Philipp Mainländer: The Life-Rejecting Socialist

when I was in high school I first got into philosophy through something called philosophical pessimism I guess it makes sense that as an angsty high schooler who didn't have any friends I found it enjoyable to read writers who disparaged the world who deemed the life worthless and rejected hopes for happiness maybe it's because I felt like they justified and legitimated all of my negative feelings and I felt comforted by the idea that what I'm feeling is not an exception but the inevitable course of things and so I sought out as many of such philosophical pessimists

as I could find Schopenhauer chore on zap PHA leopardi and there was one in particular that left an impression on me filip mind Linda I looked him up and immediately became interested when I read on the Wikipedia page that he had been credited with quote perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature his mysteriousness due to the fact that I couldn't find any of his original works in English only made me more fascinated and ever since even though I lost the interest in philosophical pessimism I had back then I would still occasionally

encounter his name without expecting it even in the context of my much more recent interest in socialism as mine Lander was an active figure on that front as well so he never stopped haunting me in large part because every single time I release a new video there's a person who comments do a video on mine Lander I will keep asking until you do well I hope you're happy because here it is filip mine Lander originally known as Phillip BOTS was born in Germany in 1841 in 1876 at the age of 34 he published his magnum

opus the philosophy of redemption in which he argued that the ultimate purpose of each and everything is to die out to cease existing that death is not only inevitable but good upon finishing this work he felt empty like there was nothing left for him to do he writes 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 honorable in state and science God

the monster infinity the species the powers of nature and the modern States and in my stark-naked atheism I validate it only the individual and egoism nevertheless above them both fillet the splendor of the pre worldly unity of God the Holy Spirit the greatest and most significant of the three divine beings yes Atlee 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 and absolute nothingness and so shortly after his book was published he hung himself standing on a stack of

the newly arrived copies of his own book his own philosophy served as the foundation for his suicide both literally and figuratively there was no doubt as to how seriously he took it mine Lander wasn't an academic following his wealthy father's instructions he worked in a trading house then his father's business than a banking house but disliked all of it and would have preferred to be in the military instead but always had with it due to his health so to escape his daily life he looked to poetry and then philosophy and so was mostly self-taught mine

Lander experienced his greatest conversion when he came across Arthur Schopenhauer's great work the world is will in representation when he found this book entirely by accident he could not stop reading and stayed up overnight until he finished it and felt reborn afterwards around this time Schopenhauer was beginning to be quite famous in Germany for some reason 19th century Germany was a place where people had become really receptive to pessimistic philosophy on the one hand Schopenhauer was most influenced by Plato and most of all Conte who formed the background of his philosophizing and Schopenhauer saw himself

as walking in the steps of the great Conte being his only true disciple and solving every philosophical problem that Kant had been unable to tackle on the other hand Schopenhauer was introduced to Buddhist and Hindu religious texts and these had an immense effect on him as well he was possibly the first popular Western philosopher to be so impressed by Buddha and the Upanishads that he placed them on par with the works of Conte and Plato he used all these influences to produce in true German fashion a totalizing unified and systematic philosophy including a metaphysics and

ethics and aesthetics and politics all in one book but what was truly unique about Schopenhauer and what he is most often remembered for is his uncompromising pessimism a kind of absolute cosmic pessimism not about any particular thing but about existence itself 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 pain lessness 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 and striving after something which he thinks will make him so he seldom attains his goal and when he does it is only to be disappointed he's mostly shipwrecked in the end and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone then it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing

and now it is over if you try to imagine as nearly as you can what an amount of misery pain and suffering of every kind the Sun shines upon in its course you will admit that it would be much better if on the earth as little as on the moon the Sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life and if here as there the surface were still in a crystalline States Schopenhauer's verdict on life was that it was fundamentally negative that suffering was built into it that pain predominated over pleasure and that lasting

happiness was an illusion life in his view mostly alternates between pain and struggle as we try to fulfill our desires and boredom which afflicts us whenever we have no immediate desires the periods of satisfaction are few and far between and are just as likely to be replaced by periods of disappointment as the things we look forward to are never quite as good as we expect them to be and yet moments of suffering are often worse than we expect them to be Schopenhauer pointed out for instance how we don't even notice the health of our entire

body and yet a single prick on the bottom of our foot suddenly directs all of our attention to it pain is not only more common than happiness it demands itself to be felt and acknowledged much much more violently nor did he think that there is any purpose to all of this he believed that behind all appearances the world is at bottom nothing but a boundless indivisible unchanging metaphysical force called will as in to will something willing or willingness the sole characteristic of this will is to strive and everything in this world expresses this will and

it's striving everything from a river that strives to flow a plant that strives to reach towards sunlight and that strives to catch its prey or a human being striving to be fulfilled and all of these strivings are ultimately fruitless because the will is unchanging it can never be satiated it is by its very nature hungry for striving and so no matter how many of your desires are fulfilled it will never be enough and you'll have new desires yet again although Schopenhauer believed that art and philosophy can give us temporary relief from this condition the only

permanent solution was to become an esthetic he believed that it is possible for certain aesthetics by renouncing all of their desires to extinguish the will to detach themselves from the metaphysical basis of this world and thereby to be released from suffering living simply in the peace and calm of painless resignation this for Schopenhauer was the height of virtue so earthly happiness is impossible the best we can get is aesthetic detachment nor is there salvation in the afterlife the world is ruled not according to some benevolent plan but by an irrational impersonal and unstoppable will nor

is there hope or meaning in history as Schopenhauer's rival Hegel believed all historical periods and societies are in essence manifestations of the same metaphysical force and so just like that force irrational violent and full of suffering and even if most of our daily struggles were removed by some sort of progress Schopenhauer believed that this would only make the meaninglessness of it all even more apparent and drive the majority to mental anguish although ignored at first and overshadowed by Hegel in a few decades Schopenhauer's works grew in popularity immensely and kicked off an entire trend of

German philosophical pessimism characterized by the belief that non-existence is better than existence Schopenhauer was responsible for making the value of life into a topic of debate and and his works would end up having a decisive influence on Nietzsche in his formative years perhaps if it wasn't for Schopenhauer we would have never seen the emergence of existentialist philosophy as we know it Schopenhauer's popularity led to a line of three 19th century German philosophers following directly in his footsteps all of whom took from Schopenhauer something's and rejected others but were all united in their pessimism the first

one was Edouard von Hartman the most famous of the three who essentially attempted to combine Schopenhauer with Hegel something which Schopenhauer himself having nothing but contempt for Hegel would have been appalled by the third one was Yulia sponson who in a way was even more radical in his pessimism than Schopenhauer as he believed that even a skepticism could not extinguish the will and yet nevertheless advocated for an ideal of tragic heroism where one pursues one's aims despite their inevitable futility as you might guess it is likely that he had an influence on Nietzsche as well

but our focus in between von Hartman and Bahnson is the second Schopenhauer Arian Philipp mine Lander he took from Schopenhauer two main claims that he never abandoned that non-existence is preferable to existence and that what is most fundamentally real and what we experience most immediately is the will the base behind all of our desires and experiences but mine Lander wasn't just the follower of Schopenhauer he was also a critic and combined Schopenhauer's teachings with a wide range of influences perhaps the most unexpected influence is that of the young Hegelians a group of left-leaning German philosophers

who used Hegelian philosophy to attack the Prussian establishment rather than legitimated like Hegel himself did and early on this group included of course the young Karl Marx the two most influential young Hegelians four-mile under whirl it Vig feuerbach and max Stirner feuerbach was influential due to his philosophy of religion he had argued that religious beliefs were a reflection of the needs people had but were unable to fulfill as humans would continue to increase their capabilities they would move past the need for God and replace religion with humanism the belief in humanity meine Lander was inspired

by this to develop his own philosophy of religion arguing that religious development follows a historical pattern in which culture start with polytheism then move on to monotheism or pantheism and then reached the final stage in atheism in which they finally recognized the true nature of the world although such historical accounts were for obvious reasons usually centred on Europe meine Lander actually believed that the final stage had only been reached in two countries India and Judea however unlike the young Hegelians mine Lander did not seek to reject religion in its entirety he believed that the ethical

teachings of humility and resignation common to many major religions were fundamentally correct and wanted to rescue from religion this core and despite being a self-proclaimed atheist he continued throughout his life to interpret things in exceedingly religious terms speaking with an almost priest-like attitude from the other young and gay lien max Stirner he adopted his individualism and egoism mine launderer believed that all ethical principles are derived from self-interest more specifically from the self-interested desire to reduce suffering he believed that we are pursuing self-interest even in our most moral moments for example when we see a person

suffering and have a strong urge to help them it is because the sight of their suffering makes us indirectly suffer as well and in helping them we thereby seek to make ourselves feel better mine Lander held the view known as psychological egoism that humans are always motivated by self-interest and when we think we are being selfless we are only fooling ourselves or falling for an illusion mine Lander like von Hartman before him also adopted the Hegelian idea that history moves towards a goal this was a clear departure from Schopenhauer because Schopenhauer had argued that the

world is fundamentally without purpose or goals characterized only by constant and meaningless striving mine lender rejected this but not in the way the usual Hegelian would for mine Lander history doesn't end in the realization of human freedom or self-consciousness or anything like that rather for him the purpose of history was nothingness to die out to stop existing because he deemed life fundamentally negative the only way to eradicate suffering was to eradicate the world and luckily for us this will happen it's the movement of history here we approach perhaps the strangest and most mythical part of

mine Landers philosophy he starts with the metaphysical problem why does it simultaneously seem as if on the one hand the world is unified a single hole where everything is interdependent and on the other hand as if the world is fragmented into a billion different objects in other words is the world one or is it many engaging in some wild metaphysical speculation meine Lander answers that it's not either one or the other but that rather there is a continual movement from one to the other from the one to the many in the beginning of time the

world was nothing but a single undivided unity however a split occurred and it began a process by which the world increasingly moves from unity to fragmentation from the one to the many from interdependence to independence and from unfreedom to freedom if you've ever read some pop science you might even suggest that he was in a primitive way describing the singularity that pre-existed the Big Bang when he was talking about that primal unity and the process he's describing afterwards is entropy either way he takes these metaphysical speculations and cloaks them in religious language to create a

kind of regulative myth a kind of story to help us make sense of the world by ascribing human qualities to it the single undivided unity existing at the beginning of time he names God after all it had many of the qualities commonly attributed to God God however was horrified at the thought of existing because he saw that non-existence is preferable to existence and so he wanted to die however he could not commit suicide without violating his own nature as God and so he had to commit suicide by proxy so to speak by first dividing himself

into fragments which would over time disintegrate and finally disappear into nothingness achieving God's intended goal of non-existence in other words the universe we live in is the rotting corpse of God today probably the most popular work in which you may find mine Landers named unfortunately for him is Nietzsche's work the gay science in which Nietzsche doesn't say much about mine Lander besides rhetorically asking could one count such dilettantes in old maids as the sickeningly sentimental apostle of virginity mine Lander as a genuine German but the gay science is also a book in which Nietzsche first

introduces his idea of the death of God of course Nietzsche's claim about the death of God had an entirely different meaning it was a cultural statement more so than a metaphysical one but it seems highly plausible that the popular imagery used by Nietzsche had the unacknowledged influence of Philip Mann Lander and Nietzsche did also try to tackle a similar problem to what mind Lander had approached earlier namely how to deal with a culture that is still in need of the orientation and meaning provided by religion but is growing increasingly skeptical of religious ideas mine Landers

answer to this was to secularize religion maintain the discourse and practice of religion but on a secular basis and he did this in very unusual ways for example he accepts the Christian doctrine that God has a plan that the universe is governed altom utley for the good but obviously in quite a different way because everything eventually leads to death and nothingness is preferable to existence as it lacks all suffering the universe does in fact tend towards the good the Bliss of nothingness is also how he interpreted Christ's teachings about heaven what heaven really is stripped

of all religious mystifications is the peace and quiet of eternal nothingness devoid of all suffering and worry it's a form of redemption open to anyone and awaiting us all mine Lander transforms Christianity into the worship of death but now we have to get to what many of my viewers will be particularly interested in namely mine Landers politics his politics wouldn't be interesting if it wasn't for the rest of his beliefs and his position as one of the German pessimists see for the most part the German pessimists were quite reactionary even by the standards of their

own time and rejected the various Liberal Democratic reformist as well as revolutionary movements of their time it makes sense how a rejection of political liberation would be connected to their pessimism after all if like Schopenhauer you believe that every human society is an essence and expression of the same metaphysical will that suffering isn't a radical and redemption can only be achieved by certain rare individuals who resort to a life of a skepticism than political movements that aim at a radical transformation of society are merely wasting their time but among all of them mine Lander is

an exception as he was the most left-wing of the bunch and sometimes self-described as a communist and was a part of Germany's social democratic movement some argue that there is a tension between mine Landers pessimism and his politics after all wouldn't a political system that satisfies everyone's basic needs only prolong people's lives and delay the goal of non-existence whether or not there is a tension both mine Landers politics and his worship of death fundamentally stem from the same source his desire to reduce human suffering sure Universal death is the only thing that eradicate suffering completely

but until then we may as well reduce the suffering of those who are still living in a socially organized society would be a significant step in that direction however I must lay out exactly what mine land are understood by socialism or communism we shouldn't assume as some are likely to do that this was Marxist communism in fact Mon Lander never refers to Marx nor was it anarcho-communism this was a time when political radicals were still trying to find their place among the numerous competing social isms and communism the currently common distinction between Social Democrats and

communists where the former means reformist and the latter revolutionary was not yet clearly made and communism did not necessarily mean a stateless classless moneyless society socialists of the most various stripes were all grouped under the single label of social democrat the viewers who share my political views might even be disappointed by mine lenders understanding of socialism and find it naive and even vulgar but let's be fair and forgiving given that he was writing at such an early stage of the Socialist Movement first of all mine Lander was not an advocate for revolution instead he believed

that his ideal social system could be implemented through parliamentary means as more and more workers became active political participants in government secondly he had very strong nationalist sentiments contrary to the internationalism one would find in Marx with the benefit of foresight we get suspicious about German nationalists but nationalistic Social Democrats were far from uncommon at the time it should also be mentioned to mine Landers credit that he was a strong opponent of anti-semitism so common among other social Democrats of the time thirdly he did not hold the goal of abolishing the state in fact he

had a Hobbesian view of the state according to which the state was necessary for any kind of peaceful social order for him socialism was a matter of the state redistributing wealth in a way that meets everyone's needs and he believed that this could be done even to the point where everyone would live luxuriously in other words this believes were less like that of MA and more like the believes that right-wingers attribute to Marx when they don't know much about the topic Marx would probably have criticized my Lander as one of the many utopian socialists who

think that socialism can be brought about by a mere change in the mode of distribution rather than a more fundamental change in the mode of production in any case mine Lander was significant enough to be acknowledged by other prominent socialists of the time Auguste babbit one of the founders of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany mentioned mine Lander in his book woman and socialism another German Socialist Bernstein who was closely associated with Marx although his politics were closer to mine Landers wrote that he was quote very interested in Mayan Lander and the first prominent

Dutch socialist knew and host considered mine Landers book to be a great contribution to socialism so if there ever was a figure capable of uniting the pessimists and the Socialists it would have had to be mine Lander [Music] towards the end of his life after mine Lander had written his magnum opus and was doubting whether he still had a reason to live his final consideration was whether he should dedicate his life to strengthening Germany's social democratic movement and he wrote down addresses to the German workers for that purpose but for whatever reason that plan didn't

work out meine Lander could not see another reason worth living for and took his own life at the age of 34 thus ended the life of perhaps the strangest figure among the German pessimists it was the only one of them who took his pessimism to its ultimate conclusion and yet despite his gospel of death and his aesthetic tendencies he did not argue for political resignation or quietude and did not give up hopes for political progress he was an incredibly paradoxical thinker in general on the one hand he described his religious view as a stark naked

atheism on the other he continued to think in largely religious terms describing himself as a messiah and seeing in events the guidance of Providence even as he describes the world as the decaying body of God he continues to worship that God even describing it as the Holy Spirit and speaking of it with religious veneration his outwardly pessimistic view that history is a process of increasing death and decay was accompanied by his optimism regarding the belief that the world has a purpose a final goal which it will inevitably reach and his praise of absolute egoism was

accompanied by a personal ideal of absolute sacrifice as I said in the beginning I used to find comfort and works of philosophical pessimism because they helped me accept the negative things I felt as being just the regular course of life however since then I've learned that there is a danger in universalizing one's experiences too much sure everyone feels suffering but not everyone suffers to the same stent or for the same reasons or equally justifiably and I've learned since then also the importance of historicizing how important it is to see how the things we feel or

a product of a particular time and place and a particular form of social organization and once you realize this you also realize that perhaps your suffering isn't just the regular course of events that instead your suffering is a condemnation of the present state of things and a demand for change and although acceptance may give you comfort only the refusal to accept can bring change if we realize that change is possible we also realize that pessimism of the kind disgust can often be used as a sedative beneficial to those who rule over us to sedate us

into accepting the status quo as something inevitable Schopenhauer may argue that everyone suffers but did he suffer as much as the Germans who were working in mines and factories and he may argue that all desire should be extinguished but did he ever extinguish his own desire to maintain all the wealth he had perhaps the paradoxical thought of mine Lander itself makes more sense if we historicize and situate him as someone trying to cope with modernity trying to make sense of religious traditions in a time when religious belief was quickly being delegitimized and trying to make

sense of historical development where unprecedented advancements in technology and productivity were accompanied by increasing misery among the poor hence we get someone's self identifying as an atheist yet extremely religious in his viewpoint and someone optimistic about the progress of history yet extremely pessimistic about life itself in any case mine Lander shows us that even at times when we do feel like life is fundamentally worthless and that suffering is as meaningless as it is all pervasive we can maintain our political hopes nevertheless so when I first discovered mine Lander there was absolutely no English translations of

his texts available people discovering him now are a bit luckier because there is an incomplete translation of philosophy of redemption available online it is however an independent amateur translation and so by no means perfect but according to Wikipedia an official English translation is also in the works for those who speak Spanish there is also a Spanish translation a philosophy of redemption out there the best piece of secondary literature on mine Lander which is what I drew from most in this video is a chapter on mine Lander from veg Metz by Frederick C by Sir let's

hope that in the future we'll have lots more material on this fascinating thinker and now I'd like to thank my patrons apply Quine that doesn't work on 37th call a pronounceable named Alec Radford and most importantly Andrei Oliva baffled and Daffy Christian Pascoe Christopher Clark Fletcher Connor d Dan beaver Daniels Ortner dink opinion John Scott Yukio Sean aveer asked Ian dent Edison who are Errico Malatesta Ethan Hastings Gary Coulter George Soros Giggy Giggy Giggy Giggy Kaakha Kaakha Kaakha Kaakha Kaakha Greg Boyer Co Genesis Chavez Hoang voo industrial robot John D Pagani jones indiana justin Armijo

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talk about in these videos that's it for everyone currently protesting and organizing good luck and solidarity thank you