The Volitional Abyss: On the Notion of Desiring-That-One-Were-Not in Philipp Mainländer’s Ontology
Among the fragments of German pessimism, the name Philipp Mainländer remains a shadow in a corridor already dimmed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Born Philipp Batz, this tragic prophet of cosmic degeneration bequeathed to the world but a single volume before taking his own life the day his magnum opus—the “Philosophy of Redemption”—was published. Therein, among cosmic speculations and metaphysical upheavals, lies a curiously understated yet richly pregnant notion of metaphysical volition: the desire not-to-be as constitutive of being’s inner structure. It is this subtle but profound detail of Mainländer’s work which shall serve as the object of our analysis.
Mainländer’s system rests upon an axiomatically original cosmology: the idea that God, once a unified and singular Being, committed suicide at the beginning of time, shattering Himself into multiplicity, giving rise to the world and all existents therein. Unlike orthodox teleologies, where becoming strives towards unity, Mainländer proposes a movement of beings further into decomposition and annihilation. Being does not strive for plenitude, he contends, but for extinction. Anti-vitalism here becomes metaphysical motor. Each being, from mineral to man, is animated by what he terms “the Will-to-Die” (Wille zum Tode), a natural obverse to Schopenhauer’s “Will-to-Live.”^1
Yet it is within the metaphysical psychology of this Will—which is not precisely negation, but desiring-one’s-own-cessation—that a particularly subtle ontological aporia arises. For how is desire, which supposes an experiencer and an aim, to be ascribed to non-being—or rather, the cessation of being? Can volition be coherently directed at that which nullifies the perceiving subject? It is here that Mainländer introduces, almost in passing, a concept of “desiring-that-one-were-not” (Begehren-nicht-mehr-zu-sein), which must be carefully distinguished from desiring suicide, as from the wish for sleep is distinct the total extinguishment of awareness.
This peculiar formulation is ontologically radical. It presupposes that to be is concomitantly to wish not to be—that the structure of existence is internally antagonistic. Not merely the existence of suffering, but the ontological condition of individuated being is conceived as intolerable to itself. The desire that one not exist—so Mainländer would have it—is not morbid pathology but the very pulse of the universe.
To appreciate the distinction, one must disambiguate between the empirical suicide and the metaphysical Will-to-Die. Suicide, in the realm of experience, annihilates the empirical ego; it may spring from pain, despair, or rational calculation. But this is not what Mainländer means when he posits Being as desiring its own disappearance. Rather, the desire-that-one-were-not is the animating principle from which life proceeds: life as the transitional form of dying, being as an intermediate stage in the cosmic dispersal of divinity into nullity. Indeed, what is generally taken to be emergence in evolutionary teleology—for Mainländer—is merely the increasing refinement in the art of self-annihilation.
It is at this juncture that we must pause and scrutinize the metaphysical consequences of this desiring-that-one-were-not. It is not a second-order desire (“I wish I wished not to be”) nor epistemological regret. It is the first ontological impulse, prior to being’s articulation even into time; it is the cosmic sigh catalyzing the expansion of multiplicity from unity. Here we see Mainländer edging close to a proto-deconstructive metaphysics: Being is not grounded in presence, but in its own decay; subjectivity originates from the fault-line between the will to persist and the deeper will to renounce.^2
Similar tones are echoed later in the negative dialectics of Adorno, where identity is persistently haunted by its non-identity, and in the paradoxical will in Bataille’s “la souveraineté,” driven toward excess and annihilation. Yet Mainländer differs by investing this dissolution not with exuberance or dialectical hope, but with an ethics of repose: suicide, both Divine and human, becomes the consummation of an inner teleology, not its interruption.
But to attend now to the theological implication of this detail: if the first volition—enacted by God—was to no longer be, then each enchained being is a last flicker of that supreme renunciation. The world is, in this sense, not merely fallen or imperfect, but decomposing—as if existence itself were radiation from a divine corpse, diffusing eternally into lesser intensities of desire and awareness.^3 Every soul that wishes deeply not to be is thus harmonizing with the primal volition of divinity.
This inclusion of insatiable metaphysical negation as the ontic seed gives Mainländer an irremediably heretical place in the pantheon of Western philosophy. For Descartes, the cogito is affirmation; even Schopenhauer, bleak as he is, leaves the Will intact as a positive though irrational principle. But for Mainländer, to be is precisely to desire not to be. The wish not to be is not contradiction, but essence.
And what then becomes of ethics? Curiously, here Mainländer anticipates not only Buddhist soteriology (as has often been noted), but also the post-Christian mysticism of Simone Weil, for whom decreation constitutes the holiest act. Acts of kindness, in Mainländer’s system, are not rooted in virtue, but in accommodation: a recognition of the shared desire for cessation. Compassion thus becomes metaphysical solidarity. To reduce suffering is holy not because it prolongs life, but because it mitigates the agony of existence until the individual arrives—through either biological death or moral purification—at ontological completion in nothingness.
In this way, Mainländer’s “desiring-that-one-were-not” is not simply metaphysics disguised as psychology; it is the key to his system and a subtle but immense deviation from Schopenhauer. The Will-to-Die is not a reaction to suffering—it is not phenomenal—but primary, ontological, and constitutive. It is eternally anterior to experience, and persists as the animating kernel of individuation.
To speak in summary: the meaningful subtlety in Mainländer’s system—too often overlooked, perhaps because it is distilled in sparse phrases amongst vast and poetic metaphysical excursions—is that volition is not toward being, nor even neutral, but toward unbeing. This is a metaphysics of voluntary apocalypse, a theology of sacred decay. One does not simply inhabit the world in Mainländer’s ontology; one gradually fulfills the divine longing to cease.
What contemporary philosophy finds difficult to reconcile is perhaps exactly what Mainländer eyes without blinking: that the riddle of life is not why it ends, but why it resists ending. Every act, every breath, every thought, conceals a deeper undercurrent—a deceleration into nothingness, folded in the midst of vitality. We are not built to live, but to die, and all suffering lies not in death, but in our forgetfulness of desiring it.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
cosmic pessimism, metaphysical volition, Mainländer, nihilology, ontology, theological negation, anti-eschatology
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^1 Mainländer, Philipp. _Die Philosophie der Erlösung_, Band I. Offenbach: J. D. Sauerländer’s Verlag, 1876, Sections 1–22.
^2 See Cooper, Barry. “The Ontology of Decline: Mainländer and the Spiritual Metaphysics of the Nineteenth Century.” _Pessimism Quarterly_, vol. 4, no. 2, 1903, pp. 45–68.
^3 For analysis of the organic-decomposition cosmology, cf. Renz, Henriette. “Die Göttliche Zersetzung: Kosmologische Thanatologie bei Mainländer.” _Archiv für Metaphysische Studien_, vol. 17, 1979, pp. 213–239.