American Samurai Vol: 4

The Teleology of Conan

I recently watched Conan the Barbarian the 1982 action/fantasy film starring the third most famous Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the surface, Conan seems to be a twelve-year-old boy's dream full of women, war, and weapons, however, under the pulp dime novel façade there is depth.  One of the most famous lines from the film gives us a peek into the philosophical motivations of Conan. There is a scene in which Conan is asked “what is best in life?” he responds “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”. This question is in effect “what is the purpose of life?”. For Conan, the answer is total victory over his enemies. It's not victory for victory's sake, it's what victory contains, which is honor and glory, that drive Conan they are his telos. 

Let's talk about telos. 

Telos. That word you won't hear used, often, at least not today. Ever since, modern education saw fit to remove philosophy from its curriculum teleology, ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics, in general, have become little more than foreign sounds to western ears. This as far as I can tell is because we live in a post-enlightenment world that sees everything through a reductionist materialist lens, and in a world that is purely material there is no place for philosophy and the metaphysical, but I digress. 

Back to telos…

Telos in the most basic terms means end goal or purpose. Generally speaking, there are four causes or four explanations to the question “why?”’, in Aristotelian thought: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. Don't worry about the other three, for now, we are only concerned with the final cause or Telos. The final cause of anything is its end goal or telos. So when philosophers use the term teleological or teleology it is simply to explain something by looking at the result. For example, the telos of sex is procreation, that is to say, the purpose or goal of sex is reproduction, and everything else is window dressing, or in philosophical terms functions.  

Telos can encompass all of life, and there are telos that are subordinate to other telos. A  subordinate telos simply serves as the means to achieve a higher telos. The telos of a blacksmith is the production of swords, while the soldier uses the sword o kill his enemies. In turn, the telos of the blacksmith and soldier serve a higher telos to a king, his telos being to maintain the kingdom. So the telos of the blacksmith and soldier are directed at the higher telos of the king. 

So everything has a telos, including you and me, and we have subordinate telos that serve higher telos. This creates a hierarchical teleological structure oriented toward an ultimate purpose. This begs the question of what telos is the highest order? Answering this would be to understand how to properly orient your life toward the ultimate good. All in all, you would be able to say what the meaning of life is. Don't get your hopes up I am not answering that and neither are you but let's consider what much smarter people have to say on the subject. 

Aristotle would say that the telos of life is eudaimonia. Eudaimonia roughly translates to happiness, not in a material sense this is more purpose-driven. For Aristotle happiness is reasoning well or acting rationally according to virtue this is his telos, true happiness. Again this is not momentary happiness, it is necessary for man to rationally act according to virtue, for his entire life because one day does not make a man happy. The active component cannot be understated, for Aristotle, it is not enough to be virtuous you must actualize that virtue and you will have a good life, you will find eudaimonia. 

What if there is more? Something bigger than you or your society, or your Instagram account?

St. Thomas Aquinas would build on Aristotle's ideas. Aquinas understood that all humans are ordered toward God and humans were defined by their intellect. These two components God and intellect are central for St. Thomas Aquinas, he explains man's telos this way.

 “Since all creatures are ordered to God as to an ultimate end, all achieve this end to the extent that they participate somewhat in His likeness. Intellectual creatures attain it in a special way, that is, through their proper operation of understanding Him. Hence, this must be the end of the intellectual creature, namely, to understand God.”

Aquinas's understanding of the telos of man is helpful. He points us to the simple fact, that to know God is the ultimate telos. It's the top of the hierarchy, that all other telos are subordinate to. If all this holds then everything oriented properly will point to God as the ultimate telos.

Where does that leave us? Our modern culture does not recognize greater meaning much less God. There is no hierarchy in modernity and egalitarianism rules the day. If all things are equal then nothing can take priority, and to understand the ultimate telos of life you have to point to that which is prior to all things, that which all telos orient themselves to, God. If knowing God is the ultimate telos then we would expect people or nations that orient themselves in that way to achieve great things since all telos then are oriented toward the highest goal resulting in the full actualization of their potential.

To be fair we may not all agree that the telos of man is to understand God, however, it should be understood that a ship needs a crew, a crew needs a captain, and that captain needs a compass. Without these, a ship will wander the high seas aimlessly. As far as I can tell America and the west have no captain and the people playing captain have Jack Sparrow's compass to guide them (if you don’t know it points to what the wearer of the compass wants not north). That's just something to think about, I digress (again).

Back to Conan, honor, and glory may seem a shallow answer in comparison to God as the ultimate telos, but it's still more profound than what our current culture offers. Conan at least looks outside of himself to find his purpose which comes from a sense of honor (as honorable as a barbarian can be). It is something to strive toward and drives him to do great things. Those that follow Conan will orient themselves toward him and share in his glory. It's all temporal Conan’s telos is not higher-order reasoning but it's better than what we are currently sold.

 Nietzsche famously quipped “God is dead”, this was not a celebration but a warning. He knew that when the west embraced enlightenment ideals and rejected God that absurd rationality would remove God as the ultimate telos.  This would leave a vacuum and if it was not filled man would atrophy and his spirit would die.  Nietzsche spent his life trying to fill that vacuum with the Übermensch. It didn't work, it turns out man cannot be his own compass. The last century and the beginning of this one have borne this out. Decades and generation after generation with no telos have led us here. 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky saw this coming. In Notes from the Underground written in 1864, he describes what happens to men without telos.

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick”

Sounds familiar? Well if Russian literature isn't your thing, consider what  Christ said in Mark 8:36

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

You see Conan orders himself to something greater, he is orientated to a telos greater than himself. Conan has a telos that guides him. Aquinas, Aristotle, and the truly great men in history have all had telos. Why should we be any different? You may not be ready to have God as your telos, but consider how much better your life would be if you simply oriented yourself to something greater than a phone screen.

I know you read all that and probably wondered how is this tied to America? Well I’ll keep this part short. Look at America or the West in general today, do they seem to have a telos? Does it not simply seek progress for progress' sake? When America had a telos it settled the west, built the Panama Canal, and went to the moon. We got really far in the 20th century because our conflict with the Soviet Union gave us a telos but they are no more. With no great enemy and endless material prosperity, America has become directionless, simply spinning her wheels in search of a purpose.

I won't end on such a down note. Consider the Reconquista for seven hundred years the Moors ruled Spain, and the Christian armies isolated to a small three-hundred-mile area in the north of Spain and driven by their love of God and country managed to drive the Moors out and place the King and the Church back in power. That is the power of telos.   

-TJS