Philipp Mainländer (; 5 October 1841 – 1 April 1876) was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main. Mainländer is best known for his pessimistic philosophy, deeply influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer.
In his central work, The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer argued that non-existence is preferable to existence, positing that the universe originated from a primordial divine fragmentation, that God committed cosmic suicide by shattering himself into the time-bound, fragmented physical matter. Mainländer believed that everything in life, matter, and celestial bodies is the decaying corpse of this original entity driven by a cosmic "will to die", challenging Schopenhauer’s "will to live" and is steadily progressing toward absolute nothingness.
Driven by his philosophical conviction that individual annihilation aligns with the universe's ultimate goal, Mainländer hanged himself on April 1, 1876, the day after the publication of his masterwork, believing it was the literal and ultimate fulfillment of his own philosophy. According to Theodor Lessing, "perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature" – Mainländer proclaims that life is of negative value, and that "the will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."
Biography
Early life and career
Born in Offenbach am Main, on 5 October 1841 "as a child of marital rape", Philipp Mainländer grew up the youngest of six siblings. One of his brothers was mentally ill, according to Cesare Lombroso in The Man of Genius; as was his grandfather, who died of suicide at the age of 33.
Mainländer attended the Realschule in Offenbach from 1848 to 1856. In 1856, at his father's instruction, he entered the commercial school of Dresden to become a merchant. The following year, his older brother, Daniel Batz, committed suicide, cementing the family history of succumbing to mental illness. In 1858, Philipp was employed in a trading house in Naples, Italy, where he learned Italian and acquainted himself with the works of Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and – most notably – Leopardi. Mainländer would later describe his five Neapolitan years as the happiest years of his life.
During this critical period of his life, Mainländer discovered Arthur Schopenhauer's central work The World as Will and Representation. Nineteen years old at the time, he would later describe the event as a penetrating revelation, referring to February 1860 as the "most important of [his] life". Indeed, Schopenhauer would remain the most important influence on Mainländer's later philosophical work.
In 1863, Mainländer returned to Germany to work in his father's business. In the same year, he also penned the three-part poem ("The Last Hohenstaufens"). Two years later, on 5 October, Mainländer's 24th birthday, his mother died. Deeply affected by this experience of loss, Mainländer began an ongoing turn away from poetry and towards philosophy. During the following years, he studied Schopenhauer, Kant – ("not poisoned through Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but rather critically strengthened through Schopenhauer"), Eschenbach's Parzival, and the classics of philosophy from Heraclitus to Condillac.
In March 1869, Mainländer worked in the banking house J. Mart. Magnus in Berlin with the declared goal of amassing a small fortune within a few years and then leading a decent life from the interest earnings. However, on May 8, 1873, the stock market crash at the caused a sudden end to these plans. Consequently, Mainländer resigned from his post at the bank.
Development of Die Philosophie der Erlösung
Although his wealthy parents had bought off his military service in 1861, Mainländer – according to an autobiographic note – expressed the desire "to be absolutely in all things submitted to another one once, to do the lowermost work, to have to obey blindly" and sedulously undertook numerous attempts to serve with weapons. On 6 April 1874, Mainländer, already 32 years old, submitted a request directly to the emperor Wilhelm I of Germany which was granted; this resulted in his appointment to the Cuirassiers in Halberstadt, beginning 28 September. During the four months leading up to his conscription, Mainländer, obsessed with work, composed the first volume of his main work Die Philosophie der Erlösung. Describing this time, he later wrote:And now an enchanting life began, a spiritual blossoming full of bliss and blissful shivers. [...] This life lasted four full months; it filled June, July, August and September. Completely clear, consistent, and well-rounded was my system in my mind, and a creative frenzy revived me that did not need the whip of the thought that I must be finished by 28 September; for on 1 October I had to put on the king's coat - this date could not be postponed. If I hadn't finished by then, it would take three years for me to put the finishing touches on my work, i.e. I would have seen myself thrown into an abyss into which the furies of a broken existence would inevitably have thrown me.Mainländer handed the completed manuscript to his sister Minna, asking her to find a publisher while he completed his military service. The author composed a letter to the as-yet-unknown publisher, requesting the omission of his birth name and substitution of the pen name "Philipp Mainländer", and stating that he would abhor nothing more than "being exposed to the eyes of the world".
On 1 November 1875, Mainländer – originally committed for three years, but in the meantime, as he noted in a letter to Minna, "exhausted, worked-out, ... at completely ... healthy body ineffably tired" – was prematurely released from military service, and traveled back to his hometown of Offenbach, where he – again having become obsessed with work – within a mere two months, corrected the unbound sheets of Die Philosophie der Erlösung, composed his memoirs, wrote the novella Rupertine del Fino, and completed the 650-page second volume of his magnum opus.
Death Around the beginning of 1876, Mainländer began to doubt whether his life still had value for humanity. He wondered whether he had already completed the duties of life, or whether he should employ it to strengthen the social democratic movement. Despite writing down addresses to the German workers, these plans did not materialize. During the night of 1 April, in his Offenbach apartment in Waldstraße 13, and very shortly after the publication of the first volume of his main work, Mainländer hanged himself. He was buried in Offenbach cemetery.
His older sister, Minna Batz, whom was Mainländer’s closest confident and was also his co-helper and co-thinker together they had co-authored works such as the 300-page poem The Last Hohenstaufens. She was charged with writing a memoir of her brother and later compiled his legacy, drafted his memoirs, and published the crucial second volume of his magnum opus, being deeply influenced by her brother’s philosophy she adopted the name Melancholia Mainländer actively embracing the deep-seated existential death wish that Philipp championed in his work, she later followed him through suicide in 1891, 15 years after her brother’s philosophical conclusion.
Philosophy
Working in the metaphysical framework of Schopenhauer, Mainländer sees the "will" as the innermost core of being, the ontological arche. However, he deviates from Schopenhauer in important respects. With Schopenhauer, the will is singular, unified and beyond time and space. Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism leads him to conclude that we only have access to a certain aspect of the thing-in-itself by introspective observation of our own bodies. What we observe as will is all there is to observe, nothing more. There are no hidden aspects. Furthermore, via introspection, we can only observe our individual will. This also leads Mainländer to the philosophical position of pluralism. The goals he set for himself and for his system are reminiscent of ancient Greek philosophy: what is the relation between the undivided existence of the "One" and the ever-changing world of becoming that we experience.
Additionally, Mainländer accentuates on the idea of salvation for all of creation. This is yet another respect in which he differentiates his philosophy from that of Schopenhauer. With Schopenhauer, the silencing of the will is a rare event. The artistic genius can achieve this state temporarily, while only a few saints have achieved total cessation throughout history. For Mainländer, the entirety of the cosmos is slowly but surely moving towards the silencing of the will to live and to (as he calls it) "redemption".
Mainländer theorized that an initial singularity dispersed and expanded into the known universe. This dispersion from a singular unity to a multitude of things offered a smooth transition between monism and pluralism. Mainländer thought that with the regression of time, all kinds of pluralism and multiplicity would revert to monism and he believed that, with his philosophy, he had managed to explain this transition from oneness to multiplicity and becoming.
Death of God
Despite his scientific means of explanation, Mainländer was not afraid to philosophize in allegorical terms. Formulating his own "myth of creation", Mainländer equated this initial singularity with God. This view is called Pandeism.
Mainländer reinterprets Schopenhauer's metaphysics in two important aspects. Primarily, in Mainländer's system, there is no "singular will". The basic unity has broken apart into individual wills and each subject in existence possesses an individual will of his own. Because of this, Mainländer can claim that once an "individual will" is silenced and dies, it achieves absolute nothingness and not the relative nothingness we find in Schopenhauer. By recognizing death as salvation and by giving nothingness an absolute quality, Mainländer's system manages to offer "wider" means for redemption. Secondarily, Mainländer reinterprets the Schopenhauerian will to live as an underlying will to die, i.e. the will to live is the means towards the will to die.
Ethics Mainländer's philosophy also carefully inverts other doctrines. For instance, Epicurus sees happiness only in pleasure and since there is nothing after death, there is nothing to fear and/or desire from death. Yet Mainländer, being a philosophical pessimist, sees no desirable pleasure in this life and praises the sublime nothingness of death, recognizing precisely this state of non-existence as desirable.
Mainländer espouses an ethics of egoism; that is to say that what is best for an individual is what makes one happiest. Yet all pursuits and cravings lead to pain; thus, Mainländer concludes that a will to death is best for the happiness of all and knowledge of this transforms one's will to life (an illusory existence unable to attain happiness) into the proper (sought by God) will to death. Ultimately, the subject (individual will) is one with the universe, in harmony with it and with its originating will, if one wills nothingness. Based on these premises, Mainländer makes the distinction between the "ignorant" and the "enlightened" type of self-interest. Ignorant self-interest seeks to promote itself and capitalize on its will to live. In contrast, enlightened self-interest humbles the individual and leads him to asceticism, as that aligns him properly with the elevating will towards death.
Personality It was noted by critics that his work reveals a gentle and warmhearted personality. Lucien Arréat expressed that many pages feel warm due to the "generosity of his soul", and, as a more general characterization, that "Mainländer had a delicate and sincere nature, a truly remarkable individuality."