2 Eros and Thanatos

The ultimate basis of the Framework, the base notation to which all things reduce, is the duality of Eros and Thanatos.

Eros(the life-impulse which breathes in) and Thanatos (the death-impulse which breathes out) are not neatly-bounded concepts. That is to say, you can’t describe Eros and Thanatos in terms of something else; they are the terms in which everything else is described. As such, we need to approach understanding Eros and Thanatos in a similar manner to an occult initiation. Strands of comparison among numerous things will create, in the gaps between them, a space for Eros and Thanatos to fill.

You should come to understand the pair through intuition without having developed a specific or intentional theory about what they are. If you find that you are developing a specific or intentional theory about what they are— for instance, if you’re using a shorthand, like “Eros is seeking security”, every time the terms come up— then there’s a good chance you’re going to come to a mistaken or incomplete understanding of what the Framework has to say, because you’re analogizing Eros and Thanatos onto another set of concepts which don’t fully align with them. Don’t gloss Eros and Thanatos onto any one of the examples or comparisons we use in describing them; instead, gloss them onto the network of associations as a whole. None of these associations alone will be sufficient or necessary to understand the duality, but in their sum total they should give you enough of a sense for it to render it useful.

Right off the bat, we’ll start with something obvious: The duality described by Eros and Thanatos is identical to the duality described by the Taoist concepts of Yin and Yang. Eros is Yang, Thanatos is Yin. However, the fact that the duality describes the same essential thing doesn’t mean that I agree with all of the conclusions reached by Taoist texts like the Tao Te Ching, or even all the ways in which they describe Yin and Yang; for instance, Yin and Yang are gendered, with Yin being female and Yang being male, but I think that the essential duality is genderless, and that gender obscures the concepts more than it illuminates them. No, rather than Eros and Thanatos being Yin and Yang, it’s more accurate to say that both pairs of concepts describe the same thing, and that the true duality exists beyond the descriptive powers of either.

I’ve decided to use (inaccurately, as it happens) the Freudian terms of Eros and Thanatos for the duality rather than Yin and Yang because the central subject of our discussion is human behavior, and in “the life urge” and “the death urge”, the former terms supply us with a valuable point of comparison.

But what is meant by this? Doesn’t everyone prefer to live?

Within the context of the Framework, the life urge is the drive towards security. It is the breath “in”, it’s the impulse that causes us to seek safety and rest. Opposed to it, the death urge is the drive towards danger. It’s the breath “out”, the impulse that causes us to seek risk and exertion.

Viewed another way, Eros is the drive towards “low risk, low reward” behavior, and Thanatos is the drive towards “high risk, high reward” behavior; in fact, if you do make the mistake of glossing Eros and Thanatos onto another set of concepts, you will be tolerably served for the better part of this book by this opposition alone.

In the tribal village, the women stay near the huts, foraging for roots and berries. This is Eros. The men venture into the plains, hunting for mastodon. This is Thanatos.

Of course, you may note, our ancestors invented agriculture, and from that point on, the vast majority of us stayed near home, profiting off the low-risk, low-reward option. And this is an excellent point; a very strong case can be made that human beings are on the whole Erotic creatures, not Thannatic ones. At the very least, we live in an extremely Erotic era of history, on a cycle almost too grand for us to perceive. All of the processes of life are additive in their ultimate trajectory; we hunt to eat, we eat to grow, we grow to reproduce. Where we— and “we” here refers to all life, not just to human beings— tolerate destruction, it’s always in service of the creation of something more complex than that which we have destroyed, or at least something that seems more complex, because it’s more similar to ourselves.

However, the fact that our Thannatic impulses are bent towards an Erotic end doesn’t make them any less vital. Thanatos is the breath exhaled; it’s the destruction of obstacles, it’s the pursuit of new things. You wouldn’t want to hold your breath forever; you very well might not want to live forever either, though ultimately that’s something you’d have to decide for yourself.

In the daily conduct of life, though, both Eros and Thanatos are essential. This can be seen clearly in their relationship to processes of thought. Eros is the engine of unio, the combination of ideas into a singular whole. Thanatos is the engine of solve, the separation of ideas into their component parts. Both of these operations of thought are essential, you couldn’t function without the capacity for both. In Kantian terms, solve is analytic thought, and unio is synthetic thought, if you find that useful; personally, I find Kant too baffling to read much further into his work than that. More straightforwardly, solve is the type of thinking you do when you’re analyzing a novel for English class. You take this single thing, this work of art, and break it apart to see what it’s made of, separating out the recurring themes and the rhetorical devices to examine them each individually. Unio is the type of thinking you do when you learn a new theorem in Math class— you take a set of claims you’ve already learned and add on a new one, filing the circumstances of its relevance away along with the manner in which it is used, building onto a single pile which is “Algebra” or “Calculus”. You might be better at one of these types of thinking than the other, but you definitely have to do both, all the time, on grand, abstract scales, and on tiny, concrete ones.

As I stated earlier, I don’t feel that sex and gender map onto Eros and Thanatos particularly well. There’s a case to be made that, biologically, men are more wired for Thanatos and women are more wired for Eros, as in the hunter-gatherer scenario outlined above. However, we can see how quickly something like agriculture overwrites this polarity— much less the cyclical pathologies which we’ll discuss at great length further on in this book. In fact, for much of the last two or three centuries, the West has consisted mostly of Thannatic women and Erotic men; it’s best to simply avoid relating Eros and Thanatos to gender altogether.

Hopefully, at this point, you’ve begun to develop a sense of what is intended here in the opposition of Life and Death. In order to further illustrate what we’re working with, I’ll provide a series of further dualities across which Eros and Thanatos are split. However, please keep in mind that no one of these pairs is absolute, that no one of them is sufficient in explaining the true duality.

• Eros is coming together, Thanatos is splitting apart
• Eros is accepting. Thanatos is questioning.
• Eros is obeying. Thanatos is defying.
• Eros is cooperating. Thanatos is competing.
• Eros is eating. Thanatos is hunting.
• Eros is rationing. Thanatos is splurging.
• Eros is making love. Thanatos is murder.
• Eros is watching TV. Thanatos is jet-skiing.
• Eros is writing your term paper. Thanatos is watching TV.
• Eros is living forever. Thanatos is dying.
• Eros is deciding to die. Thanatos is deciding to live forever.
• Eros is contentment with what you have. Thanatos is the willingness to sacrifice it in the pursuit of something greater.

And so on and so forth.

The Taoists hold that it was the cyclical interchange of  Yin and Yang which gave rise to the Ten Thousand Things which make up our reality. In my opinion, the jury is still out on whether the interchange alone was enough to give rise to reality, or whether it was the intersection of this cycle with subjective time that gave it form. In either case, one point stands— Eros and Thanatos interchange cyclically.

That is to say, there is more Eros, and then there is more Thanatos, and then there is more Eros, and so on. Always. Across every domain of existence— across every dimension of size or conceptual abstraction— signs of this interchange can be found. To some extent, what a pathology is, is the disruption of this flow— the breath inhaled forever, the breath exhaled forever; the eternal summer, the unending winter— though I prefer to get more into the weeds with regard to what a pathology consists of than this platitude alone.

What is important to understand is that, whatever the scale at which the interchange of these fundamental forces is being observed, it follows a steady rhythm. As Eros increases, Thanatos decreases. As Thanatos increases, Eros decreases. The crest of one is the nadir of the other. A cycle of solstice and equinox— periods of ultimate balance and imbalance— can be observed^[1].

The consequences of this interchange are largely dummied into the Framework and explicated in the next chapter, The Ladder of Sublimation. But keep it in mind— the rhythm of the interchange of Eros and Thanatos, the breath in and the breath out, is essential to the proper application of the Framework.

Hopefully now you have begun to develop an understanding of what Eros and Thanatos are. Of course, as we haven’t done much of anything with them yet, they’re not going to seem very useful— just as Nietzsche’s assertion that “all things in life may be judged by their tendency towards or away from the Will to Power” isn’t very useful in and of itself. Luckily, we’ll be applying the duality right away in the next chapter in which we discuss how the interchange of Eros and Thanatos gives shape to the human mind and human history.