The Catastrophe of Birth
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[🡕]
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Alyosha is the hero of Dostoevsky’s novel. Ivan ends up going mad, even having dreamed of the devil and realizing, at the end of his journey, that he should accept God, but without being able to do so. The final message of the novel is against the nihilism and rejection represented by Ivan throughout the story. Despite everything, it is much easier to place oneself in nihilistic doubt and the existential hell generated by it than in sacred certainty. It was easier for Dostoevsky, in fact. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus noted that Dostoevsky took three months to write the affirmative and anti-nihilistic chapters of The Brothers Karamazov, while the chapters that favor Ivan’s thinking took only three weeks.
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer makes a similar comment, but about Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. He writes that when it came to describing Hell, Dante must have had plenty of material to work with, since our world is full of suffering and torture, but when it came to describing Heaven and its wonderful pleasures, he must have lacked inspiration, for the same reason. It is not hard to imagine such a scenario: the poet frantically finishing line after line when his task was to describe the worst, while getting stuck when it came to imagining Paradise and the beatific vision of the saints.
It is easier to describe misfortune than blessing, because there is an abundance of one in relation to the other. Some people think that it is not so. However, those who think that it is easier to enumerate positive states than negative ones are quite deluded. There is a limit to the amount of banquets and orgasmic pleasures that we can have. There is a limit to their intensity and diversity, too. But suffering has almost no limits. It is no wonder that the tortures of hell can be described in absurdly diverse and creative ways, while the beatific vision supposedly achieved in Heaven is indescribable, just as it is indescribable to see the face of God in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Only the most vulgar interpretations of religions describe Paradise as an amalgam of worldly pleasures, ruled by wine and orgies with virgins.
Nirvana in Buddhism is also never described in an affirmative way, but rather in a negative way, as in the apophatic theology common to Orthodox and Eastern Christianity. How can we describe something so sublime and without any correlates in the world of becoming? As the rabbi Maimonides rightly stated in the 12th century, when we speak of attributes of the divine, we are talking about something that goes beyond analogy: they are mere rough approximations. […]
In a sense, there are two truths in all of these mystical traditions, as there are in Mahayana Buddhism. Originally, the great second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna considered that there are two truths: an ultimate truth and a conventional, provisional truth. The conventional truth is that which we experience in the empirical world, the world of becoming. The ultimate truth is the total understanding that all phenomena are empty of independent existence. A table, seen by conventional truth, has shape, color, weight, etc, but seen as the ultimate truth, it is empty, since it is made up of parts that are themselves made up of other parts, and all of these parts exist in time, being caused by other things, in an infinite interdependence. Ultimately, all phenomena depend on other phenomena; nothing subsists by itself.
Another interpretation of the doctrine of the two truths asserts that the phenomena of the empirical world that we experience are, in fact, empty, their truths conventional in the sense that they apply to an interconnected existence that does not subsist by itself. But the ultimate truth is the realm of the unconditioned, of the Buddha nature, nirvana. Nirvana subsists by itself and is eternal, stable. According to this interpretation, the two truths would not only have a profound empirical difference, but also an ontological one. This is how mystical traditions regard the undifferentiated. It is beyond everything, beyond all dualities, it is, it subsists by itself, outside of time and space, as the noumenon is to the phenomenon in Kantian philosophy. However, it is possible for us to have an idea of ​​it, unlike Kant’s noumenon.
Schopenhauerian Will, on the other hand, removes all divine or sacred connotations from the undifferentiated, treating it as an infinite and blind source of manifestation that produces endless suffering. While mystics attached to dogmas about the existence of a benevolent and rational God cannot conceive of this undifferentiated as being the real source of pain and evil in the world, Schopenhauerian philosophy basically treats it as Azathoth, the blind and idiotic god of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. In the literary universe created by Lovecraft and continued by other authors, all reality is just a dream of Azathoth. If he ever wakes up, we would all be annihilated at best, or we would go through something a thousand times worse than what we go through in his dream.
I return here to Ivan Karamazov. He tells Alyosha that he would respectfully return the ticket of existence to God, refusing to accept becoming. He is more than right, in my opinion. But in truth, there would be no need whatsoever to return the ticket to God, for there is no God, nor has there ever been one. If there is anything, there is only an undifferentiated and blind ground from which all empirical reality springs as manifestation, as phenomenon, or as representation. There is nothing we can do, we are trapped within this eternal scheme of the Will or whatever you want to call it. It is not possible to return the ticket, not even in prayer, for the Will, the undifferentiated, is not God, not in the sense of a deity to which we can appeal. The undifferentiated is blind and deaf, it is like a monster that seeks only to manifest itself in countless ways.
The bodies torn apart and burned alive mean nothing to the undifferentiated, which is pure manifestation. It does not understand, it does not reason, it does not exist in time and space, and therefore it cannot change, it cannot create a world where only positive states exist, or a universe where sentience is impossible. The order we see is incidental, it is not planned by a divine architect. If it were, we would be perfectly right to call it a demon or a demiurge. The Gnostic myths serve only as a folkloric approximation of the truth, which is even sadder: this existence is all there is. When we die, our individuality dissolves completely. What remains, what is immortal in us, is the Will, the undifferentiated, which merely uses us as disposable condoms in its erotic quest for manifestation and individuation.
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The murderer’s crude will springs from the same Will that, in many of us, manifests as the search for beauty, for the sublime, through artistic creation and appreciation. In this existence in which we are trapped, there can be no sublime without the possibility of there being the vile, the detestable, the grotesque as well. It could be said that the opposite is also true and that we should value positive states, ignoring or even accepting and incorporating negative states in a kind of courageous existential position. It is true that this position is much more honest than the naive positions of most people, who treat existence as a garden of earthly delights blessed by a wonderful and good God. However, despite the honesty, I ultimately disagree with the courageous position.
This courageous position has in Nietzsche one of its main defenders. How is it that wrote? If a demon visited us during the night and told us that we live the same life over and over, forever, in the same way, with the same pain, we shouldn’t despair, but embrace the demon and tell him that we are happy, because the right thing to do is to say yes to life, even with all the pain? Despite his honesty regarding the existence of suffering, I still side with Schopenhauer, for whom, if we could talk to the dead in their tombs and ask them if they would like to live again, the vast majority would say no. In fact, I think that even Nietzsche would accept this, since he himself admitted that not everyone has the courage to say yes to life. However, I still disagree with Nietzsche. The lack of courage here is not a character flaw, but a manifestation of basic prudence.
And this way of thinking is not a cowardly and hateful surrender to death. Those who think like this do not hate life, nor run towards death, but rather flee from the catastrophe of birth, as Cioran described. According to him, we are like castaways trapped on a mischievous continent and we try to forget as much as possible the greatest of all catastrophes, the one that brought us into the world. We do not hate life, on the contrary, we love it, as Cabrera wrote well. But we understand that, in the end, this is a love that is not reciprocated, not really. Life, or rather, sentient existence takes everything from us, until there is nothing left. At least there is the consolation that it ends and does not extend into eternal withering. We do indeed wither, all of us, until we reach a limit at which we can no longer bear it and succumb.
Genocides, military occupations and imperial invasions are televised, or rather, they appear on our social media timelines, and we wonder how we got here and what future we intend to build. The cacophony produced by the countless dissenting voices is maddening. Everyone sells a wonderful tomorrow, as long as we follow them to the letter. Internet idealists do not realize that the era of revolutions is over. Only a few noisy, clueless people still believe in the possibility of a universal brotherhood of men imposed on the basis of tanks sent by some mustachioed dictator. Just as stupid, those nostalgic for a glorious and stratified past do not understand that the vast majority of them would continue to be serfs, even if we could return to their beloved medieval times.
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by Fernando Olszewski