Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  Among the Titanesses this sadness is most visible in the grief of Rhea whose motherhood was harmed. It is also visible in the mourning of Mnemosyne who ceaselessly conjures up the past. The suffering of this Titaness carries something of sublime magnificence. In her inaccessible solitude, no solace can be found. Alone, she must muse about herself — a dark image of the sorrows of life. The suffering of the Titans, after their downfall, reveals itself in all its force. The vanquished Titan represents one of the greatest images of suffering. Toppled, thrown down under into the ravines beneath the Earth, sentenced to passivity, the Titan knows only how to carry, how to heave, and how to struggle with the burden — similar to the burden borne by the Caryatids.

  The Self-Sufficient Gods

  The Olympian Gods, however, do not suffer like the Titans. They are happy with themselves; they are self-sufficient. They do not ignore the pain and sufferings of man. They in fact conjure up these sufferings, but they also heal them. In Epicurean thought, in the Epicurean world of happiness, we observe the Gods dwelling in between the worlds, divorced from the life of the Earth and separated from the life of men, to a degree that nothing can ever reach out to them and nothing can ever come from them. They enjoy themselves in an eternal halcyon bliss that cannot be conveyed by words.

  The idea of the Gods being devoid of destiny is brought out here insofar as it goes well beyond all power and all powerlessness; it is as if the Gods had been placed in a deepest sleep, as if they were not there for us. Man, therefore, has no need to think of them. He must only leave them alone in their blissful slumber. But this is a philosophical thought, alien to the myth.

  Under Cronus, man is part of the Titanic order. Man does not yet stand in opposition to the order — an opposition founded in the reign of Zeus. He experiences now the forces of the Titans; he lives alongside them. The fisherman and boatman venturing out on the sea are in their Titanic element. The same happens with the shepherd, the farmer, the hunter in their realm. Hyperion, Helios, and Eos determine their days, Selene regulates their nights. They observe the running Iris, they see the Horae dancing and spinning around throughout the year. They observe the walk of the nymphs Pleiades and Hyades in the skies. They recognize the rule of the great Titanic mothers, Gaia, Rhea, Mnemosyne, and that of Gaia-Themis. Above all of them rules and reigns the ancient Cronus, who keeps a record of what happens in the skies, on the Earth, and in the seas.

  Titanic Necessity vs. Divine Destiny

  The course of human life is inextricably linked to the Titanic order. Life makes one whole with it; the course of life cannot be divorced from this order. It is the flow of time, the year’s course, the day’s course. The tides and the stars are on the move. The process resembles a ceaseless flow of the river. Cronus reigns over it and makes sure it keeps returning. Everything returns and everything repeats itself — everything is the same. This is the law of the Titans; this is their necessity. In their motion a strict cyclical order manifests itself. In this order there is a regular cyclical return that no man can escape. Man’s life is a reflection of this cyclic order; it turns around in a Titanic cycle of Cronus.

  Man has no destiny here, in contrast to the demigods and the heroes who all have it. The kingdom of Zeus is teeming with the lives and deeds of heroes, offering an inexhaustible material to the songs, to the epics and to the tragedies. In the kingdom of Cronus, however, there are no heroes; there is no Heroic Age. For man, Cronus, and the Titans have no destiny; they are themselves devoid of destiny. Does Helios, does Selene, does Eos have a destiny? Wherever the Titanic necessity rules, there cannot be a destiny. But the Gods are also deprived of destiny wherever divine necessity prevails, wherever man grasps the Gods in a fashion that is not in opposition to them. But a man whom the Gods confront has a destiny. A man whom the Titans confront perishes; he succumbs to a catastrophe.

  We can say, however, that whatever happens to man under the rule of the Titans is a lot easier than under the rule of the Gods. The burden imposed on man is much lighter.

  ***

  What happens when the Gods turn away from man and when they leave him on his own? Wherever they make themselves unrecognizable to man, wherever their care for man fades away, wherever man’s fate begins and ends without them, there always happens the same thing. The Titanic forces return and they validate their claims to power. Where no Gods are, there are the Titans. This is a relationship of a legal order which no man can escape wherever he may turn. The Titans are immortal. They are always there. They always strive to re-establish their old dominion of their foregone might. This is the dream of the Titanic race of the Iapetos, and all the Iapetides who dream about it. The Earth is penetrated and filled up with the Titanic forces. The Titans sit in ambush, on the lookout, ready to break out and break up their chains and restore the empire of Cronus.

  Our Titanic Man

  What is Titanic about man? The Titanic trait occurs everywhere and can be described in many ways. Titanic is a man who relies completely upon himself and has boundless confidence in his own powers. This confidence absolves him, but at the same time it isolates him in a Promethean fashion. It gives him a feeling of independence, albeit not devoid of arrogance, violence, and defiance. Titanic is a quest for unfettered freedom and independence. However, wherever this quest is to be seen there appears a regulatory factor, a mechanically operating necessity that emerges as a correction to such a quest. This is the end of all the Promethean striving, which is well-known to Zeus only. The new world created by Prometheus is not.

  Chapter VIII: Schopenhauer and the Perception of the Real or Surreal Postmodernity

  There is a danger in interpreting the text of some long-gone author, let alone of some heavyweight philosopher, such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). The interpreter tends to look at parts of the author’s prose that may best suit his own conclusions, while avoiding parts that other critics may find more relevant, and which the interpreter may consider either incomprehensible or irrelevant. This is true for Schopenhauer in so far as he deals in his multilayered work with diverse subject matters, ranging from the theories of knowledge, to the role of women, sex, eugenics, religion, etc., while offering aphoristic formulas on how to live a more or less livable life. Moreover, in his entire work Schopenhauer deals extensively with the perception of objective reality, our self-perception, and how our self-perception reflects itself in the perception of the Other, for instance in the mind of my political foe or friend. It’s no wonder that when Schopenhauer is read along with some postmodern authors, his work can retrospectively yield some groundbreaking insights, of which even he was not aware.

  The Devil is often in the details, but harping on the details alone may often overshadow the whole. Just because Schopenhauer was critical of Jewish monotheism, or made some critical remarks about women, should not lead us to the conclusion that he was a standard-bearer of anti-Semitism or a hater of women. The fact that Adolf Hitler was one of his avid readers should not overshadow the fact that the father of modern psychoanalysis, the Jewish-born Austrian Sigmund Freud, learned a great deal from him on how irrational will is expressed in sexual drive.

  An Apolitical Meta-politician

  How relevant is Arthur Schopenhauer? At first sight Schopenhauer’s prose may be dated for our understanding of the world today. Schopenhauer can be catalogued as a thinker of the so-called intellectual conservative revolution in so far as many thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Vilfredo Pareto, Julius Evola and others, one hundred years later, were heavily influenced by his writings. Neither can these authors be properly understood unless the reader becomes familiar with Schopenhauer’s writings first. Secondly, Schopenhauer’s teachings about the primacy of the will spearheading our perception of reality can also be of help in grasping the political hyperreality of the modern liberal system.

  Schopenhauer’s name is usually associated with cultural pessimism. Nevertheless, he is far from the caricature of a suicidal author harping ceaselessly
on the culture of death, as was the case with many of his 20th-century successors, including the magisterial Emile Cioran.24 In his aphorisms Schopenhauer provides some handy recipes as to how to minimize a life of pain and sorrow and how to discard the dangerous illusion of happiness. As a fine connoisseur of human psychology, Schopenhauer justly remarks that where there is a violent outburst of joy, a disaster looms just around the corner. It is therefore with maximum efforts that we need to curb shifts in our mood: anxiety is just the other side of ecstasy. One must not give vent to great jubilation or to great sorrow as the changeability of all things can transfigure those at any moment. By contrast, one must enjoy the “here and now,” possibly in a cheerful manner — this is the wisdom of life.25

  Schopenhauer does not deal with political treatises in his work, nor does he discuss the political sociology of the rapidly industrializing Europe, or governmental institutions of his time. The political changes he witnessed, however dramatic they were, such as the Napoleonic wars in Europe, the rise to power of America, and the post-Napoleonic era, were of no interest to him. Quite consistent with his misanthropic views about human nature, he stayed above the political and historical fray to the point of total disinterestedness.

  Schopenhauer refuses any formula for any ontological, political, or ethical system whatsoever. Instead, he demolishes all doctrines and all systems, be they religious or political. He resented politics and he can be justly depicted as an “anti–intellectual” in a modern sense of the word.

  For Schopenhauer, the world is fundamentally absurd and no political philosophy can alter its absurdity. A French theoretician of postmodernity, the philosopher Clément Rosset, is probably one of the best authors who summarized the significance of Schopenhauer for our times:

  Man has forever been successful in passing off past events for new events. He has been thought to be able to act within free and regenerating time. In reality, though, he has been in the arms of the cadaver. A retrospective horror extends to his past, in which he has lived ever since, although, just like his future, that time had lapsed for good. This time-illness, a profound source of intuition about the absence of all finality, expresses itself in the obsessive theme of repetition.26

  In other words, however much we may yearn to affect the flow of time or assign it some goal or purpose, its merciless cyclical nature always bring us to further delusions and the inevitable status quo.

  Nowhere is this absurd repetitive will of living visible as in man’s sexual desire — which Schopenhauer describes in his famous chapter and essay The Metaphysics of Sex. Once a sexual appetite is assuaged, the will continues to manifest itself again and again in ceaseless sameness of sexual desire.

  It follows from this absurd repetitiveness that the entire history of the human species is the entanglement of reenactments. World affairs and political decision-making are manifestations of a self-inflicted desire for something new. Based on such perceptions of repetitive reality, Schopenhauer shows no interest in history, noting that it is always the same people who take the world stage, with the same ideas, albeit framed in a different rhetoric. In short, his target of criticism is the philosophy of optimism and the idea of progress which lay embedded in the eighteenth century teaching of the Enlightenment.

  For Schopenhauer there is nothing new under the sun, as with every fleeting second the new becomes the old and the old becomes the new; the wheel of time turns forever. Time for Schopenhauer is devoid of historicity. Therefore, a study of some historical event, or of some political drama, is totally irrelevant. Schopenhauer advocates the abandoning of the illusory will to create a better world. He was a willy-nilly supporter of monarchical government because that form of rule offered some semblance of authority and stability.

  Despite his static philosophy that rejected human and political betterment, Schopenhauer ventures often in his lengthy work into interesting and well-founded analyses, such as his brief study on the importance of heredity. But one must be careful not to extrapolate his scattered comments on race and heredity and assume that they make up the bulk of his work. He believed in the hereditary improvement of mankind and some of his remarks about biological betterment are right on target. Irrespective of the fact that he does not delve much into the subject of heredity, one must agree that Schopenhauer could be easily used as a weapon by modern sociobiologists or race realists.

  If we could castrate all scoundrels, and shut up all stupid geese in monasteries and give persons of noble character a whole harem and provide men, and indeed complete men, for all maidens of mind and understanding, a generation would soon arise what would produce a better age than that of Pericles.27

  Schopenhauer’s remarks on heredity are perfectly compatible with his teachings on the independence of the will. Just as we can never change the predetermined nature of our genes and our genealogy, we cannot change the predetermined nature of the will:

  The only freedom that exists is of a metaphysical character. In the physical world freedom is impossibility. … [T]he will itself, as something that lies beyond time, and so long as it exists at all, never changes … Hence it is that every man achieves only that which is irrevocably established in his nature, or is born with him.28

  The Will vs. the Deceptive Reality

  The main driving force of the entire university is the will. Ideas, concepts and images are merely the objectification of our will at different levels of perception. The will is a blind force; it is subject neither to time nor to space, neither does it obey the principles of causality, nor is it subject to accidents.

  In this sense Schopenhauer represents a big break with the teachings of rationalists and idealists of his time, who were enamored with the principles of causality, and henceforth viewed necessity as a cornerstone of life on Earth. Schopenhauer stood out as an oddity in his times which were imbued with the heritage of the Enlightenment.

  The will is more important than the thought. However, at the conceptual level, as some scholars pointed out, one must carefully distinguish between the will and the instinct, as his later critical admirer and commentator, the National Socialist Minister, Alfred Rosenberg, noted in his chapter Will and Instinct in his now famous book, The Myth of the 20th Century. “Will is always the opposite of the instinct (Trieb), and not identical with it, as Schopenhauer seemed to teach.”29

  In other words contrary to Schopenhauer, Rosenberg objected that Schopenhauer used the term “will” in an overly general manner. Similar to Nietzsche and his followers, Rosenberg argued for the “implementation” of the free will for Promethean and political goals while contrasting it to the primeval biological impulses which he calls the “instinct.” (Trieb).

  Man is originally not a being of knowledge but a creature of instinct and will — a will that comes alive in cyclical time and in a non-linear way. Will is the fundamental reality of the world, the thing-in-itself, and its objectification is what is visible in external phenomena, such as objects or political events that we witness daily. In practical life the antagonism between the will and reason arises from the fact that the will is a metaphysical substance, whereas the reason is something accidental and secondary: an “appendage” to the will. The will is an autonomous desire, that is to say, an irrational need to act or to do something. The will is free in every single thought process and action, but it need not and generally does not follow the precepts of reason.

  Unlike the majority of philosophers of his time, including Hegel, Schopenhauer does not hold reason in high regard. Our illusions, based on self-serving perceptions, remain so entrenched despite the most sophisticated appeals to reason. Therefore, Schopenhauer can be justly labeled as the greatest anti-rationalist philosopher of all time. Only the genius has some capacity for objectivity in so far as he can harness his will and become the pure knowing subject.

  The absurdity of Schopenhauer’s “free” will is that man is enslaved by it without ever knowing its origin and reason. Humans act but do not know why th
ey act the way they do: apart from a few geniuses, their self-perceptions are nothing more than illusions. This leads us to a dreadful life, full of anguish on the one hand and ecstatic expectations on the other. The absurdity of our will is not how to reach the river and quench our thirst: the absurdity consists in the will for being thirsty! The will has no cause and, given that it excludes causality, it does not have any necessity or purpose.

  That the being is without any necessity is already a dreadful problem. But that this very being is in addition unhappy and miserable only emphasizes the absence of a raison d’être.30

  Schopenhauer’s theories of representation and perception can easily rank him today in the category of the founding fathers of postmodern theory of the Double and the Hyperreal. Everything that we see is fleeting “representations” and not the actual physical phenomena. We dream even when we are awake. Well, how then can we tell the difference between the real political truth and the fabricated political truth?

  Schopenhauer is a crucial source in understanding the psychopathological impact of religions, myths and the systems of beliefs. At times he labels them “allegories” whereas in other places he describes them as the “metaphysics of the masses” or “people’s metaphysics” (Volksmetaphysik). Just as people have popular poetry and the popular wisdoms or proverbs, they also need popular metaphysics. They need an interpretation of life; and this interpretation must be suited for their comprehension. The great majority of humans have at best a weak faculty for weighing reasons and discriminating between the fact and the fiction. Does this sound familiar?

  No belief system, no ideology, no religion is immune from self-serving delusional tenets linked to false perceptions of reality, although, in due time, each of them will undergo the process of demythologization and eventually become a laughing stock for those who see the illusions underlying these delusional myths.