Being human mean running oneself as a workshop of self-realization

 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adepts of the philosophical modus vivendi, and later the monks, the pentitential warriors and athletes of Christ, had withdrawn from worldly matters in order to devote themselves exclusively to what each viewed as ‘their own’.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

The age of metaphysical homelessness

Now one sees more clearly what the principle of desert means for the ecology of spirit. Whoever goes into the desert seeks out the worldly location that is uniquely suited to the minimization of the world. The desert is the option of acquiescing only to the world’s unavoidable remainder; the least evil place in the evil world is that which is most hostile to life. The desert forms only a translucent film of being holding the souls back from immediate disappearance into the ultimate ground [Grund]; it is the real almost-not-being that demands no interest for itself but stands open like an empty cosmic therapy-room for the staging [Inszenierungen] of the soul. It is the pure projection-space in which the experience of self and God, including what foils and interrupts it, can be brought to emergence. The alliance with the desert as a sort of transitional thirdness that tends toward zero thus represents a pact with a growth-hostile principle. Inasmuch as growth rep-resents the world-characteristic par excellence, the refusal of it also severs the root of the expansivity of worldly interests.8 Thereby they dry out the birth-friendliness of worldly misfortune that the force of continuation of evil sinks together into itself, the influx of forces into the reproduction of old miseries comes to a halt. Where nothing grows, spurious Becoming is also deprived of its foundation. [96] In its place, the desert offers itself as a stage for exclusive adventures into fusion; these lead, if one believes the aretalogies or glorious speeches concerning the stars of the desert, through sufferings and euphorias to an ever-higher grade of purity, to an ever more empty and sublime form of drunken soberness. If it is the virtuosity of the saints to challenge the desert, then it is the virtuosity of the desert to be amply gruesome in order to induce or elicit or call forth a salu-tary desperation; wherever she gives her best, there the desert becomes the bad-enough mother.9 By giving nothing more than barrenness, scantness, she gives the sovereign emptiness. The desert is hostile and strenuous enough to agitate individuals to a permanent commitment to the extension of the struggle for divinization; it is raw and inhumane enough to exterminate all tenderness for fleeting things. As a zone on the margins of the inhabitable world, it can house the paradoxical movements that want no other status than that of disappearance.

In this empty field,10 which seems to await signs and miracles since long ago, the first outbreakers from the antique social cosmos inscribed their hyper-bolic gestures. Like no other space the desert indeed invites one to act out psychotheological imagery. There, men who at some time in their childhood have absorbed the lectures [97] concerning the captivity of the resistant bodies by the will, move about through the driest areas of Palestine for decades with real fifty-pound iron chains around the hips. They lock themselves for many years into huge graves to prepare themselves for ascension through Christ— and if this is postponed, this is only because of the lethargy of the flesh, in which the nights pass in hard battles with sensual simulacra and the midday hours in the struggle against demons of heat. Famously the life of St. Anthony filled the image arsenals of European nightmare culture up to modernity with inexhaustible impulses. The emergence of gruesome images became possible because the deserted space framed the specter of associating and projecting souls like therapeutic brackets; above the delirious holy patients, the neutral attention of God floats as a saving ear. In this regard, the desert experiment had to lead to a spontaneous discovery of what the nineteenth century calls the unconscious; whoever was there knows more about the area out of which temptations [Versuchungen] and symptoms emerge.
If the human decides to go into the desert, he elevates his life into the state of metaphysical alertness—awakeness is everything. The metaphor of keeping oneself alert for the lord translates for these extremists of orthodoxy into an unprecedented battle against sleep, which is for the most part reduced to a few hours and in many cases only sitting, even hanging attached to ropes in vertical position. The saints spark themselves up like living eternal lights who illuminate the desert nights with their awakeness; thus, they correspond to the fixed stars, [98] whose light radiates from yonder into the black space of creation. John of Moschus, the poetic eulogist of anchoritism, saw in the people of solitary prayer out there a blooming “spiritual meadow,” and when that meadow laughed, as accords with the rules of rhetoric, its laugh already bore witness to the glamour of the overworld. In contrast, in the literal desert, over centuries people wept more than ever before or after in the history of humanity. Without the gift of tears, hardly one of these athletes could have been capable of elevation into the higher grades of dyadic unity. Tears were at all times held in the highest regard as means and signs of purification by the world-escapists. Together with persistent prayer, that inner monologue of the dyadic monad, tears were incomparably well suited to liquidate the world-blockage and to flush away the separating layers between “God” and soul. If prayers and tears have become identical, nothing is left of the subject but a supplication to be allowed to abandon itself; the supplication makes to its god the unspeakable confession that it wants to be nothing but a part of him; even the anchorite’s desperation belongs to God; in his final weakness the desperate one encounters non-being before the beloved. Then the anchorite wants to not be his own anymore, and above all to have no will of his own and no world of his own. For the sake of becoming unworldly [Entweltlichung], the monks forbid themselves laughter; many spent their whole lives naked, like animals in ecstasy; others abandoned the use of shoes, some even the use of first-person possessive pronouns. John of Cassian said about the undergarments of the Egyptian monks: “The cutoff sleeves [99] should remind them that they are cut off from all deeds and works of this world. The linen garments say to them that they are dead to all life on earth.”11 How far the concern for the destruction of all worldliness reached among the holy solitaries reveals itself above all in the mythlike episodes of anachoretic literature, which, from the fourth century onward, submerges the whole Near East in a climate of desert fanaticism.

(...)

But then the question of where the monks are going would have to be reformulated so radically that it would no longer be about monks at all. The question would instead be: how does human acosmicity manifest itself under modern conditions? How do the forces oriented toward resettlement organize themselves in post-metaphysical times? How do modern subjects conduct themselves with their element-changing tendencies, if anachoretic, monastic or psychotheological “paths” no longer stand open? What, in general, will become of the escapist, path-forging impulses of the polyvalent animal?

It bears repeating that an adequate response to these questions would amount to a cultural history of modernity. For the moment, it should suffice to indicate that the unexampled development of western music can only be understood on the basis of the necessity of producing a convincing culture-wide substitute for the lost desert and for the barred monastic refuge. European art music between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries touches, with its combination of ascesis and metaphysical tension, on the secrets of dyadic extremism formerly accessible only to hermits and mystics—it too had its athletes and its lonely protagonists, it too was oriented toward an external public, which already consisted more of spectators than of listeners. In the last hundred years, music has established itself as a universal transitional thirdness with which the world-age seeks to address its need for world-flight without recourse to the desert. The artificial sonic attack on the exterior world-noises has in this century reached an intensity unprecedented in the entire history of the species. But unlike the desert, which helped free the interior, the mass-medial musicalization of all spaces [115] floods the last breaches of free interiority: the oblivion of being out of every loudspeaker;
low-level worldlessness in every household at every time of day. Ever since headphones have existed, the principle of world-shutoff in the modern use of music has taken effect purely at the level of apparatuses. Here a drug-theoretical account of all forms of “light” ambience in modernity suggests itself.

There is hardly any phenomenon of contemporary culture in which no traces of quasi-musical world-distancing techniques can be found. The new wave of cocooning, the mass-emigration of modern subjects into the unreachable interior of solitudes, trips and symbioses, would be quite impossible without immersion in the tonal menu of sound-systems. World-distance is the lowest common denominator of a poly-escapist society.

The age of metaphysical homelessness (to recall Lukács’ formula for modernity) generalizes the habitus of flight. With its progressive constitution the world flees from itself in itself; from each point of the fleeing world, further flights are prepared. The accelerated world of money and of absolu-tized communication parodies the metaphysical relation to impermanence; it possesses neither an idea of the pleroma of metaphysics nor a conception of positive emptiness. The acosmic needs of people in a monkless time must seek other outlets—routes that, for all their differentiation, have in common that they run perpendicular to the abundance principle of the secular bourgeoisie. The word bourgeoisie here stands for the type of human that seeks wealth not in the expansion of inner space, but in stuffing oneself with content that ensures seamless self-filling. Flightiness, expanded to an element, makes a compromise between the fluid and the dead. In it move people who recognize themselves neither in the monk nor in the worldling. In a conversation with Boris Groys, the Russian avant-garde artist Ilya Kabakow issued the following statement:

The willingness to feel out of place is highly developed in me. It was always an especially comforting experience for me to not be anywhere. Whenever I go on a journey, even the foretaste of driving away already makes me happy. This obviously is an infantile trauma expressing the lack of the wish to come to the world. The world in which I was born and the form into which I was born leave me deeply unsatisfied. I don’t like my appearance and I don’t identify myself with it. I still remember when I saw my profile for the first time in the mirror; I literally moaned in pain: I couldn’t believe that that’s me. This is the desire to run away from my body, from my things, from my home. . .

I don’t have a home, I always feel that I am in a state of transit. Of such people one often says: they are well nowhere.

Instead of a commentary, I confront this statement with a temporally distant echo that responds to the artist from a nearness, and with a temporally near counterpart that distances itself from it milky-way-wide. In the Manichaean cosmogony that Theodore bar Koni quoted in the seventh century, it is said:

The shining Jesus approached the naïve Adam and awoke him from deathly sleep thereby to redeem him from the many spectres . . . so it was also with Adam, for the friend found him as he was sunken in deep sleep. He woke him, gave him movement, made him lively and drove the false spirit out of him. . . Thereafter Adam examined himself and recognized who he was. And he showed to him the fathers of the heights and how his soul was thrown into everything, devoured by those who devour, swallowed by those who swallow. . .

He erected him and let him eat from the tree of life. Thereafter Adam came to see and wept and cried with a loud voice like a roaring lion. He shook his hair, hit his chest and spoke: “Woe! Woe to him who built my body and to him who bound my soul.”

The distant echo resonates in the closing stanzas of Goethe’s poem “To the Moon”:

Blessed is he who walks apart,
Though no hate he bears,
Holds a friend within his heart;
And with him he shares
All that steals, by men unguessed,
Or by men unknown,
Through the maze of his own breast
In the night alone.

Out of the World
Peter Sloterdijk 

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

The Selfless Revanchist A note on Cioran

One can gauge the significance, or at least the independence, of a thinker not least by how long and by what means he eludes his emulators, even those who purport to be faithful commentators or to have been called upon to develop his impulses. In this respect, Cioran might without further inquiry have to be reckoned among the most significant philosophical writers of the twentieth century, since in a manner other than the star philosophers of existentialism, Critical Theory, or poststructuralism, who achieved their goals in protest of imitation, Cioran invested his intellectual suffering entirely in his inimitability. Yet the concept of significance does not do justice to the phenomenon that is Cioran, since the fundamental impetus of his thought is not that of seeing his name registered in a history of ideas or in an account of great authors. Rather, he wants to see that his pride in defending his inimitability against students and copycats is satisfied. While the great masters of the modern culture of dissidence, that is to say, Heidegger, Sartre, Adorno, and Derrida, could reckon their successes in multitudes of emulators, Cioran, more proud, more demonic, more despairing than they were, recognizes his success in discouraging potential emulators already when they are on the brink of making the attempt. He knew that all emulation ends up in parody and that whoever takes his ideas more seriously than their success shields them from the parodies that follow their impact.

The question is thus how one manages to transition from emulative negativity, which as revolutionary engagement, radical critique, aesthetic anarchism, or deconstructivist subversion forms a school, to an inimitable, completely idiosyncratic negativity that nonetheless shines light on the whole. In this context, we might recall the relevant difference in late ancient Egyptian and Syrian monasticism between friars living in cloisters and anchorites, of which the first, according to an observation by Hugo Ball, existed as athletes of mourning, while the second existed as athletes of despair. It cannot be doubted that Cioran’s place in this alternative must be sought among the anchorites, those who have withdrawn and cut themselves off from the terrestrial realm. In this position, it is no longer a matter of struggling with and reworking beings according to critical methods, but rather of putting God and the world on trial by holding one’s own shattered existence against them as proof of their failure and waywardness. While critical or subversive negativity has the effect of forming schools to the degree that its standpoint can be charted, established, copied, and simulated in beings, despairing negativity withdraws into an exile that cannot be taught, is fathomless, and cannot be emulated. In the elaboration of this position of exile lie Cioran’s singular strengths. After Kierkegaard, he is the only thinker of distinction who had the irrevocable insight that no one can despair according to sure methods.

Whoever intends to obtain his doctorat should not take the trouble to first ask Cioran whether he would like to supervise the work. The distance from the world that is characteristic of critical theorists, aesthetic anarchists, and deconstructivists is always based on a reserve from which the respective schools claim, not unjustly, that within limits they can be learned by means of a method. What Husserl called the epochē, the break with the natural attitude, means nothing other than the perfectible practice of opting out of the stream of gesticulating, intending, involved life. To this belongs the methodical cheerfulness of theory’s spectating disposition, even for mournful miens. In contrast, Cioran works with a pathological epochē, of which it cannot be ascertained how one should copy or convey it. His uprootedness is not grounded in a theoretical distancing from a normal and naive life; it arises from the curse of finding oneself to be a really existing anomaly. His reserve is anything but methodological, it is demonic. In his case, critique was preceded by torture. While ordinary critical theory, to say nothing of ordinary positive theory, distances itself from merely living out one’s life, in order to emancipate the thinker from his conditions and provide him with the resources to resist and rework the real, desperate theory is only interested in bearing witness to the failure of the construct of reality as such. Its distance is not taken up arbitrarily, but rather can be found already before all theory as an effect of a suffering in the thinker.

Cioran’s Archimedean point, from which he unhinges the normative view of the world and its philosophical and ethical superstructure, is the discovery of the privilege of sleeping, from which all other minds, not least such as take themselves to be relentlessly critical, profit as though from something self-evident. His unparalleled clear-sightedness in the disenchantment of all positive and utopian constructs has its basis in the pervasive stigma of his existence—in a sleeplessness that was undoubtedly of a psychogenic character and which marked him for years in his formative phase. This is what lends an envenomed epochē to the thinker, Cioran. The insomniac knows, in contradistinction to the critic, that he is not the master of his premises. Insomnia is not an assumption that is made, not a disposition of the practicing subject, not a provisional vacation from one’s own life in support of a pure attentiveness, and certainly not a theoretical preparatory exercise for practical revolution. A putting into question of existence and its fictions imposes itself on the insomniac, which reaches deeper than any reflective, subversive, or aggressive deconstruction. For the subject of insomnia the evidence is produced, in a way that is not sought, that all acts of both the naive and the critical life are descendants of the privilege of sleep, which again and again makes possible for its possessors the return to a minimal vital illusion. Sleep fulfills the tired human being’s demand for relief by means of discreet downfalls of the world; it is the small change of the redemption from evil; its coming to pass answers the natural prayer of fatigue. Cioran’s insomniaapriori, in contrast, opens up for thought the possibility that the subject’s plea for a temporary cancellation of the world’s compulsion of life is not answered. It is in this sense the meditation of the unanswered, which must be endured as continual wakefulness. Such an existence is a kind of torture in which the torturer is not identified and his questions not precisely posed. Already the early Cioran thinks from the position of a permanent ontological crucifixion that never reaches the point at which the victim may say consummatum est. Because sleeplessness is not a work, neither one that redeems nor one that is enlightening, it can never be declared to be finished. The insomniac is not nailed to the cross of reality, but rather is included in the gelatinous mass of the half-real. He finds out that what is gelatinous is more implacable than what is hard. While one is shattered by the latter and meets his end, one is wrecked by the former and remains spared for endless continuations. Sleeplessness is deconstruction without deconstructivists.

Cioran often noted that the characteristic impulse of his thought and writing was the reversal of a curse into a distinction. But how can the crippling effect of lost sleep be reversed into an active disposition? In a twofold way: insofar as the author, as he says himself, changes his being worn down into something chosen, and insofar as he gains an intense desire for vengeance from his forced vigilance.

With both turnings, Cioran proves himself to be a Judeo-Christian theologian in the Nietzschean sense of the term. The analyses from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality on the origin of the spirit of the theologian from out of ressentiment are initially fully accurate when applied to him. Cioran is in fact a theologian of reactive wrath, who imputes to the creator God his failure and to the created world its inability to take him in. In the mode of his reaction, Cioran reveals himself to be a dark doppelganger of Heidegger. Where the latter elaborated the crypto-Catholic thesis that thinking means thanking, Cioran unfolds the black-Gnostic counter-thesis that thinking means avenging oneself. In both cases thinking is a corresponding: a logical gathering and giving back of that which was sent to the thinker as a gift of Being. But while Heidegger’s thoughtful giving back—after its heroic beginnings—subsides into a mild, positive wanting-to-be-an-answer, in Cioran the instinct for an immense restitution remains acute. It is always clear to him that where there is a gift there is always a giver who remains to be exposed. While the spirit of the fundamental ontologist, relieved by sleep, continually and gratefully meditates anew on Being as giver and gift [Gabe], the consciousness which revolts, continually sharpened by the deprivation of sleep, devotes itself to the task of transforming the poison of Being [Seinsgift] in its own existence into precise powers of immunity and of denouncing the poisoner. Nihil contra venenum nisi venenum ispe.1Cioran’s singularity can be recognized in the fact that he developed a systematically revanchist praxis of thinking. He did not declaim against the temptations of Being and invitations to faith as an avenger in some private affair, nor as someone debased and aggrieved in the sociological sense, but rather as a medium of a transcendental wrath and as an agent of an offensive skepticism. He is a wrathful Job, who displays his defects as striking arguments against the sadistic creator. As the guardian of a chosen wrath he is as selfless as only the founder of an ascetic order could be. As guardian of his pride in this wrath he is as egomaniacal as only a Satanist could be. His philosophical revanchism is the negative of thoughtful thankfulness. Like no one else in this or any century he made it clear that thinking is a thankless occupation—especially when the intelligible future today belongs less than ever before to thinking, which is not able to move beyond meditating and stewing in its wrath, than it does to the will that formulates projects and sets operations in motion. Cioran is only lucid in not-willing, while willing for him—as for his distant kinsman Heidegger—remains an alien mode. He never sets foot in the world of willing; his whole life long he will hear nothing of what is pragmatic. He is suspicious of those who are able to believe. His hatred applies to those who are able to will.

His thankless thought lapsed into absurdity, because in him the impulse for vengeance against God extends further than does the belief in God. Under the auspices of the absurd, Cioran, the son of a priest, reaped an anachronistic aftercrop of the era of religious metaphysics, by contriving for himself the role of the reactionary blasphemer. He toppled the idols that were no longer up to date; he holed up in his garret like an anchorite, whose ascetic practice consists in piling up disappointments. By virtue of his revanchism, Cioran held onto a juvenile, vicious negativity his whole life long. It was his early and never revised pride in not lowering himself to maturity. This is what makes his writings so uniquely dense, insistent, and monotonous. He knew that his malaise was his strength and that he as an author should only treat a single theme so as not to sink into arbitrariness. He grasped it early enough: his only chance consisted in repeating himself. Sartre’s critical words, that vice is on principle the love of failure,2 registers what Cioran should have chosen as his motto. In contrast to Nietzsche, another son of a clergyman of whom there is continual talk, Cioran marked an important point through his insistence on revenge. If the former was committed to the attempt to bank his thought completely on aristocratic, affirmative, and non-reactive drives, Cioran abandoned himself to a descent into the hell of a non-aristocratism and reaction. On the basis of his degradation he also bore within himself the discovery that there is a magnanimity of vengeance which rivals allaffirming thought. His work is vengeance without an avenger and payback that knows no loss.

For this reason, his writings have therapeutic effects. Their clarity in forlornness immunizes against the temptation to amorphously surrender. In a manner different than Nietzsche, Cioran did not behave like someone who has overcome his own decadence, perhaps because he even saw through Nietzsche’s ultimate illusion, the sick dream of a great health. He accepted his decadence, his morbidity, his foreordained condemnation to skepticism as poisons of Being and distilled his writings as antidotes. The knowers and the needy may make use of this as it seems wise to them. Yet the emulators will not find in Cioran’s apothecary what their ambition seeks.

I recall a conversation with the old Cioran in the German House of the Cité Universitaire in Paris in the mid-1980s, in the course of which I brought the conversation around to his suspicious and disparaging statements about Epicurus. He immediately seemed to understand what I had in mind with my query. He candidly explained that he recanted his claims and now felt Epicurus to be very close, that he saw in him today one of the real benefactors of humanity. The word ‘benefactor,’ quietly uttered aloud, sounded oddly significant on his tongue. For on this occasion he dispensed with any sarcasm. Perhaps the recognition had ripened in the garden of his sleeplessness that there is need of a special kind of generosity that allows the human being a retreat from the fronts of the real, and that this world can less than ever do without teachers of retreat. Our century has known none more decisive than him.

Not Saved

Essays after Heidegger

Peter Sloterdijk

The Guru

 

The first in this list is the figure of the Indian guru – a name that is rarely used without irony in the contemporary Western context, as if one wanted to denote a person who gives their followers opportunity to overestimate them, and presumably not without succumbing to self-overestimation first. Naturally this habitual irony tells us absolutely nothing about Indian conditions, but a great deal about the anti-authoritarian change of mentality among Westerners in general, and about the decline in the standing of their teaching professions in particular. It reveals the scepticism that has been epidemic in the Old World for some time towards the notion that any mortal could have more insight than another into the basic conditions of the world and life – not merely in the sense of a coincidentally greater knowledge based on longer experience, but thanks to a deeper penetration of the concealed structures of existence. Just as the concept of the master is ruined in Europe – the maestro in musical life being the one exception – so the idea of any higher teaching licence in existential matters has practically lost all credit. When Martin Heidegger occasionally used the expression ‘master of reading and living’ to describe Meister Eckhart, the archaic tone was already unmistakable at the time. In doing so, he was going very palpably against the newer consensus that the discipline of life is under no circumstances open to mastery.

The scandal of the guru function is easy to pinpoint: it implies a mode of teaching and learning based on an initiation, and thus a crossing-over to the sphere of sacred or non-public knowledge – it is precisely this aspect that makes the guru-centred study model of ancient India unacceptable for the modern learning culture of the Occident. We have introductions to this or that area of knowledge to offer, but do not allow any initiations – quite aside from the fact that enlightenment is not envisaged as the conclusion to a course of study. We also presuppose among our students the continuity of person from school enrolment to matriculation to graduation, while learning with a guru entails two discontinuous aspects: one at the initiation into the modus essendi of the pupil, which implies a form of symbolic death, and the other upon the prospective attainment of the highest goal, which Indian convention describes as the insight – gained psychosomatically and via certain states – into the identity of the individual soul and the world soul. This shows how the dramaturgical form of initiatic learning, beyond its trimming through the narrative form of a step-based life, is nested in a schema of rebirth – which is why its goal must be sought not so much in a qualification as in a transformation.

For Western sensibilities, the convivial or virtually promiscuous constitution of the Indian master–pupil relationship is even more scandalous than the initiatic alliance that accompanies it. As a rule, devotion to a master in a stationary Brahmanic context implied joining his household, usually for a period that could scarcely be shorter than twelve years – this was usually the time required merely to memorize the Vedic texts whose internalization was expected of adepts, regardless of which practical exercises (asanas) were used to carry out the psychophysical work of transformation. This household element of the master–pupil relationship implied an openly psychofeudal dependency. Here the pupil not only had to receive knowledge from the master, but also to fulfil various servant duties – hence the Sanskrit name antevasin: ‘the one who accompanies the guru and waits upon him’. More often, the pupil is referred to as a shisia or chela, which denotes one who ‘sits at the feet of the master’ – a word that calls to mind the memory of a lost world before the invention of the universal anthropotechnic device of the Modern Age, namely the school desk. From an attitude-historical perspective, incidentally, modernity is synonymous with a dependence on chairs or other seating furniture, and eo ipso the dying-out of the ability to sit on the floor without feeling burdened by one’s own body.93The true meaning of the guru-centred learning model, admittedly, does not consist in the cosy homely aspects, which from a distance recall the life forms of medieval craftsmen’s households in Europe. Hence also the threat of terrible consequences for any pupil who dared embark on an affair with the master’s wife – although this does not seem entirely outlandish given the informal situation of courtly love: a noble lady and a lowly aspirant in the closest proximity, separated by a strong taboo and with the attention of each drawn to the other. Its purpose only reveals itself when one takes into consideration the psychodynamic aspect of the master–pupil relationship: this is, after all, no less than a contract for the regulation of a hyperbolic transaction. As soon as the guru takes an antevasin or chela into his following, he has implicitly made a form of perfecting contract with him. This means a simultaneously metaphysical and pragmatic alliance with the goal of advancing at least a few steps along the path to actually existing impossibility, or even of realizing the magnum opus as such: deification in one’s lifetime and transformation into the jivanmukti, the one who is saved here and now. The guru and his student thus enter an alliance perhaps not of life and death, but certainly of life and hyper-life.

Viewed by the light of recent occidental psychological knowledge, this singular relationship is a magnetopathic or psychoanalytical rapport – that is to say a stabilized state of emergency in the soul field where the master makes himself available for the most intense idealizations on the part of the pupil. In contrast to the magnetistic or psychoanalytical situation, however, where, in accordance with the prevailing norms of sobriety, the long-term goal is the dissolution of an idealizing transference, the guru–antevasin relationship aims not for the end, but rather for the clarifying amplification of that idealization – and at once an identificatory intensification that, if carried out in an orthodox and proper fashion, should be driven forwards into the supra-pictorial, pre-objective and pre-personal register. From the guru’s point of view, the pupil’s idealizing anticipations are not wrong because they aim too high; rather, the pupil is only condemned to a form of indispensable error in the sense that he cannot yet know how much higher the real goal is located than his dreamy anticipations are capable of imagining. Nonetheless, identification is the most important affective resource that is available for use in transformative work – which is why one part of the craft of guru pedagogy is to keep the fire of the beginner’s illusion burning for as long as possible. That an institutionalized art of the impossible cannot be judged by the standards of Western trivial ontology, with the corresponding psychological constructs of normality, is understandable enough.

Such references to the hyperbolic dimension in the transformation contract between masters and pupils cannot, of course, refute scepticism towards the guru-centred form of studying. It is therefore anything but coincidental that a large part of Western writings, but also of the growing native literature on the guru phenomenon – not infrequently penned by disconcerted psychiatrists, committed social psychologists and nervous sect advisers94 – is devoted to the problem of false masters and the psychological abuse of those dependent on them. The authors consistently postulate the reinforcement of quality control for products on the religious markets. They usually view the situation as if the process of globalization had also cast the spiritual world market into a state of upheaval. Just as some dangerous pathogens today profit from the facilitation of worldwide travel, the memes of the ‘God delusion’ can also spread more easily beyond the borders of their source regions. Even more disturbing is the impression that psychosis has got carried away, and is now aiming to change its status from a classified illness to a misunderstood form of fitness. Most provocative of all, admittedly, is the epidemic of mystical amoralism which, thanks to the missionary successes of Hinduizing masters, began to spread through the overly receptive Western hemisphere. The virus, which has nestled in correspondingly arranged classes since then, consists in the dangerous realization that lack of conscience and illumination are, from a certain point of view, identical.

The truth is most probably that the world of enlightenment games too has been affected by mediatization, and the appearance of performance talents among the teachers of well-tempered impossibility was only a matter of time. No guru’s life from the last decades demonstrates this shift more clearly than that of the Indian enlightenment preacher and sect founder Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–90), alias Osho, who, despite his controversial status, constitutes – along with Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo Gosh – the fourth figure of Indian spirituality in the twentieth century whose aura emanated across the world. His exceptional standing is clearest in the adoption of Western performance techniques among the forms of spiritual instruction, which were otherwise steeped in pious routine. Like a Duchamp of the spiritual field, he transformed all the relevant traditions into religious playthings and mystical ready-mades. It was not least a testament to his lucidity that, at the pinnacle of his success, he turned himself into a ready-made and, showing a clear awareness of the change in the zeitgeist, distanced himself from his Hinduizing past. As he recognized just in time, this past was tied too strongly to the mentality wave of Euro-American post-1968 romanticism. In assuming the Japanese-tinged name Osho in 1989 – ‘the joke is over’ – he quick-wittedly connected to the recently developed neo-liberal, Buddhophile mood in the West and invented a label for himself with a promising future. This gesture announced that in the field of gurucentred anthropotechnics too, the age of re-branding had begun. 

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics 

PETER SLOTERDIJK

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

The Absolute Imperative

See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!

Galatians 6:11

Who Is Allowed to Say It?

‘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. It is the call that can never be neutralized into a mere statement of fact; it is the imperative whose effects are unhindered by any indicatives. It articulates the motto that arranges the innumerable chaotic particles of information into a concise moral form. It expresses concern for the whole. It cannot be denied: the only fact of universal ethical significance in the current world is the diffusely and ubiquitously growing realization that things cannot continue in this way.

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.

In order to articulate the current overtaxing in keeping with the state of the world, Nietzsche took the risk of presenting the public with ‘a book for everyone and nobody’ – a prophetic eruption, six thousand feet beyond mankind and time, spoken with no consideration for any listeners, and yet allied in an invasive fashion with each individual’s knowledge of his intimate design for the not-yet. One cannot simply let the Übermensch programme rest if one knows that it stands for vertical tension in general. Its proclamation became necessary once there was no longer sufficient faith in the hypothesis of God to guarantee the anchoring of upwards-pulling tension in a transcendent pole. But even without God or the Übermensch, it is sufficient to note that every individual, even the most successful, the most creative and the most generous, must, if they examine themselves in earnest, admit that they have become less than their potentiality of being would have required – except for those moments in which they could say that they fulfilled their duty to be a good animal. As average Über-animals, tickled by ambitions and haunted by excessive symbols, humans fall short of what is demanded of them, even when they wear the winner’s jersey or the cardinal’s robe. 

The statement ‘You must change your life!’ provides the basic form for the call to everyone and nobody. Although it is unmistakably directed at a particular addressee, it speaks to all others too. Whoever hears the call without defences will experience the sublime in a personally addressed form. The sublime is that which, by calling to mind the overwhelming, shows the observer the possibility of their engulfment by the oversized – which, however, is suspended until further notice. The sublime whose tip points to me is as personal as death and as unfathomable as the world. For Rilke, it was the Dionysian dimension of art that spoke to him from the disfigured statue of Apollo and gave him the feeling of encountering something infinitely superior. Today, on the other hand, the authoritative voice can scarcely be heard in works of art. Nor do the established ‘religions’ or church councils possess any commanding authority, let alone the councils of wise men, assuming one can still use this phrase without irony.

The only authority that is still in a position to say ‘You must change your life!’ is the global crisis, which, as everyone has been noticing for some time, has begun to send out its apostles. Its authority is real because it is based on something unimaginable of which it is the harbinger: the global catastrophe. One need not be religiously musical to understand why the Great Catastrophe had to become the goddess of the century. As it possesses the aura of the monstrous, it bears the primary traits that were previously ascribed to the transcendent powers: it remains concealed, but makes itself known in signs; it is on the way, yet already authentically present in its portents; it reveals itself to individual intelligences in penetrating visions, yet also surpasses human understanding; it takes certain individuals into its service and makes prophets of them; its delegates turn to the people around them in its name, but are fended off as nuisances by most. On the whole, its fate is much like that of the God of monotheism when He entered the stage scarcely three thousand years ago: His mere message was already too great for the world, and only the few were prepared to begin a different life for His sake. In both cases, however, the refusal of the many increases the tension affecting the human collective. Since the global catastrophe began its partial unveiling, a new manifestation of the absolute imperative has come into the world, one that directs itself at everyone and nobody in the form of a sharp admonition: ‘Change your life! Otherwise its complete disclosure will demonstrate to you, sooner or later, what you failed to do during the time of portents!’ 

Against this background, we can explain the origin of the unease in today’s ethical debate, both in its academic and in its publicistic varieties. It stems from the discrepancy between the monstrosities that have been in the air since the Cold War era after 1945 and the paralysing harmlessness of all current discourses, whether their arguments draw on the ethics of attitude, responsibility, discourse or situations – to say nothing of the helpless reanimation of doctrines of value and virtue. Nor is the oft-cited return of ‘religion’ much more than the symptom of an unease that awaits its resolution in a lucid formulation. In reality, ethics can only be based on the experience of the sublime, today as much as since the beginning of the developments that led to the first ethical secessions. Driven by its call, the human race of two speeds began its campaign through the ages. Only the sublime is capable of setting up the overtaxing that enables humans to head for the impossible. What people called ‘religion’ was only ever significant as a vehicle of the absolute imperative in its different place-and time-based versions. The rest is the chatter of which Wittgenstein rightly said that it should be brought to an end.

For the theologically interested, this means that the one God and the catastrophe have more in common than was previously registered – not least their trouble with humans, who cannot rouse themselves to believe in either. There is not only what Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in the fiction whose absence would render aesthetic behaviour impossible. An even more effective approach is the willing suspension of belief in the real whose absence would prevent any practical accommodation with the given situation. Individuals barely ever cope with reality without an additional element of de-realization. Incredulous de-realization, furthermore, makes little distinction between the past and the future: whether the catastrophe is a past one from which one should have learned or an imminent one that could be averted by the right measures, the reluctance to believe always knows how to arrange things in such a way as to achieve the desired degree of de-realization.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK

Next to Gautama Buddha, Plato was the first epidemiologist of the spirit ...

 EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES

The Critique of Repetition

Damned to Distinguish Between Repetitions

The ethical distinction took effect from the moment in which repetition lost its innocence. The appearance of ascetics and asceticisms in the twilight of the advanced civilizations revealed a difference that had not been open to explicit development in earlier stages of civilization: in choosing to withdraw, the early practising ethicists broke with the conventional forms and attitudes of life. They abandoned the established repetition sequences and replaced them with different sequences, different attitudes – not arbitrarily different, but rather redemptively different ones. Where the original distinction between high and beneficial life forms on the one hand and hopelessly ordinary ones on the other hand makes its cut, it does so in the mode of a neuro-ethical programming that turns the entire old system against itself. Here there are initially no intermediate forms. Body and soul reach the other shore together – or not at all. ‘The whole man must move at once.’

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. Such a person would, like Monsieur Teste, state: ‘La bêtise n’est pas mon fort.’ [Stupidity is not my strong suit.] They would be the human who had killed the marionette inside them. The transformation occurs through mental deautomatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools to empty the cliché depot – a procedure that usually takes longer than a major psychoanalysis. Pythagoras supposedly demanded a five-year silence of his pupils at the beginning of their studies. Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: ‘Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus – you have to react, you follow every impulse.’144 The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.

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. That these binary oppositions entail costly simplifications is, for now, beside the point. All that matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form. It results from an awkward discovery: there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour. The first ethicists faced the decision between a life in the usually unnoticed iron chains of involuntarily acquired habits and an existence on the ethereal chain of freely accepted discipline. The most erroneous possible conclusion one could draw from this is that the appearance of genuine practising awareness concerned purely the active. Let the sadhus torture themselves in their lonely forests with complicated breathing exercises; let the Stylites feel closer to heaven on their absurd pillars, and let the philosophers sell their second coats and sleep on the ground – the average mortals will cling nonetheless to the opinion that these extravagant distortions of the ordinary are meaningless for them, the business of a sacred-perverse private meeting between the incomprehensible God and his artiste followers. Whoever is unable to participate can continue in their old habitus, which, though not perfect, seems good enough for everyday life.

The Creature that Cannot Practise

In reality, the secession of the practising places the entire ecosystem of human behaviour on an altered foundation. Like all acts of rendering things explicit, the appearance of the early practice systems brought about a radical modification of the respective area – that is, of the whole field of psychophysically conditioned actions. Explicit exercises, whether the asanas of the Indian yogis, the Stoics’ experiments with letting go of the non-own, or the exercitationes spirituales of Christian climbers on the heavenly ladder, cast a shadow on everything that lies opposite them on the implicit side: this is no less than the world of old Adam, the gigantic universe of unilluminated conventionalities. The shadow zone encompasses the area dominated by repetitions of an undeclared practice character. We can leave open the question of whether the psychoanalytical insult to humans claimed by Freud – triggered by the purportedly unwelcome discovery that the ego is not the master of its own house – ever really existed. There is certainly no doubt about the reality of the behaviouristic insult to humans, which could equally be called the ascetological one. It follows from the observation that 99.9 per cent of our existence comprises repetitions, mostly of a strictly mechanical nature. The only way to deal with this insult is to imagine that one is still more original than plenty of others. If one subjects oneself to more probing self-examination, one finds oneself in the psychosomatic engine room of one’s own existence, where there is nothing to be gained from the usual flattery of spontaneity; and freedom theorists would do better to stay upstairs.

In this investigation, one advances into a non-psychoanalytical unconscious encompassing everything belonging to normally athematic rhythms, rules and rituals – regardless of whether it stems from collective patterns or idiosyncratic specializations. In this area, everything is higher mechanics, including intimate illusions of non-mechanics and unconditioned being-for-oneself. The sum of these mechanics produces the surprise space of personality, in which surprising events are actually very rare. Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted.

Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practise implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot practise – if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being’s disposition towards the next repetition. Just as Mr K. is always preparing his next mistake, humans as a whole are constantly taking the necessary steps to ensure that they will remain as they have been up until this minute. Whatever is not repeated sufficiently often atrophies – this is familiar from everyday observations, for example when the musculature of static limbs begins to degenerate after a few days, as if concluding from its temporary disuse that it has become superfluous. In truth, one should probably also keep the non-use of organs, programmes and competencies for exercises in steady decline. Just as there are implicit fitness programmes, there are also implicit unfitness programmes. That is why Seneca warns his pupil: ‘A single winter relaxed Hannibal’s fibre.’145 Other states of weakening may follow years of neglecting-work.146From this it follows that even a simple maintenance of bodily – or rather neurophysical – form can only be comprehended as an effect of undeclared training. This comprises routines whereby the standard movements of an organ complex are, through inconspicuous procedures, employed often enough to stabilize the complex at its current fitness status. The self-activations of organisms in sequences of undeclared practice programmes, sequences that constantly have to be run through anew, culminate in a mute autopoiesis: the element in live creatures that seems like mere self-identity is de facto the result of a perpetual self-reproduction by overcoming invisible training programmes. The nocturnal activities of the brain, part of which one experiences as dreams, are probably first and foremost back-up processes for the self-programme in its state prior to the last waking phase. The self is a storm of repetition sequences beneath the roof of the skull.

Personal identity, then, offers no indication of a mental essence or inert form; it rather shows the active overcoming of a probability of decline. Whoever remains identical to themselves thus confirms themselves as a functioning expert system specializing in constant self-renewal. For surprise-friendly creatures of the Homo sapiens type, even triviality is not futile. It can only be attained through a constant cultivation of identity whose most important aid is inward and outward self-re-trivialization. Re-trivialization is the operation that enables organisms capable of learning to treat something new as if they had never encountered it – whether by equating it mechanically with something familiar or by openly denying its didactic value. Thus the new, initially and mostly, has no chance of integration into the apparatus of operating gestures and ideas because it is assigned either to the familiar or to the insignificant.147If, in turn, the neolatric culture of modernity posits meaning in the new per se, this causes a brightening of the global learning climate; the price of this is a historically unprecedented will to be dazzled that gives unlimited credit to illusions of the new. Even manifest stupidity, incidentally, cannot be taken as a simple datum: it is acquired through long training in learning-avoidance operations. Only after a persistent series of self-knockouts by the intelligence can a habitus of reliable mindlessness become stable – and even this can be undone at any time through a relapse into non-stupidity. Conversely, every learning-theoretical romanticism should be viewed sceptically, even if it appears under classical names. Aristotle was speaking as a romantic when he stated in the first line of his Metaphysics: ‘All humans strive for knowledge by nature.’ In fact, every striving for knowledge – understood by Aristotle above all as primary visual enjoyment – encounters its limits as soon as something new appears that one does not want to see. Such things are usually sights that are irreconcilable with the imperative of preserving identity. Then the much-lauded thirst for knowledge among humans turns in a flash into the art of not having seen or heard anything.

The ethical distinction not only uncovers the hidden practice character of ordinary life; it also reveals the gulf between the previous existence in the accustomed and the metanoetic life forms that must be newly chosen. This distinction demands cruelty towards oneself and others; it leads to overload in its most naked state. We hear its original voice when Jesus says: ‘Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.’148 ‘Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.’149 ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’150 The blade of distinction is the apocalypse that takes place now or never.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK

Translated by Wieland Hoban