― Aristotle

For this article,1 and for articles henceforth, it must be understood that the Agricultural Revolution (hereinafter the “A.R.” for brevity’s sake) was truly the Political Revolution.2 By this, it is meant that while we may describe the derivative mechanism of the beginning of politics as originating in “cereals,” how human life fundamentally changed did not revolve around grains or rice, but total individual, collective, and symbolic security surrounding now-invaluable land, in a way that would have rendered itself phenomenally alien to mobile hunter-gatherers. In no measure did agriculture even significantly alter relative food security. Amongst a small tribe, in the Spring, Summer, or Autumn months, to find enough food to sustain oneself was no monumental task; agriculture instead facilitated the ability to feed a much larger population, not improve their true food security, for reasons that will become apparent later—though many of the perennial problems of food security all motile macro-organisms face persisted: Winter and theft, primarily. In fact, it could be argued agriculture worsened relative security, as it relied on the conditions it produced, structurally domesticating those humans who took up its practice. A crop failure could be the result of human incompetence, yes, but could also be the fault of microscopic factors outside of a Neolithic human’s concern, and a crop failure meant death on a scale unknown to hunter-gatherers. Worse still, not only would many more die of famine, but those who remained simply could not leave as motile bands of hominins could; the land necessitated that they stay and deal with the stacks of bodies, which would have been diseased, soiled, and had a profound psychological impact on the native population.

Thus, the role agriculture occupies in our minds, as having murdered hominins and converted their organic matter into humans, is better understood as holding a political character than one concerning mere appetite. It is the beginning of the city, the state, the sovereign, the caste, and from each of their intricacies, the drama of history. This article seeks to provide a comprehensive explanation of these mechanisms; therefore, we begin at the helm of the A.R. in the period ~0 HE.

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Agriculture supplanted many of the customs that had been held by the many races of hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and concerning appetite, the most fundamental change was diet. Whereas prior, the hominin reproductive cycle was so structured that tribes and the mothers therein invested enormous effort in the sustaining and survival of a single infant, the farming of grains allowed for the smashing of the grain into soft porridges, these substituting the traditional method of breast-feeding, thereby shortening the time between female conceptions by a many number of years. This we may connect to a rather broad, yet intuitive, ecological principle: any race of any organism will itself continually tend towards the numerical carrying capacity of the environment it inhabits. This does not mean linear growth, nor does this mean observable growth at all; this means only that, absent pressures that elsewise diminish the ability of the race to expand its numerical population, the race will always direct its quantitative count upwards, never downwards, and never consciously. In no small measure was this principle tested in the aftermath of the A.R., and it was not found wanting. As the anthropologist Bellwood put it, it was, above all else, the need for mobility that capped hominin races, such that in a given square kilometre, one may only expect to find two or four hominins; sedentism increases that number, not linearly, but exponentially, such that the same square kilometre may house dozens in a few generations, hundreds in a few more afterwards, and eventually thousands.3

Secondarily, it is important to identify the concept of cumulative wealth when we seek to explain the mechanics behind the Political Revolution. Non-agrarian societies were, on average, markedly more egalitarian because of this basic fact—the fact that wealth was always temporally transient—“wealth” as it concerns animal-nature is better understood as meaning “food” than anything coherently monetary in the historical sense. Food, however, lasts for a very short time necessarily; its unique social position as valuable is tied inseparably to its ability to be immediately consumed, either by its owner, a thief, or the invisible animalcules between them. Yes, grains can go bad, cattle may contract diseases, though fertile land will remain organically fertile; unless geology deems it so, that soil will continue to grow grains and continue to house cattle. Surplus is secondary to land. While prehistoric tribes punished selfish behaviour, such as through social neglect, leaving the subject behind, or, in extreme cases, murdering the subject,4 agrarian and pastoral societies “rewarded,” or rather, allowed for, selfish behaviour.

There, of course, was no “conscious” social reward mechanism, but where there exists a tendency and permission, there exists an exponential social momentum that will gradually redefine normalcy. Early humans would still have possessed a recognisably animalistic orientation towards their lives on Earth, that the “highest goods” were those which facilitated the continuity of their life and germplasm, and the “lowest bads” were those which prohibited the continuity of their life and germplasm. Thus, if in prior instances, one was punished for doing something that the group found restrictive to each individual’s ability to survive and reproduce, the ostracisation of the selfish individual prevents future individuals from committing a similar sin, for, amongst social animals, social death often precedes biological death. In the case prior to agriculture, selfish behaviour was hence repeatedly selected out by Darwinian means. If those same mechanisms lose their force or cease entirely, the animalistic appetite lacks an equally damning incentive to cease consumption. Those equally damning incentives to curb one’s animalistic instincts in humans arise far later, only in their mature history.

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While the commodification of land and life led to the rise of figures capitalising on the opportunity within their communities, equally it led to opportunists across them. When resources accumulate, scavenging animals, of which the zoological hominin was one, sharpen their gaze and wit for the benefit of themselves and their race. Neolithic villages in Northwestern Europe repeatedly demonstrate the ubiquity of large-scale violence between communities, to do with all manner of things, including pottery, textiles, grains, and people, most often women. This is demonstrated most notably by the rapid increase in ritualised collective burials (fig. 1). While speculative, the larger the burial, the more likely it can comfortably be said to be the result of primitive intergroup conflict,5 especially given (1) the violence exhibited clusters consistently around the spine, scapula, and cranium, and (2), the subject of violence correlates consistently with adult males, with few numbers of adult females or children.6 The second point is important in particular as the archaeological record indicates that adult females rarely, if ever, were involved in intergroup conflict during the Neolithic; thus, their relatively low count of corpses, analogous to that of children, is to be expected; and where it does show, it is alongside children as the result of social substitution common between warring societies. While it is inaccurate to say the Neolithic saw the first instances of ritualised intergroup slaughter, it is indeed accurate to say the Neolithic is marked by an unprecedented and unknown sense of scale, organisation, and tactical efficacy amongst the belligerents.

— Figure I —

This recursive loop of economic scale producing conflict, and conflict reproducing economic scale, led to a fundamentally war-centred environment, wherein it may be expressed that strategic acumen was actively selected for among primitive communities, such that only martially oriented societies were equipped to persist. A few factors may contribute to this mechanism, foremost among them being the enormous cost of war, both economic and psychological. Second refers to where exactly war will tend to occur. In early communities, this corresponded to West Europe and West Asia, primarily due to their already high population densities and, in the case of West Asia, slight geologic luck with respect to its exceptional fertility.7 Simply put, where agricultural or pastoral populations settled—in resource-rich, arable land—war became frequent because of their popular and economic activity; thus, greater activity resulting from greater numbers, and greater wars resulting from greater activity recursively set the environment for which the surviving races will be specialised for, making war a prestigious manner of thing. This further reinforces the conditions that lead to conflict, as well as the incentive of native communities to materially punish outer communities who are perceived to be potential hosts of future conflict. The last point in particular is similar to the infamous “security dilemma,” for our modern ears, though it still must be placed in context within the broader prehistoric phenomenology. Defensive security as an assumed concern—one requiring widespread action—may only exist if there is already an expected precedent of aggression as the mean, rather than the humble exception. Violent conflict expands from a merely economic phenomenon, governed by the principles of energy conservation, and becomes war-proper,8 governed by the cosmos, magic, and gods. Wars may now be waged to avenge past injustices, for the spiritual domination of other communities (e.g., rapes, scalpings), or to signal in-group value (e.g., trophy collection). In other words, organised war becomes an inseparable, unquenchable, common, and most strangely, a perceptually positive aspect of human life.

This is the primary difference articulated, that between mere conflict, of which all animals engage in, and war-proper, which is a distinctly human phenomenon. Against the Rousseauian picture of “natural man” and “civilised man,” natural selection, as it occurs both between and within distinct forms of life, is an artisan that works each time with the anatomical resources at its disposal. As the morphology of animals enabled them to devour one another, the novelty of the hominin, who was strung from the organic matter of primate-animals, in his entire seven million year existence, was found as no pacific exception; and thus the novelty of the human, who was strung from the organic matter of hominin-animals, was no exception, leading to the morphology of the society enabling it to devour others. This grim task of endless war fell upon those who had contested for responsibility of the land—those who, by the virtue and merit of their ancestors, accumulated vast terrestrial bounty. The period of ~5000–7000 HE is thus best understood as amounting to the first prototypic instances of socio-political instincts in the form of patriarchal clans.

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At the head of this era lies a deeply curious event, a Y-chromosome “bottleneck” stretching over 2,000 years (fig. 2).9 As a general rule of population genetics, N (the actual number of a population) is never actually equal to Ne (the effective breeding population); this is not theoretical, as it is indeed theoretically possible for N to equal Ne, but functional. This is often expressed as V(m ∨ f), where V is equal to the variation in the number of offspring per male or female. For example, if we assume N is equal to 5, to find both N and Nm (the number of effective males), we would express Vm = {2, 2, 2, 2, 2}; this means there is no variation in the number of offspring produced per male; thus, the actual population (N) is equal to the effective population (Nm), or 5. If instead Vm = {10, 0, 0, 0, 0}, the variation would increase dramatically; critically, the relationship between V and Ne is inverse.10 In the early millennia of the Neolithic, as the zoological hominins were dying off and being outcompeted by sedentary proto-humans, genetic diversity slowly drifted from its pre-agrarian unity into a rapid diversification in the period of ~3000–5000 HE,11 thereafter, once again, beginning to contract in the wake of hierarchical accumulation.

— Figure II —

As it concerns the interpretation of this drop, a few theories were put forth, one arguing that it could have been produced by high male infant mortality, another arguing that the centralisation of reproduction within agricultural centres merely gives the appearance of a bottleneck, and a third, given by the researchers who uncovered the anomaly, that the socio-economic stratification identified in our prior paragraph was responsible. Certainly each of these may have contributed to the anomaly, especially in its formative phases (~5000 HE), but the consensus as it concerns modern archaeogeneticists is that of interclan warfare resulting in the extinction of lineages that were ripe with intense genetic unity.12 In this sense, the three preceding “explanations,” particularly the second and third dealing with popular concentration and polygyny, function more as events that made such a sharp decline possible; the actualisation of which was contingent on the inter-clan warfare thereafter. Supporting this hypothesis, archaeogeneticists developed a computational model designed after the Lotka-Volterra Population Model,13 itself a mathematical model used in ecology to simulate predator-prey relations through time, but generally a dynamical model to simulate ecological cooperation and competition. The simulation demonstrated how, relatively quickly, many haplogroups went extinct while a few others came to possess disproportionate dominance, in spite of the general stability of the actual male population (N), across the entire period (fig. 3).

— Figure III —

Fig. 3 above is the chart as illustrated by the researchers, split into four phases and compared to a case where the same computational model is applied to a non-patrilineal haplogroup. The first phase demonstrates the set-up, wherein the patrilineal haplogroup (PT) is contrasted against the non-patrilineal haplogroup (NPT). In the former, only clan is accounted for; thus, colour is the primary distinction; the latter, both clan and haplogroup are accounted for; thus, colour and shape both hold significance to the model. When the second phase begins, the “killing phase,” both groups undergo a process of randomised eliminations. Casualties occur disproportionately by happenstance, and due to the little genetic diversity across clans, the death of an entire clan is equivalent to the death or critical endangerment of its corresponding haplogroup (shape). In the third phase, the “regeneration phase,” the disproportionate survival of certain clans allows for the slow diversification of their own haplogroups within the clans, as their regions begin to overpopulate relative to now-vacated land around them. The final phase, the “fission phase,” shows migratory patterns, as successful lineages settle land previously occupied by enemy clans. In the NPT run, however, while some clans still perish, the lack of monopolised haplogroups between clans prevents genetic diversity (shape diversity) from collapsing in the interim of stages one through four.

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The first article of this publication, The Metaphysics of Historical Symbolism, once again presses its merit here, in its articulation of the spiritual superorganism.14 When clans are spoken of as the first prototypical socio-political units, it is the case insofar as one’s relation to them was no longer recognisably hominin-individual, but human-existential. Purely animal-man, who cares only for his individual reproductive and economic success, may genuinely care for the lives of his fellow hominins, and even still, only continues to live for the sake of himself rather than his fellow hominins. The human who becomes subsumed to something abstract, a lineage in this case of the clan, no longer acts for his individual genetic interests, nor even that of its sovereign or the contemporary group that comprises it, but the interests the clan as an abstraction—a collection of things both biological and spiritual, that denote identity and meaning; he now lives for the clan and its genetic character, rather than himself; and this tie is existential, not merely functional. The erasure of the clan means, inseparably so, the erasure of the individual, including his genetic trace, in a sense only accurately described as top-down. Most importantly, once a tie becomes existential, the character of attachment ceases to be economical-rational and instead becomes political-superrational. It is only that, while the aforementioned article dealt with a maturely instantiated set of human races, clans—as they are prototypical—deal with an immature set of human races, who are still defined primarily by their genetic enclosure rather than their symbolic enclosure.

Interestingly, when we observe the stratigraphy of the early Near East, it is seen that in the closing centuries, and especially decades, of this millennia-long “War of the Clans,” the second period of reurbanisation (~7350 HE) is marked by a dramatic uniformity in the expansion of each settlement, followed by an immediate diversification after this period of formative centralisation, largely due to internal differences in political, social, and institutional structures.15 Given that the period of inter-clan warfare ended in ~7000 HE, by which it is only meant that male genetic diversity began to once again loosen, it would follow that in order to manage the clans and lineages that remained, centralisation-through-urbanisation would have sufficed as a mechanism capable of coupling disparate clans under the banner of an organising sovereign. More interestingly, this second wave of urbanisation in the Near East occurred almost entirely in previously desolated regions,16 and the cities therein were built such that scholars have referred to them as “citadel cities” in order to capture the monumentality and sophistication of their defensive architecture. This would suggest a relatively “sudden” (sudden on geologic timescales) interconnected cooperation that was previously unknown during the first wave of urbanisation over a millennium prior. Moreover, it maps quite uniformly onto the conditions of a post-war Near East, accounting for the “regeneration” and “fission” phases after conflict that were accounted for by the researchers, wherein clans would have slowly diversified over many generations once more before settling the now-emptied space of their previous enemies-in-arms.

As each clan would have found itself bound in the social, economic, and political affairs of each other, cooperation would have become the politically rational choice, such that clans would no longer see each other as eternally existential enemies, but those outside of their internal affairs as always potential enemies to the current order established and maintained. Each clan would be responsible for the land of its patriarch, all patriarchs in obedience to the sovereign of the city and the arable lands surrounding it which housed villages, hamlets, farms, and eventually boroughs and sister cities. All in obedience to the sovereign of the state, with the clans as the sovereign’s military arm, the clans would naturally develop into a nepotistic landowning aristocracy of warriors. The power of this centralising activity does not simply empower the sovereign, but the clans beholden to the sovereign, for each clan would now possess a legal recognition of their prior terrestrial claims, enforced by the sovereign and every other clan under the sovereign’s jurisdiction, in order to maintain the social, economic, and internal-political balance. Equally, as each patriarch would be wary of the power of the sovereign’s body politic over his clan’s nested political unit, each patriarch becomes unified in the interests of the state itself—which guarantees their social, economic, and political security—rather than unified purely in the interests of its temporary embodiment: the current sovereign. A clan-noble may wage war directly against the sovereign, and not the state itself, if the consensus among them is such that the current sovereign ill-represents the state as it is imagined. These warriors would be tasked by the sovereign with protecting the economic, popular, and eventually symbolic, existence of the state. In the words of the sociologist Charles Tilly…17

“War made the state, and the state made war.”

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If we are to philosophise this organic evolution, the primary framework we are to work with is that left by the Great Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal work Leviathan.18 While I have discussed Leviathan in prior articles, notably in The Genealogy of Fascism, his significance as it concerns this article is that of the foundations of the state, rather than his articulation of the state “properly” manifested. His treatment in that article was popular, as a psychological backdrop to the era of political realism that defined the interwar. Hobbes himself, however, was not writing for an interwar audience; Hobbes was writing for an English audience, in the aftermath of an especially self-punitive civil conflict.

The foundation of Hobbesian philosophy concerns his zoology, wherein he identifies two primary “motions” exhibited by all animals: vital motion, and animal motion. This may be compared to the vegetative soul and sensitive soul in Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy, for it simply means the generative and unconscious motion possessed by all life, carrying it from infancy to adulthood, and the individualised motions that define its particular behaviours, which present themselves as directed and voluntary. The importance is largely delegated to the latter “animal” motion, which he splits once more into appetitive motions and aversive motions, or rather, “towards” motions and “from” motions. Hobbes finds in man one exception to that of the animal in his imagination, which compels him to conceptualise abstractions, though to Hobbes, these abstractions supervene on his prior empirical experiences. Hobbes’ writing here may be characterised as nigh anti-Platonic, wherein he identifies the material as the purely sensed, and the imaginative as a mental distortion of empirical actuality.

According to Hobbes, power is equivalent to one’s capacity to act on his will. If you remember appetitive motions, Hobbes is to say man is drawn to other men based upon an imaginative or empirical appetite the other man satisfies. Great wealth, skill, reputation, success, wisdom, prudence, eloquence, intelligence are all forms through which men acquire [metaphorical] souls into their service. To have friends or allies is to harness the will of many men into the will of one man, in which the locus of this aggregate is capable of harnessing the collective will for the growth of his own power. Equally does Hobbes identify the treatment of a man as a window into his value, for in any actions taken in relation to the man, said action will either honour him or dishonour him. These actions amount almost entirely to whether or not other men look to the subject man in times of personal or collective trouble. A man who has fallen on hard times, and looks to his neighbour for aid, has honoured him. This honour system is the manifestation of man’s primitive set of manners and attitudes, which precede civilisation and are reflected through it. Power, pleasure, wealth, virtue, beauty—all of these present themselves as perennial goods to men, disregarding particular ethical objections, thus represent the object of the appetitive motion, with their inverse—weakness, suffering, poverty, vice, ugliness—represent the object of the aversive motion.

The hypothetical state of conflict Hobbes imagines outside of states reflects his belief of what “universal rights” fundamentally are. As he understands the primitive condition, each man possesses an inherent bodily equality insofar as they are mortal, motile, and thinking; and from such an equality springs forth the hope of each man believing in the ability of their persons to achieve their subjective desires, necessitating the full employment of their power. Hobbes understands rights as the universal condition of a man to literally actualise his nature, physically violable, but not metaphysically so unless the man voluntarily relinquishes command of himself to another. A man sovereign in his actions has his own reasons to reach for his own ends, unknowable or irrelevant to the sovereignties possessed by other men, busied with their own reasons and ends; the state of war is such that each man has the literal, metaphysical right to all matter, whether his own body, the body of his fellow man, or the matter between them. If you kill your fellow man, you have exercised your liberty to act, and not fundamentally violated his liberty, only prevented him from future exercises of his liberty; in the struggle between you and he, both liberties were employed to the fullest extent, and the result was a mere dislocation of previously concentrated organic matter.

We may say, however, many people indeed have a similar disposition in their ends; the vast majority of people are not aspiring warlords, only the ambitious and violent few, but in certain situations, many men would find themselves at the behest of one. The Hobbesian anthropology is such that, in nature, as it is with the animal, aversion often overcomes appetite. Should a primate be celebrating a successful hunt when a predator arrives, the rational decision in many instances, especially when alone, would be to relinquish the food to the more powerful organism and leave yourself in an even greater state of hunger. Though, if say, you and many others rally behind the naturally desirable qualities of a certain individual, and collectively utilise your wills against the beast, you may be able to not only defend your kill, but find further material and psychological success. The attentive will realise, however, that the more people exist under one banner who ultimately desire similar things, each will have to share what they collectively pooled under one individual to gain. You have effectively surrendered your sovereignty to he who decides your portion of the provisions, for it is he who is also responsible for securing you any provisions whatsoever. Among small and affectively bound groups, the largely egalitarian approach may work to ensure each individual feels his individual genetic interest is accounted for; among large and existential groups, individual genetic interest is no longer a concern of the individual, thus representation no longer necessitated. The clan does not represent you, but rather you represent the clan, whose thoughts and actions are unified by its patriarch—its sovereign.

The office of sovereign, occupied by the man who acts for the political justice as he decides, can do neither good nor bad, only act out his office, with respect to the common security, effectively or ineffectively. The ineffective sovereign is sovereign in office only; the office ensures he is de jure, though he is not de facto. In such cases, the true sovereign would be contemporaneously invisible, even to himself, and would arise only if—or when—the political situation demanded it, for the sword of the state would, without ethical conscience or parliamentary permission, manifest in his hand and animate him into history. In cases where a state has only a de jure sovereign, or lacks both a de jure and de facto sovereign, the de facto office is decentralised into those offices holding civil and military authority, primarily magistrates, barons, counts, governors, dukes, constables, captains, admirals, and marshals; each becomes sovereign over their own unit of the state, united in their common goal to preserve it, notwithstanding the fact that they lack a coordinating voice. In other words, the ability of the state as an abstraction, its ability to command souls into its service, is tested while it lacks a clear embodiment. These periods are short-lived, for when power recognises potential, it cannot help but locate a sheath on its belt.

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This is further articulated by the Great Gaetano Mosca, whose seminal work The Ruling Class helped to define a recurring socio-political principle we may identify as the Moscan Constant.19 The Moscan Constant states that, for any political organism whatever—whether local or imperial—two fundamental castes develop, the power of the whole of which is ultimately vested in the will of an individual. This individual must, in some capacity, justify his policies as greater than the matter of his material person. Mosca argued that the taxonomic classification certain governments received, both by premodern and modern peoples, characterising things such as whether or not they involve the input of the people, the level of centralisation, or the level of legalism, were ultimately secondary to the fact of their elite class determining all the political functionings of the organism. Those taxonomies, rather, only served to clue one into how said elite came to form, and predict the qualities of the elite it would produce.

The mechanism by which a minority is capable of exercising a disproportionate amount of force upon the majority, Mosca describes as constitutive of what the minority is—a curated, unified force, unified against the individual economic interests of the majority, the former of which is constituted by, whether in appearance or actuality—as self or posterity—certain gifts valued in the subject society.

I would hedge in one’s interpretation of the minority as “conspiratorial” in the modern sense, and instead place one’s understanding in the premodern context. If a society possesses two fundamental castes, one concerned with appetite and the other with politics, as politics concerns the ability to secure existence, politics requires the vast majority of the political organism’s “stored energy,” or monetary wealth. As the political organism’s “stored energy” comes from the land tended to by the majority, the ability of the political organism to secure its existence is reliant on the persistent economic inequality between the two castes, as the nobility’s taxing duty is only afforded by the bodily labour of the peasantry who extract immense economic energy from the soil. In a more mature political organism, one which possesses culture, as the peasant would trust a musician, poet, or artisan to craft something which adequately expresses their internal feeling, he trusts the statesman to draft a policy or declare a war that is ultimately for the security of the body politic—a bad musician is simply no musician at all, as he has not adequately expressed the feeling of the clerical elements of culture, as a bad statesman cannot adequately express the political elements of a culture. For the peasant is equally incapable of technically interrogating either, whether every legal citation of an archive or every note of an orchestra; he is entrusted by both the artist and statesman simply with the task of sensing results. As such, while the minority is defined by exceptionality and coherence, the majority is defined by mundanity and incoherence, insofar as each is organised only towards more mundane and individual ends within the body politic, not managing the highly complex relations between them. In fact, the inability of the peasant to parse a literary prose or a musical tablet is arguably more important than his inability to parse the law governing his body, for the political grounds its right to exist in the metaphysical, of which the clerical elements of culture—which are always sponsored by the political elements of culture—more directly express.

Mosca uses the example of Julius Caesar in Gaul, where Caesar is written as having declared that the whole of Gallic relevance could feasibly be understood as only being possessed by the land’s druids and knights, and in no way its peasants, who Caesar compared to functional slaves. Perhaps the irony of his own civilisation having a slave caste almost as large as its intended labour caste was lost on him, or perhaps not given his use of that fact for his political campaigning before and after his Gallic Campaign.

Regardless, the crystallisation of this fact is as legal as it is direct. Immediately after the rise of landowning clans, and on the path to a state-proper, is observed the increasing importance of textile development by agricultural communities. Given the expensive nature of textiles, most especially during the Neolithic, the ability to communicate wealth through unusually elaborate or colourful clothing was critical in the development of a visible caste system, which informed all those both within and without of the natural aristocracy of their cultural status; over time, these transcended mere social signaling and, in mature cultural-political forms, instead became symbolic containers of one’s metaphysical status within the civilisation. And in no meager part was the morphology of castes linked only to the nobility. The sickle, a tool developed to prevent the shattering of the cereal ear from more “primitive” methods (tugging and pulling at the grain’s roots), eventually outlasted its own utility, even as more sophisticated tools became developed, as the sickle had become inseparable from the very idea of the peasant.20 Sons adopted sickles from their fathers, and friends from their neighbours; it was cheap, recognisable, and fundamentally so, as metaphysically relevant as the most ornate robes of the clergy or intricate armour of the nobility.

From the period of ~0–11800 HE, the humans thereupon the Earth existed within a long, interglacial, agrarian equilibrium, defined by an ecologically sustainable energy capacity, a consistent ceiling of technical complexity, and organic cultural-political formations, with its mature organisation stretching from ~7000–11800 HE; it was afforded solely by the many millennia of development preceding—the Greenlandian and Northgrippian Ages of c. 0–7000 HE. In our next article, we will investigate the character of this period, the transition from prehistory into history, the empires that, through their vast chronicles and archives, came to dominate the historical record, and why exactly political empire was such a ubiquitous practice prior to the triumph of the industrious bourgeoisie and their social and economic successes in the Western Culture’s French and Industrial Revolutions.

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While much of our modern method of historical construction is owed to Gibbon, of which his obsession above any other concerned that of the collapse of this great polity, interpretations of its decline have circled since before the Roman state even fell, and far after through the medieval period and into the European Renaissances. Many of these presented moral cases, that the decline of traditional Roman virtues animating men to its defense was the ultimate cause of its collapse, Gibbon among them. Later historians, however, have attributed the fall of Rome to more structural reasons, foremost among them being institutional and economic collapse in regards to the dwindling of the tax base, the increasing expenditure of money on foreign mercenaries, and the political intrigue of courts in Rome and Ravenna. Some argue “barbarians” as the fatal thrust, others the death of figures whose impacts struck well above their weight as individuals.

Though, in this regard, the primary disagreement presents itself to be a disagreement between causality and contingency. Was the fall of Rome the necessary effect of prior causes, or could events have unfolded differently, perhaps at the behest of greatly influential figures who, through skill and determination, have prevented the collapse of the historical titan? Let us, then, examine these positions as they have been proposed through time, beginning with arguably the most foundational piece of modern historical work ever written: Edward Gibbon’s monumental and remarkable six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.1

It will become apparent throughout our careful treatment of Gibbon that his is a narrative of deeply personal dynamics. Considerations that would matter greatly to other historians’ understanding present themselves as minor or non-existent concerns to the drama Gibbon seeks to articulate. The soil of Rome is a stage upon which men act out their roles, and the first of these men who annex its light is none other than Flavius Stilicho, the “half-barbarian” saviour of Rome.

Flavius Stilicho, a crucial Roman general and regent of the 104th century HE is introduced by Gibbon in the following manner: “The celestial gift, of which Achilles obtained and Alexander envied, of a poet worthy to celebrate the actions of a hero, has been enjoyed by Stilicho in a much higher degree than might have been expected from the declining state of genius and art.”

Further, Gibbon seeks to establish that Stilicho was universally recognised during his life as possessing a heroic character, by both Germanic and Roman populations, in spite of his half-Vandalic origins. This was most apparent in the appreciation bestowed upon him by Emperor Theodosius the Great of the Eastern Empire (10347–395 HE), whom, after earning the distinction of being the last emperor to rule the entirety of a united Roman Empire, allegedly named Stilicho as the regent of both his sons and heirs—Honorius in the West and Arcadius in the East.

Gibbon cites a critical fact leading to Stilicho’s ultimate persecution, that of the larger political divide separating East from West. The foremost reason Stilicho was chosen as regent by Theodosius regarded Stilicho’s military experience against the Goths during Theodosius’ Gothic Campaign against the Visigoths in Thrace and Illyria. In contrast, neither of his sons held such experience, and were of no age to learn. Despite Stilicho’s claim that Theodosius named him as regent of both heirs, thereby naming him as the de facto emperor of the entirety of the empire, court intrigue in the East would refuse Stilicho’s claim to regency over Arcadius. Stilicho thus spent the remainder only in consistent contact with the Western Augustus: Honorius, whom Gibbon notably described as “disgraceful” yet “memorable.”

The death of Theodosius, as Gibbon interprets, was nothing less than a great tragedy in the drama that was the Fall of Rome. Gibbon considers Theodosius as one of the last symbols of old republican-patrician virtue still ever present within the empire, even in its death throes. This is in contrast within this section to Gibbon’s deeply suspicious attitude towards Christianity, a word he often italicises to establish either a mocking or dreadful tone. Theodosius’ status as arguably the most “pro-Christian” emperor (excluding future Byzantine emperors)—outlawing paganism (defined here as any non-Christian or heterodox-Christian tradition), trying citizens under ecclesiastical laws, demolishing antique Roman altars, or else—is folded away against his otherwise strategic competence warring with Rome’s political enemies.

Gibbon writes that, with the death of Theodosius, the reluctantly disarmed Germanic tribes in the provinces of Thrace and Illyria threw themselves into open revolt by Winter of the same year (10395 HE). Alaric would invade the Hellenic provinces, facing setbacks by Stilicho, though managing to sack Athens due to complications regarding Stilicho’s ability to command legions as Western regent in the Eastern Empire. With this, Gibbon in this chapter establishes a triadic sorting of figures that becomes a perennial feature of Gibbon’s narrative retelling [Hero, Fool, Barbarian], regarding Stilicho, Honorius, and Alaric. As discussed previously, Stilicho is discussed with the utmost reverence, a divine-like competence surrounding every action and decision he makes; this is often placed in direct opposition to Honorius, whose decisions are often begotten from ambitious or incompetent eunuchs in his court, his relevance to this period of history Gibbon articulates as “seldom.” Alaric, however, as a cultural outsider and political anomaly, is given the treatment of an irrational and savage “barbarian.” Gibbon refers to the Goths here as Scythian, which we may place in context as a blanket ethnographic term for steppe peoples. Of course, as we will uncover later, the Goths did not themselves originate from the lands associated with the Scythians, even if they later occupied adjacent geography, but this was not said to make a precise cultural classification; it is to evoke the undisciplined Orient as opposed to the stoic Occident. Their revolt is thus seen to be the nature of their “barbarism,” as predictable as an equation, of which only the divine intellect of Stilicho is equipped to handle.

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Stilicho’s death, then, is handled as one may expect. The man deemed responsible, a courtier named Olympius, faces a literary crucifixion on Gibbon’s plank of virtue. He is seen to be as irrational as the barbarian, an inner enemy so daft he cannot understand the fatal injuries of his own actions. What precisely led to the execution of Stilicho, however, can be seen as the interplay of multiple contributing factors, many of which stemmed from the uncertainty of his Vandalic ancestry; foremost among these concerns were dynastic.

In 10408 HE, the Eastern Emperor—son of Theodosius and brother to Honorius—Arcadius, perished. As the West’s magister militum (“master of troops,” the highest Roman military office), Stilicho sought to exert influence over the court of the new child emperor in the East, Emperor Theodosius II, in an attempt to reestablish his prior claim as the Eastern regent, though many in the West believed Stilicho to be positioning his own son as the heir to the Eastern throne, thereby displacing half of the Theodosian Dynasty with an imperial dynasty of patrilineal Germanic descent.

A separate, though notable, contributing factor was a series of catastrophic sensational events that were easy to utilise as rallies against Stilicho, damning much of the goodwill he had so worked for serving as a trusted general under Theodosius. Alaric’s many invasions of Italy had inspired the general to deplete the Rhine frontier of its traditionally stationed elite legions. While Stilicho certainly did not waste these legions, winning several key victories against Germanic invasions in Italy, this depletion, Gibbon sees, as resulting in the infamous c. 10406 crossing of the Rhine, in which a massive coalition of various Germanic tribes crossed into Gaul well into the winter months, facing incredibly little resistance. The province of Gaul was devastated, and many senators responded with rhetoric of shame. When Alaric then threatened yet another invasion of Italy that same year should Rome not pay him coin, those in Honorius’ court were emboldened to accept war to avoid further political humiliation, though Stilicho reasoned otherwise, paying off the would-be invader against the senate’s wishes much to their dismay, and unintentionally sending a rather subtle message to those in Honorius’ court as to who precisely dictated Rome’s foreign policy—neither the senate nor the emperor, but Stilicho. Gibbon quotes that the senate was more animated by “the courage of their ancestors rather than their wisdom.”

It is therefore in this context, in 10408 HE, that Stilicho was declared an enemy of the Roman state by Honorius, an event often described as reminiscent of a coup d’état, despite Honorius, legally, holding greater authority than Stilicho. Gibbon interprets this action by Honorius as partly motivated by insecurity regarding his own sovereignty, given that for what could be written about his reign thus far, Stilicho was functionally and arguably the de facto emperor, at least insofar as he was the centre of both military and diplomatic authority, to both subjects within the imperial palm and political units operating independent of the empire (i.e., Alaric, Radagaisus). Following Stilicho’s arrest and execution, an event the general could have resisted but decided against, Olympius returns to the centre of Gibbon’s narrative, this time such that Gibbon may attribute a Roman persecution of Gothic women and children inside the empire—resulting in the alleged deaths of over 30,000—to the supposed irrational bloodlust of this resentment-driven courtier. Most shocking of this action is that those killed were none other than the families of Germanic foederati, troops aligned with the empire.2 This, predictably, stirred great anger, leading to the flocking of these men under Alaric’s banner, whose numbers hence swelled with many deeply committed and trained former Roman allies. While we will discuss the merit of this portrayal when we reach future writings, one aspect cannot be denied: that this action, alongside the execution of Stilicho, led directly to Alaric’s first of four marches and dreadfully brutal sieges on Rome, culminating in the c. 10410 sack eternally imprinted on the memories of laymen.3

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In the decades that follow, the “Venerable City” of Rome is seen by Gibbon as having objectively, in all categories, degenerated deeply. The civilisation, once built upon the principles of military conquest, strict legalism, the steadfast protection of its subjects, moral justice, philosophical and historical wisdom, and great wealth, has instead melted into vanity, vice, folly, squabbles, vulgarity, and an undeservingness. The Eternal City, as it was known, was seen to be only eternal insofar as its founding virtues animated men of equal virtue to carry her forward, of which Gibbon saw that pool of men to be now vanishingly small.

It is in this context that Flavius Aetius arises to historical significance, or rather historical providence as Gibbon would have it: “The Gothic historian confesses that Aetius was born for the salvation of the Republic.” Aetius was a Roman patrician born to a wealthy Roman mother and a militarily accomplished father.4 In this sense, Aetius was the ideal; in no period would he feel out of place, whether his enemy be the Samnites or Huns. Aetius is portrayed as the picture of the rational intellect, inspired by his polis to possess a level of Aristotelian magnanimity. This imaginative picture is only further illustrated by his biography: a boy who enrolled in the imperial guard of the emperor as a mere teenager, rising through the ranks with effortless merit. Gibbon describes him as “... graceful, manly, strong, agile, beautiful, and excellent on the saddle, drawing the bow, or darting the javelin”—that he could “endure the want of food or sleep, possessing great courage and incorruptibility.”

As Stilicho was contrasted with Honorius, so too is the specimen of Aetius contrasted with Emperor Valentinian III, repeating the triadic structure, though now composed of Aetius, Valentinian III, and a yet to be introduced “barbarian” sovereign: Attila the Hun. Attila’s relevance in Gibbon’s narrative, at least as it pertains to his introduction, lends itself to the lady Honoria, the daughter of a competent Roman general under the late Honorius, and a briefly serving Western Roman Emperor in the interim of Honorius and Valentinian’s comparatively long reigns, Constantius III. To assert a level of independence from her brother, the emperor, and prevent a future arranged marriage, Honoria had sent Attila a wedding ring as a plea, giving Atilla, in his eyes, the jus belli for an invasion of Rome, under the impression that Honoria had proposed to him. In this sense, his “invasion” is more accurately framed, in context, as a demand of dowry. It is of little surprise that Gibbon portrays this action as indicative of the selfishness and nonchalance that defined the latter years of imperial politics.

At the time of Attila’s invasion, Count Aetius was serving as the magister militum of the Western Empire, and in the weeks of preparation he had been graced, he had desperately assembled a Romano-Germanic coalition with the intent on delivering Attila his first defeat. Attila’s march into Gaul had initially been slowed by a siege he had staged upon the walls of the city of Orleans. Aetius and his contingent of mostly Visigothic allies led by Theodoric, a son of Alaric, arrived in the midst of this siege, and as Gibbon quotes the words of the Bishop of Orleans, at this site of Aetius’ army: “It is the aid of God,” a further emphasis on moral divination. This site of relief, whilst inflaming great hope in the besieged tenants of Orleans, inspired Attila to break the siege, and as fate would have it, meet Aetius’ combined armies on the fields of Châlons, in the modern French province of Champagne, at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.

At the battle’s head, Gibbon quotes Attila as having spoken, “I myself will throw the first javelin, and the wretch who refuses to imitate the example of his sovereign is condemned to inevitable death.” This is, implicitly so, contrasted with the parliamentary rallying of Aetius’ army, seen to be the reasoned response to such an existential threat. It is such that while Attila commands like a warlord, through raw power, Aetius commands through respect and reverence, drawn to war by duty rather than glory, of which the glory that trails him is thus organic rather than manufactured.

Aetius’ military success against Attila at Châlons lent him nothing less than a celebrity status in the waning empire. If he was already before considered its most important general, as evidenced by his position, it was socially and politically arguable he was now its most important politician, period. This, as Gibbon writes, Valentinian III could not allow. Gibbon writes of the young emperor that he is weak and feeble, without either reason or courage, that he is resentful of Aetius’ success. On the killing of Count Aetius, Gibbon quotes “Valentinian, drawing his sword—the first time he had—plunged it into the heart of Aetius, and was imitated by his courtiers and eunuchs.” And thus the destined saviour of the Republic lay bleeding on a marble floor for the sin of triumph, condemned to death by his own emperor.

One courtier loyal to Count Aetius and a later Sanctified Bishop of the Church, expressed his dissatisfaction in the immediate aftermath of Valentinian’s actions, quoting, “Whether you have done well or not, I do not know. But know that you have cut off your right hand with your left.” Gibbon then recites a solemn Roman omen, spoken even during the time of Cicero, one that states for each of the twelve vultures observed by Romulus during the founding of the city, twelve centuries of Roman civilisation would illuminate the world, the 105th century HE being separated from the 93rd century HE by a count of twelve.

The death of Valentinian followed shortly after his personal killing of Aetius, for there were still those in his council who felt as if Aetius was cheated from further success only through the vanity of the young sovereign. It is in the years following both of their assassinations (10454–455 HE) that the stability of the empire began to crumble rapidly, a new political equilibrium, if such a word may even be used, gripping the Roman state.

The emperor who succeeded Valentinian, Petronius, is portrayed much in a similar light, though this time lacking a more direct contrasting hero such as Stilicho or Aetius—Gibbon finding it thankful that so little of his reign remained documented in comparison to the characteristic imperial fools that preceded him. Petronius’ short rule is marked only by his failure to prevent the Vandalic sack of Rome in 10455 HE, led by the Vandalic king Gaiseric, one arguably even more insulting than that of Alaric’s, given there was no true moral justification for the sack, as could be argued for the killing of the Gothic families in Alaric’s case, only political calculus in a seeking to establish an independent Vandalic sovereignty in North Africa; and much unlike Alaric, he did not even make the effort to prevent his contingent from looting Christian relics and treasures.

We hence arrive in what Gibbon appears to interpret as Rome’s “last gasp,” so to speak, the man vested with a duty of giving the empire an ennobled end: Emperor Majorian, the successor to the short-reigned Avitus. As with both heroes who preceded Majorian, an important scenery establishes the lens through which Majorian will be written: “The successor of Avitus [Majorian] represents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honour of the human species.” There are two textual “parts” in which Gibbon sets forth his ultimate description of Majorian. The former concerns—much like Stilicho—both attention from contemporaries and posterity as a character worthy of emulation, possessing skill, courage, premature wisdom, and fortune, who had maintained a connection with Aetius rather than the senators or eunuchs in Honorius’ court in Rome; the latter concerns a subtle premise. It proposes the idea that such a character representative of early republican virtue may have only derived from the heart, for, as Gibbon understands, “his environment provided no such visible standard.” His merit in policy and battle is not inferred as individual and situational, but rather his the result of his fidelity to the historical idea of Roman-ness; he does not simply “accomplish” in the narrative set forth by Gibbon, but rather summons the primordial and virtuous spirit of Roman courage and wisdom. The third and final triadic structure thus, one far less in historical length, reveals to be centred around Majorian, Petronius, and Gaiseric.

It is such that his death at the behest of his former political ally and magister militum, Ricimer, sounds the death bell of this truly ancient empire. After Majorian, it is observed that Ricimer, until his death right before 10476 HE, occupied the functional role—even if not institutional—not as de facto emperors like Stilicho or Aetius arguably had, but as military dictator, or more accurately, a kingmaker. The short-lived chain of largely powerless emperors following Ricimer’s death ended in that of the literal joking reign of Romulus Augustulus (little Augustus), a teenager who was deposed by the Ostrogothic king Odoacer, proclaiming there to be no new Western Emperor, and thereby replacing the Western Empire with the [“Barbarian”] Kingdom of Italy.

Gibbon’s is a narrative of intuitive moral decline. The neopagan romanticism bleeds through every page of his witty work. To Gibbon’s meritocratic sensibilities, an eastern faith, whose authority derives from the infinite and intangible, which prizes inner obedience and virtue rather than external actions, and whose supernatural figure hold an embrace to their subjects that is unconditional, presents itself as fundamentally incompatible with the faith which had originally brought Rome to triumph. There is, arguably, a true correlation Gibbon points towards here; it was indeed the belief of the founding aristocracy of Rome that the city had been founded by the twin sons of Mars—Romulus and Remes—who themselves traced their lineage to the mythical Aeneus, whose own escape from the Trojan ruins was facilitated by the goddess Venus. The Roman project, thus, was entirely predicated and legitimised by the presumption of divine authority, particularly the divine authority of their own gods, goddesses, and souls.

The Christian faith therefore displays a categorical rupture from this thinking. The faith is Judaic rather than native; its “God” cannot be obviously conceptualised in the mind as cosmic-based deities could; its myths and legends centre a foreign people and disrupt the easily racialised distinction between “Roman” and “barbarian.” There are many such differences, all equally destructive to the thinking of old, though to the extent Christinaity was solely responsible for displacing these older intuitions is historically questionable.

The emperors of Elegabulus and Aurelian, for example, prior to Constantine the Great’s conversion to Christianity, had already attempted, with varying degrees of success, to replace the old Roman faith with a monotheistic Levantine faith known as the Cult of Sol Invictus. Universal in its scope—referring to the sun—this faith, more so under the military-minded Aurelian, sought to provide a new organising religion that could embody the cyclical endurance, cosmic invincibility, and provisionary nature of the Roman state. While these reforms were largely rejected under Elegabulus, they were rather uncritically embraced under Aurelian, who commanded the unquestioned respect of the legions and peasantry for his seemingly supernatural victories against Rome’s enemies.

Also popular, however primarily among the legions and barring women from entry, was the eastern cult of Mithraism, renowned amongst the both the lower and higher troop for its focus on the masculine, the martial, and the esoteric, retaining the astrological focus of early Mars cults.

This is all to illustrate a broader idea that the foundational Roman mythos had long since passed in its ability to command legions of souls. While its altars and temples persisted long into the late Roman century of which this paper concerns, its practitioners had mostly retreated to the scholarly and priestly traditionalists, whose value was seen primarily as cultural and intellectual. While Emperor Julian, the last pagan emperor, attempted to reverse much of the favouritism early clerics had enjoyed, instead believing in the merit of religious tradition, his policies were largely unsuccessful and rescinded upon his death by his successor Emperor Jovian. As it concerned religious matters, the Roman populace became drawn increasingly on extra-native practices. This is unsurprising given that the prices of Romanisation undertaken by the republic and early empire rarely demanded the abandonment of local deities, symbols, or rituals, but instead only the inclusion of the emperor as among their practices of religious devotion. In this sense, Rome had become less religious insofar as the vast majority of its population was no longer ancestrally Roman, thus holding no blood ties to this inherently racialised religion. Christianity, merely, was the most widespread of these early eastern cultic practices, the most welcoming, and generally, the most appealing to the poor rural and urban peasantry.

As it may concern the success of Christianity as opposed to the Cult of Sol Invictus specifically, one may attribute to the nature by which either were socially generated, with the former of a top-down structure, only legitimised by the prestige of one of its advocates, while the latter grew from the bottom upwards for centuries, eventually becoming too large to either persecute into extinction, as Emperor Diocletian had attempted in the early 104th century, politically ignored as had been in the case in the 101st and 102nd centuries.

I am compelled to argue that Christianity, far from weakening Roman resolve, provided the only accessible faith of both exoteric resonance and theological complexity capable of animating the diverse Mediterranean and European populations into a unitary metaphysical community, with the Roman state as a divine emissary. The rapid multiplication of denominations, the intensity of debate within state councils, the outpour of philosophical, historical, and theological works, the investment of the patrician castes into churches and clerical projects; these all demonstrate an empire-wide religious fervor absent by this point from both paganism and Christianity’s eastern competitors. The Roman project, which had since far outgrown its infancy, was awarded a new divine authority for its political and religious activities.

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Our treatment of these events was regrettably quite broad, though as we begin to pivot to more modern scholarship, now that we exhibit a solid foundation of the long century that was 10376–476 HE, we may discuss events surrounding this timeframe, as historians have deemed important, in much greater detail. At the centre of 120th-century debates, entering into the 121st, are various sediments of dualities. The three primary dualities for our purposes are as follows: Roman collapse as structural or contingent, Roman collapse as transitory or sudden, Roman collapse as internally generated or externally forced. It is along these lines that we may begin to classify 20th-century frameworks, with some later frameworks even going as far as to explicitly identify with one or more of these taxonomies.

The foundational text in 120th-century revisionist literature appears to us as Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff’s The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, written and published in 11920 HE against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. Rostovtzeff’s approach was foremost structural and internal. To Rostovtzeff, the collapse of the Roman Empire, as he translated into modern ideological language, was the interplay of conflict between the “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” socioeconomic classes, meant to articulate a rural-urban divide. Early Roman history, more influenced by the Greco-Italian polis model, emphasised the civic virtue of the landowning aristocracy. As the republic, then empire, expanded to encompass vast swaths of land outside of Italy, the culture of the empire shifted towards hypermilitarization, particularly following a string of “soldier-emperors” who arose during and after the Crisis of the Third Century. The army began to increasingly draw from rural and “proletariat” populations, who were themselves less invested in the classical-urban cultural ideals of the earlier aristocracies. The ability of the army to seemingly appoint emperors at will as the empire dragged on further reinforced the misalignment with earlier urban ideals, and thus eroded much of the early Roman excitement which anointed its monumental conquests and feats. The introduction of large Germanic populations in Gaul and Iberia further disintegrated the Roman recruitment pool and tax base, constraining the resources of the already comparatively poor Western Empire.5 This model overall attempts to visualise the fall as representative of something analogous to a quiet civil war, one raging beneath the political drama of the centuries between its beginning and end.

Despite Rostovtzeff’s incredibly materialistic view of history, at least as it pertains to Roman history, and haven written during the rise of the Bolsheviks, Rostovtzeff himself was not a Marxist, although his willingness to extend Marxist vocabularies and intuitions onto premodern historical tales would indeed shape the future historiographical thinking of Marxists to come.

Also quite prevalent in early 120th-century interpretations was what one can describe as the transitory hypothesis, pioneered by the historian Henri Pirenne in his book Mohammed and Charlemagne. This theory, still holding a sizable number of adherents today, posited that the fall of Rome was not a sudden, measurable event, but rather constituted the gradual shifting of power from traditional Latin authorities to Germanic and ecclesiastical authorities, who themselves sought to maintain the structures set in place by antiquity.6 Pirenne argues that many structures connecting Italy with its other provinces, notably in Gaul and Iberia, remained intact, such that the “Roman lake,” as it were, still existed in economic spirit. Many inherited legal codes, similarly persisted, as well as papal authority. His argument most especially shines when one considers the reign of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy and, for a time, regent of the Visigothic Kingdom in Iberia. Theodoric’s sovereignty in collaboration with Roman papal authority and civic law, had him occupy essentially the traditional role of the Western Roman Emperor, structurally, in all but name, in spite of his insistence on instead maintaining the title rex, or king. Not only were these Gothic kings often socially and culturally familiar with Roman military and civic customs, but they often even supported their continuation, notably the institutions of consul and senate, which persisted, held even mostly by Latin-patrician peoples, well into the late 106th and early 107th centuries.7

The decisive “rupture,” as Pirenne argues, came about in the later 107th and 108th centuries, in the Moorish invasion of Iberia and incursions into Gaul, which ended the Visigothic kingdom, disrupted trade routes among the Germanic kingdoms in Western Europe, and facilitated a new age of Islamic-led Mediterranean piracy. Hence, Mohammed and Charlemagne; he interprets the rise of Charlemagne, the rise of the Carolingian Empire, and thus the rise of medieval Europe more broadly as indirectly the result of Islamic expansion out of the Arabian peninsula and into the Levant, Tunisia, and Iberia, isolating Germanic kingdoms in Western Europe from Roman-established management systems. This was in opposition to the dominant view of the time, which more or less assumed medieval Europe arose naturally as the effect of German invasions and migrations westward, dramatically ending the classical world, not torchbearers who rather only replaced the occupations of their Latin predecessors.

Much in a similar vein has the modern historian Peter Brown defended this notion, though far more focused on the point of elite continuity rather than economic. Brown posits, instead of a sudden collapse, the Roman centre of power gradually left the seat of the emperor and instead reorganised, among senators and patricians, under the clergy, particularly the Bishop of Rome, or pope. He treats Alaric not as a rampaging barbarian warlord, but a strategic and calculative Roman general, not particularly devastating or emotive, only seeking to maximise his political and economic gain in the face of repeated losses serving Rome without sufficient compensation. To Brown, Christianity provided a novel Roman moral centre around which the elite could socially and economically organise around, investing in clerical infrastructure and charity. In debate with Gibbon, Brown would assert that the bishopric of Rome embodied its classical values more than any man in its waning years. The deposition of Augustulus is seen to instead be a time in which the imperialship simply withdrew, leaving Rome not “dead,” but in the palm of local strongmen, such as Odoacer and Theodoric.8

Distinctly, one may recognise both of these interpretations as materialistic in their assumptions, in direct opposition to the more existential and spiritual holding Gibbon and authors prior to Gibbon often held. In contrast, with the arrival of the 120th century, a new historiographical method impressed upon historians its presuppositions: “if X cannot be measured (socially, institutionally, or economically), X cannot be interrogated as a possible cause, and if X cannot be a possible cause, measurable X is not.” Of course, since many of the more premodern assumptions of philosophical or theological historians often operated on fundamentally opposed frameworks, instead privileging the spiritual and incalculable, concepts such as moral degeneration, divine plan, or heroic exceptionality were substituted with the concrete. This substitution provided historians an alternative assumptive framework for which to read the data provided by primary sources; whereas the materially calculable phenomena of decline were previously thought of as effects of spiritual decline, they came to now be interpreted as the causes of material decline, of which was the only decline, with spiritual decline excluded from any constructed account—a method in which later historians accused of tautology.

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As to not get caught in any philosophical webs yet, however, we continue with the development of 120th-century debate, with the reassertion that indeed, the collapse of the Roman Empire constituted something sudden and dramatic rather than parliamentary and quiet. Bryan Ward-Perkins, a British archaeologist, put forth this exact argument following a series of archaeological digs across formerly Western Roman territory. Rather than relying on literary sources, Ward-Perkins’ method was to instead investigate material discrepancies across time, particularly as it concerned economic production. He primarily used pottery as a reference, given its ubiquity and importance in antique-era civilisations. The measurable decline in pottery from the 105th into the 106th centuries, Ward-Perkins proposes, alongside corroborating evidence concerning road degradation, reduced quality of burial sites, declining quality of infrastructure and housing, and technological simplification all instead point to a collapse more reminiscent in the layman’s imagination, rather than simply the Germanic adoption of native institutions, only threatened by much later Islamic incursions into Europe and the Mediterranean.9

We arrive at the final distinction, having covered both sides of the transitory v. sudden as well as the structural v. contingent, and thus find it necessary to contrast the prior views, all of which from Gibbon onwards, present an “internalist” view defined by the presumption that Roman collapse—regardless of the ultimate reason—resulted from a series of self-made blunders, with the “externalist” view proposed by historian Peter Heather.10 According to Heather, the Western Empire did not “fall” in the sense of failing to live up to earlier, more stable or sustainable standards, but rather was murdered by increasingly pressuring invasions by, primarily, its Germanic neighbours.

Murder, perhaps, is too strong of a word to capture the subtlety of Heather’s true argument. Heather’s “murder hypothesis” concerns not malicious intent, but migratory happenstance as the result of multiple intersecting political pressures, foremost among them constituting Hunnic westward expansion. The Germanic-Hunnic wars, the specific details at least, are largely lost to history, given the oral nature of the cultures involved, leaving us with Roman sources of the events as much of the only primary textual evidence. From these sources, however, Heather is able to stitch together a narrative of the gradual expulsion of Germanic populations from eastern and central European lands by the Hunnic Empire and into the territory of Rome. In his article, Refugees and the Roman Empire, Heather draws upon the historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s observation that throughout the history of the Roman Empire, one may attribute 33 cases of large-scale people-movements into its domain. To simplify this, Heather groups these 33 cases into various clusters, the first of which taking place in the aftermath of the Marcomannic Wars under Emperor Aurelius in the 102nd century, the second of which towards the end of the Crisis of the Third Century under Diocletian, then a drastic increase and succession of these clusters towards the fall-period—one in the later 104th century, another directly after in the early 5th century, and a final in the mid 105th century.

The traditional Roman view of refugees, concerning more accurately the mid-to-late imperial period, was more structured by a political and economic calculus rather than the strict cultural chauvinism present in earlier centuries. The Roman state was especially welcoming toward [comparatively] small-scale migratory populations willing to settle as either labourers or troops, the latter of which became increasingly common as overstretched borders and devastating plagues compelled it to.1112 However, Rome remained suspicious, to outright hostile, when large-scale movements of foreign populations into the empire occurred.13 For our purposes, it is the migratory periods of the late 104th through the 105th centuries that interest this paper. In the year 10376 HE, the Eastern Emperor, Valens, reluctantly agreed to permit the entry of a large population of Goths inside of the empire, in modern-day Thrace, with the traditional expectation that this group would settle as agricultural labourers and military allies; among their numbers lay the future king of the Visigoths: Alaric. Unforgiving treatment at the hands of local Roman citizens and officials, though—primarily concerning sheltering and food supplies—would invite the Goths, under their king, Fritigern, into open revolt, beginning the Gothic War. This refers to the same Gothic War earlier discussed in regards to Emperor Theodosius and Stilicho, though in its opening stages. Two years following the beginning of open hostilities, the Goths would win a stunning victory in the Battle of Adrianople (10378 HE), killing Emperor Valens and securing one of the most catastrophic Roman defeats in their long history.

This defeat utterly crippled the Eastern Empire’s military, and without a clear heir to succeed Valens, the Western Augustus, Gratian, quickly named the closest general to the catastrophe as the Eastern Augustus: Theodosius. After a series of minor skirmishes, Theodosius would strike a deal with the rebellious Goths, granting them a significant sovereignty in the province of Illyria, where, once Alaric would rise to become king, Theodosius would welcome Alaric and his Goths as foederati in the Roman military. In the months that followed, Alaric would fight alongside Theodosius and Stilicho, notably against a Western usurper, a war in which Alaric would suffer a great many casualties, and without sufficient compensation. Thus, with the death of Theodosius only months later renewed Gothic conflict in the Balkan provinces, and following the aforementioned events in section one of this paper, culminated in a truly independent Gothic kingdom in southwestern Gaul, otherwise known as Aquitaine.

In between these events, however, is located the second of the three major migration “groupings” identified by Heather, the migrations from 10405–410 HE, the c. 10406 crossing among them. Whereas the commonly understood position held to it that the crossing was the result of the abandonment of the Rhine frontier by Stilicho to halt the invasions into Italy, Heather instead argues that, no dissimilar to the initial Gothic migration under Fritigern during the time of Valens, Hunnic westward expansion was in equal part responsible for the Rhine crossing. His reasoning follows that once the various Germanic tribes crossed into Gaul, who were seemingly stung together in a pseudo-alliance for no discernible reason, they did not march southwards towards Italy, but rather stayed settled in Gaul, establishing various independent pseudo-states in formerly Roman territories.14 In conjunction with Rostovtzeff’s naming, this loss of land deeply disturbed the material base of the Western Empire and thus its ability to effectively respond to significant threats.

Heather’s ultimate conclusion, then, is that the fall of the Western Empire was the result of an external chain reaction outside of imperial control, stemming from the expansion of the Hunnic Empire from the steppe westwards.15 It can be said that the mass movement of these peoples into imperial sovereignty, slowly stripping the Western Empire of land, people, recruitment pool, and its tax base made it such that the empire began to more often rely on the military alliance-ships of foreign Germanic kingdoms within former lands, therefore legitimizing their claim to rule and causing local Gallo-Roman officials to begin entering their courts as the managers and patrons of Germanic lands rather than Roman. This process, somewhat crudely, has sometimes been labeled the “Germanisation” of the Roman military.

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This interpretation, beyond Heather, has further been implicitly corroborated by the historian Michael Kulikowski in his work Rome’s Gothic Wars, in which, on writing on the events from the initial Gothic migrations to their settling in Aquitaine, sets forth the premise that, per the example of Alaric was set precedent to future would-be invaders that one could indeed settle in Roman lands without paying tribute, abandoning their culture, or relinquishing the ability to govern themselves independently.16

Beyond this agreement between the two historians still lies an incommensurable style of writing regarding the fall of Rome. Whereas Heather presents his view of collapse as the most academically heterodox in its assurance of conditions completely outside of imperial jurisdiction, Kulikowski instead speaks in a register reminiscent that of Gibbon, in that while Heather speaks in peoples, Kulikowski speaks in terms of individuals. Kulikowski’s framing of Stilicho, for example, in Rome’s Gothic Wars, are of a romantic style, even contrasting Stilicho’s political competence with the child-like inability of Honorius. He quotes, “Stilicho himself is a sympathetic figure… He had the misfortune to command the Western Empire in the face of severe external threats and to do so for an emperor incapable of inspiring confidence, even as a puppet and figurehead. No one could have countered every challenge Stilicho faced, and his enemies sought explanations for his periodic failures: latching on to the fact of his Vandal descent on one side, they argued that Stilicho demonstrated the inevitable treachery of the barbarian… Stilicho’s many years of conflict with the Eastern court should not be understood in terms of his Vandal blood, or more general barbarian ambitions to dominate Roman interest, but rather as the political intrigue that attends any royal minority…”

This is, however, a sentiment that has faced direct antagonism. Whilst most historical understandings of the fall of Rome opposed to that of Gibbon’s moralised native are often implicit if their denial, seeking to focus on other reasons Rome’s fall was inevitable, or attempting to restructure the understanding entirely.17 These critiques often aim to suggest that modern narratives, which prize figures such as Stilicho or Aetius, implicitly draw upon the theological narratives of Christian and pagan authors living in Rome during the events leading up to their deaths. These such moral narratives were constructed primarily by the 107th century Christian monk Johannes Antiochenus, whose understanding of Aetius as a “bulwark” against the barbarians, particularly Atilla, lends an unavoidable drama and moral lecture when considering the circumstances of his death. Many of the details and quotes Gibbon pulls, for example, regard Johannes retelling of 105th century events, such as the detail of Valentinian having personally killed Aetius, and a later bishop speaking to Valentinian that he had cut off his right hand with his left; it is to emasculate Valentinian even in his supposed moment of triumph, that he did not “reclaim” his sovereignty from Aetius, but killed the only suitable vessel Roman sovereignty could possess—that sovereignty is not freely given and taken, but a wild beast who requires taming, the qualifications of which cannot be artificially substituted for.

It is seen that in the aftermath of the deaths of Count Aetius and Emperor Majorian, though especially Aetius, who enjoyed a great deal of posthumous elevation by the Eastern Empire, many among the aristocratic and patrician classes of Rome had believed Rome was near its collapse. Refocusing our gaze on the kingmaker and effective military dictator of the Western Empire in its final years, Ricimer, there existed coded critiques of his political order circling among literary circles, pertaining to the fragility of his counter-institutional rule.18 Sidonius, a Roman aristocrat, was one such author who, in a narrative regarding his travels, wrote a ciphered criticism of Ricimer’s alliance with Emperor Anthemius, by which the political clout of the former catalyzed the imperial ascendency of the latter. He even subtly links Ricimer to Alaric, as both barbarian threats to Rome, given Ricimer’s own Suevic-Gothic ancestry. If Gibbon’s word is to be believed, the man who wrote this text was indeed also the courtier who counseled Valentinian following his assassination of Aetius.

Further, do we begin to understand how precisely foreign threats to the empire were perceived by Romans in the aftermath of the fall, with one such source by a Byzantine historian named Jordannes, providing a particularly scathing image. As we noted prior regarding Gibbon’s use of the analytically improper ethnonym of “Scythian” when referring to Alaric to evoke the image of a character both oriental and otherworldly, so too were these the common interpretations throughout the periods in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Western Empire and well into the medieval period, which, with great correspondence across many medieval scholars, attempted to attribute barbaric qualities onto historical figures through physiological descriptions. Attila the Hun bore the worst of these racially charged judgments, a fact which invites little surprise when one is to consider the more general fear and distaste present of Turkic, Ruthenian, and Mongolic populations held among Europeans. The soldier-historian Ammianus, a contemporary of Attila, went as far as to describe Hunnic populations in beastly manners, a sentiment easily reproduced to mean injurious, ugly and demonic among later Christian scholars.19 Critically, however, was the principle that for whatever qualitative judgment was levied towards Attila found its way from the top downwards to his troops and people, leading to an important concept worth dissecting: that “Attila became a canvas upon which any scholar’s feeling towards the Hunnic people could be expressed.”

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It may be expressed that the contemporary understanding bore the mark of a way of thinking in which “individuals” could not so easily be separated from “peoples,” as certain recent historiographical interpretations have assumed, but that individuals were important, recited, indispensable to understanding precisely because of their relation to a broader people easy to classify and other. In this sense, as easily as Attila may be reproduced as the Scourge of God, Aetius and Majorian may be reproduced as among the caste of Cincinnatus or Scipio, only understood through the lens of the quality of people that caste may produce. And therefore such an understanding could be reached that as easily as the caste of Cincinnatus and Scipio could reproduce Aetius and Majorian, so too could the caste of Superbus and Nero produce Honorius and Valentinian. It could indeed be argued that the conditions by which figures such as Alaric, Attila, or Gaiseric were able to wreak such unmitigated havoc was through the political ineptitude of many of those in institutional power, who otherwise, if replaced by individuals harboring qualities which demonstrably marked their indispensability, could have just as easily produced conditions the empire could have surely recovered from, if not indefinitely, then longer than it would have otherwise, such as it did after the interventions of Gallienus, Aurelian, Probus, and Diocletian in the 103rd century crisis, or Constantine in the fallout of the tetrarchic period.

There is little doubt among historians that, at the micro level, it was the ability of individual figureheads who decided immediate outcomes, of which the historical record corroborates. In this sense, we can assess competence, understand that, in the time Alaric threatened Rome (10395–410 HE), his repulsion—repeatedly, first at Pollentia, then Verona—was not driven by Honorius, nor the brazen contempt of religiously devoted senators or eunuchs in his court, but Stilicho’s pen and sword alone. It is of an equal measure that, if we were to consider the absence of Aetius in 10451 HE, there are no obviously discernable avenues by which we could imagine the Goths—a people who had been previously beaten into a fearful flight across the Rhine and Danube by the Huns—could have delivered Attila a similar defeat, leading to his retreat and the abolition of his supernatural mystique.

Furthermore, none of their deaths were necessitated, nor would they have to be for a structuralist argument to be made, for that would then presuppose the primacy of the individual. If we are to accept that the competence and placement of an individual may shape a great many number of the outcomes they involve themselves in, and that their deaths were not necessary, one may further expect the competence that led them to those victories would not inexplicably vanish in the following years. It is to say, if Count Aetius had unfortunately perished in Alpine Campaign, or Frankish Campaign, or in his civil war in Italy against Count Bonifacius, then, as established prior, he would have been unable to establish a unifying centre of gravity against Atilla later that century; but it is attestable that the competence leading him to both his many victories in Gaul and in the civic struggle of his early career, demonstrably derived from the similar substance which led him to victory at Châlons. It is a truth of the historical record that Aetius and Valentinian cohabitated the late West, its particular environment, and it is of an equal truth that of that cohabitation, only one was able to positively manipulate the outputs of those conditions. That those structures pointed to as the poisons of empire, whether internally or externally generated, necessarily so, encountered the minds of political actors unequal in their ability to actively shape historical outcomes in their favour.

While I am poised to agree with the historian Heather in his assessment that many of the Germanic incursions into Rome were indeed externally motivated, rather than as the result of Roman border mismanagement,20 many of the consequences of these settlements had, in prior centuries, presented themselves to be insufficient. The magnitude of these settlements are insufficient as explanatory either, when considering earlier emperors, such as Emperor Probus. Out of Probus’ relatively short five-year reign, therein he organised a series of large-scale military campaigns in Gaul that, despite the region having been reconquered by Emperor Aurelian years back, still hosted (reportedly) hundreds of thousands of Germanic tribesmen, whom Probus was quickly and efficiently able to extirpate in their entirety. There are reasons external to the individuals that must account in these differences, of course, most notably in reference to the Vandalic settling in the significant tax-base of North Africa, although I would warn against interpreting external events such as these retrospectively as actual causes rather than serious constraints.

One could analogously set forth with the proposal that the Palmyrene secession in the 103rd century presented a similar strain,21 that should Aurelian, or any of his successors, not had swiftly reconquered the Egyptian provinces, a similar fate would have befallen Rome then. Though, living in the world where this was not the case, it is impossible to thus label the Palmyrene secession any such “cause” of Roman collapse, for action reversed it, as a potential success at Cape Bon could have reversed the 105th century condition, should the commander sent had possessed the capability of his murdered contemporaries.

As to not web this paper in unnecessary argumentative political theory, I will simply set forth with the proposition that the concept of sovereignty exists independent that of their institutional titles; sovereign is he who has the most literal capacity to suspend or generate law. In civil war, for example, there is a beginning condition, a multiplicity of fundamentally opposed premises—each an instance of a once unified polity—with all holding to the fact that theirs is the correct and legitimate claim, each with their own laws expressive of those claims. For whoever then triumphs, whether that be through conflict, alliance, or diplomacy, it is his written law which prosecutes the vanquished, and not some other law.

It may be observed in the years between c. 10376–476, sovereignty was increasingly something in need of consistent exercise, rather than something by which law alone compelled obedient assumption. In prior years, a title was tightly coupled with power, as a lack of external threats or internal crises demoted the need for frantic policy decisions or military campaigning. In fact, at such times policy or military action were exercised by a sovereign, they were so exercised as a show of imperial excess and wealth rather than political necessity. Fittingly, it is arguable that the last emperor of a united Roman Empire, Theodosius the Great, represented the last instance in which title directly conferred power. Actors afterwards, such as Stilicho, Aetius, and Majorian, despite all holding institutional legitimacy and high-imperial titles, only held their formal imperium insofar as they maintained effective control over military and fiscal responsibilities. It is befitting that the character of an adult man who holds his formal imperium in great regard, but defers the responsibilities of its symbolism onto his subjects, would only actually care to act when he feels—or is given the feeling—that his formal imperium is threatened, his then-actions only taken against those onto whom he displaced his own responsibilities. This process, against the grain of Heather, may only accurately be described as viciously self-punitive.

This is true of figures such as Honorius or Valentinian, who implicitly relied on deferring responsibility into the hands of the aforementioned figures to maintain their own August titles. While the late West does not demonstrate that institutional legitimacy was entirely decoupled from effective sovereignty, it does demonstrate that with the acceleration of many crises generated by foreign actors—most of which were of an economic character (the loss of farmland, tax revenue, and human capital)—whoever was effectively responsible for their management, regardless of title (as noted by Stilicho, Aetius, and Majorian all technically holding different high-imperial titles),22 became instead reliant on holding their title through their own personal competence in navigating court politics and managing threats, with the inverse being true in previous periods—formal imperium previously begetting effective imperium. The crucial failure of these figures, thus, lies not in their infrequent military or civic defeats, but in otherwise minute or arbitrary blunders in court—performative failures that then stripped them of their titles. In the absence of these figures, before or after their ascension to these titles, the character of the other actors who held their positions were often of a much lesser capacity to inspire and triumph.

Each time one of these disproportionately impactful figures were killed, often as a direct consequence, catastrophe struck Rome in the immediate time thereafter. This can be written as the case for the execution of Stilicho preceding Alaric’s wars with Honorius culminating in his sacking of the city by two years, the assassination of Aetius preceding Gaiseric’s sack culminating in the Vandalic War (461–468 CE) by one year,23 and Majorian’s death preceding the deposition of the final Augustus by slightly over a decade, regarding a time in which the throne resided in the control of magister militum Ricimer. While elements in the imperial court after the death of Majorian exercised some level of independent ability, notably Emperor Anthemius and Emperor Nepos, Anthemius’ was later forced into open conflict in Ricimer, which would see his deposition from the throne, whereas Nepos was betrayed and forced into exile by an opportunistic magister militum named Orestes he had appointed that same year. The son of whom, Augustulus, would serve as the last man to hold the claim to emperor, unrecognised by the Eastern throne. This before, due to the political blunders of his father in dealing with the Scirian foederati under his command, Augustulus would be deposed and replaced by Odoacer.

The Germanic warlord instead then adopted the title of rex italiae. In Odoacer’s great moment in history, in his (seemingly) permanent conquest of Rome that neither Alaric nor Gaiseric had achieved, he does not choose to adopt the title First Citizen, acting with universal proconsular authority, nor Dominus for whom unquestioned religious and political obedience would be demanded, but the King of Italy, specifically. He defines his domain, not as the universal centre of the civilised world, but as a bounded kingdom in the Italian peninsula.

Brown argues compellingly that this was not the fault of Christianity, but that Christianity, if anything, assisted Rome in its waning hours, particularly as it provided a novel spiritual reconciliation that the old pagan religion had been lacking in recent centuries, and more importantly, provided a common socioethical language among the political elites of Rome and whichever tribe it was interacting with. Instead, the decline of formal power is attributable to the incredibly gradual process of the socioeconomic and cultural recentring Rostovtzeff articulated. It is of no mystery what catalyzed the growth of Rome, broadly speaking, in that its culture rewarded the aristocratic triumph. Social reward mechanisms were tied deeply to civic responsibility, ethical virtue, religious fidelity, military courage, and legal obedience. This was tied to the self-understanding of the Roman patrician caste as descended from ancient Trojans. The gradual decline of this norm one could attribute as beginning as far back as the Social War (9910–914 HE),24 accelerating under the professionalisation of the army under Marius and land reforms of Caesar, and arguably completing by the period of the Severan Dynasty and 103rd century crisis.25

Despite the affirmation of Brown, I find the transitory hypothesis misplaced in that it assumes for a Roman collapse to have been sudden, social change must have been equally sudden; I find the social continuity emphasised to be largely expected given the widespread adoption of Christianity, though such explanations miss the intuition as to why the field of Europe felt to contemporaries, as it continues to now, qualitatively different. A collapse, we may say, regards something supersocial, such that the subject of discussion is political existence instead of social. In this regard, I find Ward-Perkins evidence for a sharp collapse based on archaeological finds in the collapse of pottery production, the decline in general quality of infrastructure and burials, the simplification of technologies, and road degradation, as ultimately indicative that among the political actors of the time, it was experienced that the central node of politics in the European continent, and Mediterranean Sea, was unmistakably lost.

Brown’s argument that the Catholic Church, especially the Roman bishopric, replaced traditional Roman power among Italian elites, maintains inexorably a spiritual and religious truth, though a material truth it does not. In the centuries following 10476 HE, the Roman Church would be repeatedly threatened by these new barbarian kingdoms; the pope had no army, nor did it have the support of the Roman state. Its ability to freely pursue its political will, once facilitated by the aura of the Western Empire and her capable commanders, was now restrained in navigating the complex and volatile political stage of pre-feudal Europe, in which its institution acted as a social, ethical, scholarly and, of course, religious centre rather than as a political centre.

For example, as Brown himself authored, Count Aetius carried out a series of campaigns in the Gallic provinces from c. 10426–432 wherein he won key victories against a great many Germanic tribes as well as against certain revolting peasant populations. Upon his return, the senate greeted him with a large golden statue commemorating his campaign and triumphs. This informs us, as well as the later scholarly writings by the aforementioned Johannes, that in his time, Aetius was seen to be a central figure through which the Roman state was embodied. By this, I mean regardless of the many independent kingdoms settled within the Western Empire, the ability of a Roman general to campaign and win victories conferred to both Romans and foreign bodies alike that the Roman state was still an unignorable political actor capable of provisioning for its citizens and exercising authority over its acclaimed land. Following the deaths of Aetius and Majorian, this view would have been heavily weakened, with it fully shattering in the aftermath of the Battle of Cape Bon and later exile of Julius Nepos by Orestes.

In the decades following Odoacer’s ascension, travel across former Roman territories would have remained dangerous, as it was throughout the entire 105th century, though with no legitimate political body to point to, such that a migrant or trader could imagine that land routes would one day be forcibly rescued. One would have to pass through multiple independent, powerful, and conflicting polities in Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and Illyria; tax collection would have remained comparatively decentralised, and there would be no imperial army whose leader could claim authority to campaign across any former Roman region of his choosing without the legitimacy of such a campaign under question. Most importantly, these factors, to the men of the time, would have presented themselves as being irreversible. The existence of figures such as Aetius and Majorian did not act outside of these aforementioned conditions, but informed Romans and foreigners alike of the idea that these conditions could indeed be overturned as had been the case in prior centuries; their deaths condemned that idea to an equal fate.

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In the 21st century, it is the luxury of the philosopher, theologian, mystic, or scientist to describe things in great technical detail, to speak of “fields,” “particles,” and “forces,” cosmic topology, mathematical models, and spacetime geometry, referencing experiments and findings as if their universal ontologies are vindicated by them; and to further and restlessly seek to either expand their genuine empirical knowledge of these fields, maliciously engage them, or simply aggressively misunderstand their intricacies. This incredible sophistication of technical language, however, whether one may conscript quantum indeterminacy into the favour of their neo-idealist ontology, or organic chemistry in the favour of their mechanistic ontology, science only supplies thinkers with more jargon and pages referring to their ultimate “how,” not their “is”; those are questions of inner faith, answerable only to one’s gifted intuition. The “how” concerns only the mechanism of the “is,” following the necessary application of one’s metaphysical “is” onto one’s understanding of the physical.

Though, as we will come to learn, the physicalist did not first arise in modern Western philosophy, even if he was known by another name in the annals of history. For the physicalist’s true name, as history has decided, is the atomist. Such were the atomists of the Mediterranean world, Leucippus and Democritus, refined by Epicurus in Greece and Lucretia in Rome, and so too did atomism develop in the many cultures of the Asian continent, among philosophical schools founded by the radical philosophers of Ajita Kesakambali in India and Wang Chong in China, with atomist intuitions even reaching the intense religious zeal of Muslim communities in al-Andalus, at the behest of the scholar Abubacer. The historical intuition of “physicalism” far exceeds its current stance, and in no small measure would the gripes of a modern physicalist regarding the specific ontological commitments of his atomic predecessors outweigh their deep epistemological commonalities.

The apparent sophistication of a modern “physicalist,” or rather, a modern atomist, may draw upon in order to justify a reduction-to-mechanism worldview is indebted only to the intense scientific focus of the Western polities within its past centuries, though the ultimate justification has remained daftly the same. It is ultimately irrelevant to this paper the exact syntax of the entire following passages I have elected to include, nor any future passages that will continue to provide physical descriptions for whatever reason. For if I had been born in a century prior to Einstein and Schrödinger, the understanding of Newton would have structured this paper’s scientific descriptions, and universal Natural Laws would have been emphasised; and had I been born prior to Newton, the understanding of Ptolemy and Aristotle would have structured my understanding, and the terrestrial motions and five elemental natures would have been emphasised. I am confident that by the 22nd century, or the 23rd, should the industrial West still live and be so scientifically inclined, perhaps a new school of genius thinkers would have so altered our physical terminology—through the miraculous vindication of LQG, string theory, or some completely overlooked mathematical-experimental resolution of quantum gravity—that had I been born then, my opening will have reflected as such.

One must remember that science is a science of representation. Newton was “wrong,” as far as the modern physicist is concerned, regarding his precise formulation of what gravity truly is (mass-centred rather than woven into spacetime geometry), but he was close enough. So close was he, in fact, that the principle of its universality was indeed correct at the level of macrophysics, and his formulas are still widely taught and used for their simplicity and reasonable accuracy when contrasted with the more accurate, however far more complex, Relativity-model. The apparent sophistication of the cosmic description, referring to indivisible atoms or indeterminate fields of quantum particles, is irrelevant insofar as one may continue to fully describe the nature of it without which mystically instantiates from its basic materials: life.

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“Look again at that [pale, blue] dot. That’s here. That’s us … every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.” — C. Sagan

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The notion captured above (op. cit., Sagan) is beautifully resonant in its capturing of a deeply primordial human intuition; the cosmos, the gods, the supernatural are all operative on an incomprehensible scale, and their potential acts resulting in the destruction of the whole of humanity and its many civilisations would be a trivial inconvenience at most, if we are to flatter ourselves. However, that particular formulation serves as what is typical of modern thought; it is the notion that the whole of the history of life, and thus the history of man, is insignificant from a “cosmic perspective.” By a cosmic perspective, they mean not a true physical perspective, but the aesthetic of grand scale, to visit their eyes upon the Earth from the distance of Luna, Mars, Saturn, or elsewhere, and subsequently derive only the universality and symmetry of the physical. This is derived from a sense of, ironically, mythical scale.

It is said that in the observable Universe alone, there are a many sextillion number of stars, some 10 to the 23rd power, of which our whole system comprises one, one that could, and eventually will, engulf the Earth without consultation. It is equally set forth, with great pride, that one may measure the scale of an atom using electron microscopes, about a tenth of a millionth of a milliliter across, or conversely, the use of a giant telescope to see events in spacetime over 46 billion light-years distance. We have measured time at the duration of a ten-thousandth of a trillionth of a second, on the level of a 10 to the negative 18th seconds, to durations of billions of years, uncovering the very age of the Universe we are privy to. Conversely, however, would one be remiss to not highlight the scale at which life also humbles the cosmos. A 1,000 square miles of fertile soil, for example, consulting a size less than 0.2% the size of Iowa, may host a number of living organisms on a level greater than the sextillions of stars in the observable Universe, each far more complex in its internal organisation than any such astral body could feasibly become. But even if one were to counter the notion of cosmic insignificance with quantitative statistics such as those above, it would, in actuality, target the true folly of the statement, which lies in a profound logical blunder. Significance regards a qualitative thing, whereas scale is purely quantitative, measurable, and observable, precisely as the reductionist wants. But, if we are to commit to such an error, I am sure the whale will be pleased to know his life is of more significance than that of an elephant, or an elephant that of a mouse, or a mouse that of an ant, or an ant that of a cancer cell, or of a human male that of a human female, with no exceptions to this rule. Their comparative scales may pale relative to the Universe, but they indeed scale nonetheless.

Rather, one should posit how many of anything are born each day; how many die? How many lives are lived, how many memories made, how many futures anticipated, how much food consumed, or violence inflicted? If such a small plot of land may dwarf astronomical counts in quantity and quality, what if we are to account for the whole number of every organism whatever, from the origin of life on Earth to its contemporary state?

The numbers set forth by the physicist are so absurd in their smallness or largeness that they are impossible to comprehend; they lend their power to move men through the most literal fact of their incomprehension. Even the archetypal abstracted man above, Sagan, understood this, however conscious of its subtle implications, quoting:

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“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead, they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” — C. Sagan

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One can no greater understand the scales of the powers at be in the War in Heaven, Ragnarok, Titanomachy, or the End of Days. The comparative empirical basis for these physical claims is meaningless relative to the supersensible function they serve to purpose in the mind of modern man. Specifically, does it only substitute a “how” for an “is”; thus, instead of understanding a storm as derived from Yahweh, regardless of the mechanics behind it, the storm is derived from molecules, which are themselves derived from the physical processes of the Universe.

The electron, photon, or quark is no less questioned as a fundamental representation of “what is” than the plentiful elemental spirits of a river, mountain, fire, gust, or aether; a quasar or supernova inspires no less metaphysical reverence than a comet in the midst of a great battle. Habitable worlds and galaxies are mystical, faraway lands like pre-Caesarean Britannia for the Romans, El Dorado for the Spaniards, or Hyperborea for the Greeks; the possibility of other Universes inspires realm-like thinking in which alien characteristics and rules apply. The whole of the cosmic web is heaven, where baryonic matter primarily resides; the cosmic voids are hell, where an infinite darkness would suspend any life; supermassive black holes are gods, their “power” represented only by scaling that which is also impressive, even if much less, but remains far more familiar—“X billion Solar masses.” Equally does all physical scaling attempts to make the inconceivable conceivable through comparison: “X, Y, of a Z milliliters,” or rather “X light-years [away, wide, long, across],” not obviously dissimilar to the premodern allegories, metaphors, anthropomorphisms, or zoomorphisms that expressed truly wonderful natural phenomena. The heat death is an eschatology that heightens the present need for action relative to the prime cultural value—the drive that we must achieve mastery in our understanding of nature, in this case. These facts are just as obvious to us now as Mars was to a legionnaire or Jupiter was to a politician; that is precisely why they hold resonance. Their logic is non-existent; nothing logically follows, mathematically, that scale inspires any of the present awe, insignificance, or clarion call to telescopes and microscopes. Only an inner feeling can make it so, one that suspends rationality in favour of what is felt as obviously true, such that any denial feels falsified, immature, or unwise.

It is seen that from the moment space and time began, a seemingly infinite set of possible physical configurations became alive. Thus, what came to inevitably live in the cosmos were galaxies, and within these galaxies, stars, and orbiting these stars were planets, and orbiting those planets were moons. Such was the case, then, that there were vastly many more moons than planets, more planets than stars, and more stars than galaxies, those stars orbiting the elegantly blinding light of exhausted quasars. Yet, finally, from these many other configurations came one more, this being the body—equal in its relevance to the moon, planet, or star insofar as it was one of countless physical configurations. Yet life could not discard the feeling that it possessed feeling; where did these feelings come from? Why could it think of things immaterially instantiated, yet were real—indeed, causally real—in its own experience? Why could it empathise with other creatures with whom it, through no other epistemic basis than intuition, could recognise shared life? What made its infinitesimal body universally special?

The principle of this paper is built on a foundational symmetry that has been woefully overlooked. It is often purported that insignificance stems from scale—a sentiment that will, in due time throughout this text, be reduced to one’s memory—though the proponents of such a view mistake spatial scale, the mere fact of it, for conceptual meaning, or rather a lack thereof. If it is to be said that in the vast sea of the cosmos, the Universe remains indifferent to life, in equal measure does life display an indifference to the Universe. Its indifference is so absolute, so comprehensively uncompromising; it does not negotiate a Universal permit to act, nor could it conceive of such a thing as necessary or meaningful; it holds no desire or willingness to reflect itself into an abstracted suspension by adopting the sterilising “cosmic perspective” so elevated by modern reductionists. In the battles between emperors and generals Sagan describes, in the ceaseless violence of the hunts and competitions that structure the ecosystems of Earth, in no moment on our “mote of dust” is an organism not restless, not engulfed by an impassioned flame of ceaseless ambition; there is always more to be done. The cosmic perspective, fittingly, does not capture this, but only the blue of Earth—the inorganic majority to which life finds utterly irrelevant except as a stage for its many countless actualisations.

I wonder if the irrationality of these emperors and generals would appear so apparent if contrasted to the bodily savagery visited upon the hordes of animalcules everyday by other animalcules, or the blood of the many herds of omnivores shed by a pack of corresponding carnivores; how irrational the bamboo looks for piercing forthwith a hardened pile of concrete, impeding the unstoppable mana of progress that animates all of “Mankind’s” actions in the eyes of reductionist; how irrational the battles of bees and wasps appear, or ants and termites—of the microscopic brutality of mites or the urban theft of rodents, of the death visited upon the incomprehensible and opaque creatures of the oceanic abyssal, or rather among the eggs of the birds woven beautifully in the tallest trees. Or, perhaps, such examples would have exposed the absurdity of the statement, for none of the prior actions seem, intuitively so, compelled by the logic of the physical, but rather as ontological primitives. To speak at all is a declaration of qualitative worth, that without, we would all be better off dead and buried.

A cosmic perspective refuses all that is biological; it presents, rather, geometry, an endless cubic sea of black, encompassing a great many spheres, for whom it would appear the mere concept of life would strike a deep offense into such a realm’s very being. The blues, greens, and whites from the surface are pristine, bounded, and alien; no such analogue exists from the surface, where clouds appear woolly, the sky infinite, the terrain uneven, and the sea unforgiving. It is surely not in the interest of humans to venture far into the black seas from our placid island of ignorance, for while life appears an affront to the physical, to venture far would be an affront to their endowed Nature.

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§§ 1.3–1.4.5

To truly begin, this paper, which presents itself as a discourse between that which verifiably exists in our understanding of space and time—life and non-life—we must first disclose, as life derived after, what a purely non-life spacetime truly “looks like”—the pure cosmic. “Looks like” in this context refers less to embodied perspective and more to how a spacetime orients itself without the consideration for living organisms; in this sense, you may describe the beginning of this framework as pre-epistemological, as nothing may yet know anything, though events still occur. This may seem counterintuitive, and I am sure the skeptic may begin by asking “if you truly say something can be ‘known’ before the knowledge of knowledge, how may you know it to be true?,” to which the only reasonable response would reply with a rumination on the countless physical events, whether infinitesimal or truly cosmic, whose occurrences go unnoticed by any such living thing—in the vast expanse of the physical Universe, which, by virtue of its very structure, resists even the concept of our seeing of a total picture. It is less a declaration of knowledge than it is a recognition of such absurdly scalar regimes that exist simultaneously, yet could never be registered at an equally simultaneous level by one life. Because of this, thankfully, for our purposes, constructing such a spacetime is a quite easy task; even more so given that the vast majority of matter and energy in the Universe is not under the service of life, but follows the same, relatively intuitive logic it has followed since its original expansion, and will continue to follow until its ultimate heat death.

The question I have thus chosen to open with is what exactly would be the “perspective” of an astral body? Nothing, of course. To ask the perspective of a non-perceiving object was, is, and will continue to be a complete non-question in the logical fields. An astral body does not perceive; why is that? We may say, there is no “centre” of registration for the astral body itself—no membrane, nervous system, or conscious aboutness—which leads us into our first primary distinction. As the prior half of this paper is reserved for a servicing treatment of the cosmos, we must differentiate between the cosmos-as-perceived and the cosmos-in-itself. And further, when we describe the cosmos, it is not meant to say the stars in the night sky, the planets (wandering stars), and nebulae, the vast and beautiful oceans of gases we have the pleasure to observe, but simply what is physical. In this sense, you yourself possess the cosmic, in your body that is. You encounter the cosmic unavoidably; if Earth were a vacuum shielded from the rest of physical space, indeed, you would still unavoidably encounter the cosmic everywhere around. However, a perceiver does not encounter the cosmic-in-itself. This was, of course, most primitively captured by Kant in his distinction of the noumena and phenomena in the 18th century, carried over through to Hegel and Schopenhauer in the early-to-mid 19th century, then to Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger from the late 19th century through to the mid 20th century, and which continues to structure contemporary thought in the philosophies of science and mind.

The cosmic-in-itself, however, is not meant to mean an “unfiltered” object, some abstract of a neutral-universal realm of objects that “exist without perception,” for reasons that will become apparent in later sections of this paper; the cosmic-in-itself is inconsiderate of object-based thinking. The barrier cannot be simply an epistemic matter, for a purely cosmic description is defined by a lack of things for which knowledge means anything; the issue presented then is ontic, concerning the cosmos’ independent-of-life is-ness. Rather, does the cosmic-in-itself mean to convey what is instead invariant to physical things, leading us back to our hypothetical astral body. For the astral body, absent a central “node” of perception, the body, while behaving as we would expect it to intuitively, does not do so to please our cosmic intuition—i.e., our intuition of how physical things “ought” to work in our particular order of magnitude. Our cosmic intuition is a reflection of life’s object-thinking. The astral body is, as something we see, a whole; to the physical, however, “it” is composed of a great many number of particles, forming atoms of a varying charge, bound together into a cloud of matter that is measurably denser than the pockets of comparatively vacant space around them; thus, “it” does not exist in the physical, only the particular configuration of said particles. We expect, if Luna were to, for whatever reason, collide with the Earth, a large reaction would occur, in which fractions of planet-matter and moon-matter would fly every which way.

For a less dramatic example, would we expect a stone to crack if dropped from an intuitively far enough height. In each description, it is seen as the breaking of a whole, whereas what is happening in the realm of the physical is the material intolerance of some level of induced stress, leading the “object” to “crack” along the paths of least resistance. But, of course, it is counterintuitive to say an incalculable number of particles are bound by gravity and a relative lack of thermal activity, though when introduced to another group of particle fields bound by similar conditions, the particle fields split along certain chains into many different smaller boundaries, all bound also by the same prior conditions, however, to a lesser degree of mass. This is the cosmic description, the account that would find favour among reductionists. This leads to a rather simple, though consequential conclusion: the organismal perception of the cosmos—object-thinking—is indeed phenomenally true, though it does not in any measure, nor can it, capture what is invariant to the physical by itself. By which it is meant, physical invariance is without centre or privilege; the fundamental units are particles (“quantum fields,” more accurately), and these are bound by fundamental forces which relate only themselves to other particles. It is also important to clarify, before we continue, that a common misunderstanding of particles is that they are miniscule solid spheres, which I presume derives from their treatment in the helpful visuals supplied by educators; in actuality, a “particle,” refers merely to the particular excitation of a field, with a field as a fluid-like territory underlying the structure of spacetime, and its excitation as a concentrated vibration, so to speak. Any fundamental particle cannot be “seen” by anything. I only bring this up to preempt any misunderstandings that a particle is itself an “object,” though in later passages dealing with life, this notion will be further addressed by other means.

To reorganise, the cosmic-in-itself is what is objective to physical things. To speak of discrete objects that do things—a stone “cracking,” a planet “rotating,” a body of water “splashing,” is to deal with the cosmic in an organismic register; it is to say the “stone” is a real thing that is privileged within the physical, which physical laws themselves honour as a relevant centre, or the “planet,” or the “water,” that these are of ontological significance to spacetime as they appear to some form of life. What binds the cosmic are the four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong force, weak force), which describe only how things belonging to the cosmic-in-itself—fields and the particles therein—relate to one another. From this understanding of the cosmos-in-itself, does it become necessary to understand precisely what the Universe is.

The Universe refers to everything within physical spacetime, and everything within spacetime confers a physical Universal; it is the totality of what is physically instantiated across time. Verifiably, there are three spatial dimensions, though this number is meaningless for our purposes. Traditionally, there is one temporal dimension. The original Newtonian conception, which itself exceeded Newton, though came to be associated with him following the vindication of Relativity, posited a true-universal “clock-time” logic that the Universe followed. In its stead, did Relativity shatter this intuition through its distinction between proper time (p) and coordinate time (t), referring to time as it is in physics and experience, and time as is kept by mathematics, respectively. It was discovered that the former varied depending on the observer, whereas the latter reconciled the two into a new relativistic picture, such that the events coincided in spite of dilations that resulted in discrepancies across proper times. Physical things themselves, however, do not “experience” time; there is no instantiation of an internal distinction. This is not a physical claim, per se; it applies equally to both Newtonian and Einsteinian conceptions of time, as linear or relative; it is merely the principle that, however time exists physically, anything part of the cosmic-in-itself is incapable of “experiencing through it.” In example, one of the fundamental particles, a photon, has no way or desire to distinguish between the “time” of its emission and that of its absorption, yet both are measurable physical events, ones a living organism must necessarily and objectively be able to distinguish; this does not refer to the photon’s proper time, which Relativity established as 0, but its experience, or lack thereof, concerning both true physical events.

Another example to demonstrate more concretely: a road travelled upon every day has its physical roots, fundamentally, we may say, in electrons and quarks. These same electrons, each day, are trampled upon by passerbyers whose boots are also composed of, fundamentally, electrons and quarks. Yet, to the particles themselves, there is no way it may distinguish between the “first time” it was trampled as part of this perceived object and the “last time.” All trampling-events that occurred across time remain equally real, having effectively and actually acted on the particles regardless. Despite the proper time of the electron or quark, in principle, having the capacity to change, there is no centre of a present to that which is being acted upon, such that the words past, present, or future become a meaningful part of our descriptive vocabulary as relevant to the particle in and of itself. The physical time described by any ontology that a living being experiences does indeed, necessarily, distinguish between each “time” a particle as part of a physical object is acted upon. We may call that a trouble, a way of describing any event that acts upon a thing belonging to the cosmic-in-itself. While we, the perceiver, distinguish troubles in time, the electron fails to conceive of temporally differing troubles as such, for, as was touched upon prior, that which is objectively real to the physical are the four fundamental forces alone, which govern the relations between all particle interactions inside of spacetime. The particle reacts to troubles necessarily, but as the source of each trouble also belongs to the cosmic-in-itself, and is therefore governed by the same perennial forces across spacetime, there can be no temporal dimension being registered as relevant.

Hence, does any mathematical equation within the physical not literally describe an actualised “cause” leading to a novel “effect,” as one might imagine in their cosmic intuition, but a necessary relation between two actual states. It is such that A does not literally cause B—though it is easy and intuitive to describe in such a way—but that the state of A may yield only the state of B, if we are to “move forward,” so to speak, in spacetime; and as time continually moves forward, this relation can only be described in one direction by an observer for which physical time comes to hold relevance. We may understand any physical state as a moment. A moment here refers to a picture of the Universe—not a literal, epistemic-visual picture, of course, but rather the total mathematical description of a frozen point in the Universe’s history. There are an infinite number of these moments one may arbitrarily pluck out of spacetime, though in any one of them, nothing is physically lost, thus it remains to be that in any given moment, spacetime is purely actual. Between every moment does something situate an ordered-ness to these relations, revealing its relevance in the relation between two or more moments: that being entropy. The minimum entropy state of the Universe presents itself as the first moment of this order, and the maximum as its last. Analogously, do neither of the poles of any planet order themselves at the planet’s centre, nor the centre at the poles, though each cohabitate the planet simultaneously.

This also does not confer an arbitrariness to what state may lead to what, which we may use to distinguish “past” from “future,” as these are still physically real, as demonstrated by light cones, but that they only structure what an event could have possibly “caused,” or been “caused by,” per its relation to the speed of light, from the point of view of an observer. It is such that event A leads to B, though not event B to A, as illustrated prior, but that neither event A nor event B impress unto the totality of spacetime themselves as a privileged present, for a defined present exists only in relation to a privileged and defined past and future, of which one may point towards in a moment of actuality; the physical has no such capacity.

Still, this minimal level of life-independent causation, however, does not rescue the notion that anything, whether a force or something beholden to forces, is capable of acting through time, acting in a prior or later moment relative to the only moment it is ever actualised in; the Law of Thermodynamics, as a persistent and actual force present across all time, can only order events precisely due to the fact that it refuses to elevate any single one. The logic of time that therefore governs physics is not incumbent-to-novel, for it cannot distinguish a true present, but simultaneous, as all troubles present themselves as equal in their relationship to spacetime. It must, as it obeys physical logic, react in correspondence to physical forces, absent any considerations of the past or future.

This is what is meant when we establish a lack of time-experience concerning the physical. Whether or not one were to separate space and time to understand them as conditions of physical occurrence, as did Newton, or combine them into one picture of spacetime that does not exist absent the material things taking place inside of them, as Einstein did, nothing that is purely physical may consider anything outside of the purely physical, or, likewise, ignore anything within the purely physical. This is most pertinent regarding the experience of physical things, as the experience of a thing itself—even the most favourable-to-mechanism reading will say—only supervenes on physical processes and is not necessary for them (though this paper will trek further).

Therefore, the logic of the physical is that of what is actual in any given moment.1 Taken together, if we are to structure a definition that would please the philosophers of a more analytic variety, the cosmic is seen to be that everything physical is simultaneously everything else physical, in substance, across all time, without ontological discontinuity, and favouring no discrete units. In this regard, the cosmic is without substantial change. If one takes it to mean the physical Universe exists completely independent of any living mind, to describe this posited world, one must forgo completely anything intuitive to lived experience; the cosmic, rather, is inherently the realm of the opaque and counterintuitive.

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§§ 1.5–1.5.2

We hence arrive at life, the focus of which will occupy most every future page, of every future section, of this work. It is helpful to first define the characteristics of life as we observe it biologically, such that we may begin to extrapolate a coherent logic. Concerning the biological definition, life is seen to be an impression of chemical materials, hosting the novel concepts of “birth,” “function,” “metabolism,” “growth,” “reproduction,” and “death.” It is helpful to first isolate reproduction from the other five concepts, given that reproduction does not concern an individual’s life-as-lived itself, but its relation to taxonomy, lineage, and posterity.

We thus begin with “birth” and “death,” representing the first full instantiation of a proper “past” and “future” absent from the atomic view expressed in prior chapters. The implication begotten from a birthing event places life as something with a definite beginning, to which it may orient itself towards future actions, memorise past states, and hold time to be something of privileged duration rather than of equal simultaneity; this is, aptly, the pillar of duration. The following concepts cover “function” and “metabolism,” yielding “good” and “bad,” respectively. Of course, not an ethical good or ethical bad in our sense, but an existential distinction—to say foods can be toxic or nutritious, states can be healthy or pathological, organs can be functional or dysfunctional. One may analogise this terminology to a machine, though of course machines are not vested unto themselves, but purposeful tools for which organisms craft to serve an organismic function, thus even the function of machines exists only relative to an agent with an internally generated standard of goodness and badness. To loudly proclaim the purpose of a hammer is to nail is not of course a property of the hammer, for as we spent chapters prior, the “hammer” cannot coherently “do” anything as part of the cosmic-in-itself, because as a purely physical thing, it is not a hammer; its “normativity” exists relationally to a living subject such that nailing becomes an important task. Further, does grounding function in evolutionary expectation only theologise organ-based mutations, given that it cannot be said the function of any organic part is a given of the part, but only relative to the whole. In this sense, rather critically, function is not a predicate of the physical; our second pillar is therefore normativity. Finally, is “growth,” a process all life exhibits, maturing in order to act on its aforementioned normative standards, and reflecting its inner direction. Growth informs us of an internal ordering to life, that it does not just refuse to yield to external stimuli, whether environmental or genetic, but, if necessary, actively resists the external in order to actualise the internal. This internal ordering implies an orientation towards what is not yet actual, but what could be instead; our third and final pillar reveals itself to be the pillar of possibility.

All life, from all “taxonomic classifications,” is beholden to these qualities. A microorganism, whether a domain member of bacteria or the more opaque archaea, possesses within itself as much of a distinction between poison and sustenance as does a primate, or a primate as much as a plant; complexity does not confer a quantitative “more” of a whole. Each holds within itself an experience through time that animates it to possible action, action that is neither mechanical nor arbitrary, but contextualised, coherent, and patterned; it is action that makes no sense, logically, from a perspective of indifference, however makes incredible sense from the perspective of embodiment, a sense only available to living organisms and universally shared amongst them. From the release of ghrelin, a chain of amino acids composed of “organic molecules,” eating is not entailed—quite literally, in fact, if such a release were divorced from any living instance—though from hunger it ostensibly is. Further, are these qualities both subconscious and conscious. For example, in the fact that all life exhibits homeostasis, allowing it to maintain internal conditions resistant to external pressures, does it also have to enact what homeostasis enables, its general actualisation. The subconscious activities of an organism inform us of the necessity of its then-conscious action, both only cohering through our understanding of the whole and the character of its qualities. A carnivorous animal consumes herbivore-forms rather than plant-forms because its metabolic character uniquely enables it to do so.

These three pillars that unify their being, like all pillars, do not stand disconnected from one another, but are separated precisely by what unifies them—an intrinsic relation. Duration, normativity, and possibility cannot therefore be separated, as each relies on the other in order to instantiate its own quality. Duration is persistently evaluative in its relation of organismal states through time, thus normative; normativity must allow for evaluative action over a period of time, thus concerns future possibilities; possibility is directed towards the future, thus durative. Analogous would be a single pillar without the fellowship of its companions, collapsing into dust under the weight of what it was meant to hold—life, in this case. Their higher unity, that which fully defines the qualities of life and what life introduces, is a perspective.

A perspective is chosen precisely as it introduces the concept of a something into what would instead be everything. Specifically, something in a direct and continuous relation to other things. These qualities refer to a subject; X is a duration of time to something, Y is a normative standard or idealised state for something, Z is a possible state for something. Perspective refers to a point-of-view; its etymology is Latin, a construction of the prefix per- and suffix -specere, meaning to perceive. To perceive something, analogously, is to consciously situate it in a particular way; its etymology is similarly Latin, referring to a whole seizing, grasping, comprehending, or understanding of something. Specifically, this perspective is finite. Finiteness, of course, refers to something bounded, with an end. Established was the very lack of an end of the cosmic-in-itself. One may describe a “last” moment, yes, though such a moment, absent the consideration of life, can never be privileged over the infinitely many physical states preceding it. What we would consider a cosmic “end” still cohabitates physical time with its “beginning.” Life’s finiteness does not refer to its perspective, which is seen to be whole, but concerns its being—its separation from the cosmic through its persistent capacity to grow or degenerate through time.

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§§ 1.6–1.6.4.4

It stands to follow, then, how may life begin to exist? Instead of asking how something may come from nothing in the cosmological sense, how may something come from everything. How may something discrete from everything at once? If life does not, nor can, subtract from the physical everything, where precisely is the something? In the field of contemporary Western thought, the answer may vary from the intervention of God, to the accumulation of consciously experiencing particles, or to the “emergence” of biological matter from many chemical interactions, as if it were a mathematical subscript, and therefore consciously demoting life to be the effect of the impersonal force of electromagnetism, no dissimilar from a solid, liquid, gas, or plasma. The most evidenced current theory in the natural sciences is that of abiogenesis, which has its immature origins in Darwin. Darwin, rightly, concluded that if many of his “species” were reproduced from a common ancestor, and this process was repeatedly observed across all the “species” of his day, it would serve to suggest all “species” whatever were reproduced from a universally common ancestor, the location of which Darwin posited as a primeval “warm little pond.” Of course, Darwin himself did not have the resources available at the time to test his speculative hypothesis, and thus, until it was picked up by later scientists, it remained as such: a theoretical inference. Though it must be understated just how close Darwin was to later findings, for his warm little pond was hypothesised to outline the most plausible conditions for an early life-form, hosting light, warmth, and electricity in a relatively stable and shallow environment, allowing for the formation of proteins through more common chemical interactions, and eventual mutations that would allow for an easier landbound colonisation.

Many theories and experiments followed, as prior to this model, it was widely accepted that if natural selection were true, it was the result of an evolution-of-insects, insects which generated spontaneously from non-living matter. We will circle back to this idea later, though, as for its relevance to abiogenesis, it was largely superseded, given the publications of the French chemist Louis Pasteur, who would prove the theory which would later come to be known as biogenesis—the principle that life may only derive from life, not non-life. Other experiments from chemists, such as Wöhler or Strecker, would derive the concept that “organic molecules” could stem from inorganic molecules, with “organic molecules” seeming to mean molecules commonly found in life on Earth (composed primarily of carbon atoms bound to other CHNOPS [carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur] atoms). This sudden surge in experimentation and findings would culminate in the most convincing replicable evidence of abiogenesis to date—the infamous Miller-Urey experiment conducted in the mid-20th century. It set out to derive “organic molecules” from inorganic, specifically through the simulation of the likely conditions of an early Earth. Their simulation involved mimicking “lightning” and an “ocean,” composed solely of inorganic compounds. This established that the likely conditions of an early Earth could, with reliability, have produced many of the essential amino acids in protein construction. Further experiments based on Miller-Urey would not only prove the findings of Miller and Urey, but build upon them further, constructing even more of the essential list of amino acids. The field of prebiotic chemistry was opened. This did not necessarily yet “prove” life originated from mechanical chemistry, though it did prove that what would come to be known as the “fundamental building blocks of life” did indeed originate from non-living matter.

Theories began to stack—the primordial soup, submerged hydrothermal vents, panspermia or pseudo-panspermia (asteroids either carrying life or harboring crucial “organic molecules”)—all of which remain in contention to this day. It would be remiss of me to plant my flag in any one of their clays, for this is a philosophy of natural history, not a scientific paper on the chemical origins of life. In complete honesty, the exact chemical process, of which there most certainly was, is quite irrelevant and arbitrary by design. To speak of “organic molecules,” or even “protocells,” is to inspire a teleological understanding of chemistry, particularly when you begin to derive life-specific qualities—duration, normativity, and possibility—from non-life. It is just as easily said that the origin of life can be seen as the Big Bang, or indeed the death of the first star, or any other prior event which holds a canonical place in the physicochemical “origins of life,” if one is to say life is exhausted by the natural sciences. The reason being, even up to the protocell—the “growth” described, which is physically accumulative and based in happenstance, or the “proto-metabolism,” which is an externally generated chemical reaction—only external events are being registered by said “organic molecules,” and thus the problem presented is that these supposedly “organic molecules” are bound still only by pure physical actuality, favouring no discrete objects of the present as an equally discrete subject, something we have established as inherent to all true life.

The reductionist, further, could not truly disagree with the statements above, given that even in his description of bodies of life, it would be of his belief that “internal causation,” stemming from some vital force, can be classified as illusory in the sense that, within the mechanics of the body itself, nothing is disobeying the fundamental forces of physics. Your body’s “internal” mechanisms are still quite bound by the same physical invariance particles outside of your body are bound by, thus to a protocell, which exhibits primitive forms of many of the same functions, the rule that nothing “extra-physical” is occurring would apply; hence, only the lived fact of a whole organic perspective is missing; that perspective is the reason any such mechanisms become desirable to sustain, of which the protocell has no such desire to sustain them, only the stability begotten from physical happenstance. It can only be recognised as such—a “proto-cell,” that is—from the perspective of an organism for which those mechanisms are meaningful and recognisable. The ironic problem of these accounts (by which it is meant reductionist accounts, not prebiotic chemistry as a field) is their implicit cosmic teleology.

Does the atomist then mean to say, from the moment of the Big Bang, physics aimed at life? From the moment of the death of the first star, releasing crucial atomic elements; from the moment essential amino acids settled into early Earth; from the moment of initial, causal replications? Does this further suggest physics has a state it itself prefers? Does the Universe prefer to be organised as living matter; is it such that the teleological state of the Universe is a blob of these organic molecules? Or perhaps physical stability is the origin of these desired qualities; perhaps a solid block is the ultimate teleological state of the Universe, or a Universally encompassing black hole. Of course, such questions are best left untouched when one attempts to frame the origin of life, and thus all of its intense and specific qualities, as gradual, undefined, and accumulative. If the qualities are then posited to be epiphenomenal or illusory feelings of fully describable physicochemical mechanisms, it would stand to reason how one would even be capable of consciously reflecting on the internal feelings they produce, to such a degree, in fact, that this paper is a possibility at all, that I am consciously recognising and interpreting my own illusions.

The primary problem is thus the introduction of a desired possibility. The previously provided definition of the cosmic-in-itself is, necessarily for the reasons above, purely actual. To orient oneself towards the possible, in duration, based on a memorisation of prior states is not simply absent from physical description, but in conceptual conflict given what is invariant in physical description, what is true to the physical. We have discussed emergence previously; now it becomes necessary to cut it from our thought in order to prevent it resulting in potential distractions, for emergence has become a word simply thrown around without any care. It is such that everything is seemingly “emergent” in modern logical conundrums, be it consciousness, life, or whatever else presents itself as an impasse to be rationally “solved” rather than rigorously interrogated on its own terms. This is what we may call the problematisation of philosophy, where everything that either does not concern the material-thinking of physics or presented a problem for its metaphysics was labelled, aptly, a problem—knowledge, being, consciousness, life, soul, vitality, religion, symbolism, culture, or so forth—beginning with the rise of the analyticists, who fancied themselves armchair physicists and subsequently felt the need to justify themselves to scientists through metaphysical flattery. Let us, then, approach the “problem” of life as if it were the curiosity it truly is, rather than an explanatory burden to be filed away.

What exactly does it mean for something to “emerge”? The etymological origin of the word is Latin, with its meaning “to bring out” or “bring to light.” The language thus confers an already present property. What emerges is not “new,” but rather revealed. This maps onto physical emergence, as it is observed, quite well. When we speak of emergent systems arising from physical complexity, we describe nothing metaphysically novel, only something that must be explained in greater detail, accounting for these novel and contingent “emergent” properties. This is the same for all the famous examples of emergence in physical systems, such as electromagnetic emergence in chemical reactions (wetness from many non-wet H₂O molecules), or thermodynamic emergence (temperature from particle speeds). This type of emergence, however, is often labelled “weak,” and when considering that their labelling as “wet,” “hot,” or “cold” derives solely from conscious experience rather than the physical itself, much of its prior argumentative power disappears rather quickly.

In contrast, a much stronger form of visible emergence would be something analogous to a gene or ATP molecule, which each has a physically causal capacity irreducible to its constituent parts. In the case of the former, it holds the ability to store information and reconfigure molecules, whereas the latter holds the ability to store and transfer energy. Importantly, this does not refer to the absurdity of “strong emergence,” as is philosophically seen, but a species of emergence that is much stronger than the aforementioned examples far more common in these discussions. Both genes and ATP molecules possess emergent causal power in the physical, though their emergent causal power remains in the realm of physical invariance; they do not have a perspective that orients them to see such storage or transfer as dutiful or desirable. Through material manipulation, you can store any information you wish inside of a gene. They are, like with the protocell, a matter of physical happenstance, maintained only by the present conditions without any such active resistance. Thus, emergent things remain bound by our principle of pure actuality, never orienting themselves towards what is possible, evaluating through any time as they do.

The emergence school’s strongest contemporary theory is that of biological systems, emphasising the unique interplay of organismal parts and organs which maintain themselves through self-regulation, systematic integration, and interconnection. In this branch of emergence theory, life is not seen to be necessarily “in the chemistry,” but the emergent thing underpinning all the chemistry of a body. In this sense, systems theory takes the approach, so to speak, that “organic matter” is not truly a thing, but instead life is explained as an ongoing relation between many chemically interacting particles of dead matter—“in-between” the matter of the body, as it were—a rather mystical notion, notwithstanding its obvious atomic intuitions. Though, still, in no step of its explanation does it explain why the organisation of these organs in these particular ways comprises a perspectival whole, rather than simply a chemical whole. As we have shown, it is perspective that is the source of the conflict between life and physics, conceptually that is, and has continually refused to be accounted for as the interaction between non-perceiving chemical systems, however interdependent or self-regulatory. In this regard, systems theorists are correct that a lung does not derive its function from being a lung, though they mistakenly then assert it must derive its function from being below the brain and besides the heart, without interrogating where the concept of functioning itself is sourced from—in the ongoing perspective. Perhaps if the theory concerned only the device I am currently writing on, or any device for that matter, attempting to explain its “function” through the relation of its dead parts, a more defensible conclusion would be reached.

The conflict articulated, therefore, is that while physics—microphysics or macrophysics, reduced or emergent—describes only the actual, life concerns only the possible, with the actual as a privileged frame of reference. Whereas we earlier spoke of the cosmic as a lack of substantial change, life is seen to be defined by change, perceiving change, and actualising internal change from birth unto death. As spoken, this is not absent from a reduced description, like temperature or state of matter, but is in direct conflict with the concept of physics. The emergentist view posits that within physics is an inherent property capable of prioritising, conceiving of, and actualising future states, just as much as it is capable of heating or solidifying; those actually emergent properties do not consider the possible and act on said consideration, but are either actual in a given moment or are not, capable of wielding emergent causal power or incapable. Emergence, once again, as a foil to the anti-reductionist, supplants theological teleology with a naturalistic teleology, only this time positing that life-qualities are inherent within physics itself and gradually reorganised into life.

Analogously, does panpsychism commit a similar sin, however, more explicitly in its belief that the “everything” in which we articulated prior holds a minimal proto-consciousness. Panpsychism thus possesses a merit to its logic, by at least admitting its view of emergence must necessarily mean a traditionally life-specific quality—consciousness—must exist independent of life if it is to emerge into life from mere physicochemical interactions.

The problem that remains is that even if one were to accept in totality that life-qualities exist in primitive states absent life, such as conscious experience, normativity, duration, or possibility—regardless of the deep conflict it presents to the natural sciences—it does not explain the patterns life organises itself around. Which is to say, if panpsychism were the true ontology, would it not stand to reason that a slight change in the microstructure of an organism would yield an entirely separate conscious life-experience? Though this contrasts with form-specific objectivity, or population-specific intersubjectivity, we observe everywhere in life. One would also have to postulate that as long as physical particles containing this proto-conscious quality get into a structure “close enough” to an organismal form, it will reliably produce all the necessary higher experiences of that form, thus structure becomes equally fundamental, yet remains unjustified by this purely bottom-up explanation.

What exactly is “close enough” such that two phenotypically or anatomically distinct organisms of the same form, however deep the basic similarities, yield a similar orientation towards the aforementioned form-specific life-qualities? If the conscious experience of a particle is truly elementary, it certainly does not act in anticipation of constructing such complex machinery. They certainly do not know they are forming a dog or snake or mushroom or tree, so what exactly determines their cross-instance coherence? After all, it is the rallying cry of the panpsychist to claim the base “thing” of qualitative experience does not have to entail the temporal or evaluative complexity inherent in living organisms, only the bare fact of immediate experience. If these structures are instantiated via evolution and are fundamental, however, evolution can no longer be truly contingent or divorced from an unintended form of Neoplatonic metaphysics. The microinteractions of these fundamental particles into organic molecules, then life, all to create a particular structure, becomes aimed at these structures, which, for whatever reason, necessarily yield non-chaotic experiential tokens from gradual accumulation alone. In this sense, it would appear these, for all intents and purposes, Platonic structures, are far more fundamental than the mere elementary consciousness of the particles therein, thereby negating the explanatory necessity of emergent complexity.

Rather, if instead we forgo this problem and understand panpsychism as intended, the emergence of life from primitive, hidden life-qualities seems to suggest that life, instead of organising along stable classifications, presents a mass of many fundamentally different and irreconcilable individuals. This is because the qualities we identified can never be partial, but only total. That which is toxic, nutritious, possible, or normal for a microorganism is verily different from that which is equally toxic, nutritious, possible, or normal for a plant, prey-animal, carnivorous animal, or human, though every organismal form in every time is equally “evolved”—or more accurately, ecologically selected for. To deny these inherent qualities in the physical—of which I am sure most every reductionist who negligently claims that X, Y, and Z emerge would indeed deny—is instead to accept the contradiction in physical emergence, that life’s inherent qualities are not continuous with prior physicochemical states.

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§§ 1.7–1.8

The alternative to a change that is continuous with the physical, conferring “more” rather than “new,” is instead a discontinuous change, conferring something genuinely novel, irreducible, and not informed whatsoever by prior physical states. Abiogenesis and biogenesis thus hold a true reconciliation, philosophically, that is, when life, as with anything else resistant to reduction, is not treated as an inconvenience. Whereas the modernist view simply asserts an “exception,” that the minimal comparative complexity of the universal common ancestor of all life provides a quirk when contrasted against the awe of complexity produced by a contemporary plant or human, we set forth the beginning of a new mode of organisation, and afterwards, an easier way in which it may continue to replicate. The alternative view that we present is that life’s generation is indeed spontaneous from matter, in every instantiation, in that, when possible, an ontologically fundamental, prior form of life may possess a body of sufficient organisation. The origin, replication, gestative birth—whether from an egg or womb—all suggest a similar principle, that the qualities of a specific life-form impress upon an accumulation of chemical matter in a gestative state a certain internal organisation, and further that every organisation of this matter following the origin of life is no longer a matter of physicochemical happenstance, but the internally directed chemistry of the parent organism.

The “why?” of this impression of matter, unless one were to posit that the qualities of life are derivable from physics, equally cannot be derived from physics; rather, it is seen that life is not an “inherent possibility,” or a “wonderful contingency,” but a fundamental mode of existence. It is of an equal physical mystery why life continues to exist once it does as it is why life begins to exist at all. Its inherent qualities, its logic, the organic logic—good and bad, past and future, possible and undesired—compel it to, in either any case of abiogenesis or biogenesis, whether on Earth or any other hospitable astral body. While we have yet to manipulate matter into sufficient complexity to reproduce true life, nothing presents such an achievement as a logical or physical impossibility. Though without one’s inherent life-ability to distinguish between the organic and inorganic of this hypothetically manufactured life, it would remain only a manipulation of matter, by which it is meant, if a manufactured life-form is indeed ever created, its recognition as something alive—something at all—is dependent on another life capable of subjective object-thinking. Hence, this leads us into our next principle, and what truly animates our dual-logic ontology: once any life begins to exist, the Universe must register both life and non-life within spacetime simultaneously.

This is to say, we have described the cosmic as the physical, concerning what is invariant to physical things, and thus purely actual. Life, however, once existent, takes part in this Universal actuality. As we clarified near the beginning of this paper, the physical constituents of your body indeed belong to the cosmic, even if your perception of them is governed by the cosmic-as-perceived rather than the cosmic-in-itself. Yet, it is also the case that your body feels different as a material thing than the countless other material things around you, which also belong to the cosmic-in-itself. One moving their head rightwards at a 90-degree angle of their own volition would certainly feel much different than if someone, or something, were to physically force the same positioning. These advance two different, though parallel, logics. Both describe, at the physical level, particle movement, yet one is the result of actual states, whereas the other is oriented towards the possible. Of course, a reductionist would simply say the “actual” states are still occurring, just as a process connecting one’s brain or membrane to their body—tracing each biochemical trail. Though what was raised was not the physics, as both events describe physical reconfiguration, but the feeling a life exhibits in regards to that reconfiguration, the feeling of which is parallel to any levied physical description, and more importantly, takes place through an air of time. One feels purposeful because it aligns with the organism’s orientation towards the possible, while the other remains forced and thus is necessarily evaluated as disruptive.

Most of the movements an organic body will ever make, and certainly every single movement absent external physical constraint, is one felt to be purposeful. It is, therefore, exclusionary, as what is felt to be purposeful in that moment is not “everything that the body could do,” which is seen as the consideration of both its understanding of possibility and its understanding of physical allowance, but what is conducive to its finite perspective. The finite perspective consciously excludes physical events that otherwise would be irrelevant in their occurrence to a physical particle. In this sense, the organic is causal through its negation of particular physical outcomes and redirected positive action towards others; this act of evaluation, which fails to be invariant absent life, is thus causal in its ability to affect future actual physical states. This is both conscious and subconscious; in the case of the former, conscious such as the movement of the body; in that of the latter, subconscious such as the release of certain chemicals we associate with certain conscious feelings, the release of which occur without the organism’s consultation.

This is the organic perspective, and it does not concern that of the cosmic perspective, the third-person that addresses only the actual states of a body in any given moment, not its inward feelings. It is such that the experience of life is not that one is “inside of a body,” but to depart sharply from the Cartesian understanding, the organic logic is the feeling of possessing a body that is important in its existential, economic, and aesthetic domains, in which all living organisms recognise all external actions of another organism as equal to the self sourcing the possessive acts. To put the notion into its simplest terms, the organism does not live in a physical world, but rather, it lives in a sensible world. This higher organic unity most readily manifests itself in moments of intensity deemed phenomenally significant, when mind and body can no longer present themselves as separate as they would in the moment of reflective abstraction, but the senses attune perception and action into a beautiful and irreplicable harmony—in sport, in conflict, in emotion, in coupling, in battle, in performance, in creation. In this sense, the entire Cartesian picture and the centuries of debate it spawned were quite anti-climatically already resolved by any of the ancient, innumerable parables of not provoking the cornered animal; the alignment of what is seen as the animal’s “mind” and “body” in the moment of cornering is absolute, in the expressive characteristics which signal a desperation only known by the organic-sensible logic. The reflective capacity of the man to forego the animalistic picture, to embody bravery or serenity in moments of what would otherwise evoke an intense fear—like the noble Cicero as he was brought aside for execution—was never an exception to this rule, but rather, it signified to other men the expressive characteristics of something transcendent of the mere individual.

This presents spacetime as having to simultaneously register two origins concerning particle movements, one indifferent and the other evaluative. It matters little that, comparatively to the purely physical, particle movements deriving from life are incredibly minuscule in scale; it only matters that they occur at all. For it can be said that their occurrence in any measure makes it as such that spacetime, dealing in actuals, must register equally the later actual states produced by life, whether through birth, movement, growth, violence, or death, as it does the later actual states produced by the impersonality of the four forces. To illustrate, and reconnect with our earlier passages, imagine if one were to “freeze time,” to choose a moment from spacetime. In such an experiment, the organic logic would not exist, yet all that is physical, including the biochemical structure to which all biological organisms are beholden, would indeed persist. That organic logic, however, still ceases when that organism can no longer situate itself; a lack of duration prevents it, and, subsequently, it suffers from a lack of persistent normative action and, further, a lack of ability to actualise its possibilities. Despite everything remaining present, everything invariant to the physical, the body remaining part of this structural continuum, life ceases. Biochemistry, hence, fails to subordinate lived experience at the level of the organic.

In the following sections, we will escape the cosmic and centre more truly on that which is prior to life, yet structures its non-arbitrariness. We will discuss what organises life, what unifies body and mind, uncover the true meaning of objectivity, and lay the foundations for a truly new philosophy of natural history.

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In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.

In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.

In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.

In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.

― Francis Parker Yockey

§0 | Preface

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West1 is among one of the most influential works ever written as it concerns the 120th and 121st centuries of the Epoch Holocene. Not since Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah had such a comprehensive theory been put forth regarding the decline and fall of civilisations, and the historical rhythms at large. It has therefore inspired countless parrots of its prophecy, proponents of its core tenets, acolytes of its ideas in the abstract, and, of course, critics of its methodology and conclusions. As this journal is dedicated, foremost, to the study and archiving of natural history, which we argue includes that of the history of man, the anthropology and history put forth by Spengler has been an unavoidable encounter, as much as those of Karl Marx or Arnold Toynbee. We find it appropriate, then, to dedicate this article to revisiting and critically analysing Spengler’s prophetic Decline. In expectation, it will serve as an emancipation of its poetic content, methodology, and conclusions from the popular distortion.

It may be first articulated that Spengler’s particular interest in history lies not simply in content, the proverbial “decline and fall” so often recited, but in feeling. This is meant to mean that, where one would, in any age of their civilisational2 or tribal history, have a particular outlook on its trajectory and destiny—a feeling—Spengler’s interest lies in the feeling itself, the feeling of history.3 Thus, Spengler is, from the very first pages of Decline, poised to a morphological investigation of cultural intuitions rather than an analysis of economical artifacts. Analogously does one analyse anything organically generative by what it seeks to produce in spite of the adversity of the world, rather than mistaking the mechanisms by which it achieves such production as the functional alpha and omega of its being. The core of Spengler’s methodology, we may say, is inductive, particularly analogic, reasoning, rather than strictly deductive. History, belonging to those things actualising themselves, cannot be known merely by systematising them as one would with things already actualised; but one must feel them to know them, as he must feel his own life, not merely study it, to know it.4 Spengler’s primary contribution, then, to the field of history, is not the seasonal cycle which he derived from cross-referencing, but in the internal references themselves, that cohere cultural bodies into unitary things defined externally by the source and sum of all their generations. Its methodology is both its premise and conclusion, and its single most important idea.

Of all these feelings of history, the races and cultures therein, an incongruence is felt, not simply an incongruence in opinion, but in that of attitude.5 It is remarked that among the Vedic6 and Classical attitudes of history, little care for the past was conveyed, although for two internally different reasons. Concerning the former, its soul was centred upon the spiritual liberation of the self, whereas the latter was possessed by the conception of actual and everlasting glory in the minds of men. The Classical man, therefore, as Spengler remarked, “... read Homer, but [...] did not excavate Troy,” like that which the Westerner was compelled towards. As well ask Thucydides why he remarked that prior to his era of Lysander and Pericles, nothing of exceptional historical import had yet occurred. The Classical soul demanded an ethical myth to live by within the actionable present, not history for its own sake.

This informs the arrival of our next contrast, among cultures who, for whatever internal reason, were indeed deeply conscious of history and their place in it. This is said to be true of the Egyptian and Western in particular. The Egyptian was incredibly detailed in both its tending to the forthcoming and its articulation of temporal connectedness among past and future, in contrast to the infinitesimally small present. This extended to the culture’s rites of death, as well, where in contrast to the Vedic and Classical nobles preferring cremation, the Egyptian nobility and priesthood enjoyed the process of mummification.

The Western is identified with a uniqueness, for its historical consciousness, no dissimilar from its remaining symbolic disposition, is global. The West is the only culture within the history of civilisations and tribes to possess the very concept of a “world history,” the only species for whom the idea means anything, and thus it is his responsibility to bring the idea to fruition.7 It is the destiny of the idea to articulate itself and enjoy a profound attention through the unbeknown actualisations of Western scholars, as it was the destiny of classical music to enjoy a profound articulation by the unrivaled genius of Mozart.

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This was first attempted in a primitive and infected sense by the Renaissance classicists, their being prime pathology of the Western Culture, from which all future parasitic interests of the West, whether Lockean or Marxian in disposition, derived. In this schema, it was said that all history could be conceptualized according to the taxonomy of “Ancient,” “Medieval,” and “Modern,” where ancient seemingly meant a sea of various unrelated historical developments prior to the Germanic Migration Period of c. 10300–600 H.E., irrespective of their isolation or intent. Modern meant all historical events undertaken by the expanding political bodies of the West; and, of course, medieval came to mean the arbitrary time between the two. It was split in such a way for it were the classicists who identified their arrival as the end of the Western Culture’s gestative (c. 10400–11000 H.E.) and developed (c. 11000–400 H.E.) phases, and revival of the time in which Classical forms dominated the Mediterranean basin.

In the strictest sense, this notion was not even pure fact, as in their pursuit of Classical idealisations, they totally disregarded the plurality of civilisations outside of the interactive range of the Hellenic and Roman civilisations, which they also deemed to be “ancient”—notably those in Mesoamerica, Peru, India, China, and Japan (regarding the formative Yayoi-Period). To separate these two eras of “progress,” a meaningless period was invented that simply meant a referent of the time between the apparent political collapse of the Classical world and its “revival” by their rank. As we will come to realise, the Classical and Western Cultures, in spite of the humanist desire, share as much soul as do the Western and Mesoamerican, or the Western and Vedic. A “Middle Age” means nothing to the Chinese Civilisation, which had continued its dynastic cycle irrespective of the historiography of humanists, nor the Mesoamericans, who were enjoying a time of immense bounty under the classical Mayan for its vast majority of purported time. In this regard, the notion of a “Middle Age” is little more than a historical slur levied towards the Gothic Civilisation of the West, one which unintentionally carved a great historical blindspot for the study of contemporaneous civilisations and tribes.

Though, that was not the last developed, even if it remained the most impactful, for later in the West’s history, its intellectual culture having been poisoned by the humanists, the naturalist Lewis Morgan developed the taxonomy of “Savagery,” “Barbarism,” and “Civilisation,” where each taxonomically defined, Linnaean race of man belonged to one of the aforementioned stages of inevitable development.8 thereby prompting the European World-Empire9 to attempt to force their “inevitable development.” As Darwin elegantly put it, however, the Linnaean taxonomists could not even concur on which solidified races existed, whether only a few or many dozen.10 Hegel was the idealistic counterpart to this idea, though still corrupted by the progressive impulse of the early humanists, and thus he took all history to be ending in the inevitable resolution of the ideas of particular peoples into an Absolute Idea of the world.

In bringing this progressive notion of history to a materialistic schema, inspired by Morgan as much as Hegel, Marx wrote Capital in its shadow. It attempted a reduction of man to sociology, whereby, all the complexities of clans, races, heroisms, ideas, states, civilisations, religions, and cultures, atop of the mere social and economic finitudes which defined the lower caste, were flattened into an unambiguous soup of the fictitious entity called “class.” One must not mistake class to be a meaningful concept. Ironically, the entire idea of class had in spirit been a bourgeois conception, who, in their jealousy of the nobility, sought to vanquish the symbolism of blood with that of the symbolism of wealth. Class as a concept, thus, was conscripted into the vocabulary of later scholars, who responded purely to this artificial symbolism of status. In contrast, it had been previously understood that poor nobles and wealthy peasants were not anomalies, but rather expected occurrences, and there hence existed measures to rectify potential consequences of these happenings, such as donations and patronages, or otherwise arbitrary tolls upon emerging “middle classes.” Of course, for any ambitious civilisation, the contingency of wealth cannot in itself derive the morality and constituency of the political and scholarly body; it must instead have derived itself from the permanence of blood. In saying this, it is revealed that the concept of class is nothing but a materialistic exonym, in contrast to the endonym of caste still intuited even to the day. It is that which separates morally and soulfully the roles of individuals by their prime logic of decision, whether the social and economic logics of the lower estate, or ethical and existential logics of the two higher estates.

In aggregate of a man’s contingently inherited material conditions, he was told he belonged to this socioeconomic unit of “class.” Therefore, by an individual man, it was meant a desirous creature, who, because of his desire, belonged only to a part of men—a numerical set of men who all shared in each other’s economic fortune or misfortune, inspiring them to develop ideas and arts that served their collective interest as part of their “class.” These then emerged into superstructures, in the case of the then-contemporary ruling classes, resolving in the utopic age of the proletariat—coincidentally, aligning with primitive communism. Indeed, the entire rhythm outlined can hardly be named unique, in that Marx merely conscripted premodern conceptions of time and stirred it in one motion with his modern, such that the course of time went from Primitive Communism → Slave Society → Feudal Society → Bourgeois Society → Socialist Society (interim) → Proletarian Society.11 It would be remiss of me not to also highlight how dependent this framework was on the aforementioned Renaissance progression, such that Slave Society and Ancient corresponded, Feudal and Medieval, and Bourgeois and Modern—remaining just as geographically and emotionally biased as the pathological Allfather.

However, in mixing both the premodern concept of historical decline and rebirth, and the Morganite-Hegelian concept of historical progress, it simultaneously professed a return and an unprecedented arrival. Its instinct towards the past in any measure informs us of a perenniality to the communistic mass; and so even they picked from the bones of history certain heroes that satisfied their rebellious impulse. It became the tales of Spartacus and Gracchi (Classical), Zhang Jue and Li Zicheng (Sinic), and Jan Hus and Robespierre (Western), that rallied their number, all reminiscent in one way or another of the grievances of the lower socioeconomical body. More importantly, all were men who committed wanton acts of destruction against their civilisation that either ended in political catastrophe (Li Zicheng), or were eventually rectified by the autopoiesis of the body politic (Spartacus).12

This begs the question as to why this model could only cohere to the history of the European continent (not Europe as the Western Culture, but as in the totality of events within its land mass). As the motion of societies in Europe supposedly “evolved” from slavers to feudalists, circa the reign of Diocletian et seq., others had been “feudal” for a millennium, such as Chinese Civilisation, and others remained “slavers” for a millennium, such as Arabian and Turkic Civilisations.13 Indeed, some societies were once again inspired to conquest and slavery well into their era as “feudal,” even as they transitioned into “bourgeois,” such as the very Europeans Marx unleashed the full metre of his juvenile angst against. He at least has the European bourgeois to thank for diffusing its capitalistic impulse across the world, which would have never happened if their states remained content in the landmass of Europe. The prime global enmity of the Marxian ideology arrived purely by local, and thus quite un-Marxian, means. Instead of a pure cycle, decline, or progress narrative, a bastardisation of all three, mythologically inspired yet economically concerned, was all that was borne from his quill.

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What has been missing from the Western historiography, by the fault of the classicists and their successors, is a historical detachment from the objects involved, a detachment from the races, peoples, and the ideas they possess. The Western Culture must now do for its history what it has done for its physics; it must regard its study with such personal disconcern that a clearer picture beyond its unconscious, far-reaching biases may begin to emerge. In recognising that of whichever generation he writes, it is but in a long line of a potentially infinite number—each with their own biases and felt historical missions—that he may begin to regard history as a biologist regards the extinction and forthcoming of countless forms of life, whether beautiful like the butterfly or unnerving like the mold.14 History biases neither cultural flowering nor decay, only political competence.

These past few centuries seem to us now of far greater import than the almost unthinkable number of centuries we have chosen to label within the era “Common” or “Before Christ” for the same reason that the moon also appears larger to us than the planets and stars in its backdrop. But while the West conceives its era of empire (c. 11500–800 H.E.) of fantastic significance to the contemporary period, the Sinic, in all its millennia of history, chose instead to concern itself with the era of c. 9800–10220 H.E. as supremely meaningful. Spengler—as well as Herder and Vico before him, however infantile their attempts—sought to be the first scholars to correct the humanist path and fulfill the destined development of the Western conception of world history through the tradition of organicism.

This tradition set forth is to argue that mankind as an idea does not exist, but only many races of man. Humanity exists only as a referent to the form each the various races are anatomically and sensibly indebted to. “Mankind,” however, does not allude to this referent, and thus must not be confused with it; its goal is rather to cloud the apparent differentiation, leading to in all cases, as discussed prior, lapses in historical knowledge, of an empire in the time of 𝑥 or a collection of tribes absent their mention from neighboring bureaucratic records. When mankind is spoken, it is in all cases a zoological construct, one that must repeatedly insist upon itself in the face of instinctive aversion, when in actuality, if one is to understand world history, they must first understand that there exists no unit called mankind, for which some actions and arts and technics are universally valuable contributions to all peoples and their cultural and political bodies.15

At the base level, this is seen merely in a political body’s technical assignments, that a Nordic longship, Punic galley, or Polynesian canoe were desired immensely within their contexts yet utterly uninvited outside of them, for purely ecological reasons alone. The mere fact that Caesar’s boats built for the Mediterranean could not have reached the much larger Atlantic boats of the Venetii, does not convey a difference in objective technical betterment, which would imply it to be a matter of linear degree, but it is a matter of each water’s physical and living rhythms compelling maritime vessels alien to one another. The development of technics, in all instances, is corroborated by two origins: a political reality for which technical things are compelled, and a soul for which immense technical complexity is desirable.

Herein the dimension of history, there exists only units who themselves decide utility to their actualisation, dependent on the soul they possess, which is discerned morphologically by their actual expressions, in both results and intents. The physical energy of the men of these cultural units, i.e., their capacity to do work, is expended inwards, addressing the soil of which their superpersonal soul occupies in all the artistic and technical flavour it demands.16 Nothing lesser or greater may suffice.

Then, the adult prospect of a Western world history is a history of civilisational and tribal worlds, hitherto articulated. In description, though not theorem, that of civilisations we have constructed largely through contemporaneous archives, and that of tribes through archaeological findings. In keeping with the musical analogy, Spengler seems for Western historiography what Bach was for Western polyphony, as well as he confesses as such in his introduction, admitting in kind that he has certainly made regretful mistakes in this monumental work. The Decline of the West is thus not constitutive of the mature Western historiography, but rather foundational.

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§1 | A Philosophy of Mathematics

Relevant to the framework as a whole are a set of primitive definitions Spengler unleashes towards the first volume’s opening. So that, in all instances concerning the use of “becoming,” it is to mean the active condition of momentum, ending in the thing “become.” The two facts of consciousness are then laid out as “alien,” which is to refer to the basic fact of one’s perception of the outer, sensible world, and the “proper,” which exists in reference to the organism’s inward subjectivity that is felt only by it, reminiscent of “qualia.” The “soul,” meanwhile, is there to refer to the possible, capable of conceptualising the discrete present.

In this definition of the soul, the first of two elements of a “world-picture” emerge: time. As the present is already a peculiar thing; it possesses the mysterious notion of inherent direction between the yet-to-be future and the actualised past. He contrasts “soul” with the “world,” which is meant to mean the actual, i.e., what is concurrently extant from the perspective of a soul. This confers the second element: space. Lastly, “history” and “nature” are meant to denote the two modes of human understanding, concerning all things becoming or things become, respectively. These two modes together compose the entire world-picture of a soul, proceeding to be total in their apprehension of space and time, and possessing a language—not of human utterance, per se—but of capable organic generation. As “soul” and “world” have been distinguished possible and actual, so too does there exist a possible culture of ideas, and an actual culture of generated tokens (i.e., architectural styles, illustrations, musical traditions, oral and literary stories, ethical values, aristocratic ornamentations, technologies, wargears, law codes, and regimes).17

Further does Spengler conceptualise two modes of experience, the former owing to experience-as-lived and the latter to experience-as-learned.18 The latter is quite explanatory, but it is the intrigue of the former that invites speculation, for the origin of an organism’s intuitive way of understanding solutions to its problems in the moment of action reveal precisely what it as a form of life is spiritually equipped for. The natural and political philosopher Yockey spoke well on this fact, albeit for a differing reason, quoting:

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“... the rule in nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for herbivores to eat and plenty of herbivores for carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be a ‘struggle,’ since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war. [...] Even so, one must concede that it is not physically, mechanically necessary for carnivores to kill other animals. They could as well eat plants—it is the demand of their animal souls to live in this fashion, and thus, even if one were to call their lives struggles, it would not be imposed by ‘nature,’ but by the soul.”19

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At a digestive level, this is of course questionable, though diet is not exactly the intent of Yockey. The point is physiognomy, in the Aristotelian sense, to clarify. It is that abundance in nature that inspires bacilli, plants, animals, and men to so readily kill one another, whether such killing is invisible to the human eye in the case of bacilli and plants, appears a quaint meal in the case of herbivores, or appears a gratuitous and bloody feast in the case of carnivores. This purveys the economical theory presented by Bataille, in which the bounty of Earth’s solar energy provides far more than any number of life requires, and thus life—whether microscopic or continental, its will-to-power directed towards material matters or spiritual matters—must rid itself of this accursed share in whatever way it can.20 Experience-as-lived thus refers to the becoming of an organism, while experience-as-learned refers to the thing-become, whether partly or in whole—instinct and memory, respectively.

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We thus reach the true origin of the Spenglerian conception of culture and history, inspired, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, by the idealism of Kant in his distinction of the noumena and phenomena. This foundational epistemology Spengler rallies forth and employs it in the service of a philosophy of mathematics, where it is taken to create the foundation of a theory of a plurality of epistemologies.21 This notion underscores the whole of Spengler’s mathematical philosophy, which contrasts to Platonism, formalism, or the contemporaneously pioneered logicism, in that it is asserted mathematics is neither metaphysically life-independent (Plato) nor the expression of fundamental logical axioms (Russell), but an art form. If the mathematical did indeed belong to the philosophy of nature instead of the arts, it would be possible to define a supreme object of its study, such as the planets of astronomy, sediments of geology, environments of ecology, fossils of paleontology, organisms of biology, elements of chemistry, or forces of physics, an utterly hopeless goal for the mathematician, who does not observe the alien, but conceptualises within the logic of the proper.22

Therefore, it is seen that there exists not one supreme mathematic, but many mathematics; in principle, a potentially infinite number of mathematics, so long as history may continue to birth new cultures. Because its universality is a matter of opinion rather than fact, there are found multiple manners of doing mathematics: an Egyptian manner, a Vedic manner, a Classical manner, a Western manner, and so forth.23 A mathematic in this sense is defined as an idea of the number, or rather, the theoretical articulation of a culture’s cognition of the world. To express simply, mathematical imagination, its symbols and theorems, is the pure cognition of a culture, of which all cultures of all times and all dispositions feel its impress. Mathematics is the art of epistemology, whereby a culture makes theoretical and practical sense of its understanding of space (extension) and time (direction).

It is such that all forms of cultural generation owe a form of debt to one’s mathematical sense, as—whether speaking of a Gothic cathedral, cupola church, Doric temple, or an Egyptian pyramid—all structures are fundamentally the applied mathematical intuition of a culture rendered in mineral, so that a flying buttress or ribbed vault may possess an integral or double integral under their continuous curves, or a rose window express a fractal as detailed as a stonemason may make it. Both of these cathedral patterns were constructed centuries prior to their theoretical articulations in the Western Culture, yet nonetheless were exposed by the articulated mathematic of the Western Culture, developed most comprehensively by Descartes, Newton, Euler, and Gauss, who formulated their theorems in entirely disconnected applications, i.e., theoretical physics, music theory, and logical treatises.24

What is called the “history of mathematics” is in actuality the history of the many various self-contained developments and reinventions, all of which are necessary for the culture performing the development, such that the mathematical intuition may bleed into its subordinate arts. For the West, it was necessary that its geometric achievements divorced themselves in function and imagination totally from Euclid, and its algebraic achievements from Al-Khwarizmi, expressing such reimaginations—whether implicitly or explicitly—in its sophisticated forms of oil painting, music theory, and siege warfare. In the developing mathematic of the West, which was stifled by those within the cultural body obsessed with their Classical predecessors, it was compelled to redefine the Euclidean geometry of bounded polygons from the Cartesian of infinite and multidimensional graphs, in both the pure and applied sense. In this regard, of the artistic nature of mathematics, all musical, illustrative, metallic, and architectural forms of artistic development also include a corresponding mathematical imagination, the impulse of the mathematical as deep as that of song—compelling arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and calculus as it does the sistrum, lyre, lute, and organ.25

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We may illustrate the differentiation between the Classical mathematic and the Western mathematic in the undeniable fact of their two discrete conceptions of the number, the former understanding the number as magnitude, and the latter understanding the number as function. Illustrative of this case is in Pythagoras’ own words, stating that “numbers [were] the essence of all things,.” This can hardly be considered a natural statement, for it corresponded to an imaginative idea rather than an observable fact—the Classical imagination, in detail, which pledged fealty to the notion that numbers were measurable, thus those things perceptible to the bodily senses.26

For such reasons, Spengler writes, the Classical could have never captured the negative numbers of Sinic mathematics, nor the absence of numbers altogether in the Vedic mathematics, while it was in the very essence of the form of the Sinic and Vedic Cultures to articulate them. The notion that (-2 × -3 = 6) would have appeared nonsensical, as much as Euler’s Formula (e^{ix}) would have, for the mathematical intuition that determines numbers as measured magnitudes cannot in sound logic conceive of a “negative magnitude”—a “negative metre.” Indeed, many Classical mathematicians did regard contemporary cultural mathematical developments as nonsensical, and vice versa, and not for a mere lack of theoretical acquaintance.27

In contrast, a certain Classical equation may functionally express the idea of,

which establishes a tangible connection between each number for which it becomes necessary to solve for 𝑥 (where 𝑥 is expressed rhetorically rather than algebraically).28 A Western equation might instead express

(Fermat’s Last Theorem), in which there exists no pure value for either 𝑥, 𝑦, or 𝓏, nor a necessary result as we might expect from the prior, but only an inscription of an eternal relation between each variable, considering the value of the variable 𝑛 as either (> 2) or (< 2), where the variables 𝑥, 𝑦, and 𝓏 are no more numbers than are the + or = symbols.29

Thus, to the extent at which Euclidean geometry and Archimedean arithmetic truly had significant impact on the development of the Western mathematic is questionable, for if it is to be taken seriously that mathematics is a cognitive art rather than a mere observational science, the abstract analysis of Euler and Descartes belong in a totally foreign world than that of the preceding Classical scholars. In the Western mathematic, polygons merely presented themselves as daily utilities rather than central structures as they did in the Classical; addition and subtraction were reinvented from the art of reckoning magnitudes to infinite functional processes; powers changed meaning, from multiplicative magnitudes to the exponential idea of the logarithm.30 Expressions such as,

which hold great importance in the Western mathematic for their representation of the transcendental, render themselves largely superfluous outside of its own particular feeling for numbers—its own organic world-picture.

The Classical idea of numbers, thus, could ill-accept of the Western set of irrationals. Where the former could only imagine one number as occupying the space between 1 and 3 (expressed in the Western mathematic as the set of all natural numbers (ℕ)), the latter could imagine an infinite aggregate of numbers between 1 and 3 (expressed in the Western mathematic as the set of all real numbers (ℝ)), and beyond, into imaginary numbers or complex numbers,

remaining not a trace of the meaning of number in the Classical or Semitic31 sense. Within the Spenglerian schema, this presents itself as the fundamental conflict that prevents the possibility of an intercultural, universal cognition.

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§2 | Morphology and Physiognomy

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Sincerest apologies. From today, 01/09/2026, all articles from June 2025 to March 2026 are on hold for correction, and are unlikely to receive proper treatment for some time. For any and all updates regarding this Journal, proceed to the Instagram link in this account’s description.

Addendum: this article is currently being reworked from—including §2—(seen above); §3—Common Objections; §4—A Critical Analysis of Decline; and §5—Retrospection.

In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

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In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

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In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

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In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.

In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.

In the meantime, there remains three articles readily available for viewing:

i.

ii.

iii.