The Catastrophe of Birth

The fall into eternity (detail), by Raymond Douillet

On April 19, 2025, an American man named Shawn Ryan Grell died at the age of 50 in a prison in the city of Tucson, in the state of Arizona. The cause of death was not disclosed. He had been in prison for 25 years. His crime was horrific. On December 2, 1999, shortly after 7 pm, he took his 2-year-old daughter to the desert surrounding the city of Tucson, telling her that they would see beautiful Christmas lights. Arriving at a remote location, he placed her on the desert floor near the road, poured a gallon of gasoline on her and set her on fire. She crawled for a few feet before stopping and dying painfully.

Her body, in a deplorable state, was discovered the next day. Grell was arrested and openly confessed everything. There was no reason for him to do it, he just felt like it. Simple. It is from him that we know the lie he told his daughter, that they were going to see Christmas lights. He was sentenced to death at the time, but the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Grell had mild mental retardation, and applying the death penalty to someone who do not possess full cognitive capacity was against federal law. His sentence was then commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His daughter's name was Kristen Salem.

It is my position that nothing positive humanity will ever do or experience in its entire history on Earth or beyond will ever justify the few moments of extreme pain, despair, and agony experienced by Kristen Salem as she was doused with gasoline by her idiot father and burned to death on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere in North America. I would trade the entire existence for this and similar things to never have happened to anyone. I am with Ivan Karamazov when he tells his brother, Alyosha, that he would respectfully return the ticket to God.

In one of the main dialogues of Dostoevsky's novel, Ivan describes some of the barbarities committed by Ottoman soldiers against Slavic civilians: children being thrown to starving dogs to be eaten alive, babies being thrown into the air and stabbed with bayonets, all in front of their desperate mothers. He tells his brother, who is a novice at the local monastery and has great faith in divine providence, that no future reconciliation in the afterlife is possible in his eyes when God allows such pain in the world. After Ivan says that he will return the ticket of existence to God, Alyosha then claims that Ivan preaches rebellion, just like the devil, who once wanted to usurp God's throne.

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. According to Maimonides, the Bible speaks to ordinary people when it attributes a characteristic to God. For him, laypeople are incapable of understanding that we cannot attribute something like “goodness” to the divine in the same way that we do when we say that a person is good. For the Rambam, only the initiated, those who study philosophy, can understand more deeply the truth that lies behind the sacred texts.

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.

So much sadness. So much horror! The poor girl who didn’t even see the arrival of the year 2000 because her father felt the urge to destroy her with fire. Her individual and incipient will was crushed by another! The will that Shawn Ryan Grell felt, a blind, brute will, devoid of any reason beyond mere desire, sprang from the same universal Will that, in others, manifests itself as the will-to-know and allows their brilliant intellects to unravel the laws of the empirical world, the world that can be analyzed, tested and used by us. There is no radical ontological division between these wills. If there were, these brilliant intellects would not have been capable of producing horrendous nuclear, chemical and biological weapons while astonishing us at the same time with increasingly precise measurements of the age of the universe and its final destiny in the distant future.

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.

But nothing that happens in the future will ever justify Kristen Salem's death, just as nothing will ever justify children and babies being burned alive in the Levant—whether in ancient times or now. I dare say that nothing will ever justify even the situations that led some people throughout their lives to become moral monsters capable of burning children alive, nor the accidents that carbonize hundreds of individuals in a few moments, like the poor souls who were on board the Air India flight that crashed shortly after takeoff. Victims, perpetrators, accidents, no matter the source of the pain, none of them would have been possible if the participants had not existed in the first place, if they had not gone through the catastrophe of birth. Therefore, I respectfully, or not so respectfully, return the metaphorical ticket to God, or rather, to Azathoth.

I have been harping on this topic often, and will continue to harp on it, just as others have harped on their utopian or dystopian ideals. And just as they have done, I will continue to appeal to the authors who have opened my eyes. My eyes have been opened to see a terrifying reality, the reality that the pains of the world will never go away, in the sense that they will never not have happened and they will never not have been horrible. No miracle or reconciliation at the end of the world will ever make ok the carnage that has existed on our planet for so long. Neither God nor man will ever be able to cleanse the blood stain left by this torture and extermination camp floating in outer space around a star. It is foolish to believe that they will.

The final point of my gloomy proselytism is this: it would have been better if the Earth had been incapable of sustaining life, it would have been better if no sentient creature had existed. I will never tire of affirming this good news. The globe itself is a great cemetery. That is why I say I am out of the race. I will continue living and trying to love life, even though I know that it loves no one and that it drains us until there is nothing left to drain. I will also continue writing about the philosophy of rejection. This is not paradoxical. Unlike descendants of flesh and blood, texts do not suffer, but who knows, they may open the eyes of others in the future, just as the texts of other authors helped to open mine. I have reached the fake and bankrupt enlightenment possible to be achieved by some unknown person hailing from a warm third world country who one day had the brilliant idea of ​​questioning his own existence.

A passage from The Alchemy of Happiness, a book written in the 12th century by the Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, comes to mind:

Jesus (peace be upon him) saw the world revealed in the form of an ugly old hag. He asked her how many husbands she had possessed; she replied that they were countless. He asked whether they had died or had been divorced; she said that she had killed them all. “I marvel”, he said, “at the fools who see what you have done to others and still desire you.”

by Fernando Olszewski