god's decaying corpse

why does everything around us feel both connected and separate at the same time?

why does the world seem so full of life, yet feel like it’s dying at the same time?

why does it feel like we’re all pieces of something bigger, but that “something” is gone?

why is everything extinguishing? from creatures, to plants, to planets, to stars… everything is slowly collapsing. fading. disappearing.

is existence a mistake?

philipp mainländer spoke about this. he’s often seen as the most pessimistic philosopher that has ever existed. his work is profoundly shocking and disturbing, yet somehow, very seducing.

at the beginning of the universe, there was nothing. not even the void. only pure, untouched nothingness. only god. god alone. god everywhere. god always. not a god seated in heaven, not a king on a throne, but an absolute and total presence. a unity without division. an existence without boundary or end. he was all there was. and in being everything, he was confined. he was imprisoned in himself. god was the original substance, the root of all that could ever be. and within this infinite being was a loneliness no human mind could comprehend. a silence so deep that even the word ‘alone’ becomes meaningless.

god existed as a singular, infinite being, perfect, pure, undivided. yet the nature of god and the nature of finite things are fundamentally incompatible. if god is truly infinite, then nothing else can exist beside him. he fills all of reality. there is no room for ‘other.’

so how, then, does the world we experience exist?
 

mainländer proposes an extraordinary answer:
 

“the universe… is the disintegration into multiplicity, that is, into egoistic individualities arrayed against each other.”

the world appears both fragmented into countless individual parts, and at the same time as a unified whole, governed by a single dominant force, which he calls "the will" (a term he adopts from schopenhauer). mainländer arrives at this view by observing how everything in the universe feels interdependent and connected, and yet, as individuals, especially conscious ones, everything also feels isolated and distinct. we are each confined to our own body and mind, yet we emerge from the totality of nature. for him, existence is a constant interplay between unity and individuality, always moving from unity toward fragmentation.
 

“non-being must simply have earned preference over supra-being, or else god in his perfect wisdom would not have chosen it.”

in such a world, anything that exists is destined to experience disproportionate and unending suffering. for mainländer, as for many pessimistic philosophers, non-being is fundamentally preferable to being. yet he believes our existence has one purpose, which is to reach its end.
 

“every vivid feeling of pleasure must therefore be purchased with a vivid feeling of unpleasure, and with every purchase of this kind the will ultimately gains nothing.”

through life, we are propelled by an endless motion that keeps us clinging to existence, but always with dissatisfaction. we desire life, yet we desire it in particular ways, and to desire is already to lack, to suffer in striving for what we do not have. even when we attain what we seek, the fleeting pleasure quickly fades into emptiness.
 

“life in general is a 'wretchedly miserable thing': it has always been wretched and miserable and will be wretched and miserable, and it is better not to be than to be.”

life is composed mostly of suffering, where any fleeting happiness inevitably gives way to pain.

god, being the absolute all-knowing being that he is, realizes the absurdity of life. how preferable non-being is to being. existence (even perfect, infinite existence) is suffering by its very nature, and the highest “good” is to return to nothingness.

and in that knowledge, god made the ultimate decision:

he chose death.

mainländer believed the universe began not with creation, but with divine suicide. god, being infinite and omnipresent, could not simply cease to exist, there was no outside into which he could disappear, no external void to retreat into. he was trapped within himself, unable to die in the way we understand death. and so, he chose the only possible path toward non-being: he shattered his own being into countless fragments: stars, atoms, bodies, minds… all finite, all dying.

we are the remains of god’s corpse, and the world is the process of his slow decomposition.

in mainländer’s philosophy, a truly infinite and omnipresent god left no room for finite things to exist, because if god remained everything and everywhere, there could be no space for multiplicity or individuality. to make room for finite creatures like us, god had to negate himself, to contract, shatter, and die, creating the space for the world. the world is not a creation from nothing, but a creation from god, at the cost of his own being. finite existence arises only because of this divine self-destruction. but in becoming fragments of that destroyed unity, finite beings inherit the nothingness at the core of reality. existence itself is steeped in death and decay from the beginning, because we are the debris of a dead god. life is therefore a process of disintegration and release, the slow decay of god’s corpse, and our task is to embrace the return to nothing. death is not a tragedy but a redemption, because it reunites us with the state of nothingness that ends suffering and struggle. the purpose of existence is to move toward non-being again, to complete the return to nothingness that god himself initiated.

philipp mainländer didn’t just write this philosophy.

he lived it.

he believed that god's act of creation was a suicide, a divine disintegration into matter, pain, and death. and that every being born into this broken world carries a piece of that divine collapse. we are, each of us, part of god’s corpse, and to live is to rot slowly with him. to die is to return to the only peace that ever was: nothingness.

and so, on the very day his book "the philosophy of redemption" was published,

he hanged himself.

not out of despair. not in fear. but in conviction. because for mainländer, death wasn’t defeat.

it was the final truth. the last release. the only honest answer to a world built on the ruins of god’s last breath.

his death wasn’t a tragedy.

it was the conclusion of his work.