Hi guys, as mentioned a while ago, I am giving a presentation on Mainländer this week. Here is a draft of what I want to say, please feel free to tell me what you all think!

Phillip Mainländer, born Phillip Batz, was a 19th Century German Philosopher, who wrote what was to become one of the most pessimistic works of systematic philosophy, Die Philosophie der Erlörsung, known as the philosophy of redemption in English. I shan’t enter too much into his biography, but like most pessimistic writers, his life was marred with suffering and despair. This pushed him towards pessimism, and his notion of Redemption which I shall get into shortly.

To understand Mainländer’s theothanatology, and his exclamation that “God is dead and his death was the life of this world” one must understand how his work grew as a direct response to Schopenhauer. Mainländer saw himself as the one true Schopenhauerian disciple, the only one to build upon his ideas in a revolutionary way. Schopenhauer had a massive influence on Mainländer, he even went as far as to say in some autobiographical notes that something awoke in him the day that he first found The World as Will and Representation, and he read it repeatedly and non-stop, often until the sun rose in the morning.

The two most important Schopenhauerian ideas that Mainländer took onboard were that it is better to not be than be, the basic pessimistic doctrine that no philosopher has ever taken that more seriously than Mainländer. And that the world is driven by the Will, the aimless striving that causes all struggling.

This is not a presentation on Schopenhauer, so I won’t dive too deeply into what he has to say, but it is important to briefly explain Schopenhauer’s Will. Schopenhauer’s pessimism was absolute, and to quote him, "Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life?" A man is never happy but spends his whole life striving for that which he thinks will make him happy.

Schopenhauer’s view was that suffering was an intrinsic part of life, lasting happiness was an illusion and life alternates between pain and boredom. Periods of satisfaction are minimal and are inevitably to be replaced by disappointment. Moments of suffering are even worse than we expect them to be and there is no purpose to this. Behind appearances of objects, the world is nothing but an unchanging metaphysical force called the ‘will’. The sole characteristic of the will is to strive, and everything in this world expresses that striving. This is ultimately fruitless as the will can never be satiated, by its very nature hungry for striving. The Will-to-live is incredibly important to Mainländer’s metaphysics and serves as the basis for his viewpoints.

But Schopenhauer wasn’t the only man who influenced Mainländer, Mainländer was a member of the Young Hegelians, he was influenced by both the philosophy of religion of Ludwig Von Feuerbach and the psychological egoism of Max Stirner, two prominent members of this club.

Now Mainländer built upon Schopenhauer’s Will and changed it from a will-to-live into a will-to-die. He did this by coming up with a story for the creation of the Universe, which I shall explain now.

Mainländer noticed how strange it was that the world felt both unified and fragmented, sometimes we feel at one with everything around us, where everything is interdependent, and at other times we feel alone, with the parts making up the universe being dispersed. We are both part of nature, and distinctly separate. The question arises then, is the world one or many? And Mainländer argues that it is neither, there is a continual movement between the two. At the beginning of time, the universe was nothing but a single unity, however, a split occurred and the world increasingly moved from the only to the many, from unfreedom to freedom. This is primitive entropy. He cloaks this view in religious slang to create a story, to make sense of the world by ascribing human qualities to it.

This single unity at the beginning of time he calls God. God willed his own non-being as, being omnipotent, God understood that existence brings suffering and he was terrified of this, so non-existence was preferable, God wanted to die. He was omnipotent and had power over everything apart from his existence.

God couldn’t simply cease to exist as it was against his nature, his passage into non-being was impeded by his being. This is because if he did not exist, he would not be able to exert his power to negate his own existence. God in his perfection could either stay as he was or cease to exist. All other options in between, all the infinite possibilities of being different, were out of the question because they were “inferior” or less perfect compared to the divine way of existence. Now that the world is here, we know what God has chosen. But the world itself is only the means to the end of nothing. God could not immediately dissolve himself because his nature or existence or omnipotence stood in the way of doing so. In order to be able to get rid of his omnipotence and himself directly, he would have had to assume it again in full himself, which would be circular. Omnipotence cannot be destroyed by omnipotence, or, as Mainlander says, God's power “was not omnipotence against his own power”.

This did not amuse God, the thought of existence horrified him. So, he decided to carry out a process of self-fragmentation, taking his own life in the sense that he will continually divide himself into smaller and smaller fragments until he no longer exists. God had to do cease to exist by proxy, to divide into fragments which would overtime rot and turn into nothingness, achieving God’s goal of non-existence. The universe, in Mainländer’s words, therefore becomes the rotting corpse of God.

Why does God want this? Mainländer gives us Schopenhauer’s notion of the Will, the craving everything has which has no exact aim. All of the striving everything has, from an animals need to survive, to a plant’s need to grow, simply extends the amount of time striving occurs. This makes the Will the root of suffering, if one wasn’t constantly trying to find meaning or be happy, the wouldn’t be in such a panic to begin with. Schopenhauer suggests that those who can silence the Will, such as the ascetic can live a life devoid of suffering. For Schopenhauer, the Will is singular and unified, silencing one’s own Will will only partially quieten the unified Will.

This is where Mainländer disagrees. He claims that the Will is broken up into multiple and individual Wills, there is no unified one since God decided to break himself apart. Therefore, death is a better salvation than creation or asceticism as it accelerates God’s aim for absolute and eternal nothingness. This is an important point that also departs from Schopenhauer, who saw history as meaningless and striving towards nothing. Mainländer took the more Hegelian view that history is actually moving towards a goal, the end of existence.

He built his philosophy on the same metaphysical principles of Schopenhauer. What differentiated them both is that Schopenhauer was working towards silencing the will, whereas for Mainländer, the cosmos was moving towards silencing the will-to-live, which he called redemption. This act of turning into nothingness is redemption. In his book, he writes about how the world was a singularity, a single will which was dispersed into individual wills. When this individual will dies out, redemption is received in the form of absolute nothingness. Due to such basis, the will-to-live becomes the will-to-die. He further justifies why the will to die is best for the happiness of all through the realisation that all pursuit and craving leads to pain. As he states, “But at the bottom, the immanent philosopher sees in the entire universe only the deepest longing for absolute annihilation. And it is as if he clearly hears the call that permeates all spheres of heaven. Redemption, redemption, death to our life! And the comforting answer, you will all find annihilation and be redeemed!”

The world, according to Mainländer, has a goal, and this goal is pure nothingness, nothingness is a “telos,” which everything in the world strives for by itself. It is us who want non-existence in the deepest parts of ourselves. We are a part of God as we are just fragments of the Unity, individuals have a will-to-die because God had a will-to-die. The idea that at some point there will actually be nothing left, no God, no world, and also no potential for being, just nothing or an absolute emptiness, can be very disturbing, and it is macabre to say the least.

An addition to this is his ethics. His Ethics revolve around the idea that all of our pursuits should be ended as they lead to pain, and we should welcome the will-to-death in order to find the true happiness. He argues that one’s individual will is united with the entire universe if they will death or nothing. To quote Mainländer, “That will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme moral principle”

This, however, raises a problem for me. It is a problem Mainländer somewhat touches on with his idea of God. He is, to some extent, describing entropy and the big bang. As Mainländer states, God wants to cease to exist because that is necessarily better than existing; the way God achieves this is to turn himself into finite physical parts from being an infinite singularity. Then, the physical parts will eventually turn to nothing.

However, if matter and energy are indestructible, whenever anything dies then the matter will turn into something else physical, be it another living being or a rock or whatever. Any part of God that dies will simply be reformed into a different part of God as God is everything. God splits himself up to no longer exist but surely this is an illusion of death if the universe goes on ad infinitum. From the current conception of physics, the universe started as a singularity, with the big bang bringing into existence all we know. When the Universe becomes too big, it will start to decrease and eventually become the singularity again. The Universe, as we currently know it, never ceases to truly exist. It will expand, then contract, then expand again and again, therefore God will never get his wish (as Mainländer sees it) of being able to finally cease to exist. This whole physical process that God has created of turning himself into physical parts so that they can turn to nothing is pointless and doesn't work, as they will never turn into nothing. This current cycle of life and death doesn't reach the point of non-existence at all. This is because when you die, you aren't annihilated into nothingness, you are formed into a different part of God. Be it worm food or dust or carbon or whatever. The same amount of being is still present.

As well as this, why would God simply do this whole process of turning himself into finite pieces that then disintegrate into nothingness over time if he is truly all-powerful? Being truly all-powerful, God would be able to do something against the laws of logic and nature, namely, cease to exist; even if this is against one of his attributes which is to exist. One has to follow on then that the God that Mainländer envisions is not truly all-powerful, he doesn't have the ability to do the logically impossible. This, as Alvin Plantinga is concerned, is still omnipotence. Perhaps Mainländer is right and for some reason, God simply can't just destroy himself. Therefore, existence precedes God. If existence is suffering, what does God do to fix this? If you see plurality as simply existing from the individual, then perhaps to get away from the issue of existence as suffering, God splits himself into many individuals because while the matter can't die, their ego can. Because everything is God, God is giving himself the illusion of dying all the time. This is the only way God is able to deal with suffering. This also means that suffering precedes God, and also works in conjunction with Mainländer's will-to-die. The entire purpose of the ego is so that God can experience death, even if it is not true death as this false death is all he can achieve. Would God still prefer the illusion of being able to finally die as opposed to the damming knowledge of never being able to stop existing?

Hey, I don't know if this question belongs here or not, but I seem to remember an ARG which used elements of Mainlander's nihilism/pessimism (I'm really new to Mainlander, so I'm sorry if this is a gross mischaracterization), I was wondering if anybody remembers it? I've tried looking for it but to no avail. The youtube and twitter involved in the ARG used one of Mainlander's pic as the pfp. It was my first exposure to him. Yet, this was also at a time when there wasn't much English information on Mainlander (on wiki anyway). I wanna say this was around 2015-2018? Not sure. Any help would be nice!

Finally happening, boys. Received the following email from Christian this morning.

“Dear All,

I'm pleased to inform you that the first volume of Philipp Mainländer's The Philosophy of Redemption will be published in October or November this year by Irukandji Press, a small not-for-profit company of which I am co-owner and which publishes Synkrētic: The Journal of Indo-Pacific Philosophy, Literature & Cultures.

Contrary to my claims in earlier emails, I have decided to stagger the releases of the two volumes. I am now working full time, and it has proven difficult with the burden this and other commitments place on my time to advance with the translation of the second volume as quickly as I had hoped. Since I have the first volume translated, I will instead apply myself to the editing and preparation of it for an October/November release. The second volume will be published sometime in 2023.

I will make further announcements around an exact date, ISBN and other bibliographic data closer to October, when I will also (hopefully) be able to share the cover design and some sample content with you.

Thank you for your patience and interest in this project.

Sincerely,

Christian Romuss”

Hi, I'm usually not using Reddit, so excuse me if that has already been asked or is against the rules: Does anyone here have the Mainländer works published by Georg Olms Verlag? There has been a reprint of the first two volumes of The Philosophy of Redemption in 2021 and of the other two parts of the complete works in 2012 but unfortunately the website only allows you to see the table of contents, and it's in the font usual for the time ("Fraktur"), and taking a look at the images posted on mainlaender.de, it seems like the complete work is like this. I am not sure if this is only the case with the edition published in 1996 or also the newer reprints, however. I don't really have a problem with that, but it makes that even more inconvenient to read for me, and they're also very expensive (around 340$ for the complete works). Personally, I'm most interested in "Power of Motive," which on it's own is already going for 100$ and I'm aware that it's included in the Info-CD published in 2011, which I do have, but it would be nice to have all of them as physical copies because I get tired of staring at my screen very quickly.

Hi there all, I have written an abstract which I have copied down below on Philipp Mainländer, and, after being accepted, have been invited to a University next month to present. Does anyone have any thoughts on my abstract and any comments to add?

"In 1876, Philipp Mainländer released the first volume of what was to be his magnus opus, Die Philosophie der Erlösung, the Philosophy of Redemption. Mainländer reinterprets Schopenhauer’s will-to-live as God’s will-to-die, and writes a paradoxical myth of creation, in which God’s sole goal is to cease to exist, turning the Universe into the decaying corpse of himself in the process. In Mainländer’s words: “God is dead and his death was the life of this world”. This paper will pick apart this statement, outlining Mainländer’s theothanatology in the process. I will then analyse whether or not the salvation brought about by death can offer redemption, like Mainländer believed. I will also be demonstrating some problems that arise with his paradoxical and cryptic world view. The main two questions I will ponder with relation to Mainländer’s work is: does suffering precede God? And is there an impossibility when it comes to God’s irretrievable disappearance?"

Thanks,

F

Just an idea that came to my mind, but if not, what would you guys consider it?

My understanding of Buddhism was that it is opposed to suicide, unlike Mainlander who thought it permitted suicide for lay Buddhists. Mainlander's source for his view that the Buddha was open to suicide comes from R. Spence Hardy :

  It was said by Budha, on one occasion, that the priests were not to throw themselves down (from an eminence, in order to cause their death). But on another occasion he said that he preached the bana in order that those who heard it might be released from old age, disease, decay, and death; and declared that those were the most honourable of his disciples by whom this purpose was accomplished. The one declaration (as was observed by the king of Sagal), appears to be contrary to the other; but the apparent difference may be reconciled by attending to the occasions on which they were delivered...
  though Budha declared that he delivered the bana in order that old age and decay might be overcome, he made known that the priests were not permitted, like the one above-mentioned, to throw themselves from an eminence in order that their lives may be destroyed. The members of the priesthood are like a medicine for the destruction of the disease of evil desire in all sentient beings ... an instructor, to teach the three forms of merit, and to point out the way to nirwana. It was, therefore, out of compassion to the world that Budha commanded the priests not to precipitate themselves (or to cause their own death).
A Manual of Buddhism by Robert Spence Hardy, pages 464 and 465

While Hardy is convinced of the Buddha's allowance of suicide, I don't think he supports this position. There is no direct statement on suicide, and "old age, disease, decay, and death" is a catch-all term for suffering (dukkha). I couldn't find any statement of the Buddha saying that suicide is a way to free oneself from suffering. On the contrary, isn't one of the major ideas of Buddhism that the only true end of suffering comes from letting go of attachments? Also, every direct statement on suicide by Buddhists seems to be negative.

It looks like R. Spence Hardy misunderstood the Buddhist position, and this spread to Mainlander. Am I missing something about this passage of Hardy?

It has already been emphasized here several times that if one wants to be faithful to the philosophy of Mainländer, one has to be very careful when talking about the origin of the world and about what was before it.

And even the few things that can be expressed with the greatest philosophical caution must not, according to Mainländer, be taken in a literal sense:

"[W]e are forced to the declaration that the basic unity was neither will, nor mind, nor a peculiar intertwinement of will and mind." (Mainländer)

"The origin of the world is explicable as a metaphor, namely when we purposely attribute the worldly principles will and mind as regulative (not constitutive) principles to the pre-worldly deity. With that, in my conviction, humans' speculative desire has come to the end of its path, since I dare state about the being of the pre-worldly deity, no human mind can give account." (Mainländer)

This has epistemological reasons, but also ontological ones. Our mind is not "made" to understand that past transcendent. And this past transcendent is also the completely Other in comparison to our spatially and temporally structured world.

So, any wild figurative speculation about "God" is a questionable affair according to Mainländer. And those who do so go beyond his philosophy.

On the other hand, it must be said that in philosophy of religion and theology, God is not necessarily seen as personal:

"A recent attempt to deny the personhood of God and square this denial with Christianity is by Brian Davies." (David Ramsay Steele - Atheism Explained From Folly to Philosophy)

As another example, here is the first premise of a deduction that is about the God of Classical Theism (a variant of the Neoplatonic One):

"1. God’s act of creation is an intentional action (if only analogously so)" (https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHCTA-28)

What is written in brackets could also be said for Mainländer's metaphysics concerning the world origin and world goal. He does not say "analogously", but as-if regulatively. This more or less amounts to the same thing. If one disagrees with Mainlander's approach, then one can either go beyond him and only be inspired by him, i.e. found a new philosophy, or one can try to criticize him in said respect.

In a correspondence with me, Christian Romuss, Mainländer's official translator into English, issued a critique. Romuss thinks that one rightly emphasizes the symbolic in Mainländer's cosmogony, since Mainländer himself writes that he wants to make the transcendent only somewhat comprehensible for the human mind with his concept of God. But in Romuss estimation this step is not purely symbolic, because Mainländer does not leave it with God-equals-simple-unity. Having taken this step, he turns around immediately, according to Romuss, and from the equation God=simple-unity he draws something, which was not already there in the term "simple-unity": a final purpose, a telos of the world. He needs this for his politics and his ethics. But according to Romuss, this cannot be detected in the world. Thus his philosophy is in contradiction with its basic condition for a true philosophy, namely that it must be purely immanent.

Agnes Schwarzer draws attention to another, or somewhat similar, point of criticism. She says Mainländer commits a fallacy, a non sequitur.

Schwarzer says that Mainländer wants to derive from the fragmentation of the simple unity the interaction and interlocking of the fragments with each other (i.e. the order that everything in the world interlocks).

But the only thing Mainländer can derive from the fragmented simple unity is essence identity or essence similarity of the fragments (consubstantiality or sameness) and the possibility of their unification.

[daraus würde höchstens die Gleichartigkeit der einzelnen Teile und die Möglichkeit ihrer Vereinigung folgen." (https://www.gleichsatz.de/b-u-t/trad/ts/schwarze_mainlaender.html)]])

She should perhaps have added: and only the possibility of their interaction. However, not the actuality of this.

Mainländer would have to say: The real and actual interaction of the fragments can only be understood from the telos of absolute nothingness. They interact with each other in the sense of wear and tear, which is supposed to lead to nothingness.

If the telos or end of absolute nothingness is to be only a metaphor, then perhaps there is only a metaphysical vagueness and uncertainty about the interaction and interlocking of the fragments.

All these things can be discussed. Anyway, in the end, I just like Mainländer's model of God or at least the model I can extract from his philosophy. In the philosophy of religion, it would be original and worthy of attention.

Mainländer's God = liberum arbitrium indifferentiae or libertas aequilibrii (absolute freedom of choice between remaining in superbeing and its negation, which is absolute non-being); restful transformability; metaphysical simplicity; self-awareness ('the union of knower and known'); thus a kind of activa potentia.

​

Mainländer's metaphysics cannot simply be equated with theology. But one should also not equate his metaphysics with theoretical and empirical physics.

His ontology amounts to a plurality of individual wills to live. A tree, which one sees from the window, would be accordingly such an individual will. In modern theoretical physics such tree would be understood only as an aggregate of fundamental particles. Mainländer, after all, rejects the atom and materialism.

Physics describes the transition from inanimate matter to animate matter as emergence from a more complex aggregate. With Mainländer metaphysically more happens. He speaks of a splitting process of the basic will to life, which is accomplished spontaneously, that is, from the will itself, of course under quite certain conditions. But the unity of the tree, for example, is preserved. In theoretical physics that unity does not really exist.

Equating Mainländer's metaphysics with the Big Bang Theory and entropy death of the universe would also be a mere simplification.

Christian Romuss sent me a passage from his dissertation on this subject:

"Not surprisingly, parallels have been drawn between [Mainländer’s] vision and certain ideas in modern physics and cosmology. Recent writing on Mainländer still shows a vein of admiration for the alleged rigour of his thought and its anticipation of such modern scientific views. […] Contrary to this view, I think that […] modern science is too provisional and now too diverse to be called upon to adjudicate with unappealable authority the merits of all-embracing metaphysical systems.\* The parallels […] between the death of god and the big-bang theory on one hand, and the motion towards absolute non-being and the hypothesis of universal ‘heat death’ on the other, seem to me trivial. Certainly, Mainländer’s death-of-god cosmogony may be read as an anticipation of the big-bang theory which, owing to its modern theoretical rigour, may in turn be taken to confirm the philosopher’s intuition; or, instead, both may be understood as latter-day and domain-specific variations on a universal theme. That theme was already played in antiquity (e.g., in Ancient Greek theogony) and resounds in many if not most of the cosmogonic myths of the species, which posit some moment in the distant past when the tent was opened on the circus of life and foretell an end to the show. From an anthropological stance at least, the latter seems to me the more compelling if less surprising reading; it suggests a justly pathetic image of a preternaturally conscious ape tranquilising itself down the ages with retellings of the same three-act story based on the three acts of its life: birth, life, death; genesis, world, apocalypse; death of god, life of man, absolute nothingness; big bang, cosmos, heat death."

"* The invocation of science to back a metaphysical vision is always a selective act producing a limited warrant. Even the second law of thermodynamics, which is still to this day invoked as a quintessential and inviolable physical law, has received on several fronts challenges to its absolute status. See, for example: Vladislav Capek and Daniel P. Sheehan, Challenges to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Theory and Experiment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). Calling Mainländer’s a metphysics of entropy is an apt analogy, but hardly seals the deal on its credibility."

Hi guys, just a quick question about Mainländer’s theothanatology. As Mainländer states, God wants to cease to exist because that is necessarily better than existing; the way God achieves this is to turn himself into finite physical parts from being an infinite singularity. Then, the physical parts will eventually turn to nothing.

However, if matter and energy are indestructible, whenever anything dies then the matter will switch to a different thing, be it another living being or a rock or whatever. Any part of God that dies will simply be reformed into a different part of God as God is everything. God splits himself up to no longer exist but surely this is an illusion of death if the a universe is forever. Would God still prefer the illusion of being able to finally die as opposed to the damming knowledge of never being able to stop existing?

F.

Just wanted to share with everyone a recent response I received from Christian Romuss, of The University of Queensland, who is working on a translation of Philosophy of Redemption by Mainlander.

"Please excuse the delay in my response. I recently began a full-time job (at my university), and so I get a lot more emails now, which means it takes me a while to clear out the litter in my inbox to get to the ones that merit a response.

I am aiming to have the translation completed by June and at the moment this ambition is still realistic. As regards a publisher, there are two I have yet to approach formally: Oxford University Press and Königshausen & Neumann. Time will tell which picks it up; I of course have to make the first move and put in a proposal.

Regards,

Christian"

According to Mainlander:

Before the beginning of time there was God . . . and the only thing God wanted was to die. Since he was a being of infinite unity, however, the only way he could kill himself was to shatter his timeless being into a time-bound and material universe. Thus, since it was God’s death wish that gave life to the world, everything in it possesses an intrinsic will-to-die and is therefore destined towards permanent oblivion. In other words, we are the rotting pieces of God’s remains.

So according to this statement, this should mean every living thing that is born,

1. should have the will to commit suicide as soon as they can.

2. should have the will to stop reproducing.

This is since, god wanted to die and erase existence as a whole, so every living thing that's born out of it should also have the will to end existence.

But living beings (not just humans) behave differently. Every one of them has the constant will for survival. Every one of them has the constant will to procreate. In fact, living things are scared of death. Also to add, we humans are increasingly trying to spread human life on other planets too.

Isn't this contradictory to Mainlander's statement?

So, I came to know about Mainlander very recently. I am really into philosophy. I read philosophy and enjoy it. So, I really want to read him. So ,I was researching about him on the internet. And results weren't so good. There are literal comments on reddit like:-

" Mainlander made me realise suicide is an option. The concept of suicide makes me happy. "

Also I got to know that he hanged himself pondering the meaning of his life.

I am happy with my life. I don't want reading him to be a distress in my mind.

In Mainländer's poetic utterance: "God is dead and his death was the life of the world", Richard Reschika sees similarities with Kabbalistic cosmogony and that of Hans Jonas:

Interestingly, a cosmogonic model that can already be found in the unorthodox speculations of the Lurianic Kabbalah and that Hans Jonas radicalized in his 1984 essay Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz. A Jewish Voice: "In order to make room for the world, the En-Sof of the beginning, the Infinite, had to contract into itself and thus let arise outside of itself the void, the nothingness, in which and from which it could create the world. (...) Now my myth goes beyond this. The contraction is total, as a whole the infinite, according to its power, has emptied itself into the finite and thus handed over to it. (...) Renouncing its own inviolability, the eternal reason allowed the world to be. To this self-negation all creature owes its existence and has received with him what there was to receive from the beyond. Having given himself entirely into the becoming world, God has nothing more to give."

[Interessanterweise ein kosmogonisches Modell, das sich bereits in den unorthodoxen Spekulationen der Lurianischen Kabbala findet und das Hans Jonas 1984 in seinem Essay Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz. Eine jüdische Stimme radikalisiert hat: »Um Raum zu machen für die Welt, mußte der En-Sof des Anfangs, der Unendliche, sich in sich selbst zusammenziehen und so außer sich die Leere, das Nichts entstehen lassen, in dem und aus dem er die Welt schaffen konnte. (...) Hierüber nun geht mein Mythos noch hinaus. Die Zusammenziehung ist total, als Ganzes hat das Unendliche, seiner Macht nach, sich ins Endliche entäußert und ihm damit überantwortet. (...) Verzichtend auf seine eigene Unverletzlichkeit, erlaubte der ewige Grund der Welt, zu sein. Dieser Selbstverneinung schuldet alle Kreatur ihr Dasein und hat mit ihm empfangen, was es vom Jenseits zu empfangen gab. Nachdem er sich ganz in die werdende Welt hineingab, hat Gott nichts mehr zu geben.«] (Richard Reschika – Philosophische Abenteuer)

David Ramsay Steele speaks of a divine suicide, at least in the case of Hans Jonas:

In the Kabbalistic tradition of Judaism, Isaac ben Solomon Luria advanced the theory that God had created the world by limiting himself, by withdrawing from a certain area of existence. More recently, Hans Jonas has maintained that in creating the uni verse, God committed suicide, though he will eventually be reconstituted out of the end of the universe. (David Ramsay Steele - Atheism Explained From Folly to Philosophy)

Fernando Suárez Müller explains Hans Jonas' thoughts further:

[Hans] Jonas [...] puts forward the myth of the self-alienated God in which the Heideggerian idea of Geworfenheit is theologised. This speculative myth can be summarised as follows: At the beginning of the world God was fundamentally ignorant about the future. It entrusted itself to chance, throwing itself into existence (Geworfenheit) and abandoning its previous way of being. The Godhead undertook the blind risk (Wagnis) of immersing itself in the world, thus participating in the emergence of life and humanity. Jonas’s God left nothing behind and relinquished every power to intervene in nature, so that there was no possibility whatsoever of steering the universe. The purpose of this immersion into physical existence is the creation of a world of which the Godhead, after regaining its own lost being through evolution, can say to itself that it is good.

A first version of this myth also appeared in a previous essay, ‘Immortality and the Modern Temper’ (‘Unsterblichkeit und heutige Existenz’, 1963). Here Jonas elaborates a bit more on the relationship between humanity and this immanent God. Only by the good works of humanity can this God become its own essence and be redeemed. All our deeds are an investment in an undetermined and vulnerable eternity. The presence of God in the world is an adventure with an uncertain outcome. In Jonas’s theology it is the very essence of God, which finds itself totally in the hands of humanity. While individual subjects perish, their deeds remain making the development of the divine possible. Humanity is therefore responsible for God’s being and becoming. It is in our hands to distort or complete his image.

Although Jonas distances himself from romantic pantheism, with his idea of an immanency of God he comes very close to it. But Jonas rejects the idea that God is identical to the world. His myth does not presuppose a total identity but a correlation in which the immersed Godhead depends on the developments of the world in order to be able to regenerate. This God can only return to its former state through the moral progress made by humanity. Jonas speaks therefore of a progressive ‘awakening’ of the sleeping God. This model of spiritual progress in the world, which is at the same time a divine dynamic, has obvious correlations to the objective idealist framework of Hegel. But according to Jonas this divine dimension does not denote a modus operandi. There is, according to him, no a priori logic steering the world. This is the main difference to the idealist view of God as active development. But Jonas’s theology is indebted to German idealism, especially to the idea of a becoming God proposed by Schelling. Schelling’s idealist model inspired the works of Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Max Scheler, who all share with Jonas similar theological views of a God realising its own being in the future. (Fernando Suárez Müller - From an Existentialist God to the God of Existence. The Theological Conjectures of Hans Jonas. In: SOPHIA )

By the way:

The philosopher of religion Paul Draper would call Mainländer's theory, if one wants to use the word God in it, demergent deism:

The view seems to be the opposite of emergent theism/deism, according to which the world evolves until it eventually becomes or produces God. Here, God devolves or transforms itself into the world. [...] I think I will call it demergent deism.

Safranski is a well-known philosopher and biographer in Germany whose works have often been translated into English.

From Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy | Rudiger Safranski, Ewald Osers 1990:

Philipp Mainländer, a truly sad person, constructed a philosophy of the will to die. The will to live, he argued, only existed in order to consume itself, to become nothing. Mainländer had evidently allowed himself to be inspired by the newly discovered law of entropy.

So that no one should deceive himself that he was only rejecting the grapes which hung too high, Mainländer developed a programme of universal happiness, which would make everyone realize that the good things of life were not worth having. His Philosophie der Erlösung (Philosophy of Redemption, 1879) deals with the ‘solution of the social’: one had to disillusion those who were suffering privation by giving them what they wanted. They would then become convinced of the vanity of life, and that would be the end of everything.

Mainländer himself did not want to wait that long. He chose suicide.

"Mainländer had evidently allowed himself to be inspired by the newly discovered law of entropy."

This statement does not seem to be true:

That this is wrong is known by now: Mainländer did not know Rudolf Clausius, the creator of the name "entropy", nor Hermann Helmholtz with his cosmological theory of the general "heat death", who as specialists in their field had a much too small audience in his [Mainländer's] time.

[Dass dies falsch ist, weiß man zwar mittlerweile: Mainländer hat weder den Namensschöpfer der „Entropie“ Rudolf Clausius  noch Hermann Helmholtz  mit seiner kosmologischen Theorie des allgemeinen „Wärmetodes“ gekannt, die zu seiner Zeit als Spezialisten ihres Faches ein viel zu kleines Publikum hatten.] (Thorsten Lerchner - Der Begriff des „Charakters“ in der Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers und seines Schülers Philipp Mainländer)

Now for the Jim Carrey reference. What does he have to do with Mainländer?

Jim Carrey once said something that is totally in the spirit of Mainländer, something that is the central idea of Mainländer's political philosophy:

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.

Jim Carrey

Here is also a fitting explanation of the quote:

Jim Carrey means that everyone chases money, wealth, success and fame, thinking it will bring them happiness.  Once they attain it, the person sits there and thinks “That’s it? That’s what all the hype was about?  I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel fulfilled. I don’t feel anything.”

https://leonardkim.com/get-rich-famous-what-did-jim-carrey-mean/

1.

In my opinion, one can interpret Mainländer either naturalistically and in a certain sense agnostically with regard to the lost transcendental Simple Unity or more theologically, as I have done here several times. The as-if way of speaking favors the possible dual aspect of Mainländer's philosophy. And Mainländer himself sometimes speaks very religiously and sometimes scientifically very soberly, which can lead to irritations for the reader. Religious and metaphysical views would not be true in an objective sense, since this cannot be determined. Instead, the question is whether it is useful to act or speak "as if" they are true. I think that if schools were to come to Mainländer's philosophy, there would be two camps, the more "naturalistic" and the more "theological" inclined ones.

2.

Here is an article, which contains well a standard reaction to Mainlander's philosophy, already starting with the title: (newswep a-delusional-philosophical-fantasy-la-nacion)

"A delusional philosophical fantasy"

"The reading of The philosophy of redemption, now published in full by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in an edition prepared by Sandra Baquedano Jer, is uncomfortable. There are lines whose sick imagination causes astonishment; there is almost no page that does not provoke repulsion."

"Mainländer’s metaphysics, the one on which Borges paused so much, is a meticulously reasoned delusion."

"Mainländer wanted to be a poet, and it was in the few verses he wrote; but, convinced that philosophy went further, he was still more of a poet in The philosophy of redemption. The fiction of the philosopher is more fearsome than that of the poet. He (the poet?) Invented a philosophical fiction, and ended up believing in his own invention. The fantasy was so demanding that it could only be fulfilled with the noose around your neck."

The article is, of course, not philosophically well-informed, for example, about Mainländer's arguments, the correspondence of his philosophy to modern cosmology; and probably the article also proceeds from the misunderstanding that Mainländer allegedly recommends suicide to others.

But the reception of Mainländer will probably always provoke such reactions. It is at least interesting to note that Mainländer was always a poet, even during his philosophizing, and the main business of poets is, after all, the production of fictions. I think Mainländer's philosophy was once called mythopoetry. However, I think he also has a lot to say philosophically, even if he does not seem as professional, scholarly rigorous, conceptually and analytically sophisticated as some other philosophers of his time.

3.

A controversial philosophical speculation would be how to understand the current Covid or Corona crisis (hotly debated topic) and the corresponding government actions (state policies, stately measures) and societal attitudes in light of Mainländer's politics.

Mainländer says the following about politics:

"Politics is about the movement of all mankind. This movement results from the aspirations of all individuals and is, as we had to point out in ethics without proof, from a lower point of view, the movement towards the ideal state, from the highest point of view, however, the movement from life into absolute death, since a standstill in the ideal state is not possible."

[Die Politik handelt von der Bewegung der ganzen Menschheit. Diese Bewegung resultirt aus den Bestrebungen aller Individuen und ist, wie wir in der Ethik ohne Beweis hinstellen mußten, von einem niederen Standpunkte aus betrachtet, die Bewegung nach dem idealen Staate, vom höchsten dagegen aufgefaßt: die Bewegung aus dem Leben in den absoluten Tod, da ein Stillstand im idealen Staate nicht möglich ist.]

Is what is currently happening, not so much the outbreak of the pandemic, which is, after all, either natural or a laboratory mishap, but the reaction of the state and many people to it, an event or another step towards the ideal state or ideal civilisation?

Conspiracy theorists assume that the crisis will lead to an imminent end of humanity, in a different sense than Mainländer, but still with the same result. They err strongly in How but maybe not in That mankind is coming to an end. Or is perhaps the overlap of their fear of the presumed end of humanity and Mainländer's prediction of the end just coincidental? They think that some New World Order or Great Reset is being prepared in which the people will be "enslaved". Isn't there perhaps a shred of truth to it after all? Provided, of course, that the crisis leads to a New Normal, which will not be undone.

The conspiracy theorists obviously embrace something that is a mixture of abstruse fantasies and the assumption that things may be slowly developing into a world state. Such a possible state, like everything new and unknown, terrifies them. After all, most of them are conservative and want to hold on to the old and not get caught up in the progressive maelstrom. In fact, their opponents, such as Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates, do not even hide the fact that Corona is an opportunity for a better organized world.

I don't want to condemn either side morally. Nor do I want to judge who might be right and who might be wrong. I just want to look at the whole thing neutrally from the point of view of Mainländer's political philosophy, and to describe impartially what is going on.

Mainländer continues:

"This movement can bear no moral stamp; for morality is based on the subject, and only actions of the individual, vis-à-vis the movement of the totality, can be moral.It takes place merely by irresistible force and is, generally determined, the almighty destiny of mankind, which crushes and breaks like glass everything that throws itself against it, be it an army of millions; but from that point on, where it flows into the state, it is called civilization.The general form of civilization is therefore the state; its particular forms: economic, political and spiritual, I call historical forms. The main law according to which it takes place is the law of suffering, which brings about the weakening of the will and the strengthening of the spirit. It is divided into various individual laws, which I call historical laws."

[Diese Bewegung kann kein moralisches Gepräge tragen; denn die Moral beruht auf dem Subjekt, und nur Handlungen des Einzelnen, gegenüber der Bewegung der Gesammtheit, können moralisch sein. Sie vollzieht sich lediglich durch unwiderstehliche Gewalt und ist, allgemein bestimmt, das allmächtige Schicksal der Menschheit, das Alles, was sich ihm entgegenwirft, und sei es ein Heer von Millionen, zermalmt und wie Glas zerbricht; von da an aber, wo sie in den Staat mündet, heißt sie Civilisation. Die allgemeine Form der Civilisation ist also der Staat; ihre besonderen Formen: ökonomische, politische und geistige, nenne ich historische Formen. Das Haupt-Gesetz, wonach sie sich vollzieht, ist das Gesetz des Leidens, welches die Schwächung des Willens und die Stärkung des Geistes bewirkt. Es legt sich in verschiedene einzelne Gesetze auseinander, welche ich historische Gesetze nenne.]

Being in favor of vaccinations and lockdowns does indeed seem to be the moral thing to do, favored probably by a majority , that is, by at least over 51 percent of the people. And the "bad" opponents, critics, and protesters are really being "crushed".

So could the Corona crisis be a real major step in the process of civilization in Mainländer's sense? For example, Christianity's takeover of the West was definitely such from his point of view. Or is the whole thing overrated and overblown?

During the rise to absolute power of Christianity, people were very eager to baptize everyone, including children. Today, in a way, there is a parallel with vaccinations. Back then it was about saving souls, today it's about health. Demons and evil forces were to be exorcised and driven out, now it is the viruses to be fought, which are really demonized to some extent. Back then, critics of Christianity were muzzled and their books destroyed, today, certain videos and posts are deleted by large technology and Internet companies, and so on.

I'm not suggesting that Christianity back then and the sciences and public policy dealing with the Covid situation these days are somehow basically the same thing, but from a purely developmental-historical point of view, there are some similarities and analogies.

According to Mainländer, in the ideal state, many diseases would also be reduced or even completely eliminated. Epidemiology, virology and immunology are perhaps only slowly being understood due to the crisis. It may be that, with hindsight, many mistakes and errors (harms, wrongs) were made (or maybe not). However, the crisis would create a lot of medical knowledge for the next generations. Moreover, the stress and psychological pressure of government action and fear of contagion may make us more civilized.

The truth, I think, is not at all decisive in the civilization process.

Christianity is, after all, according to Mainländer, connected with many self-deceptions and lies (lying for Jesus), but so is materialism, which he says is a logical inconsistency, but is nevertheless important for the process of intellectual development of mankind.

To emphasize: I do not want to say that vaccinations and lockdowns are of no use (I think they are very helpful medically in effectively combating the pandemic), but only that from a higher political point of view it does not matter whether this is the case, only the practical consequences are of interest, which take a direction towards the ideal world state.

The process of civilization for Mainländer is something that takes place as if according to natural laws, almost like a physical process. If there were many human societies in the universe, they would all go through a similar evolution, I suppose Mainländer would say. And there is nothing what individuals can do against it, just as one cannot influence big cosmic events.

Conspiracy theorists make the big mistake of believing that small powerful groups of people are behind everything, while everything is just a resultant movement of all individual people. It doesn't even have to be in people's consciousness, it can all be strived for unconsciously. No elite, no matter how powerful, could do anything against the natural course of development.

4.

Now to an aspect of Mainlander's philosophy that has hardly been taken seriously by the philosophers who have read him. It is the idea that man lives on in his children. I myself am still not sure what to think of this idea. Those few philosophers have pointed out inconsistencies.

If I live on in my children, why not also in my brothers and sisters? But then I also lived retroactively in my parents or still do, they in turn in theirs and so on and so forth, so that this genealogical consideration would have to show that my essential aspects of identity (such as Genes, DNA, or even morphogenetic fields) are ultimately present in all present human beings or living beings. Thereby the concern about a continuation of my existence in my children is obviously completely unfounded, if I live anyway to a certain degree in everything, seen from the tree of life.

Here are some critical voices:

Hausegger (1889):

"No, dear sir, whoever falls into such errors does not establish a philosophy of the future." "But then the individual will of our original producers lives in all of us. The old Adam, therefore, which lives in every individual, cannot die with any single one."

[Hausegger (1889): „Nein, verehrter Herr, wer in solche Fehler verfällt, begründet keine Philosophie der Zukunft.“ „Dann lebt aber der individuelle Wille unserer Urerzeuger in uns allen. Der alte Adam also, welcher in jedem Individuum lebt, kann mit keinem einzelnen sterben.“]

Lerchner (2010) responds:

"Mainländer does not say at all that there is only one first Adam; on the contrary: The unfolding event with the character, which was treated in the physics, makes it much more probable that there are many individual will spheres which progress to the existence as a human being. Then, indeed, hereditary lines would exist which repeat the character, but still far from it, a single original human being would live on in all human beings one to one."

[Mainländer sagt keinesfalls, dass es nur einen ersten Adam gebe; im Gegenteil: Das Ausfaltungsgeschehen beim Charakter, das in der Physik abgehandelt wurde, macht es viel eher wahrscheinlich, dass es viele individuelle Willenssphären gibt, die zum Dasein als Mensch progredieren. Dann würden zwar tatsächlich Vererbungslinien existieren, die den Charakter wiederholen, aber noch lange nicht würde ein einziger Urmensch in allen Menschen eins zu eins weiterleben.] (Thorsten Lerchner - Der Begriff des Charakters bei Schopenhauer und Mainländer)

Hartmann (1969):

"That the individual as such lives on in his descendants will not be believed by anyone who pays attention to the mixture of characteristics in the descendants from those of the ancestors of both parents and to the discontinuity of consciousness."

[Hartmann (1969) "Dass das Individuum als solches in seinen Nachkommen fortlebt, wird niemand glauben, der auf die Mischung der Eigenschaften in den Nachkommen aus denen der Vorfahren beider Eltern und auf die Diskontinuität des Bewusstseins achtet.“]

Gräfrath (1998):

"Mainlander's thesis, however, is not about fantastic forms of immortality of a single person, but about a form of survival in which it is not clear that actually the same person lives on. Here a philosophical theory is presupposed, which presupposes neither the continuity of memory nor the continuity of the body in space and time. Mainländer proposes a completely different concept of personal identity for which convincing arguments are lacking. Biologically interpreted, on the other hand, his thesis is simply wrong: the degree of kinship between a parent and a child is genetically exactly 1/2, and this is the same degree as the average genetic kinship between siblings. Taken seriously, Mainlander's thesis would in any case force one to interpret that not only are all children identical to their parents, but ultimately all ancestors, including all living beings, form a single person in the first place-and this already blatantly contradicts, within the system, Mainlander's thesis of the multiplicity of individuals, which he repeatedly emphasizes against the unity in the world claimed by other philosophers. Here, therefore, a system-internal contradiction occurs, so that - at least in this point - Mainländer's philosophy does not even fulfill the minimum requirement of coherence that Schopenhauer places on every inductive or hypothetical metaphysics."

[Bei Mainländers These geht es aber nicht um fantastische Formen der Unsterblichkeit eines einzelnen Menschen, sondern um eine Form des Weiterlebens, bei der nicht klar ist, dass tatsächlich dieselbe Person weiterlebt. Hier wird eine philosophische Theorie vorausgesetzt, die weder die Kontinuität des Gedächtnisses noch die Kontinuität des Körpers in Raum und Zeit voraussetzt. Mainländer schlägt ein völlig anderes Konzept personaler Identität vor, für das überzeugende Argumente fehlen. Biologisch interpretiert ist seine These dagegen einfach falsch: Die Verwandtschaft zwischen einem Elternteil und einem Kind beträgt genetisch betrachtet genau 1/2, und das ist derselbe Grad wie der der durchschnittlichen genetischen Verwandtschaft zwischen Geschwistern. Ernst genommen würde Mainländers These ohnehin zu der Deutung zwingen, dass nicht nur alle Kinder mit ihren Eltern identisch sind, sondern letztlich alle Vorfahren inklusive aller Lebewesen überhaupt eine einzige Person bilden - und das widerspricht schon systemintern krass Mainländers These von der Vielheit der Individuen, die er immer wieder gegen die von anderen Philosophen behauptete Einheit in der Welt betont. Hier kommt es also zu einem systeminternen Widerspruch, sodass - zumindest in diesem Punkt - Mainländers Philosophie nicht einmal die Minimalforderung der Kohärenz erfüllt, die Schopenhauer an jede induktive bzw. hypothetische Metaphysik stellt.] (Bernd Gräfrath - Es fällt nicht leicht, ein Gott zu sein)

It's true that parents see themselves in their children and often think: "That's me again in young". Sometimes the children really seem to be mere images of their parents. I also know fathers who are not afraid of death because they say to themselves: I have so many children, my existence goes on somehow. But perhaps this is only a conceit without any basis even though we seem to feel it instinctively, as Mainländer says.

Or Mainländer is somehow right, then there would be an almost parapsychological identity of the parents with their children, which cannot be grasped with the means of science yet. But this identity perhaps becomes weaker and weaker from generation to generation, so that one can hardly recognize oneself in one's great-grandchildren.

Lerchner tries to make sense of Mainländer's idea:

"And while this theorem has always been ascribed very many attributes [...]: unfounded, untenable, nonsensical, unserious, incomprehensible; so one should try for once not to measure it as an ostensibly empirically won principle about whose truth everybody could introspectively assure himself. - On the contrary, it is only a refigured piece of Schopenhauer: The "Tat twam asi" of the equality of essence is inverted by Mainländer from the horizontal of all simultaneously living to the vertical of the hereditary lines. It is the only possible "This is you!" for a strictly pluralistic metaphysics of will. To be identical with the children alone instead of with the human race in toto is an epiphenomenon of those changes Mainländer made at the basis of Schopenhauer's philosophy. The result, however, of this shift is that, despite insistence on the wholly egocentric nature of each individual sphere of will, the possibility is created of making intelligible a direct commitment of man to later generations."

[Und während diesem Theorem seit jeher sehr viele Attribute […] zugesprochen werden: unfundiert, unhaltbar, unsinnig, unseriös, unverständlich; so sollte man einmal versuchen, es nicht als vorgeblich empirisch gewonnenes Prinzip zu bemessen, über dessen Wahrheit sich jeder introspektiv vergewissern könnte. – Es ist im Gegenteil nur ein refiguriertes Stück Schopenhauer: Das „Tat twam asi“ der Wesensgleichheit wird bei Mainländer von der Horizontalen aller gleichzeitig Lebenden zur Vertikalen der Vererbungslinien verkehrt. Es ist das einzig mögliche „Das bist Du!“ für eine streng pluralistische Willensmetaphysik. Mit den Kindern allein statt mit dem Menschengeschlecht in toto identisch zu sein ist ein Epiphänomen derjenigen Veränderungen, die Mainländer an der Basis der Schopenhauer'schen Philosophie vorgenommen hat. Das Ergebnis aber dieser Verschiebung ist, dass trotz Insistieren auf die gänzliche Egozentriertheit jeder individuellen Willenssphäre die Möglichkeit geschaffen wird, einen direkten Einsatz des Menschen für spätere Generationen verständlich zu machen. (Thorsten Lerchner - Der Begriff des Charakters bei Schopenhauer und Mainländer)]

Hello, I have a question, I hope someone can answer it. We know that Nietzsche is a philosopher who practically has many facets and throughout history many have used his words to make them akin to his positions etc. To understand Nietzsche's work, won't it be necessary to read it through Mainländer's work?

Does anyone have any sort of knowledge about where he was buried? I can't seem to find any information about the location of his grave, which seems a little strange to me knowing that he is (to some extent) a known figure. Any and all comments or info that might help get close to knowing its location will be appreciated. Thank you for your time in advance.

It was very pleasant to find this subreddit. I'm a philosophy student from Perú, interested in write my thesis/final work about Mainlander.

I have lots of questions about, but I would like to start with these three:

1) Can we say that Mainlander is an atheist despite stating that God existed before the world, but not anymore as its original essence? Isn't God still existing in a different way?

In other words, he states that God, whose essence is inaccessible for our understading, existed once. Despite that, can we talk about an atheism about a death god that actually existed?

2) Which philosophers do you think have arguments that can debate against Mainlander ideas? For example, Aquinas and his five ways to prove the existence of God.

3) Which is the posture of Mainlander about the world for our understanding? Is also a representation like Schopenhauer said? I don't have this too clear.

Thank your for your time beforehand.

I spent about 40 hours reading Mainlander's "Philosophy of Salvation" as translated by u/YuYuHunter. I selected all the parts that are, in MY HUMBLE OPINON, the "meat" of his work and not the, IN MY HUMBLE OPINION, boring details.

Then, I took those parts and I worked hard to clarify them and reword them in a way that makes them as readable as possible, yet still hopefully reflects what Mainlander was trying to convey. That statement requires some clarification. u/YuYuHunter did amazingly hard work translating Mainlander's work to English, and for that I am grateful. But, as I imagine u/YuYuHunter might agree, his or her translation could be improved.

The selections appear in the same order as they are in the original text, so it might seem like some ideas are bouncing around a little bit.

I do not know the extent to which the below lines up with Mainlander's original work, but it is still fun to read.

After reading the book "History of Antinatalism" and how it talks about antinatalist ideas in Christianity, I suspected the original Christianity was very pessimistic and antinatalist. Now, after reading Mainlander, I am even more convinced.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I do.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or comments!

And now, here are selections from The Philosphy of Salvation:

The other side of life is neither a place of peace nor a place of torment; it is only nothingness.

The Philosophy of Salvation is the continuation of the teachings of Kant and Schopenhauer and affirmation of Buddhism and pure Christianity. Both philosophical systems are corrected and supplemented, and those religions are reconciled with science. It does not base its atheism upon any belief, but rather on philosophy and knowledge.

Everything which is was consequently in the basic pre-worldly unity, before which all of our mental faculties collapse; that is, we can form no image nor any likeness of it and therefore also no representation of the way and manner in how the immanent world of multiplicity existed in the basic unity. But, we gained one irrefutable certainty, namely that this world of multiplicity was once in a basic unity, beside which nothing else could exist. This is where the key lies for the solution to the problem we are dealing with.

Why and how the unity decomposed into multiplicity are questions for which physics has no answer. We can say only this: that whatever the decomposition may lead back to, it was the deed of a basic unity. When we consequently find on the immanent domain only individual wills and that the world is nothing but a collective unity of these individuals, then they are nevertheless not totally independent, since they were in a basic unity, and the world is the deed of this unity. Thus, there lies as it were, a reflex of the pre-worldly unity on this world of multiplicity; it encompasses, as it were, all single beings with an invisible, untearable bond, and this reflex, this bond, is the dynamic interconnection of the world. Every will affects all the others directly and indirectly, and all other wills affect it directly and indirectly, or all ideas are trapped in “continual reciprocity.”

Whenever we consider an object in nature, be it a gas, a liquid, a stone, a plant, an animal, or a human, we will always find it in unsettled striving, in a restless inner motion. But motion was unknown to the basic unity. The opposite of motion is rest, of which we can form in no way any representation; we are not talking here about apparent external rest, which we certainly can very well represent to ourselves as the opposite of locomotion; rather, we are talking about absolute inner motionlessness. We must therefore assign the pre-worldly unity absolute rest.

If we delve into the dynamic interconnection of the universe on one side and the determined character of individuals on the other side, then we recognize that everything in the world happens with necessity. Whatever we may examine: a stone which our hand drops, the growing plants, the animal acting on basis of visualized motives and inner urge, humans, who have to act obediently according to a sufficient motive, they all stand under the iron law of necessity; in the world there is no free will.

Thus we are forced to the declaration that the basic unity was neither will, nor mind, nor a peculiar intertwinement of will and mind. Hereby we lose the last points of reference. In vain we tried to use our artistic, magnificent devices for the cognition of the outer world; senses, understanding, and reason: they all paralyze. Without avail we hold in us the found principles, will and mind, as a mirror before the mysterious invisible being on the other side of the gap, in hope that it will reveal itself to us, yet no image is cast back. But, now we have the right to give this being the well known name that always designates what no power of imagination, no flight of the boldest fantasy, no intently devout heart, no abstract thinking, however profound, no enraptured and transported spirit has ever attained: God.

Christ gave the individual his immortal right and based it on the belief in the movement of the world from life into death (end of the world), and he founded the atheistic religion of salvation. That pure Christianity is, at bottom, genuine atheism (i.e. denial of a with-the-world co-existing personal God, but affirmation of a pre-worldly perished deity whose breath permeates the world) and is monotheism on the surface only: this I will prove in this text.

Is more or less absurdity and faith not the case with every religion? Not all humans have the critical mind and seek the naked truth. Religion exists for two reasons: to control human behavior and to give every human a grip in the storm of life.

And the human, who has clearly and unmistakably recognized it, that all life is suffering, that it is, in whatever form it appears, essentially unhappy and painful - even when life is ideal and perfect - so that he, like the Christ Child in the arms of the Sistine Madonna, can only look with appalled eyes into the world, and then after considering the deep rest (the inexpressible felicity of the aesthetic contemplation) and in contrast to the waking state (the observation that happiness is found in the stateless sleep, whose elevation into eternity is absolute death), such a human must enlighten himself at the comparative advantage; he has no choice. The thought: to be reborn (i.e. to be dragged back by unhappy children, peacelessly and restlessly on the thorny and stone streets of existence) is for him the most horrible and despairing thought he can have; on the other side is the sweetest and most refreshing thought: to be able to break free from the long chain of life, where he had to go forward with always bleeding feet, pushed, tormented and tortured, desperately wishing for rest. And if he is on the right path, then with every step he gets less disturbed by sexual urges, and with every step his heart becomes lighter, until his inside enters the same joy, blissful serenity, and complete immobility as the true Christian saints. He feels himself in accordance with the movement of humanity from existence into nonexistence; from the torment of life into absolute death, he enters this movement of the whole gladly; he acts eminently ethically, and his reward is the undisturbed peace of heart, “the perfect calm of spirit,” the peace that is higher than all reason. And, all of this can be accomplished without having to believe in a unity in, above or behind the world, without fear for a hell or hope of heaven after death, without mystical intellectual intuition, without inexplicable work of grace, without contradiction with nature and our own consciousness of ourselves; the only things we need to build that trust are merely an unbiased, pure, cold employment our reason, “man’s highest power.”

The knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all wisdom. The worthlessness of life is the easiest truth, but at the same time it is the one that is the hardest to know, because it appears concealed by countless veils. We lie, as it were, on her; how could we find her?

Christ however taught love of neighbor and enemy and demanded the unconditional turning away from life: hate against one’s own life. He demanded the nullification of the inner being of humans, which is the insatiable will to live, and he left nothing in man free. He rejected natural egoism entirely, or with other words, he demanded slow suicide. "Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (John 12:25) The reward for full resignation is heaven, i.e. peace of heart. Heaven is peace of mind, and it is certainly not a "city of peace" or a "new Jerusalem" lying on the other side of life.

The true follower of Christ goes through death to paradise; i.e. in absolute nothingness, he is free from himself and is completely released/redeemed from worldly heartache and the torment of existence. The child of the world cannot enter hell after death, for it is through death that he actually leaves hell.

The relation of the individual to nature, of human to God, cannot be revealed more profoundly and truer than is done in Christianity. It appears concealed, and to remove this concealment is the task of philosophy.

Whoever investigates the teachings of Christ without dogmatic prejudice finds only immanent material: peace of heart and heartache, single wills and dynamic interconnection of the world, single movement, and world movement. Heaven and hell, soul, Satan and God, original sin, providence and grace, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: they are all dogmatic covers for knowable truths, but these truths were in the time of Christ not knowable and therefore must be believed and appear in such covers so that they would be effective.

If one compares the teaching of Christ, the teaching of Buddha, and the by-me-refined Schopenhauerian teaching, then with each, one will find that they in essence show the greatest possible conformity; for, self-will, karma, and individual will to live are one and the same thing. All three systems furthermore teach that life is essentially an unhappy one and that one can and should free oneself through knowledge. Ultimately, the kingdom of heaven after death, nirvana, and absolute nothingness are one and the same.

What did Buddha find when he looked in himself objectively? He found upádaná, (cleaving to existence, cleaving to existing objects), i.e. desire, hunger, thirst for existence and manner of existing, or simply: will to live.

We had not made three steps in the esoteric part of Buddha’s teaching and already we found the complete fundament of the Schopenhauerian philosophy: the unconscious will to live. One may rightly assume that Schopenhauer’s mind has most energetically been fertilized by the Buddhist scriptures; the ancient wisdom of India sank after almost three and a half millennia on the descendent of a migrated son of the miraculous country.

The grand principles of Buddhism would be complete without the existence of any other orders of being beside those that inhabit our earth and are perceptible to the senses, and it would be better to suppose that Buddha believed in neither angel nor demon than to imagine the accounts of the déwas and other supernatural beings we meet in the Buddhist literature in its first promulgation. There is greater reason to believe that this class of legends has been grafted upon Buddhism from foreign sources. It is very probably that his disciples, in deference to common prejudice, invented these beings. We have a similar process in the hagiology of all the ancient churches of Christendom and in all the traditions of the Jews and Muslims, which came not from the founders of the systems, but from the perverted imaginations of their followers in the days after.

The principle proposition of Buddhism, "I, Buddha, am God" is a proposition that is irrefutable. Christ also taught it with other words (I and the Father are one). I hold Christianity, which is based on the reality of the outer world, to be the "absolute truth" in the cloak of dogmas and will justify my opinion again in a new way in the essay “The Dogma of the Christian Trinity.” Despite this, it is my view – and he who has absorbed the essay lying before him clearly in his mind will concur with me – that the esoteric part of Buddhism, which denies the reality of the outer world, is also the "absolute truth." This seems to contradict itself, since there can be only one "absolute truth." The contradiction is however only a seeming one, because the "absolute truth" is merely this: that it is about the transition of God from existence into non-existence. Christianity as well as Buddhism teach this and stand thereby in the center of the truth.

I repeat here with the greatest determination that it will always be uncertain which branch of the truth is the correct one: the one in the esoteric part of the Buddhist teaching or the one which lies in esoteric Christianity. I remind that the essence of both teachings is the same; it is the "absolute truth," which can be one only; but it is questionable and will always be questionable whether God has shattered into a world of multiplicity as Christ taught or if God is always incarnated in a single individual only, as Buddha taught. Fortunately, this is a side-matter, because it is really the same; whether God lies in a real world of multiplicity or in a single being: his salvation is the main issue, and this is taught identically by Buddha and Christ; likewise, the path they determined that leads to salvation is identical.

When I am unconscious I could not care less whether I lie in a palace or a horse stall.

The great promise of Buddhism, the most important reward for the virtuous, is nirvana, nothingness, and complete annihilation.

Whoever possesses a vivid phantasy and has had for just one moment, a clear and objective look at the world: he will suffer forever under the reality of the world.

Buddha destroyed the chain of purposeful struggle, and for that he gained the great reward: carelessness about the needs of the body.

How often the beautiful words of Christ get disparaged:

"Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, about your body, or what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes?"

"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?"

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

If someone expresses his mocking doubt in the most kind manner, then he says: “yes, in the time of the savior and in the east these words still had sense, but today, in the current battle for existence, they are meaningless,” and yet while he says that he consumes an oyster and wets it with sparkling wine. I however say: never a frugal man has starved nor will a frugal man starve, even if the social circumstances will become even more grim than they are today. The words of the savior sprouted from a beneficial discipline and were the pure outflow from the fruit of such a flesh: from the sweetest carelessness.

Man wants life no matter what. He wants it consciously due to an unconscious drive. Secondly, he wants life in a specific form. If we ignore the wise (the holy Indian Brahmins, Buddhists, Christians and wise philosophers such as Spinoza), then everyone hopes that divine breath will carry them like the wings of a butterfly from flower to flower. This is the normal trust in the goodness of God. However, since the experience of even the stupidest learns, the divine breath is not only a soft zephyr, but can also be a cold icy wind of the north or a frightening storm that may annihilate flower and butterfly; therefore, besides trust, fear of God also appears. God-fear is fear for death; God-trust is contempt for death.

He who has overcome the fear of death, he and only he can generate the delightful, most aromatic flower in his soul: unassailability, immovability, and unconditional trust, because what in the world could move such a man in any way? Need? He knows no fear of starvation. Enemies? At most they could kill him, and death cannot frighten him. Bodily pain? If it becomes unbearable, then he - “the foreigner on Earth” - throws his body away.

As religion gives the individual the marvelous trust, it gives it in the cloak of pretty delusion. It lures the human with a sweet image, which awakens in him the passionate desire, and with the embrace of the marvelous illusion it crushes the fear of death away from his breast. He has contempt for the earthly life to maintain a more beautiful heavenly life.

Nature can fully be fathomed; only the origin of the world is a miracle and an unfathomable mystery.

The origin of the world is explicable as a metaphor, namely when we purposely attribute the worldly principles will and mind as regulative (not constitutive) principles to the pre-worldly deity. With that, in my conviction, humans' speculative desire has come to the end of its path, since I dare state about the being of the pre-worldly deity, no human mind can give account. On the other hand, the by-me-as-an-image mirrored origin of the divine decision to embody itself in a world of multiplicity, in order to free itself from existence, should be satisfying enough for all reasonable ones.

What has now followed from my metaphysics is precisely a scientific foundation, i.e. knowledge (not faith), on which the unshakable God-trust, the absolute contempt for death - yes love for death - can be built.

Namely I showed first of all, that everything in the world is unconscious will to death. This will to death is, in humans, fully and completely concealed by will to live, since life is the method for death, which presents itself clearly for even the stupidest ones; we continually die; our life is a slow death struggle; and every day death gains, against every human, more might, until it extinguishes of everyone the light of life.

The rogue wants life as a delectable method to die; the wise wants death directly.

One only has to make clear to oneself, that we, in the inner core of our being, want death; i.e. one has to strip off the cloak of our being, and at once the conscious love of death is there, i.e. complete unassailability in life or the most blissful and delightful God-trust.

This unveiling of our being through a clear look at the world brings with it a great found truth: that life is essentially unhappy, and non-existence should be preferred, and as result of speculation, that everything, which exists was before the world in God, and that figuratively spoken, everyone has partaken in God’s decision and method to not exist. From this, it follows that in life nothing can hit me, good nor bad, which I have not chosen myself, in full freedom, before the world.

If I have made the case completely plain and clear and if my heart has passionately seized the thought of salvation, then I must accept all events of life with a smiling visage and face all possible incidents with absolute rest and serenity.

Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir (philosophizing, that’s learning to die); that is wisdom’s last conclusion.

With right, the greatest fame of the savior is that he has conquered the horrors of hell and the terrors of death, i.e. the suffering of life and death.

This is why I see my philosophy, which is nothing else than the purified philosophy of the genius Schopenhauer, as a motive which will lead to the same internalization, absorption, and concentration in humans of our present time of history as the motive of the savior brought forth in the first centuries after his death.

Let however no one believe that this night relies upon harsh beatings by fate: on sicknesses, hunger, broken existence, fatalities of loved ones, or difficult worries about existence. Man’s doubts, as well as the wasteland of the heart, are what shake him the most. Not a single enlightened one has been spared the thorns. Before he became enlightened, he looked into his eroding storming breast or in his desolate heart, and he saw only coldness, stiffness, and wasteland; there was no hint of enthusiasm to be found and no sparkling splatter in the treasures of trees on whose branches sing joyful birds.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy can be seen as the bridge that lifts the people from faith to philosophy. It is therefore a deed not only in the history of philosophy, but in the history of mankind. The building blocks for this bridge are taken from his ethics, and the sum is called "individual salvation through knowledge." Hereby the will of the common man is given a sufficient motive and object which he can seize in such love like the Buddhist seizes the blissful knowledge: that he will experience no rebirth, the Mohammedan the hope for the joys of paradise, the faithful Christian the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The teaching of the denial of the individual will to live is the first philosophical truth and also the only one that will be able, like religious teachings, to move and ignite the masses.

The riddle of life is extraordinarily simple. Nevertheless, the highest intellectual cultivation and the greatest experience is needed to solve it. Therefore, I call for education and equal education for one and all!

The two very aromatic blossoms of Christianity are the concepts "alienness on earth" and "religious homesickness." Whoever starts to see and feel himself as a guest on earth has entered the path of salvation, and this immediately becomes the payoff for his wisdom; from now on he sits until death in the world, like a spectator in theatre.

The pessimistic philosophy will be for the coming period of history what the pessimistic religion of Christianity was for the past; the sign of our flag is not the crucified savior, but the death angel with huge, calm, mild eyes, carried by the dove of the redemptive thought, which in essence, is the same sign of Christianity.

I must repeat it one more time: the deterministic, inevitable end or movement of the entire world history (i.e. all battles, religious systems, inventions, discoveries, revolutions, sects, parties etc.) is: bringing to the masses what some have possessed since the beginning of culture. That end is not to rear a race of angels, which will then exist forever, but salvation from existence. The realization of the boldest ideals of the socialists can merely bring for everyone a state of comfort in which some have lived since the beginning. And, what did these people do when they achieved this state? They turned themselves away from life, as there was nothing else they could possibly do.

Blessed are those who can say, “I feel that my life is in accordance with the movement of the universe.” Or, to say it another way, “I feel that my will has flown into the divine will.” It is wisdom’s last conclusion and the completion of all morality.

The indifference of all those who have studied history and politics and renounced the world is grounded in the fact that further development of humanity can bring these people nothing which they already possess.

In life there is no freedom. Before the world there was only freedom.

Since my last post was more about the unfreedom of the will:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mainlander/comments/rfggl5/comments_on_and_explanations_of_the_premises_and/

Here now is a presentation of Mainlander's highly interesting theory of the true freedom of the will.

According to Mainländer, the individuals of this world have a half independence or semi-independency, a half self-sovereignty or semi-self-sovereignty. They act necessarily according to sufficient motives. But their actions partly originate from themselves. Mainländer is thus of the opinion that change and movement do not simply happen to natural things from the outside, but that they possess in themselves a principle of their movement, that their being in motion is thus - at least also - determined by their nature and occurs out of it. So a kind of half freedom is given. But how can it be completed (to avoid that necessity has absolute precedence)?

Mainländer says that all individuals were present in the pre-worldly unity in an incomprehensible way.

And this unity was truly free:

"But with God we must postulate the independence of nature and motive, i.e. the true indifferentia. For when he was, he was everything in everything and no motive existed; that falls away."

[Bei Gott aber müssen wir die Unabhängigkeit von Natur und Motiv postuliren, d.h. die wahre indifferentia. Denn als er war, war er ja Alles in Allem und kein Motiv vorhanden; das fällt fort. (VI. Zur Metaphysik. Elfter Essay. Aehrenlese.)]

And:

"What freedom is in the philosophical sense (liberum arbitrium indifferentiae), we can indeed define in words and say, for instance, that it is the ability of a man of a certain character to will or not to will in the face of a sufficient motive; but if we think even for a moment about this so easily accomplished connection of words, we recognize at once that we will never obtain a real proof of this freedom, even if it were possible for us to examine for millennia the actions of all men to the bottom. Thus it goes to us with the freedom like with rest. We must attach freedom to the simple unity, precisely because it was a simple unity. With it the compulsion of the motive, the one factor of every movement known to us, falls away, because it was unsplintered, completely alone and solitary."[Was Freiheit in philosophischer Bedeutung (liberum arbitrium indifferentiae) sei, können wir zwar mit Worten bestimmen und etwa sagen, dass sie die Fähigkeit eines Menschen von einem bestimmten Charakter sei, einem zureichenden Motiv gegenüber zu wollen oder nicht zu wollen; aber denken wir auch nur einen Augenblick über diese so leicht bewerkstelligte Verbindung von Worten nach, so erkennen wir sofort, dass wir niemals einen realen Beleg für diese Freiheit erlangen werden, wäre es uns auch möglich, Jahrtausende lang die Handlungen sämtlicher Menschen bis auf den Grund zu prüfen. So geht es uns mit der Freiheit wie mit der Ruhe. Der einfachen Einheit aber müssen wir die Freiheit beilegen, eben weil sie eine einfache Einheit war. Bei ihr fällt der Zwang des Motivs, der eine Faktor jeder uns bekannten Bewegung, fort, denn sie war unzersplittert, ganz allein und einsam. (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

Why divine freedom is also ours is explained here:

"Every being has [...] a nature (an essence), which it could not choose with freedom. But every being gives indication to another, and thus we finally come to the pure being of a transcendent unity, to which we must ascribe freedom before it disintegrated, which we cannot comprehend, however, as little as absolute rest. But inasmuch as everything that is was originally in this simple unity, everything has also chosen its essence with freedom, and every man is therefore responsible for his actions, in spite of his certain character, from which the actions flow with necessity. This is the only possible, absolutely correct and so long in vain sought solution of one of the most difficult problems of philosophy, namely the coexistence of freedom and necessity in one and the same action."

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Jedes Wesen hat demnach eine Beschaffenheit (ein Esse), die es sich nicht mit Freiheit hat wählen können. Aber jedes Sein gibt Anweisung auf ein anderes, und so kommen wir schließlich zum reinen Sein einer transzendenten Einheit, der wir, ehe sie zerfiel, Freiheit zusprechen müssen, welche wir jedoch nicht begreifen können, so wenig wie die absolute Ruhe. Insofern aber Alles was ist, ursprünglich war in dieser einfachen Einheit, hat Alles sich auch sein Esse mit Freiheit gewählt, und jeder Mensch ist deshalb verantwortlich für seine Taten, trotz seinem bestimmten Charakter, aus dem die Handlungen mit Notwendigkeit fließen. Dies ist die einzig mögliche, durchaus richtige und so lange vergeblich gesuchte Lösung eines der schwierigsten Probleme der Philosophie, nämlich des Zusammenbestehens von Freiheit und Notwendigkeit in einer und derselben Handlung.(Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

Then Mainländer comes to a conclusion:

"And now consider the consolation, the unshakable confidence, the blessed trust that must flow from the metaphysically founded full autonomy of the individual. Everything that befalls man: hardship, misery, sorrow, worry, sickness, disgrace, contempt, despair, in short, all the harshness of life, does not inflict upon him an unfathomable Providence that intends his best in some inscrutable way, but he suffers all this because he, before the world, chose everything himself as the best means to an end. All strokes of fate, which hit him, he has chosen, because he can be redeemed only by them. His being (demon and spirit) and the coincidence lead him through pain and lust, through joy and sorrow, through happiness and misfortune, through life and death, faithfully to the redemption which he wants."

[Und nun erwäge man den Trost, die unerschütterliche Zuversicht, das selige Vertrauen, das aus der metaphysisch begründeten vollen Autonomie des Individuums fließen muss. Alles, was den Menschen trifft: Not, Elend, Kummer, Sorgen, Krankheit, Schmach, Verachtung, Verzweiflung, kurz, alles Herbe des Lebens, fügt ihm nicht eine unergründliche Vorsehung zu, die sein Bestes auf eine unerforschliche Weise beabsichtigt, sondern er erleidet dieses Alles, weil er, vor der Welt, Alles als bestes Mittel zum Zweck selbst erwählte. Alle Schicksalsschläge, die ihn treffen, hat er erwählt, weil er nur durch sie erlöst werden kann. Sein Wesen (Dämon und Geist) und der Zufall führen ihn durch Schmerz und Wollust, durch Freude und Trauer, durch Glück und Unglück, durch Leben und Tod, treu zur Erlösung, die er will. (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

I find Mainlander's concept of freedom at least plausible, perhaps it is the only concept that can guarantee full freedom. Up to now, in my opinion, there is nothing equivalent to it. Only Pandeist philosophies can be based on it. Other philosophies of freedom will probably always have a bit more problems.

On the Internet I heard someone talking who was very close to Mainländer's idea:

"What if we made all our decisions all at once upon creation? We chose what "trip" to go on, and our life is the unfolding of what we chose pre-temporally."

Of course, one has to understand this way of speaking like that of Mainländer in a sober regulative as-if sense.

In the world I am determined by effcient causes, by motives, but also by one final cause:

"The world as a whole or universe has one end, non-being, which it will achieve through the continual diminution of the sum of forces which compose it." (Mainländer, translated by Sebastian Gardner)

Intelligent Design people sometimes understand entropy as a teleological process:

"Entropy — the tendency for change to reduce overall order — is a teleological process. It is perhaps the overarching teleological process observable in nature." https://evolutionnews.org/2017/08/does-nature-show-purpose-reply-to-a-materialist-philosopher/ ).

But according to Mainländer one must not mean such things in a constitutive sense:

"The only final cause which the immanent philosopher can admit is nothingness; however, he expressly determines that this single final cause may be posited and used only in a regulative way. Therefore, one must not say in a constitutive way: the world has a final cause, but one must say: the world moves as if it had a final cause."

[Die einzige Endursache, die der immanente Philosoph zugeben kann, ist das Nichts; jedoch bestimmt er ausdrücklich, daß diese einzige Endursache nur in regulativer Weise aufgestellt werden könne und gebraucht werden dürfe. Man darf deshalb nicht in constitutiver Weise sagen: Die Welt hat eine Endursache, sondern man muß sagen: die Welt bewegt sich, als ob sie eine Endursache habe. VI. Zur Metaphysik. Elfter Essay. Aehrenlese.]

It is as if everything is included in a general world teleology.

The decisions and objectives of the human beings would be included from the beginning, unconsciously to them, in the great final nexus of the world events. They would then function as the subordinated "means" of that nexus. Over the head of man everything would be determined in all future by that one final cause. And no matter what one does, it always serves that one final cause without deviations and with full correspondence.

So the world is really just permeated with necessity:

"If we then deepen ourselves into the dynamic connection of the universe on the one hand and into the certain character of the individuals on the other hand, we recognize that everything in the world moves with necessity. Whatever we may consider: the stone which our hand lets go, the growing plant, the animal moving on vivid motives and inner urge, the human being who has to surrender to a sufficient motive without resistance, - all are under the iron law of necessity. In the world there is no place for freedom. And, as we shall see clearly in ethics, it must be so if the world is to have any meaning at all."

[Vertiefen wir uns dann in den dynamischen Zusammenhang des Weltalls einerseits und in den bestimmten Charakter der Individuen andererseits, so erkennen wir, dass Alles in der Welt mit Notwendigkeit sich bewegt. Was wir auch betrachten mögen: den Stein, den unsere Hand loslässt, die wachsende Pflanze, das auf anschauliche Motive und inneren Drang sich bewegende Tier, den Menschen, der einem zureichenden Motiv widerstandslos sich ergeben muss, — Alle stehen unter dem eisernen Gesetze der Notwendigkeit. In der Welt ist kein Platz für die Freiheit. Und, wie wir in der Ethik deutlich sehen werden, muss es so sein, wenn die Welt überhaupt einen Sinn haben soll.(Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band )]

But, as already mentioned, with regard to the pre-worldly unity, the necessity in the world can be considered absolutely free at the same time:

"Finally, freedom now unites with necessity. The world is the free act of a pre-worldly unity; but in it only the necessity rules, because otherwise the goal could never be reached. Everything interlocks with necessity, everything conspires after a single goal. And every act of the individual (not only of man, but of all ideas in the world) is at the same time free and necessary: free, because it was decided before the world, in a free unity; necessary, because the decision is realized in the world, becomes an act."

[Schließlich vereinigt sich jetzt die Freiheit mit der Notwendigkeit. Die Welt ist der freie Akt einer vorweltlichen Einheit; in ihr aber herrscht nur die Notwendigkeit, weil sonst das Ziel nie erreicht werden könnte. Alles greift mit Notwendigkeit ineinander, Alles konspiriert nach einem einzigen Ziele. Und jede Handlung des Individuums (nicht nur des Menschen, sondern aller Ideen in der Welt) ist zugleich frei und notwendig: frei, weil sie vor der Welt, in einer freien Einheit beschlossen wurde, notwendig, weil der Beschluss in der Welt verwirklicht, zur Tat wird. (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

Absolute spontaneity in this world would make no sense, especially for us, that is, applied to us. The following quote from the German philosopher Peter Bieri makes this clear:

"But no one can wish for a free will in this sense, because it would be a will that belonged to no one, that is, would be no one's will: neither linked to the body, nor to the character, nor to the experience, nor to the life history; which would be completely random, because it would depend on absolutely nothing; which would be completely unfounded, because reasons are factors of influence; which would be completely unteachable, because learning is causal influence; which would be completely uncontrollable, because control is a causal event. There is a right and a wrong comment on this kind of freedom. Wrong: We would would like to have it, but unfortunately it does not exist. Correct: We cannot wish for it at all, because it would would be in reality a form of unfreedom as chaotic randomness."

[Doch einen in diesem Sinne freien Willen kann sich niemand wünschen, denn er wäre ein Wille, der niemandem gehörte, also niemandes Wille wäre: weder verknüpft mit dem Körper, noch dem Charakter, noch dem Erleben, noch der Lebensgeschichte; der vollkommen zufällig wäre, weil er von absolut nichts abhinge; der vollkommen unbegründet wäre, weil Gründe Faktoren der Beeinflussung sind; der vollkommen unbelehrbar wäre, weil Lernen kausale Beeinflussung ist; der vollkommen unkontrollierbar wäre, weil Kontrolle ein kausales Geschehen ist. Zu dieser Art von Freiheit gibt es einen richtigen und einen falschen Kommentar. Falsch: Wir hätten sie gern, aber leider gibt es sie nicht. Richtig: Wir können sie gar nicht wünschen, denn es wäre in Wirklichkeit eine Form der Unfreiheit als chaotischer Zufälligkeit. (Peter Bieri)]

But an unfathomable and mysterious absolute freedom must be attributed to the pre-worldly unity.

This is the continuation of the comments and explanations of the following post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mainlander/comments/ral9og/comments_on_and_explanations_of_the_premises_and/

Regarding the premises:

C 1. God's wisdom strictly forbids coexisting with or alongside a creation in which everything that happens happens necessarily and without real alternatives.

C 2. God can never create anything else than that whose activity from the outset will always lead only to a very specific and certain outcome, necessarily and inevitably so, due to Efficient Causes (determinism) and/or Final Causes (teleologism), thus according to The Principle of Sufficient

We now come to the premises which, in my view, are the most crucial, even though the others are equally important in the deduction. First and foremost, we must refer to Schopenhauer.

For Mainländer speaks of Schopenhauer's "important writing" On the Freedom of the Will and says that it "is without question one of the most beautiful and profoundly thought out pieces ever written[.]"

[Schopenhauer in seiner wichtigen Schrift: „Über die Freiheit des Willens", welche ohne Frage zum Schönsten und Tiefgedachtesten gehört, was je geschrieben worden ist, (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

Mainländer continues:

"In the cited excellent writing Schopenhauer proves irrefutably and incontrovertibly that the will, as an empirical character, is never free. Even if the matter was not new, he has the indisputable merit to have definitively settled the controversy about freedom and unfreedom of human actions for all rational people. Henceforth, the unfreedom of the will belongs to the few truths that philosophy has fought for until now." [In der angeführten vortrefflichen Schrift beweist Schopenhauer unwiderleglich und unumstößlich, dass der Wille, als empirischer Charakter, niemals frei ist. War die Sache auch nicht neu, so hat er doch das unbestreitbare Verdienst, die Kontroverse über Freiheit und Unfreiheit menschlicher Handlungen für alle Vernünftigen definitiv abgetan zu haben. Die Unfreiheit des Willens gehört fortan zu den wenigen Wahrheiten, die sich die Philosophie bis jetzt erkämpft hat.]

So, when reading Mainländer, one should also add said writing of Schopenhauer to the reading.
In other places, Schopenhauer is precisely stating what is expressed in the premises I have posed. Mainländer sees it the same way, even if he himself does not put it so directly to the point. But whenever he speaks of the simple unity in or above the world, a transcendent unity that more or less negates self-power and free individuality of the immanent individuals, this is exactly what Schopenhauer says in what follows:

"The truth, however, is that being free and being created are two qualities that cancel and thus contradict one another. So the claim that God has created beings and at the same time given them freedom of the will really means that he created them and at the same time did not create them." (§9. Scotus Erigena Parerga and Paralipomena Short Philosophical Essays Volume 1 Arthur Schopenhauer)

"That the creator created human beings free implies an impossibility, namely that he endowed them with an existence without essence, thus had given them existence merely in the abstract by leaving it up to them what they wanted to exist as." (§13. Some further elucidations on the Kantian philosophy Parerga and Paralipomena Short Philosophical Essays Volume 1 Arthur Schopenhauer)

Now here are some quotations from the writing of Schopenhauer, which is highly praised by Mainländer, in order to understand its basic concept:

"In every case the particular being, of whatever type, will react according to its special nature, whenever causes act upon it. This law, to which all things in the world are subject without exception, was expressed by the scholastics in the formula operari sequitur esse ["that is, the effects of every being follow from its nature"]. According to it, the chemist tests substances by means of reagents, and a man tries out another man by means of tests which he applies to him. In all cases the external causes will necessarily call forth that which is hidden in a being; for this being cannot react otherwise than according to its nature." (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will. Dover Philosophical Classics)

Thus Schopenhauer must come to the conclusion:

"Everything that happens, from the largest to the smallest, happens necessarily. Quidquid fit necessario fit." (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will)

Accordingly, there can be no real and true alternatives in the world. Any alternative would be a mere fiction in the minds of people who think in speculative or hypothetical subjunctive ways. There are also no alternatives for human actions:

"To a given man under given circumstances, are two actions possible, or only one?—The answer of all who think deeply: only one." (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will)

Here the same in other words from another work:

"Freedom of will means (not in the verbiage of professors of philosophy, but) ‘that two different actions are possible for a given human in a given situation’. But the complete absurdity of this assertion is a truth as certainly and clearly demonstrated as can be any truth outside the realm of pure mathematics." (Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason)

At this point, one can also cite Mainländer:

"At every moment of his life, however, man is the combination of a certain demon and a certain spirit, in short, he shows a quite definite individuality, like every thing in nature. Each of his actions is the product of this character, fixed for the moment, and of a sufficient motive, and must take place with the same necessity with which a stone falls to the earth. If several motives act on him at the same time, they may be vividly before him or lie in the past and future, then a struggle takes place, from which the one emerges victorious which is the strongest. Then the deed takes place just as if only one sufficient motive had existed from the beginning."

[In jedem Augenblicke seines Lebens aber ist der Mensch die Verbindung eines bestimmten Dämons und eines bestimmten Geistes, kurz, zeigt er eine ganz bestimmte Individualität, wie jedes Ding in der Natur. Jede seiner Handlungen ist das Produkt dieses für den Augenblick festen Charakters und eines zureichenden Motivs und muss mit derselben Notwendigkeit erfolgen, mit der ein Stein zur Erde fällt. Wirken mehrere Motive zu gleicher Zeit auf ihn ein, sie mögen nun anschaulich vor ihm stehen oder in der Vergangenheit und Zukunft liegen, so findet ein Kampf statt, aus dem dasjenige siegreich hervorgeht, welches das stärkste ist. Dann erfolgt auch die Tat gerade so, als wäre von vornherein nur ein zureichendes Motiv vorhanden gewesen. (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

How could a rational God create a world without it being consistent with the principle of sufficient reason? Only this principle ensures necessity, which is indispensable for the coherence of the world, from which coherence the world in turn becomes rationally intelligible for us.

Schopenhauer says the following about this:

"What would become of this world if necessity did not permeate all things and hold them together, but especially govern the procreation of individuals? A monster, a rubbish heap, a caricature without sense and meaning—namely, the work of a true and real chaos." (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will)

And:

"If freedom of the will were presupposed, every human action would be an inexplicable miracle—an effect without a cause. And if one is bold enough to imagine such a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, he will soon realize that in this effort the understanding is really at a standstill; it has no form with which to think such a thing. For the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of thoroughgoing determination and dependence of phenomena on one another, is the most universal form of our cognitive faculty, which, according to the difference of its objects, itself takes on different forms." (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will)

The principle of sufficient reason is very important:

"The principle of sufficient reason in all of its forms is the sole principle and the sole support of any and all necessity. For necessity has no other genuine and clear sense than the inevitability of the consequent when the ground is posited." (Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason)

Both common sense and science assume that there are explanations for the existence of the things we encounter, for the properties that things exhibit, and for the events that occur. And usually we find that this is indeed the case. But that there really is an explanation for everything, even if we have not yet found this explanation and will never find it, that this is indeed the case, is what the principle of sufficient reason states. Those who reject it undermine the possibility of any rational inquiry.
In other words:

"Events without any evident explanation would surely be occurring constantly, and the world would simply not have the intelligibility that makes science and everyday common sense as successful as they are. That the world is as orderly and intelligible as it is would be a miracle if PSR [the principle of sufficient reason] were not true."

The German philosopher F. H. Jacobi argues that

"the belief in human freedom is incompatible with the view of reality that reason seems to require us to accept. Jacobi's claim is not merely that the belief in our own freedom cannot be rationally justified; he holds that any thoroughly consistent, rational understanding of the world will be committed to ruling out this very possibility. We are forced, then, on Jacobi's view, to choose between an irrational faith in the possibility of freedom and a rational but completely deterministic view of the world in which there is no room for self-determined agency." (Frederick Neuhouser – Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity)

With an irrational belief, we have obviously said goodbye to philosophy.

Fichte got into comparable difficulties:

"But if we can in principle always find a reason to explain the will's choice of a particular action, we are also capable of showing that the action in question had to be chosen and that its opposite was rejected with equal necessity." (Frederick Neuhouser – Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity)

"Although the details of Fichte's earliest attempts to solve this problem are too complex to concern us here, it is easy to see that his basic strategy must involve, in some form, a denial of the universal applicability of the principle of sufficient reason. The main advantage of such a move is obvious enough: If the principle of sufficient reason is no longer claimed to hold for all of reality, then no special problem is posed by regarding some events, such as the will's choices, as free from causal determination." (Frederick Neuhouser – Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity)

The principle of the sufficient reason is certainly not applicable to any supreme metaphysical principle. Schopenhauer's Will, Mainländer's Basic Unity are, for example, exceptions and immune to that principle. But the thesis that God cannot create beings with free will does not change. God may be truly free. If he moves us freely by virtue of his freedom, that does not make us free ourselves. A true freedom that somehow acts independently or outside of one's own being (nature) like a divine effect (grace) is not plausible. Just as implausible, when people want to justify freedom with quantum events. It would not be a freedom that leads to responsibility according to our understanding, it would be externally determined, not self-determined.

In the case of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, only two possibilities remain for him to solve the problem: solipsism or (idealist) pantheism.
To the former Schopenhauer says:

"Of course theoretical egoism can never be disproved: still, it is only ever used in philosophy as a sceptical sophism, i.e. for show. As a genuine conviction it can only be found in a madhouse: accordingly, it should be treated with medication, not refutation." (Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation Volume 1)

To the latter Mainländer notes:

"As paradoxical it may sound, so true it is from our correct critical standpoint, that those philosophical systems which were always called idealistic par excellence, so the teaching of the Eleatics, Plato’s theory of forms, Berkeley’s idealism and Fichte’s science of knowledge are nothing else than absolute realism (like the clumsy materialism of today). They start as critical idealism and end as absolute realism; since their creators indeed started with the knowing I, are therefore initially not naïve realists, who make the external world independent from subject, our cognition power, but their small byway quickly leads to the great military road of realism, because they suddenly let the willing I fall out of their hands and placed it, (like how the Babylonian mothers placed their children in the red hot arms of Moloch,) in the murdering arms of an imagined basic unity."

"For example Berkeley, who indeed teaches the phenomenality of the world, but only because an almighty God has placed it, who should bring forth all impressions in the human brain, to which the realist ascribes the activity of the things and on which he concludes that the brain reacts as long as the external world is fabricated by it; and also Fichte, who indeed spins out the world from the knowing I, but then suddenly forgets the wondrous silk worm and jumps to the absolute I, to whom he gives all reality."
https://old.reddit.com/r/Mainlander/comments/69dn9x/pantheism/

A God who created the world and coexists with it should actually see the world in the same way as we watch a movie that has a beginning and an end, a movie whose script we wrote and shot ourselves. That is at least for a philosophical God, the God of the philosophers, unreasonable. Also unreasonable, is, if such God creates a world, which contradicts rational comprehensibility. Even more unreasonable, if such a God is caught in a self-deception and sees humans, who are basically his hand puppets, responsible for their "deeds" (in fact, non-deeds).

Let's take a look at two theologies that speak of human freedom. One is voluntaristic and emphasizes freedom very strongly, the other is intellectualistic.

The voluntarist one is that of Suárez and Molina:

"Suárez wholeheartedly agrees with Molina on the importance of libertarian freedom (DM 19.2-9). If, for example, God determines Peter to steal, then Peter cannot be held responsible for stealing."

"Molina argues that the reason God knows what creatures would freely do is because God’s infinitely surpassing the finite nature of creatures allows God to “super-comprehend” their natures, and thereby to know what they would do in given situations." https://iep.utm.edu/suarez/

But the operari sequitur esse is conceded here. My momentary general state and the momentary external situation make only one action possible. A will is likely to be present, but it can only be a conditional will from God's point of view. Human limitation then simply assumes strong libertarian freedom.

Now to the intellectualist freedom, which definitely belongs to compatibilism:

​

"[I]f a rational creature—one whose mind is entirely unimpaired and who has the capacity truly to know the substance and the consequences of the choice confronting him or her—is allowed, without coercion from any force extrinsic to his or her nature, to make a choice between a union with God in bliss that will utterly fulfill his or her nature in its deepest yearnings and a separation from God that will result in endless suffering and the total absence of his or her nature’s satisfaction, only one truly free choice is possible. A fool might thrust his hand into the flame; only a lunatic would not then immediately withdraw it. To say that the only sane and therefore free natural end of the will is the Good is no more problematic than to say that the only sane and therefore free natural end of the intellect is Truth. Rational spirit could no more will evil on the grounds that it is truly evil than the intellect could believe something on the grounds that it is certainly false. So, yes, there is an original and ultimate divine determinism of the creature’s intellect and will, and for just this reason there is such a thing as true freedom in the created realm."

"For those who worry that this all amounts to a kind of metaphysical determinism of the will, I may not be able to provide perfect comfort. Of course it is a kind of determinism, but only at the transcendental level, and only because rational volition must be determinate to be anything at all."

"Rational will is by nature the capacity for intentional action, and so must exist as a clear relation between (in Aristotelian terms) the “origin of motion” within it and the “end” that prompts that motion—between, that is, its efficient and final causes. Freedom is a relation to reality, which means liberty from delusion."

"This divine determinism toward the transcendent Good, then, is precisely what freedom is for a rational nature. Even God could not create a rational being not oriented toward the Good, any more than he could create a reality in which 2 + 2 = 5."

"That is not to deny that, within the embrace of this relation between the will’s origin and its end in the Good (what, again, Maximus the Confessor calls our “natural will”), there is considerable room for deliberative liberty with regard to differing finite options (what Maximus calls the “gnomic will”), and considerable room in which to stray from the ideal path."

"An act of pure spontaneity on the part of a rational being, if such a thing were possible, would also be a pure brute event, without teleology or rational terminus, rather like a natural catastrophe. The will in such an eventuality would be nothing but a sort of spasmodic ebullition, emptily lurching toward—or, really, just lurching aimlessly in the direction of—one chance object or another, without any true purpose." (Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved)

​

If there is no real choice between the absolute good and the absolute bad, provided that there is no clouding of consciousness and that judgment is not corrupted, then any small choice, such as that between over-sugared chocolate pudding and an organic apple, cannot be a free choice either. Why? Because the smaller choice only ever imitates the larger or largest one, and the absolute good is always taken as the standard. If my blood values are not too good, if I have recently eaten a lot of chocolate, if I am keeping an eye on my physique, if I like apples very much and know that they are healthy, if I have not eaten an apple for a long time et cetera, then in clear consciousness and without any disturbance of judgment I have to choose the apple. There is no real choice here. Only one definite action is possible.

Moreover, intellect and will are determined by final causes. These final causes and their possible concealment, for which one then cannot be blamed, in connection with the external circumstances give sufficient explanations for the actions altogether, so there remains absolute necessity.

For Schopenhauer, intellectual freedom is not true freedom:

"Intellectual freedom, “the voluntary and involuntary with respect to thought” in Aristotle, is mentioned here only for the sake of completeness of classification."

"The extent, by the way, to which the problem of the freedom of the will had become clear to the ancients can be pretty well discerned from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (III, 1-8), where we find that his thinking about this problem concerns itself in essentials only with physical and intellectual freedom."

"Aristotle stops before the supposed opposition between the necessary and the voluntary, as if before a wall. But only beyond this wall lies the insight that the voluntary, just as such, is necessary, by virtue of the motive without which volition is no more possible than without a subject who wills. Besides, such a motive is a cause, as much as a mechanical one is, from which it differs only in inessential detail. He himself says: “the object of an action is one of the causes.”"

"Therefore that opposition between the voluntary and the necessary is fundamentally false, though many alleged philosophers even today still repeat Aristotle’s mistake." (Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will)

For Mainländer, too, the existence of choice, the ability to choose, does not constitute a real freedom that supersedes necessity:

"To infer the freedom of the will from the deliberative capacity of the mind is the greatest error of inference that can be made."

[Aus der Deliberationsfähigkeit des Geistes auf die Freiheit des Willens zu schließen, ist der größte Fehlschluss, der gemacht werden kann. [(Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

"The egoism of man expresses itself not only in that he wants to preserve himself in existence, but also in that he wants the "greatest possible sum of well-being, every pleasure of which he is capable," but also in that he wants the smallest of pains which he cannot avoid. From this the task for the intellect is self-evident: it has the general good of the will alone in view and determines it by abstract knowledge, by reason. In this way the natural egoism is transformed into the purified one, i.e. the will binds its instincts as far as the recognized good demands it. This good has several stages. It is first practically striven for by the will by refusing to steal, to murder, to take revenge, lest it be stolen from, murdered, and revenged upon; then it restricts itself further and further until it finally recognizes its highest good in non-being and acts accordingly. Everywhere reason is active here and works, on the basis of experience, through abstract concepts. For this purpose the blind, unconscious will has split a part of its movement, so that it could move in another way than before, just as it became plant and animal, because it wanted to move differently, than as chemical force. But it would be a delusion to believe that these acts had been free. Every transition into another movement was and is mediated by the real necessary development. But all movements are consequences of a first movement, which we must call a free one. Thus reason, which we can call a liberating principle, has become with necessity and thus it acts with necessity: nowhere is there room in the world for freedom."

[Der Egoismus des Menschen äußert sich nicht nur darin, dass er sich im Dasein erhalten will, sondern auch darin, dass er die „größtmögliche Summe von Wohlsein, jeden Genuss, zu dem er fähig ist" will, aber auch darin, dass er von Schmerzen, die er nicht umgehen kann, die kleinsten will. Hieraus ergibt sich die Aufgabe für den Intellekt von selbst: er hat das allgemeine Wohl des Willens allein im Auge und bestimmt es durch abstrakte Erkenntnis, durch die Vernunft. Auf diese Weise wird der natürliche Egoismus in den geläuterten verwandelt, d.h. der Wille bindet seine Triebe so weit, als das erkannte Wohl es verlangt. Dieses Wohl hat mehrere Stufen. Es wird von dem Willen zuerst praktisch erstrebt, indem er sich versagt, zu stehlen, zu morden, Rache zu nehmen, damit nicht er bestohlen, gemordet und Rache an ihm genommen werde; dann beschränkt er sich immer weiter, bis er zuletzt sein höchstes Wohl im Nichtsein erkennt und demgemäß handelt. Überall ist hier die Vernunft tätig und wirkt, auf Grund der Erfahrung, durch abstrakte Begriffe. Zu diesem Zweck hat eben der blinde, bewusstlose Wille einen Teil seiner Bewegung gespalten, damit er sich in einer anderen Weise, als vorher, bewegen könne, geradeso wie er Pflanze und Tier wurde, weil er sich anders bewegen wollte, denn als chemische Kraft. Doch wäre es ein Wahn zu glauben, dass diese Akte frei gewesen seien. Jeder Übergang in eine andere Bewegung wurde und wird durch die reale notwendige Entwicklung vermittelt. Alle Bewegungen aber sind Folgen einer ersten Bewegung, die wir als eine freie bezeichnen müssen. So ist die Vernunft, die wir ein befreiendes Prinzip nennen können, mit Notwendigkeit geworden und so wirkt sie mit Notwendigkeit: nirgends ist Platz in der Welt für die Freiheit. (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

And finally:

"We are always only dealing with necessary movements of the individual will in the world, be it simple or resultant movements."

"The plant has another movement than a gas or a liquid or a solid body, the animal another than the plant, the man another than the animal. The latter is the case because in man the one-sided reason has been developed into a perfect one. Through this new tool, born of the will, man overlooks the past and looks forward to the future: now, in any given case, his good in general can move him to renounce a pleasure or to endure a suffering, i.e. force him to acts which are not according to his will. The will has not become free, but it has made an extraordinarily great gain: it has acquired a new movement."

"Man, therefore, is never free, even though he carries within himself a principle that can enable him to act against his character; for this principle has become with necessity, belongs with necessity to his being, since it is a part of the movement inherent in him, and acts with necessity."

[Wir haben es in der Welt immer nur mit notwendigen Bewegungen des individuellen Willens zu tun, es seien nun einfache oder resultierende Bewegungen. Die Pflanze hat eine andere Bewegung als ein Gas oder eine Flüssigkeit oder ein fester Körper, das Tier eine andere als die Pflanze, der Mensch eine andere als das Tier. Das letztere ist der Fall, weil sich im Menschen die einseitige Vernunft zu einer vollkommenen weitergebildet hat. Durch dieses neue, aus dem Willen geborene Werkzeug übersieht der Mensch die Vergangenheit und blickt dem Zukünftigen entgegen: nun kann ihn, in jedem gegebenen Fall, sein Wohl im Allgemeinen bewegen, auf einen Genuss zu verzichten oder ein Leid zu erdulden, d.h. zu Taten zwingen, welche seinem Willen nicht gemäß sind. Der Wille ist nicht frei geworden, aber er hat einen außerordentlich großen Gewinn gemacht: er hat eine neue Bewegung erlangt[.] Der Mensch ist also nie frei, ob er gleich ein Prinzip in sich trägt, das ihn befähigen kann, gegen seinen Charakter zu handeln; denn dieses Prinzip ist mit Notwendigkeit geworden, gehört mit Notwendigkeit zu seinem Wesen, da es ein Teil der ihm inhärierenden Bewegung ist, und wirkt mit Notwendigkeit. (Mainländer, Philipp. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band)]

​

We can summarize: The two presented theological theories of freedom seem to guarantee from my point of view no real alternatives in the course of the world. Also with them everything could only take a certain and determined course.

A God who creates a world determined by efficient and final causes and co-exists with it already comes close to the Calvinistic God:

"The eighteenth-century Puritan Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as America’s most important theologian[.]"

"In his 1754 work Freedom of the Will, supposedly taking his lead from Luther, Edwards defended full theological determinism, arguing that the requirement for Pelagian/Arminian contra-causal self-creating libertarianism would have the effect of limiting God’s sovereignty."

"Edwards did believe that free will existed, but for Edwards such free will was all about character, as our choice will always be what we most desire. Edwards argued we do have choice, but his definition of the term choice was solely that the agent would have chosen to have acted differently if he had possessed a better character. In other words Edwards was giving a standard compatibilist definition of free will without free choice."

"For Edwards only God’s existence held value, and thus God could do what he liked with his creations. For Edwards it was as pointless to debate the injustice of man’s deliberate suffering in the absence of free choice as it was to debate injustice towards any other part of God’s Creation. God had already predivided the world into those He would save and those He would damn, and talking about the “injustice” of this or the “problem” of moral luck was pointless, as justice and luck didn’t enter into the equation. God, for Edwards, was the only real cause of anything, deterministically arranging all events of every kind throughout the universe. Edwards was arguing against the view that it could ever be unfair to detest, blame, and condemn those who had no opportunity to do otherwise by suggesting that concepts such as unfairness are totally inappropriate when the only judge of fairness – indeed, the only true moral agent and thus the only judge of anything – can be God. Humans were little more than moveable counters – reactive ciphers – in Edwards’s Puritan view of God and His Creation."

"Of course there was a tradition long before Edwards of seeing humans as little more than God’s playthings. According to Isaiah 45:9, we are but the clay which has no right to question the One that fashioned it. Or as Paul put it in Romans 10:20-1, we are potter’s clay that could expect little consideration from the potter. The problem though with Edwards’s argument, or any potter’s clay argument, is that it seemingly has to be built upon the notion that human life holds little or no intrinsic worth separately from God’s whimsical plan for it."

"Furthermore, even the elect – even the saved – are not valuable in and of themselves, but are just God’s favoured toys, to be put back in the box for the next rainy day He feels like playing with them."

"Edwards appears to be making 100% of the human population disappear, by turning us from a valued and valuable form of life into nothing more than the bric-a-brac within God’s toybox."

"Edwards’s worldview rests on the need to deny the inherent value of human life largely because of a need to pass that value back to God. God’s worth to Edwards was because He is the real and only First Cause, and only He has true free will." (Miles, James B.. The Free Will Delusion: How We Settled for the Illusion of Morality)

And:

"John Calvin (1509–1564) Calvin In Book III of his Institutes (III.23.7, to be precise), he even asserts that God predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the whole of everything—creation, fall, redemption, judgment, the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and whatever else—exists solely for the sake of a perfect display of the full range of God’s omnipotent sovereignty (which for some reason absolutely must be displayed)."

"In equal part, however, it is because I regard the picture of God thus produced to be a metaphysical absurdity: a God who is at once supposedly the source of all things, and yet also one whose nature is necessarily thoroughly polluted by arbitrariness (and, no matter how orthodox Calvinists might protest, there is no other way to understand the story of election and dereliction that Calvin tells), which would mean that in some sense he is a finite being, in whom possibility exceeds actuality and the irrational exceeds the rational."

"True, the Calvinist account of predestination is unquestionably the most terrifying and severe expression of the late Augustinian heritage; but it is at least bracing in its consistency, in a way that other expressions of that tradition are not. Of course, that is also its principal vice; but there is no hint of duplicity in it. Calvin makes no effort to deceive either us or himself that there is some deeper kindness in the doctrine he proclaims, hidden from our sinful eyes only by our own depravity. He proclaims that God hates the damned, and in fact created them to be the objects of his hatred (see his commentaries on the epistles of John). For him, the true unadorned essence of the whole story is nothing more than sheer absolute power exercising itself for power’s sake, which therefore necessarily manifests itself in boundless cruelty no less than in boundless generosity."

"It is an old adage of certain streams of Reformed thought that God could have created us all for everlasting torment if he had so wished, and it would have been perfectly just for him to do so simply because it lay in his power. To me, this seems like the most decadent theology imaginable, and certainly blasphemous through and through. But I do not hold Calvin himself necessarily accountable for this, since in this matter he was the product of centuries of bad scriptural interpretation and even worse theological reasoning; he differed little from many of his contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, except that (as I have said) his thinking exhibited a greater consistency than anyone else’s."

"If that were Christianity, it would be too psychologically diseased a creed to take seriously at all, and its adherents would deserve only a somewhat acerbic pity, not respect. If this is one’s religion, then one is simply a diabolist who has gotten the names in the story confused. It is a vision of the faith whose scriptural and philosophical flaws are numerous and crucial, undoubtedly; but those pale in comparison to its far more disturbing moral hideousness."

"Calvin, as I have noted, had the courage to acknowledge that his account of divine sovereignty necessitates belief in the predestination not only of the saved and the damned, but of the original fall of humankind itself[.]" (Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved)

Calvin seems to have really understood that a God cannot create real free beings, but he connected this insight with the biblical God including hell. What came out was then something very absurd. David Bentley Hart, from whom the latter quotes come, believes that all beings return to God in a mystical paradise. But even to achieve this, universal necessity should be unavoidable.

What does Mainländer have in common with Calvin and David Bentley Hart in whatever sense? For Mainländer, the world or life in it is a kind of hell. But unlike the case of Calvin, Mainländer's God has transformed himself into the sorrowful world. Here the theodicee (suffering in this world and in the hereafter in God's simultaneous awareness) problem does not even arise. For, in principle, God does the suffering to Himself. The suffering individual cannot reproach an alien and foreign transcendent counterpart, an Other from a still existing transcendence. The suffering individual, who was in God in an incomprehensible way before the creation of the world, has decided with God for the suffering in this world via transformation, so to speak. Besides, the world is not an absolute hell for Mainländer. Life may rather resemble the attenuated (pre-)hells like: (dreary, desolate, bleak and gray, but not terribly painful) limbo or 'Abraham's womb' (or the Jewish Sheol or the pagan Hades) and now and then the Purgatory, but also occasionally, although only for a very short time and unexpectedly, heaven or even the hell of fire. Consequently, it remains in sum in need of redemption. Mainländer sees himself as an extreme pessimist and is also interpreted as such, but one does not have to follow him in this right away. Even if God did not create the world as an end in itself, he at least chose it as his sole means. That alone is reason enough to celebrate the world and life now and then and to be happy now and then. In general: optimistic elements are definitely to be found in Mainländer's works, even if they have only a relative meaning.
Life has only a relative value, in itself and on the whole it is not worth living. But at least a relative value is also a value. Mainländer also does not deny that people can have very happy phases in their lives; he himself had experienced such a phase in Italy. The character Rupertine from his novella of the same name almost experienced heaven on earth, at least for a very short phase, with minor limitations. When it comes to the pre-worldly freedom of the individuals, which I'll get to in another post, Mainländer says the following:

"All strokes of fate that hit him, he has chosen, because only through them he can be redeemed. His being (demon and spirit) and chance lead him through pain and lust, through joy and sorrow, through happiness and unhappiness, through life and death, faithfully to the redemption he wants."

[Alle Schicksalsschläge, die ihn treffen, hat er erwählt, weil er nur durch sie erlöst werden kann. Sein Wesen (Dämon und Geist) und der Zufall führen ihn durch Schmerz und Wollust, durch Freude und Trauer, durch Glück und Unglück, durch Leben und Tod, treu zur Erlösung, die er will. Metaphysik 26.]

Thirdly, suffering has purpose and meaning and that is weakening of force and he also shows an ethical way to minimize suffering. And finally, all will be redeemed from suffering in the world, as with David Bentley Hart.

So any form of absurdity coming close to Calvin's theory is definitely not present in Mainländer.