Coates Anti-Natalism

Rejectionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62287-570-2
Verlag: First Edition Design Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

Every birth brings with it pain, suffering and death. Are life's joys and pleasures worth its costs? This book examines a set of perspectives - religious, philosophical, and literary - which find human existence deeply flawed and unacceptable. Its modern expression by philosophers Benatar and Zapffe as anti-natalism needs to be taken seriously in our choice whether to procreate or not.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Coates, Ken

Leseproben

Introduction
  Human beings are the only creatures conscious of their own existence. Other living beings do not know that they exist. They cannot help going on living - reproducing and continuing the species - as programmed by nature. Humans alone have the capacity to interrogate their own existence. Since the dawn of consciousness human beings have found themselves confronting an existence they did not choose and which puts them through a great deal of pain and suffering – physical and mental - leading eventually to death. To make life with all its multifarious evils acceptable and meaningful humans have invented religion, a supernatural system of beliefs, which, among other things, seeks to justify and legitimize existence. Yet even religions have not found it easy to endorse life with all its evils – man-made and natural – and have sought ways of emancipation from it1. For example Hinduism and Buddhism, with their concepts of Moksha and Nirvana respectively (Koller 1982, 67; Snelling 1998, 54-5) point a way of transcending the phenomenal world with its recurring cycle of births and deaths. In addition, secular philosophies which consider existence to be a ‘bad’ rather than a ‘good’ have their own views about the evil of existence and the way out. Modern - mid-20th century onwards - secular philosophies see anti-natalism, i.e. refraining from procreation, as the way to liberation2. Besides expressing compassion for the unborn the decision not to reproduce is also a way of saying no to human existence. What these religious and secular philosophies have in common is the view that life in general and human life in particular is inherently flawed and that overcoming it would be a ‘good’ thing. While other creatures cannot escape their bondage to nature human beings can. They have the capacity to free themselves from the yoke of nature and to end their entrapment. And so they should. Broadly, the religious approach is based on freeing oneself from the will-to-live and the bondage to worldly desires whereas modern secular philosophies see anti-natalism as the key to emancipation. But surely the prescription of anti-natalism is counter-intuitive? Our instincts make us want to live and to reproduce. The sex drive is one of the strongest physical urges and, in the absence of contraception, results naturally in reproduction. True, as anti-natalists remind us, the coming of contraception has sundered the natural bond between coitus and conception. Celibacy is no longer necessary in order to prevent reproduction. The sex urge need not be denied to avoid conception. And as far as an ‘instinct’ to reproduce is concerned this remains a somewhat dubious proposition at least as far as humans are concerned. However, a more important objection against these philosophies is that they are unduly pessimistic and one-sided. They seem to turn a blind eye to all that is positive about life. For if there is much pain and suffering there is also pleasure, joy, love, beauty, creativity and the like. In short, life comes as a package deal, with good and evil inextricably mixed together. How can one separate them? Why dwell on the negativities of existence alone forgetting the other side? These are weighty arguments and they have to be taken seriously. They raise important philosophical issues which will be considered later (Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6). At this stage we would like to spell out the rationale for looking at these anti-existential viewpoints. Let us start by noting that from time immemorial literary and philosophical writings have given expression to the feeling of outrage at the evil of existence. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy is perhaps the best-known example. The most universally recognized symbol in Western civilization, the Cross carried by Christ, is a powerful message of life as a burden borne by man at the behest of God. In short, the viewpoint of life as evil has been a part of human consciousness. Anti-natalism too has its expression in literature such as Hamlet’s admonition to Ophelia: “Why woulds’t thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me …..What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?...Go thy ways to a nunnery”. However despite a long history of literary allusions to the ills of existence, systematic philosophies, especially secular ones, which argue the case against existence are few and far between. They only date back to the 19th century, with Schopenhauer and to a lesser extent Eduard von Hartmann as the outstanding figures. And although Schopenhauer‘s thought includes a strong expression of anti-natalism - both as compassion to the unborn and as refusal to prolong the misery of existence - a philosophical treatise arguing the case for anti-natalism has appeared for the first time only recently, just a few years ago (Benatar 2006). In short, anti-existential philosophy and more especially the philosophy of anti-natalism constitutes a relatively recent and peripheral body of thought. It deserves to be known and discussed more widely. However what is common to the religious and secular philosophies presented in this book is their rejection of existence and the search for a way out. We therefore feel justified in using the term ‘rejectionism’ to indicate the genre of these philosophies and the chief characteristic of their world view3. A second reason for paying attention to rejectionist thinking is that as conscious beings we not only have the capacity to evaluate human existence we have a duty to do so. In order to do this and to make authentic choices concerning existence we need to be fully aware of our situation. The anti-existential perspective helps to deepen our awareness. For example, the decision whether to procreate or not is one of the most significant moral and metaphysical decisions we have to make in our lives. Quite recently Christine Overall (2012), a philosopher who is not an anti-natalist, has drawn attention to the moral issues involved in the decision to have a child, an issue she discusses quite comprehensively. Clearly, in making this decision we need to take anti-natalist arguments on board. Anti-natalists, e.g. Benatar (2006), Hayry (2004), Srivastava ( 2006), argue that bringing someone into the world who has not asked to be born, to thrust life upon them and to put them through the painful business of living constitutes an immoral act. Thus children come into the world literally as someone else’s creature and we can say that their life is founded in unfreedom. They are conscripts to life. Moreover, they are often considered as a means to an end, i.e. we produce children to serve our needs and interests, to entertain us, to pass our genes on, to ensure our biological continuity, to look after us in old age etc. Apart from its dubious morality, procreation also raises metaphysical issues. It amounts to endorsing existence and makes us indirectly complicit in all the evils that existence entails. Thus we need to be fully aware of the metaphysical choice and responsibility involved in the act of procreation. These are only some of the philosophical issues surrounding procreation and we need to consider anti-natal arguments seriously. This is particularly important since sexual intercourse and reproduction comes ‘naturally’ to us – instincts, social conventions and religious teachings all conspire to incline us that way. Consider, for example, the age-old idea that women have a maternal instinct that craves satisfaction. it is only recently that this has been found to be a myth. Motherhood as the essential destiny of women has turned out to be little more than a natalist ideology propagated historically by patriarchal institutions. Millions of women, especially in developed countries, are choosing not to have children with apparently no instinctual urge to reproduce. Nonetheless voluntary childlessness, especially on the part of the married, remains taboo in Western ‘advanced’ societies. It is still considered as a form of deviant behavior (Defago 2005; Basten 2009; Overall 2012). Given the strength of conventional wisdom and the status quo it is important to pay attention to dissenting viewpoints concerning procreation. Finally the importance of rejectionist thought lies in its open articulation of value judgments concerning life. This goes against the dominant view of philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world, which became established in early 20th century, viz. that it is not the business of philosophy to make value judgments, since they amount to little more than stating the personal preferences of the philosopher. Logical positivism, and linguistic analysis, two of the three major currents of philosophical thought in the 20th century, held this view strongly. The third, viz. existentialism, differs radically in many ways from the other two. It is centrally concerned with the nature and problems of human existence. But unlike the theistic existentialism of Kierkegaard and others, non-theistic approaches, notably those of Heidegger and Sartre also stay away from making value judgments. Rather they emphasize individual freedom to decide and choose. Both thinkers stress the importance of authentic choice, i.e. a choice freely arrived at, in full awareness of one’s situation as well as of the wider implications of one’s choice (Sartre 1948; Watts 2001, 34-5, 56-60). And although Heidegger provides systematic and insightful analysis of man’s being-in-the-world, e.g. the contingent nature of our birth, our awareness of temporality and the finite nature of our...