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.
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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
