Philipp Mainländer

Philipp Mainländer (1841 to 1876) was a German philosopher and poet whose pessimistic system pushed Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphysics toward a will to die. Born Philipp Batz in Offenbach am Main, he took the name Mainländer in homage to his hometown. He trained as a merchant, worked in Naples, where he discovered Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, and later in a Berlin bank, before turning from poetry to philosophy. His central work, The Philosophy of Redemption, argues that non-existence is preferable to existence and that God shattered himself into the world of matter, which is steadily moving toward absolute nothingness. He also championed socialism as a step toward that end. Mainländer hanged himself in 1876, the day after the first volume appeared, and the book later found readers among them Friedrich Nietzsche and Emil Cioran.