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Real Men Don't Think About The Roman Empire | Blog Posts

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The Roman Empire is for dweebs. Real men think about the Roman Republic.

According to the Royal Frankish Annals (772 AD), during the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne is repeatedly described as ordering the destruction of the chief seat of their religion, an Irminsul.[7] The Irminsul is described as not being far from Heresburg (now Obermarsberg), Germany.[7] Jacob Grimm states that "strong reasons" point to the actual location of the Irminsul as being approximately 15 miles (24 km) away, in the Teutoburg Forest and states that the original name for the region "Osning" may have meant "Holy Wood".[7]

Heinrich Leutemann (1824-1904). - Wägner, Wilhelm. 1882. Nordisch-germanische Götter und Helden. Otto Spamer, Leipzig & Berlin. Page 159.

Irminsul - Wikipedia

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...tradition of Western thinkers who held that the desire for survival and for material things is often bound up with the psychological desire to be recognized by others.

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I realized one could use Nietzsche’s insights as a way to understand the aristocratic spirit of the West from the very beginning before the “citizen” starts to triumph over and assimilate the master. But let us accept Fukuyama’s important contribution, and then ask the following: if the demand for recognition is inherently inegalitarian, may it not also be the case that this desire has been unevenly manifested by the cultures of the world? Is it possible to argue with Nietzsche that not all cultures are equally proficient in the production of creative individuals? Can we not add to Nietzsche that the West produced the “highest exemplars” of humanity due to its singular aristocratic grounding? We saw in the last chapter that the “megalomaniacal desire” on the part of the chiefs is having others recognize their superiority. Fukuyama develops this point further by considering Plato’s famous discussion on the “three parts of the soul” (162–65). Plato believed that all humans had a soul which consisted of three elements: i) a physically desiring part that drives humans “to seek things outside them;” ii) a reasoning part that allows humans to calculate the best way to get the things they desire; and, iii) a “spirited” or thymotic part that drives humans to seek recognition from others. Fukuyama adds, using the language of popular psychology, that the desiring part of the soul, called thymos, comes from the innate sense in all individuals that they are worthy of some respect. This sense of self-worth and self-esteem is intimately related to the way other humans treat us and evaluate us. But the thymotic spirit is not developed equally in everyone’s soul; some individuals are not satisfied with themselves as having equal worth to others in that they want to be recognized as superior. This desire to be superior stems from its ancient Greek roots and is known as megalothymia while the desire to be recognized as the equal of others is known as isothymia.


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Now, while Fukuyama correctly explains that megalothymia is a rare psychological drive exhibited by strong and ambitious men, I believe he loses sight of the historical implications of the “first man” when he brings up various historical and cultural examples like Beethoven, Stalin, and Caesar while forgetting to specify or locate the “first man” at the beginning of history. Who was this first man engaged in a battle to the death for pure prestige? Yet, to his credit, there is a paragraph in Fukuyama which is worth citing at length because it serves as one of the few instances in which a scholar has tried to make historical sense of Hegel’s “first man” in the same way that countless scholars have occupied themselves with historical descriptions of Hobbes’s hypothetical state of nature:

The Hegelian understanding of early class stratification is probably more accurate than that of Marx. Many traditional aristocratic societies initially arose out of the ‘warrior ethos’ of nomadic tribes who conquered more sedentary peoples through superior ruthlessness, cruelty, and bravery. After the initial conquest, the masters in subsequent generations settled down on estates and assumed an economic relationship as landlords exacting taxes or tribute from the vast mass of peasant ‘slaves’ over whom they ruled. But the warrior ethos – the sense of innate superiority based on the willingness to risk death – remained the essential core of the culture of aristocratic societies the world over, long after years of peace and leisure allowed these same aristocrats to degenerate into pampered and effeminate courtiers (148).

This is the one instance in which Fukuyama equates the first men with aristocratic societies in history. But this is all we get; the historical contribution of aristocratic warriors is seemingly quick and short. After risking their lives and showing their martial superiority over the ordinary men – over the majority of men preoccupied with their self-preservation and comfort – the aristocrats go on to live a parasitic life extracting surpluses from the real producers to eventually “degenerate into pampered and effeminate courtiers.”2 Fukuyama interprets the master-slave dialectic in the same way other scholars have, including, I would argue, Hegel and Kojeve. The “first man” provokes a bloody battle which gives him satisfaction because he has risked his life and received recognition from another human, but soon the master feels that the recognition he receives from the inferior slave is no longer satisfying. As the master has a slave working for him, “his life therefore becomes a static and unchanging one of leisure and consumption.” The slave, on the other hand, rediscovers his humanity through work, which he performs out of a sense of duty and self-discipline; he uses tools, invents technology and advances scientific knowledge and, in this way, he masters nature, learns to control his immediate desires for the sake of future achievement. All this makes the slave proud and gives him a sense of his own self-worth and dignity. Eventually he conceives of the idea of freedom and, in the end, risks his own life for the realization of freedom and universal human equality (192–98).

Fukuyama does not think through the implications of the just-cited passage, namely that the willingness to risk death for the sake of validation was the defining attribute of aristocratic societies. Instead, he follows the Hegel-Kojeve supposition that the successful master was a singular man who risked his life and became the sole ruler over a servile population. He presumes that, since megalothymia is a will to superiority, the master will want to suppress everyone as a way of achieving the highest recognition. The “logic of recognition,” he writes, leads “ultimately” to the desire to be a tyrant with no rivals. It is no surprise then that many of the historical examples Fukuyama offers of rulers with powerful thymotic drives are of men like Stalin, Mao, and Saddam Hussein, all of whom fit with the philosophical model of the single master who eliminates all competitors. This is a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be an aristocratic master. What aristocrats desire is recognition of their worth and dignity by other masters possessing equal worth and dignity. There is a momentum in the drive for recognition pushing aristocrats to impose their will on other men including aristocrats. But in true aristocratic societies “some men are free” and this means that the dominant master is always “first among equals.” The master-leader finds satisfaction in the recognition he receives from his peers. Despots, on the other hand, find satisfaction in the adulation of servile masses; they fear the competition of free spirits.

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I believe there is a major flaw in Kojeve’s philosophical account (which has not been noted by his interpreters since his readers are philosophers rather than historians), namely that the master-slave dialectic misses the essential historical role of aristocratic warriors. The image we get from Kojeve is that of a singular master – a despot – who, upon winning the “first” battle, faces servile men who are unwilling to challenge his authority because they prefer security rather than a life of risk and rebellious behavior. But true warrior societies are those led by the best fighting men, all of whom recognize each other as masters. In warrior aristocratic societies there are always masters who recognize the heroic deeds of each other. Only in a despotic society where “one man is free” does the master find himself in a situation in which the recognition of the others as slaves is without value for him. Kojeve fails to see that true warrior societies are not those in which one man is free and the rest of the population is servile; they are those in which there is a class of men-at-arms who recognize the humanity of each other even when there is a recognized leader, “the bravest hero” who takes the “hero’s portion” of meat when all the mightiest warriors dine together sitting in a circle.4 A master without honor is without worth, and honor can only be conferred by one’s peers.

Kojeve, I must say, was not particularly interested in the masters even though he grasped this part of Hegel’s Phenomenology better than any interpreter at the time. What mattered to Kojeve, as a Marxist, was the future dialectic of the master-slave relation.5 He believed that once the master had played the role of risking his life in bloody wars for prestige, there was little else for him to do. He was stuck in the “wrong track” of history, in a situation in which he was recognized by a “thing” and not another man. For all the wars of prestige, the master would find himself in an “existential impasse”: either in a life of pleasure and idleness, by living from the fruits of the slaves, or simply dead in battle. His role in history did not go beyond the initial achievement of self-consciousness, with no other lasting legacy. Meanwhile, the slave would be one “ready for change.” The “very being” of the slave was indeed transformation because he necessarily works upon nature and learns about nature and becomes “master” of nature; he “transcends himself by working…he educates himself, he ‘cultivates’ and ‘sublimates’ his instincts,” as he represses his immediate desires and concentrates on his work. The slave, in this way, learns to master his own immediate biological desires in the name of creating products which objectively give expression to his goals. He realizes his essential powers through work and through the products he makes and thus ceases to be a “natural being” and “becomes truly conscious” of his humanity (Kojeve: 20–30, 42–52).

Thus, in Kojeve’s view, whereas the master “cannot go beyond himself, change, progress,” the slave makes history “in the technical world transformed by his work.” In repressing his immediate urge to consume, and forming an idea of what he intends to make – “the idea that engenders a technique is a scientific idea” – the slave (as he is gradually becoming a bourgeois) engenders “abstract thought, science, technique, the arts – all these have their origin in the forced work of the slave.” Therefore, through his work, the slave manages to free himself from the natural conditions of his existence, and learns to master nature and improve the economic conditions of life.6 As he becomes aware of his intellectual abilities, the slave “becomes conscious of his freedom,” and thus conceives “the idea of freedom,” an idea that he will eventually realize through the active abolition of slavery. The master, meanwhile is what he is, free in his idleness, the master of a being who gives him a recognition he does not value, and beyond this state the master cannot advance, and so “the master never succeeds in going beyond the freedom that is realized in himself and the insufficiency of that freedom” (Kojeve: 53–70).

It is work that brings real change, not military action; “work that produces a machine gun, and no longer an ax.” The purely warlike attitude of the master does not vary throughout the centuries, and therefore it cannot engender a historical change.” Work transforms the world and Man himself, by creating a Man that knows how to modify nature and that becomes aware of his freedom. The master starts history by forcing the slave to work, but it is the slave that pushes history forward after its start. Before realizing “human” freedom, the slave thinks through a series of philosophies of freedom…until he conceives Christianity imagining a “beyond” in which the slave is equal to the master, but as long as the slave is not willing to risk his life he will not cease to be a slave. He has to risk his life in a fight with the master, and this he will do once he transcends Christianity by realizing the Christian ideal in the actual world, which is what “is effected in and by the French Revolution” (Kojeve: 53–70).

In writing about ancient Greece, Kojeve momentarily speaks of the “masters as citizens” and of a “State of Masters,” as if aware that in this society there was not a singular master, but a state controlled by a popular assembly of citizens who were all masters (57). Clearly, these “masters as citizens” can be said to have been “truly satisfied” insofar as each was recognized by their peers. But because Kojeve frames the master-slave relationship in Marxist terms, and thus presumes that human work is the main transformative force in history, he gives no attention to the masters beyond the primordial manner in which they brought forth the essential reality of human self-consciousness. Moreover, his argument is presented in purely philosophical terms with no awareness of how particular historical beings might have achieved their self-consciousness. It seems to me that the Hegel-Kojeve idea on the origins of self-consciousness can be of value historically so long as there was a “first” society of masters dedicated to the enhancement of prestige, as the essential way by which its members asserted their “being-for-self ” (freedom) and revealed their humanity. I have already argued in previous chapters that the candidates in world history that come closest to playing this role are the Indo-Europeans.

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Barring mainland India getting involved, a man wearing plate armor could likely capture and become king of North Sentinel Island with nothing but a sword and a case of white Monsters.