What began in the Modern Age was no less than a new form of large-scale anthropotechnic regime, a fundamentally changed battle formation of disciplines. Need we repeat that it was Foucault whose studies on the history of modern disciplinary procedures, which had no models to speak of, sensitized us to this previously almost unnoticed field?
The decisive changes primarily concern the traditional division in the world of the practising life, which I call the ‘ontological local government reorganization’. In the course of this process, the practising of antiquity, the adepts of the philosophical modus vivendi, and later the monks, the pentitential warriors and athletes of Christ, had withdrawn from worldly matters in order to devote themselves exclusively to what each viewed as ‘their own’. Their whole existence revolved around the concern for their own ability to remain intact in the midst of the ominous century. Their aim was no less than the final immunization of their own lives in the face of the constant threat of injuries and ubiquitous distractions. Suum tantum curare had been the salvific formula for the era of self-discovery in retreat from the world, applying to both philosophical and religioid life plans.
One cannot remotely claim that the Modern Age disabled the world-averse and radically metanoetic forms of religiously or philosophically coded cura sui overnight. Nothing would be more deluded than to believe that in early modernity, the escapists of yesterday suddenly turned into new worldlings who regretted their gloomy absences. The legend of the ‘modern individual’s’ suddenly recovered affirmation of the world and life should be approached with suspicion. More than a few sound thinkers of the Modern Age placed their lives program-matically under the sign of Saturn – the planet of distance from the world. The homines novi who entered the stage in the fourteenth century, the early virtuoso era, were not runaway monks who had abruptly embraced the joys of the extroverted life, as if they wanted to erase the memory of their thousand-year recession like some regrettable episode. They normally clung doggedly to their ontological exile, indeed claimed more than ever a noble exterritoriality in relation to impoverished ordinariness. Even an exemplary new human like Petrarch – one of the first moderns to wear a poet’s crown, the emblem of a new type of aristocracy – had very strong personal reasons to hide in his refuge in the Vaucluse for so many years, searching for a non-monastic form of vita solitaria. Where else could he shelter his noble sickness, the world-hatred of the man of black-galled constitution, the evil discovered and fought by the abbots in the Egyptian desert under the name akédia, if not in his study cell, far from vulgar concerns?
For the early moderns, devotion to the spiritual sphere still assumed a refusal to participate in profane affairs. And yet they, the proto-virtuosos, vacillating between the older monks’ cells and the newer studios of the humanists,23 found themselves drawn into a heightened learning dynamic. They were pulled along by a drift towards self-intensification that only formed a contradictory unity with conventional monastic de-selfing courses. This intensification resulted in tendencies towards a restricted new participation of spiritual persons in the world. Using a term coined by the neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, albeit in a modified fashion, I call this return a ‘re-embedding’ of the excluded subject.24 The first embedding enables individuals to participate directly in their situations; through re-embedding, they find their way back to these after phases of estrangement. Whoever affirms an immersion in the situation is on the way to becoming what Goethe, referring to himself, occasionally called ‘the worldling in the middle’ [das Weltkind in der Mitte].25Nonetheless: even at the start of the Modern Age, the exiles of the practising were chosen just as resolutely as in antiquity, when the ethical distinction began to take effect. How else can one explain the popularity of the icon of St Jerome, which inspired countless variations on the joys of retreat in the early Modern Age? The scholar with the lion at his feet still testifies to the attraction of the contemplative life on the outskirts of a convivially transformed, in fact a bourgeoisified desert – and in a turbulent time that, one might think, was knowledgeable about everything but deserts and refuges. But note: the escapism of the moderns was as urgently motivated as it was in the days of the earliest disgust at circumstances. It still gave hope to those without worldly hope, still offered those with no social prospects the prospect of an alternative existence. Nonetheless, the newer retreats often accumulated worldly meanings with a value and scope of their own, to the point where recessively excluded subjectivity, within its enclave of self-concern, emerged as a figure of the world in its own right. Now, from the starting point of a methodically sought unworldliness, a virtuoso industry blossomed. Its masters took themselves up as workpieces of the art of living, moulding themselves into humane valuables. 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 habit26 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.
Hence what Jacob Burckhardt, following the trail of Michelet, had presented as the formula for the Renaissance – ‘the discovery of the world and man’ – was initially, seemingly paradoxically, an inner-world event. It led to the discovery of the world in humans, or rather the discovery of the human being as a model of the world, a microcosmic abbreviation of the universe. Friedrich Hebbel still had a notion of this phrase when he noted in his journal: ‘Great men are humanity’s tables of contents.’ The secret of the humane ability to be whole would no longer be founded on the biblically certified image of God: it pointed equally to the image of the world, which makes suffering, active and contemplative humans view themselves as universal mirrors and cosmic oracles. This launched the train that would not stop until it arrived at the Baroque equation of God and nature – with the human being as a copula and living sign of equality. For the subject of the Modern Age, this meant that it had to understand itself as a reality-hungry potential. From that point on, being human meant running oneself as a workshop of self-realization.
YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE
On Anthropotechnics
PETER SLOTERDIJK
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