Abstract
In this chapter I develop an interpretation of von Trier’s Melancholia as making an argument that it would be impossible to consider the elimination of the human race as something bad. After reconstructing the argument in the film as I see it, I proceed to consider whether a counter-argument can be given to provide some non-anthropocentric reasons for objecting to the end of the human race. Using the thought of Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, I show that human beings could be seen as an integral part of the development of the larger organism insofar as we contribute to the conceptual self-consciousness of the world or the less rationalistic self-perception and articulation of the world.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, A.O. Scott’s review of the film for The New York Times (Scott 2011).
- 2.
More will be said about the hedonistic argument against the importance of the continued existence of the human race later in the paper.
- 3.
See especially section 8 of Naess’s paper.
- 4.
Let me remind the reader again that I am taking a bit of license here and ignoring the fact that the whole planet is destroyed in the film.
- 5.
Benatar initially makes the argument in his “Why It Is Better Never to Have Come into Existence” (1997) and presents the fuller version of this argument in his book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2008).
References
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Benatar, David. 1997. Why It Is Better Never to Have Come into Existence. American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (3): 345–355.
———. 2008. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heath, Chris. 2011. Lars Attacks! GQ. https://www.gq.com/story/lars-von-trier-gq-interview-october-2011?currentPage=1. Accessed 8 Jan 2019.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. J.N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lovelock, James. 2016. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Left. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Naess, Arne. 1986. The Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects. Philosophical Inquiry 8 (1/2): 10–31.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2007. On the Sufferings of the World. In Studies in Pessimism, 5–18. Trans. T. Bailey Saunders. New York: Cosimo.
Scott, A.O. 2011. Bride’s Mind Is on Another Planet. The New York Times, November 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/movies/lars-von-triers-melancholia-review.html. Accessed 8 Jan 2019.
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Pedersen, H. (2019). Would It Be Bad If the Human Race Ceased to Exist? Melancholia and the Import of Human Existence. In: Haro, J., Koch, W. (eds) The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_9
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