The poor dog

Ulysses and Argos

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

The passage above was written by Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher whom I often mention. Despite being pessimistic, Zapffe isn't exactly a Schopenhauerian. However, this excerpt, found at the beginning of his essay titled The Last Messiah, expresses very well something found in Schopenhauer's philosophy, to whom Zapffe is certainly indebted. Incidentally, it's something found in the writings of other pessimists I often talk about, such as Cioran. The idea expressed in the passage is this: at a certain moment, the profound consciousness that afflicts humankind awakened in an individual of our species. This individual, a hunter who until then had lived somewhat automatically despite his human intelligence, began to understand the world in a more complex way. He saw all animals as suffering brothers and sisters of his own. He preferred death to continuing in this world where life devours itself for absolutely nothing.

I could attempt a sociological, economic, political, psychological, etc, analysis of the sad episode of the poor dog Orelha, who lived on the beach in the city of Florianópolis, in the state of Santa Catarina, being cared for by local residents, and how he was violently beaten by privileged teenagers from wealthy families, to the point that his brain matter was exposed and he had to be euthanized by a vet. I could express anger at some of the parents of these teenagers for coercing and threatening witnesses and people who publicized the case to the mainstream media, as well as point out the absurdity of seeing some of these teenagers being sent to Disney World to spend a few days away from the country, in order to escape some of the repercussions. I could try to point out how these same teenagers are suspected of attempting to kill other stray dogs in the city, and how such actions can indicate traits of psychopathy, considering the association made even by pop culture between animal abuse and serial killers.

But I'm not going to do any of that. We're already saturated with perspectives like that. Besides, I'm fed up with those who think that everything in existence boils down to politics, material conditions, history, geopolitics, and mental issues that, in theory, are solvable through some kind of treatment. These things are important, of course, but they are part of existence, they are not its lining. In the vast majority of the universe, there is no politics, material conditions, history, geopolitics, or psychological problems, because the vast majority of the universe is inanimate, inorganic; and I don't mean inorganic in the pure sense of inorganic chemistry, but in the broader sense of having no life whatsoever. The universe is malignantly indifferent to life, to the point of almost being hostile. If we could attribute some anthropomorphic characteristic to it, if we could speak of an intelligence behind the universe, we would be absolutely correct in saying that it is evil. It has managed, at least on one planet, to cram the universe with countless suffering.

Since I don't justify existence, but condemn it, I don't think this state of affairs is good, right, necessary, or anything else. I don't accept that it must be this way. If I did accept it, I would say that might makes right, and whoever manages to violently force their will upon others has the right to impose their desires upon others. Nature works this way, however much we try to romanticize it to this day. Nature is extremely hostile, horrendous, brutal, despite being beautiful to behold. However, animals don't understand this, since they live in an eternal present, without forming concepts the same way that, unfortunately, we do. Although conscious to varying degrees, some more and some less, they don't possess the profound consciousness to which we were condemned by nature itself, since it was nature that gave birth to us, just as it gave birth to other animals, our brothers. We had the misfortune of being separated by nature itself from the rest of it. Misfortune not because nature is wonderful, it is horrible. The misfortune is that we ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, to use the mythological parlance.

In a lengthy passage from The Fall into Time, Cioran writes the following about man and his separation from the rest of nature:

Once he had shattered the unity of Paradise, he dedicated himself to shattering that of earth by introducing a principle of partition which would destroy its order and its anonymity. Hitherto man had died, of course, but death, a fulfillment in the primordial indistinction, did not have the meaning it subsequently acquired, nor was it burdened with the attributes of the irreparable. Once man, separated from Creator and creation alike, became individual-in other words, fracture and fissure in Being-and once he learned, assuming his name to the point of provocation, that he was mortal, his pride was thereby magnified, no less than his confusion. At last he was dying in his own way-he was proud of that; but he was dying, dying altogether-and that was humiliating. No longer reconciled to a denouement once fiercely desired, he turns at last, and longingly, to the animals, his former companions: all, vile and noble alike, accept their fate, enjoy it or resign themselves to it; none has followed his example or imitated his rebellion. The plants, more than the beasts, rejoice to have been created : the very nettle still flourishes within God; only man suffocates there, and is it not this choking sensation which led him to stand apart from the rest of creation, a consenting outcast, a voluntary reject? All other living beings, by the very fact that they are identical with their condition, have a certain superiority to him. And it is when he envies them, when he longs for their impersonal glory, that man understands the gravity of his case.

Dogs, despite being the product of artificial selection practiced by humans for millennia, are much closer to the innocence of the natural state — not because they are incapable of inflicting pain and death like their wolf ancestors, some of them are fully capable of it, but because they don't know what they're doing in the same way we do. They work by instinct and emotion. They are intelligent, yes, but they don't form concepts like we do; in fact, they are incapable of forming concepts like malice and wickedness, which are certainly put into practice by those who beat up dogs for fun. Even wild dogs that live by hunting are incapable of ruminating in a complex and malicious way about their prey. The evil that exists there is not the animal's fault, but the fault of the whole of existence, which is poorly constructed. Humans alone have enough awareness and intelligence to understand that they are part of everything, that they are brothers, even to dogs, even those that live on streets and beaches.

While for Kant, morality is based on reason, while for him, we should only act if we consider that such action can be transformed into a universal law, for Schopenhauer, morality is based on the recognition of oneself in the suffering another, since, in his philosophy, we are all disposable puppets in the hands of an insatiable and immortal will. We suffer in the struggle for existence in the name of the will, killing, dying, and reproducing to affirm it. Humans, by force of chance, emerge with a cognitive apparatus that gives them the power to see things almost as if apart from everything else, although they are never truly apart from the rest of existence. To their horror, they understand the process as a whole. Pessimistic morality, therefore, comes to realize that we are linked in a brotherhood of sufferers who are fueled by a yearning for manifestation that is willing to trample over anything to assert itself, something that we understand we must diminish or deny within ourselves.

Some people argue and protest, saying that before we care about animals, we should care about people, and that as long as one person is suffering, we shouldn't lose sleep thinking about the suffering of animals. The problem with such assertions is that they ignore the reality that one thing hardly exists without the other. Yes, it's more common to recognize oneself in beings close to us and of the same species, but the more we recognize ourselves in those who are different, the more moral we are, the less brutal. That's why Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will and Representation, that the noble person:

[...] perceives that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, belongs only to a fleeting, deceptive phenomenon. He recognizes immediately, and without reasons or arguments, that the in-itself of his own phenomenon is also that of others, namely that will-to-live which constitutes the inner nature of everything, and lives in all; in fact, he recognizes that this extends even to the animals and to the whole of nature; he will therefore not cause suffering even to an animal.

How can the pessimist, who treats the foundation of the world as a devastating and indifferent will, who treats nature as the source of all chaos and all pain, say that we should treat other natural beings well? It is not because of nature as a whole, as an entity, that we should treat other suffering beings well. We should treat them well precisely because they suffer, because they are victims of existence, because they were placed here without any prior warning, since they did not exist, just as we were placed.

Meekness and holiness come from the denial of our own will, our ego, whatever you want to call it. It doesn't come easily to everyone, quite the contrary. But difficulty doesn't justify the practice of horror, even more so when one knows it is horror. I don't think the teenagers who committed that terrible evil against the dog Orelha should be tortured and killed. Although there's no lack of desire to curse them, it's not what the intellect knows to be right. I hope they understand the evil they did and are capable of profound change. I think it's difficult, precisely because of secondary issues, such as their upbringing, social position, and other characteristics. Although not fundamental, these things are very important indeed. The history of pessimistic religions, those for which the holiest ones are those who most deny their own will, is full of examples of saints who had horrible lives and, at a certain point, repented, including of murders. They repented to the point of denying their own will and becoming ascetics. However, once again, I highly doubt that this kind of thing will happen with these youngsters, especially since the type of religion currently in vogue in this country is completely opposed to any idea of ​​asceticism; on the contrary, it preaches that the correct thing to do is to assert one's will more and more.

What a shame.

by Fernando Olszewski