Today is the centennial of Henrik Ibsen’s death. My modest — and no doubt idiosyncratic — contribution to the commemoration of this immortal playwright is the below translation of a short essay by Peter W. Zapffe, the great philosopher of tragedy whom Ibsen’s work inspired and strongly influenced. In this succint meditation on the human condition, Zapffe puts forth for the first time the existentialist philosophy he developed at length in his 1941 magnum opus, On the Tragic.

The piece originally appeared in Morgenbladet on September 21, 1932. As with my other renderings of Zapffe, available in the Philosophy category, I have used British spelling for this likely first translation into English.

Ibsen aficionados may note that the term ‘hobgoblin thoughts’ alludes to Act Five, Scene Five of Peer Gynt.

We must presume that humans are the only species on Earth with a capacity for self-consideration, the ability to reflect on its particular circumstances and assess them in relation to those of other beings. By virtue of our spiritual endowment we not only can adapt to this given environment, but by means of techical remedies even survive changes of environment that would mean death for all other creation. If equipped with the bare capacity for reflection, we would however soon see through the repetitions of nature and know them as a mounting nightmare; and a sober comparison of the benefits and the costs of existence would swiftly lead to life’s voluntary surrender. Serving as a check on this danger is the relentless yearning that has no particular object and is independent of fulfillment, persisting as a static condition of variable magnitude. The toothache offers a metaphor of this. Working in tandem with our yearning is the imagination, which incessantly presents new singular goals, diverting from the hopelessness of the necessary conclusion that our yearning is unfounded in reality, that all speculations are but paper money without security in gold.
    Our form of existence is thus not conducive to bliss. Simpler organisms are more fortunate in this regard. The human being is, as an organic experiment, so highly driven as to approach an oscillation, an inner explosion. Cognition hands us more than we can carry. We suffer from the constant tension, the back-and-forth undulating battle between what drains the will to live and what builds it up. This is the pain of living. In certain moments we can immediately experience what it means to be of human birth, what it involves to be a thinking and feeling being, forged into an organism that follows alien laws. When exposed without mediation to those certainties and possibilities that the range of our faculties makes us liable to, when lonesome and naked under the cosmos — then we call it Weltschmertz. It is the purest form of suffering, the profoundest, truest and strongest emotion a human being can have. Popular it is not. It is often mentioned with a tentative irony to camouflage the horror. One is led to think of passengers joking about the breaker between their ears. Perhaps only those have fully felt this who were rendered unfit for life. The ancients called it to see Jehova.
    The struggle for existence, then, is only in its outward respect a fight for the daily bread. The real battle rages over the ghost of life within ourselves — where we ourselves are both the warriors, the battleground, and the strife.
    From the great bewilderment, the panic of living, has the theater, as well as cultural life in general, emerged. There is something eerie about a type of being sitting down to watch its own mode of existence and characteristics. But the idea is clear. In the theater, the battleground is moved from the mind onto the stage. We become mere spectators, relieved for a time of the burden of existence. Our own secret distress is seen to be borne by others and brought to solutions that comfort and soothe us, be it direct or indirect ones, elementary or involving high ideas, familiar or new. We look for a web of meaning and context that may isolate and shelter us from the hobgoblin thoughts. The theater is to some what mass is to others. Katharsis, said the Greeks, meaning thereby a moral purification. But the notion can be extended to signify cosmic hygiene. At worst we are led from despair to uncertainty, induced to think: Maybe still. Will and faith can be passed from spirit to spirit, especially when the donor is in command of form. The play is the most effective form there is.
    Thus the theater is directly enrolled in the service of struggling life. It stretches a bridge of purpose over the abyss, pushing with dynamic élan whenever it creaks. By cultivating the joys of experience it becomes a greenhouse for life-affirming values. The social prestige, the artistic strength, the architectonic power, the confidence of the stage machinery, and the insuperability of the entire task to any one individual endow the voice of the theater with a persuasive authority that the words by themselves might lack.
    Even in tragedy the idea, more or less manifest, should survive the disaster. There is in society a tacit understanding that the natural shall not be tolerated. A man who weeps on the street is removed, not for his own sake, but for others. The raiment of the minds is taboo.
    The state has a direct interest in this effect of the theater’s activity. Like a log driver on his logs, life jumps from creed to creed. It is imperative that the current one not be allowed to sink before the next one is within reach.