According to Mainländer, God realized that non-existence was superior to existence. To achieve this, God destroyed himself, breaking his unity into the plurality of the world we know today.
Before the existence of our universe, there was only a single, undifferentiated, absolute Power—which Mainländer terms God. This God possessed absolute freedom. However, God realized that His absolute being was a burden, a state of limitation. God desired absolute non-being (nothingness). 2. The Problem of Nothingness philipp mainlander philosophy of redemption pdf
Philipp Mainländer ’s magnum opus, The Philosophy of Redemption ( Die Philosophie der Erlösung ), is widely regarded as one of the most radical and extreme systems of pessimism in Western thought. Published in 1876, the work posits that the universe is the result of a and that all existence is a slow, decaying movement toward absolute nothingness. Core Philosophical Concepts This God possessed absolute freedom
: What, then, is salvation? In Christianity or Buddhism, redemption might mean union with God or escape from the cycle of reincarnation. For Mainländer, redemption is something far more simple and final: the complete and total cessation of existence . Death is not a transition or a gateway to another state; it is an end. It is the return of the individual will back into the nothingness from which it came. True peace is not found in life or in an afterlife, but in the absolute, dreamless silence of non-being. If you are searching for a
If you are searching for a , the original German text is in the public domain. Digital scanning initiatives have made it highly accessible:
Offers free, searchable PDF versions of the historical German texts. The Challenge of English Translations
Authors like Thomas Ligotti ( The Conspiracy Against the Human Race ) and Eugene Thacker draw heavily on Mainländer’s imagery of a dying, indifferent universe.