Maximal Stress Cooperation in light of the cardiac intellect1

Those who happen to grasp philosophy correctly

risk being unrecognized by others,
because it is nothing else
but practicing how to die and be dead.
Plato, Phaedo

1 – Physiology of stress

Heiner Mühlmann is one of the most relevant contributors to the emergent

discipline of cultural science. In the context of this field of studies, Mühlmann developed
a model which he has designated «Maximal Stress Cooperation» or MSC, in acronym,
for which he has gathered data from molecular biology, neurophysiology, psychiatry,
artificial intelligence, cultural anthropology, theory of art and philosophy. The
underlying idea to this theoretical model is that culture is a wild animal whose
fundamental dynamic must be understood in order to better control its development and
violent drifts. The work of the author, as elaborated in the book The Nature of Cultures
and in the essay Maximal Stress Cooperation – the driving force of cultures, and the
interdisciplinary laboratory of which he is the director, possess, today, a range of
influence, namely in decision centers of the German State apparatus and in global think
tanks. His work has been fairly divulged in the context of the work of Peter Sloterdijk, for
whom he represents a defining influence.
According to the author, all culture is grounded in maximal stress foundational
events. The physiology of stress is a cognitive process by which a perception is
transformed into an energy flux. By the perception of a stressor – a threat, a danger, an
act of aggression – the hypothalamus and the hypophysis react by the liberation of
hormones and neurotransmitters. The hypophysis – also called pituitary gland –
constitutes the interface between the brain and the endocrine system. The endocrine
system consists, in turn, of the collection of glands which liberate hormones into the
blood stream and in the circulatory path used by those hormones to reach the diverse
organs. In man, the neurocerebral system is assimilated to the mental-rational activity

1Communication presented at the 5th Graduate Conference – Research Seminar Aesthetics,

Politics and Knowledge Research Group, Institute of Philosophy, University of Porto, 2017.
Orality has been preserved in this version and no classical citation rules have been followed.
and the neuroendocrine system to the seat of feelings, affects and stress. The interface
assures the connection between one and the other systems and represents the
substratum of the phenomenon of self-evaluation, through which affects evaluate and
interpret thoughts and thoughts evaluate and interpret affects in a feedback circuit.
The stress reaction provokes the production of adrenaline, noradrenaline and
cortisol, which causes the acceleration of the heartbeat and the increase of blood
pressure. Appetite and sleep are affected, the metabolism, immunocompetence,
sensibility to pain and sexual activity are diminished. All the energy reserves of the
organism are channeled to the skeletal muscles, in order to improve motor capacities,
and the areas of the brain responsible for faster and more acute perceptions and
reactions are reinforced. This mobilization in face of a crucial moment for the survival of
the organism aims at a ready answer commonly called fight-or-flight response.
More important than the stress performance, though, is the feat of putting an end
in a happy manner to the stress phase, which constitutes a second aspect of this cognitive
process – by which it is settled its healthy or unhealthy quality, since pathological stress
leads to the chronic diminution of immunocompetence, depression and various diseases.
We have, thus, two phases of the cognitive process connected with stress, the first,
in which the perceptual recognition of a stressor is converted into an energy flux oriented
towards fight or flight, and the second, by which the stress activity is evaluated. If this
evaluation is not negative, the organism accesses the post-stress phase of relaxation,
characterized by a decrease of the hormonal rates and by a generalized amelioration of
the health state. The access to the relaxation phase and the evaluation required for it, in
face of a maximal stress event, are the preliminary conditions of any and all organized
social systems.

2 – Population and local rules

In this line of thought, the author poses the following question: «what happens
when stress, triggered by an individual stressor, operates on a population which
possesses, thus, the function of a subject?» 2
First of all, in order for the stressor to act on a population in the strict sense and
not over a mass of aggregated individuals it is necessary that it possesses beforehand an
organization receptive to stress. This organization is the product of a cultural formation
of delimitation and exclusion of a genetic and self-organizing type, which differentiates

2It is necessary to underline that this stressor can make an irruption from the outside as well as
emerge in an endogenous manner – this second case being designated as a virtual stressor,
product of a hostile paranoid image. From the perspective of its physiological effects, the
exogenous or endogenous character of the stressor is indifferent.
a population from another. This delimitative process proceeds from the interaction of
local cultural rules from which a global order can emerge. The author lists three species
of local rules under the names: «technical marker», «cooperation» and «allelopathy».

a) technical markers

All that can be effected with instruments and utensils belongs to the domain of
technical markers and all that is made with utensils can fall under rules convertible to
algorithmic representation and subsequently reproduced by machines. By way of
example, the author includes in technical markers: the usage of fire, metallurgy, the
employment of symbols and numbers, money, domestication, cooking recipes, the steam
machine, electromagnetic utensils, the computer. Technical markers are selected as
genetic traits esteemed in function of the adaptative advantages which they furnish. The
more well adapted or successful an individual is the more chances he has to transmit to
the next generation his genes as well as his cultural practices. Individuals compete
among themselves and in the individual plane the technical markers influence the
competition and the capacity for adaptation, designated as genetic fitness.

b) cooperation

When several individuals do the same thing then the phenomenon of cooperation
appears in the field of observation. Describable cultural structures present themselves
under the shape of trait groupings, ensembles, combinations and hierarchies. The
phenomenon of cooperation is connected to the general possibility of existence of
cultural traits. These are called cultural only because, and by definition, they are able to
be transmitted by way of instruction and learning. Transmission is of two types: vertical,
when the traits are transmitted from one generation to the next, and horizontal, when
they are transmitted inside the same generation.
Differently from biological genetics, which only allows to describe and explain
phylogenetic processes of transmission, cultural genetics describes ontogenetic
processes of transmission, i.e., which happen by way of learning or horizontal
transmission. For all purposes, culture is describable as a genetic and hereditary process,
thus transgenerational, which requires ontogenetic learning as a mediation. When the
learned individual and intragenerational traits are transmitted to the next generation,
only then they are properly called cultural traits.
Culturally acquired cooperation is, according to the author, a selfish cooperation.
In order to explain this phenomenon the author has recourse to game theory and to the
genetic algorithms developed in artificial intelligence for the reproduction of the
standard experience of the prisoner’s dilemma. Two players, A and B, must choose to
cooperate or betray the other. Applicable to different scenarios, something like two
prisoners guilty of a given crime committed together is pictured; while being interrogated
two outcomes are proposed to them: either remain silent and thus cooperate, or speak
and thus betray. By the combination of possibilities, it is resolved that if both A and B
speak, both will spend two years in prison, if A speaks but B remains silent, A is released
and B spends three years in prison (and vice-versa), if both A and B remain silent, both
spend only one year in prison.
In the first theoretical elaboration of this game, by simple combinatory calculus,
it was assumed that the only rational strategy of self-interested individuals is mutual
treason. Each player supposes and anticipates the other player’s move and acts in
conformity. To win is understood as to be minimally penalized. However, with the
development of a genetic algorithm by Robert Axelrod, whose purpose was to perform
an indefinite iteration of the game in the midst of a population – an iteration which
generates a process of learning transmitted transgenerationally –, it was verified that the
cooperation rate increases with the transgenerational transmittal of that learning and
overrides the rate of treason. Cooperation is, thereby, described as an optimized
development, being verified that, in the long run, cooperation possesses more individual
advantages.
Therefore, according to the author, selfish cooperation is not a phenomenon of a
moral nature, but of a genetic nature, product of an optimized evolution. The
philosophical conscience of the individual discovers itself from within this process and
engenders a posteriori concepts like «the good» and «the true». However, these
concepts are themselves means of justification of an evolutionary, transgenerational,
collective and unconscious process.

c) allelopathy

The third local rule under the designation allelopathy presupposes that technical
markers have no cultural pertinence except when they are able to be inherited. The
heredity of cultural traits presupposes, in turn, the existence of a mediation taking the
shape of instruction and learning, which is an example of cooperation. Nonetheless,
cooperation is not itself possible without allelopathy, described as the affective
communication between cooperative individuals. The word allelopathy comes from the
Greek allêlon which means mutual, one-another. Allelopathy consists in the affective
reaction provoked by the reciprocal perception of affects between individuals and the
permanent feedback of the affective expression between them – the behavior which
results from the behavior of immediate neighbors affecting its own in return.
The formation of allelopathic structures coincides with the formation of groups
which develop an awareness of belonging and familiarity, which refers to the respect of
certain communicative regularities, known only by the members – establishing a
delimitative barrier between those who belong and do not belong to the group. These
regularities come to function as rules according to their delimitative potential and are
described by the author, basing himself on Gregory Bateson, as injunctions, i.e., rules of
a secondary level of communication, expressed in salutations, greetings, nods and
gestures, facial expressions and somatic dispositions. These allelopathic rules produce,
as well, a cognitive threshold, by which a virtual image of the other emerges, and possess,
thus, both a prescriptive and descriptive potential.
Allelopathy constitutes, according to sociobiology, the basis of choreographic
rules observable in the so-called phenomena of swarming, such as in flocks of birds,
swarms of bees, in the construction of termite mounds, and in the behavior of human
masses in face of violent events. Swarming choreographies allow one to observe the
emergence of a global order from local rules, from the interaction with the environment
as in the circumvention of obstacles and from a dynamic of movement considered as a
global energy flux. As the author refers, basing himself on strategic-military thought, an
external organization possessing a perception of the whole can influence and direct this
allelopathic behavior.

3 – Maximal stress event and emergent order

Given the prior delimitative potential of a population on the basis of these three
local rules which differentiate it from another population, something must function as
an operator of a global energy flux which coordinates and collects the various local
groupings into a global order. For Heiner Mühlmann, maximal stress events are these
operators. By maximal stress events, the author understands wars, natural catastrophes,
terrorist attacks, among other violent events. What these events imply is an exposure to
death experienced as such by all the population, which means «matter of life and death».
Maximal means maximal level of stress intensity, whose asymptotic limit is death. If in
face of another population, conceived from the threshold of discrimination as foreign, a
stress reaction is produced, this threshold becomes a membrane which unites and
simultaneously separates conflict and cooperation, through which cooperation also
attains its maximal intensity if it is the case of a maximal stress reaction.
 When these phenomena of maximal stress cooperation are successful a global
adjustment of rules happens, the outcome of which is the emergence of a new order. This
adjustment implies a hierarchization of rules which has as a first rule that which allows
for the settling of a positive evaluation and success and, thus, conclusion of the MSC
phenomenon, triggering, from this same conclusion, the relaxation phase. This
adjustment produces a new spatial organization of the population and generates that
which the author designates as «liturgies». The event itself is spatialized. We can picture,
e.g., a city’s central avenue with its monuments, which connects a central square to the
city limits – the cooperation zone with the conflict zone – and the commemorative
parades and processions which are periodically realized there. Since the MSC founding
events are highly memoactive events, due to the organic impact of the stress reaction,
they lend themselves, par excellence, to that periodical remembrance which has as its
function the renewal of cooperation. Beyond this, the liturgy, which constitutes the
prototype of all cultural symbols and media, aims at the reactualization of the energy of
the foundational event, remaining latent in the memorial texts, images and monuments,
and its conversion into a corporeal memory.
These liturgies are extensions of the foundational events, however, the order may
invert itself, which happens only when the symbolic and mediatizing aspect of the liturgy
becomes autonomized, as a consequence of the attenuation of the MSC effects. This
inversion happened, according to Mühlmann, in the case of Nazism. Nazism arose as an
attempt to return to a cultural cooperation of an MSC kind in a society in which the
symbolic had become autonomized in the realm of aesthetics. In this kind of situation,
given the lack of an MSC event, the provocation of the event is searched for. A culture in
this state of attenuation of the MSC effects is a culture in décadence. For Heiner
Mühlmann, which on this point bases himself on the work of Bazon Brock, Nazism was
inspired by the Wagnerian liturgies for the aestheticization of its politics and for the
provocation of the event.

5 – Civilizing influence and religious immunitary devices

For Mühlmann, MSC phenomena are inescapable as the basis of cultures, but, in
the context of the classical distinction between culture and civilization, he supposes the
possibility of a civilizing influence over culture, which takes the shape of a domestication
and of what he calls a teleonomic selection, by which a rational direction may be
impressed to the genetic and affective components of a culture. This civilizing influence
becomes a pressing matter in the current conditions of globalization and development of
weaponry. At the same time, an attenuated society contains a potential for the resurgence
of MSC phenomena and the explosion of rage in marginal cultures, such as hooligans,
bands of delinquents and in the so-called religious fundamentalisms, as well as in new
nationalist movements.
As a strategic plan for this civilizing influence, the author cites the hypothesis of
certain military decision makers, for whom war management is a possible answer, i.e.,
the management of provoked MSC events, whose goal is, among others, the employment
of the base productive class, increasingly unemployable, which would otherwise be
«recruited» for the formation of marginal cultures. For Mühlmann, which rejects this
hypothesis, considering it ineffectual in the long run, the only stressor, simultaneously
real and virtual – since it consists of a threat coming from the future –, capable of
generating an intercultural cooperation and the neutralization of the conflict, necessary
for the current planetary conditions, is the possibility of an ecological catastrophe.
According to this civilizing project culture must be tamed and domesticated. But
since we ourselves are culture we must tame ourselves. Peter Sloterdijk, having
developed this thesis in his now famous speech Rules for the Human Zoo and, more
recently, in his book You must change your life, proposes the idea, by a rereading of
Platon in the light of Nietzsche, of a new pastoral power directed by self-domesticated
men. In this context too, Sloterdijk considers that the much talked about «return of the
religious» in the contemporary scene consists, in fact, in the return of the practicing life,
which was implicitly contained in religions but now reappears in an explicit and
secularized fashion. The practicing life or the practices of the self constitute the basis of
all anthropotechnics, i.e., of the self-shaping capacity of human beings, by which a bridge
between nature and culture is established.
Historical systems of a religious kind constitute a third-degree immune system,
beyond the biological and the social (legal and military). Immunitary devices are, for
Sloterdijk, that which permits cultures to become cultures, lifeforms to become lifeforms.
It is these devices which regulate all self-organizing processes and allow for the
preservation and reproduction of lifeforms by reference to a potentially and actually
invasive and irritative environment. Yet, procedures of a religious type, understood as
«the most comprehensive immunitary practice of a symbolic kind», possess a practical
vertical tensor which does not aim at the mere securization against transcendent risks,
but instead at the highest kind of self-overcoming, which Sloterdijk characterizes in
immunological terms as an «inoculation with the infinite». In the contemporary context,
i.e., explicit and secularized, God becomes this absolute vertical tensor which orients self-
overcoming. By the explication of the practical, anthropotechnical and autoplastic,
potential contained in a latent manner in religious immunitary devices, Sloterdijk seeks
to go beyond the pietist hypothesis, as well as beyond the fundamentalist hypothesis, as
factors of analysis of the so-called return of the religious and, in this way, to contribute
to the civilizing project indicated by Mühlmann.
What these two authors take, nonetheless, as an irreducible datum at the basis of
all MSC phenomena is the physiology of stress. Mühlmann poses even the hypothesis of
a genetic manipulation which would aim at its inhibition but rejects it as impossible on
the basis of scientific postulates and on the assumption that the physiology of stress
constitutes the inexpugnable basis of all cultural immune systems as well as the
necessary basis of the instinct for self-preservation. In his words:

The rational and muscular activity, constantly evaluated by the feelings and
passions, the physiological disposition adequate to the interface between
rationality and emotivity, the hypothalamus and the hypophysis, proceed from
the history of the human race. Man cannot disentangle himself from it. If he
searches to orient his activities solely to the rational domain, he is thereby
inevitably captured by his feelings and by the reactions of his endocrine system.
The rational man cannot deny the one who is made of affects and feelings. He
cannot but learn to comply and compose with it, with dexterity, like a tamer who
trains an animal with love and indulgence. (Mühlmann, The Nature of Cultures)

6 – Dyadic and triadic soul

This rhetoric – in the neutral meaning of the word – of domestication has a long
history, going back to the first ethical reflections in the history of Philosophy, as in Plato
and the Stoics. It has received, among others, a notable treatment by Plutarch, in an essay
generally designated as On moral virtue, but whose title could also be translated as «On
ethical valor (or excellency)». In retrospective, for some of the ancient authors, Ethics
presented itself as the true «first philosophy», since from ethics, for which the form of
life of man is in question, depends the character of thought. This notion possesses
actuality, since thought is no longer understood as the result of an autonomous rational
sphere, but as the psychophysically rooted expression of the quality and tenor of a form
of life.
Two problems were placed by Plutarch in this essay. First, it was important for
him to position himself against the philosophers who affirmed the unity of the soul and
intellect, for whom the soul possessed one and only faculty, simultaneously rational and
passible – which presupposed, in turn, that passions and desires were always the product
of a decision of the hegemonic, intellectual-volitional, center of the soul. Plutarch, on the
other hand, affirmed, with Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and others, the dual character of
the soul, since the conflict between reason and will, from one side, and affects and
passionate inclinations, from the other, was irreducible and experienceable by everyone.
From this irreducible conflict the existence of two psychic faculties, rational and passible,
was hypostatized. A second problem, which followed from this one, was the question of
how the rational soul can dominate, impregnate and form the passible soul. According
to Plutarch, the passible soul is rooted in the totally alogical part of the soul, called
vegetative, nutritive or sensitive – in the deepest recesses of the body and of the somatic
potencies which rule the blood, the bones, the breath, and which is expressed in
involuntarily bodily signs like paleness, blush, tremors and heartbeat.
After a reflection, driven by the idea that the ethical (ἦθος) consists in a
qualification and differentiation of the alogical or irrational that it receives from habit
(ἔθος), when it is formed by reason, Plutarch arrived at the conclusion that it is the virtue
of temperance which allows to tame and form the passible soul, without resolving with
exactitude the problem of the union of the two faculties. Plutarch, nonetheless, who was,
one has to be reminded, a philosopher, but also a Delphic priest, made at this point a
cryptic allusion either to the orphic-dionysian mysteries or to the Eleusinian mysteries,
leading the reader to suppose that the solution of the question of the unity of the two
faculties lies, in some way or another, in the participation in the mysteries.
To this problem, Christianity, above all in the ascetic tradition of the Eastern
Church, gave a different answer. In a Hellenic context, the dual character of the soul,
divided in reason and affectivity, was irreducible. Christianity, though, introduced a
novelty. The ascetic Eastern Fathers made a distinction between the word nous and
logos, which for the Greeks designated the same faculty, and they pointed out the heart
as the natural seat of the nous. In question is not a mere affective or sentimental faculty,
which was emphasized precisely by the use of the word nous – which, from within the
Hellenic semantic sphere, could be translated as «intellect». Thus, along with the
mental-rational intellect, that we would call today cerebral, for the ascetic tradition of
Eastern Christianity, there is also a cardiac intellect.

7 – Neurobiological sickness and its cure

For the Greek American theologian and historian John Romanides, who
elaborated the data of this ascetic tradition in light of contemporary scientific topical
developments, human beings suffer from a neurobiological sickness which consists in
the short circuit between the heart and the brain, or between the circulatory system and
the neurocerebral system. This sickness is based on a dysfunction of the noetic faculty
which does not operate in the heart but which is dissipated in the organism and confused
with the rational faculty centered on the brain. It is this dysfunction which generates the
instinct for self-preservation and the subsequent search for selfish and self-centered
happiness. But it is also, according to the author, this dysfunction which is at the root of
all religions. The cure of this sickness is effected by the separation of the two faculties,
noetic and rational, which operates by expelling all thoughts, images and passionate
movements from the heart and by its replacement with unceasing prayer. This
distinction is not a metaphysical but an empirical distinction, since the separation
between the rational faculty and the noetic faculty is experienceable. Those who have
effected this separation possess unceasing prayer in the heart, happening simultaneously
and without conflict with the mental operations in the brain.
If a brain is a receptor and processor of environmental influxes, the heart, when
purified of all thoughts, images and passions, and persisting in unceasing prayer,
becomes a receptor of that which in Eastern Orthodox theology is called the uncreated
energy of God. The communion in the uncreated energies is realized corporeally and has
as an effect the suspension of organic functions. Another of the possible effects of this
communion is the transformation of bodies into relics. It is this energy which retains the
body in a state of non-decomposition, which consists in the suspension of the mechanism
of cellular disintegration.
In the context of gerontological studies and research, financed today in millions
of dollars by men such as Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, in the search of the cure for aging,
it was arrived at the conclusion that it is the endocrine glands which determine aging,
since glands are the only parts of the body whose cells are not renewed but are gradually
decomposed. The ascetic cure of the short circuit between the brain and the heart has
organic effects. This cure is the answer to the Paulinian intimation: «Who will release me
from this body of death?» (Rom. 7:24)
The heart is, then, an intellectual organ or, better said, noetic. From the
developmental point of view, as observed by embryology, the brain is an extension of the
peripheral or autonomic nervous system, also called vegetative, controlled by the
reptilian brain, on the basis of the physiology of stress. The reptilian brain divides the
world in two categories, beneficial and prejudicial, from the perspective of the organism’s
survival, and controls nutrition, the fight-or-flight response and sex. It lies also on the
basis of behavioral complexes like self-defense, defense of family and individual
property, as well as on the basis of nods, waves, salutations and greetings, and it is
generally responsible for species-typical behavior, such as aggression, domination,
territoriality and ritual exhibitions. From the point of view of cultural science, the animal
man possesses the same ends and goals as the other animals – fight for survival, search
for homeostasis, pleasure and happiness. Cerebral intelligence is an extension and
mediation of those ends and is, therefore, dependent on the organic processes which
determine desires, passions and phantasies.
 According to the Eastern ascetic or neptic Fathers, the thymos, the faculty of
animus and irascibility, must guard the heart and fight against the triple invasion of
passions, phantasies and thoughts which snake around the organism. Thymotic rage
must expel and master the serpent. Yet, as Plutarch himself affirmed on the matter of
obtaining ethical valor and excellency through the good shape impressed on the
psychophysical dispositions: the one who fears intoxicating himself does not pour the
wine on the ground but tempers it. The nous must then go down to the heart, guarded
and purified, and there implant the monological thought expressed in the Name and in
its entreaty. By the energization of the heart and the subsequent redressment of the short
circuit between heart and brain, new thoughts can there be energized and liturgically
transmitted in psalms and hymns of glory.
When the True Cross was found in Jerusalem, which in the hymns of the Eastern
Church is called the new Tree of Life, it was found that vegetation was growing in it. The
assumption of the ascetic-liturgical Cross has as its finality the sprouting of this new
vegetation. This was called in the East theosis – deification and glorification –, and it
remains, to this day, not an ideal, but a sublime «cultural» reality.
The fact is that, for the Eastern Christian ascetic and neptic tradition, the
physiology of stress is not irreducible.