus of the ascetics, meditators and thinkers, it becomes the site of a drama that fundamentally questions its ability to house ethically aroused inhabitants sufficiently: what is this world if the strongest statement about it is a withdrawal from it? The great world theatre deals with the duel between the secessionists and the settled, those who flee from the world and those who remain-in-the-world.