Against Zapfee

One of my dearest and most intelligent friends recently wrote an article that, like all of our many conversations, got me thinking. This piece is a response to his—or, more precisely, a criticism of the ideas of Zapffe that he discusses in it. I have lately been reading the ancient writer Boethius, whose thinking shaped the later Middle Ages so profoundly that he may be the single man most responsible for defining its intellectual tone. His vision is the complete opposite of the meaningless existence Zapffe describes, and that collision struck me as interesting enough to become my first article.

I do advise reading his article first, so as to have a clearer idea of what we will be discussing here: https://www.liampower.co.uk/the-tragedy-of-excess

Zapffe in summary. Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) was a Norwegian philosopher, lawyer, and mountaineer whose central idea is the overconsciousness thesis: human self-awareness evolved far past what survival required, producing a creature that knows its own mortality, craves meaning, and finds none guaranteed by an indifferent universe. Consciousness, on this view, is not humanity's crown but an evolutionary overshoot—a biological malfunction, like the Irish Elk's antlers metaphor used in the article above, a trait that grew so excessive it became a liability. His signature metaphor draws on exactly that animal: the elk's enormous antlers, which won mates and fights, may also have doomed the species; human consciousness is the same kind of magnificent excess turned against its bearer. To survive this burden, Zapffe says we deploy four defense mechanisms: isolation (walling off disturbing thoughts), anchoring (clinging to stable beliefs, ideologies, routines that supply a semblance of meaning), distraction (drowning awareness in activity), and sublimation (channeling the tension into art and intellectual work). From this he draws a "tragic principle" and a soft antinatalism—the view that, since life contains more suffering than joy, we should bring fewer or no new conscious beings into existence. His pessimism is distinctively biological and evolutionary rather than metaphysical, which sets him apart from Schopenhauer. The essay pairs him with Camus, who accepts the same bleak premise but answers it with revolt rather than surrender.

All of this is mentioned and explored deeper in Liam's article mentioned above. So I'd like to tackle it point by point.

1. The origin of consciousness

Zapffe argues: Consciousness is the product of blind evolution, selected because moderate cleverness aided survival. But the trait ran past its adaptive use and now generates beliefs—in meaning, in God, in cosmic order—whose real function is to soothe the fear of death that surplus awareness creates. These beliefs feel true precisely because we are built to find them comforting; their felt truth is the symptom, not the evidence. We should therefore distrust them as illusions manufactured by a nervous system protecting itself.

But this is a genetic fallacy. How a faculty arose tells you nothing about whether what it reports is true. Eyes evolved for survival, not astronomy, yet they see real stars; the digestive tract evolved for calories, yet it correctly registers real food. "This belief is comforting and evolved" simply does not entail "this belief is false"—nor "true." Zapffe needs the bridge comforting, therefore illusory, and there is no such bridge. Worse, the move is suicidal: if our truth-detecting faculty is so corrupted by evolutionary pressure that its deliverances are illusions, then that very verdict—delivered by the same faculty—is equally suspect. He cannot exempt his own thesis from the acid he pours on everyone else's. Remove the invalid inference and the diagnosis stops being an argument and becomes a mood with footnotes.

2. The overshoot

Zapffe argues: (using Liam's methaphore as an example) Just as the Irish Elk's antlers grew beyond what was viable and helped doom the species, consciousness has grown beyond what life can bear. It is an excess, an overshoot—too much awareness for the conditions we evolved in—and that mismatch is the structural source of human suffering.

"Overshoot" is question-begging, because it presupposes the very thing Zapffe's Darwinism denies. To call a trait excessive you need a correct amount it exceeds—a target, a design spec, a purpose. But evolution, on Zapffe's own insistence, has no intent and sets no target. Without a purpose there is no overshoot; there is only what there is. So when he says "too much consciousness," the hidden question is: too much for what? He has quietly installed bare survival-and-reproduction as the measuring stick and then convicted consciousness of exceeding it—but he never argues why mere survival should be the ruler. The metaphor smuggles teleology (malfunction, excess, liability) into a worldview that has officially banished teleology. The elk image is rhetorically gorgeous and conceptually incoherent: it can only mean something in the teleological universe Zapffe claims not to live in.

To call the Irish Elk's antlers an "overshoot," you need them to have an ideal size they exceeded. But evolution didn't want the antlers to be any particular size. There was no target antler. The antlers were whatever sexual selection happened to produce, and when the environment changed, that configuration happened to leave fewer descendants. That's it. Nothing overshot anything, because nothing was aiming. To say the antlers were "too big" is to import a standard—the size antlers ought to have been—that Zapffe's own Darwinism says does not exist. In a universe without purpose, the antlers weren't "too big." They were just the size they were, in an environment that then changed. Calling that "excess" is a value judgment dressed as a biological fact.

3. Coping mechanisms

Zapffe argues: Even your wisdom, your meaning, your God are anchoring and sublimation—defense mechanisms. They are canes, not truths. To see clearly is to recognize that everything you lean on is a prosthesis built to hide the void, and that recognition strips these supports of their authority.

Grant it entirely—suppose wisdom and meaning are "just" a cane. So what? The lame man with a cane walks; the man who flings it away because "it's only a cane" lies on the ground congratulating himself on his lucidity. A belief or practice that lets a life be lived, sustained, and made fruitful has earned its standing, and Zapffe never names the higher court in which that standing could be overturned. He treats "merely a coping mechanism" as a demotion, but a demotion is only intelligible relative to some rank above it—and he has abolished all the ranks. If there is no transcendent meaning, then there is also no transcendent tribunal from which to sneer at the things that work. "It only helps you live" is, for a living being, not faint praise—it may be the whole of praise.

4. Antinatalism and the tragic principle

Zapffe argues: Because conscious life contains more suffering than joy, the ethical response is to stop producing new sufferers—a soft antinatalism. The honest conclusion of clear sight is to decline to perpetuate the tragic experiment.

Here the doctrine collides with the life of its author, and the life wins. Zapffe lived to ninety, climbed mountains for the joy of it, married, built a vast body of work, and at no point took the exit his philosophy describes as rational. That ninety-year revealed preference is a sustained, daily affirmation that existence was worth continuing—and revealed preference, the testimony of someone with skin in the game, is more honest evidence than anything the books assert. And the antinatalism caps the contradiction by being self-terminating: a doctrine whose entire practical content is "produce no more of the beings capable of hearing this doctrine" argues itself out of an audience. A philosophy that, if obeyed, erases the species that could hold it has refuted itself by the very fact of its success. It is the one position that cannot coherently want to win.

Zapffe's tragic principle rests on a single hidden seam: it pries apart two questions that the rest of the philosophical tradition insists belong together. There is the descriptive question—why does life cling to life?—and the normative one—is living good, is it worth the clinging? Zapffe answers the first with "a blind, hardcoded drive" and the second with "no," and then names the gap between them the tragedy: we are machines compelled to grip an object that does not merit the grip. Antinatalism is simply the ethical exit he draws from that gap. Defeat the separation of the two questions and the whole structure falls, because the tragedy was never in the world; it was in the seam.

Let's begin with the fact Zapffe leans on hardest—that some people do end their lives, which seems to prove the life-drive is not absolute. The point cuts, but it cuts toward the opposite conclusion. If clinging to life were purely mechanical, it would be exceptionless, like a stone obeying gravity; the fact that it can be overridden shows it is not blind machinery but something defeasible, something answerable to a judgment about worth. The question is only which state—affirmation or its collapse—is the clear-eyed one. And here the evidence is decisive: the override almost never arrives as serene philosophical insight. It arrives through suffering, illness, and despair—through a darkening of the capacity to perceive worth, not an illumination of its absence. That pattern marks worth as the default and despair as the deviation: a privation, a failure of vision, rather than a truer sight. It was Camus, no optimist, who named the question of suicide the only serious philosophical question and then spent a book answering no.

So why is living good—why does life want to live? The two greatest answers in the Western tradition converge against Zapffe from opposite directions. Plato grounds the worth of life above life: the Good, which he likens to the sun, gives things not only their intelligibility but their very being, so that to exist at all is already to hold a share of goodness, and the soul is drawn toward the Good as the eye is drawn toward light. The will to persist simply is the desire for the Good, voiced at its most elemental. Aristotle grounds it from within: every living thing has a nature that strives toward its own full actualization, and to be in act—fully at work being what one is—is the good for any being. Life "wants to live" because living is the activity of a form realizing itself, and that self-realization is what goodness means for a living thing. The striving is not bolted onto a neutral substrate; the striving is the good, in motion.

And then Aristotle delivers the precise reversal of Zapffe's central image. In the ninth book of the Nicomachean Ethics he argues that life is choiceworthy in itself, and that what makes it so is awareness—not bare perceiving, but the perceiving of our own perceiving, the consciousness that we are alive, which is among the sweetest and best of things. Set this beside the Irish Elk. Zapffe calls self-awareness the overshoot, the antler that dooms us, the faculty whose excess poisons existence by exposing it to dread. Aristotle calls the same faculty the very thing that makes existence good. One feature, two verdicts—and Aristotle's has the wider truth, because it need not deny that awareness also brings dread; it need only deny that dread is the whole of it. Zapffe mistook one face of consciousness for its essence.

Beneath both answers lies a single ancient doctrine, and it is the exact philosophical form of the intuition that existence does not accept itself pointlessly: ens et bonum convertuntur—being and goodness are convertible, two names for one thing. To be is to be good insofar as one is; goodness is not a coat painted onto neutral existence but what existence is when seen rightly. The thinker who wrote the foundational treatise on precisely this question—how things can be good simply by existing, without each being the absolute Good—was Boethius, in the De Hebdomadibus. His answer is the answer to the whole problem: things are good by existing because their being is a participated gift from the Good that is Being itself, and the creature's clinging to its own existence is nothing other than its leaning back toward that source.

The strongest opponent here is not Zapffe but Schopenhauer behind him, who agrees that all things strive to be and then inverts the verdict: the striving is a blind, insatiable Will, and the universal clinging-to-life is therefore the machinery of suffering, not the signature of goodness. But a blind Will cannot account for the data it must explain away—the felt difference between flourishing and merely persisting, the real gradations by which we rank some lives as fuller than others, the directly experienced goodness of lucid awareness. To dismiss all of that as an illusion biology tells us is to fall back onto the genetic fallacy already dismantled: it must declare our most direct experience of life-as-good a lie, with no non-circular way to know it. The clinging, in the end, is not the absurd grip of a machine on a worthless thing. It is being affirming being—and that affirmation, the tradition from Plato through Aristotle to Boethius insists, is not the symptom of our error but the trace of the Good in everything that is.

5. Lucid pessimism as the only honest stance

Zapffe argues: I am not coping. The four defenses are what other people use to avoid the truth; I have faced it. My pessimism is not a comfort—it is the refusal of comfort, the willingness to stand exposed where others flinch.

Writing The Last Messiah is sublimation by his exact definition—existential tension channeled into intellectual creation. Building a whole identity around lucid pessimism is anchoring—a stable belief-system that organizes a life and hands its owner a role. And the role is a flattering one: the man who has seen through every illusion the rest of us still need, who requires no meaning and no God, gazing down from the high passes on the tragedy of the lesser, comforted herd. That is not the absence of a coping mechanism; it is a coping mechanism that pays its user in superiority. The person who declares "I need no meaning" has made not-needing-meaning into his meaning. Pessimism here is a covert pride—the secular heir of spiritual vanity. By his own taxonomy, Zapffe never escaped the four defenses; he simply selected the two that let him feel like the only adult in the room.

6. Surrender as the verdict

Zapffe argues: Once you truly grasp the mismatch between consciousness and a meaningless cosmos, the only intellectually honest terminus is resignation. The recognition is the conclusion; there is nowhere further to go.

This treats the beginning of the problem as if it were the end of it—and that is where it earns the charge of the overwhelmed adolescent who mistakes discovering that life is hard for being excused from living it. The indifferent cosmos, the burden of awareness, the absence of guaranteed meaning: these are the terms of the task of living, not its settlement. Camus and Nietzsche both press exactly this point—the same premise that Zapffe reads as a full stop, they read as the opening of revolt, of creation, of amor fati. Zapffe surrenders at the threshold and rebrands the surrender as clarity. As logic it's an ad hominem and proves nothing on its own; it only describes.

Against "consciousness is an overshoot that only breeds dread," Boethius answers that reason is not excess but telos—the faculty by which we climb toward the highest Good, not a glitch that exposes a void. Zapffe sees a comforting perception and infers illusion; Boethius sees a true perception of a real order and infers that the comfort is the side effect of being right. That last clause is the load-bearing claim, and it's exactly the one we'll have to put on trial when we reach Providence.

And this points to a broader reflex worth naming on its own. We live in an era in which some naïve people argue that the pyramids were built by aliens. It is not a new phenomenon: the classical Greeks looked at the colossal walls of Mycenae and concluded they must have been raised by giants, since no mere man could have moved such stones. In both cases the instinct is the same—a quiet refusal to believe our ancestors could have been as capable as we are, or more so.

I have come, as I approach middle age, to distrust that instinct, even in metaphysics. We all build on the shoulders of giants—but the giants beneath the ancients were shorter than the ones beneath us. They inherited far less accumulated knowledge, which means they had to supply far more of the height themselves. Their genius carries the higher merit precisely for that reason: they climbed almost the whole way on their own power, while we are hoisted up a towering stack built by everyone before us, add a few inches at the top, and call it discovery. To think as far as they did, from as little as they had, is a feat we flatter ourselves by underestimating. Zapffe's dismissal of humanity's oldest intuitions—meaning, God, cosmic order—as mere nervous tics is the same arrogance wearing a lab coat: the assumption that what our ancestors believed, they believed only because they were not yet clever enough to know better.

All this being said, it is good that there are people who climb the mountains and try to see clearly what lies below. Not everyone sees equally—some have keener sight, some a sharper intellect for interpreting what they see. But as we have shown, and as our own times make plain, there are those who can see the structure and yet cannot see the good it does the whole. They read the mechanism and pronounce it meaningless, mistaking their view of the gears for a view of the purpose.

Yes, we all cope, each in our own way. But coping is not evidence that there is no meaning—it is evidence that living is hard, and that living well is a skill. The ancients called philosophy exactly this: the art of living. And if it is an art, then the clear-eyed pessimist who declares the whole thing pointless has not transcended the need to cope. He has simply chosen the coping that flatters him most—and of all of us, he may be the biggest coper of all.

I am planning next to write on Boethius quite a bit, as he has truly rekindled my love of wisdom. Hope you all enjoyed this.

Sig. Outis