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There was a moment in time when you were nothing more than a zygote. You're in existence, [music] but as a mere cell, determinably you, but spherical, smooth, a gel-like droplet with no other distinct features. Out of that, somehow, hints of your arms, legs, torso, and head began to grow.
Slowly, at first, then quickly. There was a moment in time when you were nothing more than a fetus. A soft, supple, and helpless arrangement of gelatin-like flesh contained within and dependent on the body of your biological mother.
You were alive but not independent. Formed but far from complete. As your body pushed and molded into a defined state, details and functions emerged.
And soon you entered the world, a suddenly independent thing, no longer constrained inside a biological womb. Now you were and still are constrained inside the womb of human existence. That is the nature of your body and the world.
Now you must breathe, bleed, sweat, eat, defecate, decay, die. If the thought of any of that, the grotesque morbid nature of the body and existence, unsettles you, you are experiencing an intimation of a dark and unsettling concept in philosophy known as the object. Objection.
In 1980, Bulgarian French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst Julia Cava published an essay titled Powers of Horror. In it, she explores and defines a comprehensive overview of the psychological and philosophical concept known as objection. Plainly, objection is the visceral, uncanny, and disconcerting experience of becoming aware of the mechanisms of one's selfhood and corporeality.
More specifically, it is the realization or interfacing with what is typically beyond the boundaries of what we consciously deem acceptable and bearable about ourselves and existence. It reveals a threat posed by what we cannot cleanly exclude from ourselves but wish we could. Fundamentally, we define and understand ourselves by establishing borders between who or what we are and aren't both physically and abstractly.
For example, on a physical level, we define ourselves by what's in and perhaps on our body and not what is beyond [music] it. Our border here is the edge of our body. But of course, we also define ourselves in abstract and conceptual ways like through the character traits, [music] preferences, values, and other things we associate with and express.
Everything we conceptually reject, loathe, or find appalling and wrong is beyond this abstract and psychological border and not us. We maintain our sense of self through the maintenance and order of these boundaries, [music] preserving them by keeping everything that we deem unacceptable or unappealing out. According to Cava, however, along with many other psychoanalytic and phenomenological thinkers like Sigman Freud and George Patai, our conscious mind works to repress and deny many qualities that are part of who or what we are.
We work to ignore, deny, overcome, or repress things associated with our flawed, fragile, caporeal, and mortal condition. We avoid talk of illness and death. We fill our days with frivolous distractions.
We hide our vulnerabilities and fears. [music] We measure ourselves in terms of usefulness. And we paint over the terror and madness of so much of what we are and do.
But in moments when we see, for example, a corpse or our blood, vomit or something rotting, we can be reminded of the truth, the grotesque nature of our being. In these moments of elucidation, according to Cava, our clean, orderly sense of self is suddenly damaged and destabilized. We experience a loss of distinction between ourselves and the world, between subject and object.
We see the borders dissolve and we become momentarily caught in a limbo between our sense of self and other. Christa writes, "Objection is above all ambiguity [music] because while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it. On the contrary, objection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.
Our flesh, blood, vomit, feces and skeleton. All of this is us, central to us. [music] Objection reminds us of this.
The clean boundaries of normaly and pleasantness are thin figments. And so too is our sense of self and stability. Ultimately, whether we accept it or not, we are also what we reject.
Missanthropy. The concept of the object both brings up questions about what we really are and leads [music] us to answers that often make us feel repugnant or gross. And if we continue further into the limbo realm of what we often are but repress, deny, and repel, we also find unsettling [music] vices and flaws.
Our wretchedness, selfishness, greed, hypocrisy, and ignorance. Those who have been to this realm can often find themselves with some variation of the cynical philosophical view [music] known as misanthropy. A general dislike or disdain for the human species as a whole.
With this view, the flaws and vices of humankind, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic, [music] eclipse everything else about us. All human beings are irredeemably faulty and fickle, and society only serves to reinforce, [music] organize, and demonstrate our flaws at scale. This view has been explicitly [music] referenced or generally embodied in the works of many prominent philosophers throughout history.
17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that humans are fundamentally self-interested and without the imposition of an absolute sovereign like a monarch, our condition reliably leads to violence [music] and social breakdown. He writes, "So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel. First competition, secondly dissidence, thirdly glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation, the first use violence to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle. The second to defend them, the third for trifles. On the opposite end of the misanthropic spectrum, 17th century Genevan philosopher Jeanjac Rouso argued that humans are inherently good, but society is a corruptive agent that causes us to become vain, competitive, prideful, and ultimately loathome.
Though Rouso and Hobbes disagree on how and when humanity enters the misanthropic [music] lens, they both ultimately arrive at a similarly cynical view of humanity. Other philosophers like Dioynes the cynic, Arthur Schopenhau, and Emil Chiron implicitly expressed misanthropic [music] views through philosophies that embraced resignation from humanity or an aestheticism of the self. Others have expressed a kind of misanthropy through their creative work.
Writers like Jonathan Swift, Charles Bakowski, and Fernando Pasoa all engaged with the humanity they rejected through their creative work. Ultimately, whether one fully agrees with the view or not, we don't need to look too hard or too far to at least understand some [music] version of it. Humanity is pervaded by vain celebrity culture, corrupt political movements, vicious power dynamics, everyday selfishness and cruelty, the organization and amplification of rage and hatred, the immensity of injustice and inequality, of famine and war, [music] of desire and futility.
We seem to so needlessly continue an absurd persistent destruction of ourselves and the world. Whether that's our fault or the underpinning of nature's [music] is hard to say. Antiatalism.
Perhaps one of the darkest seeming philosophies that misanthropy can lead to is what is known as antiatalism. The philosophical position that assigns a negative value to human birth. Though antiatalism is arguably the logical next step after missanthropy, it has very different foundations and implications.
What separates antiatalism from misanthropic views is that it is an ethical position. This is also what separates it from individuals who choose not to have children simply out of personal preference. For the antiatalist, the problem with reproduction is moral.
It relates to the management and prevention of suffering. South African philosopher David Benitar is widely regarded as the leading thinker associated with this philosophy. In his book, Better Never to Have been, published in 2006, he comprehensively formalizes what have become some of the most prominent arguments for the philosophy.
Benitar ultimately argues that human or sentient existence is on balance more negative than positive. The often intense and regular experiences of pain and [music] discomfort eclipse the fleeting and frequent experiences of pleasure and joy. Furthermore, Benitar argues that things are actually much worse than we are even aware of, especially if we reject the notion that existence has a net negative value.
Benitar claims we delude ourselves into believing that our experience of existence is better than it is. Partly due to an evolutionary optimism bias known as the Polyiana principle. Research does in fact suggest that pleasant experiences tend to be remembered more readily and are often weighted more heavily than unpleasant ones, particularly at the subconscious level.
Though it should be noted that at the conscious momentto moment level, people often fixate on the negative even though they evaluate their whole lives as more positive. Regardless of any biases, if we consider how often we are in some form of discomfort or pain in life, it likely does appear to overtake how often we are in states of definitive joy or pleasure. Even in the best cases, [music] individuals who are wealthy, have good family and friends, do work they find meaningful and so on.
[music] They too will experience intense regular unrequitted purposeless suffering. No one escapes the pain of hot and cold, hunger and urine, anxiety and boredom, the aches of a body that fills and empties, cramps and breaks, grows and decays, the loss of all that one loves, the disqu of the uncertainty above and beneath all things. With this, Benitar concludes that it is better to never be and it is morally wrong to bring sentient beings into existence.
A common and reasonable counter-argument here is that even if less frequent or less intense, the experience and remembrance of joy, pleasure, love, meaning, and wonder can make our existence worth it. These qualities do enough work to justify the pain and [music] suffering. And so, by not bringing humans into existence, such joys, pleasures, wonders, and meanings are missed out on.
For Benitar, however, it is not all worth it. In what is known as his asymmetry argument, he attempts to refute this rebuttal by showcasing the asymmetry of pleasure and pain. His argument is divided into the following four claims.
The presence of pleasure is good. The presence of pain is bad. The absence of pain is good.
And the absence of pleasure is neutral. Neither good nor bad so long as there is no individual being deprived of it. With this, Benitar concludes that the presence of pleasure cannot compensate for the presence of pain in the moral evaluation of birth because the absence of pain is good even when no one exists.
Whereas the absence of pleasure is not [music] bad so long as there is no one being deprived of it. This might sound bizarre, wrong, or counterintuitive at first, [music] and that's fair. Perhaps it is.
But Benitar defends it with several compelling thought experiments. For example, consider the planet Mars. Right now, no one exists there.
[music] Strictly in the moral sense, is that bad? Is it morally wrong that there are no sentient beings on [music] Mars experiencing joy or pleasure? Arguably, no.
It seems to be neutral. Alternatively, however, what if there were a civilization of sentient beings experiencing constant pain and suffering? That would seem to [music] be quite bad.
There lies the asymmetry for Benitar. He writes, "Whereas at least when we think of them, we rightly are sad for inhabitants of a foreign land whose lives are characterized by suffering, when we hear that some island is unpopulated, we are not similarly sad [music] for the happy people who, had they existed, would have populated this island. Similarly, nobody really mourns for those who do not exist on Mars, feeling sorry for potential such beings that they cannot [music] enjoy life.
Yet, if we knew that there were sentient life on Mars, but that Martians were suffering, we would regret this [music] for them. The fact that we would regret the suffering within their life is sufficient to support the asymmetry that I am defending. [music] The point is that we regret suffering but not the absent pleasures of those who could have existed.
Of course, on the contrary, one could argue that it is some amount bad that an island or planet is [music] desolate without any sentient experience. If we took it to the extreme and removed all life from every island, continent, [music] planet, and place in the cosmos, leaving an unending space devoid of any life, consciousness, awareness, joy, meaning, love, or possibility that does arguably elicit a terrible [music] sense of regret. There are also other legitimate, well-reasoned arguments against antiatalism.
[music] From a normative, metaethical standpoint, why is it moral to prioritize the elimination of suffering, even if it's asymmetrically [music] experienced in relation to pleasure? Why should it be a prioritization to eliminate suffering's predominance over all else? Is this not a preferential subjective claim?
Can we truly say that the absence [music] of pain is morally better than the absence of pleasure? What objective truth is that rooted in? Is this stance not like all stances located in the bogggy grounds of assumptions [music] and intuitions?
Beyond Benitar, there are also many other philosophers and thinkers [music] who have shared similar antiatalist sentiments from pessimist philosophers like Schopenhau, Chiron and Peter Vessel Zapa to writers like Thomas Legatti and Samuel Beckett. However, [music] an important thing to consider and keep in mind with these individuals and their ideas here including Benitars is that they are not expressing purely misanthropic views. [music] They are not promoting a destructive idea for the sake of destruction.
It is not inherently a disdain for humanity, but a pity and compassion. Schopenhau writes, "If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare at the burden of existence?
Or at any rate, not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood? " For most of these individuals, this philosophy is not a matter of destroying the human race. It is a matter of liberating it.
However, the problem here is this. [music] Let's say antiatalism could and were to be accepted as the morally and objectively right view and humanity somehow phased itself out of existence. There is absolutely no reason to believe that life would not continue in other forms and continue to evolve into other forms including intelligent and sentient life.
What then? Suffering in new potentially worse forms. [music] Humanity cannot extinguish the fire it was forged out of by letting itself be burned up in it.
[music] Existence is suffering. Every being is combustible in its flames [music] as it spreads, burns, clears, and replenishes reality. Humanity is just the only current species that is self agrandizing enough to think that with the [music] extinction of itself, all would be made well in the world.
Then nature would be purged of nature. [music] Surely, human life is unique, and thus human life is uniquely treacherous. We see and feel everything acutely.
[music] And so the fire that is existence inflicts us greatly. But it also fuels us greatly. [music] Its combustion fuels us to come up with ideas and philosophies not to destroy but to relieve, to improve, to transcend.
[music] Even if that means considering the idea of voluntary extinction. Regardless of whether one agrees with the arguments laid forth by antiatalism, regardless of whether one sees humanity as gross, contemptable, beautiful, allinsspiring, or all the above, one cannot deny how remarkable it is that [music] a species can create and consider such ideas. That it can see and pity its and others pain, and it can work to reduce such pain, defining new moralities and striving toward better realities.
Though perhaps if we could return to that zygote we once were and could decide whether our legs, arms, torso, and head came out, we might decide against it. Of course, we cannot do this. We cannot [music] and do not choose to be here.
Nothing does. But we are here both individually and collectively. We feel we are separate from all that contains us.
Like we can deny our existence [music] and its nature, but we are still formless in the womb of reality, constrained by and dependent on it. Our borders are not real. [music] They are imagined.
We cannot reason our way out of the order and chaos of nature. We cannot escape or revise it. Not through continuation, not through extinguishment.
Life will always strive, and striving will always be painful and grotesque. Humanity cannot stop that, but it can participate in it. And it can strive [music] to strive for good reasons, to love itself in all its flaws, and to see the meaning and rationality of the absurdity.
One of humanity's most profound qualities is its ability not only to endure the difficulties of existence, but to create and share [music] reasons for and out of this endurance. Remarkable ideas, insights, and expressions have accumulated in the libraries of history, [music] in books, research, and media that help us better understand and deal with ourselves and the world. That's why this video sponsor, Short Form, is so genuinely useful.
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com/pursuit [music] or by using my link in the description. And of course, as always, thank you so much for watching in general. And see you next video.
