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in which existence has been rendered “incredible” and the truth, afflicted by “signs of a severe flu” (83), has withdrawn to a distant corner.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.”