Human consciousness: a tragic misstep?

“Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfil. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.”   I bet very few people would guess the author of this quote in an existentialism pub quiz.   Its belongs to the 20th century Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe, and unlike most existentialists, Zapffe was a true pessimist.   You see, most existentialists, starting with Nietzsche, and moving on to the likes of Sartre and Camus, saw the meaninglessness of the universe as liberating, as an opportunity to be the authors of our own meaning, rather than be burdened with some “objective”, God-given purpose. Not Zapffe.   Taking a leaf out of an (admittedly controversial) anecdote about evolution, Zapffe argued that just as the Irish elk that roamed through Eurasia 2.6 million years ago grew antlers too heavy, and too burdensome to sustain, so too, us humans, are victims of evolution. Evolution is blind, mutations happen randomly, and while the results in our case might not be threatening the species with extinction, according to Zapffe, they are responsible for the crappiness of the human condition: a state of constant dissatisfaction with the world.   Nature endowed us not with antlers disproportional to our size and strength, but with minds out of sync with reality. Humans, according to Zapffe, have more consciousness than we can handle. We are too aware of the state of the world and the suffering, injustice, and cruelty within it, and what is more, we long for a world that is free of all those ills. We crave a just, harmonious, peaceful world, and at the same time, we are conscious that this can never be a reality. We literally have a name for those imaginary places where all is just and good: utopias, the non-places, translated from Greek.   Self-consciousness is also a bummer, according to Zapffe. We are too aware not just of the world, but of ourselves. We are conscious of our own mortality, the finitude of our abilities, of our potential legacy when we eventually, certainly, die. And for what? What’s the point of it all? There is none, Zapffe argues. This is the human tragedy: by our very nature, we desire what doesn’t exist, meaning.   If this all rings kind of true to you, don’t worry. Zapffe offers a list of copings mechanisms we can use in response to this less-than-ideal situation: isolate ourselves from the world, focus on some ideal or value to distract ourselves, or try that very Freudian/Nietzschean of tasks: to sublimate suffering into something of aesthetic value.   Cold comfort, you might think. But there is always the possibility that Zapffe was just wrong. Evolutionary existentialism might make some valid points, but does it really capture the full scope of human experience? Excessive consciousness can be a curse, but it can also be a blessing. If overthinking things is so bad, why do philosophers spend so much time perfecting it?   Alexis Papazoglou