The Virtue of Hubris

Aphorisms on Limit and Transgression

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For the Promethean, hubris is a virtue. If hubris is to be transformed from vice into virtue then, for the first time, it is possible to speak of an ethic of hubris. Hubris has become ethical. Of which ethos, then, is hubris the virtue? If Prometheus is taken as the model of our hubris, and if he is also the symbol of human futurity, then hubris, as virtue, might be the ghost of a future human ethos made present. The ghost-like strivings of our hubris are the birth pangs of an ethos not yet born, an ethos that does not yet fully recognize itself.

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Once, hubris was condemned as foremost among human evils and, as a consequence, it was caricatured. We tend to caricature the things we oppose. Even those who promoted hubris were, at least unconsciously, persuaded by that caricature. Now that hubris has been converted into a virtue, it is bound to appear quite different than it did formerly. We might almost fail to recognize that it is hubris at all.

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Hubris, at its most generic, is the transgression of boundaries, the overstepping of limits. The most generic limit is that which is. Expressed temporally, it is the present. In the mode of past time, limit takes the form of history as a fixed register of events. Hubris, temporally, is futurity. This futurity not only transgresses the limit imposed by that which is in the present, but reaches back even into the past. Hubris is sacrilegious. Sacrilege is, literally, “the stealing of sacred things” (the prototype of which is the Promethean theft of fire). It is in the fixed register of past events that sacred moments are set in stone as the immutable guideposts of historical and mythological time (that is, “temporal time” and “timeless time”). Hubris does not content itself with a mere reading of history, as of a fixed register of events, but steps back into the past and reconstructs it. Hubris relates to the past in the form that Nietzsche refers to as “monumental history”. Monumental history is the conversion of past into future, by an invisible hand that itself reaches out from the future.

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Promethean paradox: the present is the temporal limit of all that which is—the Promethean does not dispute this. He says: “that which already is does not concern me. I build my home in the midst of that which is not—and, for me, that which is not also is”. The magic word with which he expresses the paradoxical being of that which is not is “yet”—“that which is not yet”. The futurity of the Promethean is not an abstract concept, but a phenomenological paradox.

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The “pathic” (from pathos) expression of hubristic futurity is ambition, aspiration, and indomitable striving. Its “logistical” expression is the capacity for rational, long-term planning. This, on the surface, seems to produce a contradiction. The rational is the bounded and delimited, the “outward circumference of energy”, as William Blake calls it. It fences in. That which is indomitable cannot abide the grid of rational nexuses “enframing” it about as if with iron prison bars.

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These nexuses, expressed in the temporal mode of “timeless time”, are the Moirai, the mythological gridmakers. Hubris, like Hermes and Prometheus, transgresses the timeless limits drawn out by the Moirai, marking off one domain from the other (e.g. Heaven, Earth, and Hades). The chief distinction between Hermes and Prometheus is that the former’s transgression of boundaries is sanctioned—he is the messenger of the gods, and therefore must transgress boundaries in order to perform his duties—and the latter’s transgression is sacrilegious—the theft of sacred fire.

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Man is always already a transgressive being—he is a creature of heaven and of earth. His transgressivity is even more radical than that of Hermes or Prometheus. He does not only “do” transgression, he is transgression.

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Zeus and the Fates: sometimes mythology depicts Zeus as master of the Fates (Moirai), and sometimes as subject to them. This is because, insofar as Zeus promulgates and establishes Law, and that Law becomes a fixed decree, Zeus himself becomes the subject of his own Law. His Law is so irontight that it furnishes the bars for the cage of his self-confinement. Zeus cannot go back on his Word—which is to say, his Word becomes his limit. Which is to say, the fixed register of past proclamations becomes an occluding limit on futurity. Zeus’ access to the future is continually narrowed. This is why, according to the myth, Zeus’ eagle must parasitically feed on the liver of Prometheus. The liver is an instrument of divination. He needs Prometheus’ futurity in order to secure his rule, but must chain him down, that is, hamper Prometheus’ ability to act, because that same futurity, expressed as an action which brings about a new state of affairs, is the chief threat to his rule. Zeus cleaves futurity itself by dividing it into the two distinct aspects of future planning, on the one hand, and those actions which introduce novelty into the world, on the other. He instrumentalizes the former as the means of suppressing the latter. That is, he employs futurity-as-planning not in order to bring about a new state of affairs, which is the ordinary expression of futurity in action, but in order to repeat the present indefinitely.

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Empathy is an expression of social hubris, the blurring of distinct interiorities, transgressing the boundaries that divide person from person. Empathy tramples over the pseudo-concept “Other” and leaves it in the dust. Empathy, as a concept says that our interior worlds overlap—even in spite of ourselves. It says that we could not really be “other” to one an-other even if we tried.

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When one oversteps interpersonal limits this is a petty hubris. It is an overstepping of limits that reinforces another fundamental limit—one reinforces the limit of one’s individuality.  Grand hubris requires the presence of a collective, though not in the anonymous or undifferentiated sense; that we transcend the limit of individuality and move together toward piercing through the limits that condition us collectively.

To strengthen interpersonal bonds is to form a “macro-man”, a man capable, collectively, of greater deeds than an individual taken singly. That is, socialism is the precondition of the highest and most amplified expression of hubris. Collective action is the empathic mode of hubris.

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The “global elite” are not moved by hubris. Hubris is the grand vision that risks all. Hubris is Alexander’s ambition for world empire (this was, at least, a pathic expression of hubris), and yet it does not hesitate to throw itself, front and center, into the midst of battle, risking all on every occasion. The “global elite” want to consolidate comfort and security for themselves. Hubris is the coupling of a grand vision with the contempt for failure. The global elite, no doubt, think of themselves as “ambitious”. Their “ambition”, however, is the opposite of ambition as an expression of hubris—not the defiance of boundaries, but their construction. The elite’s only “ambitions” are profit and security, and their programmatic tendency is the conversion of the world into the securest (for them) possible profit-producing mechanism.

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“Be yourself”: —but my self is chained to the Caucuses, bound in iron. Only hubris can set me free, only through hubris can I “be myself”. That is, only by transgressing the boundaries of my self, can I “be myself”.

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Now, in light of this, we can reexamine the aforementioned contradiction inherent to the “logistical” mode of hubris. Hubris cannot abide to be bound by limits, and, yet, its action is always to construct limits, in the form of a “plan”, as the indispensable means of facilitating future-oriented action. The “resolution” of this paradox hinges on the word “bound”.  For Prometheus, as for Hermes, the limit is a boundary which does not bind. When Hermes traverses the fixed boundaries of the Moirai, he does not eo ipso also destroy them. The boundaries remain. The transgression of a boundary is not its dissipation, but its traversal. Transgression is not a destructive act, but an elusive and subtle one. The difference between Prometheus and Hermes must also come to the fore in this. While Hermes has the divine sanction to traverse these boundaries, Prometheus does not. Why is this? Because Prometheus’ motive in traversing these boundaries is to secure the divine fire which they encircle like a defensive wall, and this divine fire is the power through which worlds are made and unmade, the power of constructing, destroying, and modifying boundaries. Prometheus represents the forcible seizure and instrumentalization of the limit-forming power, rather than habitation within limits as within an already-given and fixed landscape. This is the technical mode of hubris (previously, we mentioned a logistical one, and a “pathic” one).

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What does it take to attain new knowledge, new perspectives, new horizons? We must look to Prometheus. He is the symbol of the task of knowing. One who wishes to know must have the willfulness to cross boundaries not meant to be crossed, to upset authorities “in high places”. It is not a total rejection of boundary and authority. On the contrary, the quality necessary is that willfulness which acknowledges boundary and authority in principle but rejects it in practice; that impudence which says “I acknowledge the validity of your Law, but I grant myself the privilege of being the exception to the rule—no matter the cost to myself or others”. The total anarchist, whether politically or epistemologically, cannot attain to the Promethean ideal, for he seeks to dissolve boundaries. One cannot cross boundaries if there are no boundaries to be crossed.

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The breaking of Law is an integral part of its use-value. Law acts both as a structural support for a certain delimited space, and as a pivot for leaping toward new spaces. Law creates a stable ground beneath our feet—just the condition we need in order to leap well.

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Prometheus is both boundary defining and boundary defying—at one and the same time, and in one and the same way. He is boundary “defyining”, if you’ll excuse the awkward coinage. Even the establishment of a law, for him, is already its own implied transgression. It is only set up as the ground and the means of its own defiance. To give an extreme example, the injunction against murder is the precondition of discerning just precisely who is supposed to be murdered and to facilitate their murder. That is, the establishment of a “universal” injunction against murder is productive of an inwardly peaceful society which, in turn, facilitates the strengthening of that society which, in turn, allows it to direct its powers toward “murdering” the members of enemy states, as well as directing hostile action toward its own internal threats. The injunction against murder, in other words, facilitates the murder of the “right people”. Under an “Olympian order”, those categories (e.g. as friend/enemy) are taken as “already-given”. Under a Promethean one, those categories are susceptible of redefinition. That which is distinctively revealed in these considerations is that the law is always already self-defying. This circumstance is not an exceptional characteristic of the Promethean. It is the capacity for redefinition as an act of defiance and defiance as an act of redefinition which is distinctly Promethean. In his defiant deeds, the Promethean causes us to reassess the meaning of our already-given categories, and in his speculative or theoretical redefinition of things, he opens up the way to previously unavailable or unconsidered courses of action, courses of action which, from the standpoint of the already-given categories, possess a defiant character. This is both liberating and perilous. The capacity for radically redefining who our friends and who our enemies are can furnish the means of opening up our “empathic field”, and extending it ever wider, but by the same token it can narrow it to the finest point. This “defyining” power, recall, is the technical mode of hubris. The double-nature of technology—as that which destroys and heals, that which liberates and imprisons—is present here also.

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The association of technology with innovation, as though the latter were part of the intrinsic nature of the former, is an error. Technology is fundamentally rigid, and rigid-making—regimenting. Real innovation is always transgressive with respect to the character of technology. This the key to understanding the archetype of Prometheus. He is both the symbol of technology and of transgression. He makes transgression itself into a liberatory technology, and technology into a means of liberation.