DAS UNTIER – THE BEAST

80 min readFeb 7, 2025

Ulrich-Horstmann

Foreword by: Robert Sebastian Castellanos Rodriguez

Foreword

There have always been those who seek meaning – philosophers, poets, rulers – each trying to carve purpose into a universe that is indifferent to their existence. They write grand theories, build great empires, and preach the virtues of faith, love, and progress. But all of it is in vain. The stars do not care. Time swallows everything. And no matter how loudly we proclaim our significance, the void does not answer.

This book does not offer comfort. It does not seek to inspire or uplift. Instead, it pulls back the curtain and forces us to look at reality as it is, without illusion. It speaks not of hope, but of truth, the truth that life is an accident, that suffering is endless, and that every effort to escape our fate is ultimately pointless.

Some may call this view pessimistic. But what is optimism, if not a refusal to see? Why should we lie to ourselves when the evidence is so clear? Nations rise and fall, wars are fought, people live and die, and yet nothing changes. We are animals who tell ourselves we are something more, clinging to myths to keep the darkness at bay.

This book is not for those who seek answers. It is for those who already know that there are none. It is for those who are tired of false promises, tired of pretending that life has meaning when every moment brings us closer to oblivion.

Perhaps, in embracing this truth, we can find a different kind of peace – not the peace of fulfillment, but the peace of surrender. The acceptance that there is no path to follow, no destiny to fulfill. Only the slow march toward the inevitable, and the quiet understanding that, in the end, none of it matters.

§ 1

The apocalypse is upon us. We beasts have known it for a long time, and we all know it. Behind the political squabbling, the debates over armament and disarmament, the military parades and anti-war protests, behind the facade of a desire for peace and the endless ceasefires, there lies a secret agreement, an unspoken grand consensus: that we must put an end to ourselves and our kind, as swiftly and thoroughly as possible – without mercy, without scruples, and without survivors.

What else would sustain the beast called “world history” if not the hope for catastrophe, downfall, and the erasure of all traces? Who could endure – let alone actively perpetuate – a millennia-long litany of hacking, stabbing, spearing, and cleaving, the monotony of slaughter and skull-splitting, the Om mani padme hum of horrors, without being secretly certain in the depths of reason that these relentless exercises draw him and his kind, massacre by massacre, battle by battle, campaign by campaign, world war by world war, inexorably closer to that final bloodbath, that global Armageddon, with which the beast will conclude its breathless tally of endlessly self-replicating suffering?

In parliaments, the doves brood, while the hawks on the gallery spread their talons. Who does not hear, in their assurances that they arm for the sake of securing “dove peace,” the age-old truth that they are dove-arming peace? Who does not silently nod at Zarathustra’s correction:

You say a good cause will even sanctify war?

I say to you: a good war will sanctify every cause.

(Nietzsche 1967 1: 575)

Thus, the beast has finally grown weary of nursery tales, utopias, paradisiacal visions, and salvation narratives. It has steeled itself to face the inevitable head-on.

Comfort now comes from the proximity of calamity, the certainty that the eons of endurance, preparation, and relentless perfection are drawing to a close, and the reward awaits: the end of suffering, the having-suffered-through. The true Garden of Eden – that is the wasteland. The goal of history – that is the weathering field of ruins. The meaning – that is the sand blown through the eye sockets beneath the skull, trickling away.

Such sentences reek of impropriety and presumption. Impropriety, because they claim the right to name the beast as a beast and boycott the euphemism “human.” Presumption, because they thereby renounce innate species loyalty and abandon the pens of common sense and its equally wholesome optimism.

Yet they stem from rational insight – even if it is an eccentric and disreputable reason, a residual and demonized rationality, that speaks here. Giving it a hearing is the aim of the following account, which thereby becomes a polemic, a plea for a new philosophy that frees itself from the Archimedean point of the “humane” and does not, in futile attempts, think humanity to its end, but rather thinks the end of humanity in its most elemental form.

The hallmark and bearer of this initially alienating mode of reflection – which nonetheless has always existed in the minds of the beasts like a Trojan horse – is what we will henceforth call the anthropofugal perspective: the viewpoint of a speculative flight from humanity. It entails the beast distancing itself from itself and its history, impartial observation, a suspension of the seemingly universal imperative of sympathy for the species to which the thinker themselves belongs, a severing of affective bonds.

To illustrate this mindset, the image of a space capsule orbiting Earth in ever-widening ellipses – until one day it breaks free entirely and vanishes into the depths of space – is most apt.

Suppose the astronaut aboard knows their trajectory, which makes return impossible, with precision. Their unbroken gaze upon the planet, their hopeless and illusion-shattering distance, the disintegration of now-useless patterns of perception and familiarity – in short, that long, painful, yet immensely illuminating farewell – would be shared with the anthropofugal philosopher. For the latter, too, has attained escape velocity – though not physical, but intellectual. Just as the astronaut breaks free from Earth’s gravitational pull, the philosopher has escaped the gravity of humanism: that ideological sphere of influence and force that still keeps the beasts firmly grounded in the “realm of facts” and denies them sight beyond the horizon.

The modernity of the astronaut metaphor, however, must not obscure that anthropofugal thought – the beasts’ ability to detach from themselves – is far older than satellites and manned space exploration. Rather, it is fundamentally a species inheritance, likely developed during hominization alongside problem-solving intelligence and pragmatic communication.

Notably, direct traces of this evolutionary stage are rare, and its ideological constructs, unlike hand axes and spearheads, are irrevocably lost. Yet even in the myths of so-called “primitives” and the religions of early advanced cultures, the disorientation, the existential sense of alienation and displacement that has accompanied the beasts since the dawn of their species history, remains palpable.

. § 2

From the very beginning, the beast was not self-evident to itself, and in an ur-form of anthropofugal world perception, it could indeed imagine this world without itself. Characteristic already are the countless creation myths in which the crafting of humans by the gods is plainly described as botched work and rejects. Here, the demiurges attempt using stone, wood, earth, wax, or reeds – and the result is invariably the same wretchedness: the wax melts in the sun, the wooden prototypes hastily flee to a better world where eternal life awaits them, the stone-carved beings disregard their creator’s code entirely, and so on (cf. Grimal 1967: 205ff.).

The constitutive flaws that the beast thus discovers within itself – and slyly imputes to the divine – also explain its very early, at times manic preoccupation with world catastrophe and its own demise. This downfall is understood as the wages of sin, divine judgment, and retribution – in other words, as something entirely logical and justifiable in its inevitability and legitimacy. The beast has always admitted, in one way or another, that it would be better if it did not exist.

This admission is retrospective, tinged with the relief of having escaped once more in the tale of the Great Flood, found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and Greek, Chinese, Australian, and Oceanic traditions. It is also prospective, stripped of such solace, in grandiose cataclysmic fantasies like the Revelation of John – well-known in Western Christian culture – or its Germanic analogue, the Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) from Norse mythology, which the Edda depicts with apocalyptic force and the beast’s characteristic relish for destruction:

From the east comes

Hrym,

He raises his shield,

In towering rage

The serpent thrashes,

Lashing the waves;

The eagle shrieks,

Rending corpses;

Nagefar breaks loose.

From the south comes

Surtr,

With searing blaze;

From the gods’ swords

The sun glints.

Giantesses fall,

Rocks shatter,

Men march to Hel,

The heavens burst.

The sun is extinguished,

The land sinks into the sea.

From the heavens plunge

The bright stars.

Smoke and fire

Rage around;

Fierce heat

Ascends to the skies.

. (Edda 1920 II: 41 f.).

• Hrym: A frost giant from Norse mythology, associated with Ragnarök.

• The Serpent: Likely Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent.

• The Eagle: A symbolic figure in Norse myths, often linked to Yggdrasil.

• Nagefar: Presumed to reference Naglfar, the ship of the dead

• Surtr: The fire giant from Norse mythology who engulfs the world in flames during Ragnarök.

• Hel: The Norse underworld (not to be confused with the Christian “Hell”).

• Giantesses (Riesinnen): Female giants (Jötunn) central to Norse apocalyptic narratives.

In this seeress’s vision (Völuspá), the cultural domestication of the beast – its settling into its planet – has already progressed so far that the visionary revocation of its own species-existence can only occur in the wake of total destruction, as a “world’s end.”

Nevertheless, even in such far-sighted globalization of death and the yearning establishment of that perfect cosmic synchrony, that harmonious relationship with the environment which the beast was never capable of during its species-existence, the primal interest in problematizing its own being – the fascination with a thought experiment of human absence as its foundational impulse – remains palpable, at least during the phase of dissolution and annihilation. And this speculative need finds ever more enduring satisfaction, for instance, in the Anahuac religion of central Mexico through the pluralization of catastrophe:

Nearly all testimonies… contain a myth known as the “Legend of the Four Suns,” which exists in various versions… Four world epochs, referred to as Suns, preceded the current age: all ended in natural catastrophes.

The first Sun, nahui ocelotl (“Four-Jaguar”), lasted 376 years. On the day “Four-Jaguar,” all earth-dwellers perished and were devoured by jaguars. “Then the sun vanished…” It was followed by another Sun, named nahui ehecatl (“Four-Wind”). In this epoch, humanity was swept away by terrible winds. Survivors were turned into monkeys. This era lasted 364 years.

Next came the Sun nahui quiahuitl (“Four-Rain”). After 311 years, a dreadful rain of fire annihilated all living beings and things. Humans were transformed into birds. The final Sun, nahui atl (“Four-Water”), lasted 676 years, and at its end, all humans became fish.

The fifth Sun, the present world epoch, bears the name nahui olin (“Four-Movement”). “It is our Sun, in which we now live…” (Grimal 1967 III: 177).

. §3

The radical break between mythic-anthropofugal world perception and Hellenistic anthropocentrism cannot be overstated if one seeks to understand why formulating a philosophy of human flight has remained an extraordinarily difficult endeavor to this day.

The entire philosophical apparatus remains impregnated with the species narcissism of antiquity – the euphoric discovery that the outcast beast, the outlawed deficient being, could elevate itself to an intellectual usurper capable of “explaining” its world and enthroning itself at its center through these explanations.

In this way, the beast ratified its civilizational achievements, which for the first time shielded it from the terror of the “primitive” natural environment, and glorified itself as homo sapiens – a staggering illusion to the mythic mind. This illusion, coupled with the Judeo-Christian injunction to “subdue the Earth,”

The dialectic here is as follows: The “primitive” exists in a nature both uncontrollable and uncontrolled, exposed to its hardships and terrors, while also lacking the instinctual equipment of animals. The primal myth conveys this experience of exposure, offering only the alternatives of pleasurable re-animalization or self-annihilation.
With the development of increasingly complex and reliable survival strategies – peaking in the Neolithic Revolution (the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian-pastoral existence) – this alternative lost its existential foundation of constant peril from a hostile natural environment and thus its plausibility.
In place of the primal myth arose stabilizing myths (securing the status quo) and aspirational myths (urging its transcendence). The distance inherent even in these was neutralized by the new self-awareness of philosophers, fueled by unprecedented confidence born from the civilized security of the polis and a universal claim to explanation – and thus meaning.
14
gave birth to ever-new techniques of domination and control, leading to a two-thousand-year feedback loop of ideologically fortified power claims and technological mastery. Until recently, this loop seemed to resoundingly confirm the philosophically refined omnipotence fantasies of Greek metaphysics.
With the launch of the philosophical “meaning machine” in the 6th century BCE – via Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras – began the merciless liquidation of the beast by “man,” the ruthless repression of the primal experience of the absurdity of species-existence. Reason reconstructed the cosmos according to its own mental schemas and, not least, carved out a place for itself in the newly homely harmony of the universe – if not as the creative primal principle of logos or nous, then as the “re-creator” and “crown of creation.” The universe’s structures became identical with those of philosophical reflection; the celestial vault above Ptolemy’s flat Earth shrank to the roof of a Platonic philosopher’s skull.
The projective nature of personal god-concepts was already known to Xenophanes (570 – 477 BCE), who mocked the anthropomorphic polytheism of the Olympian gods:

If oxen, horses, or lions had hands and could paint or create works like men, horses would paint horselike gods, oxen ox-like gods, each shaping their deities in their own image (Capelle 1968: 121).

Yet neither he nor his successors – save perhaps the nihilist Gorgias and the skeptic Pyrrho – recognized the anthropocentrism and logocentrism of their own speculations. On the contrary, the sophist Protagoras declared with conviction:

“Man is the measure of all things: of those that are, that they are; of those that are not, that they are not” (ibid.: 317).

Socrates rejected the subjectivist-relativist interpretation of this insight but emphatically reaffirmed it for the species as a whole. In its Socratic understanding, the homo mensura thesis stands as philosophy’s antithesis to the anthropofugality of myth and its far humbler view of the beast’s place and significance.

If primal myth documented exposure and peril, philosophy emerged as intellectual colonization – a speculative land-grab paralleling Alexander’s campaigns or Rome’s imperial expansion. The kinship between the philosopher’s mentality and the politician’s imperialism is evident in Cicero’s argument from De natura deorum, which, slightly modified, justified both anthropocentric thought and military action against “irrational barbarians”:

For whom, then, was this world created? Surely for rational beings: gods and men, the supreme beings, for reason surpasses all. … From the beginning, the world was made for gods and men, and all within it was prepared and devised for human enjoyment (Panitz 1974: 67).

This ideology of chosenness, this self-worship and apotheosis of “man” via reason, faced no challenge from anthropofugal insights – so long as the polis and later the Pax Romana seemingly validated its premises. Only in times of upheaval did remnants resurface, like flotsam after a receding tide. The Stoics, for instance, radicalized anthropocentric ethics into a humanist ideal to withstand turbulent times, yet their teachings harbored latent anthropofugal elements.

Epictetus’ assurance – “We are all brothers, sharing God as our Father” – or Marcus Aurelius’ humanist plea:

Why resent human wickedness? Recall that rational beings exist for one another, that patience is justice, and that wrongs are involuntary. Think of how many foes, once hated and crossed in battle, now lie as dust (ibid.: 189).

smuggle in contraband notions like ataraxia (peace of mind) and apathia (detachment), which echo anthropofugal indifference to the beast’s insatiable demands for happiness. Even the Stoic justification of (considered) suicide appears as a subjectivist shorthand for apocalyptic yearning.

2) Cf. Seneca’s Epistulae morales, where he writes:

“It is a glorious thing to learn how to die… Whoever has learned to die has unlearned slavery; they rise above all power, or at least beyond its reach. What do prisons, guards, and bars matter to them? The exit lies open. Only one chain binds us: our love of life. Though this chain cannot be discarded, it can be weakened, so that when circumstances demand, nothing holds us back or stops us from being ready to do instantly what must one day be done.” (Panitz 1974: 223)

. §4

The paralysis and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire during the Migration Period must have felt, to ancient anthropocentrism, like a literal barbaric refutation of its humanist premises, silencing it for nearly a millennium.

The unspeakable horror wrought by the plundering, burning, and murdering hordes of Huns, Goths, Burgundians, Alemanni, and Franks – the contemptuous destructiveness that made “vandalism” proverbial – should have prompted philosophically educated contemporaries to reactivate the ancient mythic insight into humanity’s essence as the “beast” (for which Stoicism had laid groundwork). Yet several factors thwarted the emergence of a post-mythological anthropofugal thought at this time.

These factors included:

The derivative nature and lack of innovation in Roman philosophy, which never moved beyond adapting Greek systems.
2. The disruption of communication networks, stifling the spread of unorthodox ideas.
3. The intimidation or physical eradication of intellectuals.
4. The rise of a superior rival paradigm: Christianity.
Christian dogma and philosophy ensured that antiquity, despite its euphoric negation of the beast, did not return to the repressed primal truth. Instead, anthropocentrism was smuggled into Christianity’s structurally homologous theocentrism.
18
This theocentrism achieved the extraordinary by merging the daily experience of humanity’s self-destructive brutality with the core tenets of ancient humanism (which faced theoretical collapse as reality mocked its ideals). The result was a synthesis plausible for centuries:
The formula was integration over polarization. Unlike Greek philosophy, which banished the beast to a taboo realm and replaced it with the sculpted ideal of “man,” Christianity spoke of the “beast within” – a flawed, degenerate deformation. This perspective allowed empirical reality to be accepted as the “Fall from Grace,” preserving the primacy of the “human” as the devout, God-surrendered believer.
The cost was the loss of existential and intellectual autonomy that had characterized Greco-Roman frivolity toward the gods. Humanism became theocentrically anchored, deriving its guarantees from a benevolent Creator and His humanophilic Son, whose sacrificial love neutralized the Father’s misanthropic whims.
In the Middle Ages, the individual’s goal became expelling the beast within through purification, as modeled in Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400 CE). When such introjected destructiveness met a hostile world, it led to martyrdom; within a Christian social context, to renunciation and asceticism – hallmarks of the era’s intellectual ethos.
19
Even in hermitic exile, anthropofugal impulses could no longer be fully lived. Fleeing humanity was reduced to a mere adjunct of a deeper movement: fleeing into God’s protective embrace.
Less meditative “beasts,” unable to sublimate their destructive urges or redirect self-loathing, relied on the Church – which, to curb destabilizing aggression (e.g., heresy) – granted sanctioned outlets for violence. This was justified by the adage “the end sanctifies the means.” While the “beastly flesh” was to be mortified, brutality against “enemies” (heretics, pagans) was divinely sanctioned.
During the First Crusade, zeal knew no bounds. At Jerusalem’s sack (July 15, 1099), over 10,000 Saracens – mostly civilians – were slaughtered. Babies were torn from mothers’ arms and smashed against walls. An anonymous chronicler recounts:

After our men finally felled the pagans, they seized many in the Temple, killing or sparing as they pleased. They ransacked the city for gold, silver, horses, and mules. Then, weeping with joy, they paid homage to the Holy Sepulchre… The dead were piled house-high outside the walls. No such pagan massacre had ever been seen. Pyres stood like cornerstones, their number known only to God. (Pernoud 1977: 101f.)

The same bloodlust erupted domestically in defense of orthodoxy. During the Albigensian Crusade, when Béziers refused to surrender heretics (1209), Catholics stormed the city singing “Come, Holy Spirit,” massacring all. The papal legate Arnaud reportedly declared: “Kill them all; God will know His own.” (Döllinger 1973: 144)

Arnaud’s statement, steeped in piety, reveals how theocentrism absolved the beast of guilt so long as it ravaged “enemy” territory. Inquisitorial purity demanded countless lives yet failed at self-reflection.

While ancient humanism could not reconcile its ordered cosmos with barbaric reality, medieval cruelty – far worse – left scholastic humanism unscathed. Violence was perceived only in dissenters, transformed into “demonic power.” Counter-violence became worship.

The original concept of the “beast within,” rooted in sin and penance, faded as the Church expanded its power. Instead, it radicalized against ideological foes, now deemed subhuman. Heretics and “witches” were tortured to “uncover” remnants of humanity within.

Burnings and trials, retroactively seen as collective sadism, were officially framed as pastoral care: the pyre acted as a “preliminary purgatory,” sparing souls eternal damnation.

Thus, theocentrism – intended to curb barbarism and sequester the beast through asceticism – increasingly bred butchers who hailed each other as adherents of a “religion of love.” Their sermons preached patience and forgiveness; their deeds, rabid misanthropy.

§5

The disparity between theoretical claims and the reality of a world not ruled by a “god of love” is reflected in Scholasticism itself – albeit theologically skewed – through the universals debate, which concerned the ontological status of general concepts.

The late nominalism of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, which dismissed universals as preexisting essences or ideas, reducing them to conventional labels for groups of things, could only understand action as voluntaristic – i.e., as the expression of an undetermined will that retroactively fabricated justifications for its deeds. What was cloaked here as “free will” was, in truth, an early insight into the instrumental nature of ideological-religious systems, which, with skillful interpretation, could absolve even the vilest acts of their stigma and recast them as expressions of pious, selfless heroism.

Within the Scholastic value system, the consequences of this skepticism could not be fully explored without destroying its foundations. The result was the Copernican turn to modern Renaissance thought, which no longer operated as ancilla theologiae (theology’s handmaiden) under the banner of faith, but under the secular flags of humanism and the studia humanitatis. Yet this humanism was Janus-faced from the start: it bore not only the noble, idealized traits of its classical antecedents but also, covertly, the visage of the “beast,” which stamped its mark not just on the past but on contemporary history.

Within Renaissance humanism thus lay the seed of an utterly anti-humanist thought – the anthropofugal perspective, the philosophical ability to detach from humanity – which philosophy would laboriously cultivate over subsequent centuries. In this sense, the era marks a revolution in intellectual history: philosophical thinking, having buried mythic human distance, began to recognize itself, at least potentially, as myth’s legitimate heir.

To clarify this duality: The Renaissance was initially a rebellion against the manifest cynicism of theocentric humanism, seeking to restore the ancient ideal of humanitas, epitomized in Cicero’s writings. Cicero expanded the original concept of “humanity” – encompassing reason, eloquence, and Roman virtus – to include dimensions central to the modern humanist ideal:

“First, ‘mildness and benevolence’ – what we might call ‘humanity’; second, ‘refined, universal education’; and third, ‘a delicate sense of propriety and custom’ – akin to ‘tact’ or ‘heartfelt cultivation.’” (Rüdiger 1966: 28)

Renaissance humanism thus revived classical anthropocentrism while serving as cultural capital that secured social prestige and literary immortality. This dual role is exemplified by Lactantius (c. 250 – 317), the “Christian Cicero,” who preserved classical heritage within Christian apologetics, distinguishing humans from animals not by divine likeness but by reason:

“Though humans are physically frail, their reason grants them dominion over stronger creatures. Thus, reason grants man more than nature grants beasts.” (Vorländer 1967 II: 170)

This ethos culminates in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man, which mythologizes humanity’s deficient nature as divine gift:

“The Creator decreed that humans, whom He could endow with nothing unique, should partake of all things…. Animals are born with fixed traits; humans, however, carry seeds of every form of life. Nurture the vegetative, and man becomes a plant; the sensual, a beast; the rational, celestial; the intellectual, an angel. But if unsatisfied with creation, man withdraws into his center, he becomes one with God, transcending all.” (Pico della Mirandola 1968: 30f.)

Pico’s metaphor of humanity as a “chameleon,” once exotic, now carries pejorative undertones. The insight into human malleability, intended to affirm perfectibility, could also invert to reveal the Gorgon’s head behind the classical mask – humanity’s historical and political reality.

The Scholastic nominalists’ skepticism toward absolute meaning radicalized in Renaissance thinkers, who saw through the restored Greco-Roman facade. Three figures epitomize this nascent anthropofugal distance:

Erasmus of Rotterdam (humanist and church critic),
2. Niccolò Machiavelli (disgraced diplomat and historian),
3. Michel de Montaigne (aristocrat and later mayor of Bordeaux).
Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), a dispassionate manual of power, marks the clearest break. Rejecting humanist idealism, he advocates Realpolitik:
“A prince must study only war…. It alone upholds born rulers and elevates commoners. Those who neglect it lose their realms.” (Machiavelli 1969: 91f.)
Morality, for Machiavelli, is situational: survival demands oscillating between man and beast.
“Since law often fails, one must resort to force. A prince must master both.” (ibid.: 103f.)
25
Machiavelli’s candid anthropology was denounced as heretical, yet it birthed a subversive countercurrent to Renaissance optimism – a “parasite” outlasting its host.
Erasmus, though ostensibly Machiavelli’s opposite, shared this unorthodox distance. His In Praise of Folly (1509), dedicated to Thomas More, masks profound disillusionment with wit:
“Why deny scholars levity when all estates enjoy mirth? Their jests often teach more than ponderous tracts.” (Erasmus 1962: 9)
While Machiavelli confronts humanity’s beastly nature, Erasmus deflects with irony, mirroring Perseus’ shield to avoid Medusa’s petrifying gaze:
“Observing humanity from afar, who wouldn’t pity its misery? Painful birth, toilsome growth, youth’s trials, aged infirmity, inevitable death! Add endless diseases, accidents, and betrayals…. Folly sweetens this lot with ignorance, shielding mortals from despair.” (ibid.: 47f.)
26
Erasmus’s precarious balance of insight and self-deception collapsed amid Europe’s 16th-century upheavals – peasant revolts, religious wars – eroding his ironic humanism.
Montaigne, writing during France’s Catholic-Huguenot massacres (e.g., St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572), renounced human pretensions to royalty:
“Nature imbued us with inhuman instincts. Our relentless cruelty forfeits any crown.” (Montaigne 1969: 204f.)
His Essays (1580) dismantle ethnocentrism, contrasting European “barbarity” with New World practices:
“Roasting the dead is less barbaric than torturing the living – as we do, even to neighbors, under piety’s guise.” (ibid.: 112f.)
For Montaigne, true humanity lies not in cultural ideals but in self-critical reason – a precursor to ideology critique.
Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon (1620) systematizes this empiricism, targeting “idols” (biases) obstructing knowledge:
• Idols of the Tribe (anthropocentric thinking),
• Idols of the Cave (individual biases),
• Idols of the Marketplace (linguistic distortions),
• Idols of the Theater (dogmatic philosophies).
Bacon’s critique of tradition and anthropomorphism seeds Enlightenment’s anthropofugal turn.

§6

For modern philosophy to finally open its eyes and confront the animal rationale – Descartes’ res cogitans – with an unflinching gaze, unclouded by narcissism or humanism, neither Bacon, Machiavelli, nor Montaigne sufficed as catalysts. What was needed was more than skepticism and scientific critique: it required a visceral lesson. This necessary instruction about humanity’s true nature and potential was delivered by the beast itself between 1618 and 1648, in the unending bloodbath history forgetfully labels the “Thirty Years’ War.”

The collective, firsthand experience of organized genocide and a runaway military machinery triggered a traumatic shock in philosophy, yielding two responses: metaphysical overcompensation or the painful pursuit of enlightenment. The first path was taken by Descartes, Spinoza (who, mirroring soldierly mentality, classified pity and remorse as vices), and later Leibniz.

Their colossal systems are both speculative fortresses and palaces of splendor. Fortresses, allowing retreat from the absurd and unspeakable reality; palaces, enthroning an unsullied reason behind metaphysical ramparts – a reason purportedly capable of grasping the Absolute and Being, holding court with Substance, its attributes, modalities, and accidents.

While Hobbes, in his political philosophy, projected the era’s chaos backward into a pre-social “state of nature” where homo homini lupus (“man is wolf to man”) reigned – indirectly highlighting the depth of civilizational collapse even during the English Civil War – Leibniz (born two years before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, amidst ruins, cripples, and invalids) ascended to theodicy: justifying the existing world as the “best of all possible.” This monstrous act of cultural repression, were it not for the grandiosity of his Monadology, might be dismissed as pathological detachment from reality.

Leibniz dismissed suffering as an optical illusion born of ignorance. All that exists, he claimed, is perfectly harmonized by divine will:

“There is nothing barren, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusion save in appearance.” (Leibniz 1959: 59). The highest philosophical virtue thus became obsequious quietism, content with the certainty that

“the universe surpasses the wisest desires… To say the world cannot be better than it is – not only in whole but for ourselves – if we submit duly to its Author.” (ibid.: 69).

Leibniz’s system, in this sense, is one prolonged bow to authority, earning popularity in absolutist courts. His era’s shattered human image is retouched with devotion to God and prince, yet the Renaissance’s Promethean ideal remains deformed, subservient, reliant on pre-established harmony. Only by hastily identifying with earthly and heavenly rulers could one forget that this “harmony” bore the visage of a pikestaff-scarred, beggarly mercenary.

“It is proven… that things cannot be other than they are. Since all is created for a purpose, it must serve the best. Noses were made to bear spectacles – hence we have spectacles; feet for shoes – hence shoes; stones for hewing into castles – thus our gracious lord has a splendid castle… Pigs exist to be eaten – so we eat pork year-round. Thus, to claim all is well-ordered is folly. Rather, all is ordered for the best.” (Voltaire 1972: 11).

This damning summary of Leibnizian doctrine, exposing its sycophancy and anthropocentric myopia, comes from Voltaire’s Candide (1759), voiced by the metaphysico-theologo-cosmologist tutor Pangloss. Blinded by metaphysics, Pangloss refuses to question his system, even as suffering mounts:

“I remain steadfast… I am a philosopher; I cannot recant. Leibniz cannot err. Pre-established harmony, the plenum, immaterial substance – what could be nobler?” (ibid.: 173f.).

Voltaire’s burlesque wit proved fatal to Leibniz’s pedantic rigidity, exposing its hollow pomposity. (One shudders to imagine a Voltairian takedown of Hegel’s Weltgeist.)

Despite immediate suppression – Candide was burned in Geneva, banned in Paris, and placed on the Vatican’s Index in 1762 – the failure to rationalize away the beast after 17th-century massacres became undeniable to the educated bourgeoisie.

§7

It is the hour of the Enlightenment – of what Kant later termed “man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity,” an immaturity manifest in a self-image utterly detached from reality and bloated with speculation.

Behind the projection screens and folding partitions of the “divinely ordained,” “higher wisdom,” and “humble endurance” that now surrounded battlefields and execution grounds, reality had to be painstakingly uncovered, rendered visible, and described without prejudice. Even the luminaries of the siècle des lumières often lacked the piercing clarity of the long-forgotten Abbé Jean Meslier (1684 – 1729).

Meslier, who served as a parish priest near Sedan (a town where his assessment of humanity would be horrifically confirmed 200 years later) for forty years, was a staunch atheist, materialist, and anarchist. In his testament, he wished fervently that “all the great ones of the earth and all the nobility might be hanged and strangled with the guts of priests” (Meslier 1976: 74). Yet historical experience had convinced him that the realm of freedom would likely never materialize.

His disgust toward his fellow beings, himself, and the lifelong masquerade forced upon him allowed neither idealistic glorification of humanity nor sentimental pity for the beast. What remained was a powerless longing for the end, for the revocation of this creature’s right to exist:

“I have witnessed so much malice in the world – even the purest virtue and innocence were not safe from slander. I saw, and still see daily, countless innocents persecuted without cause, oppressed unjustly, with none moved to aid them. The tears of the broken just and the misery of those tyrannized by the wicked rich and powerful filled me… with such loathing and contempt for life that I deem the dead far happier than the living, and those never born happier still.” (ibid.: 62f.).

Voltaire, with his “Écrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the infamy”), could muster such principled rejection only toward the Church, not humanity itself. Yet the atrocities were no less clear to him. In The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), a global voyage becomes a wander through pandemonium, where nations vie in mutual contempt. In Zadig (1747), the protagonist sees humanity as “vermin devouring one another on a speck of filth” (Voltaire 1961: 73). In Babouc, or The World as It Is (1764), an “eyewitness account” of battles waged per Leibniz-Wolffian divine harmony reads:

“He saw soldiers slaughter dying comrades to seize bloodied rags. In hospitals, the wounded perished from state-neglected care. ‘Are these men,’ cried Babouc, ‘or beasts?’” (ibid.: 9).

Yet Voltaire shields himself from Meslier’s existential revulsion with satire and irony – Erasmus’s reconciliatory balm. The effect is hallucinatory: instead of metaphysical soft focus, it offers absolution through Olympian detachment. In Micromégas (1752), giant travelers from Sirius and Saturn burst into Homeric laughter when a Thomist (visible only through a microscope) claims the universe was made for humans.

This levity ensures amusement even for bitter truths:

“A hundred thousand fools in hats slaughter another hundred thousand in turbans – a global custom since time immemorial… All for a clod of dirt… None of these millions killing or killed has ever seen the land in dispute, nor will they. The fight is whether it belongs to a ‘Sultan’ or a ‘Caesar,’ neither of whom will ever set foot there.” (ibid.: 151).

This flippant tone may mask gallows humor. Perhaps we slight Voltaire, yet he could not take – or comprehend – the final radical step. “I was deeply vexed,” he wrote, “that philosophy was pushed so far. This cursed book [d’Holbach’s Système de la nature] is a sin against nature.”

§8

What provoked such vehement rejection from the Enlightenment’s leading spirit was, in truth, an epochal synthesis and the logical conclusion of its own ideas – and, for our inquiry, one of modernity’s most significant philosophical works: Paul Thiry d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770), published anonymously. This militant materialism stands as the legitimate executor and culmination of Meslier’s testament.

D’Holbach’s achievement is the successful transition from modern humanism to anthropofugal thought – termed “materialist” in his language – a rejection of the secret Homeric sympathy for the gods’ “earthly playthings” in favor of the unflinching, affect-neutral “orbital” perspective outlined earlier.

For the first time, countless attempts since ancient Stoicism – efforts to confront humanity without anthropocentric or theocentric self-deception, without the speculative sublimation of self-love and self-praise, without the hall-of-mirrors historiography of victors and tributary philosophy – achieved unequivocal success.

D’Holbach exposes the innate self-referential delusion underlying the species’ survival and evolutionary progress:

“Man necessarily makes himself the center of nature; he judges things only by how they affect him. He loves what benefits his existence, hates what harms him, and calls ‘disorder’ whatever disrupts his machine. Thus, humanity concluded that nature exists solely for him, that all cosmic forces revolve around his needs.” (D’Holbach 1978: 312).

He simultaneously identifies the sole escape from species narcissism: the philosophical recollection of primal mythic awareness – that we are strangers, outcasts, the pariahs of creation, uniquely aware that organic life is but endless mutual devouring, senseless incorporation:

“Does the conqueror fight battles for ravens, beasts, and worms? Do Providence’s ‘favored’ not die to feed contemptible insects? The shark thrives in storms while sailors drown. All beings wage constant war, exploiting others’ misfortunes. Observe nature: everything arises to perish, subject to unceasing flux. Thus, the idea that man is nature’s ultimate purpose is absurd.” (ibid.: 452).

Abandoning teleology means discarding the pyramid of being – with inorganics at the base, ascending through plants and animals to humanity. Instead of an irreplaceable “crown of creation,” the beast sinks back into the struggle for survival, becoming philosophically conceivable as finite, extinct, fossilized:

“Is it absurd to imagine humans, animals, fish, or birds ceasing to exist? Are they indispensable to nature? Suns burn out, planets disintegrate; new ones form. Man – a speck on a cosmic mote – believes the universe was made for him, styles himself ‘king of creation,’ and dreams of eternity!” (ibid.: 80).

D’Holbach’s anthropofugal lens and proto-Darwinian view of humanity as an obsolete “ephemeron” mark a pioneering breakthrough. Reason, stripped of its role as a tool of glorification, becomes self-critical, admitting fallibility and mortality, renouncing claims to divine omniscience or eternal spirit.

While Kant, in Königsberg, demarcates the limits of reason in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), French Enlightenment figures dilute d’Holbach’s disillusionment. Condorcet constructs a secular metaphysics of infinite progress (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1794); Rousseau salvages Judeo-Christian election through inverted civilizational critique. Both cling to humanity’s cosmic exceptionalism.

This “enlightenment” failed Enlightenment. Rather than confronting ontological eccentricity and catastrophic self-delusion, anthropocentric revisionism hallucinates a new dawn. The bourgeois Prometheus dons the virtues of liberté, égalité, fraternité – and promptly ravages Europe under tricolor ideals. Guillotine-wielding “patriots” and Napoleon’s conquests expose humanist philanthropy’s bankruptcy. Yet philosophy, as after the Thirty Years’ War, retreats into denial.

Post-Napoleonic ruin and Metternich’s repression inspire Schelling’s murmurs of “primordial ground,” Hegel’s dialogues with a “World Spirit” (for whom history marches toward freedom), and Humboldt’s sermons on “humanity” and moral self-cultivation – all heedless of empirical reality

§ 9

Despite all historical and philosophical eulogies, German Idealism and its pompous engagement with the Absolute marked a philosophical dead end like no other. Its proponents, who fancied themselves the culminators of Western intellectual history and heralds of ultimate truths, transgressed the bounds of their craft and squandered their own, at times extraordinary, intellectual gifts.

Only one figure of their generation resisted the false solace of a philosophy rooted in dialectical glass-bead games and the self-aggrandizement spun from a priori world systems. He paid for his refusal with the ruin of a promising academic career, yet through a brilliant counterproposal, he demonstrated what a Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel might have achieved without the blinding lens of anthropocentrism.

That figure is Arthur Schopenhauer. In his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, he employs the very philosophical syntax, grammar, and architecture of speculative idealism, yet arrives at conclusions utterly incompatible with it – results that align more with d’Holbach’s enlightened materialism. Indeed, Schopenhauer surpasses d’Holbach’s insight into the logical possibility of a world devoid of humans by proving its desirability.

In radical opposition to Hegel’s Phenomenology, Schopenhauer’s doctrine is grounded in immediate, unfiltered experience of reality – uncensored by philosophical pretensions to meaning. It rests on the perception of a self-perpetuating, escalating, and insatiable suffering that defies justification.

For Hegel, suffering is dismissed as the “unhappy consciousness,” the result of “the madness of vanity” or the self-delusion of the “beautiful soul.” It is a sanction against faulty thinking, a painful reminder of the gap between human understanding and absolute knowledge, a byproduct of historical missteps. Hegel’s speculations, in the crudest sense, care not a whit for the whimpering, screaming flesh – the tons of human carrion left in the wake of the World Spirit’s forward march. Nations and peoples, mere “unconscious tools” (Hegel 1968: 316), are cast aside once used, deemed “rightless” and “no longer counted in world history” (ibid.: 317).

History as a “slaughterbench” (Hegel 1970: 35) is, for Hegel, a mere phantom of “subjective criticism” (ibid.: 53), the carping of those unwilling to accept their roles as extras in the grand drama. Such critics lack the supreme philosophical insight: that the real world is as it ought to be; that the true Good, divine reason itself, possesses the power to actualize itself. This Good, this reason in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world, and the content of His governance – the execution of His plan – is world history. Philosophy seeks to grasp this plan, for only what aligns with it is real; what opposes it is mere “rotten existence” (ibid.: 53).

Schopenhauer tirelessly condemned this regression into Leibnizian theodicy and the dismissal of historical suffering as “unreal” or “rotten.” He denounced the corpse-strewn optimism of historical philosophy as “not merely absurd but truly sacrilegious… a bitter mockery of humanity’s nameless torments” (Schopenhauer 1977 II: 408). Life – especially human life – is torment, a fundamental truth no philosophical system can rationalize away:

This world, this theater of tormented and terrified beings who exist only by devouring one another, where every predator is the living grave of thousands of others, where self-preservation is a chain of torturous deaths, and where the capacity for suffering grows with knowledge – reaching its zenith in humans, the more intelligent the greater – to this world, the optimists would have us believe, is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring.

Yet an optimist bids me open my eyes and behold the world’s beauty – mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals! But is the world a peepshow? To look at these things is pleasant, but to be them is another matter entirely. (Schopenhauer 1966: 159)

For Schopenhauer, all existence is the objectification of a groundless, pre-rational Will – a compulsive, frenzied drive to life that mindlessly spawns organic beings, which immediately begin preying on one another to sustain their fleeting existence. Humanity is no exception, already convulsing within its own species into the delirious agony of self-destruction:

Surveying humanity in a single glance, one sees a restless struggle, a titanic contest waged with every physical and mental faculty to sustain life and existence against ever-looming dangers. And when we consider the prize – existence itself – we find only brief intervals of painless life, soon invaded by boredom or cut short by fresh calamity. (Schopenhauer 1977 IX: 311)

Against this backdrop, neither the history of the species nor the existence of the individual reveals any purpose. For most, life is:

A feeble yearning and torment, a dreamlike stagger through four life stages toward death, accompanied by trivial thoughts. We are like clockworks wound up and set in motion without knowing why. Each time a human is conceived and born, the clock of life is rewound to repeat its hackneyed tune, measure for measure, with minor variations. (Schopenhauer 1977 II: 402)

Yet these shadows – biological multiples – suffer with a dreadful, numb intensity beyond any animal’s capacity, a vehemence amplified in those who refuse to sacrifice their reason to the hollow consolations of religion or optimistic worldviews. For Schopenhauer, philosophical reflection is thus inherently agonizing, as it dispels the “innate error… that we exist to be happy” (Schopenhauer 1966: 163), revealing human existence as a “kind of aberration,” a “misstep” (Schopenhauer 1977 IX: 311), a “mystification” and “swindle” (ibid.: 325).

Unlike d’Holbach, whose materialism remains largely indifferent to perpetual suffering, Schopenhauer – for whom suffering becomes the central, universal philosophical datum – cannot rest with the mere conceivability of humanity’s twilight. His anthropofugal stance thus takes on the character not of hypothesis but of demand:

Existence must be seen as a misstep from which redemption is a return… The sole purpose of our being is the recognition that it would be better not to exist. This is the most crucial of all truths, however starkly it contrasts with modern European thought. (Schopenhauer 1966: 162 – 163)

The pivotal claim – “that it would be better not to exist” – might be termed an apodictic postulate. Schopenhauer refuses to settle for the certainty that suffering is existence’s price and that nonexistence, particularly for those discerning enough to see through life’s illusory lure of happiness, is preferable to pain-tinged being. Instead, he derives pragmatic consequences – directives for action and conduct. The sage who sees through life’s radiant illusion must negate and break the restless Will within their own existence.

The quietives of the Will, in this sense, are aesthetic contemplation, compassion for abused creatures (human or animal), and finally, the philosophical dissolution of the principium individuationis – the reduction of the kaleidoscopic diversity of being to the “thing-in-itself,” the blind World Will. Success in these efforts yields a kind of indignant resignation:

The Will now turns away from life; it shudders at life’s pleasures, in which it recognizes life’s affirmation. (Schopenhauer 1977 II: 470)

This will-lessness and voluntary renunciation culminate in asceticism:

The Will no longer affirms its own essence mirrored in phenomena but denies it. This denial manifests in the transition from virtue to asceticism. One no longer suffices to love others as oneself but feels revulsion toward the essence expressed in one’s own being – the Will-to-Life, the core of this wretched world. Thus, one repudiates the very Will manifest in oneself, and one’s actions belie one’s phenomenal form, openly contradicting it. As nothing but a manifestation of Will, one ceases to will anything, guards against attachment, and cultivates utter indifference to all things. (Ibid.: 470 – 471)

Schopenhauer famously rejects suicide – the seemingly most radical personal application of the insight that nonexistence surpasses suffering – as a covert affirmation of the Will-to-Life.¹

¹ Schopenhauer argues in The World as Will and Representation: “Far from being a denial of the Will, suicide is a phenomenon of its strong affirmation. For denial consists not in abhorring life’s sufferings but its pleasures. The suicide wills life and is merely dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has come to him. Thus, he gives up not the Will-to-Life but life itself, destroying the individual phenomenon.” (Schopenhauer 1977 II: 492)

Moreover, the suicide negates only the individual, never the species, leaving the Will-to-Life as the “thing-in-itself untouched, like a rainbow that persists despite the ceaseless change of the droplets sustaining it” (ibid.: 493).

This emphasis on the irrelevance of personal decisions – elsewhere memorably captured in a cosmic metaphor:

The Earth rolls from day into night; the individual dies. But the Sun itself burns in eternal noon. To the Will-to-Life, life is certain. (Ibid.: 354)

– undermines the persuasiveness of asceticism, itself an individual practice. Schopenhauer’s borrowings from Indian and Brahmanic thought – metempsychosis, karma, and the extinguishing of Nirvana – feel tacked on, less an organic part of his system than an admission of unacknowledged philosophical perplexity.

§ 10

No one grasped the fracture in Schopenhauer’s thought – which recognized life as collective suffering but proposed only woefully inadequate, individual remedies, retreating into the familiar narcotics of Far Eastern mysticism – more clearly than Eduard von Hartmann. A former officer and independent scholar who built on Schopenhauer in his Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), Hartmann also offered a soberer admission of the impotence of speculative imagination in the pre-atomic 19th century, which remained utterly unequipped to answer how humanity’s tormented existence might be abolished on a global scale.

Hartmann critiques Schopenhauer’s conception of redemption and his idea of individually negating the Will-to-Life as follows:

It is evident that this assumption [of individual negation] is wholly incompatible with Schopenhauer’s foundational ideas. For the Will, to him, is the singular essence of the world, and the individual merely a subjective illusion. How, then, can the individual claim the ability to negate their will – not just theoretically but practically – when their individual volition is but a ray of that singular Will? …

Thus, striving for individual negation of the Will is as foolish and futile as suicide – indeed, more foolish, for it achieves the same end (the abolition of this particular phenomenon) more slowly and painfully, without touching the essence that ceaselessly manifests anew in other individuals. (v. Hartmann 1913 II: 219 – 220)

Precisely because Hartmann takes Schopenhauer’s pessimism seriously as total and totalizing – agreeing with his teacher that the world is “a hell surpassing Dante’s, where each devil must prey on the other” (Schopenhauer 1966: 159) – he cannot accept Schopenhauer’s half-hearted ascetic meliorism.

Where suffering is universal and happiness always illusory (Hartmann dissects the manifold phantasms of earthly, heavenly, and future bliss across nearly fifty pages), redemption too must be universal, the result not of individual but collective action. The absolute Unconscious, which drives the world process and perpetuates its misery, cannot be abolished piecemeal. It demands an apocalyptic rebellion of consciousness, a singular, eruptive act:

For one who grasps the concept of development, there can be no doubt that the struggle between consciousness and the Will … can end only at the culmination of the world process. And for one who clings to the unity of the Unconscious, redemption – the turning of the Will into non-willing – can only be conceived as a cosmic, universal act, not an individual one: the final moment after which “there shall be no more time, no willing, no activity.” (v. Hartmann 1913 II: 220)

Hartmann’s conclusion is logically consistent and persuasively corrects Schopenhauer. Yet when tasked with illustrating the final link in this abstract chain – envisioning how “the end of the world process, the abolition of all willing into absolute non-willing (and with it, all existence: matter, organization, etc.) might be conceived” (ibid.: 222) – his imagination falters. He candidly admits this failure to himself and his readers.

He tentatively suggests termination through a collective exertion of will by all conscious human spirits, yet adds:

Our knowledge is too incomplete, our experience too brief, and our analogies too deficient to form even a vague conception of that final act. (Ibid.)

Hartmann estimated centuries, if not cosmic epochs (hinting at the law of entropy), before creation’s revocation. He could not have foreseen the lights ignited over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, nor the subsequent weapons technology that would catapult apocalyptic fantasy into reality within three generations. Nor could he imagine that by the late 20th century, humanity’s final global act – “the abolition of all willing into absolute non-willing” – would be rehearsed in military war games and computer simulations, executed with the effortless precision of seasoned technicians, a skill our species has so painfully lacked throughout its history

§ 11

After a speculative odyssey spanning over two millennia, philosophy – through Schopenhauer and Hartmann – has returned to the primordial certainty of myth: that we are pariahs and degenerates of creation, an evolutionary misfit destined to render itself absurd in a spasm of self-annihilation. The truth of anthropofugal thought is so simple and self-evident that it seems almost incomprehensible how it could ever have been forgotten. Indeed, there exists a form of knowledge, distinct from philosophical reflection, that has preserved the memory of our undesirability across the ages and never renounced it: art, which we will address elsewhere.

Yet the prominent role of these thinkers in the history of a philosophy of distance and human flight cannot obscure two facts. First, their central insight – the necessity of the beast’s self-redemption, which aims at abolishing all organic suffering – possesses the character of an irrefutable axiom, a line beyond which there is no retreat. Second, their concrete formulation of this “hard core” remains bound to the speculative idealism of the early 19th century and thus cannot claim sanctity.

The hypothesis of a World Will or absolute Unconscious is as suspect to the metaphysics-averse 20th century as Schopenhauer’s solipsistic-phenomenalist epistemology. Both may safely be relegated to the archives. Why Hegelianly hypostatize a World-Spirit when myth, cataclysmic fantasies, and above all the blood-soaked annals of history proclaim the thoroughly un-metaphysical fact that “humanity… yearns for nothingness, for annihilation” (v. Hartmann 1913 II: 215)? Why preach meditation and asceticism, or – like Hartmann – ponder occult-spiritualist methods for collectively silencing existence, when bunkers, launchpads, and submarine silos have long housed far more reliable instruments, governed by familiar physical laws?

Surrounded by well-stocked, well-maintained arsenals of annihilation, secure in our stockpiled overkill capacities and the biosphere-pasteurizing technologies within reach, armed with the lessons of the First and Second Preparatory Wars, mass-media-conditioned and diligently primed for Bruegelian descents into hell and a planetary danse macabre, we, the last-born, naturally find it easy to critique thinkers who, lacking immediate intuition, relied on metaphysical substitutes – idealist constructs where even the unthinkable of their day is now obsolete weaponry slated for decommissioning.

Let us criticize with care and recognize that, for all their brilliance, Schopenhauer and Hartmann defined the task but failed to discover the appropriate method. In hindsight, the solution seems no less obvious than their simple philosophical imperative: “Suffering must end!”

The only viable path to fulfilling this demand was already sketched in 1820 – one year after The World as Will and Representation – by the French philosopher and statesman Joseph de Maistre in his Soirées de Saint-Petersburg. Despite his ultra-reactionary clericalism, de Maistre arrived at an insight that 20th-century thought, with few exceptions, still refuses to confront:

It is reserved for man to strangle man. … War will execute the verdict. Do you not hear the Earth scream for blood? The blood of animals does not suffice, nor even the blood of the guilty spilled by the sword of justice. … Thus, from mite to man, the great law of violent destruction of all living beings is ceaselessly fulfilled. The Earth, drenched in blood, is but an immense altar where all life must be endlessly, measurelessly, ceaselessly sacrificed… until the consummation of all things. … War is thus divine in itself. (de Maistre 1815 II: 31 ff.)

Since its inception, the beast has waged war against itself. With fist-axe and sword, crossbow and rifle, chariot and rocket launcher, it has effortlessly surpassed the calamities inflicted by nature through self-wrought horrors. The endless battles fought to exhaustion, the bombardments, explosions, and sieges, the towers of armor, heaps of scrap, and pyramids of skulls left in the wake of raging armies – none of this is in vain.

Far from being monuments to misguided defense, abused patriotism, or lamentable aggression, these reveal themselves to anthropofugal reason as rehearsals, preparations, exercises. If the beast had any pride, it would lie not in civilizations’ achievements but in the dazzling ingenuity of devising means for their permanent eradication. What impresses is the tenacity with which weapons are developed, tested, refined, and replaced – and if the concept of “progress” holds meaning beyond ersatz eschatology, its fundamentum in re lies in military technology’s pioneering feats.

Have other species progressed beyond poison and sting, claw, tooth, and horn? What rational being would not settle for a stick to fend off pests? Not the beast. Forsaking peace, friendship, love, and life, it has devoted itself to perfecting the defenses nature so stingily denied. From humble beginnings in gravel fields where it fashioned its first weapons, through millennia of arduous armament, it has transformed Earth into a single forge, liberating the species’ history from the dull idyll of primitivism into a ruthless tournament – a Spartakiad of blitzkriegs and mass battles, an inexhaustible training ground for conquerors, demagogues, and power brokers.

Not one decade of rest or total peace has the beast allowed itself since antiquity. Clanking with arms, it has advanced step by step, strike by strike, digging grave after grave for legions selflessly serving military progress, honoring the maxim Nietzsche clothed in Zarathustra’s words:

You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long. … You say it is the good cause that sanctifies war? I say to you: it is the good war that sanctifies every cause. (Nietzsche 1967 I: 575)

Nietzsche and de Maistre are right. War has been sacred to the beast from the start. It has never failed to lavish sacrifices upon its god, never wavered in the certainty that salvation lies in arms. Apostles of peace and humanists – as the murderous consequences of Europe’s Christianization amply demonstrate – have only reinforced this conviction.

Thus, it seems a felicitous twist that philosophy, having futilely preached abstinence and the bliss of truce, now sees some of its adherents converted to the beast’s wisdom, renouncing humanist delusions in newfound anthropofugal clarity.

Had those marching in Cyrus’s, Alexander’s, or Caesar’s ranks, storming forward in Attila’s or Genghis Khan’s hordes, followed doctrines of love rather than the war god, we would still stand here with stone axes and throwing sticks, no closer to ending incarnate suffering on this planet.

But through relentless effort, we near the goal. We have spelled out the ABCs of deterrence. We are poised to deliver a Cannae to organic agony from which it will not recover. Finally, we recognize that we are the chosen generation to translate myth’s apocalyptic visions into reality, fulfilling the species’ ancient longing to cease existing.

World history – a slaughterhouse, undoubtedly. But the horror is finite. Though we could not dictate its beginning, we now hold the power to halt its endless reproduction. World history – a post-ice age training camp, an arena where the beast hones its gladiatorial craft, arming itself obsessively, wading through bone, blood, and brain-matter, until it can unleash the inferno, strike the great blow against itself and life, a blow whose yearning premonition once guided the Neanderthal’s club.

“What can be loved in man,” writes Nietzsche, “is that he is a going-over and a going-under” (1967 I: 551). Anthropofugal thought has renounced the dream of the Overman; the prospect of the end, of going-under, is consolation enough.

The goal of humanity’s development is not Nietzsche’s nihilism of transvaluation but annihilism: the self-abolition of the beast, along with its greed for meaning, truth, and the metaphysical opium that so mercifully numbed it through millennia of preparation – hallucinations of happiness we, the last-born, no longer need.

The anthropofugal gaze has laid bare the Unconscious, and its paradox holds no terror: We exist to annihilate ourselves. The “meaning” of our existence is the downfall of the meaning-seeking beast. The aeons since our deportation into reason’s ghetto have been lavishly spent perfecting our exit with the highest scientific rationality and Nobel-worthy brilliance.

Animal species may go extinct – ravaged by plagues, stripped of niches, overspecialized, crushed by competitors, helpless before nature’s laws. Not so humanity. It stood upright, raised itself before creation, became autonomous, outgrew biological selection. It no longer tolerates being pushed around – it rids itself of itself, on its own terms

§ 12

However staggering and promising the military-technological advances of the beast in the 20th century may appear – over 100 million people have died due to warfare since the turn of the century (cf. Buchan 1968: 10) – its philosophical efforts to conceptualize this development remain pitifully inadequate.

As in previous centuries, philosophy, with few exceptions, recoils from confronting the calamity of homo extinctor as if from a leper, instead bending over the toy boxes of scientific theory, hermeneutics, and critiques of ideology and ecology. Far from advancing the insights of d’Holbach, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann – to accompany humanity’s final act of preconscious annihilism with the triumphant, conscious “yes” of anthropofugal enlightenment – it has relegated these pioneers to a cabinet of intellectual curiosities, devoting itself to the palliative care of moribund humanism.

The last metastases of humanist doctrine, prolonged by life-support measures and grotesquely misdiagnosed by philosophical therapists as signs of recovery, include Marxism, existentialism, and the practice-oriented field of “peace and conflict studies.”

While Marxism, as a secular salvation narrative and humanist religion, replicated within a century the phenomenology of martyrdom, caesaropapism, schism, heresy-hunting, saint-worship, and missionary zeal – a process Christianity took fifteen centuries to unfold – it remains, intellectually, a mere reprise. (Though its first thermonuclear crusade to the New Jerusalem of nonexistence might yet redeem it.) While existentialism unwittingly underscores the chimera of the “human” through vacuous decisionism and actionism, peace research – aiming to wrench history’s rudder at the last moment and rob the beast of its hard-won fruits – demands closer refutation.

Peace research is incarnate scruple, speculative defeatism, a flinch from the inevitable – sabotage of the anthropofugal will to end. Yet, when dispassionately weighed, its findings are encouraging. Only the interpretative framing by peace researchers themselves transforms them into the ghastly props of their humanist ghost trains.

What is scandalous about noting that “in 3,400 years of recorded history, only 243 have been free of documented war” (Leyhausen 1970: 61), or that “an average of 2.6 wars per year have been fought” (ibid.: 103), if viewed through anthropofugal clarity? Rather than demonizing armed conflict as perpetual aberration, even the smallest skirmish or massacre becomes a step toward global Armageddon.

Who would flinch at the tens of thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons now on standby – each surpassing the explosive power of all bombs dropped by the U.S. in World War II by a factor of 10 to 15 (cf. Friedensanalyse 1976 II: 16) – when faced with the monumental task of decontaminating a planet where the beast lurks not only in accessible cities but in eternal ice, deserts, and remote valleys?

Contrary to the irresponsible clamor of conflict researchers, should we not demand further rearmament to forestall the coming war from degenerating into a Third Preparatory War, necessitating another agonizing effort for survivors? Consider the mechanism Richard J. Barnet outlines in The Economy of Death:

Since there is almost no weapon system – no matter how obscure – that the Soviets could not build given time, energy, and funds, the Pentagon’s imagination is the only limit on U.S. military spending. In the real world, such paranoia would be pathological. In the world of “national security,” the system itself is paranoid. (Barnet 1969: 18)

This “paranoia” is salutary. The Schumpeter Effect – the self-perpetuating aggression of military-industrial complexes – is the engine of our felicitous self-abolition. Peace research must be thwarted from shutting down this engine with illusions of passive resistance, nonviolent action (cf. Krippendorff 1968: 477ff.), or gradualist disarmament (cf. ibid.: 250ff.).

Fortunately, factors impeding disarmament – public compliance, enemy fixation, obedience, nationalism – remain strong enough to counter peace researchers’ subversion. Militaries, too, grasp the stakes. By the late 1960s, the U.S. Pentagon employed 6,410 PR personnel, with budgets for global propaganda networks dwarfing civilian media (Barnet 1971: 53).

Some peace researchers, like Johannes Kneutgen in Der Mensch: Ein kriegerisches Tier (1970), now abandon “pessimism” for cautious optimism, acknowledging humanity’s progress toward rendering its deadliest weapons obsolete, akin to animal instinct (Kneutgen 1970: 102). Others, like the authors of Kriegsfolgen und Kriegsverhütung, focus on documenting nuclear war’s consequences:

War Scenario 9: 75 two-megaton bombs on population centers. Fallout contaminates 58% of West Germany with over 1,000 roentgen. Half the population dead, a quarter irradiated. Livestock halved. Economic losses: 196 – 227 billion DM. Evacuations: 900,000 – 6 million. Basic production collapses. (Weizsäcker 1970: 264)

Such positivist fatalism aligns with Quincy Wright’s Study of War:

Warlike peoples birthed civilization; peaceful hunter-gatherers were marginalized, exterminated, or absorbed – left only to watch their conquerors self-destruct. (Krippendorff 1968: 38)

Even former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara conceded:

History is not marked by long peace interrupted by war, but by constant conflict punctuated by exhausted lulls we call “peace.” (McNamara 1970: 62)

Like 6,000 U.S.-Soviet “disarmament” talks since WWII – which only accelerated arms races – reformed peace research could shift from conflict prevention to provocation tactics. Herman Kahn’s On Escalation (1965) exemplifies this, outlining a 44-rung escalation ladder from crisis to “spasmic war,” where “all triggers are pulled” (Kahn 1970: 88). His work equips planners with “invaluable tools” (per the blurb) and revives philosophy’s long-buried tradition of war apologia – from Plato’s warrior caste to Hegel’s praise of war as a cure for bourgeois stagnation:

In peacetime, civil life stagnates… Nations emerge strengthened from wars, and internal strife is pacified through external conflict. (Hegel 1968: 308)

Kant, too, glimpsed the truth: “An exterminatory war… would establish eternal peace in the vast graveyard of humanity” (Kant 1976: 21).

Thus, anthropofugal thought rejects the Overman for annihilism: the self-abolition of the beast, its metaphysical opiates, and its insatiable hunger for meaning. Our aeons in reason’s ghetto have honed our exit strategy with scientific precision. Unlike other species, humanity – autonomous, upright – refuses nature’s whims. It will erase itself, on its own terms.

Since the 1960s, an exemplary model of this radically restructured “new peace research” has existed, vividly illustrating the discipline’s critical role in planning the global “final solution” and ideologically arming combatants. This model is Herman Kahn’s study On Escalation and its precursor, On Thermonuclear War.

Kahn states in On Escalation that his primary research goal is to “stimulate the imagination” (Kahn 1970: 28), yet he remains wholly immune to the anthropocentric biases of his peers. His maxim does not mean inciting peace through grim visions of horror, but rather coldly calculating and analyzing what was previously dismissed as unthinkable.

Kahn’s implicit starting point is that the final war – the apocalypse, the planetary inferno – demands meticulous intellectual groundwork, just like every past conflict. A humanity engaged in its ultimate battle against itself and nature cannot afford sloppiness. For the first time, the stakes transcend victory or defeat for any faction or nation; they entail total collective annihilation. If this operation fails initially, survivors will lack the strength for a second attempt. Suffering would escalate anew across endless generations of genetic defects, radiation victims, and mutants, in an environment that would make today’s world seem Edenic. Only then might the tools of self-erasure become available again.

To eliminate reckless misuse of existing capabilities and ensure their full exploitation, Kahn designs a 44-rung “escalation ladder,” beginning with a crisis scenario. By rung 12, it reaches “major conventional war”; crosses the nuclear threshold at 21; and culminates in “central war,” whose escalation stages unfold as follows:

33. Slow warfare against “material assets”

34. Slow warfare against weapons systems

35. Limited volley to degrade military capacity

36. Limited disarmament strike

37. Strike against weapons systems (sparing other targets)

38. Ruthless attack on weapons systems

39. Slow warfare against cities

40. Volley against material assets

41. Intensified disarmament strike

42. Annihilation strike on civilian targets

43. Other forms of controlled general war

44. Spasmic or insane war. (Ibid.: 72)

In the final stage of spasm and agony, Kahn writes, “all triggers… are pulled simultaneously” (ibid.: 88). Here, we may hope that – provided the beast has meticulously executed the preparatory steps – it finally drains the cup of its tormented existence, transitioning from homo extinctor (the extinguishing human) to homo extinctus (the extinguished human).

Kahn’s model, tailored to existing devastation technologies, gives policymakers “invaluable tools” (as the blurb notes). It also allows a revolutionized peace research to reclaim its long-buried tradition: a philosophical apology for war, stretching from Plato to Hegel.

From Hobbes’ hymn to blind obedience:

“If I commit an act under orders that would be sinful for the commander, I commit no sin so long as the commander is my lawful sovereign. If I wage war at my state’s command, I do no wrong – even if I believe the war unjust. To refuse would be wrong.” (Hobbes 1959: 194)

To Kant’s prescient, if philanthropically cloaked, insight:

“An exterminatory war… would establish eternal peace… in the vast graveyard of humanity.” (Kant 1976: 21)

This tradition has never lacked prestigious advocates.

In Plato’s Republic, the warrior class is exempt from socially useful labor, wholly devoted to martial training. Plato dedicates extensive thought to indoctrination methods, censorship of “subversive” ideas, and banning “softening” music (Plato 1961: 72ff.).

Hegel, disdainful of peace, writes in his Philosophy of Right:

“In peacetime, civil life stagnates… Nations emerge strengthened from wars, and internal strife is pacified through external conflict.” (Hegel 1968: 308)

He advises governments to periodically “shake the ossified bourgeois world with wars, disrupt its self-satisfied order, and force individuals… to feel their master, Death.” (Hegel 1952: 324)

§13

Peace research – as one must conclude from the foregoing – is only meaningful and worthy of promotion where it serves war. This service, however, can be rendered in direct or indirect forms: directly through the development of scenarios and simulation models that strip the rehearsed horrors of war of their numbing, decision-paralyzing effect when realized; indirectly, as illustrated by the naive optimism of a Kneutgen, by diverting pacifist criticism into the realm of utopian ideals and absorbing, “explosive” pseudo-problems.

Among such substitute offerings for the humanistically deformed intellect – occupying it in an elegant, entirely nonviolent manner while preventing it from negatively influencing the global historical process of militarization – are currently the ecological debate, the nuclear power question, and, paradoxically to some extent, even the discussion of atomic weapons themselves, alongside the aforementioned intellectually refined yet detached variant of peace research.

The “ecological trend” (Maldonado 1972: 70), which dreads the future under the specter of an explosively multiplying humanity and rapidly vanishing natural resources, scourged by hunger, pollution, and ruthless exploitation, desperately seeking exits from this dead end, directs participants’ attention to growth curves, production diagrams, and projections of remaining raw material reserves. In doing so, it shields them from the realization that humanity, upon exhausting Earth’s resources or poisoning its industrial environment, will not gently fade into oblivion. Instead, long before that, it will seek salvation in merciless battles over distribution and wars for the last semi-healthy, contamination-free habitats.

The deteriorating ecological situation may thus become – alongside or combined with political hegemonic ambitions, ideological crusader mentalities, and the self-perpetuating logic of military complexes – a triggering factor for the “beast’s” liberating act. Yet, contrary to the assessment of eco-enthusiasts, beyond its catalytic role, it holds no greater independent significance, let alone status as our central existential problem.

Nuclear power opponents, too, cling to the comforting fiction of acting as the Archimedean fulcrum of modern world history, striving for a posterity that will, in reality, have long been bombed into nonexistence. Their view is obstructed by the grotesque vision of reactor accidents claiming tens of thousands of lives, blinding them to military operational capacities. Compared to these, an out-of-control melting reactor is as inconsequential as a firecracker detonating beneath tank treads.

The diversion of critical energies and collective protest toward comparatively secondary threats – evident in the dissolution of the 1950s and early 1960s Easter March and “Fight Atomic Death” movements, and the herding of discontented lemmings into the wastelands around Gorleben and the construction pits of Wyhl’s reactor site – stands as one of the great triumphs of societal repression. This enables the “beast” to pursue its goals unimpeded.

Even the scattered remnants of anti-nuclear and anti-militarization activists, surviving to this day and briefly warmed by the fleeting bonfire of short-lived peace debates before their final defeat, have unwittingly served the beast. Precisely because they railed so vehemently against atomic, hydrogen, and neutron bombs, the growing arsenal of B- and C-weapons (biological and chemical) has vanished almost entirely from public consciousness. Their continued development in the secluded, curiosity-free idyll of laboratories – particularly in the biological realm – has yielded unforeseen successes:

To destroy all life within a 1000x1000m area requires 16,000 artillery shells (75 or 77mm), equivalent to 10 tons of conventional explosives. The same result is achieved with 1 ton of chemical agents, 10kg of Hiroshima-style nuclear material, 10g of modern thermonuclear fuel, or a mere 0.1g of biological agents. (Central Committee of the Scientific Union 1972: 141)

For initiates and anthropofugal thinkers, such results offer solace: even those spared by atomic firestorms or lethal fallout due to marginal habitats need not abandon hope for an end. They can rest assured that, after a brief delay, as the last of their kind, they will be eradicated by mutated viruses, bacteria, and fungi – artificial plagues, devastating typhus, or unprecedented anthrax strains – beneficiaries of the foresight and care with which, in the apocalypse, even the dead shall attend to the survivors.

§14

Just as peace research prior to its revolutionary reinvention by Kahn* must be judged a staggering failure of scientific reason, so too has 20th-century anthropology proven utterly blind to the currents of its time and the now unmistakably clear goal of human evolution.

While anthropology, in its subfields of biological, philosophical, cultural, and social study, has amassed numerous insights and hypotheses about humanity’s origins and development – acknowledging since Darwin our descent from the animal kingdom and, through paleoanthropological research, tracing the stages of humanization from Australopithecus through Pithecanthropus to Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon types, which sealed our de-beastment and degeneration – it fundamentally fails to grasp the implications of these findings.

Anthropology recognizes humans as “archaically unspecialized” and “instinct-poor,” as “an infantile ape in whom higher growth never occurs, fixed at a childlike or even embryonic stage” (Landmann 1969: 148). Yet it remains incapable of synthesizing these fragments into a coherent whole, fumbling with them like a dim-witted child sorting puzzle pieces by size or whim, oblivious to the larger image they form.

This failure of modern human science is far from inexplicable; its cause lies in plain sight. Anthropology has stubbornly fixated on the whence of the “beast,” while resolutely refusing – or declaring beyond its purview – any inquiry into its whither.

This neglect of the ultimate question has had dire consequences. How can one interpret facts, analyze traits, or assign value without understanding the direction and goal of the evolutionary process, in which these facts hold specific significance and these traits act as triggers, accelerants, or brakes?

Anthropology’s data collection, divorced from an anthropofugal reference system, resembles setting sail without rigging, condemning the discipline to drift aimlessly. Yet were its practitioners to confront the concept of humanity’s ultimate self-abolition – the evolutionary goal of ending organic suffering – scales would fall from their eyes. For humans are not the “deficient beings” of textbook lore: physically stunted ape fetuses, organic incarnations of logical “defective modes.” Rather, we are exquisitely equipped for our true purpose.

Take Arnold Gehlen’s uncritically accepted summary:

“Morphologically, humans – unlike all higher mammals – are defined by deficiencies: biological maladaptations, unspecialized traits, primalisms. We lack protective fur, natural weapons, or flight-capable physiques; our senses are duller than most animals’, our instincts perilously underdeveloped, our childhood dependency unparalleled. Under primal conditions, ground-dwelling among swift prey and lethal predators, we’d have been eradicated long ago” (Gehlen 1971: 33).

One must then echo Gehlen’s bewildered question: “How does such a monstrous creature survive?” (Ibid.: 36).

Yet assemble anthropology’s puzzle pieces to reveal the “beast,” and astonishment gives way to awe at nature’s ruthless logic. What advantage, lacking fur or armor! For only thus could the beast learn to craft shields, forge plate mail, ride armored vehicles, and finally hurl three-staged missiles from concrete silos – gigantic exoskeletons – onto enemy homelands.

What blessing, lacking natural weapons! How else would generations of new armaments – against which crocodile jaws, rhino horns, and viper venom seem bumbling demiurge’s drafts – be conceived in the beast’s cranium? What grace, being unable to flee, forced to slaughter each other man by man! What fortune, born instinct-crippled!

For animals’ innate inhibition against killing their own kind caused them to recoil from humanity’s earliest, bumbling stone-age fratricide – and renders them, as history shows, incapable of wars against their peers. What luck, remaining malleable for decades! How else could a creature steeped in childhood temptations of patience, trust, and tenderness be forged into intolerance, cruelty, and lust for punishment – traits essential to crown eons of self-liberation with global success?

No, we are no deficient beings. We are lavishly endowed for our purpose, leaving no shadow of excuse for failure.

Nature’s most precious gift lies beneath our skulls: the cerebralization Gerhard Heberer describes:

“Unique in speed and scale, it underpins ‘hominization’ since the animal-human transition. From 600 cm³ (Australopithecines) to 2000 cm³ (extreme Homo sapiens), this explosive growth enabled biological-technical feats defining our world” (Heberer 1973: 93).

To which one might add: And it will leave this world in a state beyond even its own present imagining.

*OD: Herman Kahn

§15

Not a few contemporary critics of civilization, who clearly perceive the dissonance between their socially ingrained humanistic ideals and a reality that slaps these wishful notions in the face – yet stubbornly resist the shift to anthropofugal thinking – indulge in vilifying the “beast’s” cognitive apparatus. They compete in pseudoscientific explanations such as:

“The neural pathways between the archaic structures of the brainstem and the neocortex appear inadequate. … Instead of transforming the old brain into a new one, evolution merely grafted a newer, more refined structure onto the old, without preventing functional overlap or granting the new brain unambiguous control over the old. Put bluntly: Evolution left a few screws loose between the neocortex and the hypothalamus” (Koestler 1978: 20).

Or, in thinly veiled slander:

“Just as a cell cluster in a living organism can hypertrophy, as in cancer, human intelligence has hypertrophied – increasingly so, with no end to this process in sight. This is the cancer ward where we are gathered” (Bilz 1973: 50).

Science journalist Theo Löbsack amplifies this feeble analogy of “overdevelopment” – rooted more in reptilian trauma than analytical thought – into a manifesto, vowing to reject “nature’s Trojan horse, this silently pulsating organ with the consistency of fresh goat cheese” (Löbsack 1974: 17), through which he ekes out his existence. His conclusion:

“This overgrown mass, barely contained by its bony shell, has indeed become comparable to the gigantic bodies of dinosaurs – creatures forced to capitulate to their own bulk. Gigantism, whether of body or mind, evidently pays no dividends on Earth” (ibid.: 16).

Yet nothing is more absurd than the thesis of the brain as an “excessive organ” (ibid.: 250), which merely revives the orthodox anthropological view critiqued earlier – that humans are aggregates of defects and deficiencies. Our thinking organ, far from a liability, is a supremely purposeful biological instrument, worthy of kneeling before a creator – had this same brain not already exposed such a deity as an idol and delusion.

The utility of our cerebral apparatus could not be more manifold. First, its weapons technology expertise grants us the means to overcome our fleshly inertia. Second, it furnishes the rationalizations the “beast” needs to resist pacifist temptations of passivity and tolerance masquerading as “conscience.” Third, and ultimately, it reflects back on itself through anthropofugal speculation, recognizes these functions as necessary, and ascends to the heroic, sanity-shattering insight: that humanity is cosmically misplaced, must revoke its right to exist by its own logic, and thus ought not merely allow but fervently endorse the species’ unconscious drive toward self-annihilation – the summum bonum of ending perpetual suffering.

To a deranged, self-forgetful intellect, human reason’s balance sheet might appear as:

“100 million tons of rapidly multiplying human biomass now populate Earth, exhausting its resources, plundering reserves heedless of future generations, and accelerating the destruction of our irreplaceable biosphere” (ibid.: 16).

Yet the mind has done everything possible to terminate this transient state, soon to restore the planet to the stark, untouched beauty it possessed for eons before life’s self-defiling consequences ravaged its face.

The mind and its material substrate, the brain, is our most sacred possession. But just as humans underutilize their talents, so too does reason achieve its highest – anthropofugal – expression in only a few. The majority of “beasts” content themselves with vague intuitions of the species’ telos, devoting themselves wholly to inventing means aligned with our destiny.

The daily dose of humanist narcotics, administered from childhood onward, sweetens their mundane toil with dreams of progress and happiness. This inevitably atrophies higher brain functions that might pierce these useful illusions, leaving the masses – toiling in industrial Sisyphus-labor, the prerequisite of the Great Inferno – bereft of apocalyptic conviction or philosophical foresight.

This unconsciousness, from which they will only awaken on the day of catastrophe, is lamentable yet providentially vital for the annihilist process’s unimpeded momentum. For those long estranged from the final truth typically react with panic or revolt when confronted unprepared with their existential purpose.

Thus, for the greater task, we must reluctantly preserve their comforting delusions. Though we condemn 20th-century humanist ideologues – Marxists, existentialists, anthropologists, peace researchers – from the pure standpoint of anthropofugality, we recognize their socially vital role: shielding the common “beast” from the cold rationality it could neither survive nor thrive within.

Even Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s deranged vision – of humanity’s evolutionary deification into a “super-humanity” and “super-caritas” (Teilhard 1976: 74), dismissing evil as “waste” (ibid.: 60) and catastrophe as a “lazy, cheap hypothesis” (ibid.: 40) – finds its bleak instrumental justification here. His fusion of medieval theocentrism and boundless anthropocentrism, envisioning planetary “noosphere” convergence into a spiritualized Omega Point, epitomizes the pathological fantasies nurtured behind cloister walls.

Footnotes

In Charles M. Fair’s The Diseased Brain, what Koestler presents as ironclad certainty is at least framed as hypothesis – though this caution hardly bolsters its truth. Fair writes: “The cause of animals’ ‘inner unity’ … may lie in their neocortex not attempting to usurp older brain structures’ role in behavior regulation” (Fair 1971: 33). In humans, however, “a shift occurred … radically disrupting this harmony. A new functional system possibly emerged within the cortex – one diametrically opposed to subcortical systems in logic and behavior” (ibid.: 34 – 35).
2. Teilhard synthesizes medieval theocentrism with an anthropocentrism that reduces cosmic and biological history to a prelude for humanity’s “planetarized” noosphere – a totalized, spiritualized Catholic world-church or global Societas Jesu. His “Omega Point” convergence of sublimated “light-beings” with the divine is a pathology conceivable only within monastery

§16

Surveying the history of modern philosophy, anthropofugal thought – which broke through in the 18th century and reached its idealist-speculative formulation in the 19th – appears to have simultaneously peaked and been surpassed. One might even posit an inverse proportionality: as the “beast” (Untier) approaches the point of its existential revocation and gains ever greater military-technological competence, the inclination to intellectually engage with this development and recognize it as being in the highest interest of the species diminishes in equal measure.

This observation is both correct and incorrect. On the one hand, intellectual mechanisms of insulation and self-preservation exist – a desire for delusion we will return to in detail. On the other hand, the crucial step in articulating the anthropofugal truth – that it would be better if we did not exist and that we must act decisively to transform existence into non-existence – was indeed taken in the systems of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. It falls to us, the “last-born,” to preserve and expand this truth, correct its time-bound distortions, and reshape it to align with the current scientific and technological advancements.

The philosophical thought of the 20th century, however, has evaded this modest obligation with staggering irresponsibility, allowing the axioms of anthropofugal reflection to drift into oblivion. What was never meant to be more than the intellectual property of enlightened minorities has been twisted into an eccentric esoteric doctrine – something only whispered behind cupped hands, cloaked in the fool’s cap of ironic mockery, or uttered within the chimera of a despotic, senile humanism. Even then, those who dare speak it face intimidation, social excommunication, and existential peril.

The necessary consolation and stabilization of the masses through meaning-making and optimistic world models have infiltrated the truth-seeking of the few as a form of philosophical self-stupefaction. This has led to the vilification of anthropofugal thinkers, self-censorship among the less steadfast kindred spirits, and a horrifying deformation of their reflections.

Two Examples: Ludwig Klages and Sigmund Freud

To expose the negligence of those who claim to champion intellectual freedom, the cases of Ludwig Klages and Sigmund Freud suffice.

Ludwig Klages (1872 – 1956) is dismissed as an irrationalist who had the audacity to “devise a rational system to prove the absurdity of reason” (Delfgaauw 1966: 82). One history of philosophy labels him “one of the leading and most influential matadors of German anti-intellectualism” (Runes 1962: 319), alleging that despite fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he remained one of its spiritual godfathers. Another compendium of contemporary philosophy, spanning 1,300 pages, grants him half a sentence (cf. Stegmüller 1969 I: 97), replacing denunciation with the more potent silence.

Yet Klages, alongside E.M. Cioran, is one of the few anthropofugal thinkers of stature this century has produced. Defying the unconscious optimism rampant even among philosophers, Klages was convinced of the “inevitability of downfall” (Klages 1972: 1428). In his magnum opus, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929), he explains the determinism of development as follows:

Body and soul are inseparable poles of the life-cell, into which the spirit, like a wedge, intrudes from without, striving to sunder them – desouling the body, disembodying the soul, and ultimately extinguishing all life within its reach (ibid.: 7).

Critics may attack his tripartite framework of body, soul, and spirit or Schopenhauer’s idealist baggage of the “world-will,” but this does not negate the validity of Klages’ phenomenological findings or his historical prognosis. His prediction –

The essence of humanity’s “historical” process (also called “progress”) is the victorious advance of the spirit against life, culminating in the foreseeable annihilation of the latter (ibid.: 69) –

is as accurate as his assessment of technology as an earth-devastating force compared to which “the atrocities of Genghis Khan seem like childish pranks” (ibid.: 624). With admirable clarity, he recognizes humanity’s inverted mission – perverted by humanism – and its insatiable drive to destroy:

[Humanity] has already sufficed to erase dozens of primitive tribes, hundreds of plant genera, and twice or thrice as many animal species from land, air, and water. The day is near when they will all be exterminated… The universe is too vast for this mania, but the Earth, unless a “miracle” intervenes, will perish from it (ibid.: 768).

When Klages wrote these words, the Second World War lay a decade ahead, and the weapons sealing our fate were yet undeveloped. Yet he shares the apocalyptic consciousness of every true visionary, nourished not by hope for survival but by redemption emerging from humanity’s emptiness. “We are the last Mohicans,” Klages writes, adding:

Those who still dare to harbor wishes should wish only one thing: that humanity, perpetrator of such abominations, sinks, apifies, and perishes as swiftly as possible – so that forests may once more surge, burying, dissolving, and renewing themselves around its crumbling arsenals of murder (ibid.: 768).

Klages’ yearning for homo extinctus surpasses Oswald Spengler’s partial focus on the “Decline of the West” but falls short of von Hartmann’s radical consistency. His desire for annihilation springs not from solidarity with planetary suffering but from a “passionate love of [spiritless] life” – a deification of the preconscious vital. Klages seeks to liberate this organic realm from the intellect’s exploitative scourge, overlooking that it is subjected to an even crueler torture: relentless vegetating and struggle. His annihilationism is narcissistic, concerned only with humanity’s revocation. True anthropofugal reason, however, must transcend this myopic self-concern, recognize its responsibility for the entire biosphere, and universalize its solutions.

Freud’s discovery of the death drive (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920) marks a pivotal moment. He posits a regressive impulse in all life, aiming to restore an inorganic state:

The goal of all life is death… The inanimate existed before the animate (Freud 1969 XIII: 40).

Evolution, from this view, is not progress but a detour toward metabolic arrest – a “grotesquely deranged euthanasia program.” Life, Freud suggests, is a cosmic error, a “No” to existence from the outset. Yet Freud retreats under humanist pressure, balancing the death drive with Eros in a Manichaean dualism. His subsequent philanthropic turn stifles psychoanalysis, generating taboos that blind disciples like Erich Fromm to humanity’s necrophilic essence.

Fromm condemns human destructiveness as “maladaptive,” missing its anthropofugal significance: we are here to end. His “biophilia” alternative merely perpetuates humanist delusions, producing legions of half-enlightened cripples too feeble to fulfill their annihilative destiny.

The 20th century’s philosophy, shackled by humanist indoctrination, betrayed its duty to confront annihilation. Klages and Freud glimpsed the truth but faltered under societal coercion. Their legacy – a call to universalize anthropofugal reason – remains unheeded, buried beneath optimism’s tyranny.

Klages repeatedly describes humanity’s telos with stark clarity: “Violations inflicted on earthly life by an intelligence whose ultimate goal is to realize nothingness” (ibid.: 673); “The technological will-to-power, whose aim is the extermination of all Earth’s life” (ibid.: 724).
2. Psychoanalysis, despite its pretenses of objectivity, still implicitly condemns suicide as escapism. Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself (1938) is a rare exception, recognizing that “everyone ultimately kills themselves” (Menninger 1974: 11). Yet even he misses the anthropofugal insight: suicide prefigures the ultimate act of species annihilation.

Perhaps the human will to annihilation and self-destruction is merely the highest, and first self-conscious, manifestation of a primordial impulse and proto-instinct inherent to all living things, driving them toward their own demise. Perhaps the entirety of evolution was nothing but a colossal detour taken by plasma – after the “original sin” of abiogenesis and its expulsion from the inorganic – to strip itself of its newly acquired potential immortality and, after eons of proliferation, return to the nirvana of dust and gases. And perhaps the “Beast” (Untier), with all its inventiveness, self-awareness, and philosophy, is not the crown of creation but merely its noose: the ingenious method devised by the first single-celled organism billions of years ago, through endless cell divisions and subdivisions that multiplied its life, to finally commit suicide.

Those who dismiss such speculations – of the amoeba’s long march toward death, the patient suicide of DNA – as fairy tales or fantasies forget the epistemic potential of primordial myths like Ragnarök or cataclysm, which stood at the outset of our inquiry. That this new myth is narrated with evolutionary circumlocution matters little; what matters is liberating mythical consciousness from the Babylonian captivity of scientific rationality – an exodus for which Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, might have served as leader.

Freud, who explicitly called his doctrine a “kind of mythology” in a 1932 letter to Albert Einstein (Einstein/Freud 1934: 16), made a pivotal discovery in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): a rival to the previously absolute life instinct (élan vital), a more powerful force he termed the death or destructive drive, present not only in humans but in all creatures.

The antagonist of Eros is regressive, seeking to restore a pre-living state. Freud states:

The conservative nature of the instincts would be contradicted if the goal of life were a state never before attained. It must instead be an ancient starting point, which the living abandoned and to which it strives to return through all evolution’s detours. If we accept as axiomatic that all life dies for internal reasons, returning to the inorganic, we can only say: The goal of all life is death. Retrospectively: The inanimate existed before the animate (Freud 1969 XIII: 40).

From this perspective, evolution is no longer self-sufficient progress or teleological complexification, but an ever-more-convoluted detour toward metabolic arrest – a grotesquely deranged euthanasia program:

Once, in inanimate matter… the properties of life were awakened…. The tension in the previously lifeless substance sought to resolve itself; the first instinct emerged: to return to the lifeless. At that time, dying was easy for living substance, likely requiring only a brief lifespan dictated by its chemical structure.

For ages, living substance may have been repeatedly created and died swiftly until external influences forced surviving matter into ever-greater deviations from its original path, necessitating increasingly intricate detours to reach death’s goal. These detours, faithfully preserved by conservative instincts, now present the spectacle of life’s phenomena (ibid.: 40–41).

What a grandiose countervision to crude Darwinism! No singular abiogenesis birthing a vibrant, vital world, but rather refusal – a “No” to existence from the very beginning.

The giant molecules of primordial life disintegrate almost as soon as the threshold of self-preservation is crossed, fleeing the unnaturalness of the organic, evading the curse of endless generations. Yet creation’s fits of cosmic paranoia persist: again and again, life is cobbled together, temperatures calibrated, environments flooded with nutrients – until the first proto-cell’s escape fails. Its attempt at disintegration backfires as cell division, a perverse duplication of the unnatural through itself.

Life, which does not want to live, is left defenseless for eons under the curse of propagation, which blocks the exit into nothingness. Only later does speciation permit revolt through cannibalism – the Vital’s devouring of itself, a defiant “No” to creation. But the rebellion fails: for every predator, another predator arises to clear its prey. The food chain emerges – a diabolical invention of creation’s madness – that sustains rebellious organic matter against its will, punishing its defiance with pain, torment, and suffering. None of life’s subsequent self-sabotaging steps – viruses, bacteria, microbes, parasites, plagues – achieve more than intensifying this punitive measure.

The vicious circle of vitality seems closed, condemning the living to life forever. Yet these are only unconscious, instinct-driven escape attempts, doomed by their senseless repetition. Invoking the same species-specific programs that reliably kill individuals but spare the species – and larger spheres of vitality – is insufficient. The evolutionary pathways to the inorganic, through their cumbersome inflexibility, become life’s most potent supports. As Freud notes:

The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion…. Thus arises the paradox that the living organism resists influences (dangers) that could help it attain life’s goal swiftly – a purely instinctual, as opposed to intelligent, striving (ibid.: 41).

Freud’s insights not only align with Schopenhauer’s pessimism but also edge toward philosophical annihilationism – an intelligent striving for dissolution, capable of the “short-circuit” instinct lacks. Yet pitiless humanist indoctrination, weighing heavier on this century than any other, cripples Freud’s anthropofugal resolve. Even as the anthropocentric inquisition’s “Apage Satanas!” screeches in his ears, as academic witch-hunters assemble before his mind’s eye, as self-censorship judges his discovery, Freud recants. The explorer of the unconscious, who might have become a Copernicus or Giordano Bruno of life’s science, disavows his own truth: “But let us reflect – it cannot be so!” (ibid.: 41).

Freud’s “self-reflection” retreats from the death drive’s ontological primacy, balancing it in a Manichaean dualism with the life instinct. His subsequent philanthropic turn, driven by a hidden, overcompensated inclination toward anti-humanist heresy, stifles psychoanalysis. It generates taboos, filtering his students’ perceptions through a lens of humanist outrage, blinding them to what gives anthropofugal thought its greatest hope.

Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytic anatomy of human destructivity epitomizes this blindness. He acknowledges:

Humans differ from animals in being murderers – the only primate that kills and tortures its own kind without biological or economic cause, deriving satisfaction from it (Fromm 1974: 4).

Yet he misjudges this trait through anthropocentric parameters, labeling it “biologically maladaptive… malignant aggression, the real threat to humanity’s survival” (ibid.). Diagnosing the Beast’s necrophilia – its drive to transform the living into the lifeless, to destroy for destruction’s sake (ibid.: 301) – he cannot accept the obvious: we exist to end. Instead, he conjures the “fundamental alternative” of innate “biophilia” (ibid.: 332), perpetuating humanist delusions. This spawns thousands of half-enlightened cripples, too fractured to fulfill their anthropofugal destiny or even end their own decline.

Footnote

2) Unlike the enlightened views of Pliny, Seneca, or Cicero, psychoanalysis – despite its feigned objectivity – still subtly condemns suicide as escapism, morally reprehensible. Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself (1938) is a rare exception, asserting that “everyone ultimately kills themselves in their own way, swiftly or slowly, sooner or later” (Menninger 1974: II), and that “we all, deep down, wish to die” (ibid.: 17). He treats classical suicide alongside its covert forms: chronic (asceticism, martyrdom, neurosis, alcoholism), focal (self-mutilation, surgeries, accidents), and organic (disease). Yet even Menninger misses the anthropofugal insight: the suicide anticipates humanity’s ultimate annihilation, their lifeless body a monument against humanist complacency and the collective inertia veering from the path to Armageddon.

§17

The intellectual ruins left by the 20th century’s revival of the humanist chimera – amid its war-mongering fervor – are starkly illuminated by Ludwig Klages’ relegation to persona non grata through distortive reception, the deep fracture in Freud’s thought, and the grotesque detachment from reality among his followers. Surviving intellectually in this terrain was perilous, leading to further attrition among the already scattered partisans of anthropofugal resistance. Yet truth knows defeats, not surrender. Since the 1960s, despite fierce humanist counterattacks, a phase of renewed stabilization and consolidation has emerged, kindling hope that the Beast – in keeping with its intelligence – will finally execute, with clear-eyed intent, the apocalyptic strike against itself and the suffering creation it has feverishly prepared for since the Second World War.

At least now there exist unflinching documentations that strip the Beast bare, exposing its rabid historical manifestations, the St. Vitus’ dance of its “progress,” and the ceaseless vae victis of marauding brutes – no longer cloaked in humanist platitudes or metaphysical retouching. Karlheinz Deschner, for instance, rejects the typical hagiography of generals, industrialists, and politicians who “sided with the victor,” instead offering a “pathography” of the 20th century: a chronicle of disease, greed, and violence, where “the result of five millennia of civilization seems to condense into a single nutshell – as greed and violence, a chain of catastrophes. Eternal bankruptcy. History” (Deschner 1966: 8).

What Deschner and his collaborators analyze exemplarily, Hans Dollinger traces ab ovo in his Black Book of World History – from the dawn of written records and the Beast’s historical memory onward. Dollinger unearths the “underside” of official historiography: a blood-soaked, scorched, and torn canvas, the true sweat cloth of the species, hidden beneath layers of whitewash and garish historical frescoes. The “higher meaning” he reveals is the iterative monotony of pogroms: “an unbroken chain of crimes against humanity, persecutions, expulsions, mass flights, resettlements, and systematic exterminations” (Dollinger 1973: 6) – all offspring of the same genocidal mentality that reached full bloom long before Auschwitz, even before Cortés and Pizarro’s “final solutions” for the Inca and Aztec. It flourished under Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (883 – 859 BCE), who boasted of his pre-industrial mass destruction techniques:

I slew every second man. I built a wall before the city’s gates. I flayed the ringleaders and draped the wall with their skins. Some I entombed alive within it; others I impaled along its length. I gathered heads into wreaths and corpses into garlands (ibid.: 20).

Such unflinching inventory is a prerequisite for philosophy’s overdue resurrection, now reduced to a humanist hallucinogen for the intelligentsia. Fortunately, anthropofugal reason is reclaiming its rightful place, finding vigorous advocates in French structuralism – most radically in Michel Foucault, its consummator and critic.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind, positions the Beast as peripheral to structural dictates, declaring that “the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man, but to dissolve him” (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 284). This dissolution underpins Foucault’s thought, for whom philosophy is “digging beneath our feet” (Foucault 1974: 14) – permanent subversion. His work systematically sabotages humanism’s petrified certainties:

In our time, one can only think in the void left by man’s disappearance… To all those who still wish to speak of man, his sovereignty or liberation, to those who ask what is man’s essence, or who seek to ground truth in his reality – to all these warped forms of thought, we can only reply with a philosophical laugh (Foucault 1971: 412).

Foucault’s The Order of Things, subtitled An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, exhumes buried epistemic strata, revealing the eroded foundations of humanism and concluding with his famed wager: “man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (ibid.: 462).

Admittedly, Foucault’s anthropofugal stance remains epistemological, not yet existential – a prognosis of humanism’s epistemic displacement rather than humanity’s apocalyptic self-abolition. It falls short of the universal systems of Klages, von Hartmann, or Schopenhauer. Yet even this limited critique secures vital bridgeheads in a humanist-occupied cultural landscape. Foucault leaves no doubt of his intent to expand these footholds, launching raids against the “thought of man’s irrevocable value” (Foucault 1974: 16) and eudaimonic delusions. In an interview, he dismisses humanism’s fixation on happiness:

When we pretend to debate humanism, we are really discussing something simpler: happiness. Humanism defines politics as the pursuit of happiness. But happiness does not exist – and human happiness least of all (ibid.: 29).

Note:

The works cited (Deschner, Dollinger, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault) are foundational to dismantling humanist historiography and epistemology, exposing the Beast’s necrophilic drive beneath its moralizing veneer. Their unflinching clarity marks a turning point in anthropofugal thought’s resurgence.

§18

Foucault, like his structuralist companions, is a rediscoverer who, despite his erudition and knowledge of philosophical history, finds himself on philosophical terra incognita. He has forgotten that what he laboriously surveys and explores was already mapped and conceptualized by earlier thinkers. This oversight is tragic, for the humanist interregnum he battles – and seeks to end – still exerts power over him even in its decline, severing him from anthropofugal traditions that could have eased his intellectual journey, deepened his insights, and broadened his perspective.

Similar reservations apply to his Romanian-born compatriot E.M. Cioran, who, though far less renowned than Foucault, surpasses him in anthropofugal rigor. To dismiss Cioran would be to succumb to intellectual myopia.

Cioran has reached philosophy’s terminus. He will enter the annals of anthropofugal thought not as a trailblazer or excavator of repressed ideas, but as a new Schopenhauer for what might be termed the pre-apocalyptic era. A pessimist, life-denier, and stylist of the highest order, Cioran shares with the author of The World as Will and Representation even his flaws – chief among them an idealist detachment. Amid his eloquent jeremiads, polished anathemas, and visceral disgust, he neglects concrete reflection on the means to permanently pacify the planet’s vale of tears.

Schopenhauer’s retreat into individual asceticism is understandable given his era’s annihilistic impotence, but Cioran’s aristocratic abstention from engaging modernity’s ABCs (atomic, biological, chemical) of destruction is harder to excuse. Yet such criticism fades when reading Cioran. His voice seems to channel anthropofugal reason itself – a posthumous murmur from a post-human future, a “fetus devoured by omniscient idiocy before opening its eyes, a knowing stillbirth” (Cioran 1978: 194).

Memories of the Beast (Untier) surface as fossilized relics, embedded in relief that it is over. Retrospective visions of gutted landscapes and ganglia petrifying into stone evoke matter’s sigh of relief, the peace of non-being. “Thinking is undermining” (Cioran 1977: 150), he writes in The Trouble with Being Born – a jolt from the nightmare of life, a final act of love for “those who will not linger… gladiators” (ibid.: 77), the morituri in the planetary Circus Maximus. To think is to admit “we are here to make each other wretched” (ibid.: 143), to expose the Beast as a specialist in “counter-creation” (Cioran 1965: 85), a murderous ape and executioner who, even in bourgeois bonhomie, drags “a cemetery of friends and foes in his dreams” (Cioran 1978: 70).

What are these masses of “puppets stuffed with red blood cells to birth history and its grimaces” (ibid.: 86)? These “incurables,” this “pain-convulsed matter,” this “roaring flesh,” these “bones gnawed by screams” (Cioran 1972: 17), this “cancer of the Earth” (Cioran 1977: 136)?

Cioran, dismantling religion’s false consolations and philosophy’s corruptions, traces history’s arc to a conclusion:

History has no meaning – so we have cause for joy. Must we suffer torments for the sake of some favorable outcome, some final festival paid for by our sweat and failure? For future idiots who revel in our agony and dance on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiacal end-state surpasses hope’s worst delusions in its absurdity (Cioran 1978: 181).

A happy ending is impossible. Yet if history seems senseless, it harbors a perverse logic: humanity’s “fury against itself,” its “loathing of satiety and repetition,” its preference for “the unprecedented over routine” (Cioran 1972: 130 – 131). Life affirms and negates itself to the point of frenzy: “To let oneself die betrays weakness; to destroy oneself signals strength” (ibid.).

From this clarity, Cioran deduces humanity’s fate:

Exhaustion awaits man, and he will pay for his overly original trajectory. It is inconceivable, unnatural, that he should drag on and end well (Cioran 1977: 112).

We are already the last humans, post-apocalyptic scavengers of our traditions:

We are the enfeebled, crushed by primal dreams, incapable of new utopias, technicians of fatigue, gravediggers of the future… The tree of life – it approaches no new spring: its trunk is withered; they will carve coffins for our bones, dreams, and pains from it. Our flesh reeks of the beautiful cadavers strewn across millennia. Their glory beguiles us: we have drained it to the dregs. In the mind’s cemeteries lie principles and formulas: Beauty was defined – here it is buried. So too Truth, Goodness, Knowledge, and the Gods. All rot here… Over countless tombstones marking deliriums and hypotheses rises the Mausoleum of the Absolute: here lie false comforts and the soul’s deceitful flights (Cioran 1978: 149).

Yet our agony is lucid, unclouded by instinct or diminished responsibility – both curse and opportunity. A curse, for the Beast cannot evade its status as a “biological scandal” (ibid.: 109), a “digression, a heresy” (Cioran 1972: 13), whose quest for happiness only spawns new hells, confirming: “Paradise is the absence of man” (ibid.: 84). An opportunity, for reason realizes human existence is but an organic anomaly. Life, Cioran writes, is “a tragic revolt within the inorganic… matter animated and, one might say, eroded by suffering.” The only escape from this frenzy is to seek “the rest of the inorganic, peace in the elements’ embrace. The longing to return to matter is the true basis of the death-drive” (ibid.: 91).

This thrust toward the crystalline, the mineral, the inert – echoing Freud’s intuition – pervades all life. Its blockage causes the tormented, bleeding flesh that carpets the planet:

All hurtles toward ugliness and gangrene: this Earth festers, its living creatures flaunting wounds under the abscessed sky’s rays (Cioran 1978: 159).

Yet the Beast, grasping suffering’s ubiquity, might heed the silent plea of all life. It holds the power to end this Brueghel-world, this septic tank of creation, this rotating torture chamber – to let destruction’s dawn dissolve nightmares into nothing. For humanity’s rage has always been generous, a storm against existence itself:

Under this consciousness… man attains his highest privilege: the privilege of perishing. Chosen by nature as its honorific wreath, he saps her strength… destroys her… Only on the elements’ ruins could he attain completion – and descend the slope. Now his work is done; he is ripe for disappearance (ibid.: 117).

§19

The Beast (Untier) is indeed “an assassination attempt [by nature] on itself” (Cioran 1977: 65). Yet it now rests solely in our hands whether this attempt fails or succeeds. Here, however, we must correct even Cioran’s error. For precisely because the world reveals itself as “a receptacle of sighs,” his claim –

Whether one folds their arms or draws the sword, both are equally futile in this slaughterhouse (Cioran 1978: 51)

– is false. Indifference and inaction are not justified; only the sword remains.

We, condemned not to suffer in mollusk-like stupor but to comprehend global misery, who – liberated from the curse of eternal procreation – wield the power to undo existence, to render memory void, and who, through anthropofugal reflection, discern origins and ends, face a choice far more fundamental than Cioran’s futilities.

Our military-technological prowess, with its thermonuclear overkill capacity, biochemical reserves, and bacteriological “cleaners,” already enables us to eradicate our species to the last specimen. This would correct an evolutionary misstep, reassert natural selection’s sovereignty, and destroy creation’s Trojan Horse – the human mind, where suffering compounds into self-awareness. The Beast would ratify its long-lamented absurdity, transforming the conditional “I should never have existed” into the perfect “I never existed.”

Yet cursed be a humanity that squanders its destructive gifts and hoards its necrophilia! Is it not the vilest act, possessing such means, to absolve only ourselves – erasing our name from the ledger of suffering while leaving the incubator of torment intact for all other creatures? Are we not children of that first cell whose death failed? Are we not pain-seared, shuddering flesh begging for deliverance?

Is the deer, the dolphin, the ant, the lily lesser than us merely because they cannot voice their agony? Can we, who for millennia served as Earth’s torturers and conquistadors, who allowed nature’s endurance only through forbidden hope vested in us, now shirk that hope and indulge in unparalleled egoism – the selfishness of vanishing?

May anthropofugal reason preserve us from this monstrous betrayal of creation! A few more decades of research and testing will arm us with weapons capable of redeeming all life, of globally “pasteurizing” existence from mountain peaks to oceanic trenches.

One generation’s patience, and the apocalypse will no longer be a private treachery but a universal grace – the Last Day of the Organic! The return of immaculate matter! The dawn of heaven on Earth!

The flash of detonations and continents ablaze will mirror in the eyes of our last kin, transfiguring their countenance. All creatures will sink into the inferno, hailing the Beast as their savior in the hour of deliverance. Then, the last human will grasp the absurd made meaningful, raise hands over scorched flesh, bless it, and proclaim: “Take heart – the burden of being is lifted, the trial ended. Each of you was but a quartz crystal’s dream. We, all of us, never were!” And they will die in peace.

This is the true choice before us: not between impotent contemplation and futile action, but between ruthless species suicide – sparing mollusks, lichen, flies, and rats – granting us mere decades, and a responsible annihilationism that demands three steps beyond our immediate goal: solidarity with all life’s categorical No.

§ 20

(Anders)

What does the anthropofugal reason care for the frothing rage of humanists, who already fail to reckon with the past of the beast and now seek to mobilize against its future? Who still heeds the clamor of inhumanity, barbarism in spirit, and the corruption of youth that arises whenever the truth about humanity is recorded? Who would believe the sophistry that anthropofugal thought sows the very violence and terror it claims to abolish, that it invokes the apocalypse rather than preventing it in alliance with humanist sentimentalists? None of this is true. Suffering can only negate itself through totalization. But in the inferno, the revocation of creation, creaturely pain transcends itself, brightens, and exalts itself in the animal with premonition, in humans with certainty: that the wheel of generations, of rebirths in torment, is finally shattered; that the unborn remain forever unborn, life unlived, suffering unendured.

Who would not be willing to pay with their life for such a promise – a life they must one day surrender anyway, without comparable reward? Who would not hear, beneath the rumble of detonations and the groans, rattles, and whimpers of the bombed-out, the angelic choirs singing praises and hymns of those countless phantoms – the never-to-be-born, the unconceived, the liberated, the torture-escaped – spared earthly hell by their sacrifice?

And which of those who promoted and defended the apocalypse with their feeble powers, within their station and profession, would not feel in the moment of downfall how the beast’s grimace begins to disintegrate, and above its age-old murderous visage crystallizes the noble, sacred death mask of redeemed and redeeming humanity?

Yet weightier than all humanist anathemas and speech prohibitions is a caution from within our own ranks urging restraint and silence. Could the sudden disclosure and propagation of what countless generations concealed from one another and diligently hid from themselves, their children, and grandchildren, not produce consequences at odds with the original intent of anthropofugal enlightenment – indeed, openly clashing with it?

Might the masses, conditioned by humanism, perceive what is depicted here as the affirmative goal of species development – universal dispensation from Being – as a horrific threat to be repelled by any means, despite all explanations and corrections? Would this not transform the philosophical account into a brake on the very development it sought to justify and demand through bold advocacy?

Put differently: Does anthropofugal reflection, accused by humanists of invoking catastrophe, not constantly risk being hijacked by humanist sentimentalism for its own “honorable” ends? Could its frank discovery of historical truth not be degraded into a convenient scare tactic to rationalize delaying the apocalypse, demonizing redemption, and perpetuating intergenerational suffering? Does what promises the extinction and end of torment not morph, upon appearing in libraries and bookshelves, into a dire omen and revolt against the seemingly inevitable – a paranoid last protest of humanity driven mad by fear, a lunatic plea for life’s mercy?

Those familiar with the reception history of, say, Cioran or reviews of his works will harbor no illusions about the reliable automatisms of humanist distortion and reinterpretation, the professional thoroughness of cultural retouchers to whom nothing human is alien and who erase with humanophilic cosmetics all that contradicts their ideological beauty ideal.

Yet there is no cause for concern, for modernity’s cult fetish of the “humane” is defenseless against the inner logic of human development. In its described effect – hallucinatory incapacity for reality – it is not the messiah but the gravedigger of the species.

Do not be misled by the fact that the overwhelming majority who encounter anthropofugal thought judge it not by its true claim but reinterpret it as a caricature or satire still secretly legitimized by humanism.

d’Holbach long ago accounted for the ideological cataract* of the masses and professed the exclusivity of truth:

We must not indulge the hope that reason could suddenly free humanity from the errors with which so many causes have united to poison it. It would be wholly unreasonable to believe one could eliminate in an instant contagious, hereditary errors rooted for centuries, perpetually nourished and reinforced by ignorance, passions, habits, interests, fears, and the recurring needs of nations… Let us therefore aim to show reason only to those capable of understanding it, to elucidate truth for those able to endure its brilliance, to free from error those who do not resist evidence.

(d’Holbach 1978: 538 f.)

Anthropofugal thought, in its broad impact, does not compete with humanism, which it sees as a functional sedative in the final phase of escalation and accepts as unavoidable. It never defines itself as a majority doctrine, secular religion, or ideological social glue, but always as a minority perspective – the philosophy of a small exiled faction of thinkers.

[Translator’s note: “Star” here refers to the eye disease (cataract), not the bird, celestial body, or celebrity.]

Its truth, however, has been public for over two and a half centuries – since the French Enlightenment – accessible unconditionally to anyone outgrowing childish anthropocentrism and humanist self-love. Any plea for tactical silence or hope against better knowledge is historically obsolete – even at the cost of anthropofugal reason, wherever it speaks, exposing itself anew to crude misunderstandings.

No philosophy – whether complicit in humanism or an anthropofugal spectator – can influence the irreversible global course or master a planetary fate. Thus, the pragmatization (sketched above) of the certainty of imminent doom as a delaying tactic poses no medium- or long-term threat.

Even if the unthinkable occurred – if horizonless humanism heeded the warning it misunderstands as anthropofugal paradigm and summoned all of good faith to crusade against militarism and arms mania – it would ultimately prove ineffective, let alone capable of co-opting visionary anthropofugal thought or misusing its redemptive longing to intimidate and defer the inferno.

The “repression shield” automatism analyzed by Rudolf Bilz neutralizes prolonged eschatological terror, preventing sustained mobilization of the majority on which such campaigns depend. Instead, the frightened quickly relapse into lethargic fatalism and unconscious loyalty, ensuring global Armageddon remains guaranteed.

Amusingly, we owe our meticulous understanding of the psychic mechanisms driving the beast into the arms of apocalyptic technology to an arch-humanist and nuclear disarmament activist – Günther Anders – whose pious concern for humanity ultimately reveals itself as obstinate self-deception.

Anders himself admitted the dogmatic naivety of his stance. When asked how he justified his moral postulates, he replied:

“Not at all. Conversely, we must deliberately leave the problem of ‘sanctioning’ taboo… Where drowning men await rescue, one cannot linger on the bridge debating the philosophical or theological basis for valuing their lives. We must renounce probing profundity.”

(Anders 1967: 29)

Humanism as salvational thought prohibition, an ex cathedra survival religion with infallibility claims – rarely has a “humanist” so openly confessed the truth of his thinking without losing faith in it.

Not so Anders, who seems impervious to all anthropofugal challenges, stubbornly fixated on the shibboleth of survival and even reviving its long-discredited justification – the Leibnizian theodicy:

“Secondly, I know the world is an ingenious and incomparable creation, one worth preserving. Being here is enjoyable. I like the people who are here. The thought that all their suffering and joy might have been in vain, that the world will henceforth orbit as a desolate sphere through the void of the cosmos, is deeply unsettling to me – it even chokes me.”

(Anders 1967: 102)

– A “proof” that leaves Anders’ ostensibly enlightened interlocutor incredulous:

“And you believe this throat-tightening argument proves the world should exist? That we should survive?”

prompting them to abruptly end the dialogue.

[OD, 2008: Günther Anders at u1]

As early as 1956, in his study The Outdatedness of Human Beings, Anders recognized humanity’s ascension to “Lords of the Apocalypse.” Though lacking the divine power of creatio ex nihilo, we wield a potestas annihilationis – the omnipotence of annihilation, a reductio ad nihil (Anders 1956: 239). Yet this distinction remains abstract, unprocessed in its full horror (cf. ibid.: 285 f.). Anders, mired in humanist confusion, probes the reasons for humanity’s inadequate response to the installation of doomsday machinery – what he terms the “illiteracy of fear” (cf. ibid.: 265), a numbness that continues as if nothing has happened.

Years later, in Endzeit und Zeitende (End Times and Time’s End: Reflections on the Nuclear Situation), he concludes that the majority suffer not from “apocalypse blindness” but “apocalypse indifference” (Anders 1972: 185). This state arises from the “excessiveness” of the threat, which “overwhelms the limited capacity of our perception (both sensory and imaginative)” (ibid.: 184).

Anders argues that our emotional apparatus remains calibrated to archaic stimuli: we mourn a single murder, might conceive of a dozen, but imagination fails at thousands or millions of corpses. Empathy dries up; the soul “goes on strike” (Anders 1956: 269). The result is a grotesque disproportion between modern mass destruction and our stunted psychic capacities – an imbalance rendering the launch of a city-annihilating missile emotionally easier than slaughtering a chicken.

He defines this through his “Law of Inversion” or “Harmlessness”:

The greater the effect, the lesser the malice required. The scale of hatred demanded for an atrocity inversely correlates with its magnitude

(Anders 1972: 189).

The alienation between act and actor has advanced to the point where ethical accountability seems antiquated, its invocation a cringeworthy faux pas:

The hatred needed to slaughter one person is unnecessary for the button-pusher at the control panel. A button is a button. Whether I activate a fruit-ice machine, a power plant, or the final catastrophe makes no difference in attitude. No emotion or conviction is demanded. As a button-pusher, I am absolved of both goodness and malice… No Hiroshima pilot needed Cain’s malice to kill Abel. The malice required for the ultimate atrocity will amount to zero.(ibid.: 189 f.)

The “automation” of responsibility – delegated to electronic systems, machine operatives, and algorithms – transforms inhuman acts into “acts without humans” (ibid.: 200), governed by Anders’ “Oligarchy Law”:

The greater the number of victims, the fewer perpetrators required(ibid.: 194).

For the humanist Anders, this is scandalous; for the anthropofugal thinker, it is a consoling revelation: apocalypse is preprogrammed, requiring no effort, while deviating from this course demands Herculean collective energy – a revolution in thought, feeling, and values:

Like most modern effects, the final catastrophe will not stem from will, action, or labor, but from a casual, perhaps even playful, flick of a finger. Our world will not perish in rage but be switched off. Those “with unstained hands” will vastly outnumber those spared complicity in past wars. We live in the mass age of innocence, drowning in a flood of goodwill.

(ibid.: 193; italics original)

Given our ancestors’ efforts to escape existence’s curse – and the fact that their labor has turned the ladder of escalation from creation’s cesspool into an escalator carrying us effortlessly toward annihilation – Anders’ absurdity is laid bare. Though he grasps the mechanism of progress, he condemns it, urging travelers to reverse course and descend against the escalator’s flow.

Yet even the most obstinate will soon recognize the futility of swimming against history’s tide. They will close their ears to humanism’s backward gaze and surrender – without resistance, if not with anthropofugal jubilation – to the gentle transport into oblivion, ending all suffering.

§ 21

The history of the beast is fulfilled,

and in humility, it awaits its double death –

physical annihilation

and the erasure of memory of itself.

No survivor will preserve its legacy,

no saga will recount the trials it endured,

name the torments it suffered

for the sake of the great, universal redemption.

Yet peace will reign over the bare rock of its homeland,

and on the stones lies the white dust of the organic,

like frost.

The rending and devouring, the grinding and bleeding,

the stabbing and choking –

this ceaseless civil war of all living things

never was.

And the spirit, which finally settled itself

upon hind legs

and resolved within itself that enough was enough,

has become its own delusion.

It perished in an unparalleled fireworks display,

and with the ascent of the final rocket, the traces were erased –

trails a single cell etched over aeons,

furrowing the face of Earth

– as only glaciers

and ice ages once did.

The anthropofugal reason composes its obituary in its lifetime –

and justly, it will not outlive its creator.

Yet matter is magnanimous,

and from the beginning has placed a monument in the sky,

to serve henceforth as both cosmic gravestone

and triumphal arch:

Night after night, the moon rises over the horizon,

parading before us, in stark and flawless beauty,

Earth’s posthistory as paradise.

Let us steel ourselves!

Let us translate its transcendental ideal into sublunar reality!

Let us moonify our metabolism-sick planet!

For not until the crescent’s sickle mirrors itself

in a thousand crater lakes below,

not until reflection and source – moon and world –

become indistinguishable,

and quartz crystals wink at one another across the abyss

in starlight,

not until the last oasis withers,

the last sigh fades,

the last seed desiccates –

will Eden return to Earth.

End.

DAS UNTIER – THE BEAST

Written by Robert Sebastian Castellanos Rodriguez

Responses (1)