Only Cripples Will Survive

 ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE

Unthan’s Lesson

That life can involve the need to move forwards in spite of obstacles is one of the basic experiences shared by the group of people whom, with a carefree clarity, one formerly called ‘cripples’, before younger and supposedly more humane, understanding and respectful spirits of the age renamed them the handicapped, those with special needs, the problem children, and finally simply ‘human beings’.13 If, in the following chapter, I persist in using the old term, which has meanwhile come to seem tactless, it is purely because it had its traditional place in the vocabulary of the time that I am recalling in these explorations. Abandoning it for the sake of sensitivity, and perhaps merely over-sensitivity, would cause a system of indispensable observations and insights to disappear. In the following, I would like to demonstrate the unusual convergence of human and cripple in the discourses of the generation after Nietzsche in order to gain further insights into the structural change of human motives for improvement in recent times. Here it will transpire to what extent references to the human being in the twentieth century are rooted in cripple-anthropological premises – and how cripple anthropology changes spontaneously into an anthropology of defiance. In the latter, humans appear as the animals that must move forwards because they are obstructed by something.

The reference to rooting provides the cue, albeit indirectly, for the reflections with which I shall continue the explorations on the planet of the practising stimulated by Nietzsche – and, in a sense, also the contemplations on torsos introduced by Rilke. In 1925, two years before Heidegger’s Being and Time, three years before Scheler’s The Human Place in the Cosmos, the Stuttgart publisher Lutz’ Memoirenbibliothek printed a book with the simultaneously amusing and shocking title Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern [The Pediscript: Notes from the Life of an Armless Man, with 30 Illustrations]. It was ‘penned’ by Carl Hermann Unthan, who was born in East Prussia in 1848 and died in 1929 – in truth, it was written on a typewriter whose keys were pressed using a stylus held with the foot. Unthan unquestionably deserves a place in the pantheon of reluctant virtuosos of existence. He belongs to those who managed to make a great deal of themselves, even though his starting conditions suggested that he would almost certainly make little or nothing of himself. At the age of six or seven the boy, born without arms, discovered by chance the possibility of playing on a violin fastened to a box on the ground. With a mixture of naïveté and tenacity, he devoted himself to improving the method he had discovered for playing the violin with his feet. The right foot played the part of the left hand, fingering the notes, while the left foot moved the bow.

The young man pursued his exercises with such determination that after attending secondary school in Königsberg, he was accepted as a student at the Leipzig Conservatory. There, mastering an enormous practice workload, he reached a notable level of virtuosity. He expanded his repertoire, soon also including showpieces of the highest difficulty. Naturally the handicapped man’s violin playing would never have attracted such attention far and wide if it had been carried out in the usual form, without the element of acrobatic improbability. Before long, a vaudeville entrepreneur showed interest in Unthan. In 1868, still a minor, he began to go on concert tours, which, after stops in rural towns, took him to the European capitals, and later even across the ocean. He performed in Vienna, where he was introduced to the conductors Johann Strauss and Michael Zierer. In Munich he impressed the Hungaro-Bavarian military band leader and waltz king Josef Gungl by playing Gungl’s brand new composition, the ‘Hydropathen-Walzer’; he was especially flabbergasted by Unthan’s execution of double stops with his toes. After a concert at the ‘overcrowded grand ballroom’ in Budapest, he was reportedly congratulated on his virtuosic performance by Franz Liszt, who had been sitting in the first row. He patted him ‘on the cheek and shoulder’ and expressed his appreciation. Unthan notes on this incident: ‘What was it that made me doubt the authenticity of his enthusiasm? Why did it seem so artificial?’14 One can see: in this note, Unthan, who was already over seventy by the time he wrote Das Pediskript, was not simply touching on imponderabilities in relationships between older and younger virtuosos. Those questions, written down half a century after the scene they describe took place, were significant as a symptom: they reminded the author of a distant time when the illusion that he could be taken seriously as a musician, not merely a curiosity, was still intact. Even fifty years later, the author still felt the cold breeze of disillusionment in Liszt’s paternally sympathetic gesture; Liszt, a former prodigy himself, knew from experience what kind of life awaits virtuosos of any kind. So he would have known all the better what future lay before a young man who was to travel the world as a victor over a quirk of nature.

There is a widespread cliché among biographers: that their hero, who often has to go through arduous early years first, ‘conquers the world for himself’. In his mode of self-presentation, Unthan takes up this figure by following each anecdote with another and recounting the saga of his successful years as a drawn-out travelogue, moving from city to city and continent to continent. He tells the story of a long life in constant motion: on Cunard steamers, on trains, in hotels of every category, in prestigious concert halls and dingy establishments. He probably spent the majority of his career on dubious vaudeville stages, from which he would blow the baffled audience kisses with his feet at the end of his performances.15 The dominant sound in Unthan’s public life seems to have been the cheering and applause of those surprised by his presentations. Unthan’s ‘notes’, which can neither be called an autobiography nor memoirs – the closest category would be that of curiosities – are written in a language at once naïve and sentimental, full of stock phrases, echoing the diction of the factual account in the mid-nineteenth century; one can imagine the author’s tongue in the corner of his mouth while writing.

On every page of Das Pediskript, Unthan demonstrates his conviction that the success of his life is revealed through an overflowing collection of picturesque situations he has experienced. Unthan lays out his treasures like a travel writer of the bourgeois age – his first concert, his first bicycle, his first disappointment. These are accompanied by a host of bizarre observations: a bullfight in which the bull impaled several toreros; a sword-swallower who injured his throat with an umbrella; garishly made-up females of all ages in Havana in 1873, with ‘an odour of decay hovering over everything’, with dancing negresses: ‘We saw the most forbidden things imaginable’; a lizardeating event in Mexico; ‘sold out’ in Valparaiso, with the recollection that ‘the sun slowly sank into the still ocean. As if it were finding it difficult to leave …’ Seven hours of brisk swimming ‘without turning on my back’, and heavy sunburn as a result; his encounter with an armless portrait painter in Düsseldorf, a comrade in fate who painted with one leg – ‘there was no end to the questions and answers’, ‘he was full of vitality and good cheer. But most of our chats touched on deep matters nonetheless.’ His mother’s death: ‘there was a praying inside me, though I did not and do not know what it was praying’. Appearances in the Orient, where people are more distinctive: ‘a list of my most striking experiences alone would fill entire volumes’. Disappointment at the Holy Sepulchre, where ‘the most degenerate riffraff’ appeared to have gathered; arrest in Cairo, nicotine poisoning in Vienna, rifle shooting with his feet in St Petersburg, in the presence of Tsar Alexander III, guest appearance in Managua – ‘the city of León bore the character of decline’; a comet over Cuba; participation in a film entitled Mann ohne Arme [Man Without Arms]. On board the Elbe to New York as a fellow passenger of Gerhart Hauptmann, who has a brief conversation with the artiste. Then the New World: ‘Americans show a stimulating understanding in the face of the extraordinary.’ ‘ “You’re the happiest person I know”, said a man they called John D. “And what about you, with your money, Mr Rockefeller?”, I asked him. “All my money can’t buy your zest for life …” ’

Das Pediskript could be read as a sort of ‘life-philosophical performance’, using the latter word in its popular sense. Unthan steps before his audiences in the posture of an artiste whose special virtuosity on the violin, and later with the rifle and the trumpet, is embedded in an overall virtuosity, an exercise in the art of living that pervades all aspects of life – it is no coincidence that the picture section of the book primarily shows the author carrying out such everyday actions as opening doors and putting on his hat.

If one wanted to translate Unthan’s more general intuitions into a theoretical diction, his position would have to be defined as a vitalistically tinged ‘cripple existentialism’. According to this, the disabled person has the chance to grasp their thrownness into disability as the starting point of a comprehensive self-choice. This applies not only to the basic auto-therapeutic attitude as expressed by Nietzsche in Ecco Homo, in the second section under the heading ‘Why I Am So Wise’: ‘I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again.’ Unthan’s choice applies to his own future. He places the following words in the mouth of the twenty-one-year-old who felt he had been released into independence: ‘I will seize myself with an iron first to get everything out of myself.’16 He interprets his disability as a school for the will. ‘Anyone who is forced from birth to depend on their own experiments and is not prevented from performing them […] will develop a will […] the drive towards independence […] constantly stimulates further experiments.’17The consequence is emotional positivism, which is accompanied by a rigorous prohibition of melancholy. Unthan’s aversion to every form of pity recalls similar statements in Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. Only constant pain, for example, might be capable of wearing down someone handicapped: ‘All other obstacles are defeated by the will, which forges ahead into the sunshine.’18 The ‘sunny attitude to life’ of the cripple who was able to develop freely leads, we are told, to a ‘higher percentage of zest for life’ than is the case for a ‘fully able person’.19Unthan ends his account with a summary in which he presents his confession: 

I do not feel lacking in any way compared to a fully able person […] I have never found anyone with whom, taking all conditions into account, I would have wanted to exchange places. I have certainly struggled, even more with myself than with my surroundings, but I would not give up those exquisite pleasures of the soul, which came about precisely through the struggles caused by my armlessness, for anything in the world.20So it is ultimately only a matter of giving the cripple a chance to develop freely: this thesis is the culmination of Unthan’s moral intuitions, which fluctuate between the urge for emancipation and the longing to participate. This free development should not be mistaken for a licence to aesthetic excesses, as called for in the Bohemian ideologies appearing at the same time. Allowing the cripple ‘enough light and air in his development’21 rather means giving him a chance to participate in normality. For the handicapped person, this reverses the relationship between bourgeois and artistes. Unlike bourgeois rebels against the ordinary, he cannot dream of following the people in the green caravan.22 If he wants to be an artist, it is in order to be a bourgeois. For him, artistry is the quintessence of bourgeois work, and earning a living through it is what gives him a sense of pride. On one occasion, the author remarks that he would not want to receive a fur coat for the winter as a gift from a noble sir, as Walther von der Vogelweide did: ‘I would rather earn the fur coat with my feet.’23 At the ethical core of Unthan’s cripple existentialism one discovers the paradox of a normality for the non-normal. What makes this existentialist in the stricter sense of the word is a group of three motifs whose development only took place in the twentieth century: firstly, the figure of self-choice, whereby the subject makes something out of that which was made out of it; secondly, the socio-ontological constraints affecting anyone who exists under ‘the gaze of the other’ – this produces the impulse of freedom, the stimulus to assert oneself against the confining power coming from the foreign eye; and finally the temptation of insincerity, with which the subject casts its freedom away to play the role of a thing among things, an in-itself, a natural fact. 

From the perspective of French existentialism, Unthan did everything right. He chooses himself, he asserts himself against the enslaving pity of the others, and remains the perpetrator of his own life rather than becoming a collaborator with the allegedly dominant circumstances. But the reason he does everything right – perhaps more right than can be expressed in any philosophical jargon – cannot be sufficiently illuminated with the thinking methods found left of the Rhine. The inadequacy of the French approach lies in the fact that the existentialism which developed in France after 1940 formulated a philosophy for the politically handicapped (in this particular case, for the people of an occupied country), while in Germany and Austria, the last third of the nineteenth century had seen the growth of a vitalistictherapeutically coloured philosophy for the physically and mentally handicapped, namely neurotics and cripples, that charged itself up with political, social-philosophical and anthropological ideas after 1918. While the occupation taught the French to associate existence (and existential truth) with resistance and freedom in the underground, Germans and Austrians had begun two generations earlier to equate existence (and existential truth) with defiance and compensatory acts. Thus the drama of ‘continental philosophy’ – to draw this once on the laughable classification of content-oriented thought by formalists across the water – in the first half of the twentieth century can only be understood if one bears in mind the contrasts and synergies between the older and more comprehensive Central European existentialism of defiance and the younger, more politically restricted Western European existentialism of resistance. The first goes back to pre-Revolution times, for example the work of Max Stirner, and continues – after its culmination in Nietzsche – until the systems of Freud, Adler and the later compensation theorists who became active in Germany; the second, as noted above, took shape under the 1940-4 occupation, with a history extending back via the revanchism of the Third Republic to the anger collection movements among the losers of the French Revolution, that is to say the early socialists and communists. Once one has understood the German model, one will easily recognize it in its caricatured forms left of the Rhine. What circulated on the Rive Gauche after 1944 as the doctrine of the Anti was the political adaptation of German cripple existentialism, whose adherents were committed to the ethics of the Nonetheless.

Unthan undoubtedly belongs to the earlier defiance-existentialist movement. Because of the special nature of his circumstances, however, he was not fully subsumed under this tendency. What sets him apart is a special form of ‘living nonetheless’ that isolates him from the heroistic mainstream and brings him into the company of artistes. His heroism is that of a striving for normality. Part of this is the willingness to be not simply an involuntary curiosity, but a voluntary one. One could therefore define his position as that of a vaudeville existentialist. Its starting point is the cunning of fate that commands him to make an artistic virtue out of an anomalous necessity. Driven along by strong initial paradoxes, the vaudeville existentialist searches for a way to achieve a form of ‘decent exhibitionism’. For him, normality is to become the reward for abnormality. In order to be at peace with himself, he must therefore develop a form of life in which his pathological oddity is transformed into the precondition for a successful assimilation. Hence the ‘armless fiddler’, as Unthan was known on American stages, could under no circumstances perform as a mere cripple, as was the custom in the European circus and even more in the freakshows across the Atlantic. He had to present himself as the victor over his disability and beat the gawking industry at its own game.

The achievement of this success confirms Unthan’s unusual position, which is once more occupied by various outstanding artists today. 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. What Unthan conquered for himself was the possibility of becoming, as a cripple virtuoso, a subject that can be beheld and admired to the same extent as it can be exhibited and gawked at – exhibited primarily by the impresarios and circus directors often mentioned, seldom favourably, in Das Pediskript, stared at by an audience whose curiosity often gives way to moved enthusiasm within a short time. When the existentialism of defiance is heightened into its vaudeville form, we see the emergence of the cripple artiste who has chosen himself as a self-exhibitable human. In the race against the voyeuristic curiosity of the normal, which must constantly be won anew, his self-exhibition pre-empts mere sensation. 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.

(...)

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK