Grimdark Dialectics: Hegel and the Philosophy of Warhammer 40K

Acid Horizon

This episode explores the philosophical and political implications of the Warhammer 40,000 universe through a Hegelian lens. The speakers an

Key takeaways

• Warhammer 40K functions as a transmedia narrative that explores 'the worst possible worlds' through various cultural forms.
• The setting's evolution reflects the shift from Thatcher-era satire to a more ethically serious exploration of suffering and stasis.
• The Emperor of Mankind is analyzed as an 'empty signifier' or an objective institution lacking true subjectivity.
• The Horus Heresy represents a tragic transition from a project of scientific enlightenment to one of religious/mythological decay.
• The Warp serves as a metaphysical space where the human psyche and chaos intersect, complicating the boundary between materialist and idealist views.

Main topics

• Warhammer 40,000 Lore
• Hegelian Dialectics
• Grimdark Dystopia

Notable quotes

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how popular science fiction/fa

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Welcome back to the podcast. This is Craig. We are deep into a spooky September here at Asset Horizon with an anti-ocular October on the way. So our programming may get a little weird. In a few weeks, we will be live at Penn State University with members of Asset Horizon Research Commons. In November, we return to the Durations Festival in Brooklyn. Head to our events page on our webpage to see what's coming down the pike. October is also when two new classes start at AHRC. Bob Langan's Jung and Spinoza, God, Affect, Destiny, brings two thinkers of spirit and matter into conversation and follows where they connect. Sasha Ravitch's Aesthetics of Ophel digs into abjection, shame, and repulsion. From Kristeva and Bataille to transgressive fiction, these classes have become very popular, so limited seats remain. Today, Adam takes the lead. on the philosophy of Warhammer 40K, joined by John Greenaway, the Lit Crit Guy, and Leon Cato of The Left Page. They take on grimdark cosmology, empire, and the tiny painted soldiers for which Warhammer has become known. Full disclosure, I myself was indoctrinated with AD &D First Edition, and then I flirted with GURPS and Shadowrun. I was lodged in a different nerd niche, hence I would be out of my depth in this conversation. For many of us, the precursor to philosophy was our experience with tabletop RPGs. Maybe that was the case for you. What was your hang? Anyway, let's get into this conversation. Adam, take it away. Speaker 4 (1:48) It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries, the Emperor has sat immobile on the golden throne of terror. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass, writhing invisibly with power from the dark age of technology. He is the carrion lord of the Imperium, for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die. Yet, even in this deathless state, the Emperor continues his internal vigilance. Mighty battle fleets cross the demon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest among his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bioengineered super warriors. Their comrades in arms are Legion, the Imperial Guard, and countless planetary defense forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition, and the tech priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants, and worse. To be alive in such times, to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But enough about the Labour Party's manifesto. Welcome to Asset Horizon, the theory podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about the narratives of dystopia, the dialectics of tragedy that characterize the kind of a great canon of just how shit things could be and our imagination of how much worse things could get. That is Warhammer 40,000 from Games Workshop, a company that is slightly larger than the British fishing industry. And to discuss the philosophy of Warhammer 40,000, I am glad to be joined by a long-term friend of the show, John Greenaway, a.k.a. DelicatRipGuy, and comrade Leon Cato, with my friends at the left page. John, Leon, welcome to the show. Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, Speaker 3 (4:36) it's always this. I'm glad that we've come on the Serious Philosophy podcast to finally do some serious philosophy and talk about the tiny man that you have to paint. This is what philosophy has really been building towards for the last hundred years, I think. Speaker 2 (4:54) Yes. No, there's no truer self-explication than painting your meanies. This is obvious and true. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Speaker 4 (5:04) if you see the way people treat philosophers sometimes, they are treating them a little bit like action figures. So we're all going to go talk about Warhammer 40,000. It's a bloody big universe. It's pretty extensive in terms of only its temporal duration, I think it started. in the late 80s, sort of under Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and it expanded to such a degree that it's kind of everywhere. Nonetheless, it is something which, despite its vastness, or sometimes because of its vastness, really does inspire a lot of obsession, particularly in people of nerdage such as ourselves, and possibly many of our listeners as well, I would hope. So, just to throw it out there, let's start with Leon. What is Warhammer 40k? What is it that just dragged us into this? Who do you give people the elevator pitch? for something like this? Speaker 2 (5:48) After having read what I read since, which I started doing since March, I wouldn't pitch anything for the record. Just from a moral perspective, I would not recommend anything. But 40K is a universe that is obsessed with suffering, that sees suffering as in a very Ardonian type of way, as in it's something very fundamental to understand reality, any kind of social reality. and tries to articulate this in myriad of ways. Every single aspect of Warhammer can be traced back to some kind of pictorial idea of suffering, I think. And this indeed started during the Thatcher years and evolved from this more simplistic, direct, persiflage, mockery of Thatcher into something that's a bit more broad, a bit more, I would argue, ethically serious. Not that the intent wasn't there, but it's a bit more robust philosophically. So I would say for the Acid Horizon ex-Warhammer enjoyer, I would say this is my sales pitch. Speaker 3 (6:49) I think, just to add for the people who are not Warhammer enjoyers, perhaps, you know, my background is in cultural and literary studies. So like how to approach this thing is maybe a useful question of like, firstly, you have to be clear on what is the thing that we're talking about. It originates as a tabletop. RPG war game with rules which are a kind of descendant of Dungeons and Dragons. There is also the spin-off magazine, which exists to flesh out the lore of the game world, which very quickly becomes short stories and comics and novels and then video games. There have been Warhammer video games since the early 90s, I believe. Then you get shows, you get animations. So it becomes a kind of like... across a transmedia mode of narrative construction. And that in itself is probably worth paying attention to as well. But yeah, I think it's important to point out that when we're talking about Warhammer, we are in effect talking about... multiple intersecting cultural forms of production, which are geared around perpetuation of a singular shared narrative kind of life space within which the player and the various kind of psychopomps, the various representatives of the player kind of move and interact. And all of it is geared around this question of the worst possible worlds. Speaker 3 (8:14) Obviously, the introduction, the famous phrase of Warhammer 40,000 of in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war has given its name to an entire kind of subgenre of grimdark. And it's very important. I think that it's fundamentally a kind of fantasy space. It isn't science fiction. Forget technology. Forget what you think you know. So much has been forgotten already. We're not dealing with a world which is explicable through the rules of rationality and kind of knowledge. So it's for people who are not into 40K, maybe that's the kind of first question is like, what mode of 40K do you engage with? Do you engage with the tabletop games? Do you engage as me and Leon have for the last seven months? So many of the novels that you engage with the video because you don't have to do all of them. In fact, lots of people don't. I've never played the game, but I've read a lot and I'm like enmeshed within it now. Yeah, I think that's maybe how I would set it up for someone who is not a 40k enjoyer. The Speaker 4 (9:18) absolute vastness of the novels, as you said, there's so many different ways to engage with it. I've never played the tabletop game. I've painted little minis because I need something to do creative that didn't involve, in lockdowns, didn't involve booze or making various weird kinds of smash burger. This is before, you know, before it was cool, of course. We had regular sort of clubs, but mostly I played it as from the role-playing game Dark Heresy. Essentially, it became sort of a, certainly, a more gothic version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, which allowed me to indulge in making the kinds of anxieties around the worst of possible futures enjoyable because it is so outlandish. I think there's something there of, to use a phrase from Mark Fisher, libidinalising the anxiety of, well, if things get really bad, it will still look kind of cool. This is kind of the emulation there for the setting. And in terms of the premise of the world, yeah, this premise of the world is, so for listeners, you know, In the 40k world, and this is happening after most of the novels, essentially, there's this Turkish bloke, right, called the Emperor. He's sort of like a psychic wizard. And he somehow manages to unite a disparate humanity that spent a lot of its time arguing with each other and going to war based on slightly dodgy technology. And eventually he manages to unite planet Earth, creates a bunch of genetic technologies that can allow people to become, you know, Really buffed up Space Marines. Well, in that case, they're called Thunder Warriors to start off with. Don't worry, anyone who's listening, they start off as Thunder Warriors. And a lot of the stuff is based out of these... demi-god-like humans he creates called Primarchs, who also sell very cheap clothing. And essentially these Primarchs are stolen by the big bad of the entire series, which is partially humanity, but also these things called Chaos Gods, which are psychic manifestations of various kinds of human disposition turned into the most maximal form of the ontological manifestation. He basically goes, okay... I'm going to start a great crusade to go find the rest of my beautiful big boys and various kinds of wars start in the meantime. I've missed out a lot there, but it's that roughly, if people want to get the sense of the general narrative for us, I think that's sort of where we end up starting, right? Speaker 2 (11:28) I mean, the proper place to start is 60 million years before that, when the true monsters of the galaxy, the Necrons, actually rose up and so forth and so on. But we have probably identified the main character of Warhammer, which is indeed the Imperium of Man. And the main character, hidden within the main character, is indeed the Emperor of Mankind. That's entirely true. Speaker 3 (11:49) And I think even from that, even from that kind of, as you say, missing out a lot by necessity, we've set up an awful lot of... really interesting philosophical problems on questions of like sovereign legitimacy, on the questions of like a fascist eugenics, on the question of how does an empire sustain itself ideologically rather than simply through an overwhelming force of arms. But one of the things that me and Leon have been doing for the last few months is within this setting of the 41st century, there is a cataclysmic event within the kind of... universal history that happens 10,000 years earlier. It's known as the Horus Heresy. It happens in the 30th century, in which the universe is kind of torn asunder by a kind of galactic civil war, which involves, yes, it involves the large, beautiful sons of the emperor turning on their sovereign authority. It involves masses of death. It's very bloody and very grueling to try and sit through. There is a series of 60 plus novels in the core Horus Heresy library, if you will, as well as individual character novels, Primark novels, add-ons, audio dramas. You can spend as much time as you want reading this. But if you're looking for a kind of like single discrete storyline, that's maybe also another place that people could start. Speaker 2 (13:11) Definitely. I will say like to combine a couple of the things that we have now already mentioned, what I... Maybe also as a late addition to the sales page. What I can say, to start off on a positive note, is that Warhammer takes more seriously a bunch of things that these large franchises, these large IPs and so on, that Warhammer clearly resembles in structure. It takes the notions that it wants to put forth a bit more seriously, I would argue. A lot more enthusiastically than their counterparts. Like we can't one for one name a substitute. to Warhammer, but a lot of people often cite Star Wars, for instance. And Star Wars, you know, despite its original and recent addition of Andor, which was nice because it's about killing fascists again, that's cool. But it largely stops there. I, you know, we all love the hero's journey or the hero with a thousand faces in high school, that's fine. But, you know, to still make content based on that single premise alone, it's maybe a bit overly discreet. Whereas Warhammer has maybe the inverter problem. It can't make up its mind on which luscious, intellectual, esoteric, philosophical notions it wants to ham-fist down and at times somewhat enthusiastically represent and at other times properly misrepresents. And I think the final notion that we should mention real quick to understand Warhammer is that the crucial difference, why we can't name an alternative to Warhammer, is that these things like Star Wars or like these large universes of the Simmerillion Lord of the Rings, they have a clear centerpiece. The Star Wars has the original trilogy. Lord of the Rings has, you guessed it, Lord of the Rings. But Warhammer does not have... as clear of a singular as a center as these other franchises have. And I think that's largely to its credit. Speaker 3 (15:08) Yeah, and it's because it's so diffuse. It's so naturally diffuse across so many different forms of cultural production, right? There is no, like, where do you start? Do you start with the game? Do you start with the rules? Do you start with the first issues of White Dwarf magazine? Do you go back to like 2000 AD where people like Dan Abner, who's gone on to be a really key writer for 40K, kind of cut their teeth writing Judge Dredd comics? There isn't a single select thing. And this is also one of the reasons why it's philosophically interesting, because in a sense, that level of diffusion makes it very easily culturally dispersed. So even if you've never played Warhammer, even if you've never read a book or played any of the video games, you kind of know something about it anyway,