作者：托马斯·利戈蒂（Thomas Ligotti）
译者：0suffering（注：译自英语原著The Conspiracy Against The Human Race: A Contrivance Of Horror）

The Nightmare Of Being

存在的梦魇

本章小节

Psychogenesis（心理发生） | Ante-Mortem（临终前） | Wide-Awake（清醒） | Brainwork（脑力劳动） | Mutation（突变） | Undoing I（复原 I） | Zombification（僵尸化） | Undoing II（复原 II ） | Self-Hypnosis（自我催眠） | Cosmophobia（宇宙恐惧） | Pessimism I（悲观主义 I） | Pessimism II（悲观主义 II） | Blundering（失误） | Analogies（类比） | Life-Principles（生命原则） | Undoing III（复原 III） | Repression（压抑） | Suffering I（苦难 I） | Suffering II（苦难 II） | Ecocide（生态灭绝） | Hopelessness（绝望） | Debatability（争议性）

心理发生

点击展开/折叠英语原文

For ages they had been without lives of their own. The whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation. How long they had thus flourished none of them knew. Then something began to change. It happened over unremembered generations. The signs of a revision without forewarning were being writ ever more deeply into them. As their species moved forward, they began crossing boundaries whose very existence they never imagined. After nightfall, they looked up at a sky filled with stars and felt themselves small and fragile in the vastness. Soon they began to see everything in a way they never had in older times. When they found one of their own lying still and stiff, they now stood around the body as if there were something they should do that they had never done before. It was then they began to take bodies that were still and stiff to distant places so they could not find their way back to them. But even after they had done this, some within their group did see those bodies again, often standing silent in the moonlight or loitering sad-faced just beyond the glow of a fire. Everything changed once they had lives of their own and knew they had lives of their own. It even became impossible for them to believe things had ever been any other way. They were masters of their movements now, as it seemed, and never had there been anything like them. The epoch had passed when the whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation. Something had happened. They did not know what it was, but they did know it as that which should not be. And something needed to be done if they were to flourish as they once had, if the very ground beneath their feet were not to fall out from under them. For ages they had been without lives of their own. Now that they had such lives there was no turning back. The whole of their being was closed to the world, and they had been divided from the rest of creation. Nothing could be done about that, having as they did lives of their own. But something would have to be done if they were to live with that which should not be. And over time they discovered what could be done—what would have to be done—so that they could live the lives that were now theirs to live. This would not revive among them the way things had once been done in older times; it would only be the best they could do.¹

他们曾一度没有自己的生命。他们的整个存在都向世界敞开，与万物融为一体，毫无隔阂。他们就这样繁荣了多久，无人知晓。

后来，某种变化开始发生。这发生在无人记得的世代之间。一种没有预兆的修正的迹象，越来越深刻地刻在他们身上。随着他们的物种向前发展，他们开始跨越他们从未想象过的边界。夜幕降临后，他们仰望星空，在浩瀚的宇宙中感到自己渺小而脆弱。

很快，他们开始以一种前所未有的方式看待一切。当他们发现同伴僵硬地躺在那里时，他们现在围着尸体站着，仿佛他们应该做一些从未做过的事情。那时，他们开始把僵硬的尸体带到遥远的地方，以免它们找到回来的路。但即使他们这样做了，他们中的一些人还是会再次看到那些尸体，经常在月光下静静地站着，或在篝火的微光之外面带悲伤地徘徊。

一旦他们有了自己的生活，并意识到自己有了自己的生活，一切都变了。他们甚至无法相信事情曾经是另一种样子。他们现在似乎是自己行动的主宰，从未有过像他们这样的存在。他们整个存在都向世界敞开，与万物融为一体的时代已经过去了。某种事情发生了。他们不知道那是什么，但他们知道那是“不应该发生的”。

如果他们要像过去那样繁荣，如果他们脚下的土地不至于崩塌，就必须做些什么。他们曾一度没有自己的生命。既然他们有了这样的生命，就没有回头路了。他们的整个存在都对世界封闭了，他们与万物隔绝了。对于拥有自己生命的他们来说，对此无能为力。

但是，如果他们要与“不应该发生的”共存，就必须做些什么。随着时间的推移，他们发现了可以做些什么——必须做些什么——才能过上他们现在拥有的生活。这不会让他们恢复过去的生活方式，这只是他们所能做的最好的事情。

临终前

点击展开/折叠英语原文

For thousands of years a debate has been going on in the shadowy background of human affairs. The issue to be resolved: "What should we say about being alive?" Overwhelmingly, people have said, "Being alive is all right." More thoughtful persons have added, "Especially when you consider the alternative," disclosing a jocularity as puzzling as it is macabre, since the alternative is here implied to be both disagreeable and, upon consideration, capable of making being alive seem more agreeable than it alternatively would, as if the alternative were only a possibility that may or may not come to pass, like getting the flu, rather than a looming inevitability. And yet this covertly portentous remark is perfectly well tolerated by anyone who says that being alive is all right. These individuals stand on one side of the debate. On the other side is an imperceptible minority of disputants. Their response to the question of what we should say about being alive will be neither positive nor equivocal. They may even fulminate about howobjectionable it is to be alive, or spout off that to be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive, and so on. Now, there are really no incisive answers as to why anyone thinks or feels one way and not another. The most we can say is that the first group of people is composed of optimists, although they may not think of themselves as such, while the contending group, that imperceptible minority, is composed of pessimists. The latter know who they are. But which group is in the right—the existentially harrowed pessimists or the life-embracing optimists—will never be resolved.

在人类事务的阴暗背景中，一场持续了数千年的辩论一直在进行。需要解决的问题是：“我们应该如何看待活着这件事？”

绝大多数人都会说：“活着挺好的。”更深思熟虑的人会补充说：“尤其是当你考虑到另一种选择时。”这句话透露出一种既令人费解又令人毛骨悚然的玩笑，因为这里暗示的另一种选择既令人不愉快，而且经过考虑，又能使活着这件事显得比另一种选择更令人愉快，仿佛另一种选择只是一种可能发生或不发生的可能性，就像得了流感一样，而不是一个迫在眉睫的必然性。

然而，这种隐晦地带有预兆性的话语，却被任何说活着挺好的人完全容忍。这些人站在辩论的一边。另一边是难以察觉的少数争论者。他们对我们应该如何看待活着这个问题的回答，既不会是肯定的，也不会是模棱两可的。他们甚至可能会怒斥活着是多么令人反感，或者滔滔不绝地说活着就是居住在一个没有希望醒来进入自然世界的噩梦中，我们的身体深深地陷入恐惧的泥潭中，像足不出户的人一样生活在一个无人能活着逃脱的恐怖屋中，等等。

现在，对于为什么有人这样想或那样想，而不会反过来想，实际上并没有明确的答案。我们最多只能说，第一组人是由乐观主义者组成的，尽管他们可能并不认为自己是这样的人，而另一组争论者，即难以察觉的少数人，则是由悲观主义者组成的。后者知道他们是谁。但是，究竟哪一组是正确的——是那些在存在主义上饱受折磨的悲观主义者，还是那些拥抱生活的乐观主义者——永远不会有定论。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

If the most contemplative individuals are sometimes dubious about the value of existence, they do not often publicize their doubts but align themselves with the optimist in the street, tacitly declaiming, in more erudite terms, "Being alive is all right." The butcher, the baker, and the crushing majority of philosophers all agree on one thing: Human life is a good thing, and we should keep our species going for as long as we can. To tout the rival side of the issue is asking for grief. But some people seem born to bellyache that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this posture in philosophical or literary works, they may do so without anxiety that their efforts will have an excess of admirers. Notable among such efforts is "The Last Messiah" (1933), an essay written by the Norwegian philosopher and man of letters Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990). In this work, which to date has been twice translated into English,² Zapffe elucidated why he saw human existence as a tragedy.

如果说最沉思的人有时对存在的价值感到怀疑，他们通常不会公开表达他们的怀疑，而是与街上的乐观主义者保持一致，用更博学的语言默默地宣称：“活着挺好的。”屠夫、面包师和绝大多数哲学家都同意一件事：人类生命是美好的，我们应该尽可能地延续我们的物种。宣扬相反的观点只会自讨苦吃。

但有些人似乎生来就喜欢抱怨活着并不好。如果他们在哲学或文学作品中表达这种立场，他们可以毫不担心他们的努力会得到过多的赞赏。在这些作品中，挪威哲学家和文学家彼得·韦塞尔·扎普夫（Peter Wessel Zapffe，1899-1990）于1933年撰写的散文《最后的弥赛亚》（The Last Messiah）尤为引人注目。在这部迄今为止已被两次翻译成英文的作品中，扎普夫阐述了他为什么认为人类的存在是一场悲剧。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Before discussing Zapffe's elucidation of human existence as a tragedy, however, it may be useful to muse upon a few facts whose relevance will become manifest down the line. As some may know, there exist readers who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically speaking. Contrary by temperament, these persons are sorely aware that nothing indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically or literally speaking, must make its way into their lives, as if by natural birthright. They do not think anything indispensable to anyone's existence may be claimed as a natural birthright, since the birthrights we toss about are all lies fabricated to a purpose, as any student of humanity can verify. For those who have given thought to this matter, the only rights we may exercise are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to perish from corruption or mortal trauma. This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has made it to the age of being reproductively ready, neither being a natural birthright. Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die. No other right has ever been allocated to anyone except as a fabrication, whether in modern times or days past.³ The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The inalienable rights of certain people, on the other hand, seemingly remain current: somehow we believe they are not fabrications because hallowed documents declare they are real. Miserly or munificent as a given right may appear, it denotes no more than the right of way warranted by a traffic light, which does not mean you have the right to drive free of vehicular misadventures. Ask any paramedic as your dead body is taken away to the nearest hospital.

然而，在讨论扎普夫对人类存在之悲剧性的阐述之前，也许有必要先思考一些事实，这些事实的重要性将在后续讨论中显现。如一些人所知，确实存在这样一类读者——他们将哲学和文学中悲观、虚无或失败主义的作品视为自身存在不可或缺的一部分，夸张地说。然而，这类人与生俱来便带有一种逆反的气质，他们深知，无论是夸张而言还是字面意义上，任何对自身存在不可或缺的东西，都不会如同天赋的权利一般自然而然地进入他们的生活。他们不认为有任何东西是任何人天生就该享有的，因为所谓的“天赋权利”无非是为了某种目的而编造的谎言，任何研究过人类社会的人都能证实这一点。

对于思考过这个问题的人而言，我们唯一真正可以行使的权利只有以下几种：寻求个体生存，创造与自身相似的生命体，以及因腐败或致命创伤而死去。这还是假设一个人已经顺利出生并成长至具备生殖能力的年龄，而这两者本身都不是天赋权利。严格来说，我们唯一的天赋权利便是死亡的权利。除此之外，任何所谓的权利，过去亦或现在，都不过是人为的构造。

君权神授如今已被承认是一个虚构的概念——不过是一种伪造的许可证，赋予君主们狂妄的妄想与冲动的暴行。而另一方面，一些所谓不可剥夺的权利似乎依然被当作现实：我们竟然相信它们不是人为捏造的，仅仅因为某些神圣的文献宣称它们是真实的。无论某种权利看起来多么微薄或慷慨，它的本质不过如同交通信号灯所赋予的通行权——这并不意味着你就能保证免于车祸的厄运。若有疑问，可以询问那些将你的尸体送往医院的急救人员。

清醒

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Our want of any natural birthright—except to die, in most cases without assistance—is not a matter of tragedy, but only one of truth. Coming at last to the pith of Zapffe's thought as it is contained in "The Last Messiah," what the Norwegian philosopher saw as the tragedy of human existence had its beginnings when at some stage in our evolution we acquired "a damning surplus of consciousness." (Indulgence is begged in advance for the present work's profuse entreaties for assent, or at least suspension of disbelief, in this matter.) Naturally, it must be owned that there are quarrels among cognitive psychologists, philosophers of mind, and neuroscientists about what consciousness is. The fact that this question has been around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks and early Buddhists suggests there is an assumption of consciousness in the human species and that consciousness has had an effect on the way we exist. For Zapffe, the effect was

我们缺乏任何自然天赋——除了在大多数情况下无人帮助地死去——这并不是悲剧，而只是一个事实。最终来到扎普夫思想的精髓，正如它包含在《最后的弥赛亚》中那样，这位挪威哲学家认为人类存在的悲剧始于我们进化过程中的某个阶段，我们获得了“一种该死的过剩意识”。（请预先宽恕本文在此事上大量恳求赞同，或至少是暂停怀疑。）当然，必须承认，认知心理学家、心灵哲学家和神经科学家之间对于意识是什么存在争论。这个自古希腊人和早期佛教徒时代就存在的问题，表明人类物种中存在一种对意识的假设，并且意识已经对我们的存在方式产生了影响。对于扎普夫来说，这种影响是：

A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily—by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Could there be anything to this pessimistic verbiage, this tirade against the evolution of consciousness? Millennia had passed without much discussion one way or the other on the subject, at least in polite society. Then suddenly this barrage from an obscure Norwegian philosopher. What is one to say? For contrast, here are some excerpts from an online interview with the eminent British multidisciplinary thinker Nicholas Humphrey ("A Self Worth Having: A Talk with Nicolas Humphrey," 2003):

这段悲观的言辞，对意识进化的抨击，是否真的有道理？数千年以来，关于这个话题，至少在文明社会中，并没有太多的讨论。然后，一位默默无闻的挪威哲学家突然发起了猛烈的抨击。人们该如何看待？为了形成对比，这里有一些摘自英国杰出跨学科思想家尼古拉斯·汉弗莱（Nicholas Humphrey）的在线采访（《拥有自我价值：与尼古拉斯·汉弗莱的对话》，2003年）的节选：

Consciousness—phenomenal experience—seems in many ways too good to be true. The way we experience the world seems unnecessarily beautiful, unnecessarily rich and strange. . . .

Phenomenal experience, surely, can and does provide the basis for creating a self worth having. And just see what becomes possible—even natural—-once this new self is in place1 As subjects of something so mysterious and strange, we humans gain new confidence and interest in our own survival, a new interest in other people too. We begin to be interested in the future, in immortality, and in all sorts of issues to do with . . . how far consciousness extends around us. . . .

[T]he more I try to make sense of it, the more I come back to the fact that we’ve evolved to regard consciousness as a wonderfully good thing in its own right—which could just be because consciousness is a wonderfully good thing in its own right!

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Could there be anything to this optimistic verbiage in which consciousness is not a "breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature" but something that is "unnecessarily beautiful, unnecessarily rich and strange" and "a wonderfully good thing in its own right," something that makes human existence an unbelievably desirable adventure? Think about it—a British thinker thinks so well of the evolution of consciousness that he cannot contain his gratitude for this turn of events. What is one to say? Both Humphrey and Zapffe are equally passionate about what they have to say, which is not to say that they have said anything credible. Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else. But even though you cannot demonstrate the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what the audience thinks.

难道这种乐观的说辞真的有道理吗？在这种说辞中，意识并非“生命本身的统一遭到了破裂，一种生物学上的悖论，一种可憎的存在，一种荒谬，一种对自然的灾难性夸张”，而是某种“多余地美丽、多余地丰富而奇异”的东西，是“一种本身就无比美好的事物”，是让人类的存在成为一场令人难以置信的理想冒险的东西？

试想一下——一位英国思想家对意识的演化评价如此之高，以至于他无法抑制自己对这一发展方向的感激之情。对此，我们能说些什么呢？汉弗莱和扎普夫对自己的观点同样充满激情，但这并不意味着他们的观点就更可信。不管你认为意识是一种恩赐还是一种恐怖，这都只是你的看法——仅此而已。然而，尽管你无法证明自己的看法是正确的，至少你可以把它展示出来，看看观众如何评价。

脑力劳动

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Over the centuries, assorted theories about the nature and workings of consciousness have been put forth. The theory Zapffe implicitly accepted is this: Consciousness is connected to the human brain in a way that makes the world appear to us as it appears and makes us appear to ourselves as we appear—that is, as "selves" or a "persons" strung together by memories, sensations, emotions, and so on. No one knows exactly how the consciousness-brain connection is made, but all evidence supports the non-dualistic theory that the brain is the source of consciousness and the only source of consciousness. Zapffe accepted consciousness as a given and moved on from there, since he was not interested in the debates surrounding this phenomenon as such but only in the way it determines the nature of our species. This was enough for his purposes, which were wholly existential and careless of seeking technical explanations for the workings of consciousness. Anyway, how consciousness "happened," since it was not always present in our species, remains as much a mystery in our time as it was in Zapffe's, just as the process of how life came about from materials that were not living remains a mystery. First there was no life, and then there was life—nature, as it came to be called. As nature proliferated into more complex and various forms, human organisms eventually entered the world as part of this process. After a time, consciousness happened for these organisms (and a few others at much lower amplitudes). And it kept on gaining steam as we evolved. On this all theorists of consciousness agree. Billions of years after earth made a jump from being lifeless to having life, human beings made a jump from not being conscious, or very much conscious, to being conscious enough to esteem or condemn this phenomenon. No one knows either how the jump was made or how long it took, although there are theories about both, as there are theories about all mutations from one state to another.

几个世纪以来，各种关于意识本质及其运作方式的理论层出不穷。扎普夫隐含接受的理论是：意识与人类大脑相连，以某种方式使世界呈现给我们的样貌成为可能，并使我们自身在我们看来具有某种统一性——也就是说，我们作为“自我”或“个体”而存在，由记忆、感知、情感等串联在一起。

没有人确切知道意识与大脑之间的联系是如何建立的，但所有证据都支持一种非二元论的理论，即大脑是意识的源头，也是唯一的源头。扎普夫将意识视为一个既定事实，并由此展开思考，因为他并不关心围绕这一现象的争论，而只是关注它如何决定了我们物种的本质。这对他的目的而言已经足够，他的关注点完全是存在主义的，对意识如何运作的技术性解释毫无兴趣。

无论如何，意识是如何“发生”的——因为它并非一直存在于我们物种中——在我们这个时代仍然是个谜，就像生命如何从非生物材料中诞生一样仍然是个谜。最初没有生命，而后生命出现——这便是所谓的自然。随着自然演化出更加复杂和多样的形式，人类这一生物体最终作为其中的一部分进入了世界。过了一段时间，这些生物体（以及少数其他生物，以较低的程度）产生了意识。而随着我们不断进化，意识也逐步增强。对此，所有意识理论家都达成一致。

亿万年前，地球从无生命跃迁至有生命；而后，人类又从无意识（或仅具微弱意识）跃迁至足以对这一现象加以评价或批判的程度。至于这一跃迁是如何发生的，或花费了多长时间，没有人确切知晓，尽管围绕这两个问题存在各种理论，就像所有从一种状态突变为另一种状态的现象都会引发理论探讨一样。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

"The mutations must be considered blind," Zapffe wrote. "They work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment." As mentioned, how the mutation of consciousness originated was of no concern to Zapffe, who focused entirely on demonstrating the tragic effect of this aptitude. Such projects are typical among pessimistic philosophers. Non-pessimistic philosophers either have an impartial attitude about consciousness or, like Nicholas Humphrey, think of it as a marvelous endowment. When non-pessimistic philosophers even notice the pessimist's attitude, they reject it. With the world on their side in the conviction that being alive is all right, non-pessimists are not disposed to musing that human existence is a wholesale tragedy. They only argue the fine points of whatever it is about human existence that grabs their attention, which may include the tragic but not so much that they lose their commitment to the proposition that being alive is all right. And they can do this until the day they die, which is all right by them.

“突变必须被认为是盲目的，”扎普夫写道，“它们运作，被抛出，与它们的环境没有任何利益相关的联系。” 正如前面提到过的，意识突变是如何产生的，这并非扎普夫所关心的，他完全专注于展示这种天赋的悲剧性影响。

这种项目在悲观主义哲学家中很典型。非悲观主义哲学家要么对意识持公正的态度，要么像尼古拉斯·汉弗莱一样，认为它是一种奇妙的禀赋。当非悲观主义哲学家甚至注意到悲观主义者的态度时，他们会拒绝它。由于世界站在他们一边，他们坚信活着是美好的，非悲观主义者并不倾向于沉思人类的存在是一场彻底的悲剧。他们只会争论人类存在的任何吸引他们注意力的细微之处，这可能包括悲剧，但不会达到让他们失去对“活着是美好的”这一命题的信念的程度。他们可以一直这样做，直到他们去世的那一天，这对他们来说也是美好的。

突变

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Established: Consciousness is not often viewed as being an instrument of tragedy in human life. But to Zapffe, consciousness would long past have proved fatal for human beings if we did not do something about it. "Why," Zapffe asked, "has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?" Zapffe's answer: "Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness."

已确定：人们并不常将意识视为人类生活中的悲剧性工具。但在扎普夫看来，如果人类不对此采取措施，意识早已对人类造成致命影响。扎普夫问道：“为什么人类早在漫长的精神错乱流行期就没有彻底灭绝？为什么只有相对较少的人因无法承受生存的重压——因认知带来的负担过重——而丧命？” 扎普夫的回答是：“大多数人通过人为限制意识的内容来拯救自己。”

点击展开/折叠英语原文

From an evolutionary viewpoint, in Zapffe's observation, consciousness was a blunder that required corrections for its effects. It was an adventitious outgrowth that made us into a race of contradictory beings—uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation. Because of consciousness, parent of all horrors, we became susceptible to thoughts that were startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never been equitably balanced by those that are collected and reassuring. Our minds now began dredging up horrors, flagrantly joyless possibilities, enough of them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of self-soiling consternation should they go untrammeled. This potentiality necessitated that certain defense mechanisms be put to use to keep us balanced on the knife-edge of vitality as a species.

从进化论的角度来看，在扎普夫的观察中，意识是一个需要修正其影响的错误。它是一种偶然的生长，使我们成为一个充满矛盾的种族——与造物界其他部分无关的奇异生物。由于意识，一切恐怖之母，我们变得容易受到令我们震惊和恐惧的想法的影响，这些想法从未被那些收集起来的、令人安心的想法公平地平衡。我们的头脑现在开始挖掘恐怖，赤裸裸的、毫无乐趣的可能性，如果它们不受控制，足以让我们在自我污秽的惊恐发作中倒在地上。这种可能性迫使我们必须使用某些防御机制，以使我们作为一个物种在生命力的刀刃上保持平衡。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution—so one theory goes—this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us. As Zapffe concluded, we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see, which, as the Norwegian philosopher saw it, along with every other pessimist, is "the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive." Whether or not one agrees that there is a "brotherhood of suffering between everything alive," we can all agree that human beings are the only organisms that can have such a conception of existence, or any conception period. That we can conceive of the phenomenon of suffering, our own as well as that of other organisms, is a property unique to us as a dangerously conscious species. We know there is suffering, and we do take action against it, which includes downplaying it by "artificially limiting the content of consciousness." Between taking action against and downplaying suffering, mainly the latter, most of us do not worry that it has overly sullied our existence.

有一种理论认为，在远古的进化时期，微弱的意识可能具有生存优势。然而，这种能力很快就变成了一种反叛的力量，对我们不利。正如扎普夫所总结的，我们需要竭尽全力抑制我们的意识，否则它会迫使我们清楚地看到我们不想看到的东西。正如这位挪威哲学家，以及其他所有悲观主义者所认为的，那就是“一切有生命之物之间的苦难兄弟情谊”。

无论我们是否同意“一切有生命之物之间存在苦难兄弟情谊”，我们都能一致认为，人类是唯一能够拥有这种存在概念，或者任何概念的生物。我们能够理解痛苦的现象，包括我们自己的和其他生物的痛苦，这是我们作为一种危险的意识物种所独有的特性。我们知道痛苦的存在，并且我们也采取行动来对抗它，其中包括通过“人为地限制意识的内容”来淡化它。在采取行动对抗痛苦和淡化痛苦之间，主要是后者，我们大多数人并不担心它已经过度玷污了我们的存在。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a "brotherhood of suffering between everything alive" would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.

作为一个事实，我们不能在个人或集体生活中将痛苦置于首位。我们必须继续前行，那些将痛苦置于首位的人将会被抛在后面。他们用他们的呜咽束缚着我们。我们有地方要去，必须相信我们能到达那里，无论那是哪里。而且，如果我们认为“所有生命之间存在痛苦的兄弟情谊”，这将使我们无法到达任何地方。我们专注于美好生活，并且正一步步朝着更好的生活迈进。

作为一个有意识的物种，我们为自己设定标记。一旦我们达到一个标记，我们就前进到下一个——就好像我们在玩一个我们认为永远不会结束的棋盘游戏，尽管事实上它会结束，不管我们喜欢与否。如果你过于意识到不喜欢这一点，那么你可能会将自己视为一个生物学悖论，既不能与自己的意识共存，也不能没有它而存在。在这种生存与非生存的状态中，你与不死族和人类木偶站在了一起。

复原 I

点击展开/折叠英语原文

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 being so, 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.

对于地球上的其他生物来说，生存相对简单。它们的生活围绕三件事展开：生存、繁殖、死亡——仅此而已。但我们知道得太多了，无法满足于仅仅生存、繁殖、死亡——仅此而已。我们知道自己活着，也知道自己会死去。我们也知道，在临近死亡之前，我们会在生活中遭受痛苦——或缓慢或快速。这就是我们作为从自然子宫中涌出的最聪明的生物所“享受”的知识。正因为如此，如果我们的生活除了生存、繁殖和死亡之外别无他物，我们会感到被亏待。我们希望还有更多的意义，或者认为有更多的意义。这就是悲剧所在：意识迫使我们陷入一种矛盾的境地，即努力对我们自身的本质——腐烂的肉块附着在正在崩解的骨头上——保持无意识。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

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. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do, per Zapffe, although in "The Last Messiah" the character after whom the essay is named does all the talking about human extinction. Elsewhere Zapffe speaks for himself on the subject.

这个星球上的非人类居民并不意识到死亡。但我们容易陷入令人震惊和可怕的想法，并且需要一些美妙的幻觉来分散注意力。对于我们来说，生活是一场我们必须自己上演的骗局，希望我们不会意识到其中的把戏，从而剥夺了我们的防御机制，让我们赤裸裸地站在那寂静、凝视的虚无面前。为了结束这种自我欺骗，解放我们的物种，摆脱在生与死之间的矛盾命令，我们必须停止繁殖。只有这样，才行，正如扎普夫所说，尽管在《最后的弥赛亚》中，那个以其名字命名的角色是唯一谈论人类灭绝的人。在其他地方，扎普夫亲自就这个话题发表了看法。

The sooner humanity dares to harmonize itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species went extinct when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarization is the doctrine that the individual “has a duty” to suffer nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of revulsion being directed at the world-order engendering of the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things; no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead toward new bland sensations and mass deaths. (“Fragments of an Interview,” Aftenposten, 1959)

点击展开/折叠英语原文

More provocative than it is astonishing, Zapffe's thought is perhaps the most elementary in the history of philosophical pessimism. As penetrable as it is cheerless, it rests on taboo commonplaces and outlawed truisms while eschewing the recondite brain-twisters of his forerunners, all of whom engaged in the kind of convoluted cerebration that for thousands of years has been philosophy's stock in trade. For example, The World as Will and Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lays out one of the most absorbingly intricate metaphysical systems ever contrived—a quasi-mystical elaboration of a "Will-to-live" as the hypostasis of reality, a mindless and untiring master of all being, a directionless force that makes everything do what it does, an imbecilic puppeteer that sustains the ruckus of our world. But Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe's principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors or practitioners of philosophy, who typically circle around the minutiae of theories and not the gross facts of our lives. If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable. Evidence: While commentators on Schopenhauer's thought have seized upon it as a philosophical system ripe for academic analysis, they do not emphasize that its ideal endpoint—the denial of the Will-to-live—is a construct for the end of human existence. But even Schopenhauer himself did not push this as aspect of his philosophy to its ideal endpoint, which has kept him in fair repute as a philosopher.

扎普夫的思想与其说是令人震惊，不如说是更具挑衅性，它或许是哲学悲观主义史上最基本的思想。它既浅显易懂又令人沮丧，它建立在禁忌的陈词滥调和被禁止的真理之上，同时避开了其前辈们深奥的脑筋急转弯。他的前辈们都从事了数千年来一直是哲学主要手段的复杂思辨。例如，德国哲学家叔本华的《作为意志和表象的世界》（两卷，1819年和1844年）阐述了有史以来最引人入胜的复杂形而上学体系之一——对“生存意志”的准神秘阐述，将其视为现实的实体，一种盲目而不倦的存在主宰，一种使万物各行其是的无向力量，一个维持我们世界喧嚣的愚蠢的傀儡师。但叔本华的“生存意志”，尽管作为一种假设似乎值得称赞，但在论证过程中过于复杂，以至于只能成为让困惑专家们陷入的又一个智力迷宫。相比之下，扎普夫的原则是非技术性的，永远不会激起教授或哲学从业者的热情，他们通常围绕着理论的细枝末节而不是我们生活的粗略事实打转。如果我们必须思考，那么应该只在圈子里思考，圈外是不可思议的。证据：虽然叔本华思想的评论家们将其视为一个适合学术分析的哲学体系，但他们并没有强调其理想的终点——对“生存意志”的否定——是人类终结的构建。但即使叔本华本人也没有将他哲学的这一方面推向其理想的终点，这使他作为一名哲学家保持了良好的声誉。

僵尸化

点击展开/折叠英语原文

As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations regarding humanity's "biological predicament." The first was that consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done, Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.

如上所述，扎普夫就人类的“生物困境”得出了两个核心结论。第一个结论是，意识已经超出了作为我们物种可承受特性的范围，为了减轻这个问题，我们必须减少我们的意识。在众多且各种各样可以做到这一点的方法中，扎普夫选择了专注于四种主要策略。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.

(1) 隔离。为了使我们能够生活而不陷入恐惧的自由落体，我们通过将生存的可怕事实归入思想的一个遥远角落来隔离它们。它们就像阁楼上那些精神失常的家庭成员，我们在一个沉默的共谋中否认他们的存在。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional "verities"—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.

(2) 锚定。 为了在混乱的汹涌波涛中稳定我们的生活，我们合谋将它们锚定在形而上和制度上的“真理”——上帝、道德、自然法则、国家、家庭——这些“真理”让我们沉醉于一种官方、真实和在床上感到安全的错觉。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets, their government's foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.

(3) 分散注意力。为了不让我们的思想反思一个充满恐怖的世界，我们用一个充满琐碎或重大垃圾的世界来分散它们的注意力。这是推动阴谋最有效的手段，它持续不断地被使用，并且只需要人们把注意力集中在球上——或者他们的电视机、他们政府的外交政策、他们的科学项目、他们的职业、他们在社会或宇宙中的位置等等。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance. Zapffe uses "The Last Messiah" to showcase how a literary-philosophical composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of true-to-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a King Lear's weeping for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing.

(4) 升华。 为了消除对健全的身体和心灵可能遭遇的恐惧，我们通过公开展示这些恐惧来升华它们。在扎普夫的意义上，升华是用来对抗人类最罕见的技巧。运用诡计和技巧，思想家和艺术家将生活中最令人沮丧和不安的方面转化为作品，以风格化和疏远的方式呈现人类最糟糕的命运，作为娱乐。换句话说，这些思想家和艺术家制造的产品，通过对痛苦的虚假模拟——例如，悲剧戏剧或哲学空谈——来提供逃避痛苦的途径。扎普夫在《最后的弥赛亚》中展示了文学哲学作品如何不能像真实生活的恐怖那样严重地扰乱其创造者或任何人，而只能提供这些恐怖的苍白表现，正如李尔王为他死去的女儿考狄利娅的哭泣不能使观众感受到真实事件的痛苦一样。

---

点击展开/折叠英语原文

By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy theories seldom pique the curiosity of "right-minded" individuals and are met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: "None of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don't leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you."

通过对上述共谋手段的警觉实践，我们或许能够避免过于勤勉地审视那些可能降临于我们的骇人灾祸。这些灾祸必须以突如其来的方式降临，因为如果我们预见到了它们，那么这场共谋便无法施展它的魔力。自然，“正派”人士很少会对阴谋论产生好奇心，即便偶有涉及，也只会遭到怀疑与否认。最好让你的意识对那些惊骇可怖的念头产生免疫，这样我们才能继续共谋着生存和繁衍，作为一种自相矛盾的存在——能够自行行走和言语的傀儡。即使做不到这一点，至少把那些惊骇可怖的想法藏在心里。请仔细聆听：“没有人愿意听到那些我们深埋心底的焦虑被直言不讳地说出口。压抑你那四处宣扬痛苦与梦魇的冲动。掩埋你的苦难，不要在世间留下痕迹。务必继续前行，否则我们将抛下你独自前行。”

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In his 1910 doctoral dissertation, published in English as Persuasion and Rhetoric (2004), the twenty-three-year-old Carlo Michelstaedter audited the tactics we use to falsify human existence as we trade who we are, or might be, for a specious view of ourselves. Like Pinocchio, Michelstaedter wanted to be a "real boy" and not the product of a puppet maker who, in turn, did not make himself but was made as he was made by mutations that, as Zapffe relays to us from evolutionary theory, "must be considered blind," a series of accidents that continually structure and restructure all that exists in the workshop of the world. To Michelstaedter, nothing in this world can be anything but a puppet. And a puppet is only a plaything, a thing of parts brought together as a simulacrum of real presence. It is nothingin itself. It is not whole and individual but exists only relative to other playthings, some of them human playthings that support one another's illusion of being real. However, by suppressing thoughts of suffering and death they give themselves away as beings of paradox—prevaricators who must hide from themselves the flagrantly joyless possibilities of their lives if they are to go on living. In Persuasion and Rhetoric, Michelstaedter pinpoints the paradox of our division from ourselves: "man 'knows,' which is why he is always two: his life and his knowing."

在1910年，年仅23岁的卡洛·米歇尔施泰德（Carlo Michelstaedter）发表了他的博士论文，后来以英文版《说服与修辞》（Persuasion and Rhetoric，2004）出版。他在论文中审视了我们为了换取一种虚假的自我认知而背弃真实的自我或潜在的自我，从而扭曲人类存在的种种策略。就像匹诺曹一样，米歇尔施泰德想要成为一个“真正的男孩”，而不是一个傀儡制造者的产物。而这个傀儡制造者本身也不是自造的，而是如扎普夫从进化论中转述给我们的那样，由“必须被认为是盲目的”突变所造就的，一系列偶然事件不断地在世界这个工场中构建和重构一切存在。对米歇尔施泰德来说，世界上的一切都只能是傀儡。而傀儡不过是玩物，是由各个部分拼凑起来的真实存在的仿制品。它本身一无所有。它不是完整的、独立的个体，而是仅仅相对于其他玩物而存在，其中一些是人类玩物，他们互相支撑着彼此是真实的幻觉。然而，通过压抑对痛苦和死亡的思考，他们暴露了自己作为悖论性存在的本质——为了继续生存，他们必须向自己掩盖生活中显而易见的无快乐的可能性。在《说服与修辞》中，米歇尔施泰德指出了我们与自身分裂的悖论：“人‘知道’，这就是为什么他总是分裂为二：他的生命和他的认知。”

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Michelstaedter's biographers and critics have speculated that his despair of humanity's ability to become disentangled from its puppet strings was, in conjunction with accidental factors, the cause of his suicide by gunshot the day after he finished his dissertation. Michelstaedter could not accept a stellar fact of human life: that none of us has control over what we are—a truth that extirpates all hope if what you want to be is invulnerably self-possessed ("persuaded") and without subjection to a life that would fit you within the limits of its unrealities ("rhetoric," a word oddly used by Michelstaedter). We are defined by our limitations; without them, we cannot suffice as functionaries in the big show of conscious existence. The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community. In the observance of Zapffe, an unleashed consciousness would alert us to the falsity of ourselves and subject us to the pain of Pinocchio. An individual's demarcations as a being, not his trespass of them, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being something special and not a freak of chance, a product of blind mutations. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities—having absolute control of what we are and not what we need to be so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death—would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves. The lesson: "Let us love our limitations, for without them no body would be left to be somebody."

米开尔斯泰特的传记作者和评论家推测，他对人类摆脱傀儡之线的能力感到绝望，这一绝望，加上偶然因素，导致了他在完成论文的次日开枪自杀。米开尔斯泰特无法接受人类生活的一个基本事实：我们都无法掌控自身为何物——这一真相会彻底摧毁所有希望，特别是当你的愿望是成为一个无懈可击、自我掌控（“确信”）且不受制于将你限定在虚幻之中的生活（他以一种奇特的方式使用“修辞”一词）时。我们的界限定义了我们自身；若无界限，我们便无法作为有意识存在的宏大表演中充当功能角色。你越是向着一种无局限条件的对人类的认知迈进，便越是远离使你成为人类社会中“人”的那些特质。按照扎普夫的观点，被释放的意识将使我们察觉自身的虚妄，并让我们承受皮诺曹式的痛苦。一个人的界限——而非他对这些界限的逾越——构成了他的身份，并维系着他对自身特殊性、非偶然性的幻觉，否则，他不过是盲目突变的产物。超越一切幻觉及其衍生的活动——完全掌控自身为何，而不是必须为何以便在最令人不快的生死现实中存续——将使我们与自我设限的存在彻底脱钩。其教训在于：“让我们热爱自己的局限，因为没有局限，就无人可成其为人。”

复原 II

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The second of Zapffe's two central determinations—that our species should belay reproducing itself—immediately brings to mind a cast of characters from theological history known as Gnostics. The Gnostic sect of the Cathari in twelfth-century France were so tenacious in believing the world to be an evil place engendered by an evil deity that its members were offered a dual ultimatum: sexual abstinence or sodomy. (A similar sect in Bulgaria, the Bogomils, became the etymological origin of the term "buggery" for their practice of this mode of erotic release.) Around the same period, the Catholic Church mandated abstinence for its clerics, a directive that did not halt them from betimes giving in to sexual quickening. The raison d'etre for this doctrine was the attainment of grace (and in legend was obligatory for those scouring hither and yon for the Holy Grail) rather than an enlightened governance of reproductive plugs and bungholes. With these exceptions, the Church did not counsel its followers to imitate its ascetic founder but sagaciously welcomed them to breed as copiously as they could.

扎普夫的两个核心主张中的第二个——我们的物种应当停止繁衍自身——立即让人想起神学史上一类被称为诺斯替派的群体。十二世纪法国的诺斯替派教团卡特里派（Cathari）坚定地相信世界是由一位邪恶的神创造的邪恶之地，以至于其成员被要求在两种选择中择其一：禁欲或鸡奸。（在大致同一时期，保加利亚的博戈米尔派（Bogomils）也持有类似信仰，并因其采取这种方式进行性释放而成为“鸡奸”（buggery）一词的词源。）与此同时，天主教会规定其神职人员必须守贞，但这一规定并未阻止他们偶尔屈服于性冲动。推行该教义的理由是为了获得神恩（在传说中，这也是那些四处寻找圣杯之人必须遵守的义务），而非出于对生殖器与肛门的开合进行开明的管控。除此之外，教会并未劝诫信徒效仿其禁欲的创始人，反而明智地鼓励他们尽可能多地繁衍后代。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In another orbit from the theologies of either Gnosticism or Catholicism, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Philipp Mainländer (born Phillip Batz) also envisaged non-coital existence as the surest path to redemption for the sin of being congregants of this world. Our extinction, however, would not be the outcome of an unnatural chastity, but would be a naturally occurring phenomenon once we had evolved far enough to apprehend our existence as so hopelessly pointless and unsatisfactory that we would no longer be subject to generative promptings. Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness would be quickened by our following Mainländer's evangelical guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity. Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainländer figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.

在不同于诺斯替主义或天主教神学的轨道上，19 世纪德国哲学家菲利普·迈因兰德（原名菲利普·巴茨）也将非交合的存在视为救赎“身为这世界的会众”之罪的最可靠途径。然而，我们的灭绝并不会是某种不自然的禁欲所导致的，而是当人类进化到足够的程度，彻底领悟到自身存在的绝对无望与无法满足时，自然而然发生的现象。在这个悖论性的进程中，促使人类走向厌世的，恰恰会是一种不断增长的幸福感。而这种幸福感的加速，则源于人类遵循梅兰德所布道的指导方针，去实现诸如普世正义与博爱之类的理想。梅兰德认为，唯有在世间获得一切可能的美好之后，我们才能真正认识到，这些美好远不及虚无来得更好。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

While the abolishment of human life would be sufficient for the average pessimist, the terminal stage of Mainländer's wishful thought was the full summoning of a "Will-to-die" that by his deduction resided in all matter across the universe. Mainländer diagrammed this brainstorm, along with others as riveting, in a treatise whose title has been translated into English as The Philosophy of Redemption (1876). Unsurprisingly, the work never set the philosophical world ablaze. Perhaps the author might have garnered greater celebrity if, like the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger in his infamous study translated as Sex and Character (1903), he had devoted himself to gripping ruminations on male and female matters rather than the redemptive disappearance of everyone regardless of gender.⁴

虽然废除人类生命对普通悲观主义者来说已经足够，但迈因兰德的幻想的终极阶段是对“死亡意志”的完全召唤，他推断这种意志存在于宇宙中的所有物质中。迈因兰德在一篇题为《救赎哲学》（1876）的论文中，绘制了这一奇思妙想以及其他同样引人入胜的想法。不出所料，这部作品从未在哲学界引起轰动。或许，如果这位作者像奥地利哲学家奥托·魏宁格在他那本臭名昭著的、译为《性与性格》（1903）的研究中那样，专注于对男性和女性问题的引人入胜的沉思，而不是对所有人（不论性别）的救赎性消失，他可能会获得更大的名气。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

As one who had a special plan for the human race, Mainländer was not a modest thinker. "We are not everyday people," he once wrote in the royal third-person, "and must pay dearly for dining at the table of the gods." To top it off, suicide ran in his family. On the day his Philosophy of Redemption was published, Mainländer killed himself, possibly in a fit of megalomania but just as possibly in surrender to the extinction that for him was so attractive and that he avouched for a most esoteric reason—Deicide.

作为一个对人类有特殊计划的人，迈因兰德并不是一个谦虚的思想家。他曾用皇室第三人称写道：“我们不是普通人，必须为在神桌上用餐付出高昂的代价。”更糟糕的是，他的家族有自杀倾向。在《救赎哲学》出版当天，迈因兰德自杀了，这可能是出于狂妄自大，但也可能是屈服于对他来说如此有吸引力的灭绝，他为一个最深奥的原因——弑神——辩护。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a God who, in the beginning, masterminded His own quietus. It seems that existence was a horror to God. Unfortunately, God was impervious to the depredations of time. This being so, His only means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide.

迈因兰德确信，他认为会在人类中涌现的“死亡意志”是上帝在精神上植入我们体内的，而这位上帝在最初策划了自己的寂灭。似乎存在对上帝来说是一种恐怖。不幸的是，上帝不受时间摧残的影响。因此，他摆脱自己的唯一手段就是通过一种神圣的自杀形式。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

God's plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang—likeinto the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer's philosophy, "God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity." Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. "God is dead," wrote Mainländer, "and His death was the life of the world." Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator's self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.

然而，只要上帝作为一个统一的实体存在于时空和物质之外，他的自杀计划就无法实现。为了消除他的统一性，以便他能够被送入虚无，他像大爆炸一样将自己粉碎成宇宙中受时间限制的碎片，也就是那些几十亿年来在这里和那里积累的所有物体和生物。在迈因兰德的哲学中，“上帝知道，他只能通过发展一个多样的真实世界，才能从超现实状态转变为虚无。”通过采用这种策略，他将自己排除在外。“上帝死了，”迈因兰德写道，“他的死是世界的生命。”一旦伟大的个体化开始，其创造者的自我毁灭的势头将持续下去，直到一切都被其自身的存在耗尽，这对人类来说意味着，他们越快认识到幸福并不像他们想象的那么好，他们就越乐于消亡。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

So: The Will-to-live that Schopenhauer argued activates the world to its torment was revised by his disciple Mainländer not only as evidence of a tortured life within living beings, but also as a cover for a clandestine will in all things to burn themselves out as hastily as possible in the fires of becoming. In this light, human progress is shown to be an ironic symptom that our downfall into extinction has been progressing nicely, because the more things change for the better, the more they progress toward a reliable end. And those who committed suicide, as did Mainländer, would only be forwarding God's blueprint for bringing an end to His Creation. Naturally, those who replaced themselves by procreation were of no help: "Death is succeeded by the absolute nothing; it is the perfect annihilation of each individual in appearance and being, supposing that by him no child has been begotten or born; for otherwise the individual would live on in that." Mainländer's argument that in the long run nonexistence is superior to existence was cobbled together from his unorthodox interpretation of Christian doctrines and from Buddhism as he understood it.

因此：叔本华认为激活世界走向痛苦的“生存意志”，被他的门徒迈因兰德修正，不仅被视为生物体内痛苦生活的证据，而且被视为万物中一种秘密意志的掩盖，这种意志旨在尽快在生成的火焰中自我燃尽。从这个角度来看，人类的进步被证明是一种讽刺性的症状，表明我们走向灭绝的衰落进展顺利，因为事物变得越好，它们就越朝着可靠的终点前进。而那些自杀的人，如迈因兰德，只会推进上帝结束其创造的蓝图。当然，那些通过生育来取代自己的人毫无帮助：“死亡之后是绝对的虚无；它是每个个体在外观和存在上的彻底消灭，假设他没有生育或生下孩子；否则，个体会在孩子身上延续下去。”迈因兰德关于从长远来看不存在优于存在的论点，是由他对基督教教义的非正统解释以及他对佛教的理解拼凑而成的。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

As the average conscious mortal knows, Christianity and Buddhism are all for leaving this world behind, with their leave-taking being for destinations unknown and impossible to conceive. For Mainländer, these destinations did not exist. His forecast was that one day our will to survive in this life or any other will be universally extinguished by a conscious will to die and stay dead, after the example of the Creator. From the standpoint of Mainländer's philosophy, Zapffe's Last Messiah would not be an unwelcome sage but a crowning force of the post-divine era. Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come to see that "the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom." Elsewhere the philosopher states, "Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell."

正如普通的有意识的凡人所知，基督教和佛教都主张离开这个世界，它们的离开是为了未知的、无法想象的目的地。对于迈因兰德来说，这些目的地并不存在。他的预言是，有一天，我们在这个或任何其他世界生存的意志，将普遍被一种有意识的死亡意志所熄灭，并保持死亡状态，效仿造物主的榜样。从迈因兰德哲学的角度来看，扎普夫的“最后的弥赛亚”不会是一个不受欢迎的智者，而是后神圣时代的巅峰力量。迈因兰德总结说，我们不会抵抗我们的终结，而是会明白“认识到生命毫无价值是人类一切智慧的精华”。这位哲学家在其他地方说，“生命是地狱，而绝对死亡甜蜜寂静的夜晚是地狱的毁灭。”

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Inhospitable to rationality as Mainländer's cosmic scenario may seem, it should nonetheless give pause to anyone who is keen to make sense of the universe. Consider this: If something like God exists, or once existed, what would He not be capable of doing, or undoing? Why should God not want to be done with Himself because, unbeknownst to us, suffering was the essence of His being? Why should He not have brought forth a universe that is one great puppet show destined by Him to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness had been established? Why should He fail to see the benefits of nonexistence, as many of His lesser beings have? Revealed scripture there may be that tells a different story. But that does not mean it was revealed by a reliable narrator. Just because He asserted it was all good does not mean he meant what He said. Perhaps He did not want to leave a bad impression by telling us He had absented Himself from the ceremonies before they had begun. Alone and immortal, nothing needed Him. Per Mainländer, though, He needed to bust out into a universe to complete His project of self-extinction, passing on His horror piecemeal, so to say, to His creation.

尽管迈因兰德的宇宙论听起来可能与理性格格不入，但它仍然应该让任何热衷于理解宇宙的人停下来思考。考虑以下几点：如果类似上帝的存在，或者曾经存在过，他有什么是不能做或不能撤销的？为什么上帝不希望结束自己的存在，因为我们不知道，痛苦是他存在的本质？为什么他不创造一个宇宙，一个由他注定要被碾碎或分散的盛大木偶戏，直到绝对虚无建立起来？为什么他看不到不存在的好处，就像他的许多低等生物一样？或许有启示的经文讲述了一个不同的故事。但这并不意味着它是可靠的叙述者所启示的。仅仅因为他断言一切都是美好的，并不意味着他言行一致。也许他不想给我们留下坏印象，告诉我们他在仪式开始之前就已经退场了。孤独而永生，没有什么需要他。然而，根据迈因兰德的说法，他需要爆发到一个宇宙中，以完成他自我灭绝的计划，将他的恐惧一点一点地传递给他的创造物。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Mainländer's first philosophy, and last, is in fact no odder than any religious or secular ethos that presupposes the worth of human life. Both are objectively insupportable and irrational. Mainländer was a pessimist, and, just as with any optimist, he needed something to support his gut feeling about being alive. No one has yet conceived an authoritative reason for why the human race should continue or discontinue its being, although some believe they have. Mainländer was sure he had an answer to what he judged to be the worthlessness and pain of existence, and none may peremptorily belie it. Ontologically, Mainländer's thought is delirious; metaphorically, it explains a good deal about human experience; practically, it may in time prove to be consistent with the idea of creation as a structure of creaking bones being eaten from within by a pestilent marrow.

迈因兰德最初也是最后的哲学，实际上并不比任何预设人类生命价值的宗教或世俗伦理更奇怪。两者在客观上都是站不住脚且不合理的。迈因兰德是个悲观主义者，就像任何乐观主义者一样，他需要一些东西来支撑他对生存的直觉。没有人能够提出一个权威的理由来解释人类应该继续还是停止存在，尽管有些人认为他们已经找到了。迈因兰德确信他对存在毫无价值和痛苦的判断有一个答案，而且没有人可以断然否定它。从本体论上讲，迈因兰德的思想是谵妄的；从比喻上讲，它很好地解释了人类的许多经验；从实践上讲，随着时间的推移，它可能会被证明与“创造是一种骨骼吱嘎作响，被有毒骨髓从内部啃食的结构”的观点相符。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

That there is redemption to be found in an ecumenical non-existence is an old idea on which Mainländer put a new face. For some it is a cherished idea, like that of a peaceful afterlife or progress toward perfection in this life. The need for such ideas comes out of the fact that existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities. If this were not so, none would need cherished ideas like an ecumenical nonexistence, a peaceful afterlife, or progress toward perfection in this life.⁵

在普世的虚无中可以找到救赎，这是一个古老的想法，迈因兰德赋予了它新的面貌。对一些人来说，这是一个珍视的想法，就像和平的来世或今生朝着完美的进步一样。这种需求源于一个事实，即存在是一种没有任何救赎品质的状态。如果不是这样，没有人会需要像普世虚无、和平来世或今生朝着完美的进步这样的珍视想法。

自我催眠

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Among the unpleasantries of human existence is the abashment we suffer when we feel our lives to be destitute of meaning with respect to who we are, what we do, and the general way we believe things to be in the universe. If one doubts that felt meanings are imperative to our developing or maintaining a state of good feeling, just lay your eyes on the staggering number of books and therapies for a market of individuals who suffer from a deficiency of meaning, either in a limited and localized variant ("I am satisfied that my life has meaning because I received an 'A' on my calculus exam") or one that is macrocosmic in scope ("I am satisfied that my life has meaning because God loves me"). Few are the readers of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) who do not feel dissatisfied with who they are, what they do, and the general way they believe things to be in the universe. Millions of copies of Peale's book and its imitations have been sold; and they are not purchased by readers well satisfied with the number or intensity of felt meanings in their lives and thus with their place on the ladder of "subjective well being," in the vernacular of positive psychology, a movement that came into its own in the early years of the twenty-first century with a spate of books about how almost anyone could lead happily meaningful lives. ⁶ Martin Seligman, the architect of positive psychology, defines his brainchild as "the science of what makes life worth living" and synopsized its principles in Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002).

人类存在的不愉快之处之一是当我们感到自己的生活在身份认同、行为方式以及对宇宙运行规律的普遍认知方面缺乏意义时所承受的羞愧。如果有人怀疑感受到的意义对于我们发展或维持良好情绪状态的重要性，只需看看为那些遭受意义缺失之苦的人群所出版的数量惊人的书籍和治疗方法，无论是局部有限的意义缺失（“我对生活有意义感到满足，因为我在微积分考试中得了A”）还是宏观范围的意义缺失（“我对生活有意义感到满足，因为上帝爱我”）。诺曼·文森特·皮尔的《积极思考的力量》（1952年）的读者中，很少有人对自己是谁、做什么以及对宇宙运行方式的普遍认知感到满意。皮尔的书及其模仿作品已售出数百万册；购买这些书的读者并非对自己生活中感受到的意义的数量或强度感到满足，也不满足于自己在”主观幸福感”阶梯上的位置——这是积极心理学的术语，积极心理学运动在二十一世纪初期通过大量关于几乎任何人都可以过上快乐有意义生活的书籍而兴起。马丁·塞利格曼，积极心理学的创始人，将其定义为”研究什么使生活值得过的科学”，并在《真实的幸福：运用新积极心理学实现持久满足的潜力》（2002年）中概述了其原则。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

There is nothing new, of course, about people searching for a happily meaningful life in a book. With the exception of sacred texts, possibly the most successful self-help manual of all time is Emile Coué's Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion (1922). Coué was an advocate of self-hypnosis, and there is little doubt that he had an authentically philanthropic desire to help others lead more salutary lives. On his lecture tours, he was greeted by celebrities and dignitaries around the world. Hordes turned out for his funeral in 1926.

当然，人们在书中寻找幸福而有意义的生活并不是什么新鲜事。除了宗教经典之外，可能最成功的自助手册就是埃米尔·库埃的《通过有意识的自我暗示实现自我掌控》（1922年）。库埃提倡自我催眠，毫无疑问，他真诚地希望帮助他人过上更健康有益的生活。在他的巡回演讲中，他受到了世界各地名人和政要的欢迎。1926年他去世时，大批民众前来送别。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Coué is best known for urging believers in his method to repeat the following sentence: "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better." How could his readers not feel that their lives had meaning, or were proceeding toward meaningfulness, by hypnotizing themselves with these words day by day? While being alive is all right for the world's general population, some of us need to get it in writing that this is so.

库埃最广为人知的是他敦促信奉其方法的信徒们重复以下句子：“日复一日，在各个方面，我都变得越来越好。”通过日复一日地用这些话语催眠自己，他的读者怎么可能不觉得他们的生活是有意义的，或者正在朝着有意义的方向前进呢？虽然活着对世界上大多数人来说都是可以的，但我们中的一些人需要用文字来确认这一点。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Every other creature in the world is insensate to meaning. But those of us on the high ground of evolution are replete with this unnatural need which any comprehensive encyclopedia of philosophy treats under the heading LIFE, THE MEANING OF. In its quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it. But though our appetite for meaning may be appeased for a time, we are deceived if we think it is ever gone for good. Years may pass during which we are unmolested by LIFE, THE MEANING OF. Some days we wake up and innocently say, "It's good to be alive." Broken down, this exclamation means that we are experiencing an acute sense of well-being. If everyone were in such elevated spirits all the time, the topic of LIFE, THE MEANING OF would never enter our minds or our philosophical reference books. But an ungrounded jubilation—or even a neutral reading on the monitor of our moods—must lapse, either intermittently or for the rest of our natural lives. Our consciousness, having snoozed awhile in the garden of incuriosity, is pricked by some thorn or other, perhaps DEATH, THE MEANING OF, or spontaneously modulates to a minor key due to the vagaries of our brain chemistry, the weather, or for causes not confirmable. Then the hunger returns for LIFE, THE MEANING OF, the emptiness must be filled again, the pursuit resumed. (There is more on meaning in the section Unpersons contained in the next chapter, "Who Goes There?")

世界上的其他生物对意义是无知觉的。但我们这些处于进化高地上的人类，充满了这种非自然的需求，任何全面的哲学百科全书都会在“生命的意义”标题下对此进行论述。在寻求意义感的过程中，人类对从未向其提出的问题给出了无数答案。但尽管我们对意义的渴望可能暂时得到满足，如果我们认为它永远不会再出现，那就是自欺欺人。我们可能会度过数年不受“生命的意义”困扰的时光。有些日子我们醒来后天真地说：“活着真好。”分解来看，这句感叹意味着我们正经历着一种强烈的幸福感。如果每个人一直都保持如此高昂的情绪，“生命的意义”这个话题就永远不会进入我们的思想或哲学参考书中。但是一种没有根据的欢乐——甚至是我们情绪监测器上的中性读数——必然会暂时或在我们余生中永久衰退。我们的意识在无好奇心的花园中小睡一会儿后，会被某种刺痛所刺激，也许是“死亡的意义”，或者由于我们的脑化学、天气或无法确认的原因而自发地调节到小调。然后，对“生命的意义”的饥渴又回来了，空虚必须再次被填满，追求必须继续。（关于意义的更多内容在下一章“谁在那里？”中的“非人”部分有所论述。）

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Perhaps we might gain some perspective on our earthly term if we stopped thinking of ourselves as beings who enact a "life." This word is loaded with connotations to which it has no right. Instead, we should substitute "existence" for "life" and forget about how well or badly we enact it. None of us "has a life" in the narrative-biographical way we think of these words. What we have are so many years of existence. It would not occur to us to say that any man or woman is in the "prime of existence." Speaking of "existence" rather than "life" unclothes the latter word of its mystique. Who would ever claim that "existence is all right, especially when you consider the alternative"?

如果我们停止将自己视为“生命”的演绎者，或许我们就能对自己的尘世期限获得一些新的视角。这个词充满了它本不应有的含义。相反，我们应该用“存在”来代替“生命”，并忘记我们演绎得好坏。我们中没有人拥有我们通常理解的叙事传记式的“生命”。我们所拥有的只是多年的存在。我们不会想到说任何男人或女人正处于“存在的黄金时期”。用“存在”而不是“生命”来表达，会剥去后者神秘的外衣。谁会声称“存在还不错，特别是当你考虑到另一种选择时”呢？

宇宙恐惧

点击展开/折叠英语原文

As heretofore noted, consciousness may have assisted our species' survival in the hard times of prehistory, but as it became ever more intense it evolved the potential to ruin everything if not securely muzzled. This is the problem: We must either outsmart consciousness or be thrown into its vortex of doleful factuality and suffer, as Zapffe termed it, a "dread of being"—not only of our own being but of being itself, the idea that the vacancy that might otherwise have obtained is occupied like a stall in a public lavatory of infinite dimensions, that there is a universe in which things like celestial bodies and human beings are roving about, that anything exists in the way it seems to exist, that we are part of all being until we stop being, if there is anything we may understand as being other than semblances or the appearance of semblances.

正如先前所述，意识或许在史前艰难岁月中助益了我们物种的生存，但随着它变得愈发强烈，它也进化出了毁灭一切的潜能，若不能将其牢牢缚住，便会酿成灾难。这就是问题所在：我们要么设法智胜意识，要么被抛入其悲戚事实性的漩涡之中，遭受扎普夫所称的“存在的恐惧”——不仅是对我们自身存在的恐惧，也是对存在本身的恐惧，即这样一种念头：原本可能为空无的境地，如今却如同一间无限尺度的公共厕所隔间般被占据；宇宙之中竟然有诸如天体与人类这样的事物游荡；任何事物竟然以它看似存在的方式存在着；而我们则是整体存在的一部分，直至我们不再存在——如果“存在”这一概念还能被理解为某种不同于表象或表象的显现的东西的话。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

On the premise that consciousness must be obfuscated so that we might go on as we have all these years, Zapffe inferred that the sensible thing would be not to go on with the paradoxical nonsense of trying to inhibit our cardinal attribute as beings, since we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of duplicity—that we are not what we are: unreality on legs. As conscious beings, we must hold back that divulgement lest it break us with a sense of being things without significance or foundation, anatomies shackled to a landscape of unintelligible horrors. In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.⁷

鉴于要维持我们至今的生存状态，意识必须被遮蔽，扎普夫推论出，明智的做法是不再继续这荒谬的努力——试图抑制我们作为存在者的核心属性。因为只有在错综复杂的幻觉、双重欺骗的戏法之下，我们才能容忍自身的存在——才能相信我们并非真实的自己，而是行走的虚无。作为有意识的存在，我们必须压抑这种揭示，否则它将以无意义与无根基的认知击垮我们，让我们成为被桎梏于一片无法理解的恐怖景观之中的解剖之物。用更直白的话来说，我们只能作为自欺者而生存，必须对自己撒谎，既欺骗自身的本质，也欺骗自身在这个世界上无法取胜的境遇。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Accepting the preceding statements as containing some truth, or at least for the sake of moving on with the present narrative, it seems that we are zealots of Zapffe's four plans for smothering consciousness: isolation ("Being alive is all right"), anchoring ("One Nation under God with Families, Morality, and Natural Birthrights for all"), distraction ("Better to kill time than kill oneself"), and sublimation ("I am writing a book titled The Conspiracy against the Human Race"). These practices make us organisms with a nimble intellect that can deceive themselves "for their own good." Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are among the wiles we use to keep ourselves from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. Without this cognitive double-dealing, we would be exposed for what we are. It would be like looking into a mirror and for a moment seeing the skull inside our skin looking back at us with its sardonic smile. And beneath the skull—only blackness, nothing. Someone is there, so we feel, and yet no one is there—the uncanny paradox, all the horror in a glimpse. A little piece of our world has been peeled back, and underneath is creaking desolation—a carnival where all the rides are moving but no patrons occupy the seats. We are missing from the world we have made for ourselves. Maybe if we could resolutely gaze wide-eyed at our lives we would come to know what we really are. But that would stop the showy attraction we are inclined to think will run forever. ⁸

接受前述陈述中包含某些真理，或者至少为了继续当前的叙述，我们似乎正是扎普夫四种压制意识计划的狂热信徒：隔离（“活着还算不错”）、锚定（“在上帝庇佑下的国度，拥有家庭、道德和所有人的天然生存权”）、分心（“消磨时间总比自杀好”）、升华（“我正在写一本书，书名叫《针对人类的阴谋》”）。这些手段使我们成为一种机智灵活、能够“为自己好”而自欺的生物。隔离、锚定、分心和升华正是我们用来避免揭穿一切幻象的诡计，而正是这些幻象维持着我们的运转。没有这种认知上的自欺欺人，我们就会暴露自己的真实面目。那就像是看着镜子，突然间看到皮肤下的头骨正对自己露出讽刺的微笑。而在头骨之下——只有黑暗，虚无。我们感到某种存在，因此我们觉得自己还在，但实际上却什么也没有——这种诡异的悖论，一瞥之间便是全部的恐怖。我们世界的一角被揭开，露出的却是嘎吱作响的荒凉——一个游乐场，所有的游乐设施都在运转，但座位上却空无一人。我们缺席于我们为自己打造的世界。也许，如果我们能够毫不退缩、睁大双眼直视自己的生活，我们就能认清自己的本质。但那样做，就会终止我们误以为会永远持续下去的华丽表演。

悲观主义 I

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Along with every other tendentious mindset, pessimism may be construed as a fluke of temperament, a shifty word that will just have to do until a better one comes along. Without the temperament that was given to them in large portion, pessimists would not see existence as basically undesirable. Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply "Of course" before returning to their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book. The conclusions to which temperament lead an individual, whether or not they are conclusions refractory to those of world society, are simply not subject to analysis.

与所有其他带有倾向性的思维方式一样，悲观主义可以被理解为一种气质上的偶然现象，一个权宜之词，在更好的词出现之前，它只能暂时充当这个角色。如果没有大量赋予他们的这种气质，悲观主义者就不会认为存在本质上是令人不快的。乐观主义者可能对存在的基本可取性抱有短暂的怀疑，但悲观主义者从不怀疑存在本质上是令人不快的。如果你在他们进入狂喜状态（悲观主义者也会有这种状态）时打断他们，并询问存在是否本质上是令人不快的，他们会在回到狂喜状态之前回答“当然”。他们为什么会这样回答，这是一个谜。气质引导个体得出的结论，无论这些结论是否与社会主流的结论相悖，都根本无法进行分析。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Composed of the same dross as all mortals, the pessimist cleaves to whatever seems to validate his thoughts and emotions. Scarce among us are those who not only want to think they are right, but also expect others to affirm their least notion as unassailable. Pessimists are no exception. But they are few and do not show up on the radar of our race. Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and everything else that puts both average and above-average citizens in the limelight, pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause.

悲观主义者和所有凡人一样，都是由同样的糟粕构成的，他们紧抓住任何似乎能证实其思想和情感的东西。我们当中很少有人不仅想认为自己是对的，还期望别人肯定他们最微不足道的想法是无可辩驳的。悲观主义者也不例外。但他们人数很少，不会出现在我们种族的雷达上。他们对宗教、国家、家庭以及其他一切将普通和高于普通公民置于聚光灯下的事物都免疫，他们在历史和媒体中都是旁观者。由于不相信神或鬼，不受全面妄想的驱使，他们永远不可能安放炸弹、策划革命或为某个事业流血。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Identical with religions that ask of their believers more than they can possibly make good on, pessimism is a set of ideals that none can follow to the letter. Those who indict a pessimist of either pathology or intellectual recalcitrance are only faking their competence to explain what cannot be explained: the mystery of why individuals are the way they are. To some extent, however, why some individuals are the way they are is not a full-fledged mystery. There are traits that run in families—legacies lurking in the genes of one generation that may profit or impair those of another. Philosophical pessimism has been called a maladaptation by those who are concerned with such things. This call seems indisputably correct. The possibility must be considered, then, that there is a genetic marker for philosophical pessimism that nature has all but deselected from our race so that we may keep on living as we have all these years. Allowing for the theory that pessimism is weakly hereditary, and is getting weaker all the time because it is maladaptive, the genes that make up the fiber of ordinary folk may someday celebrate an everlasting triumph over those of the congenitally pessimistic, ridding nature of all worry that its protocol of survival and reproduction for its most conscious species will be challenged—unless Zapffe is right and consciousness itself is maladaptive, making philosophical pessimism the correct call despite its unpopularity among those who think, or say they think, that being alive is all right. But psychobiographers do not often take what is adaptive or maladaptive for our species into account when writing of a chosen member of the questionably dying breed of pessimists. To them, their subject's temperament has a twofold inception: (1) life stories of tribulation, even though the pessimistic caste has no sorrows exclusive to it; (2) intractable wrongheadedness, a charge that pessimists could turn against optimists if the argumentum ad populum were not the world's favorite fallacy.

与那些要求信徒做出超出他们能力范围的宗教相似，悲观主义是一套没有人能够完全遵循的理想。那些指责悲观主义者患有病态或者固执己见的人，只是在假装他们有能力解释无法解释的事情：个体为何会成为现在这样的奥秘。然而，在某种程度上，为什么某些个体会成为现在这样并非完全是个奥秘。有些特质在家族中延续——潜伏在一代人基因中的遗产可能会使下一代受益或受损。哲学悲观主义被关注此类问题的人称为一种不良适应。这种说法似乎无可争议地正确。因此，必须考虑这种可能性：存在一种哲学悲观主义的基因标记，自然已经几乎从我们的种族中淘汰了这种标记，以便我们能够继续像过去这些年一样生活下去。假设悲观主义在遗传上的影响较弱，并且由于它是不良适应而变得越来越弱，那么构成普通人纤维的基因可能有朝一日会永远战胜先天悲观主义者的基因，消除自然界对其最有意识物种的生存和繁殖协议会受到挑战的所有忧虑——除非扎普夫是对的，意识本身就是不良适应，使得哲学悲观主义尽管不受那些认为或自称认为活着没问题的人欢迎，却是正确的判断。但是心理传记作家在写作他们所选择的可疑濒临灭绝的悲观主义者时，通常不会考虑什么对我们的物种是适应性或不适应性的。对他们来说，研究对象的气质有两重起源：(1)艰难困苦的生活故事，尽管悲观主义阶层并没有专属于它的悲伤；(2)顽固的错误观念，这一指控如果不是诉诸众人的谬误是世界上最受欢迎的谬误的话，悲观主义者也可以对乐观主义者提出。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including "everything happens for a reason," "the show must go on," "accept the things you cannot change," and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up. But pessimists cannot give themselves over to this program, and its catchwords stick in their throats. To them, the Creation is objectionable and useless on principle—the worst possible dispatch of bad news. It seems so bad, so wrong, that, should such authority be unwisely placed into their hands, they would make it a prosecutable malfeasance to produce a being who might turn out to be a pessimist.

我们这个物种中的大多数人似乎能够经历任何创伤，而不会对他们那些习以为常的口号进行深入反思，比如“凡事皆有因果”“演出必须继续”“接受你无法改变的事物”，以及任何其他让人振作起来的格言。然而，悲观主义者无法顺从这一套说辞，这些口号对他们而言如鲠在喉。对他们来说，创造本身就是原则上不可接受且毫无意义的——最糟糕的坏消息以最坏的方式传达。他们认为这一切糟糕至极、错误至极，以至于如果他们轻率地被赋予这样的权力，他们会将生育一个可能成为悲观主义者的生命视为一种应受起诉的渎职行为。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Disenfranchised by nature, pessimists feel that they have been impressed into this world by the reproductive liberty of positive thinkers who are ever-thoughtful of the future. At whatever point in time one is situated, the future always looks better than the present, just as the present looks better than the past. No one today would write, as did the British essayist Thomas De Quincey in the early nineteenth century: "A quarter of man's misery is toothache." Knowing what we know of the progress toward the alleviation of human misery throughout history, who would damn their children to have a piteous toothache in the early nineteenth century, or in times before it, back to the days when Homo sapiens with toothaches scrounged to feed themselves and shivered in the cold? To the regret of pessimists, our primitive ancestors could not see that theirs was not a time in which to produce children.

被自然排除在外，悲观主义者感到他们被那些永远着眼于未来的乐观思考者的生殖自由强行带入这个世界。无论一个人处于何种时间点，未来总是看起来比现在更好，正如现在看起来比过去更好。如今没有人会像十九世纪早期的英国散文家托马斯·德·昆西（Thomas De Quincey）那样写道：“人类四分之一的痛苦是牙痛。”考虑到我们对历史上减轻人类痛苦的进步的了解，谁会诅咒自己的孩子在十九世纪早期或更早的时期遭受可怜的牙痛，回到那些患有牙痛的智人艰难觅食并在寒冷中颤抖的日子？令悲观主义者遗憾的是，我们的原始祖先无法看到，他们所处的时代并不适合生育孩子。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

So at what time was it that people knew enough to say, "This is the time in which to produce children''? When did we think that enough progress had been made toward the alleviation of human misery that children could be produced without our being torn by a crisis of conscience? The easy years of the Pharaohs and Western antiquity? The lazy days of the Dark Ages? The palmy decades of the Industrial Revolution as well as the other industry-driven periods that followed? The breakthrough era in which advancements in dentistry allayed humanity of one-quarter of its misery?

那么，究竟是在什么时候，人们才有足够的理由说：“现在是生育子女的合适时机”？我们是在何时认为，人类在缓解苦难方面已取得足够进展，以至于可以毫无良心上的挣扎去生育子女？是在法老统治下的安逸岁月，还是西方古代的黄金时代？是在黑暗时代的悠闲时光，还是工业革命及其后续各个产业驱动时期的繁荣年代？是在那个突破性的时代——牙科的进步消除了人类四分之一的痛苦？

点击展开/折叠英语原文

But few or none have ever had a crisis of conscience about producing children, because all children have been born at the best possible time in human history, or at least the one in which the most progress toward the alleviation of human misery has been made, which is always the time in which we live and have lived. While we have always looked back on previous times and thought that their progress toward the alleviation of human misery was not enough for us to want to live then, we do not know any better than the earliest Homo sapiens about what progress toward the alleviation of human misery will be made in the future, reasonably presuming that such progress will be made. And even though we may speculate about that progress, we feel no resentment about not being able to take advantage of it, or not many of us do. Nor will those of the future resent not living in the world of their future because even greater progress toward the alleviation of human misery will by then have been made in medicine, social conditions, political arrangements, and other areas that are almost universally regarded as domains in which human life could be better.

但几乎没有人因生育子女而产生良心危机，因为所有的孩子都在整个人类历史上最好的时代出生，或者至少是在缓解人类痛苦方面取得最多进展的时代，而这个时代总是我们所生活和曾经生活的时代。我们总是回顾过去，认为当时在缓解人类痛苦方面的进展不足以让我们愿意生活在那个时代，但我们对未来在这方面会取得多少进展并不比最早的智人知道得更多，尽管合理地推测，这种进展将会发生。即使我们可能对这种进展进行推测，我们也不会因此而对自己无法受益感到怨恨，或者至少大多数人不会。未来的人们也不会因为未能生活在他们未来的世界而感到怨恨，因为到那时，在医学、社会状况、政治制度以及其他几乎普遍被认为可以改善人类生活的领域中，缓解人类痛苦的进展将会更进一步。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Will there ever be an end of the line in our progress toward the alleviation of human misery when people can honestly say, "This is without doubt the time produce children"? And will that really be the time? No one would say, or even want to think that theirs is a time in which people will look back on them from the future and thank their stars that they did not live in such a barbaric age that had made so little progress toward the alleviation of human misery and still produced children. As if anyone ever cared or will ever care, this is what the pessimist would say: "There has never been and never will be a time in which to produce children. Now will forever be a bad time for doing that." Moreover, the pessimist would advise each of us not to look too far into the future or we will see the reproachful faces of the unborn looking back at us from the radiant mist of their nonexistence.

我们的进步是否会在缓解人类痛苦的道路上最终抵达终点，以至于人们能够诚实地说：“毫无疑问，现在是生育子女的合适时机”？而那真的是合适的时机吗？没有人会愿意认为，或者哪怕去想，他们所处的时代会被未来的人回顾，并庆幸自己没有生活在这样一个野蛮的年代——一个在缓解人类痛苦方面进展如此之少，却依然生育子女的时代。正如悲观主义者所言：“从来没有，也永远不会有一个适合生育的时代。‘现在’永远是个糟糕的时机。”此外，悲观主义者还会劝诫我们，不要把目光投向过远的未来，否则我们会在那光辉弥漫的虚无之中，看到未出生者责备的目光回望着我们。

悲观主义 II

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In his lengthy study Pessimism (1877), James Sully wrote that "a just and correct estimate of life is to be looked for" in "views . . . which lean neither to the favourable nor the unfavourable pole." By this claim, Sully erred in his otherwise able dissection of his subject. People are either pessimists or optimists. They forcefully "lean" one way or the other, and there is no common ground between them. For pessimists, life is something that should not be, which means that what they believe should be is the absence of life, nothing, non—being, the emptiness of the uncreated. Anyone who speaks up for life as something that irrefutably should be-that we would not be better off unborn, extinct, or forever lazing in nonexistence—is an optimist. It is all or nothing; one is in or one is out, abstractly speaking. Practically speaking, we have been a race of optimists since the nascency of human consciousness and lean like mad toward the favorable pole.

在其冗长的研究著作《悲观主义》（1877）中，詹姆斯·萨利（James Sully）写道：“对生命的公正而正确的评价，应当在既不偏向乐观亦不偏向悲观的观点中寻找。”然而，在这一观点上，萨利在其对悲观主义这一主题的深刻剖析中犯了错误。人要么是悲观主义者，要么是乐观主义者。他们都会坚定地“倾向”某一方，而在两者之间并无共同立场。对悲观主义者而言，生命是一种不应存在的东西，这意味着他们所认为应当存在的，是生命的缺席、虚无、非存在、未被创造的空无。任何主张生命理应存在、认为我们未曾出生、灭绝或永远沉寂于虚无中并不会更好的人，都是乐观主义者。这是非此即彼的选择；从抽象意义上说，人要么在其中，要么在其外。而从实际情况来看，自人类意识诞生之初，我们便一直是一种乐观主义的种族，并且疯狂地倾向于乐观的一极。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

More stylish in his examination of pessimism than Sully is the American novelist and part-time philosopher Edgar Saltus, whose Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885) and </>The Anatomy of Negation</i> (1886) were written for those who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence. In Saltus's estimation, a "just and correct view of human life" would justly and correctly determine human life as that which should not be.

在对悲观主义的探讨上，美国小说家兼兼职哲学家埃德加·萨尔特斯比萨利更具风格。他的《幻灭哲学》（1885年）和《否定的解剖》（1886年）是为那些将充满悲观、虚无或失败主义色彩的哲学与文学作品视为生命中不可或缺之物的读者而写的。在萨尔特斯看来，对人类生命的“公正而正确的看法”应当公正而正确地断定，人类生命本不该存在。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Controverting the absolutist standards of pessimism and optimism as outlined above are "heroic" pessimists, or rather heroic "pessimists." These are self-styled pessimists who take into consideration Sully's unfavorable pole but are not committed to its entailment that life is something that should not be. In his Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1913), the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno speaks of consciousness as a disease bred by a conflict between the rational and the irrational. The rational is identified with the conclusions of consciousness, primarily that we will all die. The irrational represents all that is vital in humanity, including a universal desire for immortality in either a physical or nonphysical state. The coexistence of the rational and the irrational turns the human experience into a wrangle of contradictions to which we can bow our heads in resignation or defy as heroes of futility. Unamuno's penchant was for the heroic course, with the implied precondition that one has the physical and psychological spunk for the fight. In line with Unamuno, Joshua Foa Dienstag, author of Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006), is also a proselytizer for a healthy, heroic pessimism (quotes implied) that faces up to much of the dispiriting lowdown on life, all radically pessimistic visions being cropped out of the picture, and marches on toward a future believed to be personally and politically workable. Also siding with this never-say-die group is William R. Brashear, whose The Desolation of Reality (1995) concludes with a format for redemption, however partial and imperfect, by holding tight to what he calls "tragic humanism," which recognizes human life's "ostensible insignificance, but also the necessity of proceeding as if this were not so, . . . willfully nourishing and sustaining the underlying illusions of value and order." How we nourish and sustain illusions of value and order in our lives is explained in Zapffe's "The Last Messiah." How we might nourish and sustain at will what we know to be illusions without a covenant of ignominious pretense among us is not explained by Brashear and has never been explained by anyone else who espouses this façon de vivre. Not in the same class of pessimism as the anti-natalist Zapffe—Unamuno, Dienstag, and Brashear meet existence more than halfway, safely joined in solidarity with both ordinary and sophisticated folk, who take their lumps like grown-ups and by doing so retain their status with the status quo. Attuned as they may be to the pessimist's attitude that lifeis something which should not be, they do not approve of it. But Unamuno, Dienstag, and Brashear's solution to the pessimist's rejection of life puts us in the same paradoxical bind that Zapffe sees in human existence, that is, living with the pretense that being alive is all right. The only difference is that Unamuno, Dienstag, and Brashear knowingly accede to a pretense that ordinary folk shirk knowing, at least as a general rule, because even average mortals are sometimes forced to admit this pretense—they just do not linger over it long enough to make it a philosophical point of pride and sing their own praises for doing so.

反对上述悲观主义和乐观主义的绝对标准的是“英雄式”悲观主义者，或者说是英雄式的“悲观主义者”。这些自称悲观主义者的人接受萨利所指的不利极端，但并不认同其必然结论，即生命是不应存在的。在《人类与民族的悲剧情感》（1913年）一书中，西班牙作家米格尔·德·乌纳穆诺（Miguel de Unamuno）将意识描述为一种疾病，源于理性与非理性的冲突。理性被归结为意识的结论，最主要的是我们终将死去这一事实；非理性则代表人类一切具有生命力的东西，包括对肉体或非肉体形态的永生的普遍渴望。理性与非理性的共存使人类的体验变成一场充满矛盾的争斗，我们可以选择低头认命，或者作为徒劳的英雄进行抗争。乌纳穆诺倾向于后者，并认为前提是个体需具备足够的生理和心理勇气。与乌纳穆诺观点一致的还有约书亚·福阿·丁斯塔格（Joshua Foa Dienstag），他在《悲观主义：哲学、伦理、精神》（2006）一书中倡导一种健康的、英雄式的悲观主义（加引号），这种态度直面生活中的许多令人沮丧的现实，同时又将所有极端的悲观主义视角排除在外，并朝着一个在个人和政治层面上都可行的未来前进。另一位持相同立场的是威廉·R·布拉舍尔（William R. Brashear），他在《现实的荒凉》（1995）一书的结论部分提出了一种尽管不完美但仍可行的救赎方式，即坚守他所谓的“悲剧人文主义”（tragic humanism）。这种立场承认人类生命的“表面上的微不足道”，但也认为必须像这一点并不存在一样继续前行，“有意识地滋养并维持价值与秩序的基本幻象。” 我们如何在生活中滋养并维持价值与秩序的幻象，扎普夫在《最后的弥赛亚》中给出了答案。然而，如何在不与他人订立可耻的欺瞒契约的情况下，主动滋养并维持我们明知是虚假的东西，布拉舍尔没有解释，也没有任何其他支持这种生活方式的人作出解释。与反出生主义者扎普夫不属同一类别的悲观主义者——乌纳穆诺、丁斯塔格和布拉舍尔——对存在采取了较为妥协的态度，他们与普通人及思想精英站在一起，像成熟的大人那样接受生活的打击，并以此保有自己在社会现状中的地位。他们或许对悲观主义者认为生命不应存在的态度有所共鸣，但并不认可这一观点。然而，乌纳穆诺、丁斯塔格和布拉舍尔对悲观主义者拒绝生命的回应，使我们陷入扎普夫所指出的同样的悖论，即在生存的同时假装活着是可以接受的。唯一的区别在于，乌纳穆诺、丁斯塔格和布拉舍尔是有意识地接受这种假象，而普通人则通常避免去意识到这一点——尽管即便是普通人，有时也会被迫承认这一点，只不过他们不会长时间地深究，更不会将其视为一种哲学上的荣耀，并为此自我颂扬。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

A philosophical cohort of Unamuno, Dienstag, and Brashear is the French existentialist writer Albert Camus. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus represents the unattainable goal of the title figure as an apologetic for going on with life rather than ending it. As he insists in his discussion of this gruesome parable, "We must imagine Sisyphus as happy" as he rolls his boulder to the top of mountain from which it always tumbles down again and again and again to his despair. The credo of the Church Father Tertullian, "I believe because it is absurd," might justly be placed in the context of Camus's belief that being alive is all right, or all right enough, though it may be absurd. Indeed, the connection has not been overlooked. Caught between the irrationality of the Carthaginian and the intellectuality of the Frenchman, Zapffe's proposal that we put out the light of the human race extends to us an antidote for our existential infirmities that is infinitely more satisfying than that of either Tertullian or his avatar Camus, the latter of whom meditated on suicide as a philosophical issue for the individual yet did not entertain the advantages of an all-out attrition of the species. By not doing so, one might conclude that Camus was only being practical. In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent. Like Unamuno, Dienstag, and Brashear, Camus believed we can assume a view of life that can content us with the tragedy, nightmare, and meaninglessness of human existence. Camus may have been able to assume this view of life before his life ended in a vehicular misadventure, but he must have been jesting to pose it as a possibility or a duty for the world.

法国存在主义作家阿尔贝·加缪可被视为乌纳穆诺、丁斯塔格和布拉希尔的哲学同侪。在他的随笔《西西弗神话》（1942）中，加缪将标题人物那永不可得的目标视作一种为继续活下去而非自我终结的辩护。他在这则残酷寓言的论述中坚持道：“我们必须想象西西弗是幸福的”，尽管他不断地将巨石推向山顶，而巨石又总是一次又一次地滚落，使他陷入无尽的绝望。教父特尔图良的信条“我信仰，因为这荒谬”或许可以放在加缪的思想背景中——他认为活着尚且可以接受，或者说足够可以接受，即便它是荒谬的。事实上，这一联系早已被人注意到。迦太基人的非理性与法国人的理性之间，扎普夫提出的方案——熄灭人类的火光——为我们的生存困境提供了一种远比特尔图良及其化身加缪更令人满意的解毒剂。加缪思考自杀这一哲学问题时，着眼于个体，却未曾考虑过整体性的人类消逝所可能带来的益处。从某种意义上讲，他或许只是现实主义者。但最终，他那“我们必须想象西西弗是幸福的”这句断言，既不现实，也充满了污秽。与乌纳穆诺、丁斯塔格和布拉希尔一样，加缪相信人可以采取一种人生观，使自己对人类生存的悲剧、噩梦和虚无感到满足。或许在他因车祸去世之前，他还能维持这一人生观，但他竟然将其视为一个可能性，甚至是一种对世界的义务，这未免近乎戏谑。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

It would be a sign of callowness to bemoan the fact that pessimistic writers do not rate and may be reprehended in both good conscience and good company. Some critics of the pessimist often think they have his back to the wall when they blithely jeer, "If that is how this fellow feels, he should either kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite." That the pessimist should kill himself in order to live up to his ideas may be counterattacked as betraying such a crass intellect that it does not deserve a response. Yet it is not much of a chore to produce one. Simply because someone has reached the conclusion that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born does not mean that by force of logic or sincerity he must kill himself. It only means he has concluded that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born. Others may disagree on this point as it pleases them, but they must accept that if they believe themselves to have a stronger case than the pessimist, then they are mistaken.

要哀叹悲观主义作家不受重视，并且可能在良知和体面的陪伴下遭到谴责，这只能算是稚嫩的表现。一些批评悲观主义者的人常自以为将其逼入绝境，轻率地嘲讽道：“如果这个家伙有这样的感受，他要么该自杀，要么就该被斥为伪君子。” 认为悲观主义者应当自杀以兑现其理念，这种看法之粗鄙，简直不值得回应。然而，回应它也并非难事。仅仅因为某人得出结论，认为这个世界上的痛苦已经多到足以使任何人都宁可从未出生，并不意味着他出于逻辑或真诚就必须自杀。这只意味着他得出了这样的结论——世界上的痛苦足以使任何人都宁可从未出生。其他人可以随意对此持不同意见，但他们必须承认，如果他们自认为比悲观主义者的立场更有力，那他们就错了。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Naturally, there are pessimists who do kill themselves, but nothing obliges them to kill themselves or live with the mark of the hypocrite on their brow. Voluntary death might seem a thoroughly negative course of action, but it is not as simple as that. Every negation is adulterated or stealthily launched by an affirmative spirit. An unequivocal "no" cannot be uttered or acted upon. Lucifer's last words in heaven may have been "Non serviam," but none has served the Almighty so dutifully, since His sideshow in the clouds would never draw any customers if it were not for the main attraction of the devil's hell on earth. Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life's rattle and hum. Without a "yes" in our hearts, nothing would be done. And to be done with our existence en masse would be the most ambitious affirmation of all.

当然，确实有悲观主义者选择自杀，但他们既无义务自杀，也无需背负伪善者的污名而苟活。自愿的死亡或许看似一种彻底的否定之举，但事实并非如此简单。任何否定都掺杂着某种肯定，或隐秘地由肯定的精神所驱动。一个毫不含糊的“否”既无法被言说，也无法被践行。路西法在天堂留下的最后一句话或许是“Non serviam”（我不服侍），但没有人比他更尽职地侍奉全能者，因为如果没有魔鬼在地狱的主场吸引顾客，他在云端的副业就永远不会有任何生意。唯有紧闭于自身的木僵者与昏迷者，方能体面地坚持退出生命的喧嚣与骚动。倘若我们心中毫无“是”的成分，便不会有任何行动。而彻底了结我们自身的存在，将会是最雄心勃勃的肯定之举。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Most people think that vitality is betokened only by such phenomena as people in their eighties who hike mountain trails or nations that build empires. This way of thinking is simply naive, but it keeps up our morale because we like to imagine we will be able to hike mountain trails when we are in our eighties or live as citizens of a nation that has built an empire. And so the denunciations of critics who say the pessimist should kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite make every kind of sense in a world of card-carrying or crypto optimists. Once this is understood, the pessimist can spare himself from suffering more than he need at the hands of "normal people," a confederation of upstanding creatures who in concert keep the conspiracy going. This is not to say that such individuals do not suffer so much and in such a way that they sometimes kill themselves, possibly even more per capita than do pessimists, or that because they kill themselves they are hypocrites for ever having said that anyone is better off for having been born. It is only to say that when normal individuals kill themselves, even after having said that anyone is better off for having been born, they are disqualified as normal individuals, because normal individuals do not kill themselves but until their dying day think that being alive is all right and that happiness will stand out in the existence of life's newcomers, who, it is always assumed, will be as normal as they are.

大多数人认为，生命力只能通过某些现象来体现，比如八十多岁仍能徒步登山的人，或者建立帝国的国家。这种想法实在是天真，但它能维持我们的士气，因为我们喜欢想象自己在八十岁时仍能徒步登山，或者能够作为一个建立了帝国的国家的公民而生活。因此，那些批评者的指责——说悲观主义者要么应该自杀，要么应当被斥为伪君子——在一个充斥着公开或隐秘乐观主义者的世界里是完全合乎逻辑的。一旦理解了这一点，悲观主义者就可以避免在“正常人”手中承受不必要的痛苦。这些“正常人”是一群正派的生物，他们齐心协力维持着这场阴谋。这并不是说，这些个体不会经历极大的痛苦，以至于他们有时会自杀，甚至可能比悲观主义者的自杀率更高；也不是说，因为他们自杀了，就意味着他们曾经宣称“任何人出生都是幸运的”是虚伪的。这只是说，当所谓的“正常人”自杀时，即便他们曾宣称“任何人出生都是幸运的”，他们也随之被取消了“正常人”的资格，因为“正常人”不会自杀——他们直到生命的最后一天，都认为活着还算不错，并且坚信幸福会在未来生命的新来者身上显现，而这些新来者理所当然地会像他们一样正常。

失误

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist agrees—a blunder of blind nature, according to Zapffe, that has taken humankind down a black hole of logic. To make it through this life, we must make believe that we are not what we are—contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. To correct this blunder, we should desist from procreating. What could be more judicious or more urgent, existentially speaking, than our self-administered oblivion? At the very least, we might give some regard to this theory of the blunder as a "thought-experiment." All civilizations become defunct. All species die out. There is even an expiration date on the universe itself. Human beings would certainly not be the first phenomenon to go belly up. But we could be the first to precipitate our own passing, abbreviating it before the bodies really started to stack up. Could we know to their most fine-grained details the lives of all who came before us, would we bless them for the care they took to keep the race blundering along? Could we exhume them alive, would we shake their bony, undead hands and promise to pass on the favor of living to future generations? Surely that is what they would want to hear, or at least that is what we want to think they would want to hear. And just as surely that is what we would want to hear from our descendents living in far posterity, strangers though they would be as they shook our bony, undead hands.

意识是一种存在上的累赘，所有悲观主义者都同意这一点——在扎普夫看来，它是盲目自然的一个失误，使人类陷入了逻辑的黑洞。为了在这个世界上存活下去，我们必须自欺欺人，不去承认自身的本质——我们是自相矛盾的存在，我们的延续只会加深我们的苦难，因为我们是一个扭曲悖论的体现。要纠正这一失误，我们应当停止繁衍。从存在论的角度来看，还有什么比主动选择湮灭更明智、更迫切的呢？至少，我们可以将这一“失误理论”当作一个思想实验来考虑。所有文明终将衰亡，所有物种终将灭绝，甚至宇宙本身也有一个终结的时刻。人类当然不会是第一个消亡的现象，但我们或许可以成为第一个主动促成自身灭绝的物种，在尸骸真正堆积如山之前提前终止这一进程。如果我们能知晓所有先人曾经历过的生命，以最细微的程度去体会他们的生存境遇，我们会因他们维系这个错误种族的努力而心存感激吗？如果我们能让他们死而复生，我们会握着他们枯槁的亡灵之手，并承诺将生命的馈赠继续传递给未来的世代吗？毫无疑问，这是他们愿意听到的话，或者至少，这是我们愿意相信他们愿意听到的话。同样地，我们也会希望远在后世的子孙——尽管他们对我们来说不过是陌生人——在握住我们枯槁的亡灵之手时，对我们说出同样的话。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one?

自然以失误推进；这就是它的方式。我们的方式亦然。因此，如果我们因将意识视为一个失误而犯了错，又何必大惊小怪？我们自行退出这个星球依然会是一场壮举，一项辉煌得足以令太阳黯然失色的成就。我们有什么可失去的？我们的离去不会带来任何邪恶，而我们所经历的诸多邪恶也将随之灭绝。那么，为什么要拖延这唯一值得称颂的壮举——也是唯一的壮举？

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Of course, phenomena other than consciousness have been thought to be blunders, beginning with life itself. For example, in a novel titled At the Mountains of Madness (1936), the American writer H. P. Lovecraft has one of his characters mention a "primal myth" about "Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake." Schopenhauer, once he had drafted his own mythology that everything in the universe is energized by a Will-to-live, shifted to a commonsense pessimism to represent life as a congeries of excruciations.

当然，除了意识之外，其他现象也曾被认为是错误的，首先便是生命本身。例如，在美国作家H·P·洛夫克拉夫特（H. P. Lovecraft）1936年的小说《疯狂山脉》中，有一位角色提到了一个“原始神话”，其中讲述了“伟大的旧日支配者从群星降临，并将地球生命当作一个玩笑或错误创造出来。” 叔本华在构建了自己的神话——认为宇宙万物都由生存意志所驱动——之后，又转向一种常识性的悲观主义，将生命描述为一堆痛苦的集合体。

[L]ife presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment, but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body and mind. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for some thing that is of no value. But when we consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive. (The World as Will and Representation, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp)

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Schopenhauer is here straightforward in limning his awareness that, for human beings, existence is a state of demonic mania, with the Will-to-live as the possessing spirit of "ephemeral and tormented individuals." Elsewhere in his works, he denominates consciousness as "an accident of life." A blunder. A mistake. Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?

叔本华在这里直截了当地描绘了他对人类生存状态的认知：那是一种魔性的狂热，而生存意志则是附身于“短暂而受折磨的个体”之上的恶灵。在他作品的其他地方，他将意识称为“生命的偶然产物”——一个失误，一个错误。我们的欢笑与泪水背后，真的有什么意义，还是仅仅是进化上的一次失误？

类比

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Schopenhauer's is a great pessimism, not least because it reveals a signature motif of the pessimistic imagination. As indicated, Schopenhauer's insights are yoked to a philosophical superstructure centered on the Will, or the Will-to-live—a blind, deaf, and dumb force that rouses human beings to their detriment. While Schopenhauer's system of thought is as impossible to swallow as that of any other systematic philosopher, no intelligent person can fail to see that every living thing behaves exactly in conformity with his philosophy in its liberal articulation. Wound up like toys by some force—call it Will, élan vital, anima mundi, physiological or psychological processes, nature, or whatever—organisms go on running as they are bidden until they run down. In pessimistic philosophies only the force is real, not the things activated by it. They are only puppets, and if they have consciousness may mistakenly believe they are self-winding persons who are making a go of it on their own.

叔本华代表了悲观主义的一次伟大实践，尤其因为它揭示了悲观主义想象的标志性主题。如前所述，叔本华的洞见与一个以“意志”或“生存意志”为中心的哲学上层建筑紧密相连——这是一种盲目、无听觉且无言语的力量，它使人类陷入不利境地。虽然叔本华的思想体系与任何其他系统哲学家一样难以被人完全接受，但任何有智慧的人都能看出每个生物的行为都完全符合他哲学的广泛阐述。生物体被某种力量——无论称之为意志、生命力、世界灵魂、生理或心理过程、自然，还是其他什么——像发条玩具一样上紧发条，按照命令运行直到停止。在悲观主义哲学中，只有力量是真实的，而非被它激活的事物。它们只是傀儡，如果它们拥有意识，可能错误地认为自己是能够自行运转的人，认为自己正在独立地生活。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Here, then, is the signature motif of the pessimistic imagination that Schopenhauer made discernible: Behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world. For Zapffe, the evolutionary mutation of consciousness tugged us into tragedy. For Michelstaedter, individuals can exist only as unrealities that are made as they are made and that cannot make themselves otherwise because their hands are forced by the "god" of philopsychia (self-love) to accept positive illusions about themselves or not accept themselves at all. For Mainländer, a Will-to-die, not Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, plays the occult master pulling our strings, making us dance in fitful motions like marionettes caught in a turbulent wake left by the passing of a self-murdered god. For Bahnsen, a purposeless force breathes a black life into everything and feasts upon it part by part, regurgitating itself into itself, ever-renewing the throbbing forms of its repast. For all others who suspect that something is amiss in the lifeblood of being, something they cannot verbalize, there are the malformed shades of suffering and death that chase them into the false light of contenting lies.

这就是叔本华所揭示的悲观想象的标志性主题：在生命的幕后，潜藏着某种有害的东西，使我们的世界沦为一场噩梦。对扎普夫而言，进化所带来的意识突变将我们拖入了悲剧之中。对米歇尔施泰德而言，个体只能作为虚幻的存在，他们被造就成现在的模样，而无法使自己变得不同，因为“自恋之神”（philopsychia）强迫他们要么接受关于自身的积极幻觉，要么根本无法接受自己。对迈因兰德而言，操控我们命运的隐秘主宰不是叔本华的“生意志”，而是“死意志”，它牵动我们的线索，让我们如同傀儡一般，在一位自我毁灭的神明所留下的湍流中抽搐起舞。对巴恩森而言，一股无目的的力量在万物之中吹入黑暗的生机，并逐步吞噬它们，最终将自身呕吐回自身，永无止境地再生其颤动的盛宴。至于所有其他隐隐察觉到存在本身的血脉中有某种不对劲之处，却无法言明的人，他们被痛苦与死亡的扭曲幽影追逐，逃向那虚假的慰藉之光。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

By analogy with that pernicious something the pessimist senses behind the scenes of life are the baleful agencies that govern the world of supernatural horror fiction. Actually, it would be more proper to speak of the many worlds of supernatural horror, since they vary from author to author as much as the renderings of the human fiasco vary from pessimist to pessimist. Even within the writings of a single author, the source of something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world switches about, the common link being a state of affairs that overturns our conception of reality for the worse.

就像悲观主义者在生活幕后的某处感受到的那种恶意存在一样，在超自然恐怖小说的世界中，也有着那些支配一切的凶险力量。事实上，更准确地说，应该提及超自然恐怖的“诸多世界”，因为它们因作者而异，正如不同的悲观主义者对人类惨败的诠释各不相同。即便在同一位作者的作品中，那种使我们的世界沦为噩梦的邪恶源头也会不断变化，其共同点在于——现实被颠覆，并朝着更糟的方向发展。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In "The Willows," for instance, the twentieth-century British writer Algernon Blackwood suggests that an inimical force abides within nature. What this enormity might be is known to the characters of the story only by mysterious signs and sounds that unnerve them as they make their way in a small boat down the Danube and camp for the night on an island overgrown with willows, which become the symbolic focus of a region where nature shows its most menacing aspect. The narrator tries to explain what it is about the willows that seems particularly threatening to him, as distinct from the more immediate perils of the severe weather conditions that have developed along the Danube.

在《柳树林》（The Willows）一书中，二十世纪英国作家阿尔杰农·布莱克伍德（Algernon Blackwood）暗示，自然中潜藏着一种怀有敌意的力量。这种巨大存在究竟为何，故事中的人物只能通过神秘的迹象和声音察觉到，这些未知的征兆让他们感到不安。当他们乘一艘小船沿多瑙河顺流而下，并在一座长满柳树的岛上扎营过夜时，柳树成为了象征性的焦点，代表了大自然最具威胁性的一面。叙述者试图解释，在严峻的天气条件日益恶化的情况下，究竟是什么让这些柳树显得格外可怖，并使他感受到一种不同于直接环境威胁的恐惧。

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous: many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering water touched the deep sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with the power of the driving wind—this shouting hurricane that might almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with it too—a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The mystery of the pernicious something that the willows represent is never resolved. However, at the end of the story the two travelers see a man turning over and over in the rushing river. And he bears "their mark" in the form of indentations they had seen before in the sands of the island—funnels that formed and grew in size throughout the night the men had camped on the island. Whatever power that was not "altogether friendly to us" had procured its victim and satisfied itself. The men had been saved at the price of another's death. That which makes a nightmare of our world had revealed itself for a time and withdrawn once again behind the scenes of life.

神秘莫测的柳树所代表的某种邪恶力量从未被揭示。然而，在故事结尾，两位旅行者看到一个男人在湍急的河流中翻滚。这个人身上带有“他们的标记”，即他们之前在岛上沙地中看到的凹痕——这些漏斗状凹痕在两人在岛上露营的那个夜晚不断形成并扩大。那个“对我们并不完全友好”的力量已经获得了牺牲品并满足了自己。两名旅行者得以幸存，但代价是另一个人的死亡。使我们的世界宛如梦魇的存在曾短暂地显露出来，随后又退回到生命的幕后。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Such is the motif of supernatural horror: Something terrible in its being comes forward and makes its claim as a shareholder in our reality, or what we think is our reality and ours alone. It may be an emissary from the grave or an esoteric monstrosity, as in the ghost stories of M. R. James. It may be the offspring of a scientific experiment with unintended consequences, as in Arthur Machen' s ''The Great God Pan," or the hitherto unheard-of beings in the same author's "The White People." It may be a hideous token of another dimension revealed only in a mythic tome, as in Robert W. Chambers' "The Yellow Sign." Or it may be a world unto itself of pure morbidity, one suffused with a profound sense of a doom without a name—Edgar Allan Poe's world.

这就是超自然恐怖的主题：某种存在本身即为可怖之物，它现身而出，宣称自己是我们现实世界的股东，或者至少是我们以为仅属于我们的现实的一部分。它可能是来自墓穴的使者，或是神秘莫测的怪异存在，如M.R.詹姆斯（M. R. James）的鬼故事所描绘的那样。它可能是一场科学实验的意外产物，如阿瑟·马琴（Arthur Machen）的《伟大的潘神》(The Great God Pan)，或者是他在《白衣人》(The White People)中描绘的前所未闻的生物。它可能是某本神秘典籍中揭示的另一维度的恐怖象征，如罗伯特·W·钱伯斯（Robert W. Chambers）的《黄色印记》(The Yellow Sign)。又或者，它可能是一个纯然病态的世界，一个充满无名厄运的世界——那便是埃德加·爱伦·坡（Edgar Allan Poe）的世界。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Reflected in the works of many supernatural writers, the signature motif Schopenhauer made discernible in pessimism was most consistently promulgated by Lovecraft, a paragon among literary figures who have thought the unthinkable, or at least thought what most mortals do not want to think. In conceiving Azathoth, that "nuclear chaos" which "bubbles at the center of all infinity," Lovecraft might well have been thinking of Schopenhauer's Will. As instantiated in Lovecraft's stories, the pernicious something that makes a nightmare of our world is individuated into linguistically teratological entities from beyond or outside of our universe. Like ghosts or the undead, their very existence spooks us as a violation of what should and should not be, suggesting unknown modes of being and uncanny creations which epitomize supernatural horror.

在众多超自然文学作家的作品中，叔本华在悲观主义中所揭示的标志性主题最为一致地由洛夫克拉夫特加以宣扬。洛夫克拉夫特是一位卓越的文学人物，他思考着不可思议之事，或者至少思考着大多数凡人不愿意面对的事物。在构思阿撒托斯（Azathoth）——那个“在无尽的宇宙中心沸腾的核混沌”时，洛夫克拉夫特很可能想到的是叔本华的“意志”。在洛夫克拉夫特的故事中，这种使我们的世界变成噩梦的邪恶之物，被具体化为语言上近乎怪物般的存在，它们来自我们宇宙之外或之外。像幽灵或不死者一样，它们的存在本身就让人惊惧，因为它们违背了应有的秩序，暗示着未知的存在方式和令人不安的创造物，这些正是超自然恐怖的极致体现。

生命原则

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Philosophically, Lovecraft was a dyed-in-the-wool scientific materialist. Nevertheless, he is a felicitous example of someone who knew ravishments that in another context would qualify as "spiritual" or "religious." Yet from childhood he adhered to a vigorous atheism. In his lectures collected as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James proposes that a sense of "ontological wonder" and "cosmic emotion" argues for the legitimacy of religious faith. In both his creative writings and his letters, Lovecraft's expression of the feelings James describes form an exception to the philosopher-psychologist's argument.⁹ For Lovecraft, cosmic wonder and a "tranquility tinged with terror," as the British political theorist and aesthetician Edmund Burke referred to such experiences, were basic to his interest in remaining alive. Sublimating his awareness of the universe as nothingness in motion, he also mitigated the boredom that plagued his life by distracting himself with reveries of nothingness "surprise, discovery, strangeness, and the impingement of the cosmic, lawless, and mystical upon the prosaic sphere of the known" (Lovecraft's emphasis).

从哲学上讲，洛夫克拉夫特是一位根深蒂固的科学唯物主义者。然而，他的经历却恰好表明，在另一种语境下可能被归类为“精神”或“宗教”的狂喜体验对他而言并不陌生。尽管如此，他自童年起便坚定地持有无神论信仰。在威廉·詹姆斯（William James）于1902年发表的演讲集《宗教经验之种种》（The Varieties of Religious Experience）中，这位哲学家兼心理学家提出，“本体惊异”（ontological wonder）和“宇宙情感”（cosmic emotion）可以为宗教信仰的合理性提供论证。然而，在洛夫克拉夫特的创作与书信中，他对詹姆斯所描述之情感的表达却构成了对这一观点的例外。对洛夫克拉夫特而言，宇宙的惊异感以及“带着恐惧的宁静”——正如英国政治理论家及美学家埃德蒙·伯克（Edmund Burke）对类似体验的描述——是他保持活下去的基本动力。他将自己对宇宙之本质的理解——即“无的运动”——加以升华，并通过沉浸于“虚无之梦境”来缓解时常困扰他的无聊情绪。在这些梦境中，他体验到“惊奇、发现、陌异感，以及宇宙的、无法律可循的、神秘莫测的力量冲击着已知世界的平凡领域”（洛夫克拉夫特原文强调）。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

From the other side of an emotional and spiritual chasm, the French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote of his a sense of being "engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread" (Pensées, 1670). Pascal's is not an unnatural reaction for those phobic to infinite spaces that know nothing of them. "Kenophobia" is the fear of such vast spaces and voids. Perhaps kenophilia should be coined to describe the "ontological wonder" and "cosmic emotion" Lovecraft felt when he contemplated the outer rim of the unknown.

从情感和精神的深渊另一侧，法国科学家兼基督教哲学家布莱兹·帕斯卡（Blaise Pascal）曾写道，他感到自己“被无垠无知的空间吞没，而这些空间对我一无所知；我感到恐惧。这些无限空间的永恒沉默令我战栗”（《思想录》，1670）。对于那些对无限空间感到畏惧、认为其对自己毫无知觉的人来说，帕斯卡的反应并非不合常理。这种对广阔空间和虚无的恐惧被称为“虚空恐惧症”（Kenophobia）。或许，我们应该创造“虚空嗜好症”（Kenophilia）一词，以描述洛夫克拉夫特在凝视未知世界的边缘时所体验到的“本体惊奇”与“宇宙情感”。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

A complex and contradictory figure, as illustrated above, Lovecraft often seemed to be on the fence when it came to his convictions about the value of existence. In a letter to Edwin Baird, the first editor of Weird Tales, he penned some remarks that express a univocal stand by a pessimist who is estranged from all solace known to ordinary folk. These merit quotation at length.

洛夫克拉夫特是一个复杂而充满矛盾的人物，正如上文所述，他在关于存在价值的信念上似乎常常持观望态度。然而，在写给《怪奇故事》（Weird Tales）首任编辑埃德温·贝尔德的信中，他写下了一些言辞，展现了一位悲观主义者的坚定立场——一个与普通人所知的任何慰藉都格格不入的悲观者。这些话值得长篇引用。

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and "different" as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace . . . Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example—a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who wishes to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs . . . and leads armies of them in the manner of the Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth; Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror-for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

畅销作家们并不理解，也显然无法理解这样一个事实：真正的艺术只能通过彻底摒弃正常性和惯例，完全摆脱任何通常或先入为主的观点来实现。尽管他们可能认为自己的作品怪诞而“与众不同”，但实际上，这种怪诞仅仅停留在表面；从本质上来说，他们仍然在重复那些陈旧的传统价值观、动机和视角。善与恶、目的论的错觉、甜腻的感伤主义、以人为中心的心理观——这些都是最常见的陈词滥调，无论如何包装，依旧充斥着那种永恒且无可避免的庸俗…… 谁曾经写过一篇小说，从这样的视角出发——认为人类是宇宙的污点，理应被根除？举个例子——我认识的一个年轻人最近告诉我，他打算写一个故事，讲述一位科学家为了征服地球，培育并过度发展细菌，让它们像埃及的瘟疫一样成为他的军队。我告诉他，尽管这个主题有一定的潜力，但赋予这个科学家一个普通的动机，却让整个构思变得平庸至极。想要征服世界并不稀奇，亚历山大、拿破仑、威廉二世都曾有过这种野心。相反，我告诉我的朋友，他应该塑造这样一个人物——一个对生命本身怀有病态的、狂热的、战栗般憎恶的人，他的愿望是将地球上所有生物，无论是动物还是植物，包括他自己在内，全都彻底消灭。这样的构思才算勉强有些原创性。但归根结底，原创性取决于作者本人。如果没有对人类社会的完全心理抽离，如果没有一面魔幻的棱镜，使主题和风格都充满那种因病态幻象而产生的怪诞和令人不安的扭曲，那么就无法写出真正有力量的怪奇故事。只有愤世嫉俗者才能创造恐怖文学——因为每一部真正的恐怖杰作背后，都必须有一种驱使它前进的恶魔般的力量，它憎恨人类及其幻想，并渴望将它们撕碎、嘲弄。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The salient interest of this letter is that it shows Lovecraft as a perfectionist of cosmic disillusion. But relatively dissociated from Lovecraft the cosmic disillusionist was another Lovecraft, one who reveled in protectionist illusions that could not be more alien to the propensities of his alter ego. In this latter identity, he took refuge from what he specified as his cynicism (also "cosmic pessimism") in a world of distractions and anchorings he had amassed over the years. Among them was his sentimental immersion in the past. Especially dear to him was the traditional way of life emblemized by architectural remnants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. Old towns with winding streets, houses with semicircular fanlight doors, and other postcard images of Yankeedom conjured up for Lovecraft a picture of bygone times as an aesthetic phenomenon that often tailed into a Blood-and-Soil mysticism. A proud Novanglian, Lovecraft grew up and lived among abundant reminders of a past he idealized. His attachment to historic New England counterbalanced his infatuation with the far reaches of time and space, beside which, as he well knew, the outdated culture-streams that so enraptured him were local, fleeting, and accidental forms without immanent virtue. For Lovecraft, both quaint small-paned windows and a bracing alienage from human mores had charms that he heartily honored in his works as well as his life, even during his darkest days of cynicism and pessimism.

这封信的显著之处在于，它展现了洛夫克拉夫特作为宇宙幻灭主义者的完美主义倾向。然而，与这位沉溺于宇宙幻灭的洛夫克拉夫特相对立的，是另一个洛夫克拉夫特——他沉溺于一种保护性的幻想之中，这种幻想与他的另一面格格不入。在这个身份下，他从自己所称的愤世嫉俗（也即“宇宙悲观主义”）中寻求慰藉，转而投身于多年积累的各种消遣与精神寄托之中。其中之一，便是他对过去的感伤沉迷。尤其令他珍视的，是新英格兰十七、十八世纪的传统生活方式，这种生活方式被那些象征性的建筑遗迹所承载。在他心中，古老的小镇、蜿蜒的街道、带有半圆形扇形窗的门，以及其他描绘“新英格兰文化”的明信片式画面，共同勾勒出一幅逝去年代的美学景象，而这种美学往往又带有某种“血与土”式的神秘主义情结。作为一个自豪的新英格兰人，洛夫克拉夫特生于并长期生活在充满历史印记的环境中，而他所理想化的正是这样的过去。他对新英格兰历史的依恋，恰好平衡了他对无尽时空的迷恋，而在那无尽时空的尺度下，他深知自己所热爱的过时文化潮流不过是偶然的、转瞬即逝的地方性存在，并不具备内在价值。对洛夫克拉夫特而言，无论是古雅的小窗，还是对人类习俗的彻底疏离，都具有独特的魅力——他不仅在作品中表达了这一点，也在自己的生活中深深拥抱，即便在他最为愤世嫉俗、悲观绝望的日子里，也未曾改变。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Like most of us, Lovecraft distracted himself with fabricated values, and he did so until death was bestowed upon him by a combination of intestinal cancer and Bright's disease. Concerned as a fiction writer with smashing to bits humanity's grand illusion about its place in the universe, Lovecraft welcomed any illusions he could accept in good faith, as did Zapffe and Schopenhauer, who also pursued gratifying diversions that took their minds off what the latter philosopher called the "vanity and suffering of life." During his later years, Lovecraft did seem to mellow considerably as he walked the plank into nonexistence. In letters to his friends and colleagues he attested that he had left his cynicism and pessimism behind and had become an "indifferentist," meaning one who sees no malice in the physical universe but only a flux of particles. To the benefit of supernatural horror aficionados, Lovecraft's indifferentist philosophy did not require him to discontinue writing about pernicious things that compromise the sanity of anyone who learns of their existence. Lovecraft was exhilarated by the idea of something pernicious that made a nightmare of our world, whether it was indifferent to us or quite partial to our devastation. In his indifferentism, Lovecraft did not seem to have shambled far from the cognitive-style of the individual who advised his friend to write about "a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself." If only there were a man who could bring to fruition such a wish. Then the earth could finally be "cleared off," as Wilbur Whately wrote in his diary in "The Dunwich Horror."

像我们大多数人一样，洛夫克拉夫特用虚构的价值观来分散自己的注意力，并一直这样做，直到肠癌和布赖特氏病的双重折磨将死亡降临于他。作为一名小说家，他致力于粉碎人类关于自身在宇宙中地位的宏大幻觉，但他仍然乐于接受任何他能真诚信奉的幻觉。正如扎普费和叔本华一样，他也追求那些能让自己摆脱后者所称的“生命的虚无与痛苦”的令人欣慰的消遣。在生命的晚年，洛夫克拉夫特似乎确实温和了许多，逐渐走向虚无。在写给朋友和同僚的信件中，他声称自己已经摒弃了愤世嫉俗和悲观主义，转而成为一名“冷漠主义者”——也就是一个不认为物理宇宙中存在恶意，而只是看到粒子流动的人。然而，这种冷漠主义哲学并未妨碍洛夫克拉夫特继续写作那些危害人类理智的可怖事物，这无疑令超自然恐怖文学的爱好者们受益匪浅。无论那些可怖事物对我们漠不关心，还是专注于毁灭我们，洛夫克拉夫特都为此感到兴奋。他的冷漠主义并未让他偏离某种特殊的认知方式——毕竟，正是他建议友人去写“一个对生命本身怀有病态的、狂热的、战栗的憎恶之人，他希望将地球上的一切生物——无论是动物还是植物，包括他自己在内——彻底铲除。” 要是有这么一个人，真的能实现这一愿望就好了。那样的话，正如《敦威治恐怖》（The Dunwich Horror）中的威尔伯·魏特利在日记中所写的那样，这颗地球就能最终被“清理干净”了。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Why anyone should be drawn to the writings of Lovecraft and his confederates is usually expounded as a natural aspect of the human temper, a healthy yearning of our souls to exceed the bounds of ordinary existence. In his lecture "On Morbidity," part of a series of brief expositions on supernatural horror, an academician known only as Professor Nobody (an ostentatiously cocky pseudonym) submits his analysis of an atypical individual who does not partake in the wholesome motivation of the majority with respect to the horrific and extraordinary, "a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself." While there is indeed something invigorating in supernatural horror for this individual, it is a negative rather than a positive activation that pleasures him by its antipathy to all that lives. The floor is now ceded to the professor.

为什么会有人被洛夫克拉夫特及其同侪的作品所吸引，这通常被解释为人类性情的一种自然表现，即我们灵魂对超越平凡存在的健康渴望。在其关于超自然恐怖的一系列简短讲座中，一位仅以“无名教授”自称（一个极为张扬、自负的笔名）的学者，在《论病态》（On Morbidity）一讲中分析了一个异乎寻常的个体——此人并不分享大多数人对于恐怖与非凡事物的正向动机，而是“一个对生命原则本身怀有病态、狂热、战栗般憎恶的人。” 对于这类人而言，超自然恐怖的确能激起某种情感，但这种激活是消极的，而非积极的。他从中获得的愉悦，来自对一切生者的对立和敌意。现在，让我们将话语权交给这位教授。

Isolation, mental strain, emotional exertions, visionary infatuations, well-executed fevers, repudiations of well-being: only a few of the many exercises practiced by that specimen we shall call the “morbid man.” And our subject of supernatural horror is a vital part of his program. Retreating from a world of heath and sanity, or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. It is in that corner that he builds a world of ruins out the battered stones of his imagination, a rancid world rife with things smelling of the crypt.

But this world is not all a romantic sanctum for the dark in spirit. So let us condemn it for a moment, this deep-end of dejection. Though there is no name for what might be called the morbid man’s “sin,” it still seems in violation of some deeply ingrained morality. The morbid man does not appear to be doing himself or others any good And while we all know that melancholic moping and lugubrious ruminating are quite palatable as side-dishes of existence, he has turned them into a house specialty1 Ultimately, however, he may meet this charge of wrongdoing with a simple “What of it?”

Now, such a response assumes morbidity to be a certain class of vice, one to be pursued without apology, and one whose advantages and disadvantages must be enjoyed or endured outside the law. But as a sower of vice, if only in his own soul, the morbid man incurs the following censure: that he is a symptom or a cause of decay within both individual and collective spheres of being. And decay, like every other process of becoming, hurts everybody. “Good!” shouts the morbid man. “No good!” counters the crowd Both positions betray dubious origins: one in resentment, the other in fear. And when the moral debate on this issue eventually reaches an impasse or becomes too tangled for truth, then psychological polemics can begin. Later on we will find other angles from which this problem may be attacked, enough to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives.

Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his time on earth to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, wan moonlight, and pasty specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.

复原III

点击展开/折叠英语原文

When people are asked to respond to the statement "I am happy—true or false," the word "true" is spoken more often than "false," overwhelmingly so. If there is some loss of face in confessing that one is not happy, this does not mean that those who profess happiness as their dominant humor are lying through their teeth. People want to be happy. They believe they should be happy. And if some philosopher says they can never be happy because their consciousness has ensured their unhappiness, that philosopher will not be part of the dialogue, especially if he blathers about discontinuing our species by ceasing to bear children who can also never be happy even though, to extend the point, they can also never be unhappy given their inexperience of existing. Ask Zapffe.

当人们被要求回答“我很幸福——对还是错”这一陈述时，“对”这个词被说出的频率远远高于“错”。如果承认自己不幸福会导致某种失面子，这并不意味着那些声称幸福是自己主要情绪的人在撒谎。人们希望自己幸福，他们相信自己应该幸福。而如果有哲学家说，人类永远不可能幸福，因为他们的意识注定了他们的不幸，那么这个哲学家将不会被纳入对话之中，尤其是当他喋喋不休地谈论通过不再生育来终止我们的物种，以防止那些孩子也无法幸福——尽管从另一个角度来看，他们同样也不会感到不幸，因为他们从未体验过存在。去问扎普夫吧。

So you ask whether I would choose to be unborn? One must be born in order to choose, and the choice involves destruction. But ask my brother in that chair over there. Indeed, it is an empty one; my brother did not get so far. Yet ask him, as he is traveling like the wind below the sky, crashing against the beach, scenting in the grass, reveling in his strength as he pursues his living food Do you think he is bereaved by his incapacity to fulfill his fate on the waiting list of the Oslo Housing and Savings Society? And have you ever missed him? Look around in a crowded afternoon tram and reflect whether you would allow a lottery to select one of the exhausted toilers as the one whom you put into this world. They pay no attention as one person gets off and two get on. The tram keeps rolling along. (“Fragments of an Interview,” Aftenposten, 1959)

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For optimists, this fact plays no part in their existential computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic. Whether a pessimist urges us to live "heroically" with a knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy to observe. But this problem can be solved only by establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that would enable us in principle to say which is more desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When they do argue for the desirability of human life it is only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

在没有出生的情况下，不会有任何人存在，因此也就不存在被剥夺幸福的可能性，这一点显而易见。对于乐观主义者来说，这一事实在他们的生存计算中毫无影响。而对于悲观主义者而言，这却是一个公理。无论一个悲观主义者是敦促我们带着刀插在肚子里“英雄般”地活下去，还是直接谴责生命不值得活下去，这些都无关紧要。重要的是，他毫不掩饰地承认痛苦是一个重大问题，而哲学必须对此加以审视。然而，这个问题只能通过建立痛苦与幸福之间的某种不平衡来解决，以使我们原则上能够判断哪种状态更可取——存在还是不存在。尽管至今还没有人能够提供一个无懈可击的论证来证明人类生命的不值得，但悲观主义者仍然孜孜不倦地尝试着去证明这一点。而乐观主义者并没有类似的使命。当他们试图论证人类生命的可取性时，也只是对悲观主义者的论点做出的反应，尽管从未有人能够无懈可击地证明生命的可取性。乐观主义一直以来都是人类文化中不言自明的政策——它源于我们作为动物的生存与繁衍本能，而不是一种经过系统阐述的思想体系。它是我们血液中的默认状态，既无法被我们的理性有效质疑，也无法因我们的痛苦而受到严重动摇。这也许可以解释，任何时候，食人族的数量都比哲学悲观主义者要多。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matterhow much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is noamount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness evenobtain for human beings except as a misconception—that cancompensate us for life's hurt. As a worst-case example, a pessimist might refer to the hurt caused by some natural or humanmade cataclysm. To adduce a hedonic counterpart to the horrors that attach to such cataclysms would require a degree ofingenuity from an optimist, but it could be done. And the reason it could be done, the reason for the eternal stalemate between optimists and pessimists, is that no possible formula canbe established to measure proportions and types of hurt andhappiness in the world. If such a formula could be established,then either pessimists or optimists would have to give in totheir adversaries.

对于乐观主义者来说，无论遭受多少痛苦，人的生命永远不需要被证明其合理性，因为他们总能对自己说，一切都会好起来的。对于悲观主义者来说，无论多少幸福——如果幸福这种东西真的能在人类身上实现，而不仅仅是一种误解——都无法弥补生命中的痛苦。以最糟糕的情况为例，悲观主义者可能会提到某种自然或人为灾难所带来的痛苦。要为这些灾难所附带的恐怖找出一个享乐主义的对应物，对乐观主义者来说可能需要极大的巧思，但这仍然是可能的。而之所以可能，之所以乐观主义者与悲观主义者之间永远无法达成共识，是因为根本无法建立一种公式来衡量世界上的痛苦与幸福的比例和类型。如果这样的公式能够建立起来，那么悲观主义者或乐观主义者中的一方就不得不向对方让步。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

One formula to establish the imbalance at issue has beentendered by the South African philosopher of ethics David Benatar. In his Better Never to Have Been: The Hann of Coming intoExistence (2006), Benatar cogently propounds that, because someamount of suffering is inevitable for all who are born, while theabsence of happiness does not deprive those who would havebeen born but were not, the scales are tipped in favor of notbearing children. Therefore, propagators violate any conceivablesystem of morality and ethics because they are guilty of doingharm. To Benatar, the extent of the harm that always occursmatters not. Once harm has been ensured by the begetting of abundle of joy, a line has been crossed from moral-ethical behavior to immoral-unethical behavior. This violation of morality and ethics holds for Benatar in all instances of childbirth.

南非伦理哲学家大卫·贝纳塔（David Benatar）提出了一个公式来阐述这个不平衡问题。在他2006年的著作《最好永远不曾存在：降生之害》中，贝纳塔令人信服地提出，由于所有出生的人都不可避免地要承受一定程度的痛苦，而幸福的缺失并不会剥夺那些本可能出生但未出生的人的什么，所以天平倾向于不生育子女。因此，生育者违反了任何可想象的道德和伦理体系，因为他们犯下了造成伤害的罪过。对贝纳塔而言，伤害的程度并不重要。一旦通过生育一个“欢乐的捆绑包”¹确保了伤害的发生，就意味着已经跨越了道德-伦理行为的界限，进入了不道德-不伦理的行为。这种对道德与伦理的违反，在贝纳塔看来，适用于所有生育的情况。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

People like Benatar who argue that the world's "ideal popu lation size is zero" are written off as being unhealthy of mind. Further accentuating this presumed unhealthiness is Benatar's argument that giving birth is not only harmful but should be seen as so egregiously harmful that there is no happiness that can counterbalance it. As harms go in this world, there are none worse than the harm that entails all others. Ask William James for a perspective on one of those great harms—to which he gives the name "melancholy"—and how it is generally passed over in the lives of healthy adults.

像贝纳塔这样主张“理想的人口规模是零”的人，往往被视为心智不健康。进一步加深这种被认为不健康的观点的是，贝纳塔的论点认为，生育不仅是有害的，而且应被视为一种极端的伤害，以至于没有任何幸福可以抵消它。在这个世界上，若论伤害之严重，没有比导致所有其他伤害的伤害更甚者。若想了解其中一种巨大伤害的视角，可以询问威廉·詹姆斯，他将其称为“忧郁”，并指出在健康的成年人生活中，它通常被忽视。

The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)

点击展开/折叠英语原文

James himself suffered a brush with melancholy, but he made a full recovery and began to think positively, or at least equivocally, about being alive, answering yes to the question "Is life worth living?" However, by force of his honesty of intellect he knew this opinion needed to be defended as much as any other opinion. No logic can support it. Indeed, logic defeats all feeling that life is worth living, which, James says, only a self-willed belief in a higher order of existence can instill. Then every suffering will seem worthwhile in the way that the vivisection of a living dog, to use James's example, would seem worthwhile to the animal if only it could comprehend the goodly ends its pain serves for the higher order of human existence. In his lecture "Is Life worth Living," James opined that human beings, unlike dogs, can in fact imagine a higher order of existence than theirs, one that may legitimate the worst adversities of mortal life. James was a rare philosopher in that he put no faith in logic. And he was doubtless wise to adopt that stance, since the fortunes of those who attempt to defend their opinions with logic are not enviable.

詹姆斯本人曾与忧郁擦肩而过，但他最终完全恢复了，并开始以积极的态度看待生命，或者至少是以一种含糊其辞的方式。当被问及“人生值得活下去吗？”时，他回答“是的”。然而，凭借其知识上的诚实，他深知这一观点与任何其他观点一样需要被捍卫。没有任何逻辑可以支持它。事实上，逻辑会摧毁所有关于生命值得活下去的感觉。詹姆斯指出，只有一种对更高存在秩序的自愿信仰才能赋予人这种感觉。这样一来，每一种苦难都会显得有价值，就像詹姆斯举例所说的，如果一只活体解剖中的狗能够理解其痛苦所服务的人类更高存在秩序的崇高目标，那么它的痛苦也将显得值得。在他的演讲《人生值得活下去吗？》中，詹姆斯认为，人类不同于狗，他们实际上能够想象比自身更高的存在秩序，而这种秩序或许能够使凡人生涯中的最惨痛遭遇变得正当。詹姆斯是少有的不信任逻辑的哲学家。而他毫无疑问是明智的，因为那些试图用逻辑捍卫自己观点的人，结局往往并不可取。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Naturally, for those whose opinion is that it is "better to be" than "better never to have been," Bena tar's logic for the latter proposition is rejected as faulty, the more so in that its conclusions are not supported by a consensus of ordinary folk. Logic notwithstanding, Benatar's moral-ethical censure of reproduction does prove that humanity's continuance is not universally accepted as a good in itself, even in a super-modern world. It also reminds us that no one can make a case that every individual's birth, or any individual's birth, is a good in itself. And that is the case that needs to be made, at least morally and ethically speaking as well as logically speaking. (For more on this, see the section Pressurized in the chapter "The Cult of Grinning Martyrs.") If most people believe that being alive is all right—the alternative to this belief having no appeal for them—the rectitude of causing new people to become alive is just a matter of opinion.

对于那些认为“存在更好”而非“从未存在更好”的人来说，贝纳塔支持后者的逻辑被视为有缺陷的，尤其是因为他的结论并不被普通大众的共识所支持。抛开逻辑不谈，贝纳塔对生育的道德伦理谴责确实证明了人类的延续并非被普遍接受为本身就是好事，即使在超现代世界中也是如此。这也提醒我们，没有人能够证明每个人的出生，或任何个人的出生，本身就是好事。而这正是需要被证明的观点，至少从道德伦理和逻辑角度来说是如此。（关于这一点的更多讨论，请参见“咧嘴殉道者崇拜”章节中的“受压”部分。）如果大多数人认为活着是好的——这种信念的替代方案对他们没有吸引力——那么导致新人出生的正确性就仅仅成为一个观点问题。

压抑

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In "The Last Messiah," Zapffe wrote: "The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life." The quartet of formulas that Zapffe picked out as individual and social mechanisms of repression are probably the most trite he could have chosen, which may have been deliberate on his part because they are so familiar to us and so visible in our day-to-day existence. These mechanisms are related to the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious repression, although they are also perilously accessible to the conscious mind. And when they are accessed, no one can concede them with impunity. Not overweight persons or tobacco users, who must play dumb when they are scarfing down a cupcake or smoking a cigarette. Not soldiers fighting a war, who must not be aware they are risking their lives and limbs for a rationalization—their country, their god, etc. Not anyone who is going to suffer and die (that is, everyone), who will not voluntarily confess to playing the same old games for as long as possible rather than be haunted by thoughts of mortality and the unpleasantness that may precede it. And definitely not artists, who keep their aesthetic distance for fear of being hamstrung by the realities they "bring to life."

在《最后的弥赛亚》中，扎普夫写道：“我们今天眼前看到的整个生命，从最深处到最外层，都充斥着压抑机制，无论是社会的还是个体的；这些机制可以追溯到日常生活中最陈腐的公式。”扎普夫挑选的这四个公式，作为个体和社会压抑机制，可能是他能选择的最平凡的，这可能是他故意为之，因为它们对我们来说如此熟悉，在我们日常的存在中如此显眼。这些机制与精神分析理论中的无意识压抑相关，尽管它们也危险地接近于意识层面。而当它们被意识到时，没有人能够轻松承认它们。比如肥胖的人或烟民，在大快朵颐享受蛋糕或抽烟时，必须装作什么都不知道；再比如在战争中作战的士兵，他们不能意识到自己是在为某种合理化（比如国家、神明等）冒着生命和身体的风险；或者任何即将受苦与死亡的人（也就是每一个人），他们不会主动承认自己在玩同样的游戏，尽可能地活得久一些，而不去被死亡和可能随之而来的痛苦困扰。尤其是艺术家，他们为了不被现实束缚，总是保持着审美上的距离，生怕被他们“赋予生命”的现实所拖累。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Once the facts that repressional mechanisms hide are accessed, they must be excised from our memory—or new repressional mechanisms must replace the old—so that we may continue to be protected by our cocoon of lies. If this is not done, we will be whimpering misereres morning, noon, and night instead of chanting that day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better. Although we may sometimes admit to the guileful means we use to keep us doing what we do, this is only a higher level of self-deception and paradox, not evidence that we stand on the heights of some meta-reality where we are really real. We say we know what is in store for us in this life, and we do. But we do not know. We cannot if we are to survive and multiply.

一旦我们接触到被压抑机制隐藏的事实，这些事实就必须从我们的记忆中被清除——或者旧的压抑机制必须被新的取代——这样我们才能继续被我们谎言的茧所保护。如果不这样做，我们将从早到晚哀鸣悲歌，而不是吟诵“每天，每方面，我们都越来越好”。虽然我们有时可能承认我们用来维持所做之事的诡计手段，但这只是一个更高层次的自欺欺人和悖论，而非证明我们站在某种元现实的高度，在那里我们是真实的存在。我们说我们知道在这一生中等待着我们的是什么，事实如此。但我们并不真正知道。如果我们要生存和繁衍，我们就不能真正知道。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Annotating humanity's attempt to bluff itself in the interest of the species is an extensive literature on self-deception, denial, and repression.10 Naturally, none of those working in this area of study believe human life to be such a morass of self-deception, denial, and repression that we do not know which way is up. But in Zapffe's analysis of self-deception, denial, and repression, we cannot know which way is up without paying dearly for this knowledge. Enough of us must addle our consciousness so that we can be far less conscious than we might, which is the tragedy of the human species, for anyone who might have forgotten. Those who cannot pull this off will suffer the consequences.

关于人类为了物种利益而试图自欺欺人，关于自我欺骗、否认和压抑的文献相当广泛。自然，研究这个领域的学者们并不认为人类生活是一个充满自我欺骗、否认和压抑的泥潭，以至于我们连方向都分不清。但在扎普夫对自我欺骗、否认和压抑分析中，我们若想知道自己身处何方，必须为此付出巨大的代价。我们中的足够多的人必须让自己的意识陷入混乱，以便比我们本可以做到的更加不自觉，这是人类物种的悲剧——如果有人已经忘记的话。那些无法做到这一点的人，将会遭受后果。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Some who study self-deception, denial, etc. believe these are healthy practices if they facilitate our happiness without infringing on the happiness of our fellows. They speak of self-deception, denial, etc. as "useful fictions" or "positive illusions" and ballyhoo them as staples for both the individual and society. (For his book Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception [1996], Daniel Goleman studied how people and groups play along with factitious designs to scotch the animus and anxiety that would be loosed if an etiquette of honesty were somehow enforced.) Others believe that self-deceptive practices are too complex to be usefully analyzed. This does not mean that self-deceptive practices do not support heinous acts by the ingenious denial of these acts (Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, 2001); it only means that we cannot know how self-deception works in these cases. Finally, many of those who study self-deception believe we are not capable of self-deception because we cannot both consciously know something and consciously not know it, for this would involve us in a paradox.

一些研究自我欺骗、否认等现象的学者认为，如果这些做法能够促进我们的幸福而不侵犯他人的幸福，那么它们就是健康的行为。他们将自我欺骗、否认等称为“有用的虚构”或“积极的幻觉”，并将其大肆宣传为个人和社会的必需品。（在丹尼尔·戈尔曼的著作《重要的谎言，简单的真相：自我欺骗的心理学》[1996]中，他研究了人们和群体如何配合虚构的设计来消除如果强制实行诚实礼仪可能会释放出的敌意和焦虑。）另一些学者则认为自我欺骗的行为太过复杂，无法进行有效分析。这并不意味着自我欺骗的行为不会通过巧妙的否认来支持可憎的行为（斯坦利·科恩，《否认状态：了解暴行和苦难》，2001年）；这只意味着我们无法知道在这些情况下自我欺骗是如何运作的。最后，许多研究自我欺骗的学者认为我们不可能进行自我欺骗，因为我们不可能同时有意识地知道某事又有意识地不知道它，因为这会使我们陷入矛盾。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

However, others have reasoned their way around this supposed paradox. An example of such reasoning is presented by Kent Bach ("An Analysis of Self-Deception," Philosophy and Phenomenal Research, 1981), who offers three means of avoiding unwanted thoughts that are nevertheless accessible to a subject's consciousness: rationalization, evasion, and jamming. These are identical to the methods of isolation, anchoring, and distraction spotted by Zapffe in human life. Each may keep a subject in a state of self-deception regarding what is really the case. Bach's essay does not, of course, extend his three categories of self-deception to the entire human species, as does Zapffe. To Zapffe, we remember, we are all by nature and necessity false and paradoxical beings and should terminate our existence as strangers to reality who cannot live as we are and cannot live otherwise, who must constrain our consciousness because, tragically, our sanity depends on it.

然而，其他人已经通过推理解决了这个所谓的悖论。肯特·巴赫（Kent Bach）在《自欺的分析》（《哲学与现象研究》，1981）中提出了一个例子，展示了如何避免不想面对的思想，这些思想尽管存在但仍然可被个体意识到：合理化、回避和干扰。这些方法与扎普夫在人的生活中所发现的隔离、锚定和分散注意力完全相同。每种方法都可能让个体在自欺欺人的状态中停留，忽视真实的情况。当然，巴赫的文章并没有将他所列举的三种自欺的方式扩展到整个种族层面，而是局限于个体。至于扎普夫，正如我们之前提到的，他认为我们每个人天生就处于一种虚伪和矛盾的状态，必须终结我们的存在，作为与现实陌生的存在活着，无法以现在的方式生活，也无法以其他方式生活，我们必须约束我们的意识，因为，悲哀的是，我们的理智依赖于此。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In his Why We Lie: The Evolution of Deception and the Unconscious Mind (2007), David Livingstone Smith examines the mechanisms of self-deception and denial, both individual and social, in terms of evolutionary psychology. This approach leads him to a conclusion about these mechanisms that is compatible with Zapffe's diagnosis of humanity as a paradox. Smith's thesis is that at some time in the remote past the human mind split into the dual levels of conscious and unconscious processes the better to deceive itself and others for the purpose of adaptation. This makes Smith's hypothesis about the process of denial tantamount to that of the psychoanalytic theory of repression, by which individuals deny unpalatable facts about themselves to themselves, and, by extension, to others. Smith is in fact a psychoanalyst, and this may be seen in his statement that the "ever-present possibility of deceit is a crucial dimension of every human relationship, even the most central: our relationship with our very selves." To practice this deceit, one must repress consciousness of the deceiving, which does not exclude self-deception concerning consciousness itself and what it discloses about human life. Effectively, then, Smith is allied with Zapffe's position that the human being

在他的《我们为什么说谎：欺骗与无意识心智的进化》（2007）一书中，大卫·利文斯通·史密斯（David Livingstone Smith）从进化心理学的角度，考察了自我欺骗和否认机制，包括个体和社会层面的机制。这种方法使他得出了一个与扎普夫的“人类悖论”诊断相一致的结论。史密斯的观点是，在远古时期，人类心智分裂成了意识和无意识两个层面，以便更好地欺骗自己和他人，进而适应环境。因此，史密斯关于否认过程的假设等同于精神分析理论中的压抑理论，即个体为了应对无法接受的事实，对自己乃至他人进行否认。史密斯实际上是一位精神分析学家，这也可以从他的一句话中看出：“欺骗的永恒可能性是每段人际关系中的一个关键维度，即使是最核心的关系：我们与自我的关系。”为了实践这种欺骗，个体必须压抑对欺骗行为的意识，这并不排除自我欺骗本身，尤其是对意识及其揭示的人生真相的自我欺骗。因此，史密斯的观点实际上与扎普夫的立场相一致，即人类存在着某种悖论。

performs . . . a more or less self-conscious repression [Zapffe’s emphasis] of its damning surplus of consciousness. The process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.

Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the “healthy” and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, “fear of life,” refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of anti-biological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced—correctly—as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Even though Zapffe regarded psychoanalysis as another form of anchoring, whether or not a repressional mechanism is accessible to our consciousness or is wholly unconscious seems a trivial point. For both Smith and Zapffe, they lead to the same thing: occlusion of the real. Another thing Smith and Zapffe share is that their ideas about humankind are not scientifically verifiable and will not be for some time to come, if ever. And without proof on a platter, anyone whose ideas are unpalatable to scientists, philosophers, and average mortals must expect to be poorly heard. Smith does not seem to understand this, and in the closing pages of his book expresses hope that humanity will one day "get real," as the saying goes. At the end of "The Last Messiah," Zapffe expressed an unconditional pessimism that this could ever happen, which was patently the only reasonable attitude for him to take. Smith himself might consider "getting real" about his hope we will ever get real, given that humanity will always have its reasons for being repressed, self-deceptive, and unreal. A utopia in which we no longer deny the realities we presently must repress cannot be realistically hoped for. And who except a pessimist would wish for that utopia?

尽管扎普夫认为精神分析是另一种形式的固定化，但是否能够意识到压抑机制，或者它完全是无意识的，似乎是一个微不足道的问题。对于史密斯和扎普夫来说，它们最终导致的是相同的结果：对真实的遮蔽。史密斯和扎普夫有一个共同点，那就是他们关于人类的观点目前无法科学验证，可能很长一段时间都无法验证，甚至永远无法验证。而没有明证，任何对科学家、哲学家以及普通人来说令人不悦的观点，都注定会难以被接受。史密斯似乎没有意识到这一点，在他书的结尾，他表达了希望人类有一天能“面对现实”的愿望，按照流行语来说就是这样。然而，在《最后的弥赛亚》的结尾，扎普夫表达了一种无条件的悲观主义，认为这一点永远无法实现，而这显然是他能够采取的唯一合理的态度。考虑到人类总会有理由保持压抑、自欺和不真实，史密斯本人或许应该对他希望我们能够面对现实的想法”面对现实”。一个我们不再否认目前必须压抑的现实的乌托邦，是不可能实现的。除了悲观主义者，谁会希望那样的乌托邦呢？

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The effectiveness of conscious repressional mechanisms has been analyzed from many angles, particularly in relation to the fear of death. An enumeration of traditional strategies for grappling with thanatophobia appears in Choices for Living: Coping with the Fear of Dying (2002) by Thomas S. Langer. Although the subtitle of this book suggests that it concentrates on the fear of dying, it is more about the fear of death, not about the suffering and terror that may attend either a short-lived or a dawdling migration into death. Factually, Langer's book, like many others of its kind, is fixated on living rather than on either death or dying, which seem to be only blurry contingencies while an individual is alive.

关于有意识的压抑机制的有效性，已经从多个角度进行了分析，特别是在面对死亡恐惧的背景下。传统的应对死亡恐惧症（thanatophobia）的策略在托马斯·S·兰格（Thomas S. Langer）的《生活的选择：应对死亡恐惧》（2002年）一书中有所列举。尽管该书的副标题暗示它集中讨论死亡过程的恐惧，但它更多关注的是对死亡本身的恐惧，而非与短暂或缓慢死去过程相关的痛苦和恐怖。事实上，兰格的这本书，像许多类似的作品一样，更加专注于“生”的话题，而非死亡本身（death）或死亡过程（dying），这两个概念在一个人在活着的时候似乎只是一些模糊不确定的可能性或偶然的事件。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

DOCTOR: "I'm afraid you have an inoperable tumor and haven't long to live."
PATIENT: "That can't be. I feel in perfect health."

医生：“恐怕您得了一个无法手术的肿瘤，您的日子不多了。”
病人：“这不可能，我感觉身体非常健康。”

点击展开/折叠英语原文

POLICE OFFICER: 'I'm sorry to inform you, ma'am, that your husband has been involved in a vehicular misadventure. He's dead."
WIFE: "That can't be. He just left the house ten minutes ago."

警察：“很抱歉通知您，女士，您的丈夫发生了交通事故，已经去世了。”
妻子：“这不可能，他才刚刚十分钟前离开家。”

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Given a little time, of course, the cancer patient and the woman who just lost her husband come around to their respective realities. Acceptance of one's new condition, as opposed to going mad or reacting in some other pathological manner, seems to be the usual process—on the condition, naturally, that an individual lives long enough to accept it and does not die of an inoperable tumor first. In the media and all forms of entertainment, such bad breaks are exposed to us all our lives. But we still do not heed the old saw "Hope for the best, but expect the worst." Instead, we hope for the best and think we have a very good chance of getting it. If we really expected the worst, we might well go mad or react in some other pathological manner before the worst came for us and ours. And that really would be the worst.

当然，给一些时间，癌症患者和刚失去丈夫的女人最终都会接受各自的现实。接受自己新状况的过程，通常是比发疯或以其他病态的方式反应更常见的过程——自然，前提是个体活得足够长，能够接受这一切，而不是先因无法手术的肿瘤而死去。在媒体和各种娱乐形式中，这些不幸的遭遇一生都暴露在我们眼前。但我们依然没有听从那句老话：“抱最好的希望，做最坏的打算”。 相反，我们希望最好的结果，并认为我们有很大机会得到它。如果我们真的预期最坏的情况，我们可能会在最坏的情况降临到我们和我们所爱的人身上之前就发疯或以其他病态方式反应。而那才真的是最糟糕的。

苦难 I

点击展开/折叠英语原文

For almost all philosophers who write about death, the subject is studied in the abstract, with the unsightly tangibles at its bedside either bracketed or shrugged off. If dying is even given the time of day by philosophers, it must be studied as a subcategory of SUFFERING, THE MEANING OF, which few thinkers discuss outside of moral philosophy and ethics, relatively soft cognitive pastimes when placed beside logic, epistemology, ontology, etc. Philosophies that take human suffering as their overarching subject are given short shrift by analytic types, who leave SUFFERING, THE MEANING OF to religions such as Buddhism and Christianity, or to pessimists. Unless a philosopher is prepared to go all the way with it, · to take a hard line on its relevance to the whole of human life, as did Schopenhauer and a few other relics of the pre-modern era, he will balk at saying anything about suffering.

几乎所有探讨死亡的哲学家，都是以抽象的方式研究这一主题，把伴随死亡的那些丑陋现实要么搁置一旁，要么轻描淡写地带过。即使哲学家愿意正视临终的过程，也往往将其归为“苦难之意义”这一子类别，而这个话题本身很少被探讨，通常只出现在道德哲学和伦理学中——这些领域在逻辑学、认识论、本体论等硬核学科面前，被视为相对“柔软”的认知消遣。那些将人类苦难作为核心议题的哲学体系，经常被分析哲学派系忽视，他们把“苦难之意义”留给佛教、基督教等宗教，或者干脆归入悲观主义者的地盘。除非某位哲学家愿意走到底，像叔本华和少数几个前现代时代的“遗物”那样，坚决地将苦难视为理解整个人类生命的关键，否则他通常会回避这个话题，不愿发表任何看法。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

One who did not balk entirely was the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) did have a thing or two to say about human suffering. Briefly, he revamped the Utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote: "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness." Popper remolded this summation of a positive utilitarianism into a negative utilitarianism whose position he handily stated as follows: "It adds to clarity in the fields of ethics, if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of happiness." Taken to its logical and most humanitarian conclusion, Popper's demand can have as its only end the elimination of those who now suffer as well as "counterfactual" beings who will suffer if they are born. What else could the "elimination of suffering" mean if not its total abolition, and ours? Naturally, Popper held his horses well before suggesting that to eliminate suffering would demand that we as a species be eliminated. But as R. N. Smart famously argued (Mind, 1958), this is the only conclusion to be drawn from Negative Utilitarianism.

奥地利裔英国哲学家卡尔·波普尔（Karl Popper）是少数没有完全回避这个问题的人之一，他在《开放社会及其敌人》(1945)中确实对人类苦难发表了一些看法。简而言之，他改造了19世纪英国哲学家约翰·斯图尔特·密尔（John Stuart Mill）的功利主义，密尔曾写道：“行为的正确程度与其促进幸福的倾向成正比，与其促进幸福的反面成反比。” 波普尔将这种积极功利主义的总结重塑为一种“消极”功利主义，他简明地表述如下：“如果我们以否定的方式表达我们的要求，即我们要求消除痛苦而非促进幸福，这将为伦理学领域增添清晰度。” 如果将波普尔的主张推向逻辑上最人道的结论，那唯一的终点只能是——消除现有的受苦者，以及那些“反事实的”未来可能出生并遭受苦难的人。否则，“消除苦难”还能意味着什么呢？难道不是彻底的消除苦难本身，包括我们的存在？当然，波普尔并没有鲁莽地得出“消除苦难就意味着消灭人类”这样的结论。但正如R.N.斯马特（R. N. Smart）在1958年发表于《心灵》（Mind）期刊上的著名论述所指出的那样，这正是负面功利主义唯一可能得出的结论。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In "The Last Messiah," Zapffe is not sanguine about eliminating suffering, nor is he so unworldly as to beseech a communal solution for its elimination by snuffing out the human race, as did the Cathari and the Bogomils. (He does lash out at the barbarism of social or religious proscription of suicide, but he is not a standard-bearer for this form of personal salvation.) To reiterate with due compunction, Zapffe's thought is foremost an addendum to that of various sects and individuals who have resolved that conscious existence is so odious that extinction is preferable to survival. It also has the value of advancing a new answer to an 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 possessively named 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 and can we ever get there. That said, we can continue as if it had not been said. The measure of a philosopher's thought is not in its answers or the problems it poses, but in how well it fiddles with these answers and problems such that they animate the minds of others. Thus 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.

在《最后的弥赛亚》中，扎普夫并不乐观地认为痛苦可以被消除，也没有像卡特里派和波哥米尔派那样天真地祈求通过消灭人类来共同解决痛苦问题。（他确实猛烈抨击了社会或宗教对自杀的禁令所体现的野蛮性，但他并不是将自杀作为个人救赎的旗手。）再次谨慎地重申，扎普夫的思想首先是对那些认为有意识的存在过于令人厌恶，因而灭绝比生存更可取的各种教派和个人观点的补充。他的思想还提供了一个古老问题的新答案：“为什么未来的世代应该被免于进入人类的绞肉机？” 然而，所谓的“扎普夫悖论”（遵循哲学入门书中常见的、带有所有格命名的命题传统）与任何其他支持生命、反对生命，或仅仅是玩弄概念以试图确定“什么是现实、我们能否抵达现实”的思想一样——没有用处。话虽如此，我们还是可以假装这话没说过。衡量一个哲学家思想的标准，不在于他的答案或提出的问题本身，而在于他如何巧妙地摆弄这些答案和问题，从而激发他人思维的活力。正因如此，修辞既重要又空洞。问问任何一个坚定的悲观主义者，但不要指望他指望你认真对待他的话。

苦难 II

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pess1m1sm is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species' obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparkling Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by "human suffering," the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But these are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe's "Last Messiah." It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

或许，对哲学悲观主义最有力的反驳在于它唯一的主题是人类的痛苦。这是我们物种执念清单上的最后一项，并且削弱了所有对我们来说重要的东西，比如“善”“美”，以及“闪闪发光的马桶”。对于悲观主义者来说，任何与人类痛苦无关的思考，或者任何不以探究痛苦的起源、本质和消除为动机的认知，归根结底都是一种娱乐，无论它是以概念探索的形式出现（比如研究博弈论），还是以实际行动的形式表现（比如探索外太空）。所谓“人类的痛苦”，悲观主义者指的不是具体的苦难及其缓解，而是“痛苦本身”。某些疾病的解药可能被发现，某些社会政治的野蛮状态也可能得到纠正。但这些只是权宜之计。只要人类存在，痛苦就无法彻底解决。唯一真正有效的解决方案，是扎普夫在《最后的弥赛亚》中提到的那个方案。它或许不是一个适合这个充满权宜之计世界的“受欢迎的”解决方案，但它将永远终结痛苦——如果我们有一天真的愿意那样做的话。悲观主义者的信条之一是：不存在从未伤害过任何人，而存在伤害了所有人。

尽管我们的“自我”可能只是意识虚构出的幻象，但我们的痛苦却是真真切切的。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

As a survival-happy species, our successes are calculated in the number of years we have extended our lives, with the reduction of suffering being only incidental to this aim. To stay alive under almost any circumstances is a sickness with us. Nothing could be more unhealthy than to "watch one's health" as a means of stalling death. The lengths we will go as procrastinators of that last gasp only demonstrate a morbid dread of that event. By contrast, our fear of suffering is deficient. So Shakespeare's Edgar when he passes on the wisdom that "the worst is not I So long as we can say 'This is the worst."' Officially, there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

作为一个以生存为重的物种，我们的成功是以延长生命年限来衡量的，减少痛苦只是这一目标的附带结果。在几乎任何情况下都要保持活着，这对我们来说是一种病态。没有什么比“关注健康”作为延缓死亡的手段更不健康的了。我们为了推迟最后一口气所愿意付出的代价，只是证明了我们对死亡的病态恐惧。相比之下，我们对痛苦的恐惧却不足。正如莎士比亚笔下的埃德加所传达的智慧：“只要我们能说‘这是最糟糕的’，那就不是最糟糕的。” 官方说法是，没有比死亡更糟糕的命运。非官方地说，这样的命运有很多。对某些人来说，仅仅是带着终将一死的想法活着，就是比死亡本身更糟糕的命运。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Longevity is without question of paramount value in our lives, and finding a corrective for mortality is our compulsive project. Anything goes insofar as lengthening our earthly tenure. And how we have cashed in on our efforts. No need to cram our lives into two or three decades now that we can cram them into seven, eight, nine, or more. The lifespan of non-domesticated mammals has never changed, while ours has grown by leaps and bounds. What a coup for the human race. Unaware how long they will live, other warm-blooded life forms are sluggards by comparison. Time will run out for us as it does for all creatures, true, but at least we can dream of a day when we might elect our own deadline. Then perhaps we can all die of the same thing: a killing satiation with our durability in a world that is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.

长寿无疑在我们的生活中具有至高无上的价值，寻找抵抗死亡的方法是我们不懈追求的项目。只要能延长我们在世的时间，我们愿意尝试任何方法。而我们确实从这些努力中获益匪浅。我们不再需要将生命压缩在二三十年里，现在我们可以将它延展到七、八、九十年或更长。非家养哺乳动物的寿命从未改变，而我们的寿命却突飞猛进。这对人类来说是多么伟大的胜利啊。其他温血生物不知道自己能活多久，相比之下显得懒散。时间终将耗尽，这对所有生物都是如此，但至少我们可以梦想有一天我们能够选择自己的期限。那时也许我们都会死于同一种原因：对我们在这个恶性无用的世界中的持久性感到极度厌倦。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

"Worthless" rather than "useless" is the more familiar epithet in this context. The rationale for using "useless" in place of "worthless" in this histrionically capitalized phrase is that "worthless" is tied to the concepts of desirability and value, and by their depreciation introduces them into the existential mix. "Useless," on the other hand, is not so inviting of these concepts. Elsewhere in this work, "worthless" is connected to the language of pessimism and does what damage it can. But the devil of it is that "worthless" really does not go far enough when speaking pessimistically about the character of existence. Too many times the question "Is life worth living?" has been asked. This usage of "worth" excites impressions of a fair lot of experiences that are arguably desirable and valuable within limits and that may follow upon one another in such a way as to suggest that life is not totally worthless. With "useless," the wispy spirits of desirability and value do not as readily rear their heads. Naturally, the uselessness of all that is or could ever be is subject to the same repudiations as the worthlessness of all that is or could ever be. For this reason, the adverb "malignantly" has been annexed to "useless" to give it a little more semantic stretch and a dose of toxicity. But to express with any adequacy a sense of the uselessness of everything, a nonlinguistic modality would be needed, some effusion out of a dream that amalgamated every gradation of the useless and wordlessly transmitted to us the inanity of existence under any possible conditions. Indigent of such means of communication, the uselessness of all that exists or could possibly exist must be spoken with a poor potency.

在这种语境下，“worthless”（无价值的）比“useless”（无用的）更为常见。然而，这个以戏剧性大写形式出现的短语选择“useless”替代“worthless”，背后的理由在于“worthless”与渴望和价值这些概念紧密相连，而它们的贬损会将这些概念引入存在的探讨之中。相比之下，“useless”则不太容易唤起这些概念。在这部作品的其他地方，“worthless”与悲观主义的语言联系在一起，带来了它所能造成的损害。但问题的关键在于，当悲观地讨论存在的本质时，“worthless”其实还不够彻底。“生命是否值得活下去？”这个问题已经被提出来太多次了。“worth”这个词激发了一连串的印象，暗示在一定的限度内，生命中确实有许多可以说是令人渴望和有价值的体验，并且它们可能相继出现，从而让人觉得生命不算完全没有价值。而“useless”则不那么容易让渴望和价值的虚幻幽灵浮现。自然地，所有存在的事物及一切可能存在的事物的“无用性”，与它们的“无价值”一样，会遭到同样的否定。正因如此，“malignantly”（恶毒地）这个副词被附加到“useless”之前，以稍微扩展它的语义边界，并注入一丝毒性。然而，若想充分表达对一切皆无用的感受，语言本身已显得无力。我们需要一种非语言的表现形式，一种仿佛从梦境中流出的倾泻，融合了无用的每一种层次，毫无言语地将存在在任何可能条件下的荒谬传达给我们。但在缺乏这种表达方式的情况下，我们只能用贫乏的言语勉强诉说一切存在及可能存在之物的无用性。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Not unexpectedly, no one believes that everything is useless, and with good reason. We all live within relative frameworks, and within those frameworks uselessness is far wide of the norm. A potato masher is not useless if one wants to mash potatoes. For some people, a system of being that includes an afterlife of eternal bliss may not seem useless. They might say that such a system is absolutely useful because it gives them the hope they need to make it through this life. But an afterlife of eternal bliss is not and cannot be absolutely useful simply because you need it to be. It is part of a relative framework and nothing beyond that, just as a potato masher is only part of a relative framework and is useful only if you need to mash potatoes. Once you had made it through this life to an afterlife of eternal bliss, you would have no use for that afterlife. Its job would be done, and all you would have is an afterlife of eternal bliss—a paradise for reverent hedonists and pious libertines. What is the use in that? You might as well not exist at all, either in this life or in an afterlife of eternal bliss. Any kind of existence is useless. Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relativistic potato-masher sense.

毫不意外地，没有人相信一切都是无用的，这是有充分理由的。我们都活在相对的框架之中，在这些框架里，“无用”远非常态。如果想捣碎土豆，那么土豆捣碎器就不是无用的。对一些人来说，一个包含永恒幸福来世的存在体系可能也不会显得无用。他们可能会说，这样的体系是绝对有用的，因为它给了他们度过此生所需的希望。然而，一个永恒幸福的来世，并不会因为你需要它就变得“绝对有用”。它只是一个相对框架的一部分，仅此而已。就像土豆捣碎器只是相对框架的一部分，只有当你需要捣土豆时它才有用。一旦你熬过了这一生，进入了永恒幸福的来世，你对那个来世也就没有了需求。它的任务完成了，剩下的只是一种永恒幸福的来世——一个供虔诚享乐主义者和敬神放荡者逍遥的乐园。而那又有何用呢？你干脆别存在算了，无论是在此生还是在永恒幸福的来世。任何形式的存在都是无用的。没有什么是自我正当化的。一切都只能在“相对的土豆捣碎器意义”上被正当化。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

There are some people who do not get up in arms about potato-masher relativism, while other people do. The latter want to think in terms of absolutes that are really absolute and not just absolute potato mashers. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have a real problem with a potato-masher system of being. Buddhists have no problem with a potato-masher system because for them there are no absolutes. What they need to realize is the truth of "dependent origination," which means that everything is related to everything else in a great network of potato mashers that are always interacting with one another. So the only problem Buddhists have is not being able to realize that the only absolutely useful thing is the realization that everything is a great network of potato mashers. They think that if they can get over this hump, they will be eternally liberated from suffering. At least they hope they will, which is all they really need to make it through this life. In the Buddhist faith, everyone suffers who cannot see that the world is a MALIGNANTLY USELESS potato-mashing network. However, that does not make Buddhists superior to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It only means they have a different system for making it through a life where all we can do is wait for musty shadows to call our names when they are ready for us. After that happens, there will be nobody who will need anything that is not absolutely useless. Ask any atheist.

有些人不会对土豆捣碎器相对主义感到愤怒，而其他人则会。后者希望以真正绝对而非仅仅是绝对土豆捣碎器的方式思考。基督徒、犹太教徒和穆斯林对土豆捣碎器存在系统有真正的问题。佛教徒对土豆捣碎器系统没有问题，因为对他们来说没有绝对值。他们需要认识到”缘起”的真理，这意味着万物都在一个巨大的土豆捣碎器网络中相互关联，这些捣碎器总是相互作用。所以佛教徒唯一的问题是无法认识到唯一绝对有用的事情就是认识到一切都是土豆捣碎器的巨大网络。他们认为如果能克服这个障碍，就会永远从苦难中解脱。至少他们希望如此，这也是他们度过此生所需要的全部。在佛教信仰中，每个无法看到世界是一个恶性无用的土豆捣碎网络的人都会受苦。然而，这并不意味着佛教徒优于基督徒、犹太教徒和穆斯林。这只意味着他们有不同的系统来度过一生，在这一生中，我们所能做的就是等待阴暗的影子在准备好时呼唤我们的名字。在那之后，将不会有任何人需要任何绝对无用的东西。问任何无神论者都是如此。

生态灭绝

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Despite Zapffe's work as a philosopher, although not in an occupational role (he earned his living by writing poems, plays, stories, and humorous pieces), he is better known as an early ecologist who popularized the term "biosophy" to name a discipline that would broaden the compass of philosophy to include the interests of other living things besides human beings. In this capacity, he serves as an inspiration to environmentalists who worry about the well-being of the earth and its organisms. Here, too, we catch ourselves—and Zapffe himself, as he affirmed—in the act of conspiring to build barricades against the repugnant facts of life by signing on to a cause (in this case that of environmentalism) that snubs the real issue. Vandalism of the environment is but a sidebar to humanity's refusal to look into the jaws of existence.

尽管扎普夫的主要身份是哲学家，虽然他并未以此为职业（他主要靠写诗、戏剧、故事和幽默作品谋生），但他更为人熟知的是作为一位早期的生态学家，他推广了“生物哲学”（biosophy）这一术语，用来命名一种将哲学范围扩展到包括人类以外其他生物利益的学科。作为一名生态学家，他成为了环保主义者的灵感来源，尤其是那些关心地球及其生物福祉的人们。在这个领域中，我们同样会发现自己——以及扎普夫本人，如他所确认的——正在共同构筑一种抵御生命令人厌恶事实的壁垒，我们为此签署加入某个事业（在这里是环保主义），而这事业却忽视了真正的问题。环境破坏不过是人类拒绝面对生命真相的一个附带问题。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In truth, we have only one foot in the natural environment of this world. Other worlds are always calling us away from nature. We live in a habitat of unrealities—not of earth, air, water, and wildlife—and cradling illusion trounces grim logic every time. Some of the more combative environmentalists, however, have concurred with Zapffe that we should retire from existence. But their advocacy of worldwide suicide as a strategy for saving the earth from being pillaged by human beings receives no mention in "The Last Messiah" and was probably not on Zapffe's mind when he wrote this essay. As appealing as a universal suicide pact may be, why take part in it just to conserve this planet, this dim bulb in the blackness of space? Nature produced us, or at least subsidized our evolution. It intruded on an inorganic wasteland and set up shop. What evolved was a global workhouse where nothing is ever at rest, where the generation and discarding of life incessantly goes on. By what virtue, then, is it entitled to receive a pardon for this original sin—a capital crime in reverse, just as reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual's death?

事实上，我们在这个世界的自然环境中只站了一只脚。其他世界总是在呼唤我们远离自然。我们生活在一个虚幻的栖息地——而非土地、空气、水和野生动植物的世界中——温柔的幻觉总是轻易战胜冷酷的逻辑。然而，一些更激进的环保主义者却与扎普夫达成共识，认为我们应当退出存在。然而，他们主张以全球自杀作为拯救地球免遭人类掠夺的策略，这在《最后的弥赛亚》中没有提及，或许在扎普夫写这篇文章时也并未考虑到。尽管一场全球性的自杀协议听起来颇具吸引力，但仅仅为了保护这个星球——这个宇宙黑暗中微弱的光点——就参与其中，真的值得吗？是大自然造就了我们，或者至少资助了我们的进化。它侵入了原本无机的荒芜，开张营业。最终演化成了一个全球性的苦役场，在这里，没有什么东西能安息，生命的生成与抛弃永不停歇地进行着。那么，大自然凭什么配得上赦免它的“原罪”呢？这是一种反向的死刑，就如同繁衍使人类在某种意义上成为“个体死亡的共犯”一样。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In its course, nature has made blunders in plenty. These are left to die out, as is nature's wont. Perhaps this will be how we will go—a natural death. It might be idly theorized, though, that nature has a special plan for human beings and devised us to serve as a way revoking itself, much like Mainländer's self-expunging God. An offbeat idea, no protest, but not the strangest we have ever heard or lived by. We could at least take up the hypothesis and see where it leads. If it is proved unviable, then where is the harm? But until then, might we not let ourselves be drawn along by nature's plan, which includes our sacking the earth as a paradoxical means of living better in it, or at least living as our nature bids us to live.

在其演进过程中，自然犯下了无数谬误。这些谬误依照自然的惯性，被任其消亡。或许，我们也将如此——迎来一种自然的死亡。然而，可以随意推测，自然或许对人类另有特殊的安排，创造我们是为了作为其自身撤销的一种方式，就像迈因兰德所描绘的那位自我湮灭的神。这一想法确实有些离经叛道，毋庸置疑，但也不是我们所听闻或遵循过的最荒诞的理念。我们至少可以尝试接受这一假设，并看看它将我们引向何方。如果它最终被证明是站不住脚的，那又有何妨？但在此之前，我们何不任由自己被自然的计划牵引，而这一计划或许正包括了我们对地球的掠夺，作为一种矛盾的方式，使我们在其中更好地生存，或者至少以符合我们本性的方式生存。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along—a world where all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves. Left unchecked, this process will last as long as a single cell remains palpitating in this cesspool of the solar system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in nature's suicide? For want of a deity that could be held to account for a world in which there is terrible pain, let nature take the blame for our troubles. We did not create an environment uncongenial to our species, nature did. One would think that naturewas trying to kill us off, or get us to suicide ourselves once the blunder of consciousness came upon us. What was nature thinking? We tried to anthropomorphize it, to romanticize it, to let it into our hearts. But nature kept its distance, leaving us to our own devices. So be it. Survival is a two-way street. Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet from outer space. It's the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us. Let it save itself if it can—the condemned are known for the acrobatics they will execute to wriggle out of their sentences. But if it cannot destroy what it has made, and what could possibly unmake it, then may it perish along with every other living thing it has introduced to pain. While no species has given in to pain to the point of giving up its existence, so far as we know, it is not a phenomenon whose praises are often sung.

我们并未创造自己，也未塑造出一个无法运转而无痛苦的世界——一个充满巨大痛苦、仅有少许快感来吊着我们继续前行的世界，少得可怜。所有生物的一生都被痛苦无情地驱使着去做那些能提高它们存活和繁衍机会的事情。如果不加以阻止，这一过程将持续下去，直到这片太阳系的污水坑、银河系的厕所里，仅存的一颗细胞仍在微微跳动。那么，何不助一臂之力，让大自然自我了结呢？ 既然找不到一个可以为这充满可怕痛苦的世界负责的神明，那就让大自然为我们的苦难担责吧。并非我们创造了这个不适合自身生存的环境，而是大自然如此塑造的。人们或许会以为，大自然是在试图杀死我们，或者在意识降临到我们身上之后，想让我们自己了结自己。它究竟在想什么？我们曾试图将其拟人化、浪漫化，把它放进我们的心里。但大自然始终保持距离，任由我们自生自灭。既然如此，生存便是一条双向街道。一旦我们在外星站稳脚跟，就可以从太空中炸毁这颗星球。唯有如此，我们才能确保它的恶臭不会追随我们。让它自己拯救自己吧——被判死刑者总是会竭尽全力、变换各种花招来挣脱自己的命运。但如果它既无法毁灭自己所造之物，也无法摧毁那些可能消灭它的存在，那么愿它与所有它带入痛苦中的生灵一同毁灭。至今为止，我们所知的还没有哪种生物因痛苦而彻底放弃自身的存在，但这种现象也并不值得歌颂。

绝望

点击展开/折叠英语原文

In Zapffe's "The Last Messiah," the titular figure appears at the end and makes the mock-Socratic, biblically parodic pronouncement, "Know yourselves—be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye" (Zapffe's emphasis). As Zapffe pictures the scene, the Last Messiah's words will not be well received: "And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails." Semantically speaking, the Last Messiah is not a messiah, since he saves no living soul and will be erased from human memory by a vigilante group whose kingpins are "the pacifier makers and the midwives." Moreover, a resurrection seems to be the last thing in the Last Messiah's future.

在扎普夫的《最后的弥赛亚》中，书名中的这个人物出现在结尾，并以一种戏仿苏格拉底式、带有圣经讽喻的方式宣告道：“认识你们自己——保持不育，让大地在你们之后沉默。”（扎普夫本人强调）然而，在扎普夫的描绘中，“最后的弥赛亚”的话语不会受到欢迎：“当他说完，人们会倾巢而出，冲向他，领头的是那些安抚制造者和助产士，并用他们的指甲将他掩埋。” 从语义上讲，“最后的弥赛亚”并非真正的弥赛亚，因为他并未拯救任何一个活着的灵魂，并且最终将被一群义愤填膺的暴民彻底抹去，这群暴民的首领正是“安抚制造者和助产士。”此外，复活似乎是“最后的弥赛亚”最不可能的结局。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

To exposit why humanity should not further tarry on earth is one thing; to believe that this proposition will be agreeable to others is quite another. Due to the note of hopelessness in the coda to Zapffe's essay, we are discouraged from imagining a world in which the self-liquidation of humanity could ever be put into effect. The Norwegian himself did not take the trouble to do so in "The Last Messiah." No reason he should, since he would first have to imagine a new humanity, which is not as a practice done outside of fiction, a medium of realism but not of reality.

阐述人类不应在世上继续逗留是一回事，认为这一主张会为他人所接受则是另一回事。由于扎普夫那篇文章结尾处的绝望基调，我们很难设想一个人类自我消亡得以实现的世界。挪威人本人在《最后的弥赛亚》中也没有费心去做这样的设想。他没有理由这么做，因为他首先得想象出一个新的“人类”，而这在现实中并非惯例，只有在虚构作品中才会进行——一种现实主义的媒介，而非现实本身。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Yet these new humans would not have to be super-evolved or otherwise freakish organisms living far in the future. They would only have to be like Zapffe in recognizing that a retreat from the worldly scene would be a benevolent proceeding for the good of the unborn. Becoming extinct would seem to be a tall order, but not one that would be insurmountably time-consuming. Zapffe optimistically projected that those of the new humanity could be evacuated from existence over the course of a few generations. And indeed they could. As their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders of our species could be the most privileged individuals in history and share with one another material comforts once held in trust only for the wellborn or money-getting classes of the world. Since personal economic gain would be passe as a motive for the new humanity, there would be only one defensible incitement to work: to see one another through to the finish, a project that would keep everyone busy and not just staring into space while they waited for the end. There might even be bright smiles exchanged among these selfless benefactors of those who would never be forced to exist. And how many would speed up the process of extinction once euthanasia was decriminalized and offered in humane and even enjoyable ways?

然而，这些新人类并不需要是超级进化的生物，或是遥远未来里某种异类的存在。他们只需像扎普夫一样，认识到退出尘世舞台是为了未出生者的福祉而采取的仁慈之举。灭绝似乎是一个艰巨的任务，但并非难以克服或耗费无尽时光。扎普夫乐观地预测，新人类的撤离过程可以在几代人的时间内完成。而事实上，这确实可以实现。随着他们的数量逐渐减少，这些人类“终结者”可能会成为历史上最特权的一群人，彼此共享那些曾经只属于上层阶级或富有阶层的物质享受。由于个人经济利益在新人类社会中将不再是驱动力，唯一正当的工作动机便是互相扶持，直至终点。这一事业将使每个人都忙碌起来，而不是在等待终结的过程中茫然凝视虚空。他们甚至可能会在彼此之间交换明朗的微笑，作为对那些永远不会被强迫存在之人的无私馈赠。而一旦安乐死被非刑罪化，并以人道甚至令人愉悦的方式提供，又会有多少人加速这一灭绝进程呢？

点击展开/折叠英语原文

What a relief, what an unburdening to have closed the book on humankind. Yet it would not need to be slammed shut. As long as we progressed toward a thinning of the herd, couples could still introduce new faces into the human fold as billions became millions and then thousands. New generations would learn about the past, and, like those before them, feel lucky not to have been born in times of fewer conveniences and cures, although they might still play at cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, management and labor. The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we are just a mob always in the market for new recruits.

多么宽慰，多么解脱，人类这本书终于合上了。然而，无需猛然合拢。只要我们朝着群体缩减的方向前进，夫妻仍然可以为人类阵营带来新面孔，而人口则会从数十亿降至数百万，继而降至数千。新生代会了解过去，并像他们的前人一样，庆幸自己未曾出生在缺乏便利与疗法的时代，尽管他们或许仍会玩“牛仔与印第安人”“警察与强盗”“资方与劳方”的游戏。我们的最后一代或许会是地球上曾经行走过的最优秀的一代，是我们曾梦想成为的人类典范，直到我们看清现实，明白自己不过是一群总在招募新成员的乌合之众。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Quite naturally, this depiction of an end times by an extinctionist covenant will seem abhorrent to those now living in hope of a better future (not necessarily one in which glorious progress has been made toward the alleviation of human misery, but at least one that will partially exculpate them from a depraved indifference to the harm predestined for their young). It may also seem a romanticized utopia, since those who predict major readjustments in humanity's self-conception (Karl Marx, et al.) often believe that a revolution in ethics will blossom when their "truths" are instituted. Worse, or perhaps better if the solution to human suffering is to be final, the idea of a new humanity may be a smokescreen for a tyrannical oligarchy run by militants of extinction rather than a social and psychological sanctuary for a species harboring the universal goal of delimiting its stay on earth. If Zapffe uselessly exercised himself by formulating the thesis of "The Last Messiah," he was sharp enough to give it a hopeless finale. Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to take charge of its own deliverance. The delusional will forever be with us, thereby making pain, fear, and denial of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations.

对于那些现在怀着美好未来希望的人来说，这种由灭绝主义契约所描绘的末日景象自然会显得令人憎恶（这种美好未来不一定是指在减轻人类痛苦方面取得了辉煌进步，但至少能部分地让他们摆脱对注定降临于其后代的伤害的冷漠罪责）。它也可能看起来像一个浪漫化的乌托邦，因为那些预测人类自我观念将发生重大调整的人（如卡尔·马克思等）常常相信，当他们的“真理”被建立起来时，伦理革命将会蓬勃发展。更糟糕的是——或者，如果解决人类痛苦的方案是最终的，也许更好的是——“新人类”的概念可能只是一个烟幕，掩盖着由灭绝主义激进分子统治的暴虐寡头，而非一个为怀有终结其地球停留这一普遍目标的物种所提供的社会和心理庇护所。如果扎普夫徒劳地提出了“最后的弥赛亚”这一论题，他也足够敏锐地给出了一个绝望的结局。毫无疑问，人类现在和将来都永远不适合掌控自己的拯救。妄想者将永远与我们同在，从而使痛苦、恐惧和对眼前事实的否认成为首选的生活方式，并将其传递给无数世代。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

The reception of the research of a Canadian scientist named Michael Persinger may be seen as an indication of humanity's genius for keeping itself locked into its old ways. In the 1980s, Persinger modified a motorcycle helmet to affect the magnetic fields of the brain of its wearer, inducing a variety of strange sensations. These included experiences in which subjects felt themselves proximate to supernatural phenomena that included ghosts and gods.

加拿大科学家迈克尔·珀辛格（Michael Persinger）的研究所受到的反响，或许可以视为人类固守旧习的天才表现。20 世纪 80 年代，珀辛格改装了一顶摩托车头盔，以影响佩戴者大脑的磁场，从而引发各种奇特的感知体验。其中包括一些受试者感到自己接近超自然现象，比如幽灵和神祇。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Atheists used Persinger's studies to nail closed their argument for the subjectivity of anyone's sense of the supernatural. Not to be left behind, believers wrote their own books in which they contended that the magnetic-field-emitting motorcycle helmet proved the existence of a god that "hard-wired" itself into our brains. A field of study called neurotheology grew up around this and other laboratory experiments. Even if you can prop up a scientific theory with a cudgel of data that should render the holy opposition unconscious, they will be standing ready to discredit you—imprisonment, torture, and public execution having gone the way of chastity belts.

无神论者利用珀辛格的研究来彻底确立他们的论点，即任何人对超自然的感知都是主观的。不甘落后，信仰者们也写了自己的书，主张这种能发射磁场的摩托车头盔证明了某种“硬接入”我们大脑的神的存在。围绕这一实验及其他实验，一个名为神经神学的研究领域应运而生。即使你能用数据的铁证来支撑科学理论，使那些虔诚的反对者晕厥倒地，他们仍会随时准备反驳你——毕竟，监禁、酷刑和公开处决已经和贞洁带一起被淘汰了。

点击展开/折叠英语原文

For writers of supernatural horror the perquisite of this deadlock is that it ensures the larger part of humanity will remain in a state of fear, because no one can ever be certain of either his own ontological status or that of gods, demons, alien invaders, and sundry other bugbears. A Buddhist would advise that we forget about whether or not the bogeymen we have invented or divined are real. The big question is this: Are we real?

对于超自然恐怖文学的作家来说，这种僵局的先决条件在于，它确保了大多数人将始终处于恐惧之中，因为没有人能确切知道自己是否真正存在，更无法确定诸如神祇、恶魔、外星入侵者以及各种可怕怪物的本体论地位。佛教徒会建议我们不必纠结于那些我们创造或领悟出的鬼怪是否真实，真正值得思考的问题是：我们自己是否真实？

争议性

点击展开/折叠英语原文

Even though Zapffe's theory is perceptible in our lives, we do not actually have any sense, or any strong sense, that human beings are false and paradoxical beings, at least not yet. And if we did, why would that mean we should go extinct and not continue to live as we have all these years? One would think that neuroscientists and geneticists would have as much reason to head for the cliffs because little by little they have been finding that much of our thought and behavior is attributable to neural wiring and heredity rather than to personal control over the individuals we are, or think we are. But they do not feel suicide to be mandatory just because their laboratory experiments are informing them that human nature may be nothing but puppet nature. Not the slightest tingle of uncanniness or horror runs up and down their spines, only the thrill of discovery. Most of them reproduce and do not believe there is anything questionable in doing so. If they could get a corpse to sit up on an operating table, they would jubilantly exclaim, "It's alive!" And so would we. Who cares that human beings evolved from slimy materials? We can live with that, or most of us can. Actually, we can probably live with any conception of ourselves for quite a while longer. Although we may have phases in which the power of positive thinking peters out, no scientific discoveries or anything else can get to us for long, at least not as far as we can see into the future. As a species with consciousness, we do have our inconveniences. Yet these are of negligible importance compared to what it would be like to feel in our depths that we are nothing but human puppets—things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were. At this time, barely anyone can conceive of this happening—of hitting bottom and finding to our despair that we can never again resurrect our repressions and denials. Not until that day of lost illusions comes, if it ever comes, will we all be competent to conceive of such a thing. But a great many more generations will pass through life before that happens, if it happens.

尽管扎普夫的理论在我们的生活中是可以察觉的，但我们实际上并没有感觉到，或者说没有强烈地感觉到，人类是虚假且自相矛盾的存在，至少目前还没有。如果我们真的有这种感觉，那为什么这就意味着我们应该灭绝，而不是像这些年来一样继续生存下去呢？按理说，神经科学家和遗传学家应该有同样的理由走向绝望，因为他们一点一点地发现，我们的思想和行为大多是由神经线路和遗传决定的，而非我们个人对自身的控制，或者说我们以为的个人控制。然而，他们并不因此觉得自杀是必然的。实验室的研究结果告诉他们，人性可能不过是傀儡的本性，但这并未让他们感到丝毫的不安或恐惧，他们感受到的只是发现的兴奋。大多数人仍然会选择生育，并且不认为这样做有什么值得质疑的。如果他们能让一具尸体在手术台上坐起来，他们会兴奋地喊道：“它活了！”我们也会如此。谁在乎人类是从黏液状的物质进化而来的？我们可以接受这一点，或者至少大多数人可以。事实上，无论我们如何认识自身，我们或许都能继续生存相当长的一段时间。尽管有时积极思考的力量会衰退，但无论是科学发现还是其他事物，都无法长久地击垮我们，至少在我们目前所能预见的未来是如此。作为一个拥有意识的物种，我们确实有自身的困扰。然而，与深刻地意识到自己不过是人形傀儡——一个身份错置的存在，必须带着可怕的认知活下去：他们无法凭借自身努力成功，也不是他们曾以为的自己——相比，这些困扰微不足道。如今，几乎没有人能够设想这样的时刻会到来——跌入绝望的深渊，发现自己再也无法重建过往的压抑与否认。直到幻觉彻底破灭的那一天降临，如果它真的会降临，我们才能真正理解这一切。但在那之前，许多世代仍将继续度过他们的生命，直至这一刻的到来——如果它真的会到来。

译者注：

---