INTRODUCTION: On the Anthropotechnic Turn
European Enlightenment – a crisis of form? An experiment on a slippery slope, at any rate, and from a global perspective an anomaly. Sociologists of religion put it quite bluntly: people keep believing everywhere else, but in our society we have glorified disillusionment. Indeed, why should Europeans be the only ones on a metaphysical diet when the rest of the world continues to dine unperturbed at the richly decked tables of illusion?
The ethical programme of the present came into view for a moment when Marx and the Young Hegelians articulated the theory that man himself produces man. The true meaning of this statement was immediately obscured, however, by another chatter that presented work as the only essential human act. But if man genuinely produces man, it is precisely not through work and its concrete results, not even the ‘work on oneself’ so widely praised in recent times, let alone through the alternatively invoked phenomena of ‘interaction’ or ‘communication’: it is through life in forms of practice. Practice is defined here as any operation that provides or improves the actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as practice or not.
It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition. Just as the nineteenth century stood cognitively under the sign of production and the twentieth under that of reflexivity, the future should present itself under the sign of the exercise.
The Planet of the Practising
REMOTE VIEW OF THE ASCETIC PLANET: Nietzsche’s Antiquity Project
The term ‘late renaissance’, which I have suggested to characterize the still inadequately understood sport cult phenomenon that appeared after 1900, proves helpful in dating Nietzsche’s intervention in the midst of the discourses of the Enlightenment as it changed into modernity.
From a processual perspective, Nietzsche would have recognized himself at the current pivot of an advancing renaissance that was in the process of outgrowing its educated middle-class definitions. Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first ‘art system’), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. Under no circumstances could the earth remain an institution in which the ressentiment programmes of the sick and the compensation-claiming skills of the insulted determined the climate.
ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE: Unthan’s Lesson
By managing to develop the paradoxes of their mode of existence, the handicapped can become convincing teachers of the human condition – practising beings of a particular category with a message for practising beings in general. For him, the dichotomy between life and art no longer exists. His life is nothing other than the hard-won art of doing normal things like opening doors and combing one’s hair, as well as less normal things such as playing the violin with one’s feet and dividing pencils in the middle through a gunshot triggered with the foot. The virtuoso of the ability to be normal can rarely indulge in the luxury of depressive moods. Living in the Nonetheless imposes an ostentatious zest for life on those who are determined to succeed. The fact that things may be different on the inside is no one’s business. The land of smiles is inhabited by cripple artistes.
This advocation of existence with compulsory crutches reaches its most dramatic form in the statements of biological palaeoanthropology in the work of Louis Bolk and Adolf Portmann: according to them, Homo sapiens is constitutively a cripple of premature birth, a creature condemned to eternal immaturity that, because of this condition (which biologists term neoteny, a retention of juvenile and foetal traits), is only capable of survival in the incubators of culture.
These highly generalized statements of modern anthropology present a functional explication of the holistic pathos that was characteristic of older cultures – those cultures that insisted intransigently on the priority of tradition and custom (the established incubator) over the whims of individuals eager for innovation. Every orthodoxy, whether it draws its validity from religion or from being venerable and ancient, is a system for preventing mutations of the structures that ensure stability. In this sense, the ancientness of the ancients is self-validating. While a tradition, as long as it appears old enough, provides evidence of its viability and its compatibility with other stock elements, a new idea and its subjective deviation must first prove their repeatability – assuming they are interested in doing so. In the antimutation traditionalist systems, however, the presupposition is that even permitting the attempt to prove the usability of something new is never worthwhile. Periods with a greater openness for innovation, on the other hand, rely on the observation that even after far-reaching moral revaluations and technical innovations, a sufficient number of stabilizations are still possible in order to redirect our modus vivendi towards a more pleasant state. But the innovations must always be assessed in terms of their agreement with the need for stability in care systems for premature birth cripples (commonly known as cultures).
In short, people had to speak about the handicapped, the differently constituted, to stumble on a phrase that expresses the general constitution of beings under vertical tension. ‘You must change your life!’ means, as we saw in Rilke’s torso poem: you must pay attention to your inner vertical axis and judge how the pull from its upper pole affects you! It is not walking upright that makes humans human; it is rather the incipient awareness of the inner gradient that causes humans to do so.
LAST HUNGER ART: Kafka’s Artistes
There is much to support this: whoever looks for humans will find ascetics, and whoever observes ascetics will discover acrobats.
Kafka was an advocate of gymnastic exercises, vegetarian diets and ideologies of hygiene that were typical of the time. In the collection of statements he excerpted from his octavo notebooks and arranged in a numbered list (later edited and published by Max Brod under the title Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg [Observations on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Path]), the first entry reads: The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.
RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST: From Pierre de Coubertin to L. Ron Hubbard
The fate of Olympism and the business of the Scientological ‘churches’ show that ‘religion’, as understood by those who exploit the notion, does not exist – and never has. Both de Coubertin and Hubbard fell for a modern mirage whose examination gives insights into the fabrication and constitution of ‘religion’ in general. Both wanted to found or contribute to something that cannot be, and which therefore, once ‘founded’, inevitably transpires as something other than what its founder thought it should be or should seek to become. Both founders made the same mistake in opposite ways: actual Olympism refused to become the religion planned by de Coubertin, while the Scientology movement resists being viewed merely as the psychotechnic firm that it in fact is.
Through its de-spiritualization, the Olympic movement of the twentieth century shows how a ‘religion’ can spontaneously regress to the format of its true substance – the anthropotechnic basis, as embodied by a graduated system of exercises and diversified disciplines, integrated into a superstructure of hierarchized adminstrative acts, routinized club relationships and professionalized media representations. None of the structural characteristics of an elaborated ‘religion’ remain except for the hierarchy of functionaries and a system of exercises that, in keeping with their secular nature, are referred to as ‘training units’.
There is no stronger example in the twentieth century of the tendency towards a phenomenon I have mentioned several times, namely the de-spiritualization of asceticisms, than the Olympic movement. As far as the opposing tendency is concerned, the worldly appropriation of the spiritual, the Church of Scientology founded by the novelist and DIY psychologist L. Ron Hubbard is just one example among many – but an outstandingly informative one. In the following, I would like to honour the inventor of Dianetics as one of the greatest enlighteners of the twentieth century, as he decisively increased our knowledge about the nature of religion, even if largely involuntarily. He earned himself a place in the pantheon of science and technology, as he successfully performed a psychotechnic experiment whose results were significant for culture as a whole. After Hubbard, it is clear once and for all that the most effective way of showing that religion does not exist is to establish one’s own.
Against the background of the incipient nuclear arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, ‘Dianetics’ initiated an alternative course of the world – between itself and the world system of war, mental illness and crime. Confronted with such a scenario, who would have refused to join the camp of those who claimed self-assuredly that they had the solution to the world’s problems?
The Conquest of the Improbable For an Acrobatic Ethics
HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY: The Doctrine of Upward Propagation and the Meaning of ‘Over’
Nietzsche’s ‘artiste metaphysics’ can follow on effortlessly from the tenets of Darwinist biology. In terms of their improbability, natural species and ‘cultures’ – the latter defined as tradition-capable human groups with a high training and skill factor – are phenomena along the same spectrum. In the natural history of artificiality, the nature–culture threshold does not constitute any particularly notable caesura; at most, it is a hump in a curve which rises more rapidly from that point on. The only privilege of culture in relation to nature is its ability to speed up evolution as a climbing tour on Mount Improbable. In the transition from genetic to symbolic or ‘cultural’ evolution, the shaping process accelerates to the point at which humans become aware of the appearance of the new in their own lifetime. From that point, humans adopt a stance on their own capacity for innovation – and, until recently, almost always one of rejection.
The creator follows a metaphysical assignment: if life itself is already a vibrating mountain of improbabilities, one can only prove an affirmation by piling that mountain up even higher. That is why upward procreation is meant to create a creator. By producing additional increasers of the improbable, one acclaims the dynamic of improbability increase as a whole. Hence the demand for a human being who has overcome their own obstacles in life and is free of resentment towards creativity. Only such a person would no longer take themselves – let alone their ancestors – as a yardstick for the becoming of the next generation. Only they could affirm without neophobic reflexes the idea that the cultural mountain range of improbability must, in future, be unfolded a level higher with each generation; they would not turn their own imperfection into an obligation for their descendants. They would rather die out than return unchanged. They understand and welcome the fact that according to the law of the normalization of the improbable, earlier peaks present themselves as mere hills or plains in the perception of later generations.
The existence of tomorrow’s humans is thus to be based entirely on practice and mobility, including a gymnastics of the will and tests of courage for one’s own powers. Nietzsche even envisages a training for moral virtues in which one can prove one’s ‘strength in being able to keep one’s word’.
‘CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE’: Twilight of the Life Forms, Disciplinics
I will show in broad terms how the shift from a theory of class society (with vertical differentiation through dominance, repression and privilege) to a theory of discipline society (with vertical differentiation through asceticism, virtuosity and achievement) can take place.
‘You must change your life!’ This presupposes that life has something about it which the individual has – or can acquire – the competence to change. In 1937, Wittgenstein noted: ‘The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mould. So you must change your life and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear.’ The belief in the possibility of a better ‘fit’ between form and life is based on a concept of form that can be traced back to the founding phase of philosophy in the work of Socrates and Plato, and to the early period of Brahmanic asceticisms. It expresses the conviction that there is a ‘good form’ of life, regardless of whether it comes from the Viennese workshops, the Athenian school or the monasteries of Benares – a form whose adoption would necessarily lead to the elimination of disturbances in existence. Finding the good form is a design task that includes a moral-logical exercise.
It is the working form of transformative ascetism, and hence aesthetic secessionism in action. It is carried out with the aim of choosing between the muddle of life forms dictated, absorbed under situative compulsion and inevitably close to ‘swinishness’ to find those that can be taken up into the clarified ‘monastic rule’. Every thing is a ‘language game’, living crystal and swinishness alike – what matters is the nuance.
If Wittgenstein was an occult and involuntary Nietzschean, Michel Foucault emerged from the outset as his manifest and voluntary counterpart. Nonetheless, one can say that Foucault started from where Wittgenstein left off: showing that entire branches of science or epistemic disciplines are nothing other than complexly structured language games, also known as discourses or discursive practices.
Foucault had understood that the Dionysian fails if one does not implant a Stoic inside him. The latter admits entertaining the misconception that getting beside oneself already means going beyond oneself. The ‘beyond’ in the practising going-beyond-oneself is now only seemingly the same as the one discussed upon the early discovery of tragic or Icarian verticality. It is, in truth, the ‘beyond’ of superior maturity, acquired on the rungs of the practice ladder.
In reality, he had completed the breakthrough to a conception of philosophy as exercise and trained off the last remnants of excess surrealistic weight. He had realized that aestheticism, activistic Romanticism, constant irony, talk of transgression and subversionism are but dreamy and sluggish pursuits that conceal with difficulty a lack of form. He had long since understood: whoever speaks of subversion and effuses about becoming belongs in the beginners’ class. Foucault had turned himself into something of which Nietzsche had provided a first notion in his last ‘physiological’ notes: the carrier of an intelligence that had become pure muscle, pure initiative. Hence the complete absence of mannerisms in his late style.
There is a constant external observation of disciplines by authorities and individuals that are remote from them; these value or frown upon the results of exercises in foreign spheres according to their own standards. Outside observers can find what athletes do unimportant and what jewellers do superfluous without having to worry about whether the athletes or jewellers are the best in their field. External observers are even free to say that it would be better if this or that discipline, or even an entire complex of disciplines, did not exist – indeed, that the existence of some disciplines as such is a reprehensible aberration. Thus early Christians were convinced that gladiatorial fights were evil, even if the fighters were masters of their field, and the whole system of bread and circuses was nothing but a loathsome perversion. These negative assessments prevailed in the long term – which, to my knowledge, no one regrets. The decisive factor in their success was the fact that they precisely introduced alternative disciplines and surrounded these with positive evaluations. Some people today, by contrast, are of the opinion that parliamentary democracy, orthodox medicine or large cities should be abolished, as nothing good can come of them. These critics will not prevail because they do not show what should be done instead. The operative distinction here is between good and evil. What is evil should not be; one cannot improve it, only eliminate it. Just as the first distinction works with a withdrawal of value, the second works with a withdrawal of being.
SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS: On the Demons of Habit and Their Taming Through First Theory
Ludwig Binswanger was probably the only psychiatrist who Foucault knew understood, not to say predicted him – in the sense that he found in Binswanger’s writings the most important elements for a language of endangered life, both in general and in his own particular case. In those writings he became acquainted with the tragic interpretation of verticality, in which the ‘extravagance’ of existence means being stuck too high up on the existential ladder.
For the time being, nothing seems simpler than the thought that existing passions, destructive intensities or obsessions demand restraining – 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-supported autonomous effort at a certain point in their development. As elementary as the distinction between habits and passions may 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 themselves, the ambiguities in the understanding of áskesis 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.
CUR HOMO ARTISTA: On the Ease of the Impossible
The non-political division of classes initiates the history of the inner witness or ‘observer’. Swimming in the waters of habitus, discourses 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.
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 salto 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 impossibility, with making an impression as a subsidiary subject.
Exaggeration Procedures
FIRST ECCENTRICITY: On the Separation of the Practising and Their Soliloquies
By separating my power and its jurisdiction from all other powers and competencies, I open up a narrowly defined sphere of influence in which my ability, my wanting, but above all my mission to shape my own existence ascend, as it were, to autonomous rule. The critical distinction that enables this promotion made its first explicit appearance on Western soil among the Stoics, who, in a perpetual exercise, put all their energy into separating the things that depend on us from those that do not. Own or non-own – this is the question that provides the sharp-edged canon, the yardstick for measuring all circumstances. This cut divides the universe into two areas, from which the operator naturally only chooses their own half, the one that is decisive for themselves. That is why the typical axioms of the Stoics begin with ‘It is in your power …’
Marcus Aurelius tell us: ‘Matters outside our doors stand there by themselves neither knowing nor telling us anything about themselves.’ Subject to poor sensuality and meagre materiality, the ‘external’ truly has no choice but to stop at the entrance to the separated ego. All it is good for now is serving as an opposite pole to withdrawal, flight and contempt (anachoresis, fuga saeculi, contemptus mundi) – at most, it becomes an object of disintegrative and disenchanting investigations. Perhaps in a later order of things, when the ideal of withdrawal moves to the second row, it will be ‘rediscovered’ as the target area for care, mission and spiritual conquest. The decisive aspect is that the increasing insignificance of the exterior following from the secessionary distinction releases an incredible surplus of self-referentiality in the individual. Channelling this surplus into occupational programmes is the purpose of existence in ethical separation. Indeed: once the outside world has been separated from me and has become distant, I find myself alone and discover myself as a never-ending task.
In recession to themselves, humans develop a form of enclave subjectivity in which they are primarily and constantly concerned with themselves and their inner conditions. Each human transforms themselves into a small state for whose inhabitants they must find the right constitution. No one expressed the recession imperative, which calls upon the living to govern their own lives, as clearly as Marcus Aurelius: From now on keep in mind the retreat into this little territory within yourself. Avoid spasms and tensions above all.
Enclaved subjectivity thus constitutes itself as a provisional state in which self-concern comes to power. The practising life form is like an inner protectorate with a temporary government and an introspective supervisory authority. In practical terms, this modus vivendi can only be established through an ascetic pact with a teacher whom one supposes already to have achieved ethical reform. In order to keep up the enclaved state, a constant guarding of borders and daily checks for infiltrations from the outside are indispensable. The most difficult part of the withdrawn subject’s task is actually to interrupt the stream of information that joins the practising person to their former environment. There are two weak points that must be kept in mind especially here, and present a constant danger: firstly sensory openings, and secondly language connections, to the social environment. Without a strict regulation of both crisis areas, any attempt at a vita contemplativa is doomed from the start. On the subject of sensory contacts, more or less all systems of contemplation show how they work at the interruption of the perceptual continuum – they close the visual channels in particular (to say nothing of oral or tactile ones), and prescribe a systematic withdrawal of the practising person from all sensory fronts until complete disaffection has been achieved.
Images like the ‘inner citadel’ or the ‘inner statue’, which were used to provide the meditator with notions of goals for their vivid self-perfection, were able to follow on from such advice on progressive apathy. Without a certain acquired heartlessness, spiritual attitudes like apathy, peace of mind or detachment cannot be realized. The ethics of advanced civilizations produces an artificial inhumanity, resulting in an equally artificial benevolence being summoned up to compensate for it.
An even more important factor is the removal of the subject from the language stream of the first society, which would keep it shackled to the foreign rule of everyday notions and affects even more firmly than the sensory channels do. That is why all practice communities develop symbolically ventilated microclimates in which the ascetics, meditators and thinkers hear and learn fundamentally different things from those they hear in the village square, the forum or the family. This does not mean that a secret language always needs to develop because of recession, though there is no shortage of such ideas in many spiritual subcultures. Even where the spiritual teachers use the people’s language with enlightened simplicity – as is said of Buddha or Jesus – there is an unmistakable tendency towards the development of closed language game circles.
The practising life is thus a continuum of self-persuasive acts. Without these, nothing whatsoever can happen among the practising, not even those who have devoted themselves to a largely non-verbal mode of practising, as is the case in the majority of Asian school systems. Many doctrines incessantly emphasize the vast difference between the desired inner states and the rational level with its linguistic reference points. Nonetheless, the cult of non-verbalizable states drifts towards an endless stream of speeches on stages and nuances of ascent. All exercises, be they of a Yogic, athletic, philosophical or musical kind, can only take place if carried by endo-rhetorical processes in which acts of self-admonition, self-testing and self-evaluation – in line with the criteria of the respective school tradition – play a decisive part, and with constant reference to the masters who have already reached the goal. Were this not the case, recessively isolated subjectivity would return to its diffuse initial situation in a very short time, mingling once more with uncultivated conditions.
Since the emergence of ambitious forms of existential acrobatics, there are notably unanimous warnings in East and West alike of the danger that humans could get stuck to their ego – or ‘little I’, as some call it – and thus fail to take their true place in both the cosmic hierarchies and their own social contexts. The global spiritual conspiracy against the ego is not without a certain irony, as it stems from the same movements that spawned the ego phenomenon in the first place. If there has ever been an ego that made itself the measure of all things, there can be no doubt that it was first and foremost in the radius of the egotechnic procedures described here – and only secondarily on the side of the world-people who fall prey to games of power and prestige.
As soon as one understands that the subject itself is nothing other than the carrier of its own exercise sequences – on the passive side an aggregate of individuated habitus effects, and on the active a centre of competencies that plays on the keyboard of callable dispositions – one can join Nietzsche in calmly admitting what was unspeakable for millennia: egotism is often merely the despicable pseudonym of the best human possibilities. What, by the light of the humilitas hysteria, resembles a sinfully exaggerated self-relation is usually no more than the natural price of concentrating on a rare achievement. How else should the virtuoso reach and maintain their level if not through the ability to evaluate themselves and the state of their art soundly? Only where the self-relation keeps running idly can one speak of an out-of-control exercise. In such cases one should speak of an aberration rather than a sin, a malformation rather than a malicious act. Something that theological authors considered a major factor, namely the desire to be evil purely for the sake of it – including the oft-cited Augustinian incurvatio in seipsum – is presumably as rare as perfect holiness. Where people supposed egotism, and accordingly condemned it in brief malediction procedures, closer inspection shows the matrix of the most exceptional virtues. Once this is revealed, it is the turn of the humble to explain what they think of the outstanding.
THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE: How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories
The remoulding of humans as carriers of explicit practice programmes in the more advanced civilizations not only leads to the eccentric self-relation of existence in spiritual enclaves. It also imposes a radically altered sense of time and the future on the practising. In reality, the adventure of advanced civilizations consists in lifting an existential time out of the cosmic, universally shared time. Only in this framework can one call upon humans to cross over from the even years of being into the dramatic situation of a project time. The acceleration whereby existence frees itself from the inertias of the course of the world is characteristic of existential time. Whoever takes the step into the practising life wants to be faster than the whole – whether they seek liberation still ‘in this life’ or still aim for ‘heavenly exaltation’ (exaltatio caelestis) in vita presente.
This is where the seemingly patient East and the manifestly impatient West converge. Just as Buddha advises his followers to lead this life as if it were the last, the Christian doctrine, bringing together Jewish and Mediterranean thought, convinces its adepts that this life is the only one they will ever have, and each day a part of the last chance.
One characteristic of the structure of the practising and zealous life in its initial phase is the ability to be moved by its goal-image from any distance. It provides the most vivid example of what is listed as the fourth causal type in Aristotle’s doctrine of causes (after material, formal and efficient causes) – the final cause (causa finalis): while the other causae ‘carry’ the effect or push it along in front of itself, as it were, the final causality has the property of contributing to the effect in question through a pulling tension acting from above or in front. By this logic, goals resemble magnets, which irresistibly draw in suitable objects located within their radius of attraction.
What counts is the fact that the apostle himself is not speaking from the position of one who has achieved the goal, but from that of a practising person halfway there – or, in modern terms, someone committed – who is almost as far away from the goal as those to whom he turns as spiritual mentors. This makes him testify all the more emphatically to the significance of being moved by the idea of the goal. What early Christianity meant by ‘faith’ (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipator towards the goal through anticipation.
One can say that encompassing practice histories are not only teleologically directed; they also show a latently eschatological structure. In this field, imaginary goals and last things show a tendency to merge. As soon as the practising person is concerned not simply with the learning of an art or craft as a process that can be concluded with the attainment of mastery, but rather with the existential art in which life as a whole strives for elevation and transfiguration, death and perfection inevitably come into contact. This trait is shared by paths of spiritual practice in the most diverse cultures; what sets them apart from one another are the codings of the highest and last, the modes of approach, the number of steps to complete, and the shaping of the different degrees of harshness against which the advanced must fight.
The wise man, then, is not an artist with visions of something new, but rather a conservator in search of the original state. The restoration of a concealed archetype is his passion. Whether the conservation succeeds is another matter, as Western apprentices of the cura sui have only a fraction of the resources known in the Orient at their disposal – they must seek redemption primarily in the automatization ensured by countless repetitions that are meant to ingrain the improbable habitus of inner peace in the bodily memory. Whether this meets the requirements of an ars moriendi worthy of the name remains uncertain – in extremis, it is the psychophysical constitution that is most decisive, while the lifelong habit of suppressing the fear of death and preventing our fantasies from making things even worse than they already are only plays a collaborative part.
What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering – mathein pathein – into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things?
The world of meditation-induced states is a broad country, or rather a galaxy with unsecured routes and uncertain borders. Whoever travels through it can never be sure whether other travellers have seen or visited the same stars in the same Milky Ways. Though the masters insist that they have reliable maps for the expanses of the meditative space, only contradictory things have been heard about their art of map-reading. We would be falling prey to mystification if we assumed that the routes to completion all led to the same goal. In fact, meditation – in a comparable way to dreams – opens up a sphere of unobservable observations, such that here, as with dreams and their interpretation, one remains dependent on secondary reports and tendentious modifications after the fact. In addition, it is characteristic of mystical states that their carriers privilege silence as a form of communication. It would certainly be a mistake to conclude that silence indicates illumination. In terms of sheer non-communicability, any dim-wittedness can compete with an ascent to the third heaven.
Though there are no concrete notations for the artificially produced inner states of ascetics, it seems clear that they contain manifold endospheres that remain as inaccessible for us as the dreams of strangers. We would know absolutely nothing about them if we were not ourselves capable of dreaming and gliding between the musical keys of mental life.
MASTER GAMES: Trainers as Guarantors of the Art of Exaggeration
In its least muddled definition, the term ‘culture’ refers to grooming systems for the transmission of regionally essential cognitive and moral principles to subsequent generations. Because this transmission is always the source of serious intelligence work, all actually successful cultures sufficiently capable of reproduction develop a form of central ontological organ that passes judgement on the vital or non-vital status of ‘things’ – six thousand feet beyond the philosophical distinction between the substantial and the accidental. Thus ‘things’ are always already matters for negotiation in the forum of survival intelligence.
The ‘cultivation’ dimension of cultura here refers to the concern for the eternal return of the similar in subsequent generations. Where cura and cultura, concern and cultivation, appear, they initially serve the purpose of similarity. Similarity demands that the members of a population always behave in such a way that the sum of acts in the group can produce a sufficient number of similar juniors. Whoever behaves in an unconcerned or non-cultivating fashion here permits uncontrolled growth that will more often seem decadent than original. In this context, we should once again recall the basic neophobic mentality of older cultures. The wonder of later, liberally opened civilizations can be expressly defined against this background: it is the possibility for a given population to have become sufficiently sure of its reproductive capability, its didactic techniques and the attractiveness of its mode of life to be able to afford to dispense with the longstanding suppression of unwelcome variation and instead embrace the new, hazardous habitus of a broad tolerance for variation. This leads to the typical late cultural problems that occupy us daily today – they grow from the non-peaceable coexistence of variation-hostile and variation-friendly groups within a civilizatorily asynchronous state population.
Initially, only one thing is certain here: what would be called ‘school’ in later times was at first less of a pedagogical than a thaumaturgical phenomenon. First the miracle, then education; hence the close link between ethics and artistry. When Plato and Aristotle assure us that philosophy begins with amazement (thaumazein), they are just managing to grasp the very end of an order in which all higher achievements were measured in relation to the unbelievable; it was only much later that half-price trivializations and imitations would be able to dictate the agenda. At first, certainly, the introduction to the improbable has nothing to do with guiding children; it is directed at adults who realize halfway through their lives that ordinary human existence is no longer enough. The beginning was not education but seduction by the amazing. The effects that move humans to secede come purely from the school of wonder.
Let us say clearly where the basic paradox of all advanced civilization lies: it follows from its orientation towards hyperbolic or acrobatic excesses, which are always viewed on the assumption that they are only suitable for imitation or normalization. By elevating exceptional achievements to conventions, advanced civilizations create a pathogenic tension, a form of chronic altitude sickness to which sufficiently intelligent participants in the paradoxical game can only respond with the development of an internal space of evasion and simulation, and thus a ‘soul’, a ba, a psyché, an atman – or, more generally speaking, an inner world that is permanently reflexively unsettled.
Against this background, the figure of the trainer can be explained as the one who leads the way into improbability. In systemic terms, they have the task of making invisible the paradox of advanced civilization, where precisely that which is impossible to imitate is employed as an incentive to the most intense imitation.
The first round of the transference experiment had already seen the appearance of a phenomenon that accompanies all foundings of schools as an almost tragic shadow: the separation of the suitable from the unsuitable. The efficient spiritual trainer not only develops the prudence of the ancient doctor, who stays away from incurable cases; they also develop the specific perception unique to the fisher of men, who senses those with a natural affinity with the spirit of the teaching among the merely interested. In scholastic times they would be called talented, in the bourgeois era gifted – and, for understandable reasons, the abstractly universalistic ressentiment would one day be up in arms about the concept of ‘talent’ as such. It is not only old Manto who loves those who desire the impossible; everyone who embodies advanced-civilized élan does so. What is more important than loving the one who desires the absurd, however, is picking them out from the countless cases in which it would be a waste of effort to attempt a nurturing of the eros of the impossible within an individual. Like Charon, the ferryman of the underworld who conveys a Faust lusting after Helena, all the great trainers accompany those students who will not cease desiring on their way ‘across’.
The phenomenon of craftsmanly mastery is of paradigmatic significance for an understanding of both the ancient and the modern vita activa, as it marks the beginning of the process whereby the artistic mirabile became commonplace. Whether the craft is ship-building – a discipline Plato enjoys weaving into his discussion of the nature of techné – surgery, pottery or goldsmithery (Sennett, as a critic of the modern fragmentation of abilities and demoralization of mere job work, is especially fond of the last of these), the respective craftsmen are producers of artifices that overstep the circle of natural things in varyingly conspicuous ways. Because of their standardized, serial and everyday character, these works of ‘art’ have mostly ceased to be an object of admiration, though that does not stop their production from requiring a substantial amount of practice, experience, care and vigilance. This activity in the field of an anonymized and degraded artificiality provides the ideal conditions for a type of production located precisely on the threshold between fabrication and meditation. It stimulates a practising work in which the agent reproduces and expands their competence to perform this very work to the same extent that they immerse themselves in the production of the object or effect. This explains why every conscientiously performed work of craftsmanship can be of spiritual surplus value.
CHANGE OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION: On Conversions and Opportunistic Turns
The spokesmen of the great ascetic caesura were never content to label their behaviour as mere distancing, as a retreat (epoché) to the shore of observation or an evasion of the real, even though their own statements of intent do not lack such turns of phrase – recall such widespread distancing metaphors as flight from the world (fuga mundi), flight from the times (fuga saeculi), passionlessness (apátheia), detachment (vairagya) or refuge in the Dharma path. The last great symbol of distance of this type is the ‘Angel of History’ in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation, which backs away step by step from the flood of disasters, its eyes fixed in disbelief on the world scene. The concern of the most resolute secessionaries is not simply a fascinated retreat from a reality that no longer invites participation, but rather a complete reversal – a turn away from the superficially manifest, which means a turn towards something that is better, true and real on a higher level.
The implications of these seemingly harmless reflections are literally monstrous: they constitute no less than the first sketch for a doctrine of subversion which holds that pedagogy more platonico must virtually be defined as an integral science of revolution. The licence to teach in this field is acquired thus: an individual pioneer of the new way of seeing escapes from the collective cave into the open, and subsequently – initially with inevitable reluctance, overcoming himself – feels ready to descend once more to the wrongly directed in the shadow cinema and explain to them how to access these liberations. In this sense, Platonic pedagogy is a pure art of conversion – revolutionary orthopaedics. Purely because the philosopher is already a ‘convert’, one who has been turned around and the first of his kind, can he make it his task to pass on the turn to others. If he simply remained enlightened on his own behalf, he could bask in his private happiness; if he is seized by concern for the state, however, he must abandon privatism and seek to share his illumination with the many.
Pierre Hadot calmly encapsulates the surplus flowing from radical reversal: ‘All education is conversion.’ One must add: all conversion is subversion. In the instruction to this movement lies an inexhaustible ‘revolutionary’ potential, at least as long as it does not content itself with individual reversal. At the start, after all – because of the strict parallelism between the psyche and the polis – it always had to be concerned with the universalization of turning, and sought to include virtually all members of the commune it meant to reform in the other way of living. It was only the later philosophical schools – the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists – that made private tuition a central concern. For them it became a sign of wisdom to content oneself with the conversion of individuals and give up on the incorrigible many – hence their belief that there is no wisdom without resignation, and no resignation without a certain consent to the ‘cruelty of life’.
The conversion of Paul belongs in an entirely different category of ‘turnings’ that display an apostolic-zealotic character, not an ethical-‘revolutionary’ one. The theological tradition provides the term metánoia for this, whose general tendency is best formulated as ‘change of heart’, with ‘penitence’ as the heightened Christian form. From a psychodynamic perspective, the term belongs in the force field of the inner collection that seems appropriate before or after great events – whether after a personal or political defeat that forces a re-evaluation of one’s decorum, one’s guiding maxims in life, or in anticipation of an imminent event that is apocalyptically foreshadowed. Metanoia is above all a panic phenomenon, in that it goes hand in hand with the gesture of pulling oneself together in a crisis and getting serious before the looming end. It is no coincidence that the era of the European Reformation, which was swarming with people who wanted to get serious, was another heyday of the dark belief in astral influence and the fear of end times.
The Exercises of the Moderns
PROSPECT: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject
Tempus est, Comenius wrote on the wall in fiery letters in 1639: ‘It is time’ – this formula continues to determine agendas for the futurized world to this day. The most pressing item on these agendas is the systematic production of human beings who meet the highest standards of anthropomorphism – we are speaking of the seventeenth century in Europe, when the zeitgeists of change were becoming strong (though the word Zeitgeist only entered the modern German vocabulary around 1800). ‘Anthropomorphism’ – at the time, this still meant an unimpaired image of God. For the passionate reformatory theologian, it encompassed universal knowledge of the three great books of being: nature, the human soul and the Holy Scripture. Humanity was now to go into serial production in order to populate every area of this continent – and later the planet – with individuals at the level of the humanly possible. Patience with the old inadequacies had come to an end: it was time for humans to cease being an outgrowth of moral coincidence. We, the meanwhile impatient self-sculptors and man-sculptors of the technological centuries, could no longer wait until some individual deigned to break with their conventional existence and create a heightened, exemplary life through metanoia, asceticism and study. In future, the young creatures in the human gardens of the Baroque state would be cultivated on high trellises to become well-formed specimens of their kind.
Looking back on the programmes and workshops of the practising life in the premodern world, it becomes clear: the realization among Marx and the Young Hegelians that ‘man produces man’ can only be understood in all its ramifications if one looks behind the word ‘produce’, which was borrowed one-sidedly from the modern working world and its industrial procedures, and also perceives the universe of practising behaviour, training and routines of conscious and unconscious keeping-in-shape, among which, ironically enough, one must also include the phenomenon of getting-out-of-shape through the wrong training and exercises in neglect. This concession seems more acceptable in the case of athletes and monks than farmers, factory workers or handymen. Nonetheless, even the most intense activities of a working type constitute one of the many masks of the practising life. Whoever lifts it sees through the mystifications of the productivistic era and sees the omnipresence of the practice aspect amidst work phenomena. Then it becomes demonstrable, down to the smallest detail, how the active mould themselves through regularly repeated activities. It is necessary to understand why and through what repercussions on his own existence man can effectively be considered the producer of man.
The basic information about the production of humans through humans is made explicit via study of the vita activa; the pragmatists of the nineteenth century realized this. By studying the active life, they uncovered the basic anthropotechnic law: the repercussions of all actions and movements on the actor. Working places the worker in the world and marks them with the stamp of their own acts by the short route of a practising self-shaping. No activity evades the principle of retroactive influence on the operator – and whatever reacts to earlier events also affects later ones. The act produces the actor, the reflection the reflected, the emotion the feeler, and the test of conscience the conscience itself. Habits shape the virtues and vices, and complexes of habits form ‘cultures’.
The practising life is not limited to a simple reproduction of actors by their actions, however. All expansions of ability circles, all increases extending to the furthest caves of artistry, take place on the basis of self-shaping through practice.
With increases in mental and fine motor performance, supercompensation is augmented by a form of superadaptation. This ensures that nervous and kinetic systems accommodate certain regular stimulations through a form of preemptive willingness to execute – thus even highly improbable movements such as prestissimo runs on the piano or a conjurer’s tricks (‘prestidigitator’ literally means ‘fast-fingerer’) can be imprinted on the bodily memory and stabilized as a virtuosic habitus. Here it is the anticipatory intelligence in particular that is stimulated. Recent research in the fields of learning theory, neuro-motorics, neuro-rhetoric and neuro-aesthetics consolidate and vary didactic intuitions that originate in early asceticisms and artistries. All somewhat advanced civilizations make use of the observation that every active person is dyed in the lye of their activities until the miracle of ‘second nature’ takes place and they perform the near-impossible almost effortlessly.
The highest theorem of explicit training theories, then, is that ability subjected to persistent furthering tension produces, almost ‘of its own accord’, heightened ability. Through exact descriptions of the circulus virtuosos, it becomes explicable how accomplishment leads to higher accomplishment and success to expanded success. The Jesuan axiom ‘everyone who has will be given more’ is not evidence of an early Galilean capitalism, but rather one of the oldest formulations of the circle of success, also known in sociology as the ‘Matthew effect’. Whoever is able will be granted more ability. It is not without reason that successful people from the most diverse fields believe they can learn from one another at a distance; they intuit that virtuosos from all kinds of disciplines emerge from comparable circles of increase. They see humans standing at the crossroads which all forms of positive feedback must pass. Together, they thus become carriers of able virtue, which is often only a short distance away from giving virtue – this observation creates the possibility of affirming the medieval doctrine of the connexio virtutum on a modern foundation. Everyday intuitions already tell us that non-leisure is the beginning of virtue. Conversely, Christian monks recognized lethargy as the mother of despair – accompanied by its other unattractive daughters: digression, verboseness, aimless curiosity, lack of restraint and inconstancy. It is the daily line of writing that forms the artist, the daily self-denial that forms the ascetic, the daily encounter with the power needs of other humans that forms the diplomat, and the daily joy at the willingness of children to be stimulated that forms the teacher.
Anyone who subjects themselves to rituals and regularities develops nolens volens into their representative. What is a carrier of culture if not a guardian of repetition? Just as practice makes perfect, training makes the subject – provided that we understand subjectivity in the light of the general theory of practice as the carrier of its activity sequences, the apprentice of trainable modules and the holder of its habitual acquisitions, without having to deny the relative validity of the usual interpretation of subjectivity as the epicentre of expression, reflexivity and innovation. As soon as one realizes how every gesture carried out shapes its performer and determines their future state from the second occurrence on, one also knows why there is no such thing as a meaningless movement.
What Nietzsche’s confession in Ecce Homo – ‘I took myself in hand’ – renders audible, as well as the auto-therapeutic impulse of a chronically ill man, are overtones that recall the turn of the early moderns towards a transformation of themselves into living artifices. Perhaps the habit maketh not the monk, but study gets the scholar in shape, writing exercises make the humanist skilled at his subject, and virtù allows the virtuoso to shine. In the midst of a subjectivity excluded through regression into itself, the practising discover a distant coast within themselves – the promise of an unknown world. More than a hundred years before the actual continent, a symbolic America appeared on the horizon: its coast is the place where the practising of modernity set foot in the small world of themselves.
In the course of anthropological enlightenment, it became clear just how far every individual was caught up in vertical tensions and hierarchical effects of an apolitical type. If existence means the personal realization of chances at ability, then everyone is always already on a ladder of more or less, where they position themselves through the results of their own efforts and cannot dismiss those ahead of them as oppressors. Now the individual seems more like a trainer who oversees the selection of talents and drives the team of his habits. Whether one calls this ‘micropolitics’ the ‘art of living’, ‘self-design’ or ‘empowerment’ is purely a matter of taste.
ART WITH HUMANS: In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics
The activism of the moderns pushed the monastic way of life to the margins; the Reformation drove the Orient out of Christianity. Leftovers of contemplation survived in the art system, where faith was converted into amazement and prayer into admiration. Here individuals learn to experience the effects of the great masters’ works on them, with varying reverence, as artistic enjoyment. In the fifteenth century, the devotio moderna moved from the monasteries to the cities as a popularized mysticism. It expressed the idea that in future, ordinary citizens should also have the right to be crucified alongside the Lord – as a form of the ability to suffer, the imitation of the God-man on the via crucis set up a sublime attractor for the laity. At the start of the artistic age, the will to passion changed camps: now it expressed itself as admiration for artistes whose performances show suffering and ability merging into each other. What is art if not the ability-form of suffering that is simultaneously the suffering-form of ability? The empathetic sharing in the virtuoso’s suffering and ability became the foundation of modern applause. The old style of crucifixion is given less attention in a world full of artists.
In sport, the spirit of competitive intensification found an almost universally comprehensible, and hence globally imitated, form of expression. It not only completed the ‘rebirth of antiquity’, but also provided the most concrete illustration of the performative spirit of modernity, which is inconceivable without the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. De-spiritualized asceticism is known as ‘training’, and corresponds to a form of reality that demands fitness as such, fitness sans phrase, of individuals. Training is Methodism without religious content. Hence the predominance of the West in the evolution of world society in the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came not only from widely and rightly criticized ‘imperialism’; the deeper reason was that it was the people in this part of the world who, because of their head start in practice, forced all other civilizations on the planet to join in with the training systems they had introduced.
‘Culture is a monastic rule’ – for the moderns, this meant constantly facing the task of integrating themselves into an order of achievement that imposed its rules on them, with the notable detail that far from entering the order of their own volition, they were born into it. Whether they liked it or not, their existence was embedded in ubiquitous disciplinary milieus from the outset – with no breakaway movements, romanticisms of laziness or great refusals to oppose it. As if to prove that it was serious about its imperative of achievement, the order of achievement that donned the mantle of civil ‘society’ also has something resembling confirmations for the élan of the young: certificates, examinations, doctorates and bonuses.
From the modern state’s initiation of human production emerged, through the intervention of the educators, the most powerful idea of the last five hundred years: the notion of world improvement appeared on the scene when the Baroque school accepted the task of warding off the human catastrophe triggered by the early modern state through its policy of unfettered human production. In this situation, improving the world meant improving humans en masse. As this was no longer practicable as the self-improvement of an ascetic minority, it required improvement of the many through educational institutions. Hence the pedagogues of early modernity, for the first time, applied the metanoetic imperative directly to children. Only then did the meaning of the thesis that all education is conversion truly become clear. The later totalitarian systems would be heir to the invasive schools, reclaiming the prerogative of completely capturing the young.
IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE: New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics
What is decisive in all that followed is the observation that the demand for self-change and reversal no longer affected the change-disposed consciousness only from above: it need not always be the light from the vertical that casts the zealot to the ground before Damascus. The bright streak on the horizon towards which we wander on the ground now takes on a new spiritual and moral value. If the east is red, it cannot be a mistake to walk in that direction. The Reformation abolished the spiritual privileges of monastic life, as every point in the world is equidistant from grace. This changed the preconditions for a radical rejection of the world in their most sensitive point. If the ascetics in their strict orders were no closer to the light than the laymen in public offices and workshops, the latter could also find opportunities to advance spiritually by worldly means. The Enlightenment was able to follow on directly from this. And more than this: since the beginnings of the lighting policies that gave rise to the lumières, one could imagine the path to the illumination of all things as a gentle upward slope on which anyone with a vaguely good will who understood the signs of the times could move forwards. An inarticulate urge from within was now to be sufficient in order to find the right path; where there is an urge, there is a way forwards. From the eighteenth century on, a constant striding along moderately rising paths was rationalized as the authentic mode of progress. Cultura non facit saltus. World improvement is the good thing that needs time.
Thus the idea of progress and development in modernity transpires as the worst enemy of old-style radical metanoia. It deprives the steep old-ascetic vertical of its plausibility, relegating it to the domain of ‘fanaticism’. This change lies behind the thousandfold repeated misreading of modernity as the era of secularization. Certainly Christianity lost its predominance in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, but only a few Enlightenment zealots established a form of ‘humans alone’ movement that slammed shut all doors to the beyond and sought to transfer everything unconditionally to the realm of immanence. The general populace had always retained a vague awareness of transcendence, even in the supposedly secular centuries – William James called the popular tendency towards the simultaneously credulous and incredulous supposition of a higher reality ‘piecemeal supranaturalism’, applying it also to himself. This disposition was perfectly suited to the pragmatic immanentism of the Modern Age, as well as the good logical manners of academia and the educated audience, and it is this familiar attitude that is attracting attention once more in the rumours currently circulating of a ‘post-secular society’. The central moral-historical event of this epoch was therefore not secularization, but rather the de-radicalization of the ethical distinction – or, if one prefers, the de-verticalization of existence.
These observations can be translated into a distinction: in the practising life of the spiritual-ascetic, virtuosic or athletic type, the agent has a self-improving influence on themselves via the direct route of daily training. On the path of world improvement, by contrast, they become a user of objective optimization tools that modify their ethical status indirectly at most, albeit not insignificantly. This distinction directly concerns the way in which the call to change one’s life modifies the existence of the individual. As we have seen, where the metanoetic imperative is accepted at its full price – to retain our business jargon – existence comes under a steep vertical tension: it imposes the passion form of the individually chosen field on life, whether that of the ‘religious’, artistic, political or sometimes also the sporting sphere. If, on the other hand, the half-price imperative is adopted, as in the shallower forms of enlightenment, progressive thought and starry-eyed idealism, a mode of existence is established whose aims are facilitation of life, breakdown of vertical tension and avoidance of passion.
As long as the moderate tendency succeeds in presenting itself as the reasonable that is in the process of becoming the real, and thus claims universal validity, it is not overly problematic to compare and perhaps even equate technological progress with moral and social progress. For conventional progressism, the journey forwards and upwards is one that does not need to be completed under one’s own steam; it is like a current that we can allow to carry us. Coming from distant sources, it has flowed through entire epochs; our ship of progress would not have travelled so far had it not been drifting on this current – though we have only recently started guiding it towards the port. Shame on anyone who has trouble imagining rivers that flow uphill!
Modern conditions are characterized by the fact that self-competent individuals increasingly draw on the operative competence of others for their acts on themselves. I call the referring-back of having-oneself-operated-on to self-operation the auto-operative curvature of the modern subject. It is based on a strongly evident fact: whoever lets others do something directly to them is indirectly doing something for themselves. This leads to an altered way of integrating suffering into actions. The competent subject must not only attend to the expansion of its own radius of action; it must also extend its responsibility for ‘treatments’ through others. It is easy to see why this is the only possibility in a modernized world. Individuals are not only unable to take the entire work of changing the world upon themselves – they cannot even take care of everything required for their own personal optimization by themselves. By exposing themselves to the effects of others’ ability to act, they appropriate a form of passivity that implies a roundabout or deferred way of acting themselves. The expanded passivity competence of the moderns expresses itself in the willingness to have oneself operated on in one’s own interests.
If it were possible to keep its pietistic connotations at bay, one could mark this figure of a passivity underpinned by independent activity as the manifestation of ‘calmness’ that is constitutive of modernity. Calmness means passivity competence – it is the small change of ability that carries greater passions. It comes into play in situations where the subject is ready and willing to take the position of a client and profit from the savoir-faire of the operating partner. It is thus more a mode of prudence than the modern substitute for wisdom that Heidegger wanted to see in it. We recall: the philosopher had recommended ‘calmness’ [Gelassenheit] so that the modern human being, dazed by its own ability to act, could expose itself once more to treatment by Being itself. In reality, passivity-competent behaviour is part of the game intelligence of humans in an elaborated networked world, where it is impossible to make a move without simultaneously allowing others to play with one. In this sense, calmness is inseparable from the self-conception of experienced actors for whom the philosophical chimera of the subject residing at the centre of its circles of action has faded – or rather, has lost its utility value as the self-description of the day. It is replaced everywhere by concepts for agents who operate and are operated on, ‘prosumers’ and users of technical interfaces.
Only those who take the idea of world improvement utterly seriously will arrive at the view that world improvement is not enough. Identification with the principle of externalized metanoia leads to the insight that the existing world, that is to say the given ‘social’ order, will remain incorrigible until its basal construction flaws – class society and the unequal distribution of material and immaterial wealth – are rectified. Thus the world of the ‘existent’ must not be progressively improved but revolutionarily eradicated. With the help of reusable elements from the old construction, the new construction can begin after the great rupture in the spirit of equality before the ‘achievements’ – past and futures ones alike. Conventional progressism must be rejected so that the good intentions underlying it can take effect. It seems that the naïveté of the progressives has been seen through once and for all: they sincerely believe they are doing a service to freedom by opting for small, controlled steps. In reality, they are allying themselves with what is quintessentially bad – with the conditions based on the private property of world-improving means.
The notion that property is the means to all other means was ruled out by the new radicals. The deep-seated ressentiment towards private property, indeed towards anything private, blocked the conclusion that follows from any impartial examination of wealth-producing and freedom-favouring mechanisms: an effective world improvement would call for the most general possible propertization. Instead, the political metanoeticians enthused over general dispossession, akin to the founders of Christian orders who wanted to own everything communally and nothing individually. The most important insight into the dynamics of economic modernization remained inaccessible to them: money created by lending on property is the universal means of world improvement. They are all the blinder to the fact that for the meantime, only the modern tax state, the anonymous hyper-billionaire, can act as a general world-improver, naturally in alliance with the local meliorists – not only because of its traditional school power, but most of all thanks to its redistributive power, which took on unbelievable proportions in the course of the twentieth century. The current tax state, for its part, can only survive as long as it is based on a property economy whose actors put up no resistance when half of their total product is taken away, year after year, by the very visible hand of the national treasury for the sake of communal tasks. What the un-calm understand least of all is the simple fact that when government expenditures constitute almost 50 per cent of the gross national product, this fulfils the requirements of actually existing liberal-fiscal semi-socialism, regardless of what label is used to describe this situation – whether people call it the New Deal, ‘social market economy’ or ‘neo-liberalism’.
Conversion means spiritually resetting one’s life; revolution implies the gesture of redesigning the world from zero. It transforms historically congealed reality into a mass without qualities that could literally turn into anything in the reconstructive phase. In the chemical flask of revolution, the matter frozen into qualities is transformed into a totipotent potential that can be used by new engineers for free projects. Where world improvement is the priority, the New Human Being must be imagined as a function of a New Society. The New World comes about as the production of revolution and technology. The call for the technical repetition of the miracle is the most intimate agent of great change. For an enterprise on this scale, the reassignment of faith from the miracle to the miraculous is not enough. While the Christian and Yogic traditions reserved the impossible for the few in their cults of saints and living-saved figures, the spiritually subverted revolution reclaims the impossible for all.
The principal operation of biopolitical utopianism in Russia can be expressed in a simple formula: what had previously seemed possible only in the imagination would now be realized in technical procedures. Where there were man-made works, there would now be man-made life. Modern technology tears down the boundary between being and phantasm, and transforms impossibilities into schemata of the actually possible – empty sets that would now begin to be filled with actually existing entities. The term ‘anticipation’, which forms a common thread running through Marxist commentaries on the ‘achievements’ of earlier cultural periods, would now refer to planned phantasms.
The development of the Western civilizatory complex after 1945 seems to provide almost complete confirmation for the moderate. It led to the saturation of one’s surroundings with easily accessible means of world improvement for most. Their distribution occurred partly through free markets, partly through services of the redistributive state and the overgrown insurance system – the two apolitical operationalizations of the solidarity principle, which do more for the practical implantation of leftist motifs than any political ideology could. The most important intellectual-historical realignment, however, lay in the fact that metanoia changed its direction yet again: after an era of bloody slogans and malign abstractions, the commonplace seemed like something one could ‘bring back’ once more. Countless people realized that the here and now was a remote island on which they had never set foot. This supplied one of the preconditions for the rediscovery of the ethical distinction in its original form – the distinction between concern for oneself and attention to everything else. Nothing was more helpful for the disenchanted revolutionaries than the re-actualization of this distinction.
The supra-epochal tendency of modernity towards a de-verticalization of existence continued under the present conditions. At the same time, the symbolic immune systems demanded fine tunings that would break through some of the automatisms of overly crude secularism. This is the origin of the widespread new interest in ‘religious’ and spiritual traditions – and the discreetly reawakening awareness of vertical imperatives. In fact, a resolute anti-verticalism established itself in the dominant forms of the zeitgeist after 1945: in existentialism as the cult of finitude, in vitalism as the cult of overexertion, in consumerism as the cult of metabolism, and in tourism as the cult of changing location. In this de-spirited time, top athletes took over the role of guarding the holy fire of exaggeration. They are the Übermenschen of the modern world, beheaded Übermenschen who strive to reach heights where the old human being cannot follow them – not even within themselves. It is the inner androids that now constantly exceed themselves. All that the old human being inside the athletes themselves can offer is a dull commentary on the performances of the Über-androids they embody.
EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES: The Critique of Repetition
The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philosophers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehensive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodelled, the world of thoughts restructured from the bottom up, and the spoken word overhauled. The whole of life rises up as a new construction on the foundation of favourable repetition.
A first enlightenment came about when the spiritual teachers showed that humans are not so much possessed by demons as controlled by automatisms. They are not assailed by evil spirits, but by routines and inertias that force them to the ground and deform them. What impair their reason are not chance errors and occasional errors of perception – it is the eternal recurrence of the clichés that render true thought and free perception impossible. Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit: he recognized everyday opinion, the doxa, the pestilence that does not kill, but does occasionally poison entire communities. Empty phrases that have sunk down into the body produce ‘characters’. They mould humans into living caricatures of averageness and turn them into incarnated platitudes. Because existence in the ethical distinction begins with the annihilation of empty phrases, it inevitably leads to the negation of characters. Part of the charm of free humans is that one can see in them the caricature they might have become. Whoever sought to eradicate it would be the human without qualities, free for an absence of judgement, character and taste.
This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the impure and immerse itself in the pure.
Just as a person’s unexpected suicide calls their entire social environment into question, an individual’s conversion to philosophy or their entrance into an ethical group problematizes the modus vivendi of all those with whom they had previously lived under the same roof – bound by the same customs, impregnated with the same habits, entangled in the same stories. Every conversion implies the speech act: ‘I herewith leave the shared reality’, or at least the statement of intent, ‘I wish to leave the continuum of the false and harmful.’ To do this, the adept does not need to board the ship that would take them to the island of Utopia. The destinations are often only a few hours’ travel from the hopeless villages or a day’s walk from the agitated city. Whoever seeks out these heterotopias knows that once they arrive there, they will have to undertake far longer inner than outer journeys.
More than any form of civilization before it, modernity relies on sorting out what deserves to be passed on and foreshortening maladaptive developments – even if the necessary warnings are perceived by the protagonists of a current generation that basks in expressive malformations as oppressive infringements. Being allowed to bask in short-lived maladaptations, incidentally, is a significant factor in the appeal of modern life forms. It defines their aroma of freedom and lack of consequences; it liberates the present from the burden of creating role models – it is no coincidence that modernity is the Eldorado of youth movements. Its greatest temptation is to abolish the future on the pretext of being the future. Whoever restricts themselves to ‘single-age’ ways of life does not have to worry about conveying role models in multi-age processes. As self-evidently maladaptive forms also tend towards reproduction under liberal conditions, and go on to haunt subsequent generations, it is important for the civilizatory process to musealize such variants as soon as possible – at the latest, one generation after the resignation of the protagonists.
RETROSPECTIVE: From the Re-Embedding of the Subject to the Relapse into Total Care
Regardless of whether modernity sought to adapt humans to the demands of the conditions or vice versa, its aim was always to bring back those who had voluntarily become estranged from the world in their secession from the ‘country home of the self’ to ‘reality’. Its ambition was to imprint on them a single citizenship that gives and takes everything: being-in-the-world. It binds us to a communal life that knows no more emigration. Since living there we all have the same passport, issued by the United States of Ordinariness. We are guaranteed all human rights – except for the right to exit from facticity. Hence the meditative enclaves gradually become invisible, and the residential communities of unworldliness disband. The beneficial deserts are abandoned, the monasteries empty out, holidaymakers replace monks and holidays replace escapism. The demi-mondes of relaxation give both heaven and Nirvana an empirical meaning.
The true price of the epochal operation is revealed by the aberrances of the last century. If one were to compress this era into a film script, its title would have to be ‘The Secularization of the Inner World’, or ‘The Revenge of the World on Those Who Thought that They Could Remain Untouched by It’. It would demonstrate that humans are destined for mass consumption as soon as one views them as a mere factor in the game of world improvement. The plot would be centred on the symmetrically interrelated primary ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which advanced the re-translation of humans from world-flight into world-belonging: naturalism and socialism – one could, because of their close kinship, also say social naturalism and natural socialism. Both systems strove to reclaim humans, along with their physical foundations, entirely for the ‘ensemble of social relations’ and to prevent their flight into supposed inner worlds or counter-worlds – to say nothing of religious backworlds. Both approaches are inseparable from an elemental pragmatism which states that a thing is only real if it can be treated in social actions and technical procedures. It is augmented by a relentless moralism, indeed an inclination towards moral-demonic excess: if humans can no longer succeed in distancing themselves spiritually from worldly conditions, then countless people at least do everything they deem necessary so that, under the given conditions, they can count themselves among the good, the morally superior.
What Heidegger calls concern [Sorge] is the concession of humans to the world that they cannot seal themselves off against its infiltration. The shore on which the observer wanted to establish themselves is not a genuine rescue. Factical existing is ‘always also absorbed in the world of its concern’. However it might attempt to protect and isolate itself – as atman, as the noetic psyche, as Homo interior, as an inhabitant of the inner citadel, as a soul spark, as an underlying subject, as a present ego, as a personality, as an intersection of archetypes, as a floating point of irony, as a critic of the context of delusion and as an observer of observers – its constitutive being-outside-itself in fact means that it is always already in the grip of concern; only the gods, and fools with them, are without concern in themselves.
Thus everything suggests that after three millennia of spiritual evasions, human existence has been taken back to the point where the secessions began, and is little the wiser for it – or at least, barely faces less difficulty. This impression is simultaneously correct and incorrect: correct in so far as the exuberance of surreal ascents, hungry for a world beyond, has neither stood the test of time nor stood up to analysis; and incorrect because the treasuries of practice knowledge are overflowing, despite being rarely frequented in recent times.
Now it is time to call to mind anew all those forms of the practising life that continue to release salutogenic energies, even where the over-elevations to metaphysical revolutions in which they were initially bound up have crumbled. Old forms must be tested for reusability and new forms invented. Another cycle of secessions may begin in order to lead humans out once again – if not out of the world, then at least out of dullness, dejection and obsession, but above all out of banality, which Isaac Babel termed the counter-revolution.
OUTLOOK: The Absolute Imperative
‘You must change your life!’ The voice Rilke heard speaking to him at the Louvre has meanwhile left its point of origin. Within a century, it has become part of the general zeitgeist – in fact, it has become the last content of all the communications whirring around the globe. At present, there is no information in the world ether that cannot be connected to this absolute imperative in its deep structure.
Once again, we have reason to recall Nietzsche. It was he who first understood in which mode the ethical imperative must be conveyed in modern times: it speaks to us in the form of a command that sets up an unconditional overtaxing. In so doing, he opposed the pragmatic consensus that one can only demand of people what they are capable of achieving in the status quo. Nietzsche set the original axiom of the practising life against it in the form established since the irruption of ethical difference into conventional life forms: humans can only advance as long as they follow the impossible. The moderate decrees, the reasonable prescriptions, the daily requirements – in all cases, their fulfilment presupposes a hyperbolic tension that stems from an unrealizable and inescapable demand. What is the human being if not an animal of which too much is demanded? Only those who set up the first commandment can subsequently present Ten Commandments In the first, the impossible itself speaks to me: thou shalt have no other standards next to me. Whoever has not been seized by the oversized does not belong to the species of Homo sapiens. The first hunter in the savannah was already a member; he raised his head and understood that the horizon is not a protective boundary, but rather the gate for the gods and the dangers to enter.
When it comes to man-made catastrophes, the twentieth century was the most instructive period in world history. It demonstrated: the greatest disaster complexes came about in the form of projects that were meant to gain control of the course of history from a single centre of action. They were the most advanced manifestations of what philosophers, following Aristotle and Marx, called ‘praxis’. In contemporary pronouncements, the great projects were described as manifestations of the final battle for world domination. Nothing happened to the humans of the age of praxis except what they or their fellow humans had instigated. Hence one could say: there is nothing in hell that has not previously appeared in programmes. The sorcerer’s apprentices of planetary design were forced to learn that the unpredictable is an entire dimension ahead of any strategic calculus. Small wonder, then, if those good intentions did not recognize themselves in the bad results. The rest was in line with psychological probability: the militant world-improvers withdrew from their self-induced debacles and attributed whatever was too much for them to disastrous fate. The most convincing interpretation of this behavioural pattern was penned by a sceptical philosopher: after fatal undertakings, the failed protagonists indulge in ‘the art of not having been the one’.
It was the philosopher Hans Jonas who proved that the owl of Minerva does not always begin its flight at twilight. Through his remoulding of the categorical imperative into an ecological one, he demonstrated the possibility of a forward-looking philosophy for our times: ‘Act in such a way that the effects of your actions can be reconciled with the permanence of true human life on earth.’ Thus the metanoetic imperative for the present, which raises the categorical to the absolute, takes on sufficiently distinct contours for the present. It makes the harsh demand of embracing the monstrosity of the universal in its concretized form. It demands of us a permanent stay in the overtaxing-field of enormous improbabilities. Because it addresses everyone personally, I must relate its appeal to myself as if I were its only addressee. It demands that I act as if I could immediately know what I must achieve as soon as I consider myself an agent in the network of networks. At every moment, I am to estimate the effects of my actions on the ecology of the global society. It even seems that I am expected to make a fool of myself by identifying myself as a member of a seven-billion-person people – although my own nation is already too much for me. I am meant to stand my ground as a citizen of the world, even if I barely know my neighbours and neglect my friends. Though most of my new national comrades remain unreachable for me, because ‘mankind’ is neither a valid address nor a thing that can be encountered, I nonetheless have the mission of taking its real presence into consideration at every operation of my own. I am to develop into a fakir of coexistence with everyone and everything, and reduce my footprint in the environment to the trail of a feather.
The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth, spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part – the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms – will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations: co-immunism.
Civilization is one such structure. Its monastic rules must be drawn up now or never; they will encode the forms of anthropotechnics that befit existence in the context of all contexts. Wanting to live by them would mean making a decision: to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises.