The Ruse of Utopia and Its Discontents, Part II: Heaven on Earth
“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”
― Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Prometheus is bound to a stone in the Caucasus. It is his punishment for bringing the secrets of heaven to humanity that it might lay bare the path to civilization and so it has, and Prometheus is sentenced to have his liver daily devoured by an eagle — the emblem of Zeus — for eternity. And though civilization was found, in its dawning humanity would not discern the difference between the gods’ knowledge of heaven from the proof of our vanity in what we proclaimed as its namesake on earth, for the pinnacle of civilization as an ideal is equivalent in the mind of humanity with heaven on earth.
Though he knows, Zeus stands atop Mount Olympus overlooking the whole of civilization, watching, no less observing the foibles of humanity unfold before him. And we might ask ourselves why? Despite all the vastness of the universe at his command — the formations of galaxies, the staggering voids, the cosmic explosions emptying into their own self-made eternities — why does he watch us, humanity? Though as the god of gods, perhaps he watches it all simultaneously, his interest being equally distributed between any and all, because, perhaps, the significance of humanity is only a significance we hope Zeus would see in us. The god of gods must be unjealous, unaffected, unhindered by the failures and successes of any. Surely, it makes little difference, for a god is a god, interested as much in the whole of the drama of humanity as he is in any of the most minute esoterica that his mind may ponder, from the dappled psychedelia of the orchid to the swirling collapse of the supernova shearing in and out of the void upon his fingertip.
It is the secrets of the gods humanity desires, and through our desire we are tempted with likening ourselves to that which we seek.
The desire for utopia is synonymous with humanities desperate search for meaning in a world that we are of and by and, therefore, must be both desirous of inextinguishable life while simultaneously being utterly dependent on a world that inherently tends toward the dissolution of it. We live in a world of imagined absolutes where we can imagine how wonderful eternal life on earth could be but are forever levelled by the fact of life itself.
Though such thinking has been quite useful, it would be even more useful still to recognize the impossibility embedded in that desire and the impact that very desire has on our actions. Because, it seems, there is a tendency to disassociate desires we know are impossible in reality with what we can imagine if imagining is gone unchecked. In other words, we talk as if heaven were an impossibility but find ourselves infuriated beyond words when someone questions our ideals, as if they were standing in the way of a very real and clear path to heaven as utopia on earth, despite, as we have seen in part I of this essay, the inherent impossibility of it.
And here, it seems, is the crux of the matter which is that we must distinguish between forethought itself and its often contingent relationship with the absolute of our desires and, in particular, how the two manifest into utopian thinking. Though we may never make a clear, distinct departure between the two entirely, naming them and seeing their habits can help us recognize the pitfalls within ourselves of utopian idealism from rational, goal oriented forethought itself.
It is in absolutes that we can imagine the breaking point of where our ideals may no longer possess congruency with our priorities, that is of course if we have a mindset that would consider our outlook to possess flaws to begin with. Because if our mindset is not predicated on the inevitability of error or blind spots, we will never take the time to think if we have gone too far.
And so, by absolutes, we may call on the gods.
Zeus’ understanding of the cosmos is itself encompassed in the hopeful habit of the will of humanity, no less in the individual than in the masses, for the hopeful habit of humanity can be nothing more than an approximation of what must be the de facto of a god such as Zeus, because his choices will determine the fate of any or all, if he so desires it. Whatever the scale he may be concerned with, it certainly seems by the human eye that the least of the creatures of earth have been given no less care and delicate molding than we, but that we, for all it is worth, seem so much more rational, so much more thoughtful, so much more possessed of a capacity to see beyond ourselves in a world that is nevertheless purportedly infinite. And, then again, perhaps that is only an impression we carry of ourselves as would any entity who has not yet had their insignificance revealed to them, and, nonetheless, it may be of the greatest necessity for such an impression to preside over the origins of any intelligence, however modest, lest the intelligence believe too little in itself to overcome the trials of mere being to find the momentum to will it self into a state of imminence.
But a god need not have existential faith in his command of his life and destiny insofar as a god is the very embodiment of the existential will itself, for the existential will, as such, is the ultimate logical conclusion of the human desire for freedom of will, and, as an absolute, it may only reside in the world of forms for we need only cross a busy street to know that we cannot do whatever we want if we are to place any value at all in ourselves as existential beings or anyone else. And what an important place to start if we are to understand the extent and scale of our freedom of will. For, in a world in which humanity is compelled by a restrained autonomy, only Zeus stands alone and may not when he desires not to, unaffected by the vast network of interconnected narrative threads in play before him and about him. He is a light unto himself, a moral antithesis even, who commands his own will and testament upon all that he oversees, including himself. He is the embodiment of the will at its absolute and utterly unreal pinnacle.
Of course, Zeus is a god and a god does stand alone, for if a god were to exist at all, how else might one be than by just such a self-impending imminence? A rule and a judge unto himself that can both see and apprehend his own flawed systems of logic — and so flawed he might otherwise have been, his forethought supersedes even the most uncanny of eventualities. He is a being that is truly independent of all other beingness as a human is tangibly bound.
Indeed, a god is the best judge of the validity of their own point of view, for a god alone may see their judgements pass through realities equivalent in their minds eye and witness the ultimate conclusion of their actions as they might otherwise truly be. To a god, their point of view is validity itself.
But a god a human is not and faith in our existential right to preside over our own destiny is no more than a hopeful right at its absolutely real pinnacle, relying on forces that we can no more understand now than if it were actually true that Zeus himself did, in fact, command the cosmos and our destiny. For, when scaling a human life against eternity, even the oldest of humans is no more immortal than the oldest of trees, and, nevertheless, immortality alone is not how one would define the unimpeded will of a god. And here we find in ourselves the seemingly eternal flaw of the human will in its most tangible form. Though we may imagine an unimpeded ego such as Zeus, such a thought is incongruent with even the most absolute peaks of any one person’s possible realities. And here it is in absolutes, in ultimates, and in logical conclusions that we find the breaking point of our own aspirations and to know where the breaking point is is to know how and whether our aspirations are tenable. For though we be desirous of a more and greater and less impeded will, we are, nonetheless, human and utterly restrained by the unseen forces of a world that is so possessed of complexity that we have long assumed it was the very work of the gods for lack of a more tangible means by which to explain its power over our lives.
Though, for all intents and purposes, the gods may well command our lives because, for all the complexity of the world, we may yet find ourselves leveled by forces without the least explanation against our hopeful freedom in it. To navigate such a world, it seems, the only tenable means by which to judge the extent of our hope for freedom is in that the sooner our ideas may lead to our undoing the sooner we should interrupt their influence on our aspirations, however inevitable it may be.
And it is here that we see the first tangible similarity between the will of a god and that of a human reaching its breaking point. For it is in forethought alone that we circumvent what might have otherwise proven to be our demise, and it is in forethought that we find light in the darkness of an utterly incomprehensible world. By such a light through so much darkness we might mistake the possession of a degree of such a capacity as being an absolute having not fully comprehended that what lay in the darkness possessed far more depth than what the light had clearly indicated.
To our own mind, it can seem much like the glow of a firebrand in a dark room, but that what the firebrand’s globe of light reveals is not simply that there is much that is unseen but that there is far more beyond the light that is quite literally gone — as in not within the mind’s capacity for conscious contemplation. Which is to say that in its absolute, at it’s logical apotheosis, to be possessed of forethought amid the hardships of a world that might only be overcome not merely by knowledge alone but also confidence — and a confidence that is often fostered into egotism at the misguidance of the human heart — we might mistakenly draw an equivalent to our inklings of forethought to an absolute under the pressure of the moment as being much more than what it really is, for absolutes are so much less complicated and clear in comparison to a world that is vague, uncertain, and enigmatic and utterly terrifying to glimpse into that darkness beyond the light. And though less complicated they may be, we should use them to reveal when we break from reality, and not that we break from reality.
Beyond the light lies the consequences of our failures and successes, and it seems that only a god might bestow upon us from beyond that veil the guide of enlightenment and forethought — for how else might we be inclined toward absolutes if we had not received it from an absolute? And so, Prometheus being humanity’s greatest champion has stolen for humanity fire from heaven that we might see deep into the night, and, thusly, we have gained forethought and wisdom as the tools to attain civilization, and so much more.
But Zeus, for Prometheus’ insatiable desire to triumph over him, sentenced Prometheus to be chained to a stone and to have his liver eaten from his body by an eagle each day for eternity. To be possessed of forethought is itself to be enlightened, though would Prometheus have stolen fire from heaven if he had possessed the forethought of his eventual punishment? Or, nevertheless, might it be more true that Zeus simply possessed that much more forethought which would always leave Prometheus in proverbial darkness relative to Zeus? and, therefore, forever destined to misinterpret his capacity to outdo the god of gods. And this the most human of human traits, to believe in a capacity that we do not fully possess because our desires so often overshadow our insight into the extent of our own capacities.
But why would Zeus sentence Prometheus, the god of forethought and wisdom itself, to his eternal torment for giving humanity the tools to relieve itself of the hardships of pre-civilization? Of course, the answer to that question lies in the fact of the myth itself, for Zeus is a creation of the human imagination which tells us something fascinating about our own often-overlooked and often-disregarded capacity for knowledge, and, even more importantly, of self-knowledge. For it is not that Zeus sees detriment in humanity possessing forethought and thus must chain Prometheus to a stone, but that we, humans, see and despise the knowledge of our own flawed forethought in ourselves and would prefer to chain such an awareness to a stone, to torment it for eternity as punishment for the reminder of our own flaws than to have our assumption of omniscience disrupted by a challenger. And so, the darkness beyond the light is not just simply what we do not see but what is quite literally gone, never to be seen or considered, thus leaving it to the distant reaches of our mind very often when it is most in need of being at the forefront. For Prometheus too is a creation of the human imagination and in the recognition of that fact and the fact of the myth itself we recognize the necessity of collaboration in order to create fire and bring ourselves out of the darkness and across the voids that we create between us, even if we would rather chain that recognition to a stone.
As if some unconscious force were at play among us that has slipped these works of the great playwright into the obscurity of the past, it seems, the final two installments of Aeschylus’ trilogy of Prometheus are lost. The only surviving text of the supposed trilogy detail Prometheus’ torment at Zeus’ command, thusly leaving humanity, as far as the Aeschylusian tragedy is concerned, at a loss as to whether or not we ought to release our knowledge of a flawed forethought from its torment or leave it chained so that we might yet assume our supreme insight into a world we inevitably find we had not, in fact, understood very well at all.
But as Nietzsche pointed out, these gods too are dead and perhaps they should be. One thing that we can say for certain is that the conflict between Zeus and Prometheus lead the denouement of humanity and humanities fate up till now. Even if the gods are dead their myths still give us crucial insights into human nature and in this case, it seems, it would be that there is much to be gained from discordance, conflict, disagreement and even actions motivated by jealousy. But if we know that anyways, that is if we know that disagreement and conflict lead to evolution, might we do it in recognition of our flawed foresight? That is to say, might we agree that we should disagree and thus do it with equanimity because we know full well that we cannot see the flaws in our own judgements as well as someone else might who has the ease of perspective of being able to look over our shoulder to see where we might have gone wrong?
