Eren Yeager and The Contradiction of Dialectical Materialism
Can the struggle of Attack on Titan’s protagonist help reconcile Marx’s biggest contradiction?
*This contains spoilers and the author’s own interpretation of the story.
Hajime Isayama’s wildly popular manga series, Attack on Titan (進撃の巨人) has come to an end. Behind all the thrilling action lays a story about the fight between the inevitability of history and humanity’s free will.
Eren Yeager is born into a world in which humanity is devastated by man-eating giants called titans. We are told that humanity constructed three walls to protect them from titans, and for 100 years, what’s left of humanity has lived peacefully. At the time we are introduced to him, he is a young boy wanting to journey outside of the walls. He yearns for the freedom that the existence of titans has robbed him of. Immediately after the readers get acquainted with him, titans break down the wall, leaving Eren helpless as he watches his hometown being destroyed and his mother being eaten.
This sends him on his journey to find the true origins of titans. Later in the story, he finds out that titans were formally humans belonging to a persecuted group of people called “The Subjects of Ymir,” or Eldians. What’s left of humanity are these Eldians, living on an island off of a larger continent, full of enemy countries wishing to do away with Eldians altogether. These mindless, human-eating titans that terrorized humanity living behind the walls, were Eldians formerly living on the continent who were sent off to the island and transformed into titans for, most of the time, petty crimes.
Ymir was a slave 2000 years before the story started. She became the first titan, the Founding Titan, by coming into contact with a hallucinogenic creature, which resulted in her being granted wild abilities. After her early death, her titan powers were passed down to her daughters and she was trapped in a cosmic realm, entitled “The Paths.” The rules of time and space do not apply here and she is forced to carry out the will of whoever controls the Founding Titan, who we later find out is now Eren Yeager. Much like Eren, Ymir’s sole want is freedom. Ymir can only be granted freedom if the creature that granted her the powers she holds is destroyed on Earth. As Ymir lives outside of time, it is implied that she knows it can only be destroyed at a very specific point in time. If this time passes with the creature still alive, seemingly, time resets to when Eren was a little boy, waking up from a nap under a tree. Creating a time-loop.
Eren has lived out this timeline countless amounts of times, never receiving the freedom that he so desperately wants. In the current timeline, the one in which the main story takes place, Eren eventually learns of future memories and learns what history has in store for him. He will go on to commit genocide against the rest of humanity outside of his island, in order to protect the Eldians living on the island. He accepts this as his only chance at freedom, just perhaps not the freedom he has always wanted. While committing these horrible acts, his fellow countrymen turn on him to stop these horrible crimes. In doing so, killing Eren and the hallucinogenic creature living inside of him and thus, freeing Ymir and breaking the time loop.
Now, how does all of this relate to Marxist theory?
Well in it, there are two opposing concepts. The first is the march of history. Using a method of his own creation, dialectical materialism, Marx theorizes that history is a story of class struggle. This struggle has taken many forms and will continue to evolve until the struggle is resolved and society becomes classless. Just as the ills of the feudal system gave way to capitalism, the ills of capitalism will create the conditions needed for the proletariat to gain class consciousness and transform society into a socialist one. The conditions and contradictions of the previous system gave way to the creation of the new one. This will continue to happen until the contradiction of class struggle is resolved. The second is human free will. Marx is explicit in stating that humans have free will and can shape history. So how can these two things be true at the same time? How can history have a predetermined ending point, yet humans are free to choose their own destiny?
The march of history is present but does not just happen. Humans need to make it, and before they do, they must choose to make it. There are limits to free will, those limits are the realistic constraints put on us by the reality in which we live. In the Attack on Titan world, Eren was free to make choices, yet those choices were limited. Eventually, his choices led to the freeing of Ymir and the breaking of the time loop. This led the world to a greater stage, one free from the terror of the titans. It was predetermined, yet it relied on the free will of humans to bring it to fruition.
Our world, our history is not that of the Attack on Titan world. We are not in a time loop. This does not mean we are outside of the march of history. Human choices have and will continue to create history. Yet these choices have continued to increase the prosperity of the human condition, but not in a clean, linear way. Will there be a point in time in which the tension between the classes resolves itself? Yes, eventually. Is that predetermined point in time the creation of a classless society? That is not clear, but what is clear is that the choices made by humans out of their own free will, will create and shape that point in time. Just as Marx once wrote, “Men make history, but never just as they please.”
The plight of Eren Yeager
Eren’s sole wish is freedom, yet he turns out to be a slave to history. His want for freedom takes on a subservient position in favor of the march of history. However, by doing so, his wish for freedom is fulfilled. However, this freedom is not what he envisioned. This freedom lives out in his friends and loved ones. Yet in doing so, he has taken the freedom away from countless amounts of people, by killing them.
In the real world, we saw something similar play out in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Any dissidence shown to the state, any exemplification of free will that deviates from that of the state’s will was crushed, in the name of the march of history. We can observe that if given sole priority to determinism, Marxists can wreak havoc on mankind. These real-world tragedies, and the ones in Attack on Titan should serve as a reminder of the dangers of ignoring human free will. Making the rectification of the contradiction of determinism vs. free will all the more important.
In the Attack on Titan world, it was necessary that the march of history took priority, yet in the real world, a more nuanced approach will yield better results. What our world and the Attack on Titan world share is that, if given sole priority, the march of history will result in tremendous human suffering. If there is anything we can learn from Attack on Titan, it is that.
