Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe (Tromsø, 1899 - Asker, 1990) was a Norwegian philosopher who also worked as a writer, lawyer and mountaineer. He is best known for a pessimistic and antinatalist view of human existence, and for calling his school of thought Biosophy. His work belongs to the European pessimist tradition, and he drew on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Ibsen. It remains worth reading because it confronts directly the clash between human consciousness and the natural world.

The son of a pharmacist, he studied law, and in 1921 he took up mountaineering around Kristiania. In the 1920s he made a number of first ascents in northern Norway. In 1928 he worked as an interpreter during the rescue of the crew of Umberto Nobile's airship and later joined an expedition searching for Roald Amundsen. After a series of personal and professional setbacks, he moved to Kristiania in 1929. His most widely read text is the essay The Last Messiah (1933), a shorter version of his treatise On the Tragic (1941).

For Zapffe, humans are born with a consciousness that has developed beyond what nature seems to require. Our craving for justification about life and death cannot be satisfied, so tragedy lies in spending our lives trying not to be fully human. To cope with this paradox, he described four defence mechanisms: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation. His concern with human cultivation of nature also led him early on toward a form of conservationism aimed at keeping nature free from human domination.

His influence has been quieter than that of other pessimist thinkers, but his work still attracts readers interested in antinatalism and philosophical pessimism. His humorous mountaineering stories and his photography complete an unconventional legacy, one that reads today as a reflection as ironic as it is severe on the place of human beings in the world.