Robert Wicks, The University of Auckland
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 122:1(2002), pp. 160-162.
“Titanism,” as it appears in the title of Nicholas F. Gier’s, Spiritual Titanism, refers to any “worldview in which human beings take on divine attributes and divine prerogatives” (p. xi). Gier’s study is extensive, and it examines a wide-ranging, cosmopolitan assortment of religio-philosophical conceptions of human nature, highlighting the extent to which they convey, or do not convey, an objectionable megalomaniac quality. The selection of outlooks range from European postmodernism, existentialism and Nietzscheanism, to Middle Eastern Judeo-Christianity, to the Vedic, Jainistic and Buddhistic philosophies of the Indian subcontinent, to Chinese Confucianism and Taoism, to Japanese Zen Buddhism. Gier organizes a grand exhibition of perspectives from which he extracts the practical moral message that the exercise of humility and the nurturing of respect for mother earth defines the most realistically human way to be.
Gier aligns himself with perspectives that offer a more temperate, socially-integrated, relationalistic, and finitude-recognizing sense of self, and opposes those whose self-conception is distinctively atomistic, potentially aggressive, disengaged from the daily world, and inflated with superhuman attributes. According to Gier, the Chinese Confucian sages typically exemplify the former; the Yogic masters and Jaina saints typically exemplify the latter. The more Titanistic views, Gier adds, carry sexist overtones: “the psychology of Titanism extends male power everywhere it can” (p. 208).
A virtue of Gier’s book resides in its impressive and useful wealth of doctrinal and historical detail; he takes us on a round-the-world intellectual tour, and his expositions often resonate with a pleasantly-mild exoticism. Few books cover so much thought-provoking ground, and Gier does not fail to provide impeccable scholarly support for most of his interpretative claims. Upon occasion, though, his interpretations select only aspects of a given outlook that allow him to press it more squarely into the book’s overall thematic service, and he sometimes pays a high price for having neglected essential aspects of those positions. When Gier characterizes European thinkers, this problem of one-sidedness is relatively more pronounced. He stands on solidly-informed ground when his attention shifts over to the Middle East and Asia.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, for example, is alleged to be titanistically grounded in Sartre’s famous assertion each human is absolutely free. Gier supports this titanistic interpretation by quoting Sartre, and by reminding us that Sartre’s “Promethian challenge is that ‘the fundamental project of human reality is that man is the being whose project is to be God’” (p. 28). Humans are supposedly godlike because they are absolutely free, and the project of becoming God amounts to the Sartrean quest for authentic awareness via the elimination bad faith.
Sartre’s crucially foundational claim that it is impossible to become God, because the achievement of this feat would contradict the projective nature of human consciousness, Gier overlooks entirely. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that acts of reflection never yield explicit and perfect self-coincidence, and can therefore never instantiate a being, namely God, that would be a “for-itself-in-itself.” So very contrary to Gier’s titanistic picture, Sartre’s conception of absolute human freedom in conjunction with his theory of consciousness condemns people to an inescapably finite, non-godlike condition of frustration, finitude, suffering and anxiety.
Another misconception, slightly more subtle, arises in connection with an organizational centerpiece of Gier’s study, namely, Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the superhuman, which Gier also claims is not titanistic. This, he believes, is because superhumans “can never transcend their animal natures” (p. 18). (Gier’s argument here, ironically, can be used to show why Sartre’s absolutely free human can never be a Titan.) Things go astray in Gier’s interpretation of Nietzsche, owing to his tacit sympathy throughout the book to “the greatest discovery of the ancient Hebrews, namely, the transcendence of God” (p. 25). By too-often tending to conceive of God as an otherworldly, non-spatial, non-temporal being, he does not articulate well, how pantheistic conceptions of God and their intellectual relatives may also harbor the titanistic attitudes he seeks to criticize. Gier is thereby led to precipitate interpretations of Nietzsche’s superhuman and of Taoist sages, among other ideal types, that under-thematize their titanistic dimensions.
How? Gier claims that Nietzsche’s “will to power” is “not an individual, egoistic will but is the life force itself” (p. 226). Given his linkage between atomistic conceptions of the self and Titanism, Gier concludes that Nietzsche’s superhuman being -- a being that embodies the will to power most affirmatively and fully -- cannot be a Titan.
If everything is the will to power, however, and if life itself is the will to power, then the superhuman embodies life itself. Since Nietzsche’s core philosophy is grounded in the unconditional affirmation of life, his superhuman being -- when seen from a logical and theoretically structural standpoint -- becomes close kin to ideal figures who, within other viewpoints, are vehicles through whom God supposedly speaks, or those through whom the cosmos supposedly expresses itself, or those through whom the “Way” supposedly acts, etc.
We can now anticipate how Gier’s non-titanistic interpretation of Nietzsche’s superhuman parallels his non-titanistic interpretation of the Taoist sage. He writes:
The extreme humanism of Titanism, in which human agency is exaggerated, is inverted in Daoism by the fact that it is Heaven/Nature (tian) that works through the perfect person. Using the technique of ‘fasting of mind,’ the Daoist sage empties himself of everything, including every notion of self. . . . [and thereby can] tap into the energy (qi) of the universe. (p. 224).
Spiritual Titanism suggests that it is not essentially egoistic, if someone claims to embody God’s (or the cosmos’s, or the universe’s) principles. It is egoistic, though, if the person claims to be God (or the cosmos, or the universe). For Gier, “merging with the cosmos” (p. 209) defines a legitimate and realistic relationship to the world at large. Anthromorphically projecting oneself into, and as, the cosmos itself, however, he regards as objectionably unrealistic and megalomaniac.
Submitting oneself as the perfect servant of God, or dissolving one’s personal interests to become the embodiment of universal forces, even if one acknowledges God’s or the universal forces’s transcendence of human individuality, is a fundamental project that aspires to set the individual into coincidence with what is absolute, and it implicitly aims to define the resulting quality of the resulting experience as superior to those who do not count among God’s, or among the universe’s, embodiments.
In its details, Nicholas F. Gier’s global survey of overly-inflated self concepts is revealing and spiritually educational, but the thematic edge of the study is blunted by the influence of traditional theism, and it is distracted by the religious quest to tap into cosmic principles, as worldly, temperate and as humble as these connections assert themselves to be within Gier’s preferred religious modes. The problem of inflated and hardened egos that rightfully worries Gier, one can submit, resides not in specific claims to this or that kind of absoluteness, however, but in claims to absoluteness in general, and hence, in claims to the very status of sagehood -- an idea whose positive value Gier never interrogates.