The human need for meaning, in what can appear a meaningless world, is a cause for extreme pessimism, argued Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. The little-known thinker and mountaineer gives voice to the darkest, most despairing of human feelings – and despite the heartache at the core of that voice, it is outstandingly beautiful. Sam Woolfe argues, what Zapffe forgets, is that human consciousness, although giving rise to the tragic in life, also gives birth to existential joy.

The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe is little-known to most Anglophone readers. He was greatly inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and has been called one of the “bleakest thinkers of all times and places”. Zapffe was also an avid mountaineer and a friend of fellow Norwegian philosopher – and originator of deep ecology – Arne Næss. His only major work is his doctoral dissertation On the Tragic (1941), which has still never been translated into any other language. Fortunately, though, we can familiarise ourselves with some of the themes and ideas expressed in this work through a short essay that Zapffe wrote, one of his few works to ever be translated into English.

The Last Messiah is a 1933 essay that encapsulates Zapffe’s view on the human condition and stands out as an important work in the sphere of philosophical pessimism. The views expressed can be classed as a kind of evolutionary existentialism, in that Zapffe propounds a view on the nature of human existence that incorporates an evolutionary perspective. The Last Messiah summarises the thoughts that Zapffe would later express in On the Tragic. The horror writer Thomas Ligotti also frequently references Zapffe’s essay in his non-fiction, pessimistic work The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010).

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Zapffe’s Analysis of the Human Condition

For Zapffe, existential angst, despair, and depression are due to our overly evolved intellect. He believed – as he argues in The Last Messiah – that we have an overabundance of consciousness, we essentially think too much for our own good. He refers to the human being as “a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature.” Rust Cohle, a nihilistic character in the series True Detective, expresses the same view: “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution.”