The immanent philosophy of Philipp Mainländer

http://philosophy-of-redemption.blogspot.nl/2013/05/the-rotting-god-mainlanders-metaphysic.html

http://philosophy-of-redemption.blogspot.nl/2013/06/the-assembly-line-of-death.html

To get in touch with Mainländer’s ideas, the summary above is almost the only source the Anglophone community has. I want to give the possibility to experience more of his ideas by translating some parts of his work.

Here I want to add a few things about his philosophy. He writes:

The true philosophy must be purely immanent, that means, its complete material, as well as its boundaries, must be the world. She must explain the world from principles which by itself every human can recognize and may not call upon extra-worldly forces, of which one can know absolutely nothing, nor forces in the world whose being cannot be perceived.

Mainländer proudly refers to his own philosophy as the immanent philosophy, because his system is the first one to not leave the boundaries of experience in this world in order to explain it. His philosophy is therefore atheistic. For the first time atheism is proven, so he claims.

He rejects materialism, although “it can be compared to an acid, which destroys centuries old rubble, all leftovers of shattered forms, all superstitions, making the human heart unhappy, but purifies it in exchange”.

The intellectual development of civilizations goes through three stages, first

1. the forces of nature get personified (polytheism);

2. these forces are unified (pantheism/monotheism);

3. the last stadium of atheism is reached.

However in that blog a “God” is mentioned which gave rise to a lot of confusion and skepticism, since for people of our time it’s not possible anymore to believe in any god.

The only thing Mainländer says is that the world has had a beginning, and that of what was before this world we can form no concept. Since we can have no experience of it, can comprehend nothing about it, transcends all experience we could say the world was created out of nothing. A relative nothing (since if it were an absolute nothing it couldn’t have the property that the world follows from it), a transcendental area which no longer exists. The only thing which exists, now, is the immanent area, the world.

However for an unperceivable existence which has created the world there is already a name: God. From this follows that it doesn’t affect his radical atheism, which is why a contemporary, Von Hartmann, called his use of the word God blasphemy.

The transcendental area (pre-existence) and the immanent area (existence) are strictly separated. There are no the experience transcending forces active in this world, everything is ruled by causality.

Mainländer is a hard determinist. Every action is determined, happens necessarily. The movement from existence into non-existence is pre-determined and nothing can be changed about the way it happens.

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Those who have read Schopenhauer know that the key to what the things-as-they-are are lies in our self-consciousness. How do we experience our self-consciousness?

Answer: Absolutely and entirely as one who wills. Everyone who observes his own self-consciousness will soon become aware that its object is at all times his own willing. By this, however, we must understand not merely the definite acts of will that lead at once to deed, and the explicit decisions together with the actions resulting from them. On the contrary, whoever is capable of grasping any way that which is essential, in spite of the different modifications of degree and kind, will have no hesitation in reckoning as manifestations of willing all desiring, striving, wishing, longing, yearning, hoping, loving, rejoicing, exulting, detesting, fleeing, fearing, being angry, hating, mourning, suffering, in short, all affects and passions. For these are only movements more or less weak or strong, stirrings at one moment violent and stormy, at another mild and faint, of our own will that either checked or given its way, satisfied, or unsatisfied. They all refer in many different ways to the attainment or missing of what I desired, and to the enduring or subduing of what is abhorred. They are therefore definite affections of the same will that is active in decisions and actions. Even what are called feelings of pleasure and displeasure are included in the list above; it is true that they exist in a great variety of degrees and kinds; yet they can always be reduced to affections of desire or abhorrence and thus to the will itself becoming conscious of itself as satisfied or unsatisfied, impeded or allowed its way. Indeed this extents even to bodily sensations, pleasant or painful, and to all countless sensation lying between these two extremes. For the essence of all these affections consists in their entering immediately into self-consciousness as something agreeable or disagreeable of the will. If we carefully consider the matter, we are immediately conscious of our own body only as the outwardly acting organ of the will, and as the seat of receptivity for pleasant or painful sensations. But, as I have just said, these sensations themselves go back to immediate affections of the will which are either agreeable or disagreeable to it. Whether or not we include these mere feelings of pleasure or displeasure, we shall in any case find that all these movements of the will, those variations of willing and not-willing, which with their constant ebb and flow constitute the only object of self-consciousness. (Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will)

They both use this key, self-consciousness, which is an “I” which “wills”. The fundamental difference between Mainländer and Schopenhauer, is that Schopenhauer throws away this “I” and proclaims it to be a mere illusion. The empirical world is a projection of the metaphysical Will.

Mainländer considers both this “I” and this “will” to be real, meaning, the things-as-they-are are individual Wills to Live. The closed collection of all individual wills is the world, and nothing exists outside of it, everything which exists is individual will to live.

The immanent philosophy, which acknowledges no sources but the for everyone’s eyes existing nature and our inside, rejects the assumption of a hidden basic unity in, behind or above the world. She knows only countless Ideas, i.e. individual Wills to Live, which, as sum, form a closed collective-unity.

Pantheism is therefore strongly rejected, and should all wills disappear then absolutely nothing remains.

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Metaphysik 22

The immanent philosophy may not condemn; she can’t. She doesn’t call for suicide, but serving truth alone, must destroy counter motives with violence. Because what says the poet?

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

This undiscovered land, these believed mysteries which have opened the hand of so many, who had already firmly clamped the dagger – this frightful land, the immanent philosophy had to destroy it completely. There once was a transcendental area – it no longer is. The life-weary, who asks himself: existence or non-existence? must find reasons for and against in this world (the complete world: he should take his still blinded brothers in regard, who he can help, not that he delivers shoes and plants cabbage for them, but by helping them to achieve a better state) - on the other side of the world is not a place of peace, nor a place of torment, but only nothingness.

This can be a new counter motive and a new motive: this truth can draw one person back into the affirmation of the will, pull others powerfully into death. The truth may however not be denied. And if up until now the idea of an individual continuation after death, in a hell or in a heaven, has kept off many from death, while the immanent philosophy leads on the other hand many into death – so must it be from now on, since every motive, which enters the world, appears and works with necessity.