The View from Mount Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), a disciple of Schopenhauer, was a Norwegian philosopher, lawyer, author, mountaineer, and ardent cyclist. He started out as a lawyer and a judge but returned to the university to search for answers. He became an author and a great pessimist. His pessimism apparently did not prevent him from living a full life, as evidenced by his many activities. His major work (On the Tragic, 1941) has not been translated into English, so persons who wish to become acquainted with his philosophy must reply on the shorter essay The Last Messiah.

Zapffe’s view is that humans are misfits. They are born with an overdeveloped sense of understanding that Nature never intended (does Nature intend anything?), a mind that is an abomination and an absurdity that makes them unfit for life. People have a craving for justification and meaning that Nature cannot satisfy. The tragedy that results from this is that people spend their lives in a fruitless search for answers to questions that cannot be answered.

Zapffe compares man with the Irish elk, whose overdeveloped antlers eventually weighed him down and caused him to become extinct. In The Last Messiah, Zapffe relates a fable of a stone age hunter who leaves his cave, at the waterhole is stricken with pity for his prey, and has an existential crisis. The parable resounds with two archetypical ideas of Western culture.

Firstly, in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic, a prisoner breaks his chains, leaves the cave, and sees the light. Secondly, Zapffe alludes to The Fall, the creation myth in Genesis. Man ate from the tree of knowledge, but then Nature turned his back on him.

Every individual consciously or subconsciously knows that he is an ephemeral being of no cosmic significance. Schopenhauer said, “The individual is a mistake that death corrects.” Julius Bahsen echoed the same thought when he stated, “Man is a self-conscious nothing.”

Man has developed civilization, which has four defense mechanisms, to prevent him from staring into this abyss of nothingness.

Firstly, unlike Nietzsche, who went insane from too much awareness, most people do not commit suicide or go mad because they practice self-censorship. Like the ostrich, they restrict the scope of their consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living. Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy and viable’ is at one with the highest in a person’s life. Psychiatrists say obsession with one’s existential predicament is pathological. Isolation then is the suppression of grim facts by sweeping them under the rug. The epitome of this is the American culture, which has turned the Day of the Dead into Halloween.

In everyday relations, a conspiracy of silence reigns. It is regarded as tactless to dwell on man’s grim existential predicament. Such a one is regarded as a crepe-hanger and is shunned by polite society.

Secondly, from early childhood the mechanism of anchoring in parents, home, the school, the neighborhood gives the individual a sense of assurance, the happiest protection against the indifferent cosmos that we ever know in life. When these anchors turn out to be ephemeral, the individual replaces them with other ones, e.g. devoting himself to the firm or a cause.

All cultures are systems of anchoring based on certain collective firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, the people, the future). The more important these foundations are, the more perilous it is to touch them. Secular and religious penal codes (the Inquisition) have been created to protect them. The carrying capacity of each segment depends on its fictitious nature not having been exposed or being regarded as necessary anyway (e.g. religious education is useful to society).

Distraction is a third method for keeping doom at bay. It is high society’s tactic for living (jaunts to Las Vegas, sojourning in Miami or on the Riviera). Like an airplane made of heavy material, it must be always in motion (make plans for the next outing). A crisis ensues as soon as the engine stalls.

The fourth remedy against existential panic is sublimation. By artistic talent some individuals are able to confront the evil and turn it to their own ends through heroic, dramatic, lyric, or pictorial forms. This is the least common method, however.

Zapffe warns that civilization cannot be sustained forever. Technology frees up ever more time for us to face our demons. He foretells the appearance of a last Messiah, a prophet of doom, a spiritual kinsman of the legendary caveman at the waterhole, who will be just as ill-fated, for his Word will subvert the precept “be fruitful and multiply” and turn it to “Know thyself – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”

Zapffe’s antinatalism is shared by such authors as Thomas Ligotti (Conspiracy against the Human Race) and Emile Cioran (The Trouble with Being Born) and is summed up succinctly in one sentence, “Having children is like bringing wood to a burning house.”