THE RETURN OF GRACIAN'S COOL PERSONA THE PRISONER'S
MOBILITY DOCTRINE
“Man has one purpose: life, that is, to move,” notes Werner Krauss, a specialist in romance literatures. It is 1943; he is awaiting execution in
Our question now concerns Krauss's interest in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Gracian's midseventeenth-century code of conduct, which he reconstructs in the extreme isolation of his prison cell. What he finds in the Jesuit's precepts is first of all a challenge of intellectual engagement in the “border area between humanism and barbarism.” Gracian appears to Krauss as an advisor on how to behave in mined territory, where the placement of every step requires caution. In this situation, morality is not a compass you grip in your hand. If threats rain down from all sides, Krauss learns from Gracian, “the whole of morality comes down to tactical rules.” Gracian's book offers guidance for situations in which existence has been rendered “incredible” and the truth, afflicted by “signs of a severe flu” (83), has withdrawn to a distant corner.
These few words from Krauss's Lebenslehre (1947) may suggest the reason for the resistance fighter's interest in the Spanish Jesuit. In a letter of 26 March 1946 to Erich Auerbach, who was living in Istanbul in exile, he offers a succinct account of the reasons for his imprisonment:
At the instigation of the former Dean Tra'ger [dean of the Philosophische Fa-kulta't at the University of Marburg], who wanted to get rid of me, I was conscripted into the army in 1940. Ad arma cucurri, and I made it all the way to lance corporal. But my brilliant career met a sudden end when I was arrested at the end of 1942. for my part in the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen conspiracy. In January 1943 I was sentenced to death, along with countless others, by the Reich war tribunal. In May, after the judgment had been confirmed, I was moved to Plotzensee for execution…. It was possible to manage a transfer and, with the assistance of one of the tribunal justices (who committed suicide after 20 July 1944), to arrange for my psychiatric examination. I was moved from one prison to the other. Only at the end of 1944 was the death sentence commuted to confinement in a penitentiary. New danger from the Gestapo, which wanted to get me out of the military sentence and send me to Buchen-wald. My salvation was the hasty evacuation of the Torgau fortress, when I was able to take advantage of the confusion and flee in a hospital train.[7]
The commentary on Gracián took shape in this context.
A list of fourteen of the three hundred behavioral precepts from the Art of Worldly Wisdom will help clarify the reasons for Krauss's attraction. The criteria of selection reflect their astounding correspondence with precepts current in the 19205:
Hope is a great falsifier of truth; let skill guard against this by ensuring that
fruition exceeds desire, (no. 19)
Know how to withdraw. If it is a great lesson in life to know how to deny,
it is still greater to know how to deny oneself as regards both affairs and
persons, (no. 33)
Think with the few and speak with the many. By swimming against the
stream it is impossible to remove error, easy to fall into danger, (no. 43)
Never be put out. 'Tis a great aim of prudence never to be embarrassed. It
is a sign of the real man, of a noble heart, for magnanimity is not easily put
out. The passions are the humours of the soul, and every excess in them
weakens prudence; if they overflow through the mouth, the reputation will
be in danger, (no. 52)
Observation and judgment. A man with these rules things, not they him.
He sounds at once the profoundest depths; he is a phrenologist by means of
physiognomy, (no. 49)
Find out each Man's Thumbscrew. 'Tis the art of setting their wills in action…. Have resort to primary motors, which are not always the highest but more often the lowest part of his nature, (no. 26) Do not wait until you are a Sinking Sun. 'Tis a maxim of the wise to leave things before things leave them. One should be able to snatch a triumph at the end. (no. no)
Get used to the failings of your familiars, as you do to ugly faces. It is indispensable if they depend on us, or we on them. There are wretched characters with whom one cannot live, nor yet without them. (no. 115) Never complain. To complain always brings discredit. Better be a model of self-reliance opposed to the passion of others than an object of their compassion. For it opens the way for the hearer to what we are complaining of, and to disclose one insult forms an excuse for another, (no. 129) Never contend with a Man who has nothing to Lose; for thereby you enter into an unequal conflict. The other enters without anxiety; having lost everything, including shame, he has no further loss to fear. (no. 172)
Make an Obligation beforehand of what would have to be a Reward afterwards. The same gift which would afterwards be merely a reward is beforehand an obligation, (no. 236)
The Art of getting into a Passion. If possible, oppose vulgar importunity with prudent reflection; it will not be difficult for a really prudent man. The first step toward getting into a passion is to announce that you are in a passion. By this means you begin the conflict with command over your temper, for one has to regulate one's passion to the exact point that is necessary and no further, (no. 155)
― 36 ―Nothing depreciates a Man more than to show he is a Man like other Men. As the reserved are held to be more than men, so the frivolous are held to be less. (no. 289)
Be able to Forget. It is more a matter of luck than of skill. The things we remember best are those better forgotten. Memory is not only unruly, leaving us in the lurch when most needed, but stupid as well, putting its nose into places where it is not wanted, (no. 262)[8]
All the core ideas of the 19205 cult of objectivity are present here: the prohibition of ritual complaining; the disciplining of affect; the knack of manipulation; the cunning of conformity; the armoring of the ego; the practice of physiognomic judgment; and the reflection of behavior within a parallelogram of forces.
Much of the advice is difficult of access. “Sitting over this work with my hands in manacles,” as Krauss later recalled, “I understood the paradox of my endeavor.”[9] At first what interests the prisoner is only Gra-cian's understanding of the virtue of restraint (retentiva) and the art of hopefulness (espera)—as well as cunning during interrogations, for which the manual has advice to offer. “A player never plays the card his opponent expects,” states Gracián, adding: “and even less, naturally, the card his opponent would like him to play.”
Krauss's return to Gracián is not, I suggested earlier, an isolated event. It corresponds to a broader tendency on the part of the European avant-garde in the interwar years' “trench communities” (Marc Bloch), namely, its Nietzsche-inspired skepticism about any sort of “organic phantasm of the personality culture,”[10] which Gracián also calls radically into question. An early diary entry by Krauss, on 12 November 1932, shows how closely the scholar's protean ambition predisposed him toward his reading of Gracián:
Become what you are not. Thence man, rather than condition existence on change, draws change into his own ego, making of himself a monad determined by laws of change specific only to itself, which transforms the outer world in the process into a space for personal development. The innocence of becoming, as Nietzsche nicely blasphemed.[11]
What interests us here is Krauss's interpretation of the subject in the courtly codes of conduct. I want to build a bridge from his construct to the philosophical anthropology of the 19205 and then to track the codes' fate in new objectivity narratives. At issue for Krauss and his contemporaries is nothing less than an experimental attempt to Jepsychol-ogize the modern concept of the subject.
The subject with whom Krauss becomes acquainted in Gracián's code has no internal compass to call on when it moves into life-threatening territory. The inner regulator, the conscience, is precisely what the Jesuit has removed from the subject, because the conscience restricts freedom of movement. Gracián has in view a subject that requires an external voice for the sake of orientation. The persona the code presents knows neither the bourgeois's “worldless interiority” nor its Protestant variant, the conscience. Introspection is available to the persona as little as is the direction of conscience, raising the question of how it can establish identity.
Here Krauss discovers in Gracián's code of conduct a procedure that George Herbert Mead and Helmuth Plessner defined in the first two decades of the century as the “reciprocity of perspective.” The persona finds its identity by combining the perspectives of ego and alter ego. Gracián's persona acquires an instrumental image of itself by reading the perceptions of others, with which it is constantly vying. Since the shared world in which reflection takes place is “always merciless,” and the stakes are survival, the image of itself the persona finds reflected there corresponds to perfectly realistic self-knowledge. The only guarantee of mobility is a high-strung alertness and readiness to cut ties at any time. The complete persona, therefore, must never allow others to affix any firm characteristics on it. A total absence of characteristics increases the radius of action.
Gracián's persona is a master in the art of distinction. All “idylls,” which leave this (male) subject open to the wiles of passion, are to be avoided like “traps,” as he puts it; arcadian voices stir the nerves; too many possessions “overburden the run,” says Gracián, according to Krauss; for “man has but one meaning; that is, to move.”
We might well expect Gracián to advise against “excessive individu-ation” (113). A strain of authenticity could in easier times serve both uprightness and distinction, or even garner prestige. But on a minefield it is clearly a defect, and Gracián warns against it: “Individuating does nothing but attract unhealthy attention!” Little wonder that his Art of Worldly Wisdom would be deemed appropriate to a period of total mobilization.
And the maxims of the courtly mobility doctrine reconstructed by Krauss do in fact reappear in the literature of the 19205. The most extreme version of the code at that time is found in Brecht:
| Whatever you say, don't say it twice | |
| If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them. | |
| The man who hasn't signed anything, who has left no picture | |
| Who was not there, who said nothing: | |
| How can they catch him? | |
| Cover your tracks.[12] |
Why such audacity is useful emerges from a review of Krauss's book in 1950, in the journal Romanische Forschung. “If life is a battle,” concludes the reviewer, who was in equal parts impressed and perplexed by Krauss's book, “then morality is choosing the most successful path to triumph.”[13] The secret of Jesuit spirituality would be, according to Krauss, the conception of life as master strategy: the objective is to win the whole world, with no damage to the soul. But when the Christian goal starts losing its power to illuminate, the result can easily be double-entry bookkeeping for the conscience. For if every political path to the goal is justifiable, means and ends have no necessary ties between them. The radical methodology of politics prevails, while the Christian goal, “set on a distant altar,” no longer interferes with the method's inner laws. So goals become interchangeable, an outcome with unfathomable consequences:
Reading Gracián is no doubt a pleasure for a Marxist, if only because certain of Grecian's formulations all but invite him to strip away the life doctrine's mythical wrapping and reveal its valuable core, as the founding genius did with Hegel's dialectic.[14]
The possibility of retooling Gracián in this way naturally depends on Jesuit theology, for which Christ represents not an ethical intervention into the wicked world but the doctrine of virtue's “crowning achievement.”
THE MODERNITY OF THE PERSONA CONCEPT
Krauss's modern analyses of Gracián's concept represent a greater challenge today. “Gracián's persona is faced with the ceaseless task of ‘being somebody’ in a hostile and competitive world,” writes an American reviewer in 1949, wishing to emphasize the book's contemporary relevance.[15] Krauss's reflections on the idea of a persona reflect the experience of the ego as an illusion.[16]
In 1938, when Marcel Mauss traced the development of the fundamental category of “person” from the masquerade presented in the sacred
As Krauss elucidates Gracián's persona concept, he allows himself to be swept along the current of the new objectivity: self-knowledge, attending to conscience or the possibility of regret, is of little use as a procedure for maintaining an identity. Others' understanding of the self is the royal road to a secure self; for—the language of new objectivity pamphlets left no doubt about it—“the path of knowledge leads from outside in.” Krauss borrows the “emphatic image” of the persona developed in 1925 by his teacher Karl Vossler, who was searching for a concept of personal being adequate for both individual and collective use: “From mask or specter, from body or face, departing, in short, from an individual's externalities, the [concept of the persona] aims at our most internal, inalienable self. One is a person to the extent of one's success in arriving at the self by way of roles and their realizations.”
Another reference to Vossler's persona follows in Karl Löwith's 1928 book, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen. Here Löwith defines the individual “in the existential category of the ‘persona’” as the otherwise bounded being whose essential existence derives from social roles, one who is “fundamentally and formally established for himself by means of his correspondence with others.”[19] The evidence delivered by others' perceptions is also the source for Krauss's idea of a personal environment, which is the only medium in which affective development can take place. Existence in the form of a persona fixes the individual's reactive character and dependent status in relation to others:
Gracián compares the person with a swimmer who has learned his skill through the threat of drowning. An activating stimulus is necessary-for the only way a person can achieve value is by going into the world. And there is no existence outside this value. The existence of a person is grounded in the unconditioned processes of social behavior. (107)
In a militarized situation, this version of anthropology-in which we hear echoes from the 19205 of Scheler and Plessner and also find concepts borrowed from Vossler, Heidegger, and Löwith—is highly explosive. If the battle gets decided in the social world, which, we recall, is “always irreconcilable,” then the individual is compelled to focus attention on matters of self-representation. Orientation—and this is fiendish advice—must be geared to the value judgments upon which social recognition and acceptance depend. There are serious consequences for the persona: under these circumstances, being and appearing do not form a pair of diverging opposites, and the difference between them can be altogether inconsiderable—when it is a question of success. Krauss takes the idea to its logical extreme:
Being needs appearance. What does not appear falls short of recognition. An increase in appearance does not reduce being; on the contrary, it doubles its substance, (in)
Behaving according to the laws of probability (Wahrscheinlichkeit) now comes to mean using appearance (Schein) to gain recognition for the truth (Wahrheit). In such circumstances, objectivity quite naturally gains the upper hand; for prudence in life often demands that the persona behave in a businesslike manner, calculating the value of things on the market (113).
Alongside this motif, with which anyone born in 1900 and educated in the decade of the new objectivity would be familiar, it is of note that Krauss also undertakes a revaluation of the concept of politics by way of Gracián, and that it also corresponds to ideas from the 19205. Krauss lays considerable emphasis on the claim that Gracián's code of conduct exceeds the bounds of a noble's breviary, restricted to the rules of life around the Spanish court. Court for Gracián is only a model, at once a “gathering place for life's dangerous creatures” and a “tempting laboratory” (119). Court affairs proceed according to life's most comprehensive law, to the forms of mutual obligation that typify aggressive or defensive situations. Gracián, as Krauss concludes in the theological spirit of Carl Schmitt, removes the concept of the political from the autonomous
The political persona cannot get by without a heroizing attitude, another idea that, we shall see, suggests the contemporary relevance of the seventeenth-century Jesuit. Having fenced to the point of exhaustion on courtly terrain, the persona is by no means able to regenerate itself in colorful popular activities, or take part in any history-making mass movement. It must distinguish itself. Gracián fears the people; there is no sign of latent sympathy in his intellectual bearing. “The people appeared to him an obstacle in the path, a harmful power in its lack of understanding” (79 ff.). At this point Krauss's reconstruction of the heroic persona begins taking on uncanny qualities. Gracián's hero must make his way on his own within an aristocracy riven with competition; there is no way to take refuge in a philosophy of history that values his deeds from the perspective of a meaningful progression; there is no getting lost in popular currents. Suddenly visible in the distant mirror of the seventeenth century are the essential features of a heroic attitude in the twentieth: the constructions of the philosophy of history lie in ruins; in the absence of group solidarity or autonomous historical processes, artificial apparatuses in the form of parties are forming; the people are not to be trusted.
Extremely isolated from historical forces that had ever offered reason for optimism, the Jesuit discovers the immediate relevance of theology. Since the exemplary bearing of the heroic individual has lost its anchoring in the “primal force of existence,” a theological turn becomes unavoidable. The heroic bearing “requires transcendence, a radiation by supernatural powers, for it to maintain itself in its distance from the people” (79 ff.). What remains of heroism when transcendence no longer radiates?
As Krauss, condemned to death as a member of the Rote Kapelle resistance group, formulates these ideas, he is already thinking in terms of a “popular front” strategy, although his skepticism about popular attitudes at the time of his arrest must have been considerable, judging from his report on a pamphleteering campaign:
Sch.-B. [Schulze-Boysen] thought it necessary to the cohesion of his group to undertake an action he himself regarded as of minor political significance. Of course it was not a question of using slogans to achieve a propaganda effect, but it quite likely did concern giving the population the feeling that we are
― 42 ―still alive and that power stands ready for mobilization inside. A representative of the KPD [German Communist Party] had been invited to attend the preliminary discussions as a nonvoting observer. Rittmeister hadn't even been informed of the meeting, since his rejection of the idea could be assumed from the outset. Professional obligations kept me from attending the discussions, so I sent Ursula Goetze to Thiel to represent a similar negative position. I thought that the time was conceivably a bad one, given the major offensive against the Russians slated for the summer, where early successes had to be anticipated. My further objection, that the effort was too great and too risky for a merely symbolic action, was dismissed with remarks that the posters had already been printed. Calling the action off now would completely demoralize the group. Once the question was resolved in this way, Ursula, as we had agreed for such an eventuality, declared our readiness to submit to group discipline and take part in the action.Thiel took over distributing the posters. We pasted up a large number of them around Sachsendamm the night of 17 May 1942. The affair made a big stir in Berlin, but all attempts on the part of the police to track down the perpetrators were in vain. We were mostly hidden at military positions.[20]
THE CODE OF OBJECTIVITY
When social ties fail and extreme agonistic tension fills the space in which individuals interact, the time has come for rules to govern behavior. Alfred Doblin called the Weimar Republic “a republic with no instruction manual.” In fact, however, there arose during this period a wealth of codes to guide conduct, from architecture to philosophical anthropology, from sexuality to theater. Each political camp had its own catechism. The disoriented subject was clearly in need of an external voice to tell it where to go and what to do.
In this situation Max Weber offered up his own Art of Worldly Wisdom, “Science as a Vocation,” his famous address from 1919 that founds new objectivity codes of conduct and simultaneously reveals the dilemma inherent in them.[21] For what sparked further discussion in his impressive document was less the idea of the dialectic of disenchantment or the polytheism of values than the closed habitus of those who want “purely to serve the fact (Sache) at hand”—even if it is transient, even if the chain of progress of which it becomes a part is “meaningless,” and its final evaluation falls entirely to fate. Weber proposes disenchantment and defiant awareness of fate's demonic power, which the results of the various rational intellectual disciplines cannot sublate. The intellectual style he recommends takes shape from within a particular habitus; because hope is no longer to be vested in the evolutionary process, attitudes
No summer's bloom lies ahead of us (Adolf Erik Nordenskjold. Photo by Graf Georg von Rosen. With the permission of Archiv Deutsches Schiffahrtsniuseuni, Bremerhaven.)
No summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.[22]
Weber's scientific type of the cool persona also manifests itself in his acceptance of the hard world of objective fact, in which all principles are relative and all developments are finally a matter of accident.[23] “Disillusioned realism” is the keyword. Karl Mannheim points out that this way of looking at things is also grounded in fear.[24]
We find in Weber the signature of the new objectivity: “Complete disillusion about the age and yet an unqualified commitment to it” (Benjamin). Only one ethical law applies to the scientific guild, and that is the relativism of variant valuations. Yet this ethical law, rather than allowing scientists to adopt a more relaxed attitude, makes them tensely alert to any intrusion of ethical conviction into their scientific practice and willing to maintain a defiant stand on the platform of negativity.
The 19205 is a boom period for codes of conduct. But their effective radius tends either to be restricted to expressions of the new objectivity itself or overwhelmed by the mass of rules they promised to relieve, which are rules generated by surrounding institutions, parties, and political camps. We meet here a generation of intellectuals whose readings of Sorel and Nietzsche, Marx, Le Bon, and Kierkegaard had been influenced by experiences of war, the suppression of workers' uprisings, and inflation. They were only all too familiar with the idea that law's origi-nary violence lay hidden in every legal institution, that latently illegitimate powers are at home in the houses of parliament. A small turn in the wheel of fortune was all it took for “naked” violence-violence not adorned with the insignia of legality-to emerge from within the machinery of the constitutional state.
In this intellectual context we can perceive the republic as “earthquake territory” and uncover references to codes of conduct conceived in the violent world of the seventeenth century. As Krauss formulated it, there was a demand for a methodology that promised to “delve systematically into the warlike character of existence” (12,0). In Gracián's cool persona observers recognized the figure of a mobile subject, without psychological depth, with a radius of action unhampered by moral intervention or the voice of conscience. Whether this figure merged with Nietzsche's ideal of the “intellectual nomad” or the nineteenth-century dandy, or—one of the tricks of the Weimar intelligentsia—appeared in the uniform of the soldier, the worker, or the Communist cadre, the cool persona had caught everyone's attention.
As Krauss reconstructs Gracián's code of conduct, it has three motifs that take decisive roles in the rejection of ethical commitment and the radicalism of its expressionist offspring:
Radical expression, as well as all discursive rituals involving exposure, confession, and sincerity seem silly to the new objectivity; these forms disarm the self and, as Gracián remarked, have the
― 45 ―single function of provoking the evil latent in the enemy. Impotence, in the 19205, loses the discreet charm it had enjoyed. “It would be ludicrous to believe,” as Schmitt puts it, “that a defenseless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of a resistance.”[25]In codes of conduct such as Gracián's, the elements of feigning (dis-simulatio) and “masking [were forms] of resistance to seventeenth-century Lutheran orthodoxy.” The Lutheran formula for authentic personal salvation was bound to heartfelt contrition, the free expression of pain, and the activity of the conscience. The arts of prudence and diplomacy, as well as the particular way Jesuits of Gracián's stamp assimilated foreign cultures, were “of the devil,” and at the same time fitting instruments in the world of appearance. Proponents of the new objectivity perceive in expressionism and its cult of the scream the tradition of Lutheran authenticity. They opt instead for Jesuit strategies, explore their fascination for the hybrid type of the dandy-soldier. They accept Gracián's slogan—“Appearance civilizes”—in an effort to transcend the traditional division of labor between the cultures of private salvation, on the one hand, and public wickedness, on the other.
Gracián relinquishes the plaintive cry over the loss of a more “authentic” community. In his Art of Worldly Wisdom there is no lament about how people have become estranged from some origin. His persona moves inside a space of “seamless estrangement” and accepts it as an inevitable condition.
In Gracián's words:
Time has moved far from its origin. There is nothing left to do but to live as one can, rather than as one would like to live. It is necessary to regard what fate bestows upon us as superior to what it denies. (86 f.)
In Plotzensee, Krauss discovers his agreement with Gracián in principle. His personal experience of the origins myth of the National Socialist movement has scarred him. In opposition to that kind of fundamentalism, he forms his persona in terms of the necessity for self-defense. Its cardinal virtues are “absolute alertness” and cunning. Krauss uses Gracián's code of conduct to seal himself off from the temptations of irra-tionalism and the seductions of community. The man he becomes is an
THE COOL PERSONA AS BOGEYMAN
This figure's prospects could not appear less favorable today. In the last few decades whenever science has focused its attention on the armored subject, the examination has quickly turned into a tribunal. Perhaps in political and rhetorical terms the concept of the persona serves as a neutral technical category encompassing observation of the self and observation by others, but the addition of coolness as a qualifying attribute all but guarantees a negative resonance. From the viewpoint of a culture of sincerity, the cool persona makes a ridiculous impression, a judgment that, in its expression, easily recalls Rousseau:
Cool temperaments and cool hearts are the active properties of the come-dic character, which derives its artistic and reflective senses solely from the brain.[26]
Cool personas are recognizable by their fraids poses; they are deaf to the heartfelt tones of lament, anaesthetized to all that is authentic. Their strong suit is the exquisite finesse with which they decline to lend their own voices to the cri de la nature:
At the proper time, operating coolly and according to plan, in unchanging conformity to their own will, they bring into play whatever guarantees their self-interest.[27]
In today's climate, the only legitimate interest in the cool persona is antiquarian. As early as 1943 Krauss drew attention to a pair of obvious shortcomings in Gracián's code, identifying precisely the points that had been taken to extremes in the 19205 and that would disqualify it absolutely today: Gracián's precepts construct a purely male world in which gender polarization effectively silences the female voice; the people appear in it only “in the armaments of a major power,” which is always hostile to the individual. The rule is “Always armored, never carnivalesque.”
It is easy to levy judgment: the cool persona implies a “masquerade of virulent narcissism.”[28] All truly human qualities—which, arguably, necessarily involve personal vulnerability—atrophy inside an armored ego.[29] So many easy reproaches beset Gracián and Krauss's new objectivity type nowadays that it would scarcely find life livable. Dissections
Feminist research has both multiplied these judgments and rendered them more precise. It uncovers in protective coolness a variant of male self-reflection, identifying in the cult of objectivity and coolness a compensation for the loss of the adjudicating father, and in the code of discretion a patriarchal division of labor (Ulrike Bauereithel), whereby women are expected to do all the work close to the home, while men are allowed to choose work at a distance (Claudia Szcesny-Friedmann).[31]
Already in 1923, Otto Rank conjectured that the remarkable cult of coolness he was witnessing among Weimar intellectuals was simply a “heroic compensation” for the birth trauma arising from the sudden loss of symbiotic community. Others found compulsive behavior of one sort or another embedded in the drive structure of all variants of the cool persona. Concealed behind an obsession with the state or a fetishizing of the collective is, in the words of one author, “men's deeply rooted fear of the female,” which stimulates a compulsive attempt to contain phenomena suggestive of chaos or fluidity.[32] Praise of coolness, an acceptance of alienation, the cult of distance, the courage to make decisions: in light of the Freudian teaching on neurosis, the characteristics of the cool persona appear as pathological symptoms. And the symptoms involve more than the deformation of individual beings. The armoring results from a civilizing process that links the idea of autonomy to the disciplining and “cooling” of the affects. The containment of the ego, as Theweleit claims, following Norbert Elias, goes hand in hand with the centralization of state power, so that the autonomous ego becomes something like “a centralized state power in miniature.”
If we pursue the question of the self-image implied in the judgments levied today—on the armored self, the metallic ego, the bunker personality—we find code words such as “relaxation,” “demilitarization,” “meditation.” According to this model, ideal individuals live in harmony with their moderate drives, have cast off all “illusions of perpetration,” and have no need to mark off bodily boundaries or zones of discretion. They pursue a policy of “active inactivity.”
Thus does Diogenes of Sinope wander unwittingly into the civil war
Where we have done nothing, there's no tiger on the loose and difficult to get off of. Those who know how to let things alone do not get dragged along by out-of-control projects; those who practice abstinence do not get caught up in the automatic self-replication of unrestrained physicality.[33]
Is it possible to imagine that society's power plays actually stop short of some realm of “unrestrained physicality,” as this image suggests? In this free space, can the human psychic constitution really be “tigerless”?