{As he was pawing through my bookshelves the other day, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat managed, intentionally or not, to knock one book to the floor. The book was Thomas Ligotti’s ‘The Conspiracy against the Human Race,’ which I had purchased on a whim a year or so ago (for $.99, as I recall), skimmed briefly, and then dismissed as too bleak for my taste. It had been sitting unread on the shelf ever since, until Pascal got his paws on it. As it turns out, the book aligns perfectly with Pascal’s pessimistic view of existence, so much so that he is now encouraging all the other cool existential cats to read it, too.}
Consciousness is an existential liability. Existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities. (Thomas Ligotti)
Life presents itself as a task, a drudgery to be performed. Everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that is of no value. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
When there's too much of nothing, no one has control. (Bob Dylan)
Back in 1912, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in his The Tragic Sense of Life, wrote that “Consciousness is a disease.” I mention this only to demonstrate that Thomas Ligotti was not breaking new ground with his relentlessly grim 2010 book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He was, however, digging the hole of nihilism deeper than had most of his predecessors (e.g., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Unamuno) or his contemporaries (e.g., Emil Cioran). 1
Like the ancient Gnostics, but without their metaphysical flourishes, Ligotti makes the case that, when it comes to existence, a mistake has been made; we ought not to be here, he insists, and certainly not saddled as we are with consciousness. What, precisely, does Ligotti object to about consciousness or about existence itself? Let him explain:
For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And as such, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.2
Ligotti’s train of thought, explicitly building on the radical pessimism of the mid-20th century Norwegian writer Peter Zapffe, in some ways tracks that of Ernest Becker. Becker's thesis (in Denial of Death) was that our awareness of death would have been psychologically crippling if we had not developed ways to distract and to distance ourselves from that awareness. All human activities—the building of civilizations, the construction of cities, the creative arts, religion, etc.—are nothing but frantic efforts to avoid facing our mortality; or, as Ligotti puts it, “Every human activity is a tack for killing time.” 3
All human activities are not created equal, of course; some serve our death-denying purposes better than others. Ligotti notes that deep existential contemplation—or, better, deep ontological contemplation—tends to be a minority preference at best:
That being human might mean something very strange and awful, something quite uncanny, is not given a passing thought. If it were, who knows what would happen to us? We could disappear in a puff of smoke or fall through a mirror that has nothing on the other side. The single most startling and dreadful revelation for human beings is that we are not what we think we are.
In the twentieth century, German philosopher (and sometime Nazi) Martin Heidegger drilled down to the philosophical bedrock by asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The radical nihilist responds by saying, “Maybe there isn’t.”
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1 Spoiler alert: the “conspiracy against the human race” turns out to be life and life only.
2 “The silent staring void” evokes none other than Blaise Pascal himself! Pascal was not a nihilist, of course; he was a Jansenist, which Catholic authorities considered even worse.
3 To be clear, Ernest Becker, while probing human motives, generally approved of the ways in which humans kept mortality's skeleton in the closet; Ligotti, on the other hand, was pretty sure there's no point.
Rev. Markle: I believe I am a ray of freaking sunshine, and not at all the misanthropic buzzkill you seem to think I am. Anyway, what's the difference--I mean, none of it matters, right?
Posted by: Jack Shifflett | 01/04/2024 at 04:18 PM
Too bleak for your taste? Tell me another one.
Posted by: Ann Markle | 01/03/2024 at 11:49 PM