The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe

American author Thomas Ligotti is one of the greatest living writers of supernatural horror fiction. He isn't nearly as well known as novelist Stephen King since Ligotti sticks with his muse and literary inspiration by writing short stories. Nope, not even one full length novel from Thomas Ligotti.

However, Ligotti did write a work of nonfiction recently - The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I'm listening to the audio book at the moment. Fascinating. Admittedly, although I don''t share the author's view that human life is one unending nightmare, I have been greatly enjoying his reflections. As part of his pessimistic thesis, Ligotti repeatedly refers to Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe and his essay The Last Messiah. I was intrigued, thus my review. Below are direct quotes from Zapffe's essay with my corresponding comments:

"A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being."

 

The idea here is somewhere along the evolutionary line, in order to sustain our survival, we humans developed a consciousness that empowered us to envision the future and past, to conceptualize, to use symbols and language, to abstract. But, as it turns out, to our disadvantage, our developed human consciousness propels us into a world where we are forever attempting to construct meaning, a world where we are constantly yearning and fretting for what we don't have, a world where our stream of consciousness is endlessly spinning obsessively over a past we can't undo and a future we will never reach - in a word, perpetual suffering. Added to this, we are painfully aware of our own inevitable death.

"And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him." 

 

Not one plant or mineral or animal shares in our uniquely human consciousness, thus on Planet Earth we are alone. By the way, this is much of the appeal of science fiction - making contact with other forms of "intelligent," somewhat human-like life forms.

Zapffe goes on to highlight four strategies we human take in order to shield ourselves from the ghastly truth of the reality of our human condition:

Isolation
"By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling." 

 

In other words, we seal out the reality of our constant moving toward death and dying by packing such thoughts and reflections in a mental closet. The methods we use to keep the closet door shut are nearly infinite, from nonstop humming to obsessive TV watching to addiction to booze, tobacco and drugs to out-and-out denial.

Anchoring
"The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance."

 

We wrap our individual identity up with some larger group or cause - family, friends, country, religion, sports team.

"The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner." 

 

According to Zapffe, the major appeal for owning more houses than we will ever use and having more money in the bank than we can ever spend is to ground ourselves in the identity of someone with great wealth. Sidebar: Ironically, the more wealth a person has, the more others tend to look forward to the death of that person so they can get their hands on the wealth.

Distraction
"A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions."

 

A prime mode of distraction in our modern world: being a workaholic, making one's work the alpha and omega of life.

Sublimation
"The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects."

 

Ah, those artistic and literary types! To take suffering and death and use them as the topics for making a film or writing a novel or painting a tragic subject. The artist is facing up to suffering and death but at an aesthetic distance so as not to feel the full force of its brutal sting.

"Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”

 

One solution Zapffe proposes: stop having kids! Not a popular position. Just take a gander at the statistics included in the link below.

Link to Zapffe's essay: https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/T...

Link to World Statistics: http://www.worldometers.info/


Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1899 – 1990