Nor does this --its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a
Titanism of power.
For one of its effects is that Celtic traditions, even as they are being included on the cultural map of the British Isles, are simultaneously being contained as the source of a "spirituality"--what Arnold calls "the
Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact" (1883, 118)--that precedes the pragmatic reason now essential to statecraft and material, capitalist progress.
The Austrian physicist shows that the fundament of any ethical code (Tugendlehre) is the concept of self-conquest / self-transcending / surpassing oneself (Selbstuberwindung) (by virtue of will-power / strength of mind), which, for instance, in Blake's and Brancusi's system becomes the radical idea of self-annihilation or annihilating the selfhood (see especially Blake's poems Milton and Jerusalem), while in scientific romanticism it becomes the notion of "scientific
Titanism," namely the idea that science must be in search of infinite knowledge, the romantic scientist transcending in that search the very cosmos he inhabits, with a view to reaching the transcendence beyond the cosmos (Harold Bloom emphasized this purpose of the romantic system).
He cites Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris on the
Titanism of pre-aesthetic human being: this pre-subject of immediate contact has the "vigorous marrow of the Titans" (der Titanen / Kraftvolles Mark ist sein) (Schiller 1967, 172).
The elements of
Titanism and barbarism turned out to be quite as fundamental as the Apollonian element." (34)
At every turn of the clock of exploitation--from commercial capital of the colonial venture to industrial
titanism of the heyday of Henry Ford, from post-war celebration of superpower accession to empire in the heady years following 1945 to our present hegemonic financial juggernaut that since the 1970s crisis of overproduction has made ever-new forms of the ever-old trick called "debt" the irrepressible instrument of relentless accumulation--the back story has been the same: a logic of growth enshrined in a new mode of principality called a corporation that has ramified its operation under the presumption of Western "right" and white exceptionalism.
Both sides of
Titanism are evident in earlier Christian references to the story.
Nor does this--its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a
Titanism of power.
In 'On the Study of Celtic Literature' Arnold speaks of Byron as embodying 'the
Titanism of the Celt', and of the hero of Manfred as 'self-consumed, fighting blindly and passionately with I know not what', (11) and the implication of his latter-day version of Byron's poem is that his hero, Empedocles, is more conscious of what he is fighting.
On Nietzsche's
Titanism see Cioran's Leurres, 239; OEuvres, 264.