Like a boxer who has practiced his counters, Benatar has anticipated a range of objections. Many people suggest that the best experiences in life—love, beauty, discovery, and so on—make up for the bad ones. To this, Benatar replies that pain is worse than pleasure is good. Pain lasts longer: “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure,” he said. It’s also more powerful: would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure? Moreover, there’s an abstract sense in which missing out on good experiences isn’t as bad as having bad ones.
[...]
Benatar also rejects the argument that struggle and suffering, in themselves, can lend meaning to existence. “I don’t believe that suffering gives meaning,” Benatar said. “I think that people try to find meaning in suffering because the suffering is otherwise so gratuitous and unbearable.” It’s true, he said, that “Nelson Mandela generated meaning through the way he responded to suffering—but that’s not to defend the conditions in which he lived.”
I asked Benatar why the proper response to his arguments wasn’t to strive to make the world a better place. The possible creation of a better world in the future, he told me, hardly justifies the suffering of people in the present; at any rate, a dramatically improved world is impossible. “It’ll never happen. The lessons never seem to get learnt. They never seem to get learnt. Maybe the odd individual will learn them, but you still see this madness around you,” he said. “You can say, ‘For goodness’ sake! Can’t you see how you’re making the same mistakes humans have made before? Can’t we do this differently?’ But it doesn’t happen.” Ultimately, he said, “unpleasantness and suffering are too deeply written into the structure of sentient life to be eliminated.” His voice grew more urgent; his eyes teared up. “We’re asked to accept what is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.” In an ordinary conversation, I would’ve murmured something reassuring. In this case, I didn’t know what to say.
— The Case for Not Being Born: The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again.
By Joshua Rothman. (Bold mine, everything else is unaltered.)
We have to talk about antinatalism... again by Fernando Olszewski
The term “antinatalism” appears to have been coined by the South African philosopher David Benatar, author of the book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, published in 2006. Although the term is recent, the idea behind it, the idea defended by Benatar that it would be better to never have been born and that we should therefore refrain from creating new suffering beings, did not begin with him. His argument using asymmetries is original and, in my view, brilliant, but he himself has written and said on several occasions that the idea is very old, even mentioning Schopenhauer in some interviews, in addition to also mentioning Buddhism.
However, the idea that not being is better than being and that we should therefore refrain from creating new beings is one that emerges, or at least renews itself, around the world from time to time. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Argentine-Brazilian philosopher and professor at the University of Brasília, Julio Cabrera, began to propose what he called negative ethics, which reached the same conclusion as Benatar, that creating new suffering beings is ethically problematic. His negative ethics project culminated in the excellent book Discomfort and Moral Impediment, published in 2018 in Brazil, in which Cabrera explains his moral philosophy in detail. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, still in Brazil, we had one of the greatest writers of all time openly using the Schopenhauerian philosophy of the Will in his novels and short stories. I am talking here about Machado de Assis.
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In 20th century continental Europe, two of the most prominent names associated with philosophical pessimism were Peter Wessel Zapffe and Emil Cioran. For the Norwegian Zapffe, evolution endowed humans with a deep consciousness that cannot bear the fact that they are an ephemeral creature among many others; therefore, man consciously or unconsciously seeks to alienate himself in various ways. However, Zapffe says that none of his alienations are capable of curing him and that the best thing is to abandon existence, refusing to bring new sufferers into a meaningless and painful reality. The Franco-Romanian Cioran wrote in several essays and aphorisms that human consciousness is a mistake in nature's path. For him, even the most minute degrees of animal consciousness are capable of making the creature suffer.
The ideal, for Cioran, would be a world inhabited at most by plants, or better still, by minerals. Life itself is an error of inorganic matter, according to him.
Click on the link to read more:
Distraction, by Erik Thor Sandberg Eight years ago, I wrote and published on my Portuguese-written blog an essay titled We have to talk abou
Procreation is the most important gamble one can take, and it’s a gamble with another person’s life. Their entire existence based off YOUR decision, and every subsequent experience the fault of that decision.
I love my life, but that’s just because I’ve been so lucky thus far. I know very few people having as good of a time as I am right now… And still, everything I love can be taken from me at any second, my whole world shattered by a single event, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
That I may die childless—that when my hour comes I may turn my face to the wall saying, I have not increased the great evil of human life—then, though I were murderer, fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an excellent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and the stain upon him shall endure for ever.
This post is a part of an ongoing biweekly series on philosophical pessimism and related positions. You can find other posts in the series h
“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.”
(…)
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.
(…)
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.”
