#zapffe

“In this blog post, I examine the anti-natalist theory of the Norwegian existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990). According to Zapffe, human nature is riddled with an inherent, irresolvable conflict, the result of which is that human lives are filled with too much suffering for procreation to be morally permissible. In contrast to the God of the Old Testament, who instructs us to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” Zapffe instructs us, in his 1933 essay “The Last Messiah,” to “be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”

According to Peter Wessel Zapffe, human life is inescapably very bad, the central reason for which is that there is an irresolvable conflict inherent in our nature. What does this conflict consist of? On the one hand, Zapffe explains, we humans are biological beings that, due to the evolutionary forces that have shaped us, are constantly prompted to act in ways that promote our own survival and reproduction. Having become the dominant species on Earth, we have, in evolutionary terms, been successful. One of the central explanations of our success, Zapffe suggests, is our advanced cognitive capacities. While cheetahs gain an evolutionary advantage by being fast and bears by being strong, we humans gain an advantage by being smart: The human intellect enables us, among other things, to make tools and traps, to cook, to plan, to communicate effectively, and to adapt quickly to changing environments.

Zapffe suggests, however, that the human intellect comes with a very significant downside: It confronts us with our frailty, with the suffering and death that eventually awaits us, with the vastness of suffering on Earth, and with our own cosmic insignificance—and these insights, he writes, are apt to fill us with “world-angst and life-dread.” While “in the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life.” One reason for fear and despair is that we humans grasp not just what is right before us; due to our “creative imagination” and “inquisitive thought,” “graveyards wrung themselves before [our] gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against [us] from the ghastly decaying shapes.” Another reason is that, as beings with an intellectual nature, we crave justification, and thus we are uniquely confronted with, and pained by, the meaninglessness and injustice of suffering. This, Zapffe holds, is a secular truth behind the myth that we humans have “eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise.”

(…)

Zapffe concedes that his bleak outlook on life is likely to strike many as counterintuitive. This is so, he suggests, not because life is in fact tolerably good, but because we have developed elaborate strategies to prevent ourselves from seeing the horrors of life. He argues that such strategies, which he calls strategies of suppression, “proceed practically without interruption as long as we are awake and in action, and provide a background for social cohesion and what is popularly called a healthy and normal way of life.”

Echoing ideas from early psychoanalytic theory, Zapffe lists three central strategies of suppression: Isolation, anchoring, and distraction. Isolation is the process of isolating ourselves from unpleasant impressions by institutionalizing taboos and by ostracizing those who break them. This is most evident, he suggests, in how we protect children from the harsh realities of life: We tell them that, in the end, all will be fine and good, even though we know that, in the end, we will suffer and die, and, eventually, be forgotten. Anchoring is the process of entertaining fictions that tell us that we belong in a certain stable place, such as a family, a home, a church, a state, or a nation. “With the help of fictitious attitudes,” Zapffe writes, “humans are able to behave as if the outer or inner situation were different from what honest cognition tells us.” Finally, distraction is the process of filling our waking hours with tasks that distract us from existential dread. We keep our “attention within the critical limit by capturing it in a ceaseless bombardment of external input.”

Zapffe suggests that these mechanisms of suppression are needed to keep us from being paralyzed by fear. He maintains that one of the crucial functions of any culture is to provide effective suppression, and that many psychiatric disorders should be understood as results of a breakdown of the mechanisms of suppression.

In addition to isolation, anchoring, and distraction, Zapffe lists a fourth strategy: sublimation. Sublimation is the process whereby the tragedy of human life is given aesthetic value. The production and appreciation of art, Zapffe writes, is perhaps more properly called a mechanism of “transformation rather than repression.”

The reason is that while isolation, anchoring, and distraction work by trying to push suffering out of sight, sublimation confronts suffering head-on and seeks to transform suffering into beauty.

(…)

Although art can give us consolation, however, it cannot save us from suffering, the reason for which is that the source of suffering is too deep. We suffer, Zapffe suggests, because of our very nature as humans. Insofar as we use our intellect, which, as humans, we must do in order to sustain ourselves, we are bound to suffer. Insofar as we suppress our intellectual capacities, we reject our humanity and undermine the faculty that is most crucial to our mode of survival. Humanity, therefore, is confronted with the grim fundamental alternative of having to choose either death or suffering.

This is a gravely pessimistic view of the world.

As for we don’t really have choices in life, why we are swamped by those things to fulfill our existence that we didn’t choose at the very first time? Why can’t we make those things as choices? For examples, we could choose to have hopes or not, we could choose to have dreams or not, we could choose to have descendants or not, we could choose to have a decent social status or not, without being seen as a failure.

Why can’t we withdraw entirely, we hide ourselves, for example, inside a cave to retreat far away from the sparkling world? To be a monk with no desire, meditating ourselves in total tranquility, or even to be a cricket that chirps in the solemn nights.

Vi sitter på varden og lar blikket seile. Fra jøkelens islys i øst til Lofotvæggens hilderland i vest under havranden. Det ryker av dypet og det driver av himlen, mens storm og tåke knuses mot hjørner og gjél. Og syn og sus flyter sammen til en saga om mineralets evige suverænitet.

Me? I have nothing like that. My ‘problem’ has no solution. My problem is my being able to think, my cognition, my mentality and my head in general. ‘Think positively’ is what you’d say but what’s there to think positively about? The truth is, to quote Ligotti, everything is ‘malignantly meaningless’. One day, much sooner than your defense mechanisms let you perceive, you’ll slide into non-existence and all your life and everything else you’ve made a great deal out of will cease to exist. Yes, you might have a happy life if you manage to do or achieve what you want to do or achieve, but for me, who has no such wants or desires, what is there? I feel like I am literally living just for the sake of being alive. For what? If right now I have a really good life, what could possibly ever change, given that I don’t look forward to anything in particular, that could make me feel better? Everything that makes me feel good is temporary while my cognition won’t leave me. Not even when I sleep. The costs and benefits equation does not look favorable. I don’t understand how most people are content with their lives, I don’t understand how they are able to not get fucked by the utter meaninglessness and worthlessness of their lives and I don’t understand how most of the people live their whole lives without ever getting to wonder why, to what end. 

Now how do you solve this problem? I’m completely stripped of any defense mechanisms supposed to keep me from digging all the way down to the core of existence. I stripped them all myself, I am not even going to pretend that I did not do this to myself. Why, when most people are pretty good at keeping away from ‘negative’ stuff or whatever, I am a sucker for nihilism. And you can’t talk about this. If you have a ‘normal problem’ yes, it is alright to talk about it. ‘My boyfriend cheated on me’, ‘I can’t make the rent’, people will listen and feel sorry and, in most cases, will help. But nobody wants to hear how nothing makes sense over morning coffee. Who exactly do you turn to? Once your problem is a taboo issue everybody prefers, for their own sake, to be oblivious about, you’re completely on your own. It is what it is. ‘You’re going through a divorce? Oh no honey, we are here for you!’ they say looking concerned. ‘There’s no point to any of this? Maybe change your mentality.’ they say while hurriedly packing their stuff to get away. Why? Because it is much more acceptable to have temporary and solvable problems. Which, again, makes perfect sense. No one ever wants to be drawn into acknowledging they have a problem they can’t do anything about. It is so much easier to stay ignorant.

I cannot stop thinking. I c a n n o t. What to most people is ‘oh if only I had money’ to me is ‘oh if only I had been born in a different time or even better as a different species with a non-developed neocortex’. My problem is the complete pointlessness of it all. And that I cannot make a meaning, a subjective one, as existentialists would argue, out of anything either. I have tried and have been trying for years. So if there is no objective meaning and no subjective one either, what the fuck is the point in subjecting myself to another 60 years of being alive, 70% of which will be work and adhering to societal norms (which I have dire opinions of as well don’t even get me started) just for the sake of being alive, which I am not particularly fond of either way?