Philipp Mainländer's Radical Pessimism - Will to Death

Philosophical Pessimism

Philipp Mainländer’s philosophy, particularly as articulated in his magnum opus The Philosophy of Redemption, stands as one of the most radical systems of pessimism in philosophical history. Published shortly before his suicide in 1876, Mainländer’s work builds upon Schopenhauer’s philosophical legacy but takes it in an even darker and more extreme direction. Theodor Lessing referred to it as perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature, emphasizing its profound and uncompromising nature.

Central to Mainländer’s philosophy is the concept of the death of God, a notion that later resonates in Nietzsche’s philosophy, although with a different metaphysical interpretation. For Mainländer, this concept is tied to the idea that God, in creating the world, effectively brought about His own annihilation. This act of divine self-negation sets the stage for the world as we know it, where the principle of existence is not a will to live, as Schopenhauer posited, but a Will to death. This Will to death is the inverted form of Schopenhauer’s Will to live and serves as the underlying force driving all existence. According to Mainländer, life itself holds no inherent value. Instead, the supreme principle of morality is the realization that non-being is preferable to being. This recognition ignites within individuals a transformation of their Will to live into a Will to death. In this view, the Will to live is merely a tool employed by the Will to death to achieve its ultimate goal — annihilation. Redemption, therefore, is found not in the perpetuation of life but in its cessation. The annihilation of the self and the return to non-existence is seen as the highest form of salvation.

In contrast to Schopenhauer, who viewed individual Wills as mere manifestations of a singular, all-encompassing Will, Mainländer embraced a pluralistic conception of reality known as nominalism. This ontological pluralism posits that individual Wills are finite and mortal; their existence is both temporally and spatially limited. When an individual dies, their Will is extinguished entirely, reducing it to nothingness. Unlike in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, where the disappearance of individual manifestations could not diminish the overarching Will, Mainländer’s pluralism allows for the complete annihilation of the Will through the death of individuals. This metaphysical framework bestows death with an essential negative power — the power to erase the essence of the world, understood as the sum of all individual Wills. Since Mainländer views non-being as superior to being, death becomes a significant benefit, offering eternal peace and tranquility. He refers to this ultimate state of non-existence as redemption, borrowing from the Christian lexicon. Indeed, Mainländer interprets Christianity, particularly in its mystical form, as a religion of renunciation and salvation, which he sees as an early revelation of his own philosophical views. In Mainländer’s perspective, Christianity’s emphasis on self-denial and the transcendence of worldly desires parallels his own philosophy’s call for the renunciation of the Will to live. This renunciation, culminating in death, is seen as the path to true redemption — a return to the nothingness from which all existence originally sprang. Mainländer’s ontological pluralism, which posits that reality consists solely of individual Wills, marks a decisive departure from Schopenhauer’s metaphysical framework. In rejecting the notion of a cosmic universal Will that transcends individual Wills, Mainländer asserts that knowledge is inherently immanent, empirical, and representational — confined strictly to the realm of individual consciousness. For him, each Will is self-contained and isolated, both epistemologically and ontologically, with no overarching metaphysical unity linking them together. However, Mainländer acknowledges a seeming contradiction: natural sciences reveal that all beings in the world are systematically interconnected, suggesting that each entity depends on others according to necessary laws. This interdependence appears to challenge the idea that each Will is autonomous and self-enclosed. Mainländer resolves this paradox by introducing the dimension of time into his philosophy. He posits that, in the beginning — before time as we know it — there existed a singular, undivided unity. With the commencement of time, this original unity fragmented into multiplicity, initiating a process of division that continues to this day. This fragmentation, while giving rise to the interconnectedness observed in nature, does not negate the individual character of each Will. The unity that once existed belongs to the past, and what remains is the divided, individualistic nature of reality. To illuminate this transition from unity to multiplicity, Mainländer introduces his tragic concept of the death of God. He proclaims in a prophetic and somber tone: God has died, and His death was the life of the world. Mainländer interprets the figure of Christ in Christianity as an intuitive grasp of this cosmic truth. He envisions God — the original singularity — as a perfectly free and omnipotent being who, upon realizing the limitations inherent in His own existence, becomes overwhelmed by anguish. God perceives that His current state of being is of negative value, less desirable than non-existence. Driven by this realization, He resolves to bring about His own end — not directly, which would be impossible, but through the creation of the world. By creating the cosmos and dividing it into countless individual entities, God sets in motion the process of His own self-destruction. This divine impulse towards self-annihilation, according to Mainländer, animates the entire cosmos. While the Will to live may initially appear to dominate, it is ultimately the Will to death that governs all existence. In the organic realm, for instance, the Will to live is merely a mask for the underlying Will to death, which eventually triumphs as all living beings inevitably perish. This trajectory from life to death is seen as the fulfillment of God’s original desire for non-being. Mainländer extends this idea to all levels of existence, from the inorganic to the organic, arguing that everything is subject to a fatal process of cosmic annihilation. This process manifests physically as entropy and, in the realm of the living, as struggle and conflict. Mainländer views this progression as inescapable, likening it to a Greek tragedy where the fate one attempts to avoid is ultimately realized. In this grim cosmic drama, the entire world is nothing more than the rotting corpse of God, a decaying remnant of the divine impulse towards self-destruction that underlies all of existence.