The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Read Online Free PDF

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    speed the extinction of humanity. Lusting to empower itself, the Church slacked off from the example of its ascetic founder in order to breed a copious body of followers and rule as much of the earth as it could. In another orbit altogether from the theologies of either Gnosticism or Catholicism, the German philosopher who wrote under the name Philipp Mainländer advocated chastity as the very axis for a blueprint for salvation. The target point of his redemptive plan was the summoning within ourselves of a “Will-to-die.” This brainstorm, along with others as gripping, was advanced by Mainländer in a treatise whose title has been translated as The Philosophy of Redemption (1876). Unsurprisingly, the work itself has not been translated into English. Perhaps the author might have known greater celebrity if, like the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger in his popular study translated as Sex and Character (1903), he had ruminated more about the psychodynamics deriving from the venereal goad rather against it altogether.10 He also made the cardinal error of pressing his readers to work for such ends as justice and charity for all. Mainländer was an unbridled visionary, although not of the inspirational sort that receives a charitable hearing from posterity. He shot himself in the foot every chance he got before aiming the gun a little higher and ending his life. The act was consummated the day of the publication of The Philosophy of Redemption. The author, who avouched his personal sense of well being and proposed universal suicide for a most peculiar reason (see footnote thirteen to this section), may have killed himself to plead his sincerity. But it is not possible for anyone to seal definitively their subjective bona fides by an objective gesture. We are too estranged from one another’s inner worlds for any such measures to be convincing unless we are predisposed, for whatever reason, to be convinced. Had Mainländer lived longer, he might have taken lessons from Friedrich Nietzsche on how to be irrational and still influence people.11
    In “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe betrays no illusions about the possibility of defeating consciousness in the manner of Buddhism, nor is he so unworldly as to beseech a communal solution to snuff out the race as did the Cathari or the Bogomils. (He does critique the barbarism of social or religious maledictions in reference to suicide, but he is not a standard-bearer for this form of personal salvation.) His thought is a late addendum to that of various sects and individuals who have found human existence to be so untenable that extinction is preferable to survival. It also has the value of advancing a new answer to the old question: “Why should generations unborn be spared entry into the human thresher?” But what might be called “Zapffe’s Paradox,” in the tradition of eponymous formulations that saturate primers of philosophy, is as useless as the propositions of any other thinker who is pro-life or anti-life or is only juggling concepts to clinch “what is reality?” in part or in whole. Having said as much, we can continue as if it had not been said. The value of a philosopher’s thought is not in its answers—no philosopher has any that are more helpful than saying nothing at all—but in how well they speak to the prejudgments of their consumers. Such is the importance—and the nullity—of rhetoric. Ask any hard-line pessimist, but do not expect him to expect you to take his words seriously.
    SOLUTIONS
    Thinkers who agitate for pessimism are often dismissed with the riposte that their griping solves none of humanity’s chronic ills, all of which may be subsumed under the main 23

    head of SUFFERING. It goes without saying, or should go without saying, that no one has any solutions for suffering, only stopgaps. But Zapffe does offer a “solution,” one that obviates all others—a solution to solutions. It may not be a realistic solution for a