Carefree laughter II

When children’s carefree laughter receives a lot of attention this is, of course, also due to the fact that grown up people know innermost it’ll come to an end shortly: Laughter will be siphoned away by the vicissitudes of life.

If parents are well aware that carefree laughter (not general laughter) will end soon and are, thus, familiar with the human condition: why did they start their children’s existence in the first place?

What counts: How to bring it about?

It looks like we can learn from other movements, first and foremost perhaps from the vegetarian movement. Similar to antinatalism the vegetarian movement faces the question of how to make people change decisions that are tightly knit to causing animal (and human) suffering. Similar to parents who like to “have” children, carnivors like to “eat” meat, thus causing the coming into being of ever new myriads of sentient animals.

There might be two major fractions between vegetarians. Members of group A maintain a low profile, they do not try to convince people, they rather try to live on quietly as a still role model. Members of group B, however, act differently: They show around shocking and reproaching pictures from the meat industry that, as a matter of fact, are directly linked to consumer demand. Group B confronts meat eaters with the gruel outcome of their decisions.

One gets the impression that group B is way more successful than group B when it comes to making people change revise their decisions. Therefore, in order to make people change their pronatalist decisions one should make them drastically aware of the consequences by presenting real pictures and by telling real storys. Pictures and stories from illnesses and old age homes for example. But who has what it takes in order to accost pronatal people in such a way?

What counts?

What counts is not only the antinatalist mätopia – a world without sentient beings prone to feel pain – but rather to argue in favour of a revision of pronatal decisions. Contributing to the revision of as many pronatal decisions as possible is at the heart of antinatalist moral theory and practical antinatalist ethics.

Carefree laughter

Every now and then people would say „Listen to that child’s carefree laughter!“ Those incidences should be looked at as a most revealing insight into the human condition. Because what is the make-up of a world in which it is necessary to always highlight children’s light-hearted laughter? Children should be light hearted and carefree all the time. The unfailing attention paid by bystanders and the apparent scarcity of easygoing laughter unwittingly testify to the fact that something isn’t right with acting in such a way that a new human being begins to exist.

Kurnig’s Neo-Nihilism as early 20th century antinatalism

If one subtracted the metaphysics of will from Schopenhauer’s general philosophy some non-metaphysical antinatalism would have to ensue. Therefore, one might suspect that after the demise of German idealism a corresponding thinker, an outspoken antinatalist, would have taken up the vacant systematic place well before the still hesitant antinatalist pronouncements by Norwegian thinker Zapffe or in the setting of Negative Utilitarianism (first and foremost by Hermann Vetter).

As a matter of fact there is such a philosopher. He wrote under the pseudonym of KURNIG defending an outspoken and – with respect to Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann – non-metaphysikal antinatalism.

Here are two quotations from his work ‘Neo-Nihilimus’ as a sample:

“I consider human life as something which is overall unpleasant, as a misfortune. Unborn people would not ask for it. In the face of abysmal misery I was unable to simply watch taking on the passive role of an observer.”

“I beget you (we hear a parent saying) in order to see with pleasure what is inside you and what is not. By the same token, however, I am forcing upon you a lot of suffering and, finally, the ghastly catastrophe of dying.” [Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sängewald, Leipzig 1903]

Those who read German may want to have a look at my contribution on Kurnig’s early antinatalism [website is currently being reworked]: Exodus aus dem Sein. Kurnigs Neo-Nihilismus als buddhistisch säkularisierter Geist des frühen Christentums


Is the concept of antinatalism historically tainted?




