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My review of Peter Wessel Zapffe's "The Last Messiah"

After reading Emil Cioran’s ideas, particularly The Trouble With Being Born, I decided to step a few decades back to see what his Norwegian predecessor, Peter Wessel Zapffe, thought of humanity’s chaotic existence. Zapffe’s essay proved itself to be quite a thoughtful read.
One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.
Zapffe’s decision to employ the essay format to convey his nihilistic perspective on humanity is undoubtedly effective. In short, he considers the human consciousness, in its developed, post-ape state that we’ve had for many thousands of years now, as a tragic accident. It is what Zapffe calls “a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature.”

Zapffe observes that, in order to combat the existential dread of being so conscious of life, as well as life’s inevitable end, humans have developed some solutions, many of which are used today. Specifically, Zapffe points to four primary solutions, which I will briefly summarize.
  1. Isolation: the decision to look away from the darkness of life, from “all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling,” as Zapffe writes. How “one should not think, it is just confusing” is an example that Zapffe provides.
  2. Anchoring: the decision to make ground to stand on amidst the chaos of life. Anchoring gives us a value or ideal that lets us live in a consistent way. Society depends on anchoring; the sources are everywhere: religion, psychology, government, morality, fate, the people, science, and the future.
  3. Distraction: the decision to concentrate all of our energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from concentrating on itself. As Zapffe writes: “One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions.”
  4. Sublimation: the decision to redirect our energy away from negative results toward positive ones. Zapffe’s own essay is an example, and he is aware of it: “The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.”
Even with these four modes of surviving the circus of our temporary existence, Zapffe believes that they’re not truly the final solution to suffering. For Zapffe, the final key to solving all of human suffering is to not produce more humans, in other words, antinatalism. Already being a firm nihilist, Zapffe’s antinatalistic solution is almost natural. If life is a meaningless circus, why bring more people into this mess?

In the end, Zapffe envisions a future messiah, but not one who saves humanity from suffering towards a better future. Rather, Zapffe imagines an inverted savior, not the savior that many of us would usually think of. This messiah, the last messiah, is here to announce the final solution, despite the expected outcome of his words, that people will not listen to him and will execute him for even breaking their existing anchors. Regardless of what happens, the last messiah speaks:
The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater. The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks? But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution. Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.
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