Endo-Rhetoric and Disgust Exercises

 Solitude Techniques: Speak to Yourself!

The second of the aforementioned preconditions for existence in recessive subjectification, the regulation of language, must be strictly applied and constantly reaffirmed, as the adept can only sustain their efforts on the path to self-governance if there is a constant flow of stabilizing information from the closed language game circle of salvific and practice knowledge. This requirement is fulfilled through the establishment of a methodically regulated praxis of conversation with oneself. Here, incidentally, one can easily show how and why the practising life, contrary to what popular clichés about the mystical or supra-rational quality of spiritual processes might suggest, depends very significantly on rhetorical phenomena that have been turned inwards, and that a cessation of the endo-rhetorical functions – aside from such rare states of meditative trance as samadhi – brings about the end of spiritual life as such. What is known as ‘mysticism’ is, for the most part, an endo-rhetorical praxis in which the rare moments without speaking have the function of fuelling endless words about the wonders of the unspeakable.

From the universe of endo-rhetorical methods – which are augmented in theistic practice systems by prayers, ritual recitations, monologies (one-word litanies) and magical evocations, which do not concern us here – I shall highlight three types without which the existence of recessively stabilized practice carriers would be inconceivable. Thomas Macho’s concept of ‘solitude techniques’ can be applied to all these forms of speech; the term refers to procedures whereby humans learn to keep themselves company in retreat.27 With their help, the recessively isolated manage, as shown by the history of hermits and countless other secessionaries, not to experience their more or less rigid self-exclusion from the world as banishment. Instead, they mould their anachoresis into a salvatory concentration on what is now considered essential. The central trait of the solitude-technical procedure consists, as Macho shows, in the ‘self-doubling’ of the contemplator. It offers an indispensable stratagem for all who are halfway along the practice path: it shows them a way to be in good company after withdrawing from the world – at least, in better company than would be available to the withdrawn individual if they remained alone with themselves undoubled.

Self-doubling only makes sense if it does not produce two symmetric halves – then the contemplator would encounter their own identical twin, who would confront them again with their muddled state in a superfluous act of mirroring. Those who practise successfully rely without exception on an asymmetrical self-doubling in which the inner other has the association of a superior partner, comparable to a genius or an angel, who stays close to its charge like a spiritual monitor and gives them the certainty of being constantly seen, examined and strictly assessed, but also supported in case of a crisis. While loneliness makes the conventional depressive sink into the abyss of their insignificance, the well-organized hermit can profit from a privilege of notability, as their noble observer – Seneca sometimes calls it their custos, guardian – constantly supplies them with the feeling of having a good companion, in fact the best, albeit while under strict supervision. In the Benedictine Rule, the friars were reminded that a monk must know that he is watched (respici) by God at every moment, that he must take into account that his every action is witnessed from a divine observation point (ab aspectu divinitatis videri) and constantly relayed upwards (renuntiari) by the angels.28This plausibly shows how recessive subjectivity can develop into a forum for intense dialogues, even passionate duels between the self and its intimate other. As the Great Other only gains a clearer presence through retreat from the multiplicity of daily themes – a procedure from which psychoanalysis and related therapeutic techniques also profited in the twentieth century – the withdrawn individual gains mental intensity by isolating themselves monothematically. They learn from their inner other who they themselves are meant to be, and their daily self-examination tells them what state they are in. One must admit, however, that in this arrangement they remain a split subject for the meantime – they live as a solitary, perhaps not quite coram Deo, but under the gaze of the master or angel whom they fear disappointing. At this level of concern for oneself, one cannot yet speak of any unification with the Great Other or a dissolution of the duality between real and ideal self, as taught in Neoplatonism and the Indian schools of non-duality.

Endo-Rhetoric and Disgust Exercises 

There are essentially three forms of speech that can be given at the inner forum as part of the recessive subject’s psychogymnastic exercises: firstly, separation speeches, which are devoted to reinforcing the recession; then training speeches, with which the practising person seeks to improve their spiritual immune situation; and finally vision speeches, which enable the contemplator to direct their gaze at the whole and to the heights – and from imaginary heights back down to the depths.

Speeches of the first type are especially important for the stabilization of the recession, as they fight the practising person’s inclination to regress to the experiential mode of the worldlings. It is clear enough that the position of exclusive self-concern is existentially far more improbable, and thus in far greater need of cultivation, than the formerly practised lifestyle of unspoilt participative pluralism, where individuals were allowed to unburden themselves via group drift, collective curiosity and mediocre diversion. Heidegger, following Kierkegaard’s example of a philosophical insulting of the audience,29 famously described the modus essendi of this form of self in his analysis of the ‘they’ in Being and Time: everyone is the other, and no one is themselves. He went in search of a path to authenticity that would no longer lead through a withdrawal to the enclave, but rather through a renewed participation in the historic ‘event’ that is elevated to the call of being. As long as the spiritual call to withdrawal applies, however, nothing must be fought more ardently than the constantly reappearing inclination to find ordinary life with its little refuges and communitary anaesthetics attractive. Whoever starts dreaming of the joys of ordinariness again after their withdrawal is spiritually lost. That the primitive truth of existence in normal situations, the participative embeddedness in natural and co-personal circumstances (as post-metaphysical spherological analysis explains with comprehensive descriptions), must be sacrificed is part of the price of life under increased vertical tension. This context demands the denaturing of normality and the transformation of the improbable into second nature.

Attacks of homesickness for the lost normality can be remedied through endo-rhetorical exercises from the angle of disgust arousal. They are effective because they fight the root causes of the temptation to find, on occasion, the external world left behind attractive. Thus Marcus Aurelius notes:

Just as taking a bath seems to you a matter of oil, sweat, dirt, scummy water, all of it offensive, so is every part of life and every kind of matter.30

This shows in a highly suggestive manner how the genesis of the external also includes ethical and affective distancing mechanisms. Sensory disgust arousal is assisted by disillusioning and disenchanting analysis:

Altogether, human affairs must be regarded as ephemeral, and of little worth: yesterday sperm, tomorrow a mummy or ashes.31

In this context, ancient atom theories find their moral place: they show how all phenomenal life is based on momentary groupings of particles. In the long run, only the spiritual soul can confront the vanitas of the particle flurries. One need hardly point out how much Buddhism owes to the use of the atomic theory, and more generally to the analytics of the composite – and how strongly the obligatory motifs of disgust arousal and disillusionment affected it. The doctrine of the not-self (anatman) so characteristic of Buddhism likewise has less of a theoretical than an aversive purpose: it persuades its adepts to accept that even if there were such a thing as the self or the soul, these would be dissoluble – which is meant to put us off the whole thing from the start.

The contemplation of organic metamorphoses goes a step further: 

Observe every object and realize that it is already being dissolved and in process of change, and, as it were, coming to be from decay or dispersion, and how each is born, in a sense, to die. 32

In this context one can appreciate Ovid’s achievement, the poetic retrieval of transformative phenomena. It was the honour of poetry to protect the space of normality from devastation by a disillusioning analysis that had got out of control. In addition, there is a wealth of self-admonitions intended to render any affective attachment to the non-own impossible through constant exercises in separation and disaffection – recall Epictetus’ suggestion to parents not to kiss their child without bearing in mind that death could take it away from them the very next day. The practising person had to have such maxims of self-admonition and self-training ‘to hand’ day and night, like a spiritual first aid box – in the terminology of the school, such mentally handy material was called the procheíron, and whoever still speaks today of having some thing or other ‘ready’ is quoting the conventions of a lost practice culture from a distance. Endo-rhetorical phrases with comparable tendencies can be found in abundance in the practice systems of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, spiritual Islam and others. We are all familiar with images of Indian sadhus meditating next to pyres on cremation grounds (shmashâna). For the notorious Aghori, who fall into a trance state while sitting on corpses, the cemetery symbolizes ‘the totality of psychomental life, fed by consciousness of the “I” ’.33 Shaivite extremists insist on eating and drinking from the skulls of Brahmans – and noisily bearing witness to it. One can easily imagine what they say to themselves in their inner monologues on the charnel ground: ‘You must transcend all this.’ Those with a Catholic upbringing will remember the Ignatian exercises, which constitute one great rhetorically structured persuasion of the meditator to participate in the passion of Christ and turn away from the recklessness of worldly life. In the Protestant camp, in Puritanism, the believer’s day is structured by admonitions to withdraw from worldly temptations. Most people are familiar with the ominous processions in Shi’ite Iran, where grown men walk through the streets of their cities lamenting and bleeding, striking their heads with broad knives amid monotonously tormenting monologues to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn. 

There is no need to list examples for the methods of immunization and training speeches, or for vision and worldview speeches directed at one’s own intellect. The two are closely connected, as the striving for a transvital self-securing beyond death aims directly for the highest-level symbolic immune system. In Stoic doctrines, this is presented as the totality of nature: dissolving into it must be viewed as the highest form of integration, even if it is accompanied by the disintegration of that conglomerate of atoms which I provisionally think of as my body. In Christianity, by contrast, death is understood as a transition from this life to eternal life. In those spheres dominated by the idea of karma, the final immunity is attained by disabling the guilt-driven causal impetus; thus only a life that had completely ceased to produce suffering would be safe from the repercussions of those products. In this sense, Nirvana refers less to a place than to a state in which all injury and contamination by the effects of being has ceased.

To consider such ideas of dissolution, transition and final immobilization existentially plausible, the practising would constantly have to call to mind their own finitude and endo-rhetorically anticipate its sublation into absolute immunity in keeping with the conventions of their cultural area. In doing so, they speak to themselves from the position of perfect teachers attending to this student as if there were no others. Recessive subjectivity always takes private tuition from the universe, from God, from Nirvana. The three absolutes would be bad teachers if they did not encourage their students to view the impossible as if it were close enough to touch; but they would be equally bad if they did not occasionally threaten to end the tuition if there were no clear improvements in performance.

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.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics 

PETER SLOTERDIJK