by Ken Coates
In other words quite apart from the question of pain and suffering that human existence entails there is also the question of its sheer contingency and pointlessness. Is it really necessary to endorse existence via procreation and thus prolong it? This too demands a reasoned answer. Programmed by nature and socialized by the collective, which demands conformity, we are required to play the ‘game’ of life. But as one of Beckett’s characters puts it, “why this farce day after day?” Where is all this leading to? After all there is no purpose, no goal or destination for the human race except its own perpetuation. Yet the need, indeed the yearning, for some transcendental rationale, some higher meaning or significance to it all has been a characteristic of humans and has led humanity to invent all kinds of excuses and rationalizations for our being here, primary among them being religious. But even religions are hard put to explain human suffering and injustices. What had the Africans done to be turned into slaves and worked to death in the plantations of Americas? What had the six million Jews done to deserve their cruel fate in the hands of Hitler? True, for the ever-present evils of the world religions have invented explanations. An egregious example is the Hindu doctrine of ‘karma’ , a theodicy which sees the individual’s fate in this life to be the result of his conduct in his previous life or incarnation. On the other hand, it is to the credit of ancient Hinduism to have judged moksha or liberation from the perpetual cycle of births and deaths as the supreme good that humans can aspire to.
Modern rejectionism is of course based on secular beliefs and has no place for supernatural phenomena intervening or controlling the world. Rejectionists believe that contingency rules nature and nature cares not a whit about individuals. Accidents decide so many things that are of supreme importance for the individual. In a deeper sense the contingent nature of existence means that there is no purpose or meaning out there which justifies life. Of course it is possible to embrace contingency and give life a meaning or purpose that it does not possess intrinsically. Taking life as a given we can then proceed to endow human world with values such as liberty, justice, compassion among others. This is the meaning of the existential premise that existence precedes essence. As Sartre (1948, 28) writes, ‘man surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards’. In other words it is up to each of us as individuals to create or choose values and forms of action. Thus humans lift themselves up so to say with their bootstraps and can go wherever they choose to. Existentialists go on to elaborate upon the vertigo, the dizzying feeling of total freedom and inescapable responsibility that human beings face in confronting such an arbitrary and yet consequential choice.
To start with, then, individuals can choose to respond in any way they like to the contingency of existence. This of course includes the decision whether to accept existence or to reject it. However, as pointed earlier, the idea of rejecting existence itself scarcely features in existentialist thinking (see Ch.3 above). It is not an aspect of choice that is explored in formal existentialist philosophy, whether that of Sartre or Heidegger. Indeed as we mentioned in the Introduction, atheistic existentialism is also essentially a value-free perspective which emphasizes choice but refuses to discuss, not to say prescribe, the substance of this choice. However it does take human existence for granted and seems to proceed on that basis. Is that a premise that involves value judgment? It is not clear but is implied by the claim that existentialism is a form of humanism (Sartre 1948). Unlike Sartre and Heidegger it is the value-committed philosophy of Nietzsche, who is also considered an existentialist, that discusses the question of acceptance or rejection openly as it does sexuality and procreation. And of course Nietzsche comes down strongly in favor of saying yes to existence and its perpetuation. He believes in progress through evolution and advocates a vigorous affirmation of life1.
Rejectionism, on the other hand, is a philosophy which says no to existence. What it shares with Sartrian or for that matter Kierkegaardian existentialism is the freedom and the importance of individual choice which must include one’s fundamental evaluation of existence. Thus rejectionism may be seen as a form of applied existentialism. It is somewhat paradoxical that Sartre, the philosopher of freedom, says nothing about the fact that we begin our life in unfreedom (we do not choose to be born), and in turn impose the same unfreedom via procreation on others. Put simply, procreation involves the enslavement of another, something that deserved a commentary from Sartre , the existentialist, who above all extols freedom and autonomy of the individual. Be that as it may the fact remains that neither the human species as a collective nor individual humans have chosen existence but find themselves saddled with it with no more meaning or purpose to their lives than any other living thing. In light of this pointlessness of existence rejectionism finds a dual objection to the business of procreation. It conscripts sentient beings to a lifetime of vexations and sufferings which they might be spared. Second, it perpetuates the unnecessary and pointless game of existence, taking it for granted as ‘natural’ and/ or legitimizing it with all sorts of rationalizations.
With increasing secularization religion as a principal means of legitimizing existence appears to have been weakening and we may expect it to weaken further. Nonetheless it has shown considerable resilience and persistence in the face of advances in scientific knowledge and technologies which impinge in profound ways on the religious view of life. Religion has shown considerable ability to adapt to the changing conditions of modernization. This together with the myriad of functions that it performs for believers in sustaining them through life means that its longevity and influence is not to be underestimated ( see e.g. Pollack and Olson 2008 ). Indeed adherence to some form of religion, no matter what, remains an important marker of social conformity. Atheism still remains somewhat taboo, and open declaration of being an atheist subject to social disapproval. Rejectionism, on the other hand, presupposes a secular view of existence.
Religion apart, the principal mode of legitimation in conditions of modernity seems to be the idea of ‘progress’. We might call it a form of secular faith. If religion is one form of ‘opium of the people’ the idea of progress can be called another. It appeals to believers and non-believers alike. Put simply, the core idea of progress is that reason together with scientific method has given us a powerful tool for the advancement of knowledge and its application to both material and social spheres. It means steadily improving material, social and political welfare throughout the world and a limitless horizon of progress and new discoveries. The idea of progress and the reality of it is of course relatively recent in human history. It goes back to 18th and 19th centuries, if not the 17th ( Bury 1960; Nisbet 1994: 171-2). True, in a way the entire evolutionary process could be looked upon as ‘progress’ i.e. the evolution of the human species through the ages with its physiological and psychological dimensions including the development of consciousness (Bronowsky 2011 ). To this we could add material and cultural development, viz. language, writing, production of economic surplus and more recently increasing productivity and material affluence. In the 21st century the application of science and technology and the spread of market economy has had spectacular results in improving living conditions. Nonetheless the notion of progress, both as a concept and reality, remains highly contentious.
Looking back at the various perspectives we have discussed, which span three millennia, we find very little by way of reference to progress. While we would not expect it to be a feature of Hindu or Buddhist metaphysical thought, with its supernatural beliefs in rebirth and in cyclical time, we would expect the other philosophies, namely those of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Zapffe and Benatar to consider the idea of progress and its relevance to their thought. Schopenhauer makes only a passing reference to technological progress, e.g. the coming of the railways, and dismisses it as of little relevance in the context of the all-consuming will-to-life and its attendant misery and suffering. This is in line with Schopenhauer’s rejection of history and societal development as irrelevant to
his timeless philosophy of the will and its resulting implications. By contrast, Hartmann takes the issue of historical development more seriously and discusses the question of progress in some detail drawing on a wide range of examples. But in the end he too dismisses ‘progress’ as making little difference to his assessment of existence. He writes, ‘However great the progress of mankind, it will never get rid of , or even only diminish, the greatest of sufferings – sickness, age, dependence on the will and power of others, want, and discontent’(Hartmann 1884, v.iii, 103) . As for material improvements, new generations get used to them quite quickly and do not ‘feel’ them as anything special. Their general effect is to multiply needs and wants and any thwarting of these leads to greater discontent.
In fact the more important perspective on progress from Hartmann’s philosophical standpoint is that intellectual, educational and cultural advance leads to a higher level of awareness, in short heightened consciousness, in humans. The result of this deeper awareness is that more and more people will see through our bondage to the will, the primitive will-to-live which keeps us under illusion and makes us do its bidding. In Hartmann’s historical approach to the problem of existence ‘progress’ is a necessary condition, an ‘urgent… requirement’ in order for reason to prevail over will (115). Among rejectionists he is unique in embracing progress, not because of its amelioration of human suffering but because of its emancipatory potential. Secularization frees man from the grip of religion - the ancient justifier of existence with its supra-mundane beliefs - and as civilization advances and deepens further it emancipates man from the illusion of progress. For material progress shows at the same time that there is no moral progress as technology enhances the destructive potential of man and exposes the fundamental evil of existence more clearly. In short human development carries within itself the seeds of its own demise. For Hartmann liberation from bondage to nature and material existence is man’s ultimate destiny and the highest point of spiritual awareness and affirmation. Interestingly enough, here he connects with the ancient Hindu and Buddhist thought with its conception of man’s ultimate emancipation from existence - the “eternal recurrence” of births and deaths - as the supreme goal.
As for Zapffe, it is clear that progress makes no difference to what he sees as the fundamentally flawed and contradictory nature of human existence. What ‘progress’ does is to invent new forms of distraction. Zapffe was also an early ecologist of sorts and drew attention to the adverse consequences of urbanization and industrialization for the environment.
David Benatar makes no reference to ‘progress’ as such given that his argument, in the manner of Schopenhauer, is ahistorical. No matter how well-fed, clothed and housed people are every life is sure to experience some if not a good deal of pain and suffering. Moreover we know that the other side of technological and scientific advance is that it enhances human capacity to inflict pain, suffering and destruction on an ever larger scale. As Benatar (2006, 91) shows, the carnage and destruction of the two world wars, the atrocities of the Nazi and communist regimes, as well as other wars and revolutions of the 20th century constitute a mind-numbing record of human suffering and man-made evil. It is also witness to what is euphemistically called ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. It is as though what happened was an aberration, a deviance from human nature. No doubt it is comforting to assume that these were ‘unusual,’ ‘unnatural’ happenings brought about by ‘monsters’ such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, to name but a few. Clearly the record of the 20th century is a big blow to the Panglossian view of human progress. We should not forget that the 19th century was a period of great expectations, of peace and progress in the future through secular enlightenment, economic development and free trade between nations (Bury 334-9, Nisbet 171-2, 330 ). The history of communism in particular exposes the yawning gap between man’s hopes and aspirations on the one hand and the cruel realities of human behavior on the other. Yet at the beginning of the 21st century we can see ‘man’s incurable optimism’, as Beckett would put it (see above), taking over once again.
The paradox of progress: Does it make sense to speak of the paradox of progress in the context of rejectionism? Quite apart from the evolution of human species and the development of consciousness which enables the latter to question and to negate existence there is a more specific and modern development which strengthens the idea of a paradox. First, there is the liberalization of attitudes and ideas, associated in part with secularization, which makes it possible to express unconventional views and to have a reasoned dialogue about issues once considered strictly taboo. There are many examples notably homosexuality, contraception and abortion, suicide, voluntary euthanasia and death with dignity. It was not so long ago that some of these forms of behavior and practice were deemed immoral, indeed seen as crimes which entailed severe punishment. Of course many of the above, as well as attitudes such as atheism and rejectionism, are still considered as forms of deviance and entail social sanctions and condemnation. Even in the developed countries religious authority, especially Catholic Church, remains intransigent and influential and we have to think here in relative terms. Undoubtedly however, ‘progress’ in the sense of liberalization of social norms, greater tolerance of different lifestyles and greater freedom of expression, helps to further the dissemination and practice of rejectionism. In the less developed societies the collective, notably the family as a group remains important for both physical and economic security. Children are almost a necessity for individual survival. It is only with the development of advanced industrial democracies that these conditions begin to lose their salience. In the post-industrial and post-modern society the individual comes into her own. Individuals and couples can live relatively safely in both physical and economic sense. The ‘welfare state’ is an important contributor n this context.
Perhaps the most important is the development of safe contraception which, thanks to technological advance and secularization, has become widely available. It is this above all which makes it possible to satisfy the coital urge and sexual desire without requiring abstinence and the frustration of sexual needs. The sundering of reproduction from sexual intercourse is a major step in weakening the grip of nature thereby extending ‘choice’ and the freedom to act. One might consider this important technological development as a necessary condition for anti-natalism to achieve widespread acceptance and support. Thus progress in these two interrelated spheres, those of ideas and technology, facilitate the rejection of existence. In this sense human development may be seen as a phenomenon hoist on its own petard. Alternatively anti-natalism can be seen as a part of ‘progress’ which enlarges our freedom of choice. Liberalization in the realm of ideas, greater control over reproduction, higher levels of education, and global communications help to raise awareness of the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of existence. Greater variety of beliefs and lifestyles become acceptable.
Hartmann, it will be recalled, saw development as an inherent unfolding of that evolution whose ultimate aim is the ascendancy of reason over will, leading to the negation of existence. True, he thought in terms of emancipation at the collective level through a global rise in consciousness, leading to a common resolve to end existence. But ignoring for the moment his teleology and emphasis on the collective, the logic of his argument has a great deal of relevance at the individual level. ‘Progress’ enlarges the scope of choice, and individuals can more easily decide not to procreate. Moreover it is not a mere coincidence that the voluntary childless tend to be more highly educated compared to the natalist population. In any case, both the acceptance of existence by way of reproduction and its rejection via non-reproduction are choices available to human beings. Underlying each of these choices are moral and metaphysical values and their affirmation.
The principle underlying rejectionism is that it is wrong to subject a sentient being to pain and suffering if it can be avoided. And this can be accomplished by abstaining from procreation. Rejectionism does val
ue the ‘good’ that life also contains. However it is not prepared to pay the cost of that good by way of the evils of existence. Acceptance of life, on the other hand, in so far as it goes beyond simply being a form of naturalistic or traditional – including religious - behavior implies an acceptance of the evils of existence as part of a package which also contains much that is good. And each of these choices has a variety of implications. For example if everyone accepts the rejectionist approach then that means the gradual extinction of the human race. This unintended consequence of individual action is a part of the logic of rejection. On the other hand in practice it seems highly unlikely that the large majority of the world’s population, including those in advanced countries, will give up procreation any time soon.