Zapffe For A New Political Age

Cameron Hendy thinks it’s about time we all stopped.

- Cameron Hendy

Do you recall the first time that you stumbled across Peter Zapffe (1899-1990) – assuming that you ever have done? I do. His antinatalism – the idea that the human race should stop reproducing – was new to me at the time; simultaneously exhilarating yet terrifying. Reading Zapffe’s essay The Last Messiah was almost epiphanic – an intense moment that represented the crystallisation of my own nebulous philosophical position at the time.

To read The Last Messiah is to experience déjà vu, and revisit thoughts that tend to arise spontaneously due to the essential nature of human existence. Perhaps this is the best indicator of the fact that Zapffe touches upon a topic that seems instantly familiar to most of us: the inescapable, sometimes unendurable nature of merely being alive. For many readers the position Zapffe articulates may also feel the epitome of all philosophical taboos, defying the conventional assumption that continued human existence is morally desirable.

Zapffe, an eccentric mountaineer, who was also Norway’s greatest existentialist writer, presents a beautiful, haunting view of existence. In essence he says that humans are a tragically over-evolved species, having developed a vastly more powerful intellect than that needed to survive in the biological sense. This biological aberration exceeds the parameters of consciousness within which we would otherwise have been as content and innocent as the other higher primates. As Zapffe himself puts it: