Nature's Unluckiest Children

Still life with skull, by Philippe de Champaigne.

Imagine physical and chemical processes unfolding over billions of years, finally producing the first protocells capable of replicating and diversifying over time. For a few billion years, life on our planet was unicellular and microscopic. Multicellular beings, such as plants, fungi and animals, are a late addition to the biosphere, having emerged only in the last 600 million years. Since then, the tree of life has produced a multitude of beings equipped with increasingly complex sensory apparatuses, and of these, some feel discomfort, ill health and injuries through organs that translate these stimuli as pain: the unlucky members of the animal kingdom.

Nature has produced countless creatures that have undergone stimuli that are harmful to their health, only to leave descendants and die, in a chain that stretches over several geological eras. Here and there, small genetic variations, which are normally deleterious to organisms, have produced new species that have survived the pressures of natural selection and passed on their successful traits to future generations. The first plants, the first fungi, and the first animals emerged, and they have diversified more and more. In the animal kingdom, strange beings that became extinct hundreds of millions of years ago gave rise to the invertebrate and vertebrate animals that exist today.

And it was in animals that things got really dark. With their varied nervous systems, certain harmful signals began to be interpreted as pain. Pain is an evolutionary trait that, in aggregate, allows the survival of the species. By avoiding pain, the animal has a better chance of surviving and reproducing. But let's face it, the perception of harm through pain is a detestable natural innovation. And the more complex it is, the greater the ability of the animal to feel and express its pain. While even single-celled beings are capable of responding and, depending on the case, moving away from harmful stimuli, and while plants also have mechanisms for perceiving certain stimuli that threaten their health, it is in animals that the perception of harmful stimuli becomes pain. This perception of pain through a nervous system is called nociception.

The more complex a species' nervous system is, the greater the apparent depth of physical pain to which an individual of that species is subjected. But it doesn't stop there. The more developed the nervous system is, the more susceptible the animal will be to pain that goes beyond physical pain. Not only will injuries caused by external agents and diseases negatively affect the animal, but also internal states produced by the way the animal perceives and understands the world around it. The greater the animal's cognitive capacity, the more able it is to absorb the world, the more its capacity for mental pain is enhanced.

We humans are not the only animals who can suffer psychologically. We are not the only animals who experience joy and happiness. However, of all the animal species alive on the face of the Earth today, we are by far the most cognitively gifted. We can ponder everything, even if we do not arrive at an answer or conclusion. We are unfortunate enough to be able to reflect on the world and on ourselves, including our beginnings and our ends. We can even reflect on all the suffering that all sentient creatures have endured throughout natural history. Having pondered natural selection and the meaninglessness of animal suffering throughout his life, Charles Darwin wrote the following in his Autobiography:

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?

This resembles the passage from the second volume of The World as Will and Representation in which Schopenhauer writes about the observations of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, a German physician, geologist and botanist from the first half of the 19th century:

Junghuhn relates that in Java he saw an immense field entirely covered with skeletons, and took it to be a battle-field. However, they were nothing but skeletons of large turtles five feet long, three feet broad, and of equal height. These turtles come this way from the sea, in order to lay their eggs, and are then seized by wild dogs; with their united strength, these dogs lay them on their backs, tear open their lower armour, the small scales of the belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year in year out. For this, then, are these turtles born. For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is the point of this whole scene of horror? The only answer is that the will-to-live thus objectifies itself.

It is worth remembering that Schopenhauer preceded Darwin by a few decades and did not live to see the revolution caused by his discoveries. However, for men who saw the world without the lenses of religious conformism or the philosophical-political ideals of the time, reality was quite clear: nature has produced an ocean of sentient beings who are incessantly subjected to a procession of pain in exchange for nothing. Man fits into this picture in the worst way: he can understand what is happening. This, of course, makes him rebel and seek some kind of illusion or, at most, the heroic acceptance of his condition. In The Fall into Time, Cioran writes:

Once man, separated from Creator and creation alike, became individual—in other words, fracture and fissure in Being—and once he learned, assuming his name to the point of provocation, that he was mortal, his pride was thereby magnified, no less than his confusion [...] No longer reconciled to a denouement once fiercely desired, he turns at last, and longingly, to the animals, his former companions: all, vile and noble alike, accept their fate, enjoy it or resign themselves to it; none has followed his example or imitated his rebellion. The plants, more than the beasts, rejoice to have been created: the very nettle still flourishes within God; only man suffocates there, and is it not this choking sensation which led him to stand apart from the rest of creation, a consenting outcast, a voluntary reject? All other living beings, by the very fact that they are identical with their condition, have a certain superiority to him. And it is when he envies them, when he longs for their impersonal glory, that man understands the gravity of his case.

We are nature’s unluckiest children because we know what is happening, we understand that the whole process that brought us here is futile, pointless. In the grand scheme of things, we are food for worms and nothing more. We rebel against this fate, but it is no use. We envy other animals not because nature is beautiful and harmonious, it is not. Our envy arises from seeing them ignorant of the whole. They are part of the whole. Even though they suffer horribly, they do not understand this, they do not change. The turtles that Schopenhauer wrote about do not have the faculty of understanding. Natural selection did not shape them to be able to do this, unlike us and our immediate ancestors. That is why they mastered fire, began to make stone tools and ended up inventing the wheel. But the same natural advantage that gave us the chance to master nature made at least some of us see the futility of it all.

What makes us special compared to other creatures capable of feeling? Nothing. We are losers after all. The condition of other animals, however, should not be romanticized. They are our brothers, and therefore, they are always just a few steps away from being shaped over the ages by nature to suffer as intensely as we do. They already suffer, and a lot. Their only advantage is that they do not have the profound knowledge of their suffering and mortality — although some other animals are also subject to sadness and recognize death, they are not plunged into an abyss of understanding as we are. In the same work, The Fall into Time, Cioran writes about how close we are to our brothers and what sets us apart from them:

Without pain, as the author of Notes from Underground saw so well, there would not be consciousness. And pain, which affects all the living, is the sole indication which permits us to suppose that consciousness is not the privilege of man. Inflict some torture upon an animal, consider the expression of his eyes, and you will perceive a flash which projects the creature, for an instant, above his condition. Whatever animal it is, once it suffers it takes a step toward us, it strives to join us. And it is impossible, while its affliction lasts, to deny it a degree, however minimal, of consciousness.

Consciousness is not lucidity. Lucidity, man's monopoly, represents the conclusion of the severance process between the mind and the world; it is necessarily consciousness of consciousness, and if we distinguish ourselves from the animals, it is lucidity alone which must receive the credit or the blame.

Lucidity is the consciousness of consciousness, the total separation between cognition and the rest of the universe. It reflects the walking paradox that we are: beings born of the cosmos, but who do not see themselves as part of it. We are orphans of something, exiled from somewhere. We understand our own understanding and, therefore, there is a split between man and animals, because our consciousness are no longer one with the whole. They individuate themselves, encapsulating themselves. A true master trick forged by natural pressure. There is no point in trying to imagine ourselves as part of this whole. We are not. And when we try, we are chased away by the other animals. Even indigenous societies, which many innocently assume to be in perfect balance and to belong to some natural state, already represent a complete break with the whole of nature. But it is not their fault, nor ours. It is the fault of the evolutionary chance that created us.

Although not everyone stops to question the whole, although many go about their days as if they were robots, after a while, it is inevitable that people will emerge who think about their lives, about life in general, about existence and mortality. Death is the real cause of philosophical astonishment, according to Schopenhauer. It is true. But death is not only the muse of philosophy. It, along with suffering and the obvious banality of life, is also at the root of the lies we tell ourselves in order to get through the day. It is also the muse of our arts. The most sublime work of art, within this context, may be a mere distraction, but I argue that it is more than that: it is the human trying to transcend its condition, sublimating the now with the aim of touching the eternal, the unconditioned, without the help of charlatan illusionists and God-botherers.

Art, religion, philosophy, civilization and technology were invented by humanity to escape its abject natural condition. The myth of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden is quite appropriate, as there is a clear rupture between life and knowledge. We have embarked on a quest for knowledge and have paid dearly for it to this day. We will never stop paying. We have reached a perfect understanding of what life is: life is a natural phenomenon that arose due to specific chemical conditions, a condition that gave birth to beings that replicate, generate descendants and change over time, pressured by the environment that extinguishes some groups while temporarily rewarding others. There is no reason for this whole mechanism. It simply happens. Our species, in order to survive, depends on the ability to judge, albeit implicitly. Other species do too, but in a more rudimentary, less sophisticated way. However, every day, most of us judge life positively.

Positive judgment in the face of endless adversity is ingrained in us. It is to be expected. If it were not, we would not have been so successful as a species. Fortunately, our great misfortune in understanding the futility of everything does not affect everyone more fully. While the entire human race feels that there is something wrong with its existence—for if it did not, it would not see the need to have faith in some supernatural or earthly ideal—only a select group of the naturally cursed reject the mantra that life is beautiful. We see beauty, yes, but we perceive the insidious mechanism that lies behind the curtains, controlling everything, like a conspiracy. We view even beauty with suspicion, and rightly so. We envy animals out of ignorance and not because we romanticize them, something that is pathologized as depression by lovers of life and lucidity.

Those who are deluded and diagnose us as mentally ill often ask: “How can we look at the forest and the ocean and not see the beauty of creation?” The answer is easy: because the forest and the ocean are factories of death that would make the administrators of the worst extermination camp of the 20th century envious. They are beautiful, yes, but the implications of this beauty are deeper than affirmative aesthetic analysis can comprehend.

Animals are unlucky to mechanically experience the horror of the objectification of the Will-to-live, and we are doubly unlucky to experience the same horror and know it. What shocks us is the prison of flesh that surrounds us. But when we stop to look closely, there is only flesh, nothing else. There is no soul or metaphysical essence trapped inside this body. We are exiles, yes, but without a homeland to return to. It is horrifying. We are lucky, at least, to know that the nightmare is coming to an end, both for us as individuals and for everyone else, collectively. Even luckier are those species that have already become extinct.

by Fernando Olszewski