Peter Zapffe was called “the bleakest philosopher of all time” in a Reddit post dealing with existentialism. That didn’t make me eager to learn more about him. But I still wanted to, having come across several mentions of Zapffe in Robert Saltzman’s book, Depending on no-thing.
That title may sound depressing as well, but actually I feel energized when I read Saltzman’s writings. While he rejects philosophical, metaphysical, and religious attempts to make life seem more appealing that it actually is, Saltzman’s emphasis on direct experience of here and now is wonderfully simple.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to question the reality of here and now. After all, the past is gone and the future hasn’t happened yet. That leaves the present moment as all we have that isn’t an abstraction, a flimsy thought built upon the solid structure of our immediate experience.
Saltzman says this about Zapffe in some passages in the first part of his book, which is all I’ve read so far. This is an interesting idea that I hadn’t heard expressed in quite this way before.
Zapffe’s big idea was that we humans have brainpower enough to formulate and ask ultimate questions about life, death, God, the self, etcetera, but not enough to answer those questions adequately.
So, in an attempt to justify the suffering and anxiety that seem part of this aliveness, we have devised modes of masking the issue of mortality, such as identifying with family or nationality, attaching ourselves to grand ideas or long-lived institutions, distracting ourselves with constant stimulation, or pursuing the arts in hopes of finding aesthetic justifications.
….The Norwegian author, Peter Wessel Zapffe, theorized that humans are born with an overdeveloped skill — self-awareness — that is not needed for survival, and so does not really fit into nature’s design. I am reading about Zapffe in a book by Thomas Ligotti called The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.
We humans, Zapffe thought, endowed with this unneeded self-awareness, crave to understand matters such as life and death, but, due to human limitation, that craving cannot be honestly appeased. We know about death but cannot explain it. In other words, nature has given humanity a desire that nature cannot satisfy.
Faced with this hunger that cannot be fulfilled, Zapffe thought, most humans — almost all humans, he said — spend their time trying to not be human. I am in accord with this observation entirely.
Basically, this makes sense to me. I approach the question by considering conscious beings less intelligent than humans and more intelligent than humans.
Our dog, Mooka, is aware when both my wife and I have left the house. Mooka doesn’t like to be left alone. She used to howl when this happened, something we knew from security cameras in our house. It seems clear that while Mooka knows when we’ve driven off, she isn’t capable of knowing why we left and that we’ll be back fairly soon. Hence, her anxiety about an obvious problem with no apparent solution. Until we come home.
On a more speculative front, I can imagine alien beings arriving on Earth from a far-off galaxy. Since they seem friendly, and possess technological knowledge we can’t even dream of, our top scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders are eager to ask them questions via their Universal Translation capability. Such as, Why is there something rather than nothing? After asking that question of an alien being, the answer appears almost instantly in every major human language.
Problem is, no one can understand it, even though it is grammatically correct. Just as our dog lacks the ability to know why my wife and I leave the house for several hours, no person on our planet is capable of grasping concepts that are child’s play to the alien beings. No matter how they try to get us to comprehend their knowledge of the cosmos, just as Zapffe says, we humans are smart enough to ask ultimate questions, but not smart enough to grasp the answers.
Perhaps this helps explain why religious dogma is so unsatisfying, once someone examines it with a critical eye. The answers to life’s most important questions that religions put forward are really nothing more than everyday human experience writ large. We see light. Religions say that God’s light is hugely brighter. People have certain powers. God has vastly more power, omnipotent power. We are conscious. God is superconsciousness.
Religion’s answers don’t satisfy, because they so obviously arise not from a genuine ultimate understanding, but from extrapolating everyday answers to a cosmic level. Science is in much the same situation, but science is much more likely to say “We don’t know” than religion is. If Zapffe is correct, that not-knowing will be very long-lasting, given that we are much better at posing big questions than arriving at big answers.
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That’s the thing about those old authors before the internet. They were all just talking to themselves before they got published. The good ones still are.
If you look outside after a decent cup of coffee, you can if you will observe animals ..what do they do? …. keep themselves in good shape and have an eye on the surroundings as they can be food to another species. Part of the maintenance, the survival activities is the need for rest, sleep. As all activities are service to the primal instinct of survival, they will only let sleep overcome them when they have concluded that it is safe to sleep.
Humans, are made in the same way and they operate in the same way ..not only in nature but also in the artificial, abstract copy of nature …culture and society.
In order to be able to sleep one must be convinced that one will wake up safely and that is only possible if one can make assessments about the surroundings … the world must be recognizeable as it was before on waking up
Now have another coffee and ask yourself how much is there left as it was since you were young. I am not talking about the natural flux of things the changes of nature with the seasons but the lost of meaning an value that occured in relation to everything, material mental and also spiritual … dramatical changes … those changes you thought could and would nevr happen in earlier days.
Leaving the details aside one can say that we do not longer stand on the schoulders of those that lived before, we do not longer stand in a tradition … everything has lost its meaning and value.
We have ended up in a society and culture that is no longer able and willing to attribute WORTH / value and meaning of the OLD …and a society without WORTH FOR … becoimes itself a worthless-society.
In such an society, what was green when one went to sleep can turn out to be red the next morning. In the beginning when these changes happen to little important things these changes go unnotice and will not become alarming but as overtime it turns out that it affects everything in your life it becomes dramatic, it gets under your skin, it makes you restless
Restless you seek, listen to the INFLUENCERS of sorts, being those of low grade or those of high grade . For a while that offers direction, rest but soner or later you will find that these influencers, themselves are all pointing into different directions having tlost themselves the way.
Then you end up arithmetical speaking in the place that was describe by Dante in the first 3 verses of the HEL:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ah quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinnova la paura!
Tant’è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch’io vi trovai,
dirò de l’altre cose ch’io v’ho scorte.
In an english Translation it says:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
Metaphorical .. because that is how I USE it to ilustrate what was written before:
If the declamation is done in Italian, nobody can escape the the feelings of lost, loneliness, fear etc that Dante is describing.
In the first couple he uses the word ri-trovare instead of trovare = finding. He re-finds himselve, he wakes up to himself and discovers that the path he was on is not an path at all but an animal track comming from nowheren and going nowhere believing himself to have walke on a path from A to B. Imagine how that most be, …from one moment on another he loses all frop on his life …imagine you driving a car and all of a sudden the instruments of guiding fail, no stearing, no break nothing at al.
The agony he describes is intens he has lost all controll … and that is our society we live in.
No able and willing to use what served us in the past as individual, social and cultural people walk around as ants in a desturbed nest, frantically trying to restore order but how can that be done if “the old is fault”
Well peole will in the end no longer listen to influencers and find rescue in themselves and hold on to those things the consider meaningfull and wortfull to live for. They will be one of the thousands and thousands that cross the Rubicon all carying one stone one brick to build a new world, a new society a new culture
The most dangerous people are those that will tell you how the new world will look like .. they are all without exception like old nazi elite, that cannot forget and leave behind
If you need something to hold on, to love, to devote, to hope for, to have faith in ..it is to be found inside of your house, it is the key to staying alive in the forest,
>>Maybe we humans are smart enough to ask ultimate questions, but not smart enough to answer them<<
Those that started the anti- authoritarian movement in the seventies, started to de-valuate what was near and dear to society and culture ..i t can be compared with the "cultural revolutopn" in china where the youth turned itself against their own tarditions and the keepers of that tradition. Whatever could be destroyed was destroyed.
The youth in the west was as destructive as those in china nothing of their parents, grandparents etc was worth to keep and look after ..empthy handed and empty minded they turned to the east in an attempt to fill that emptiness …and they failed
Why did they fail?
They never realized that the problem was not OUTSIDE themselves but within ..instead of accepting that they had no talent to be an artist, or if they had one, were not willing to put the effort in it in order to develop it, they started to find fault with the schools, the teachers and even art itself …hahaha …just an example
No they wake up, many years older, that due to themselves they have to live in a meaningless and valueless society …and … they themselves have nothing to give, they are just empty shells.
What did paul write about those drums?
haha ….. why complain than about the rulers they created for themselves?
Consumers!
We have within us capabilities that are not fully developed nor widely known.
And these, when developed, give us greater insight and experience into our connection to this creation. Therefore it makes little sense to limit reality or discussion to thinking generated by a limited consciousness.
It’s as if Mooka tried to conjecture why you disappeared and why someone else showed up to stay with her for the few days you are away.
What explanation might she offer? That for a time you ceased to exist? That maybe you never existed at all and were mearly a figment of her imagination? That there was in this moment while you were away no evidence you ever were? And yet, she believes in an invisible owner with all her heart. She lives believing you were real and are going to return. Is this some Dog religion? The Dogma of Mooka?
And yet somehow, due to past experience and conditioning, she knows down to her doggy tail that you are real, and will return.
Other dogs tell Mooka, at the dog park, that she is imagining things. That she should just let it go, that you are nowhere to be seen, never were andd never will be. They gather at the side of the field and look at poor Mooka with pity.
But she is far better off than they. She may not remember, for what can we say of the limited dog brain? But she knows, somehow.
And on the day of your return she is ecstatic. The other dogs pity her silly emphatuation with her own imagination. They see the Dogma of Mooka as some strange superstitious religion. But to Mooka it is absolute reality, and can only be understood by a slightly larger experience, and the conditioning of that experience. For her, the other dogs’ ignorance is a shame. But understood. She is a dog too.
But what do they know?
Is it that we are not smart enough to answer such questions – or is it just that the hoped for answers do not exist – as both the questions and hoped for answers are not based on reality?
Where a question is based on reality answers may be found but questions such as is there an afterlife, does God exist, what is the self and what is consciousness etc, are abstract, thought created questions that have no basis in reality being based on conjecture, perhaps wishful thinking and from our fears, greed and anxiety.
@ Ron E.
Many things said in one situation, I found, can be transported into other situations beyond words lik, seeing, doing, listening etc.
He said: “Sister, it is because you have put it before me, … otherwise … I would have had no knowledge of it.
These questions and answers, often discussed here, are, I suppose, all be put before us as an part of conditioning to society and its culture.
Those that live in remote parts of the world, having had no access to our world, would and could never have any idea about its contents … and … if one of them would visit us and relate of his experiences to his brothers and sisters he would have to do so in their language, a language born from and developed in that specific remote part of this world. It is doubtful if they would be able, using their own language, their own cultural concepts, to construct an mental image of say a car.
We … all of use are in the same position with regard to the content of so called inner experiences.
So … in fact we are all discussing hearsay, things that are put before use by our parents, our teachers in school and later what we ourselves studied …they are all coming from OTHERS
Language was put before us and through it whatever we have in mind … nothing is ours beyond our experiences and even the perception of it is not ours.
So .. If it was not put before me, I would have had no knowledge, no interest in almost anything I know of and of which I came to put meaning and value in…. it was all put before me by OTHERS
If you want to understand what I mean by OTHERS ..listen to what the3y are talking about and above all look at their faces in the morning train …they are all going to serve OTHERS … and they can rightly be called ..SLAVES .. for that reason …. look at their faces … Are they smilling????
Here you discuss, the opinions of OTHERS as if they were your own flesh and blood …not YOU RON … hahaha
Dogs are pack animals and get anxious and stressed when separated from their pack – and their pack leader(s). It is quite natural.
Interestedly, l read that dogs, (more than cats) can become quite neurotic, developing human-like conditions. And, as they are often pampered and can live longer than wild animals, they do tend to suffer from old age related diseases.
Enjoyed reading about Peter Zapffe. Never heard the name before, never heard of the man. Love your insatiable appetite and energy to discover new interesting ideas, Brian, and love the chance this gives us to also acquaint ourselves with all of this!
———-
While obviously I agree with Zapffe’s rejection of religious certainties: but his pessimism per se, while he’s certainly entitled to it on an emotional level, but I’m afraid it makes no sense to me as a rational argument.
Here’s what I mean. His core argument, as described by Saltzman, seems to be this: Zapffe’s big idea was that we humans have brainpower enough to formulate and ask ultimate questions about life, death, God, the self, etcetera, but not enough to answer those questions adequately.
And that’s nonsense, isn’t it, that above?
We humans do have brainpower enough to both formulate and ask ultimate questions about life, death, God, the self, et cetera; as well as to answer them adequately.
That’s what the whole larger project of science is all about. That’s what the whole point of rational self enquiry is all about. To adequately — which is to say, as correctly and as completely as we can at some particular point in time — to understand ourselves, to adequately understand the universe, and to adequately understand our place in the world.
Sure, some questions remain unanswered, for the time being. But they do remain answered adequately. Questions about God, and life, and death — we have, indeed, answered those questions adequately. Those answers are tentative, those answers are a work in process: but certainly they’re adequate. Completely entirely adequate enough to clearly reject God ideas, for instance.
———-
Again, I don’t understand all of this to-do over the man’s pessimism. Like I said, certainly he’s entitled to feel despondent basis his finding out the fictive nature of religious nonsense, if his emotions lead him to such: but that’s between him and his shrink, surely? None of what he’s argued is in itself cause for pessimism. Zapffe’s pessimism seems to be predicated squarely on his hankering for the ironclad certainties of religious revelation: and while I’m sympathetic of such, certainly, but I see no reason whatever to either endorse that pessimism, or to share in it.
Heh, I came on kind of strong there, didn’t I? …I mean, I do stand by every bit of what I said, but after all it’s based on only a short excerpt from Zapffe, in fact from a short excerpt of someone else talking about Zapffe. …Happy to find out more about the man’s views, should you want to discuss more about him, Brian; and happy to change my views about him basis better acquaintance with his ideas, if so warranted.
But yeah: if that, what I quoted from Saltzman above, is indeed the substantive core of Zapffe’s “pessimistic” argument: if that short summing up is indeed representative of the core and the essence of the man’s message: well then I reject that pessimism per se as unfounded.
Once more, before I move on
and set my sights ahead,
in loneliness I lift my hands up to you,
you to whom I flee,
to whom I, in the deepmost depth of my heart,
solemnly consecrated altars
so that ever
your voice may summon me again.
Deeply graved into those altars
glows the phrase: To The Unknown God.
I am his, although I have, until now,
also lingered amid the unholy mob;
I am his—and I feel the snares
that pull me down in the struggle and,
if I would flee,
compel me yet into his service.
I want to know you, Unknown One,
Who reaches deep into my soul,
Who roams through my life like a storm—
You Unfathomable One, akin to me!
I want to know you, even serve you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1864
We want to get over our need to seek God. But it’s quite impossible.
@ Sant 64
Again .. I wonder if anybody would have these sentiments as described in that poem if it was not put into them ..starting from breastfeeding by their mother.
How can one stay away and free if the linguistic culture, injects one with the word and concept of God?!
Hi Um
You ask a great question
“How can one stay away and free if the linguistic culture, injects one with the word and concept of God?!”
Or anything else culture invents, including notions of cause and effect, true and false, before and after, Creator and Random.
But all these are distillations of the small Teapot of chemicals called the human mind.
I like Brian’s question. Clearly we can use our tiny imagination to believe in things unseen. But by what means can we ever find out the reality behind what we envision? Even the reality behind what we think we are seeing?
For that we have our journey of discovery, awareness and self-discovery.
The moment anyone discovers something more from their journey, either scientific or spiritual, they are hooked!
And so they proceed as if they found buried treasure. As they should.
Now, it takes a lot of culture to convince them they were mistaken and the journey is an illusion. But it does happen at the early stages. We growl like Mooka at the first sight of a new dog. Before we learn they are our friend.
But for those with a little experience, such doubts are simply the ignorance of children. And as we ourselves are children we do not take umbrage with it, but can only respond with gentle encouragement. The same patient and gentle encouragement Annie Sullivan showed for all the years as Helen Keller protested, until she finally made a connection: a real connection to reality.
@ Spence
How often did I not use the example of climbing the Mnt Everest?!
The mnt everest is there, there are those that feel called to climb it. There is a complete, industry developed to make that possible and the participants do it for more or less or without selfish purposes, whether material, mental or spiritual …
And as I wrote time and again, one should sit with one that has fulfilled his wish to reach at the top, have coffee with him or her and rejoyce with him or her for what they attained .. and as a listener gratefull for having the oportunity to participate in that joy by listening to the story.
That said, there is no reason whatsoever that any other person should follow the story teller in his or her foodsteps or made to believe that he should, suggesting that it is the purpose of life
He had his secretary say to me, when looking me straight in the eyes: “The pull has to come from within, and if it is not there, it is just not there and there is nothing you can do about it.
So yes .. there are those that have an inner calling and they should heed it but others do not have it.
You cannot and should not drink my coffee and I will not suggest you to even think about it.
Whatever people are born into is their mission ..the crow is to experience the world as a crow and so am I … makes litle sens to change for anything but to surrender to what is.
Hi Um
Everyone’s situation is most certainly to be honored. As for my perspective, that includes all beliefs and philosophies, lifestyles and choices.
These are quite wonderful to witness, even to enjoy the play of heroes and villains, and then to look above the table and see that our attributions are a matter of position and perspective. We are all identical in 99.999999999% of who and what we have been and are. We have far more in common with an ant and an amoeba than we know, let alone our relationship with each other. We are truly brothers and sisters.in the same boat. But nothing wrong with heroes and villains. It’s a play after all.