The Last Messiah - Simplified Translation – Peter Wessel Zapffe

[Ismael Hegazy]

Dedication : To the soul of Abdel Rahman Badawi (1917 - 2002) , the late Egyptian philosopher who was a major reason for the interest and reading of many people in the Arab world for Western and Eastern philosophies.

Preface : To whom it may concern , I present this simplified English translation of the essay "The Last Messiah" to all the lovers of Philosophy and Anthropology around the world , especially to the speakers of English as a second language.

When I was completing this translation , I took into account that I must simplify - as possible - all the words and expressions that some may find ambiguous or might be misunderstood , and I did that - as possible - without making any distortion of the meaning or the context.

I do not forget to express my thanks and respect to Professor Gisle R. Tangenes , for his translation of the original essay from the Dano-Norwegian language , without which there would not have been an Arabic translation of the essay (which was Gratefully done by Karim Saad and Ahmed Qayati) , and I would not have been able to make this simplified translation without his original translation.

And this essay (published in 1933) written by the Norwegian philosopher
Peter W. Zapffe (1899-1990) , is no less wonderful and important than the novel "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan" which was written by the Arab philosopher
Ibn Tufayl (1110-1185).

And because philosophy and science in general were transferred interchangeably from the ancient Greeks to the Arabs , then from the Arabs to the Europeans in the Middle Ages , and finally from the Europeans in the Renaissance era and the modern era to all peoples of the world ; and since languages are the means of that philosophical and scientific exchange , therefore I urge the speakers of English as a second language - if they have the Time and Ability - to translate this simplified English translation into their own native languages.

– Ismael Hegazy
(January 2023)

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One night in long bygone times , a man woke up and saw himself.
He saw that he was naked under cosmos , homeless inside his own body.
All things vanished before his eyes , wonder above wonder , and horror above horror , unfolded in his mind.
Then a woman also woke up and said : "It's time to go out and hunt". He took his bow and arrow , the fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand , and went outside beneath the stars.

But when the animals came to their waterholes - as he expected them to do as usual - he no longer felt the bound of tiger in his blood , but a great song of the brotherhood of suffering among all living things.

In that day he did not return with a prey , and when they found him by the rising of the next new moon , he was sitting dead at the waterhole.

II

Whatever happened? A breach in the depth of the unity of life , a biological paradox , an outrageous thing , an absurd event , a catastrophic exaggeration.

Life had overshot its target , blasting itself. It over-armed one species with a great anxious soul , but as great this soul is , it is a disaster on his peace of mind. Its weapon is like a sword without a hilt , a two-edged blade that cuts through everything , but whoever uses it , he must hold the blade and point it at himself.

Despite his new eyes , man remained rooted in matter , his soul mixed with it and submitted to its blind laws ; but he was able to see matter as something foreign to him , to compare himself with all phenomena , to see through his vital processes and define them.

He comes to nature as uninvited guest , in vain stretching out his arms to beg conciliation with his maker : nature no longer cares , it performed a miracle with man , but after that it no longer knows him. He lost his right to reside in the universe , he has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and was expelled from Paradise. He is great in his near world , but he curses his greatness because he bought it with the harmony of his soul , his innocence , and his inner peace in life's embrace.

He and his visions stand there questioning and fearing , betrayed by the universe. The animal also knew fear , during thunderstorms and under the claws of lion ; but man has become afraid of life itself — of his very being , in fact.

Life — which was for the animal to feel the power play , the heat , the games , the pursuit and the hunger , and then finally bend to the law of course.

Suffering is limited to animals ; but for man , suffering perforates in him a fear of the world and a despair of life.

Even as the child begins its journey in the river of life , the roar of the waterfall of death rise highly above the valley , and it keeps getting closer , crying , crying in delight.

Man looks at the earth and sees it breathing like a giant lung : whenever it exhales , life flows joyfully from all its pores and reaches the sky , but when it inhales , the groan of rupture runs through the masses of beings , and corpses fall to the ground like rain-drops.

He not only saw his end , the graves turned before his eyes , and he heard the wailing of bygone eras among the ruins , and the dreams of mothers that had failed by the earth.

The future lifted its curtain to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition , a senseless waste of organic matter. The suffering of billions of people finds its way to him through the gate of sympathy , and from everything that happens a laughter emerges mocking the demand for justice , his most urgent principle.

He sees himself emerging from his mother's womb , raising his hand in the air , and there are five branches on it : "Where did this cursed number five come from , and what is its relationship to my soul?"

He can no longer see himself clearly - he touches his own body in full horror : "This is you and this is the limit of your extension". He carries food in him : "Yesterday , it was an animal grazing around , Now I have eaten it and made it a part of me ; What is I and what is not me?"

All things are connected in a chain of causes and effects , and whenever he wanted to take hold of something , it vanished before his eyes.

Soon he sees mechanics even in what seems to be whole and dear to him , in the smile of his beloved , there are other smiles too , a torn shoe with toes sticking out.

Ultimately , the attributes of everything are only his attributes himself. Nothing exists without him , every line returns to point to him , the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice.

He is jumping and screaming as he wants to vomit his ego / self and his impure food on the ground. He feels the coming of madness and wants to die , before losing even such ability to do so.

But as he stands on the brink of death , he also realizes its nature , and the cosmic significance of the next step. His creative imagination builds new , frightening outlooks behind the curtain of death , and he sees that even there , there is no safe refuge.

Now he can distinguish the outlines of his biological and cosmic conditions : He is the universe's helpless captive , locked up to fall into unknown possibilities.

From this moment on , he is in a state of restless panic.

The "feeling of cosmic panic" is a central feeling to every human mind. For it really seems that death is the destiny of the human race , since any effective method of preserving and sustaining life is unlikely to be found , when one has exhausted all his attention and energy in enduring or avoiding the disastrous tension within him.

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life due to over-evolving of one ability is not confined to the human species. There is - for example - a certain type of deer in the ancient times that became extinct because they had acquired a very heavy antlers.

The mutations must be considered blind , they evolve and emerge and are thrown away , without any contact of interest with their environment.

In cases of depression , we can see the mind in the image of this antler , in all its fantastic splendor , knocking its bearer to the ground.

III

Why - then - has not mankind long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only few people die because they fail to endure the strain of life because consciousness gives them more than they can bear?

Cultural history , as well as , our observation of ourselves and others , allow the following answer : Most humans learn to save themselves by artificial ways that limit the content of their consciousness.

If the giant deer could break the tips of its antlers every once in a while , it might have been able to survive longer ; Yet it would suffer from fever and constant pain , because in reality it will live as a traitor to its central idea , to the essence of its peculiarity ; It was designed by the hand of creation to be the "antler bearer" in the wilderness world.

What it gained in continued existence , it will lose in significance , in the greatness of life , in other words it will be a continued existence without hope , marching not upward to self-affirmation , but forward in an endless chain of ruins , a race that destroys itself against the sacred will of blood.

The correlation between meaning and misery , in the case of both the giant deer and the human , is the tragic paradox of life. In fidelity to its self-assertion and its species , the last Irish deer (Cervus Giganteus) bore the badge of glory it had inherited from its ancestors to the end.

As for the human , he saves himself and continues to survive.

To extend a common meaning , he makes a more or less self-conscious repression of the damaging surplus of consciousness.

This process is almost constant throughout our waking and active hours , and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.

Psychiatry is even based on the assumption that what is "healthy" and appropriate for life is the same as the highest of personal achievement.

[ Depression , "fear of life" , refusal to eat , etc.. ] , are usually treated as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter.

But , often these phenomena are messages from a very deep and very direct sense of life , it is the bitter fruits of the geniality of thought or feeling , which is the root of anti-life tendencies.

They are not the expression of a sick soul , but they are the means of protection when they fail , or when one rejects them because they are - sincerely - seen as a betrayal of the ego's highest potential.

All the life that we see before our eyes today is enmeshed , from its deepest depths to its most apparent manifestations , with individual and social repression mechanisms that we can observe even in the most accurate forms of daily life.

Although it takes many and varied forms , it seems that we can distinguish at least four main forms , which naturally appear in all possible combinations : isolation , anchoring , distraction , and sublimation.

And what I mean by isolation here is the full arbitrary expulsion of all disturbing and destructive thoughts and feelings that arise in consciousness. (Albert Engström says : "One should not think , it is a disturbing thing"). There is a stark , almost brutal example of this among some physicians , who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. And it can also descend into pure barbarism , as among petty thugs and medical students , when they eradicate the tragic side of life by violent means (playing football with corpses heads , and so on).

In everyday interaction , isolation appears in mutual silence as a general agreement : beginning with the children , we avoid directly and unnecessarily frightening them of the life they have just begun , but let them retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return , children do not disturb adults with untimely reminders of sex , toilet , or death.

Among adults there are rules of "tact" , which is the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.

As for the anchoring mechanism , it works since early childhood : the child sees parents , home , and the street as natural axioms , and this gives him a sense of security. This circuit is the first - and perhaps the happiest - protection against the universe that we ever get to know in life , which also undoubtedly explains the much debated "childish bonding" , and the question of whether it is sexual or not is unimportant here.

When the child later discovers that these fixed points are "random" and "ephemeral" like any others , he has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and immediately looks around for something else to lean on or cling to (looks around for another anchoring) : "In Autumn , I will attend middle school" , If this substitution somehow fails , the crisis may take a fatal course , or what I call an anchoring spasm will occur : when a person clings to dead values , trying as hard as he can to conceal from himself and others the fact that they are no longer appropriate , this person is spiritually insolvent. This results in constant feelings of insecurity , "feelings of inferiority" , over-compensation , and anxiety. And as long as this state has taken certain forms , then psychoanalysis takes it as a subject of treatment , which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.

Anchoring may be described as a fixation of points within , or a construction of walls around the flaming liquid of consciousness.

Although it usually happens unconsciously , it can also happen quite consciously (one "adopts a goal"). Society looks at its useful anchorings with sympathy , and sanctifies those who "'sacrificed themselves completely" for the sake of their anchorings (firm/cause) ; they have established a great fort against the dissolution of life , and other people - by inspiration - are gaining from their strength.

It is also found - brutally and deliberately - among "immoral" men : ("One should marry in the proper time , and then the constraints will come of themselves"). This is how a person establishes a necessity in his life , exposing himself to an obvious evil from his point of view , but it is a peace of mind , a high-walled container that surrounds some rationality in a life that keeps growing increasingly crude.

As an example , Henrik Ibsen presents two flowering cases ("living lies") ,
Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik [in The Wild Duck Play] , there is no difference between their anchoring and the pillars of society except that the former is practically and economically unproductive.

Any culture is a large and complex system of anchorings , built on the foundations of basic cultural ideas. The average person has no problem with collective plinths , the personality is to build for himself. And the "person of character" has finished his construction , more or less grounded on the inherited basic collective foundations (God , the Church , the State , morality , fate , the law of life , the people , the future).

The closer a structural carrying element is to the foundation plinths , the more perilous it is to approach it. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of criminal laws and the threat of persecution (inquisition , censorship , the Conservative approach to life).

The solidity of each element depends either on its superstitious nature is not yet clear , or else on its being considered necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools , which even atheists support , because they don't know any other way to teach children about Social ways of response.

Whenever people become aware of the superstitious character or the uselessness of the elements , they will strive to replace them with new ones ("the limited duration of truths") – and hence all the spiritual and cultural unrest which , along with economic competition , form the dynamic content of world history.

The pursuit of material goods (power or influence etc..) is not motivated by the direct pleasures provided by wealth : for no one can sit on more than one chair nor eat more than his energy ; Rather , the value of wealth to life consists in the rich opportunities of anchoring and distraction it provides to its owner.

For both individual and social anchorings , it is granted that when one of the elements collapses , a crisis occurs , its intensity increases as this element approaches the basic foundations.

And within our inner circles , which are protected by the outer walls , these crises occur daily and almost without pain (disappointments) ; Even a playing with anchoring values in this range is (wit – wittiness , normal talk , alcohol). But it happens during such playing that someone says something unintentionally that penetrates directly into the depth , and the scene turns from elation to gloom , and the horror of existence stares us in the eye , and we realize in a dreadful gush that our minds like spiders , are dangling in flimsy threads of their own spinning , and that a hell is lurking underneath.

The deep plinths are rarely replaced without major social spasms and the risk of slipping into complete dissolution (calls for reformation and revolution). During those times , individuals increasingly rely on their own ways of anchoring , and cases of inability to do so increase , therefore cases of depression , extremism , and suicide appear (German officers after the war and Chinese students after the revolution).

Another drawback of the system is that the different fronts of danger require very different plinths. And when a logical superstructure is built upon each plinth , conflicts ignite below it between patterns of feeling and thought that cannot be reconciled.

Then despair can enter through the cracks. In these cases , the person may become obsessed with destructive joy , destroying the entire artificial structure of his life with rapturous horror as he sweeps it away to start over. Horror arises from the loss of all protective values , and ecstasy arises from his intense harmony and unity at that moment with the deepest secret of our nature , the vital defect , the perpetual propensity towards death.

We love our anchorings because they save us , but we also hate them because they limit our sense of freedom. Whenever we have power , we enjoy to bury a dead value in a majestic funeral. Here material things acquire a symbolic meaning (the radical approach to life).

And when a person gets rid of his visible anchorings , and nothing remains inside him except the unconscious anchorings , then he calls himself a liberated personality.

One of the very popular methods of protection is distraction. One distracts his attention from the dangerous impulses within him with an endless stream of enthralling impressions.


This is normal even in the childhood years. Without distraction , the child is also insufferable to itself : "Mom , what shall I do now?".
A little English girl visiting
her Norwegian aunts comes out of her room and says: "Now what shall we do?" , The nannies respond brilliantly : "Look , a little dog! / Look , they're painting the palace!". The phenomenon is too clear to need more clarification.

Distraction - for example - is the "high society’s" tactic for living. It's like a flying machine , made of heavy material , but it has a principle that makes it fly when applied. It must remain in perpetual motion , for the air cannot carry it for long. The pilot may sleep and rest as usual , but as soon as the engine fails , the crisis becomes severe.

This tactic is often quite conscious ; And despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes , like a sudden fit of crying. And when all options for distraction have been exhausted , depression sets in , from mild apathy to fatal depression.

Women , being generally Less likely to be possessed by cognition / thinking , and therefore more secure in their living than men , they (women) preferably use distraction.

A large part of the disadvantages of imprisonment is the deprivation of most options for distraction. And because of the badness of other means of salvation as well , the prisoner will always find himself on the brink of despair. What he does then to escape from the last stage rises from the principle of vitality itself. (1)

It is in those moments that he experiences his soul within the universe , and his only motive for this is his unbearable condition.

Pure examples of panic from life are probably rare , because the protection mechanisms are repeated , automatic , and to some extent never switched off.
But even the adjacent frontiers bear the mark of death , and life there is strenuous and almost unbearable. Death always appears as an escape , and one ignores the possibilities of an afterlife ; and because the way we experience death depends in part on how we feel it and view it , it can be somewhat of an acceptable solution.

And if , at the time of death , one could act as if one was taking a pose (such as reciting a poem or making a certain gesture , in order to "die standing up" , that is , as a final anchoring or as a final distraction (as in the death scene of Mother Aase) , that ending is not the worst of all.

The press , which is here serving as a concealment mechanism , never fails to find causes which do not arouse alarm behind phenomena : "It is believed that the recent fall in the prices of wheat…"

When a human commits suicide due to depression , this is a "natural death" due to spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of "saving" the suicidal person is based on an outrageous misunderstanding of the nature of existence.

Only a limited part of humanity is satisfied with some "'changes" , whether in work , social life or entertainment. The cultured person needs connections , lines , progress in changes.

Nothing limited is enough in the long term , one is always moving , acquiring knowledge , advancing at work. This phenomenon is known as "yearning" or "aspiration for the transcendent" ; Whenever one goal is achieved , the yearning is directed to another goal ; Hence , the goal is not its object , but rather the act of reaching it itself , the inclination and not the highest point , in the curve representing one’s life.

The promotion from soldier to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the promotion from colonel to general. This important psychological law destroys any possibility of "progressive optimism".

The human yearning is not merely a "striving towards" but equally an "escape from" ; and if we use the word in a religious sense , only the latter description fits.

In this life , no one knows exactly what he is "yearning" for , but one is clearly aware of what he is "fleeing" from , namely the earthly valley of tears , the unbearable human condition.

If the awareness of this predicament is in the deepest layer of the soul - as I have just indicated - then we will also understand why religious yearning - as an experience and feeling - is seen as something that cannot be renounced.

But the hope that its subject to be embodied in a divine image – which is a happy prospect in itself - arises under these considerations from a truly melancholic desire.

The fourth remedy for panic , sublimation , is about transformation rather than repressing. Through artistic and stylistic talents , the pain of life can sometimes be transformed into valuable experiences ; where positive impulses clash with evil and exploit it to achieve their goals , based on their pictorial , dramatic , epic , lyrical , or even comical aspects.

But that use is not likely to occur , unless the person has relieved the sting of cruel suffering by other means , or has not let it take control of the mind (Image : A mountain climber will not enjoy the view of the abyss while he is choking with vertigo ; and he will only enjoy it if he has somehow overcame his feelings — that is , he has managed to "anchor" to something).

In order to write a work of tragedy , one has to somehow get rid of his personal sense of tragedy — to betray it — and look at it from an outside point of view , the aesthetic point of view.

And by the way , there is something hiding here , which is an opportunity for wildness that has no ceiling in playing with ironies , which is unfortunately slipping into an abyss of hell. Here one can chase his ego in many arenas , enjoying the ability of different layers of consciousness to dispel each other.

The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer , he is filling pages , and will be published in a journal.

A kind of sublimation also appears in the "martyrdom" of lonely women , as they gain some reverence through it.

However , sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective mechanisms mentioned here.

IV

Is it possible that "primitive natures" can throw off all these cramps and acrobatics , and reconcile themselves in the pure bliss that love and work create? I think that in order to include them as human in any way , the answer must be No !

The strongest claim we can make about peoples who live in nature is that they are somehow closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural peoples.

Even though we have so far been able to save the majority of humans at the occurrence of every storm , what helps us to do that are the aspects of our nature that have not been affected by modernization except to a small or medium extent. This positive basis (because protection alone does not create life , but only impedes its decline) must be due to what we have developed by nature in terms of the mobilization of energy in the body and the useful parts of the soul from the vital side , under hardships stemming precisely from our sensory limitations , our physical weakness and our need to work for life and love.

Only this limited area of bliss within the fronts is negatively affected by civilizational progress , technology and the establishment of rules. For as more of our mental functions are continually withdrawn from the battle against the environment , there is an increase in "spiritual unemployment". We must judge the value of any technical progress for life in general by the extent to which it contributes to providing humanity with the opportunity for spiritual occupation.

Despite the overlapping of borders , perhaps the first cutting tools are an example of a positive invention.

As for the other technical inventions , they only enrich the life of their inventor , and represent a major theft that is extracted from humanity's common reserve of experiences , and it should invoke the harshest punishments , if it is made publicly available , against the grip of censorship.

One of those crimes - among many others - is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted lands. Thus one destroys with one devastating blow , rich opportunities for experience that many might have benefited from , if each could - by effort - obtained his fair share. (2)

Precisely , this circumstance smudges the present phase in which the earth suffers from a chronic fever.

The absence of natural spiritual activity (of vital origin) is seen for example in the widespread resort to "distraction" (entertainment , sports , radio – "the rhythm of the era").

Anchorings are no longer accepted , as all inherited anchoring systems receive critical arrows ; Anxiety , disgust , bewilderment and despair infiltrate through the cracks ( "corpses in the cargo-ship" [in Ibsen’s expression] ).

Communism (which also has a spiritual reflection) and psychoanalysis - which the two have nothing else in common - try to renew the old escape with new methods ; They use - respectively - violence and cunning to improve the vital condition of humans by seizing the critical surplus of their cognition. The idea in both cases is very logical , but it also cannot produce a final solution. Certainly a deliberate degeneration into a viable bottom might save the species in the near term , but it will not by its nature find peace in such resignation , or indeed will not find any peace at all.

V

If we extend these considerations to their bitter end , there is no doubt as to where we shall come. If the humankind naively clings to the ominous delusion that victory is its vital destiny , nothing essential will change. As The number of humans mount and the spirits darken , the methods of protection will inevitably take on an increasingly brutal nature.

And the humans will continue in dreaming of salvation , self-affirmation , and a new Messiah. And one day , after many saviors have been crucified on the trees and stoned in the squares of cities , then The Last Messiah will appear.

Then will appear the man who will be the first to dare to bare his soul and offer it as a living sacrifice to the greatest idea of the human race , the idea of death. A man who explored the depths of life and its cosmic dimensions , and his pain is the size of the collective pain of the earth. How can the furious screams of mobs from all nations not erupt demanding his death a thousand times , when his voice surrounds the earth like a cloak and the strange message resounds for the first and the last time :

“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river , but Earth’s is a pond and a stagnant water.
– The sign of death is written on your brows – how long will you kick against the pin-pricks? (3)
– But there is one conquest , one crown , one redemption and one solution.
– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after you.”
And when he has spoken his words , they will pile themselves over him , led by the pacifier makers and the midwives , and bury him in their fingernails.
He is the last Messiah. And as son comes from father , he is from the offspring of that dead hunter at the waterhole.
Peter Wessel Zapffe , 1933
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Notes :
(1) The principle of the existence of a hidden power in the living things. (Ismael Hegazy)

(2) I emphasize that this is not about fantastic reform proposals , but rather a psychological view of the principle. (Peter W. Zapffe)

(3) The phrase "how long will you kick against the pin-pricks?" is intended to mean "how long will you struggle against the small calamities?". (Ismael Hegazy)