Discovering Peter Zapffe
and the consequences of evolutionary overdevelopment

A few years ago I encountered a claim that grabbed my imagination and so far hasn't let it go. It held out a possible answer to a question I’d been occupied with ever since I could think seriously. It suggested that a plausible cause of much human suffering is our evolutionary overdevelopment. In short, evolution had saddled humans with surplus consciousness, with far-reaching consequences.

Although a Christian, I’d long doubted Christianity’s claim that humankind was the primary purpose and pinnacle of creation, deliberately fashioned by God as a more-or-less finished product. The evidence, as I gazed upon it, contradicted this. And anyway, the claim held a whiff of hubris that was unappealing.

Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990) believed that much of the inescapable day-to-day suffering and distemper of humankind arises from our overly evolved brains. He suggested that evolution simply had gone too far [1], didn't know when to stop, burdening us with a surplus of consciousness that led to a perpetual disease. The manifestations are to be seen in many forms, not least our capacity for worry, anxiety, fear, and depression; in fact, in all forms of human psychological (existential) suffering.

He called this inescapable condition one of cosmic panic.

Inescapable, yet we do all we can to distract ourselves from it’s brooding presence. Zapffe categorised avoidance practices in to four groups: isolation, anchoring, diversion, and sublimation.

• Isolation is pushing awareness from one’s mind. Just bury it.
• Distraction/Distraction is the focusing of all one’s thoughts and energy on an idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself.
• Anchoring is the prime method that Zapffe believed most humans use to avoid panic. It is picking a fixed point in the “liquid fray of consciousness” in order to focus one’s attentions in a consistent manner.
• Sublimation is a direct effort to convert the very problem into the purpose, perhaps by discussing it or writing about it. He writes, in his essay, “the present essay is a typical example of sublimation. The author does not suffer. He is filling pages, and is going to be published in a journal.”

Zapffe warned that one of the most risky steps we can take is to pick an anchoring point, and discover that it is “false.” Many humans have found themselves in this discovery. It can be a moment of catastrophe or liberation. And what might these anchoring points be? Unquestioning religious identification, conventional life (marriage, hum-drum occupations), isms of any and every kind.

[1] An example Zapffe cites is that of a species of deer in some quarters referred to as the Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus). It thrived throughout Eurasia during the ecological epoch known as the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). It had the largest antlers of any known deer, with a maximum span of 3.65 meters. Historically, the explanation given for the extinction of the Irish elk was that its antlers grew too large: the animals could no longer hold up their heads or feed properly — their antlers, according to this explanation, would also get entangled in trees, such as when trying to flee human hunters through forests. A case of harmful over-development in evolutionary terms. Zapffe says humans are in a similar situation, in relation to their consciousness.

Peter Wessel Zapffe -

• 1899-1990
• Norwegian
• Philosopher, novelist, artist, lawyer, and mountain climber
• Influences: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
• Publications: The Last Messiah (“Den sidste Messias”, 1933), On the Tragic (Om det tragiske, 1941)
  

“We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.”

“Depression, angst, a refusal to eat, and so forth, are taken without exception to be marks of a pathological condition, and are treated accordingly. In many cases, however, these phenomena are indications of a deeper, more immediate experience of what life is all about, bitter fruits of the genius of the mind or emotion, which is at the root of every antibiological tendency. It is not the soul that is ill, but its defence mechanism that either fails or is abjured because it is considered—correctly—as a betrayal of man's most potent gift.”

“Nobody has ever managed to explain what it is they are longing after in religion, but it is quite clear what they are trying to escape from – this earthly vale of tears, one’s untenable existential situation.”

And in this quote, Zapffe gives a possible hint of the way out of the condition humankind finds itself in:

“If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains "peace of mind".”

Belgian artist Thomas Lerooy's sculptures show humans weighted down by the size and endless nature of their thoughts (these from his  2009 series of four bronze sculptures, created for his Braindance exhibition).  Zapffee might have found them illustrative of his thesis.