Please note that this is an incomplete assessment of motivations simply because comic book characters will never have an end to their story. I am also not informed on Thanos’ current exploits in the comics since I have not read Marvel, or any comics for a number of years. The focus will be on an older iteration of Thanos and his fascination with death that I believe derived from him growing up in a utopia of immortals essentially. Also, this is not an explanation of the Hollywood version of Thanos since his motivations make no sense and is clearly just political propaganda from writers that don’t know anything about population trends. This is not a super in-depth analysis either, I’ve merely looked at his motivations through the lens of the Nietzschean last man, as well as the underground man from Dostoevsky's works.
I had difficulty understanding it at first, mostly because I personalized concepts too much that I shouldn’t have, namely Lady Death. Which in turn, made Thanos’ motivations look like an outburst of an angsty teenage boy. You can’t fully personalize a concept in a story otherwise you miss the point, Lady Death is still death itself, the only real reason it was given form is because that’s seems to be the easiest way to relate to values expressed in stories; it makes it easier to embody them through secondary personalization, which is a term coined by the psychologist Eric Neumann. Secondary personalization is an act from which the more something is understood, the more it is refined in the consciousness until it’s anthropomorphised completely, creating almost a god image within the individual. It’s essentially the same as the image of Helen of Troy discovered by Faust when he travels to the realm of the mothers, she was the spirit of unbridled creative generation and freedom that he longed for. Lady Death is the anthropomorphised value of what Thanos desires most, and he expresses it as female because he is male, because it’s that which he lacks, the other part of his reality. That is partly a Jungian notion from which the male takes an inward journey to discover the Anima within, or his inner feminine that is tied to his highest value, making the attaining of that value an almost sexual act of union between being and image, something like that.
“But wait” you may say, “then why is Death a woman to all within the Marvel universe?” Good question, that is because the concept of death has always been a feminine one throughout history; it is the consumptive element of nature that consumes the life that came before so that successive generations may come into being. The easiest picture to express this in is the Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its tail. It is the sphere that contains existence from which death, or consumption is the precursor to new life. Other faces of death are the Babylonian Tiamat, the Malekusian Le-Hev-Hev which translates to “she who draws us in with a smile so she may consume us.” There is also Nut from Egyptian myth, the mother sky who embraces all in death, which you can see her image placed on sarcophagi, and Ta-Urt who is the bestial guardian of the underworld. Death is Feminine because it is part of nature, or the great mother earth, so it’s not surprising that we will portray it as a woman... Most of the time.
For this assessment though, I want to focus on Lady Death as a very singular expression of his “highest art” so to speak, which arised from the stagnancy of Utopianism. So, let’s begin.
What would a man(or eternal) strive for when perfection was already attained? I really needed to think about that for a second because when you think about utopia, the interesting bits are always the struggle to achieve it. That’s where the meat is in such a value system, that’s where all the action is, and that’s when I had an idea. So, what would a man(eternal) strive for when perfection was already attained? Perhaps he would strive for struggle itself. Perhaps when given eternity, what then would be more desirable than the finite? What could you desire more after you are given the universe through society, than to have it all taken away? It sounds crazy doesn’t it, who would ever destroy perfection merely to struggle? Well, a human would... Even in the face of eternal happiness and comfort, simply to achieve one semblance (if even for a moment) of the meaning that comes only from the finite and imperfect, a person would dash it all away.
That is the purpose of Thanos, he craves the one thing that was taken from him by his parents, and the society that believed it knew better, namely death. Honestly, what meaning could you ever possibly find in a world where people have already conquered the most meaningful aspect of it? Things have to die, things have to wear down, they need to decay because the universe isn’t a structured space of rules and laws. It bends, it curves, it’s constantly changing, it’s a flow of perpetual becoming. The speed of light itself is constantly changing, and that is the speed of causality itself, which is the frame from which events can even happen in reality. Laws, structures, immortality are all societal concepts born from consciousness, more precisely the consciousness of the left hemisphere; especially the concept of immortality. Things are always changing, we just cant perceive most of it, and you, are not really you. Everything you are now is the current complexity of a a cosmic lineage that dates back to the very beginning of existence. All the material that makes up your being came from the death of something before you. Whether it be the nutrients you ingest from animals and plants, or the elements of you refined in the cores of long dead stars. You are a process, not an end, and to extricate yourself from that process is to produce a fate far worse than death could ever be, an immortal Utopia.
I had to ask myself, is that really the goal of life, just to transcend it? If like the eternals that happens, what other outcome could you have but a utopia of eternal happiness and complacency? Why would you even want that when what is taken is so much? What other options could you ever have than sacrificing everything that made you human; to place it all at the alter of godhood, so that you could simply keep existing and going through the motions like a machine. There’s a reason why vampires are portrayed as impulsive nihilists most of the time, because what the hell else can you do with eternity once you have it. Of course there is a universe full of possibility within the universe, but it will never be achieved by the eternals because they are no longer part of that process and the only kind progress they can achieve is scientific analytical processes which is very indicative of western culture now, because that’s all they value. Which in turn will probably only lead to them becoming like Celestials, ethereal nothings that don’t exist in reality, that don’t understand the underlying complexity and importance of emotion, and merely act like computers.
That entire society and Thanos himself is a microcosm, most likely of the projected anxiety of a post-industrialized society that puts far too much (to an almost pathological degree) value in a singular system of linear analytical cognitive progress. My god ladies and gentlemen, if eternity was sitting in a lab continually making it easier for people to live for the eternity they have anyway, where all that’s left are mere intellectual and habitual procreative pursuits, I would also think death and destruction would be a far more preferable option, it could even become an ideal. Jesus, just try it for a hundred years and get back to me on how you feel about it. I don’t blame Thanos for pining after it, lusting after it, making it his muse, his companion, the Galatea to his Pygmalion, his reason for being. It’s meaning that matters, not more life, not happiness, not perfection, It’s the meaning in the struggle for more life, it’s the meaning you derive from struggling for happiness, it’s the meaning in life that you derive from struggling for perfection that gives depth to existence. It’s not the result, it’s the process. Death matters because it makes everything beautiful, everything meaningful, everything is something you will never see again, something that will never be again. Struggle matters because it makes you more than what you were, it allows you to change. Now let me talk about struggle more.
To struggle is to be human, to suffer is to truly live. Humans are the only beings that can say life is suffering and have a smile on their face. And humans are the only beings in the known universe that will willfully suffer in full understanding of it. Each person has a vast ocean of dormant potential in them just waiting to be realized. I don’t say that in a metaphorical way, though that’s the best way to describe it. You have a plethora of dormant genes in you that wait for the right environmental factors to be activated and embodied as new modes of being, because humans are action oriented, not cognitive oriented. It’s the notion of wishing upon the stars, each one represents a potentiality of what you could be, and you have a choice, you can pick a star and struggle for it. But if you don’t have to struggle anymore, if you have forever and everything provided for you, you won’t do it, you won’t experience it, because you don’t have to. I say this because Thanos is human, strikingly human, perhaps even the greatest of what humanity could be, essentially he is the underground man in a world of last men.
“I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. Alas! There comes a time when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas! There comes a time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Behold! I show you the last man, ‘What is love? What is longing? What is a star?’ So asks the last man and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.”
“His species is ineradicable like that of a flea; the last man lives the longest. ‘We have invented happiness’ says the last man, and blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live for one needs warmth. Becoming sick and being suspicious are sinful to them: One proceeds carefully. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or human beings!”-Thus Spoke Zarathustra p.13
Of course, it would be very rational to want such an existence, and everyone on his world is very rational, but rational isn’t reasonable, and reasonable isn’t meaningful. People are contradictions unto themselves. They almost never want what they need, or need what they want, or even want what they want. The easy paradisaical life is a beautiful dream full of splendor and joy... Only so long as it stays a dream. If man were to make his dream a reality I believe, well, I know that the moment after he would spit on the very ground he toiled so arduously to build and content himself with its absolute destruction, just so something interesting could happen in his utopia. That is the folly of it, and that’s what I believe Thanos saw, even if he didn’t understand it himself. That is essentially Dostoevsky's notion of utopia and the values of enlightenment which is basically the society the eternals had made.
“There are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity to make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that sooner or later those people have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you? What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? 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 then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all of this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself(as though it were so necessary) that men are still men and not keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive suffering of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by this curse alone he will attain his object- that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated chaos darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!” -Notes From Underground p.230-231
The point I’m expressing is that people are inherently chaotic, and that they love it too, it’s the source of our greatest freedom, the dancing star. We would also destroy all that was good for us merely to keep it. That chaos is lethal to utopianism and eternity. Thanos killed his people and worshiped death because perfection had a flaw, it was meaningless. They sacrificed everything for it, and in turn missed the sole notion powerful enough even to propel one to remake the whole universe and succeed... death. But, that’s just some guys opinion.
