The Grey Man
τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει
Nietzsche is famous for proclaiming the death of God through his character Zarathustra, but Philipp Mainländer (1841-1876) was actually the first philosopher in the Western tradition to assign a prominent role to the concept in the exposition of his thought.
Mainländer occupies an obscure position in the history of philosophy. As a German pessimist of the nineteenth century, he stands in the shadow of Schopenhauer, who himself is not much recognized outside of academic circles. In some ways, he stands to Schopenhauer as the latter does to Kant; both of them revered his predecessor and saw it as his mission to complete his work. For Schopenhauer, this meant revising and expanding Kant's metaphysical doctrine of transcendental idealism to ground his system of ethics; for Mainländer, it meant refining Schopenhauer's ethics, from their epistemological roots to their soteriological crown.
Very briefly, it was the principal philosophical achievement of Kant to point out that space and time are subjective, in a sense quite different from that meant by Einstein. Whereas the theory of relativity would, over a century later, reconcile the apparent invariance of the speed of light with the Galilean principle of the uniformity of nature by postulating the Protean curvature of the spacetime continuum around reference frames, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1789) reconciled the contending epistemological schools of his day–empiricism and rationalism–by postulating the synthesis by the subject of experience of the raw information furnished by the senses to form the objects of that experience, a multiplicity of phenomena.* According to Kant's doctrine, the intuitive knowledge which each subject possesses in and through these phenomena is not, as the empiricists think, passively received from without, nor is it capable of being expanded upon by problematic speculative judgments, as the rationalists claim. Rather, it is itself a judgment of the knowing subject which is equivalent to the synthesis of sensory information to form a singular experience, a unity of apperception.* Cogito, ergo sum. Time and space are transcendental, which is to say that they are forms of intuition or a priori conditions of possibility for experience; time and space are also ideal, in that the manifold phenomena arranged in time and space to form an experience are knowledge of nothing but that experience: this is what is meant by 'transcendental idealism.' To Kant, the reality beyond experience–the noumenon or thing in itself–is an unspeakable mystery.
Schopenhauer accepted the key points of transcendental idealism, but objected to Kant's insistence upon the unknowability of the thing in itself. If experience is the only thing of which we have knowledge, on what grounds can we say that it is merely ideal, and that the thing in itself, about which we know nothing except that we know nothing about it, is alone real?: Schopenhauer's answer to this problem, that experience is at once real thing-in-itself and ideal phantasm, became the central thesis of his philosophy and the title of his magnum opus: The World as Will and Representation (1819).
To Schopenhauer, intuitive knowledge has a subjective and an objective aspect; one has, on the one hand, internal knowledge of oneself in one's will and, on the other, external knowledge of others in objects or phenomena. The knowledge of one's own actions alone has a double aspect in that its subjective and objective aspects are experienced simultaneously; in the voluntary movements of one's own body alone does one experience the objectification of one's self-knowledge. This begs the question: If the voluntary movements of my body are the objectification of myself, of what are all other natural phenomena the objectification? According to Schopenhauer, the answer is, again, yourself; the innermost kernel of all objects, be they human, animal, vegetal, or inorganic, is that same will which we find in ourselves.** Schopenhauer identifies this will with the qualitates occultæ, those regularities manifest in phenomena which cannot be explained from, but which comprise the organon of the explanation of the phenomena themselves from, other phenomena as a ground in accordance with a form of the principle of sufficient reason; just as the enterprise of natural philosophy explains objective knowledge in terms of inexplicable forces of nature, so Schopenhauer circumscribes subjective knowledge to knowledge of oneself as a manifestation of the will and vice versa. Now, since natural forces are problematic speculative postulates whereas one's will is known in and through subjective knowledge, the latter alone is real; the will is the thing in itself (the Ātman and Brahman of Indian philosophy) of which nature is an ideal representation (Māyā). Together, they form the inscrutable existential duality of which we have a serviceable pictorial microcosm in M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands:
Schopenhauer is best known for his exposition of the ethical consequences of this metaphysical doctrine, for which he has garnered a reputation as the quintessential Western pessimist. If we take 'pessimism' to mean the belief that it would be better had nothing existed, then this reputation is well-earned. In identifying the will as the thing in itself, he was confronted with an appalling existential predicament, for the will can no more be satisfied than can the natural forces that are its objectification. It must needs strive, and there is nothing for it to strive against but itself. Though it may appear, through the illusorily individuating lens of Māyā, that one conquers only others, one harrows only oneself by opposing one's will. Suffering, pain, want, desire, frustration, unhappiness, egoism, and duḥkha are all names for this omnipresent opposition of the will to itself–punishment, crime, and existence itself are all one in the same. Dikê eris ("strife is justice"). As manifestations of the will, all beings are condemned to struggle against and inflict suffering upon one another as long as they live; life is like a neverending Greek tragedy in which all the characters are helpless playthings in the hands of cruel fate.***
Schopenhauer did not believe that this situation could be rectified by terminating one's own life, since this only annihilates a particular manifestation of the will, which continues to torment itself in other forms. Instead, he believed that a brief respite from the endless cycle of death and rebirth was possible in and through peaceful experiences in which the vehemence of the will is diminished and disinterested knowledge of objects predominates, so that the tragedy of life (strife) is not without catharsis (justice)–transcendence. For the common man, these moments of grace are but brief; they are sustainable for longer periods of time by some artistic geniuses, and for longer still only by a few exceptional people who, recognising themselves and others alike as manifestations of the same senseless conflict of the will with itself, renounce their desires and, with them, life itself. For these ascetics, wisdom is the light, resignation the path, that leads them to salvation.****
With Mainländer I am less familiar than with his predecessors, but he appears to have gone further than Schopenhauer in the sense that he believed that salvation was not only possible for a few saints who renounced desire, but inevitable for everyone. He apparently viewed the second law of thermodynamics–the inevitable increase in entropy in nature with respect to time–as the objectification of the inevitable redemption of the will. As nature appeared to be asymptotically approaching, from an original singularity, a state of maximal distribution of energy in which manifestations of natural forces would be vanishingly insignificant, so he believed that the will would eventually extinguish itself. Thus, what Schopenhauer conceived of as a purposeless striving actually does have an endstate–in death.
Mainländer illustrates this idea allegorically with his story of the death or, rather, the suicide of God. According to this self-conscious creation myth, we are all fragments of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent entity who only wanted–indeed, could only want–one thing: nothing. The death (disintegration) of a human being is analogous to the original self-sundering of God which will repeat itself in miniature until the last particle in the universe ceases to be and nothing alone remains.
So, what do you think about Mainländer's story of the death of God? Schopenhauer's asceticist ethics? Kant's transcendental idealism? About what were these thinkers wrong? Do you have any loosely related comments on philosophy in general? Discuss!
Myself, I think Mainländer's doctrine of redemption is provocative if nothing else, but I'm hesitant to grant it more than that until I've read more of his philosophy. I'm wary of his bold speculation concerning the fate of the universe and especially of the ethical conclusions he draws from it, like the value of celibacy and of suicide (he hung himself at 34 years of age, shortly after completing his philosophical work). If entropy is inevitable, why does it need to be helped along? Couldn't it just as easily be impeded by suicide due to the butterfly effect?
All the same, Mainländer appears to be a worthy philosopher. The second volume of his principal philosophical work contains a lengthy critique of Schopenhauer's philosophy (following the pattern set by The World as Will and Representation, which contains a critique of Kant's), in which he seems to make some very lucid comments on Kant and Schopenhauer, particularly concerning the aprioroty of causality, which I always viewed as a weak spot for both. Further research is warranted.
If you haven't figured it out, I have a very high opinion of Kant and Schopenhauer. They are to Western metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics what Newton is to natural philosophy. Could Mainländer be their Einstein?
Mainländer occupies an obscure position in the history of philosophy. As a German pessimist of the nineteenth century, he stands in the shadow of Schopenhauer, who himself is not much recognized outside of academic circles. In some ways, he stands to Schopenhauer as the latter does to Kant; both of them revered his predecessor and saw it as his mission to complete his work. For Schopenhauer, this meant revising and expanding Kant's metaphysical doctrine of transcendental idealism to ground his system of ethics; for Mainländer, it meant refining Schopenhauer's ethics, from their epistemological roots to their soteriological crown.
Very briefly, it was the principal philosophical achievement of Kant to point out that space and time are subjective, in a sense quite different from that meant by Einstein. Whereas the theory of relativity would, over a century later, reconcile the apparent invariance of the speed of light with the Galilean principle of the uniformity of nature by postulating the Protean curvature of the spacetime continuum around reference frames, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1789) reconciled the contending epistemological schools of his day–empiricism and rationalism–by postulating the synthesis by the subject of experience of the raw information furnished by the senses to form the objects of that experience, a multiplicity of phenomena.* According to Kant's doctrine, the intuitive knowledge which each subject possesses in and through these phenomena is not, as the empiricists think, passively received from without, nor is it capable of being expanded upon by problematic speculative judgments, as the rationalists claim. Rather, it is itself a judgment of the knowing subject which is equivalent to the synthesis of sensory information to form a singular experience, a unity of apperception.* Cogito, ergo sum. Time and space are transcendental, which is to say that they are forms of intuition or a priori conditions of possibility for experience; time and space are also ideal, in that the manifold phenomena arranged in time and space to form an experience are knowledge of nothing but that experience: this is what is meant by 'transcendental idealism.' To Kant, the reality beyond experience–the noumenon or thing in itself–is an unspeakable mystery.
Schopenhauer accepted the key points of transcendental idealism, but objected to Kant's insistence upon the unknowability of the thing in itself. If experience is the only thing of which we have knowledge, on what grounds can we say that it is merely ideal, and that the thing in itself, about which we know nothing except that we know nothing about it, is alone real?: Schopenhauer's answer to this problem, that experience is at once real thing-in-itself and ideal phantasm, became the central thesis of his philosophy and the title of his magnum opus: The World as Will and Representation (1819).
To Schopenhauer, intuitive knowledge has a subjective and an objective aspect; one has, on the one hand, internal knowledge of oneself in one's will and, on the other, external knowledge of others in objects or phenomena. The knowledge of one's own actions alone has a double aspect in that its subjective and objective aspects are experienced simultaneously; in the voluntary movements of one's own body alone does one experience the objectification of one's self-knowledge. This begs the question: If the voluntary movements of my body are the objectification of myself, of what are all other natural phenomena the objectification? According to Schopenhauer, the answer is, again, yourself; the innermost kernel of all objects, be they human, animal, vegetal, or inorganic, is that same will which we find in ourselves.** Schopenhauer identifies this will with the qualitates occultæ, those regularities manifest in phenomena which cannot be explained from, but which comprise the organon of the explanation of the phenomena themselves from, other phenomena as a ground in accordance with a form of the principle of sufficient reason; just as the enterprise of natural philosophy explains objective knowledge in terms of inexplicable forces of nature, so Schopenhauer circumscribes subjective knowledge to knowledge of oneself as a manifestation of the will and vice versa. Now, since natural forces are problematic speculative postulates whereas one's will is known in and through subjective knowledge, the latter alone is real; the will is the thing in itself (the Ātman and Brahman of Indian philosophy) of which nature is an ideal representation (Māyā). Together, they form the inscrutable existential duality of which we have a serviceable pictorial microcosm in M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands:
Schopenhauer is best known for his exposition of the ethical consequences of this metaphysical doctrine, for which he has garnered a reputation as the quintessential Western pessimist. If we take 'pessimism' to mean the belief that it would be better had nothing existed, then this reputation is well-earned. In identifying the will as the thing in itself, he was confronted with an appalling existential predicament, for the will can no more be satisfied than can the natural forces that are its objectification. It must needs strive, and there is nothing for it to strive against but itself. Though it may appear, through the illusorily individuating lens of Māyā, that one conquers only others, one harrows only oneself by opposing one's will. Suffering, pain, want, desire, frustration, unhappiness, egoism, and duḥkha are all names for this omnipresent opposition of the will to itself–punishment, crime, and existence itself are all one in the same. Dikê eris ("strife is justice"). As manifestations of the will, all beings are condemned to struggle against and inflict suffering upon one another as long as they live; life is like a neverending Greek tragedy in which all the characters are helpless playthings in the hands of cruel fate.***
Schopenhauer did not believe that this situation could be rectified by terminating one's own life, since this only annihilates a particular manifestation of the will, which continues to torment itself in other forms. Instead, he believed that a brief respite from the endless cycle of death and rebirth was possible in and through peaceful experiences in which the vehemence of the will is diminished and disinterested knowledge of objects predominates, so that the tragedy of life (strife) is not without catharsis (justice)–transcendence. For the common man, these moments of grace are but brief; they are sustainable for longer periods of time by some artistic geniuses, and for longer still only by a few exceptional people who, recognising themselves and others alike as manifestations of the same senseless conflict of the will with itself, renounce their desires and, with them, life itself. For these ascetics, wisdom is the light, resignation the path, that leads them to salvation.****
With Mainländer I am less familiar than with his predecessors, but he appears to have gone further than Schopenhauer in the sense that he believed that salvation was not only possible for a few saints who renounced desire, but inevitable for everyone. He apparently viewed the second law of thermodynamics–the inevitable increase in entropy in nature with respect to time–as the objectification of the inevitable redemption of the will. As nature appeared to be asymptotically approaching, from an original singularity, a state of maximal distribution of energy in which manifestations of natural forces would be vanishingly insignificant, so he believed that the will would eventually extinguish itself. Thus, what Schopenhauer conceived of as a purposeless striving actually does have an endstate–in death.
Mainländer illustrates this idea allegorically with his story of the death or, rather, the suicide of God. According to this self-conscious creation myth, we are all fragments of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent entity who only wanted–indeed, could only want–one thing: nothing. The death (disintegration) of a human being is analogous to the original self-sundering of God which will repeat itself in miniature until the last particle in the universe ceases to be and nothing alone remains.
* One is reminded of Leibniz's characterization of experience as the "multitude dans l’unité ou dans le substance simple".
** This panpsychist all-is-me-and-I-am-all doctrine is perhaps best summed up with a saying from the Oupnekhat that Schopenhauer himself quotes in The World as Will and Representation: Hæ omnes creaturæ in totum ego sum, et præter me aliud ens non est (roughly, "All these creatures am I, and besides me naught is").
*** Schopenhauer's ranging survey of the conflict of the with itself as objectified in nature, from its lowest 'grade' (of complexity) in the opposition of attractive and repulsive natural forces to the unfathomable wickedness of the human intellect earned him the special admiration of–it bears mentioning on a forum named for a revision of his theories–Jung. Einstein was also an avid reader of the philosopher.
**** We find a fictional paradigm for this process in the character of Andrei Bolkonsky in Leo Tolostoy's novel War and Peace, who, upon witnessing the suffering of his enemy as both lay gravely wounded after a battle, is moved by the shared plight of all beings to forgive all who had wronged him, achieving a state of universal compassion before losing the will to live altogether.
** This panpsychist all-is-me-and-I-am-all doctrine is perhaps best summed up with a saying from the Oupnekhat that Schopenhauer himself quotes in The World as Will and Representation: Hæ omnes creaturæ in totum ego sum, et præter me aliud ens non est (roughly, "All these creatures am I, and besides me naught is").
*** Schopenhauer's ranging survey of the conflict of the with itself as objectified in nature, from its lowest 'grade' (of complexity) in the opposition of attractive and repulsive natural forces to the unfathomable wickedness of the human intellect earned him the special admiration of–it bears mentioning on a forum named for a revision of his theories–Jung. Einstein was also an avid reader of the philosopher.
**** We find a fictional paradigm for this process in the character of Andrei Bolkonsky in Leo Tolostoy's novel War and Peace, who, upon witnessing the suffering of his enemy as both lay gravely wounded after a battle, is moved by the shared plight of all beings to forgive all who had wronged him, achieving a state of universal compassion before losing the will to live altogether.
So, what do you think about Mainländer's story of the death of God? Schopenhauer's asceticist ethics? Kant's transcendental idealism? About what were these thinkers wrong? Do you have any loosely related comments on philosophy in general? Discuss!
Myself, I think Mainländer's doctrine of redemption is provocative if nothing else, but I'm hesitant to grant it more than that until I've read more of his philosophy. I'm wary of his bold speculation concerning the fate of the universe and especially of the ethical conclusions he draws from it, like the value of celibacy and of suicide (he hung himself at 34 years of age, shortly after completing his philosophical work). If entropy is inevitable, why does it need to be helped along? Couldn't it just as easily be impeded by suicide due to the butterfly effect?
All the same, Mainländer appears to be a worthy philosopher. The second volume of his principal philosophical work contains a lengthy critique of Schopenhauer's philosophy (following the pattern set by The World as Will and Representation, which contains a critique of Kant's), in which he seems to make some very lucid comments on Kant and Schopenhauer, particularly concerning the aprioroty of causality, which I always viewed as a weak spot for both. Further research is warranted.
If you haven't figured it out, I have a very high opinion of Kant and Schopenhauer. They are to Western metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics what Newton is to natural philosophy. Could Mainländer be their Einstein?