Utter nihilism: Schopenhauer, Philipp Mainländer, Julius Bahnsen

I read Weltschmerz by (Beiser, 2016), a book-length review of the Pessimism movement in 19th century Germany, and the many philosophers involved in it. This post summarizes the philosophies of the three philosophers I like the most in the book.

Schopenhauer

• There is only one thing in this world: The Will. Nothing is real except this Will.
• The Will has no ultimate purpose. It is not rational.
• The Will, by some obscure philosophical argument (based on the Principle of Sufficient Reason), can have parts of it achieve temporary independence as an individual.
• Everything in this world: rocks, trees, people... are physical aspects of this Will. They all act with purpose: magnets point north-south, trees grow up, people act purposefully.
• These fragmentary aspects of this universal Will struggles terribly against each other, and the universe is a bloodshed, a factory of pain.

Schopenhauer illustrated this idea of aspects of this universal Will, fighting each other, by a remarkable example:

But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried."

• Humans are the only thing in this world that both has a physical aspect and a mental aspect (Schopenhauer endorses a kind of dual-aspect theory).
• Our will is never truly satisfied.
• True happiness does not exist. Happiness is merely a temporary pause in pain. Boredom ensues if we are happy for too long.
• Life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom.
• After we die, the Will remains. My personal life is a ripple on the vast ocean of this Will.
• We deserve all our suffering, because we are aspects of this Will, and this blind Will brought on all its pain for itself.
• The only way out, only salvation, is not suicide, but denial of the will inside us.
• To deny this will, we should be ascetic like Buddha, to stop getting concerned about fame or health or the struggle for existence. And DO NOT reproduce.
• This can be done by knowledge. If the intellect truly knows the root of suffering is desire, the intellect can stop the desiring will.
• Unfortunately, most people can never do that. Only certain lucky "geniuses" can do that.
• But non-geniuses can still be saved for a brief moment, by great art that can be such an awe-inspiring sight, that other people, for a brief moment, forget themselves, lost in the art.

Mainländer

• There was one thing in this world: God.
• God broke apart. Now there are many wills, not one. Schopenhauer is wrong.
• We can't ever know why God did it. Maybe God wanted to die. God understood that existence is so terrible that death is the only salvation. But God cannot die directly, and the only way for God to die is by breaking into parts, and for the parts to die one by one.
• No matter what God did, or why, we know for sure that our lives are terrible, and death is the final peace. Thus, death is definitely salvation for us.
• Everyone will be saved. Suicide is the fastest salvation.

After finishing his book, Mainländer wrote about his struggle and the blessed Death of God:

I felt serene that I had forged a good sword, but at the same time I felt a cold dread in me for starting on a course more dangerous than any other philosopher before me. I attacked giants and dragons, everything existing, holy and honourable in state and science: God, the monster of ‘the infinite’, the species, the powers of nature, and the modern state; and in my stark naked atheism I validated only the individual and egoism. Nevertheless, above them both lay the splendour of the preworldly unity, of God... the holy spirit... it lay ‘brooding with wings of the dove’ over the only real things in the world, the individual and its egoism, until it was extinguished in eternal peace, in absolute nothingness.

My cherished writer, Borges, once wrote about Mainländer, in his essay Biathanatos.

Rereading this note, I think of the tragic Philipp Batz, known to the history of philosophy as Philipp Mainländer. He, like me, was an impassioned reader of Schopenhauer, under whose influence (and perhaps under that of the Gnostics) he imagined that we are fragments of a God who, at the beginning of time, destroyed himself, avid for non-being. Universal history is the shadowy death throes of those fragments. Mainlander was born in 1841; in 1876, he published his book Philosophy of Redemption. That same year he took his own life.

Bahnsen

• There are many wills in this world.
• This world is harsh, confusing and downright contradictory. There are real contradictions in this world, in the sense that 1 = 2 is possible in reality. This is because two wills can will differently.
• When two contradictory sides meet, they destroy each other, without creating something better in the process. Hegel thought that thesis + antithesis = synthesis, but really, thesis + antithesis = 0.
• There is no universal purpose in this world. There are only individual purposes.
• The intellect is a complete slave to the will. Everything we think is just a side effect of what is happening in our wills, like the smoke is just a side effect of the fire.
• In particular, it's utterly impossible to use knowledge for salvation. Knowledge cannot stop the will from wanting what it wants and going where it goes.
• The world is fundamentally tragic. There are moral rules and duties, but they are inconsistent, so we are doomed to sin.

The image in my mind is a house of four walls, one of which has a gaping hole. I am desperately tearing down one wall to brick up the other, but the house will still crumble.

• The great problem of life is not that there is too much pain, but too much frustration of hope, and how inevitable it is for us to sin.
• This is fundamentally caused by the contradictions within one's will.
• There is no salvation. Not even in death.
• The most one can do is to be a tragic hero, to fight even if victory is impossible.

This last point reminds me of Orwell's description of Hitler's appearance.

The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs... He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.