A Not So Perfect Future

A Zapffean Look at Decision

We live and we make decisions. Most of us rarely stop to think whether or not the decisions, purchases, costs, and risks that we undertake may not actually be as perfect as we think they are. There are a multitude of psychological fallacies between our precious egos and the truth and even regarding the most minor decision we routinely delude ourselves in relation to the matter at hand. In short, we like to think that everything we do and will do is just absolutely perfect. It is the best of the best and couldn’t be otherwise for the fact that we’ve done it. If it wasn’t the best possible option then we wouldn’t have done it, ergo…

However, as some will understand, perfection is impossible. And no, it’s not impossible in the modern sense wherein if only we had enough wealth then it could be achieved. No, perfection is quite literally not a state of being. It can’t be. People have been trying to make this clear to us ever since Zeno and his paradoxes. Such paradoxes, I might add, have fallen headfirst into the trap of materialism and found themselves being squandered into the dustbin of banal, quantified logic games, as opposed to an investigation into their inherent philosophically analogous questioning. (Or, when we reach X, the process of reaching X means it is no longer X). Before undertaking any investigation perfection should be the first ideal to be thrown out and not even considered. If we consider perfection an actual possibility prior to any venture then we have already defined the point unto which such a venture will stop, and once something has stopped it is nothing but prey for entropy. Such an approach has quickly become my personal approach for philosophy and reading in general.

See, after so much time spent reading countless philosophical texts from a wide array of (often overlooked) thinkers and theorists, I’ve come to find myself on the lookout for the particular meta-textual idea in question, namely, perfection. As soon as I get a sense that a philosopher thinks they’ve ‘figured it out’ and that anything after their greatness is a mere footnote to an absolute conclusion, I find it difficult not to throw all their work in the trash. Of course, I don’t, because there are always truths to be found everywhere and anywhere, but I’ve yet to find a single place that contains Truth itself, especially in the form of a quantified system. Such a ‘place’, I might add, cannot exist for the fact of its determinate reality - a place, a book, a mind, a history, a culture, a religion is (by its nature as determined) already over in terms of seeking. The Truth doesn’t stand still, and any attempt to believe such shall result in the ever-visible - yet futile - past-time of masses upon masses of people desperately trying to crawl backward in time, back towards that temporal allotment wherein the ‘thing’ in question once stood.

But this idea isn’t only found within le grand obscurantist texts of academic philosophy, but, in some horrid display of the Hermeticist mantra of ‘As Above, So Below’ gone awry, is found everywhere. From our loftiest ideals of planetary dominance, down to our casual coffee machine purchases, everything of modern human life finds itself veiled under the false auspices of perfection/conclusion/completeness/finished. Whatever it is, we humans love a cold, hard stop. It makes us feel like we’re in control. Completeness allows full relation. Once something is done we can begin the process of relating it to everything and anything as a means to (quantifiably) understand it.

To open us this idea I want to draw in a taxonomy of meaning proposed by the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. Many will know of Zapffe primarily from his short masterpiece The Last Messiah. Very little of Zapffe’s work has been translated into English, and so very few people realize just how much of a systematic and complicated philosopher Zapffe was. With this said, I don’t read Norwegian, and am very much drawing my knowledge from Silviya Serafimova’s book In Search
of the “Universe’s Helpless Captive”. A Glimpse to Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Philosophical Heritage, a 500+ page overview of the complexities of Zapffes thought. With this out of the way, let’s take a look at how Zapffe lays a foundation for this notion of perfection, relying here on two Zapffean taxonomies - The ‘Four Interest Fronts’ and the ‘Four Fixations’.

For Zapffe there are four interest fronts - biological, social, autotelic, and metaphysical - which inherently relate to man’s position as an ‘interest bearer’, that is someone who is aware of their own interests, and, by proxy, has an existential relationship with meaning. The biological, social, and metaphysical interest fronts are self-explanatory, with autotelic simply standing in for the apt anthropocentric habit of developing meaning for its own sake. Such ‘fronts’ are our plans of mediated interaction between ourselves and the environment. As such - and roughly put - any meaning that is derived from a singular interest front is itself constructing a form of artificial existential limitation, wherein the projected meaningful outcome does in fact make sense and may even appear complete, but it does so from an inherently incomplete form of mediation. Humans have a range of multi-frontal interests inclusive of all four interest fronts (combined and interconnected), thus making the journey towards both meaning and possible perfection more complicated.

To give a contemporary example of the aforementioned single-front fallacy, we need only look at the work of Bryan Johnson, the man who seeks to measure and maximally reverse the quantified biological age of over 70 of his own organs and has thus far resulted in an epigenetic age reversal of 5.1 years [wiki]. Yet we can already see that in a Zapffean sense, Johnson’s project is entirely caught up within a single interest front. As soon as questions regarding his project are asked outside of the scope of the strictly biological Johnson appears to have few answers. For instance, what are the social and existential ripples that such a project may cause? If Johnson is successful and we all live to be over 120, have the social factors (marriage being a clear one) even been addressed? Johnson has, idealistically, already reached perfection. But via a Zapffean analysis, we can already see that such perfection only exists due to its inherent existentially artificial limitation.

This brings me to the second Zapffean taxonomy of the ‘Four Fixations’, one which readers of Zapffe’s The Last Messiah will be familiar with. These fixations are:

Isolation - "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling".

Anchoring - "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness"^. The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal to consistently focus their attention on. Zapffe also applied the anchoring principle to society and stated that "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future" are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments.

Distraction - "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions". Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself.

Sublimation - the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation.

One can already see conceptual overlaps and connections between the fronts and the fixations, for all are forms of avoidance via affirmation as opposed to negation. This is to say that stereotypically we understand avoidance, obfuscation, and/or repression to be an act of negation whereby a certain idea or concept is consciously (or often unconsciously) shoved away via some form of self-justification. Zapffe’s two taxonomies, however, allow us to see that the vacuum created by new information - information that holds the possibility of upsetting one’s apple cart of perfection - is not simply whisked away, but is in fact quickly overwritten by the very idea it seeks to question. In short, we consistently double-down on the perfection we find most agreeable. Be it Nation, State, God, Religion, Book, Philosophy, Law, Community, Family, or Morality, if something seeks to destabilize and possibily eradicate the idea/system we’ve come to understand as perfect, ironically, we lean back upon that perfection to bolster it against its own fraility. Tautologically speaking, any attack against our subjective perfection is fought of as folly via our understanding of perfection as perfection - for if it is perfection, as we believe it to be, then any attack is already complete nonsense. And yet, if Eden were truly perfect there would have been no need for anything other than what was given, but of the fruit they did eat.

Where then do we go from here? Is not everything thwart with imperfection? Yes and no. On the one hand, there is a difference between single-front/fixation and multi-front/fixation apprehensions of one’s enviroment. Yet simultaneously, each apprehension is just that, a form of frontal-fixated mediation that can never truly get to the heart of the matter, can never truly get to Truth. It is for this reason that within Zapffe’s thought we find a strange form of absurd nihilistic usurpation that arrives not from the side of man, but from the side of nihilism itself. (This is turn leads to the clarification that Zapffe is not a nihilist. For there is meaning and meaning-seeking within the Zapffean philosophical perspective, it is only that the meaning we seek can never be afforded to us by the environment, hence, a tension.)

For when we arrive at truth and/or perfection, we come to understand that such a position - with its defined stasis - can itself never be perfect for the fact of its severed position amidst an ever-changing world. The truth is never still and so all perfection is impossible. For Zapffe, then, all meaning is meaningless. As we come to find meaning (perfection) we equally come to find its inherent non-meaning in relation to the ongoing flux of existential enquiry.

Man approaches meaning only to find a veiled meaninglessness that quickly disappears. At this juncture, man has two options:

1. Retreat to one of/combination of the fronts/fixations

2. Continue on his journey towards truth/meaning with the knowledge that each stepping stone shall be the same.

Man’s fate is either to lie to himself or to continue upon a ladder of recursive-non-ascent.

Within all this we find much that is practical - and let it be known that Zapffe is a highly practical thinker. For to get caught up within any singular is always a lie for the fact of its capture. Whenever one hears this book, that film, this -ism or -ology, one should be immediately suspicious. If someone has figured it all out, in truth all they have done is stood still and indexed their surroundings all whilst time and life continues on without them. To stand still is, of course, very comforting. There is, perhaps, a need to stand still once in a while and get ones bearings. But there is nothing more tiresome - if not loathesome - than those and that which refuses to move due to its own hubris. The aging academic who just so happened to find the correct philosopher to hang their hat on 50 years ago and can now somehow relate everything from cosmology to a ham sandwich to their corpus. The individual who feeds everything through the anchoring lens of nationalism (despite the fact nations no longer exist); the community whose happiness and contentment relies on both a physical and ideological isolation (therein accepting the Other as only hostile); the consumer who, despite a thousand previous purchases brought forth from the same invisible impetus, believes this thing will be the one to fill the lack; the sovereign intellectual who sublimates their angst via appreciation of the esoteric and hidden, thereby anchoring themselves to an isolated community that appears elite, but in truth is only lost in a more complex way.

And yet, meaning may be inherently meaningless due to its definition as captured, but the process unto which discovery of and in-between meanings is always under way. What Serafimova defines as ‘Process Ontology’ is this process unto which the tension between meaning’s inherent meaninglessness is brought to the fore as a signpost onwards, sidewards, upwards into the mountain of non-perfection. The ever recurring ascent towards the question of essence. But this is not a piece on what to do, for in telling others what to do something has been defined, and even in this projection into an unknown future it adheres to a limitation.