The intellect has crowned the human being at the summit of the animal kingdom. With their unprecedently refined ability to rationalize, analyze, and self-reflect, humans could manipulate and control their environment like no other species. However, such an extraordinary gift of evolution came at a dire price. According to Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, the intellect is humanity’s greatest gift and its most perilous curse.
What Is the Tragedy of Human Evolution?
The tragedy of human evolution lies in man’s insatiable need for meaning in an inherently meaningless universe. The intellect is the bittersweet fruit of our evolution. With its exceptional sequencing of cause and effect, the intellect came to search for cause where it cannot be found. Unlike any other animal, humans are the only species that have a basic need that nature can never fulfill – an overarching meaning and purpose of life. In his lyrical prose, Zapffe likened the intellect to a double-edged blade. Using its sharp cognitive powers, humans could cleave through absolutely anything in the world.
But whoever used the blade, warned Zapffe, had to “turn one of its edges against himself” (Zapffe, 1933). The two faces of consciousness, the outward and the inward, served us paradoxically. When facing the outer world, the cognitive prowess of our consciousness has placed us at the top of the food chain. When facing our inner world, however, it has destroyed us.
Nature has betrayed humans. Through the overdevelopment of a single faculty, humans became unfit for life, unable to bear the burden of self-consciousness and the perils of their inner lives. The betrayal, according to Zapffe, is that nature made “a miracle with man but has refused to acknowledge him since” with an answer to his innermost yearning for meaning (Zapffe, 1933). This paradox of the human condition is how Zapffe interpreted the story of Adam’s banishment from paradise, where the Tree of Knowledge symbolized the accursed gift of his own mind.
Our “surplus of consciousness” has made us “the universe’s helpless captives” – aware of our transience, aware of the meaninglessness of our existence, and yet completely powerless against it (Zapffe, 1933). The question at the heart of Zapffe’s magnum opus, The Last Messiah, is how most people survive the soul-crushing angst of their existential reality.
How Do We Survive Our Meaningless Existence?
We survive our meaningless existence by artificially dulling our consciousness. If the diagnosis of our ailment is a surplus of consciousness, then certainly the remedy lies in its suppression. Zapffe argued that “man’s survival is made possible by a more or less conscious suppression of his hazardous surplus of consciousness”, which “becomes a condition for social adjustment and what is popularly called ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ behavior” (Zapffe, 1933). Depression, angst, or insanity are but the side-effects of a true perception of the deeper reality of life. It is not a sickness of the heart, but a failure of the defense mechanisms we maintain to protect us from the terror of witnessing the transient and meaningless nature of our existence.
Zapffe identified four main defense mechanisms that constitute the countless ways we suppress our surplus of consciousness: isolation, sublimation, attachment, and diversion. Isolation is our tendency to hide our existential condition from one another. It is an unwritten social agreement to conceal and censor our recognition of the true nature of life. Sublimation is a defense mechanism characterized by transformation rather than suppression. Through sublimation, we detach from the tragedies of life and address them with a positive attitude, appreciating their aesthetic value. Such is the case with artists who transform pain into poetry, paintings, films, or novels. The last two defense mechanisms, attachment and diversion, are the most powerful walls we hold against the terror of our existential void.
How Do Attachments and Diversions Save Us?
Attachments and diversions save us by diverting our conscious awareness away from the reality of our transience and the meaninglessness of our existence. Zapffe defined attachments as “an attempt to establish fixed points in, or a wall around, the shifting chaos of consciousness” (Zapffe, 1933). Attachments form from early childhood when we take the features of our lives (e.g. our parents, friends, routines, etc.) for granted. We enjoy an illusive sense of security until we realize these attachments are as transient and accidental as others. We then replace them, and the cycle repeats. Attachments are simultaneously individual and collective.
According to Zapffe, “Every social unit is a large, rounded attachment system, built on the solid beams of basic cultural ways of thinking” (Zapffe, 1933). These attachment systems are the roots of social norms, protected through sociopolitical, and even religious, reward and punishment techniques. Ultimately, the matrix formed by both individual and collective attachments is pure fiction.
The other major bulwark is diversion. Diversion keeps our awareness “within acceptable bounds by keeping it busy with a ceaseless stream of new impressions” (Zappfre, 1933). Unlike attachments, diversion strategies are generally conscious endeavors. We dread having nothing to do, nothing to divert our attention away from ourselves. We don’t flee from boredom but from the gnawing abyss that lies right beneath the surface of our attention. The building blocks of our economy are built to help us remain distracted from the fact that “we come from nothing and go to nothing, and [that] there is nothing more to it than that” (Zapffe, 1990).
Everything else is an expression of one, or a combination of several, of these four defense mechanisms. Our lust for material goods and power, for example, has nothing to do with their direct practical use. Essentially, “The real value of great wealth is that the wealthy have at their disposal a much wider variety of possible attachments or distractions”. Inversely, this is why imprisonment is a punishment.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, who was a humorous and lyrical pessimist, offered us no hope at the end of his treatise. The only advice he offered for ending the misery of our existential condition is to simply stop reproducing. In his last major work, he playfully tells his despairing readers: “Unfortunately, I cannot help you. All I have for facing death myself, is a foolish smile” (Zapffe, 1941).
