Norwegian Pessimistic Anti-Natalism

This post is a part of an ongoing biweekly series on philosophical pessimism and related positions. You can find other posts in the series here.

Every year, around 140 million human beings are born. This amounts, on average, to four births per second. Even though procreation is almost universally celebrated and encouraged, it is difficult to deny that there is an extreme moral seriousness involved in the act of bringing a new human being into existence. A child that is born might go on to live a good life, but in no case can this be guaranteed, and even the best of lives inevitably contains suffering.

Should we continue to procreate? According to anti-natalism, we should not. Although anti-natalism has never been a mainstream position, it has been a persistent minority viewpoint among philosophers. Its most influential advocates are Hegesias and Sophocles in ancient Greece, Arthur Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century, and, in contemporary philosophy, David Benatar (who contributed an earlier post in this series).

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.”

In order to illustrate the conflict between the biological and intellectual aspects of our nature, Zapffe tells the following parable in “The Last Messiah”:

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror, unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

This man’s intellect, the very capacity that enables him to hunt using a bow and arrow, ends up paralyzing him by confronting him with his own brutality.

Zapffe introduces a number of metaphors to further elucidate his view. He compares the capacity to reason to a sharp sword that lacks a handle. While it is a powerful weapon, whoever uses it to cut into the flesh of others inevitably also cuts into his own hand. He further compares the human predicament to that of the Irish giant deer, which (or so the story goes) evolved cripplingly large antlers. Although the large antlers had been the Irish giant deer’s distinguishing weapon in the struggle for survival, and thus the source of its greatness, the antlers became so large that they ended up causing its extinction. In a similar way, Zapffe suggests, we humans are also undermined by the very capacity that gives rise to our greatness. This makes human life tragic, since, in Zapffe’s view, the essence of tragedy is demise caused by greatness. This is his central claim in On the Tragic, his magnum opus, published in 1941.

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.

To understand how sublimation can play this role in Zapffe’s worldview, it might be instructive to return to the “brotherhood of suffering” in the parable with the paralyzed hunter. When the hunter recognizes that the animal’s fear and hunger are similar to his own, he includes the animal in a “brotherhood of suffering.” Art provides its appreciators with the experience of being included in a brotherhood of suffering. The artist shows the art appreciators that he understands them and sees the world, at least in part, the way they see it, and thereby he communicates to his fellow human beings that they are not alone.

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.

How, then, does Zapffe get from this argument for pessimism to the conclusion that procreation is immoral? One premise on the path to this further conclusion is that life is not just filled with suffering, but is filled with so much suffering, and with so little happiness, that human lives tend not to be worth living. Another premise is that nothing short of extinction can bring human suffering to an end. To appreciate why he holds this premise, notice that in Zapffe’s philosophy, there is no hope that social reform can solve the problem of suffering. Although social reform might perhaps alleviate some of the suffering, he takes the core problem to lie, not in the way in which society is organized, but in human nature. The problem, we might say, lies not in the rules of the game but in the internal nature of the game pieces, and therefore, we cannot expect to be able to solve the problem by changing the rules of the game. The third and last premise, which is implicitly assumed rather than explicitly stated by Zapffe, is that it is immoral to create lives that one cannot reasonably expect to be worth living. If we accept all three of these premises, we have reached the anti-natalist conclusion that it is immoral to procreate.

How does Zapffe’s argument for anti-natalism compare with the arguments of other anti-natalist philosophers? In some respects, his arguments resemble (and were indeed inspired by) the arguments of Arthur Schopenhauer, who also held that “life is filled with suffering” and that, for this reason, we should cease to procreate.

According to Schopenhauer:

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?

In what ways do their views differ? One difference is that while Schopenhauer held that a human “is generally capable of much greater sorrows than is the animal,” he also held that a human can experience “greater joy in satisfied and happy emotions” than an animal is capable of experiencing. There is no mention, in Zapffe’s works, of such an upside for humans. Another difference is that Zapffe and Schopenhauer appear to have different views on the nature of suffering. In Schopenhauer’s view, we suffer because we strive to satisfy our desires. This striving, he argued, leaves us either in a state of dissatisfaction (insofar as we do not get what we strive for) or, alternatively, with boredom and the formation of new desires (insofar as we get it). For Schopenhauer, therefore, the fundamental problem does not lie in the very nature of certain qualities of experiences, but in our response to certain qualities of our experiences. So, in Schopenhauer philosophy there is a glimmer of hope in that suffering will end if we reach a state in which we no longer strive but, instead, related to the world ascetically, in dispassionate contemplation (Schopenhauer was influenced by Indian philosophy, particularly Buddhism and Jainism). Zapffe does not appear to believe in the elimination of striving as a way out of suffering. One explanation might be that Zapffe thinks striving is unavoidable. Another explanation might be that he locates badness, not in the way in which we respond to our experiences, but in the intrinsic quality of certain experiences. In that case, we could, in theory, stop all striving, yet continue to suffer.

How does Zapffe’s argument for anti-natalism compare to that of David Benatar? Like Zapffe, Benatar holds a pessimistic view of human life, according to which “people’s lives are much worse than they think and . . . all lives contain a great deal of bad.” A crucial difference, however, is that Benatar’s argument for anti-natalism does not really depend on pessimism, but instead, on what he calls the asymmetry thesis.

In Benatar’s view, persons benefit from being happy. Nevertheless, he argues, we cannot justify the creation of a new person by appealing to the happiness that they will come to experience if they are brought into existence. Benatar suggests that even though we do something morally good if we make an existing life happy (or if we make a life that will exist anyway happy), we do something that is at best morally neutral if we bring a new life that is happy into existence. In the former case, we fulfill a need; in the latter case, we both create and fulfill a need.

Benatar proceeds by arguing that if we fail to create a happy life, there is no one who is deprived of that happiness: “[a]lthough the good things in one’s life make it go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived.”

So while Benatar suggests that it is morally neutral to create a happy life, he suggests that it is morally good to avert the creation of a life that would not be worth living for that person.

Here, then, is the crux: If happiness in a prospective life cannot justify its creation, but suffering in a prospective life can justify averting its creation, then as long as a prospective life is likely to contain at least some suffering we are not justified in creating it. In Benatar’s view, if we could be certain that a prospective life would not contain any suffering, it would presumably be permissible to create it, but no matter how much happiness it contained, we would still not have any positive reasons to create it—or at least, no positive reasons grounded in the interests of that prospective person.

Both Zapffe’s and Benatar’s arguments for anti-natalism are based on the badness of suffering. Benatar’s argument, however, does not depend on any particular empirical premise regarding the prevalence of suffering in life; instead, Benatar bases his anti-natalist conclusion on the asymmetry thesis, according to which we should weigh happiness and suffering differently in decisions about prospective lives than in decisions about existing lives. Zapffe’s argument is not based on the asymmetry thesis, but on an empirical premise about the pervasiveness of suffering in human lives (i.e. pessimism).

Although I do not share Zapffe’s conclusion—as I explain in this article—I think Zapffe deserves more scholarly attention. Zapffe’s collected works were published in 10 volumes in 2015. Hitherto, however, little has been translated into English. A translation of his most important essay, “The Last Messiah,” was published in Philosophy Now in 2004 and there has, thankfully, recently appeared a fine translation of and commentary on Zapffe’s discussion of The Book of Job that has been published in Transactions of The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

Those interested in exploring Zapffe’s ideas should keep in mind the University of Oslo’s annual Zapffe prize, which is a US$10,000 prize awarded to the best essay discussing Zapffe’s ideas. The next deadline is in June 2023 and the assignment (which is usually quite general) for 2023 will be posted on the prize website, in both English and Norwegian, during winter.

This blogpost is based on the essay that won the Zapffe prize in 2019. That essay, “Pessimism Counts in Favor of Biomedical Enhancement: A Lesson from the Anti-Natalist Philosophy of Peter Wessel Zapffe”, was published in Neroethics in 2021.

Ole Martin Moen

Ole Martin Moen (b. 1985) is a Norwegian philosopher. He is Professor of Ethics at Oslo Metropolitan University. Over the last few years, his articles has appeared in, among other venues, Journal of Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, and Bioethics.