Eternism — Death and Individuation between Mainländer and Schopenhauer

This is a moderately amended version of the text submitted for my undergraduate thesis in philosophy.

Life’s eternity must be lived within life’s brevity, it seemed to him with his sorrowful face blotted out by clouds.¹ — Marguerite Young

The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.² — Hermann Weyl

Abstract

This thesis seeks to utilise the metaphysical systems of Arthur Schopenhauer and Philipp Mainländer to highlight a connection, left implicit in Kant’s First Critique, between individuation, death and eternity. I aim to show how the pathway of ‘Will’ taken by these thinkers is of great importance to bridging the weltanschauung of German Idealism with contemporary Eternalist theories of Time in the 21st century. Specifically it is a way of conceiving the ‘All’ of nature and rehabilitating a notion of the ‘Absolute’ without recourse to the frayed coherence of Hegel. The position I will take that simultaneously holds the deathless, epistemic certainty of critical metaphysics with a universe destined for thermodynamic equilibrium is what I shall call, ‘Eternism’.

— Schopenhauer, Mainländer, Eternity, Individuation, Death

Introduction

The guiding thread from Galileo to Einstein is a deepening of immanence, a corrosive solvent that dissolves all vitalistic barriers between us and the universe. If there is one topology that is seen under higher and higher resolutions throughout the ages, it is the anastrophic epistemology of utter fatalism and phenomenological freedom, the (im)possibility of satisfying desire, and most importantly for the human being: what happens when we die? To answer such a question, we need to get into what it means to experience time before we can determine its absence. This takes us to the heart of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose system represents the most important step in decoding the mysterious topos of time, and whose reverberations throughout intellectual history still inform the language of the current debates in the philosophy of physics.

In its post-critical form, the bedrock assumption that we are progressing forward, in time, from a past to a future, is put under considerable scrutiny, to the point where it is almost entirely dismissed on varying grounds. To understand the existential and epistemological limits to such a counterintuitive notion, to understand all the different contours on its sculpture of lived experience, requires recourse to thinkers that were writing long before Einstein. Through a particularly powerful idea put forth by Benjamin de Casseres, the question of ‘Eternalism’ must take us back through to the beginnings of the critical project. This is for a multitude of reasons, but mainly it is because of the following two. The thinkers of this time grappled with the epistemological and existential questions that contemporary philosophy of physics also addresses from a much more holistic perspective. And, in a similar vein, they were writing as grand system makers which is tantamount to anachronism and arrogance in today’s climate of atomistic individuation within disciplines. Eternism is an attempt to regain such confidence, as thinkers like Mainländer and Schopenhauer speak to the depths of these issues far better than our contemporaries, the unpacking of whom shall form the next chapter.

Chapter 1 - Eternism and McTaggart’s Paradox

20th century philosophy of time begins with an infamous essay by J.M.E McTaggart titled ‘The Unreality of Time’. As the title suggests, he argues that time as we know it is unreal, ‘nothing that exists can be temporal, and that therefore time is unreal’³. He further differentiates two key approaches to the philosophy of time, the A-Series and B-Series. The first is what is later known as ‘Presentism’, that only the point that fluxes along the peak of becoming is real, all pastness and futurity are illusions concretely speaking, but order the flow of sensations brought onto the subject. The B-Theory is completely tenseless, this starts by understanding that past, present and future are relations to the subject, as such constructs reveal themselves to be contradictory. He writes:

‘The reality of the A series, then, leads to a contradiction, and must be rejected. And, since we have seen that change and time require the A series, the reality of change and time must be rejected. And so must the reality of the B series, since that requires time. Nothing is really present, past, or future. Nothing is really earlier or later than anything else or temporally simultaneous with it. Nothing really changes. And nothing is really in time.’⁴

Such a conception of time, especially post Einstein and Gödel, is called the ‘Block-Universe’, where all events are frozen in a block of all that there is. This is precisely where contemporary science is vindicated by the combined findings of Schopenhauer and Mainländer, such a concept through the lens of critical philosophy is precisely Eternism. There are two thinkers in the contemporary philosophy of time discourse that I would like to focus on to fine tune where the conception of the block-universe stands with all the 200 year old metaphysics in the previous chapters. These two are Theodore Sider and Simon Prosser. Beginning first with Sider, he defends a variant on the B-Theory that he called ‘Four-Dimensionalism’; the defining thesis of which is essentially that temporal parts are extended in the same way that spatial parts are, temporality itself being just as much a scaffolding dimension as spatiality. For Sider and other Eternalists, ‘reality consists of a four-dimensional spatiotemporal manifold of events and objects—the so called ‘block universe’⁵. ‘Presentism’ falls out of favor because within the frame of Minkowski spacetime there is no distinguishing between space and time and no claim to simultaneity that is observer independent. In a saddening sting of humanism that has pervaded the sciences, theories have been presented to make room for free-will. One of which is the growing-block theory of the universe, a mode of presentism that establishes the block after the permanence of the act has been established, recoursing to a Newtonian conception of absolute time that consists of a simultaneous present perduring uniformly over all time. It should come as no surprise how such a view is completely regressing to a science before Minkowski and Einstein did the good work of refining the Transcendental Aesthetic. Sider unpacks such a conception as thus: that ‘there is a common topological and metrical structure between any given spatial dimension and the temporal dimension (at least relative to any given reference frame)’⁶. The objects we encounter every day are called ‘space-time worms’, their dimensions are lasting and malleable in space just as much as they are in time, this Sider sees as a suitable resolution to many analytic paradoxes of coincidence. Using a helpful analogy, Sider writes that ‘the temporal procession of temporal parts is analogous to the spatial procession of spatial parts one gets from running the mind’s eye across any object, a branch of a tree say’⁷. Put within the context of death from a fourth dimensional perspective; to ask where someone goes when they die is akin to asking where did the branch go when you trace your finger past its end. Everything is already completed, simply and wholly in its own spatio-temporal perdurance granted at the dawn of the Universe. This is precisely the form of epistemological topology that the subject lamentfully finds itself in.

Such a suffocating existence is completely and wholly counterintuitive to every single phenomenological facet of our daily lives, yet with the theoretical and logical lucidity given to us in 1781, it is precisely where this leads. Describing ‘Eternalism’ within a certain kind of phenomenological lens is exactly what Simon Posser takes up in his book Experiencing Time. In it he states ‘that no experience, of any kind, can give us a genuine reason to believe that time passes, and that even if time did pass it would be quite impossible for any experience to be an experience of time passing’⁸, the goal being to immediately purge ontological arguments against eternalism that solely rely on a rather puzzling form of empiricism⁹. The insistence is that mental claims of a veridical nature are only tackling a subjective feeling of the passing of time, and are actually anachronistic to eternalism by virtue of their nature. That is to say that ‘nothing about our experiential engagement with the world could possibly reveal to us that time passes’¹⁰, and Prosser himself acknowledges his debt to Kant in the formulation of such a position: ‘the putative dynamic features of the world are contributed by the mind, and must be so contributed for experience to be possible’¹¹. Referring once again to the ‘Permanence of Substance’ discussed in the first critique, that is that one only perceives change because there is a substantial identity that carries over through the change, ‘this involves a necessary falsehood’¹², Prosser says. In the latter part of the book he begins to hold fast to a notion of ‘indeterminism’, as established by Daniel Dennett. Such a view however seems to be simply a rhetorical strategy commonly employed by philosophers of western traditions; which is tantamount to the spirit wincing at the thought of its position in the great and rigid quietism of all that is, Prosser himself says ‘even though, at one level of description, that is the case’¹³. This is actually a form of immanentisation of the subject within the axis of spatio-temporality, the illusion is the ground for what it means to conceive of both illusion and ground. All the objections to such a reality are convincingly disarmed by Prosser, with a reluctance even on his part to realise quite how bleak the picture he has painted truly is.

There is a distinct difference between the view espoused by McTaggart which argues that nothing really changes in time, and the modern physicists perspective which states that things do change in time, however it is my firm conviction that this elucidates the necessity of their connection within critical discourse. ‘Eternalism’ is the structure of B-Theories elaborated since McTaggart, exclusively ontic in their scope, Eternism however is an attempt to broaden such a view into a cohesive picture of reality as a transdisciplinary whole, regardless of how much it seems to propel the thinker into the life a character in a Beckett piece. This is all something that I would argue to be implicit within Kant, and fractured throughout the German sentinels previously discussed. The transcendental ideality of time asserts that one cannot speak of something within time, only through succession as a form of our synthesis within understanding. Time receptivity has a phylogenetic component because temporality is such a production; but not from the ethically sound seat of the Kantian subject, but the Will objectified as person, and as Nietzsche has it: ‘every person is a prison’¹⁴. A further prison imprisoning the prison of subjectivity is the prison of the universe, eternal and complete. In this way we shall use an old dictum of the early Schelling: ‘that a universe exists; this proposition is the limit of experience itself’¹⁵, all of the effluvia and the levels of consciousness are singular in their manifestation insofar as they are nothing more than the sum of their parts. The perception of time is like a shadow of a shadow, a right angle in a hall of mirrors, and this is precisely the Buddhist anatta that Schopenhauer fixates upon, the inexistence of a self.

On April 1st 1876, in a dreary attic lining the cobbled streets of south Germany, Philipp Mainländer hanged himself. His death occurred days after the publishing of his philosophical treatise, Die Philosophie der Erlösung, or The Philosophy of Redemption. This book was written as a continuation, a purification, of the teachings of his master, Arthur Schopenhauer. The text has remained woefully underappreciated in contemporary philosophical scholarship. Thomas Ligotti makes a passing mention at the beginning of his Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Fredrick C. Beiser also provides perhaps the most sustained English treatment of Mainländer in his book Weltschmerz. However it was only in 2024 when the first full, published translation of his magnum opus actually appeared, having only existed in extant fragments and forms in certain online spaces beforehand. His nascence and underappreciation play a large role in the inspiration for this thesis, but this work is actually hypnotised by the epistemological fixity of Kant’s first critique, in the same way as all of the thinkers discussed henceforth. What I seek to demonstrate is how Mainländer and Schopenhauer, taken together, illuminate a dialectical problem in the epistemological conditions surrounding the death of the individuated being. This is a problem that the many vicissitudes of contemporary scientific discourse claim to have solved, but has actually been denigrated in the name of enlightenment rationalism. On one hand, we have Schopenhauer’s account, the monistic apparatus of the principle of individuation as actualised by the infinite ‘Will’ decrees the conscious subject illusory. The moment the material substrate sustaining a particular individual runs out and bodily death occurs, the sensible aspect of consciousness is immediately reborn in the churning kaleidoscope of all beings, which are really one in the same, a distinctly dharmic idea. On the other hand we have Mainländer, he rejects the unity of the universe under the tsalalic Will and instead opts for a plurality of Wills, all originating from a single unity that split with the sole goal of annihilation. Death here is the complete and utter end, the Demiurgic flame is extinguished and absolute nothingness befalls the subject, its only point of rest. What a synthesis of these two positions results in is what I shall be calling ‘Eternism’.

Chapter 2: Eternism — The term and its origin

It is custom to unpack one’s ending position, avoiding hermeneutic sorrow as best as possible, in this case the term Eternism and its milieu are of crucial importance. The original mention of the term comes from polemical writer Benjamin de Casseres. In his 1936 work ‘I Dance With Nietzsche’, he discusses the outlook of the ‘supra-historical man’ in Nietzsche’s second untimely meditation. The quote he responds to goes as follows:

‘… the world is complete and reaches its finality at each and every moment. What could ten more years teach that the past ten were unable to teach!’¹⁶

To which de Casseres writes:

‘One of Nietzsche's profoundest sentences. It is pure Spinozism—Eternism.

It is the doctrine of the Eternal Return in an even profounder sense than Nietzsche saw. For there is no eternal “return”. How can Eternity “return”? Eternity and all that it has accomplished and all that is possible exist whole and undivided in any single moment.’¹⁷

This is the rather mystical kernel I seek to unpack. One reason is because I believe this allows for speculation to begin at an intersection wholly intimate to Kant, and undercuts the need for recourse to Hegel and that specific historical tributary in intellectual history (although I still will be addressing Hegel briefly to explain such a change of route). In another book written by De Casseres on Spinoza, this polemical and grand statement is given convincing ballast and uses the term ‘absolute’. On the oblique logic of the ‘liberator of God’ he writes: ‘The Absolute being All, it is all things at once and simultaneously’¹⁸, in stunning prose he remarks on Spinoza’s system allowing one to be a ghost to life and death. ‘It certainly made no difference to him whether he was (or is) what they call “dead” or “alive”. For he who knows he is eternal can be “dead” and “alive” simultaneously’¹⁹, the Absolute contains within it our entire life, the entire worm carved by our synthetic unity of apperception, and death means nothing. That death cannot be an object of experience is no shock here, not even Epicurus was new, but with Kant it presents a unique relationship with the way that temporality constitutes firstly, the life of the individual, but also that as time.

Chapter 3 - Kant on Death

Kant’s relationship to death is vague and strange, often he explicitly addresses it in the form of a cog in an ethical system—capital punishment, salvation, the 3rd Critique and Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone—as Nick Land once wrote: ‘There is no place, no domain, for [death] in Kant’s thinking, since even auto-generativity in nature is conceived as a regulative analogue of rational willing’²⁰. That is to say that Kant’s subject, even when pushed into the grander realms of art and sublimity such that it is in the Critique of Judgement, cannot consider death in any way aside from an apophatic negativity as it escapes the bounds of possible experience. In ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’ for example, Kant even writes how the impossibility of imagining such an intimate epistemological negation leads the human to think of the ‘experience’ of their bodies in the grave, gnawed at by worms²¹. The most explicit form of this occurs within the ‘Critique of Judgement’, where Kant writes: ‘no illuminating or determining judgement as to the separate nature of what thinks, or of the continuance or discontinuance of its personality after death, can possibly be made on speculative grounds by any exercise of our faculty of theoretical knowledge’²². The inability to enquire about what lies beyond death, in this reading of Kant, does not signify an open-ended potentiality, but rather a primordial dead end, forever barred from speculation, a nothing, ‘and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility’²³ as Kafka once said. For the sake of this thesis however, my focus will not be on these passages, it will be on a more focused and metaphysical account, specifically in the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ and the consideration of the Self as a Transcendental Subject: the atriums in the heart of the deduction. In the former, Kant investigates the propositions of the rationalists in their grand assertions around the soul, that the ‘I’ of individuation is immaterial, incorruptible and therefore according to people like Leibniz and Wolff, immortal. If the soul does not change, the ‘I’ that accompanies life and its representations is therefore of a substance that is pure, however all this does is affirm the doctrine of the Transcendental Subject’s individuation depending on a synthesis of the categories. The feeling of a soul is a precondition for the apperception of one’s own self and other selves, ‘for although the whole of the thought could be divided and distributed among many subjects, the subjective I cannot be divided or distributed, and this I we presuppose in all thinking’²⁴. The rational psychology that Kant is in dialogue with collapses simply, ‘the conclusion is that in no way whatsoever can we cognize anything about the constitution of our soul that in any way at all concerns the possibility of its separate existence’²⁵. Temporality is the more key factor in individuation, Heidegger is also not new here (his metaphysics of presence comes from the transcendental deduction), and this is how Deleuze too bridges Kant with the Eternal Return of Nietzsche, he writes:

‘Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.’²⁶

Fractured not in the phenomenal sense of the unity of lived experience, but fractured insofar as the subject must interiorise and be produced by difference, per the transcendental deduction, within the locale of thought and being, sensibility and understanding. What this shows is how there is something deeper going on within the topic of temporality, something that escapes the horizons of conceiving its absence within the dead end of critical philosophy or a fantastical afterlife. What Deleuze, through Holderlin, calls ‘the emptiness of pure time and … the continued diversion of the divine’²⁷. There has to be something in between, all or none. In a lot of language surrounding variously atheistic conceptions of life after death, there is a baleful shift back into a pious want for a soul that can outlast the tedious clamour of the body and actually experience the infinite calm of the void. In which case, critically speaking, there is no difference between positing a realm of afterlife populated by a hell or heaven—the specifics matter nought—or the bosom of presence’s absence commonly called ‘nothingness’.

On the other side of the same depicted Time, the concept of Eternism, when brought in contact with Critique, concerns the entirety of nature in a way that is analogous to Hegel in more ways than one. Insofar as the individuated subject is a particular, amongst a world, Eternism makes a statement about the totality of the world, ‘the Absolute’ as Hegel would call it. Now the later Hegel makes more and more distance, but Eternism means to the individuated being what the early Hegel’s Absolute means to all things within it: ‘the posited and its opposites disappear because it does not simply put them in context with other finite things, but connects them with the Absolute and so suspends them’²⁸. It is an underlying suspicion, that I do not have time to unpack here, that the issues Hegel found in Schelling’s static absolute, contrasted with his own one of movement, are symptomatic of a further antinomy that comprehension of the Absolute presents, how can it be everything yet still contain movement and development? Eternism provides a critical window into how this question may be approached, bringing Schelling and Hegel in confrontation with our patron-saint of pessimism. In Schopenhauer, it goes without saying, that such a comparison is symptomatic of an intellectual charlatanism that is nothing short of tumorous, bringing these two thinkers into any form of dialogue has not been favorable in academic discourse since Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Chapter 4: Totality – The insufficiency of Hegel and Schelling’s Absolute

Firstly, it is worth unpacking briefly how Hegel reaches the Absolute from Kant, through to Fichte and Schelling, in order to set the stage for my own conception of a totality and why it slightly differs. Hegel takes Kant’s philosophy to be convincing as a framework, but falls short of the dialectical and historical movement that constitutes it and has evolved it. He does not see a perpetual subjective theatre adrift in a ‘shoreless ocean’, but as a possibility to comprehend the entirety of the dialectical process, the world process, the Absolute with the aforementioned contained within it. He writes that ‘the defect of Kant’s philosophy consists in the falling asunder of the moments of the absolute form; or, regarded from the other side²⁹, our understanding, our knowledge, forms an antithesis to Being-in-itself: there is lacking the negative, the abrogation of the “ought”, which is not laid hold of’³⁰. In a similar way that his conception of freedom relies solely on an individual application of a practical maxim and not historically conditioned by the movement of Geist. ‘This shortcoming was removed by Fichte’³¹, he writes, Fichte’s ‘Absolute Ego’ is a realisation of Kantian critique immanentised to a Notion of Being, of ‘Pure Thought’, an abstraction that was as controversial as it was drastic (famously lambasted by Kant himself). The underpinnings between Fichte’s ‘I’ and Schopenhauer’s will are similar in this regard, as are they with regards to Schelling. Hegel praised Schelling for his work considering Thought as a determination of ‘Nature in itself’³² and to ‘have pointed out in Nature the forms of Spirit’³³, but falls short of bringing these two the point of completion found in Hegel’s own system post 1816:

His defect is that this Idea in general, its distinction into the ideal and the natural world, and also the totality of these determinations, are not shown forth and developed as necessitated in themselves by the Notion.³⁴

Insofar as these dichotomies are subsumed into the absolute, they are reduced of their determinate significance, the movement of Spirit as the self conception of the absolute, the concept of the concept as Hegel ends the Science of Logic. It is Hegel’s chief achievement to bring a systemic connection between this intimately Kantian discussion of the subject, fine tuning Schelling and Fichte’s philosophy of nature (a process that it would be not incorrect to suggest a heretical corollary between it and what I am doing here), and introducing the key importance of the historical. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, this dimension takes its early form in the ascribing of the ‘social space’ as the transition from ‘nature’ to spirit’. The indeterminate, reason-lacking realm of nature is replaced by the social structure i.e. spirit, a term defined by its ability to be self referential, to be able to supplant previously incorrect speculative notions in the churning of the dialectic to advance onwards, spirit itself being the Absolute’s conception of itself, 150 years before Alan Watts said that we are the universe experiencing itself. Hegel’s conception of the Absolute is obviously different from this perspective of Schopenhauer and Mainländer in many ways, but in certain aspects Schopenhauer’s dismissal of it as nonsensical verbiage is misguided, this I shall outline briefly before moving on to his metaphysics of Will.

In Hegel, the Absolute is dynamic, explicitly established against the self-defined backdrop of stillness substantiated by Schelling and Spinoza, however such a logical stillness is actually less present in these thinkers than it is in Hegel, especially Schelling. As Hegel infamously writes in the preface to the Phenomenology: ‘The truth is the bacchanalian revel where not a member is sober’³⁵, it is only defined via cognition, via Spirit, from within the process that it is wholly isomorphic to. A totality that is actively on a deathless course towards achieving a reunification, via religious, political and artistic speculation, but also is already complete from the viewpoint of eternity, dialectically torn between completion and activity, being and nothingness. Its completion is its activity, the essence of itself is the whole on the perpetual course toward completion, throughout all eternity—although Hegel only ever considered the Absolute as a result, locked into itself completely only at the final, final moment. In fact, such a usage of the term eternity on my part is distinctly Spinozist in essence (sub specie aeternitatis), and a venture that Hegel would term the ‘bad infinity’. This is a method of immanentisation that I will be returning to in the synthesis of Schopenhauer and Mainlander’s position. Hegelian philosophy is inescapable, even his most fervent modern detractors like Nick Land would agree. As Foucault writes when talking about his indebtedness to Jean Hyppolite, a notable Hegelian:

‘ … truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.’³⁶

His method, specifically with regards to the boundlessness of time and space, stands waiting for us at the end. In his later period, Fichte’s most lucid period of Absolute Intuition, he writes that ‘[there is] no distinction between time and eternity’³⁷, and this is precisely where Eternism begins.

Before embarking into the systems of the thinkers in this thesis, it is customary to first address what I am addressing when I use the term ‘individuation’. Individuation is a term that is characterised differently by each and every thinker that utilises it, especially in the thinkers this thesis seeks to discuss. What is at stake in the conceptual grounding of the individual is the separation of a part from the whole. For Kant, individuation is precisely the synthetic part of the transcendental subject that unifies the ‘rhapsody of perceptions’ into a coherent whole, the manifold that orders sensation into a world. It is its ownmost possibility of a metaphysical ground once the presuppositions of rationalism and skepticism have refined it. For Schopenhauer, individuation is conditioned by the ‘principle of individuation’ that extends to all that exists within the four pillars of his doctoral thesis. Peering introspectively into the core of our being and desires, we find a surging will to life, this will is the same that ‘through the green fuse drives the flower’³⁸, this will is singular and infinite. For the purposes of this thesis, individuation is the form of being that has evolved into homo sapiens, the specific tributary borne from evolution that houses the closed monad of the conscious human. Mainlander is the one who saw this clearest by making the world a collection of distinct individual wills, passing through teleological and cosmic stages, within which the meta-stable individual person is nothing but an accident.

Chapter 5: Individuation in Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of Will is of a beautifully haunted development from Kant’s critical apparatus. It is through him that a libidinal materialism³⁹ begins to emerge, where Kant’s rigorous moral optimism, teleological freedom and epistemological modesty is transformed into an ached ethics of compassion, strict determinism of drives/character and transcendental pessimism. Rather than Plato’s wonder, young Schopenhauer takes takes Schulze’s longing for the Eternal as his philosophical beginnings in his younger years⁴⁰, and his doctoral dissertation reflects such glacial yearning. The tension in Schopenhauer’s philosophy lies between critical metaphysics and the abhorrent suffering experienced by all living beings. In his doctoral dissertation he terms the tension between willing and cognising the ‘Weltknoten’, writing:

But now the identity of the subject of willing with the cognizing subject, by means of which (and, indeed, necessarily), the word 'I' includes and indicates both, is the knot of the world and therefore inexplicable.⁴¹

Willing we shall address second, but first, Schopenhauer’s principium individuationis. This is where we see Schopenhauer is of a much more intimately Kantian disposition than Hegel was with his grand sweeping historical odyssey or Schelling’s ‘Divine Comedy of Time’ as Wolfram Hogrebe called it⁴². Schopenhauer starts from the most immediate sensuous data in both branches of his investigation, and this explication shall follow the same structure he uses in his work. Firstly, the world as representation, my representation. In Kantian terms, he collapses the categories into the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereby PSR), space and time are witness to the exhumation of what Kant termed ‘Transcendental Realism’, a move also found in Mainländer, Bahnsen and Trendelenburg. With regards to space and time as isomorphic to the differentiation of matter, he writes that ‘for matter, its being is its acting, [...] only by acting can it fill space and time’⁴³, instead of causality being an a priori synthesis producing the categories as it is in the Transcendental Aesthetic, it is an a priori condition that is anterior to the faculties of judgement and understanding. This is where he breaks and theatrically begins his acidic conception of the self, individuation as a kind of dream, that there is no speculative interaction between subject and object, ‘we must concede to the poets that life is an extended dream’⁴⁴. Schopenhauer commits to cleaving reality into the two halves of ‘will’ and ‘representation’, however, this is merely a theoretical endeavour and a statement about how the epistemological structures of the self are conceived from within the unfolding of will as it itself hominises its objectification into human. In a more inwardly directed way as opposed to its Hegelian opposite, Schopenhauer also sees that Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself being completely and wholly unknowable as a reductive modesty that Kant's system was not able to surpass, ‘a riddle to which my own doctrine is the key’⁴⁵ as he says in his critique of Kant. Where this development is mostly making leaps and strides is in Schopenhauer’s concept of Will, which is his very own ‘thing-in-itself’. The mystical kernel of his system is accessed via his method of conceiving such a will, a distinctly Plotinian notion:

‘...we can never reach the essence of things from the outside: no matter how much we look, we find nothing but images and names. We are like someone who walks around a castle, looking in vain for an entrance and occasionally sketching the facade.’⁴⁶

There is something that steers this dream, something monstrously indifferent, that is causing me to type this just as much as it is causing you to read it. If there wasn’t we ‘would not understand the motives’ influence any more intimately than he would understand the connection between any other effect and its cause’⁴⁷, ‘the solution is will’⁴⁸ he says. The duality is collapsed because the action spurred by the will is both, ‘only given in two entirely different ways: in one case immediately and in the other case to the understanding in intuition’⁴⁹. This is true of every single act within will, there is no difference between will and action, in even the most basic of biological functioning: ‘teeth, throat and intestines are objectified hunger’⁵⁰, merely different gradients of complexity that, at the end of it, Schopenhauer erroneously sees man as the crowning achievement. This will is not only the abundant principle of all that lives, but all that exists, even gravity and plant growth are very low notes on the piano that is the ascending complexity within the Will’s self-objectification. Because it escapes the totalising grasp of the concept (concept itself coming from ‘concipir’ in Latin which means to snatch or to harvest), it cannot come under the constraints of the broadest of metaphysical categories, the one or the many. It is of a oneness that is beyond the oneness simply theorised within the bounds of matter refracted through time and place. He writes:

‘It is itself one, but not in the manner of an object, since an object's unity is known in contrast to a possible multiplicity: nor is it one in the way a concept is, since a concept arises only through abstraction from multiplicity: rather, it is one in the sense that it lies outside of time and space, outside the principium individuationis, i.e. the possibility of multiplicity.’⁵¹

The reason why Schopenhauer fixates on the world Will instead of Force or Drive is because of its distinctly intimate nature to us as beings that occupy a position in the world. It is not an unthinking and unfeeling social category, it is the very motor for thinking and feeling as a being. In terms of the totality of phenomena, from gravity to neurons, the notion of the will militates a more comprehensive method to link all things, it does not merely posit existents, but posits a hideous gnosis, that is to say that the mystical kernel of Schopenhauer’s thought is a remarkable way to conceive of the singularity of existence in all its pointless and extravagant churning.

Employing a deduction of the categories that make up Will paints a bleak picture for the subject, one that Schopenhauer is famous for never shying away from. As he summarises with particular exactitude: ‘the absence of all goals, of all boundaries, belongs to the essence of the will in itself, which is an endless striving’⁵², and later with more poetic sorrow: ‘We see striving everywhere inhibited in many ways, struggling everywhere; and thus always as suffering; there is no final goal of striving, and therefore no bounds or end to suffering’⁵³. For the subject’s cognition sparked by the will’s incessant action toward its own life, this necessarily implies friction for all who find themselves incarcerated by its manifestation as them. When will is defined as striving, it follows then that any satisfaction can only be replaced by bitter emptiness, by ennui, thus the body is torn between boredom and gnashing teeth. For our stand as humans, Schopenhauer sets out four principles in his supplementary volume to ‘the world as will’:

‘(1) that the will to life is the innermost essence of the human being; (2) that in itself the will to life is blind and devoid of cognition; (3) that cognition is a principle that was originally alien to the will to life and only added on later; (that cognition is in conflict with the will to life and our judgement applauds the victory of cognition over the will.’⁵⁴

This short little essay expresses a great deal of the way that Schopenhauer provides the scaffolding to build a thoroughly lucid understanding of how death relates to the individuated subject. In the subsequent pages after those four principles, he establishes that philosophy must find a way to advance between a vaguely dharmic conception of immortality and an abrahamic notion of the monad of individual life, extinguished completely in death. We return now to the idea that the self is a type of dream, an auto-production from the will that is itself nothing but that will, a shadow of a shadow. In the essay he discusses a frequent motif raised in popular discussions of the topic, namely: one has already experienced the infinite void of no-thing before one was born, the one awaiting you is no different. A reassurance beyond any balm. As a consequence of consciousness being a mere surface manifestation of the Will, we are constantly witness to what a world would be like without us. The forces that constitute us, that put a skeleton around the sand in our hearts, they can’t last forever no matter how much one feels they will, ‘the existence of organic beings in general is ephemeral’⁵⁵. This is greatly vindicated by modern science; studies of geological and cosmic deep time show that we are a briefly meta-stable crust of frenzied matter, burning up under the gaze of a trillion dead stars. However, Schopenhauer isolates two main conceptual vectors to define why the individual outlasts death, why it should not fear its inevitability: transindividual everlasting and a form of libidinal presentism⁵⁶.

Firstly, in the same essay discussed previously, Schopenhauer uses metaphors such as leaves on a tree throughout the seasons to illustrate how he sees the relationship between the individual and the genus, the nameless individuality that is the system of cognition as it manifest itself through the will of every individual to ever live. He writes:

‘Recognise your own being, the very thing that is so consumed with a thirst for existence, recognise it again in the inner, secret, driving force of the tree which, forever one and the same in all generations of leaves, is not affected by coming to be and passing away.’⁵⁷

This is precisely what Thomas Ligotti isolated, that ‘behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world’⁵⁸, the inescapability of the individual is but a blip in the penumbra of the entire human race’s catastrophe. Mainländer finds his biggest departure from Schopenhauer here, in no other part of his metaphysics is his monism more acutely present than here:

‘... that all plurality is only apparent, that in all the individuals of this world, however unending the number in which they present themselves after and alongside one another, only one and the same truly existing essence really manifests itself, present and identical in all of them’⁵⁹

It is through this notion that Schopenhauer’s philosophy reaches its practical and ethical dimension. One has compassion for their fellow being, for all beings that have done or will exist for that matter, because we are all manifestations of the same source. We are literally all the same person, refracted through the disturbing prism of facticity. Not only outward compassion for others, but inward compassion for oneself in the form of the condemnation of suicide. For the suicide, it is precisely because they will life so much and that they thrash so violently against their circumstances that, for Schopenhauer, that it is insufficient to abolish the will. Returning to the previous attitude towards the species, he writes that ‘the person who commits suicide negates only the individual, not the species’⁶⁰, the suffering they seek to escape burns them ever brighter in a self-annihilating supernovae. As Edgar Saltus says: ‘the suicide, to be effectual, must be that of the cosmos’⁶¹, an irrevocably twisted and protracted existence has slunked itself upon a calm nothingness, and the only way to remove its suffering is to remove it all in its entirety. ‘The will to life itself cannot be suppressed by anything except cognition’⁶², therefore it follows that Schopenhauer, in all his reverence for genius, sees the only way out from the misery of existence to be a route mapped by the intellect alone, in a wise and saintly manner reminiscent of ancient buddhists. Through ascetic starvation, the slow withdrawal of every part of your person that the will most strongly objectifies itself in, a suicide where the actor has ‘stopped willing altogether’⁶³, liberation from this nightmare is possible. Insofar as the person is a singular manifestation of the one will, for ‘those in whom [said] will has turned and negated itself, this world of ours which is so very real with all its suns and galaxies is — nothing’⁶⁴. Thus, for the subject it is indeed as if the entire cosmos has annihilated itself.

The second form of these epistemological shackles, as previously mentioned, is a form of presentism, ‘the present is the form of all life’⁶⁵. Not only is the individual a shadow on the wall of the cave, but we are perpetually locked in step with the evolutionary curse that is the sensuous experience of the present. A far deeper intimacy with the singularity of the will is thus presented, ‘the life of every animal species throughout the millennia of its existence is really to a certain degree akin to a single moment: for it is mere consciousness of the present without that of the past or the future or, therefore, of death’⁶⁶. This is not anything that is an advance upon the ideality of time as outlined by Kant, it is merely an unpacking of the Transcendental Aesthetic with vastly more dramatic prose. Everything, not in the sense of a quantitative exhaustion but in a qualitative totality vignetted by cognition, ‘is filled with [cognition] and there is no place where he does not exist, no being in which he does not live’⁶⁷. The αίών (aiôn), the simultaneous truth that ‘there would in fact be no difference whether I existed only throughout my own lifespan or throughout an infinite time’⁶⁸, is the core of Schopenhauer’s thought and what we will be bringing into confrontation with Mainländer. Insofar as Schopenhauer sees the will, which he makes no mistake deeming undecipherable, as continuing infinitely in time through a perpetual renewal of the lust for life, he falls short by making a qualitative judgement beyond the bounds of pure reason, an attempt to peer beyond the veil of māyā. This sensitivity to the ancient and the mystical is precisely Schopenhauer’s critical downfall, his undying allegiance to Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’ is what allows for his own form of reincarnation.

Chapter 6: Individuation in Mainländer

Before beginning with Mainlander, it is worth establishing the necessity of the order I have laid this out in. Schopenhauer makes no secret that his system is a purification of the great architecture established by Kant, Mainlander sees himself as the next step beyond. His work is entirely conceptually isomorphic in terms of the language and structure, but taken to a conclusion that is often seen as the bleakest system ever created. As Beiser writes: ‘he alone was willing to take pessimism to its ultimate conclusion: suicide’⁶⁹.

Mainländer is a methodological bridge between the established poles of Schopenhauer and Hegel. Similar to the beginnings of ‘pure being’ in the latter, Mainländer begins his treatise by establishing that ‘true philosophy must be truly immanent’⁷⁰, much later on he phrases this in a much more Kantian register:

‘... the sober-minded thinker turns with a light heart away from the “shoreless ocean” and devotes all his mental power to the divine act, to the book of nature, which lies open at all times before him.’⁷¹

This book of nature has been helpfully arranged by Mainlander with more detail than Schopenhauer’s four sections. His division proceeds in increasing complexity like so: Analytics, Physics, Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics and finally Metaphysics. Beginning with the Analytic, Mainlander proceeds in a primarily Kantian register. He outlines the structures of representation, the subject/object split, and in about 100 less pages than Schopenhauer already states that ‘the present of any Subject is therefore always a precise index of the point of motion of all things-in-themselves’⁷². In the latter part of the Analytic he sets up the cosmological narrative that is the hallmark of his system, his own interpretation of the death of god. Beginning by inquiring about the Aristotelian quest back through antecedent causes to come to a unity, as all we find within the immanent domain of the world is a multiplicity of wills. ‘In the immanent domain, in this world, we can never get beyond multiplicity’⁷³, it then follows that reason must as a regulative system point toward when the motion of all individual wills began. It is reached via a form of apophasis, whereby the definition of what came before the universe is defined against the properties we see within it, that of plurality, finitude and movement. He sets it out clearly as thus:

‘1) that all developmental chains have a beginning (which, incidentally, already follows with logical necessity from the concept of development);

2) that there cannot therefore be any infinite causal chains A PARTE ANTE:

3) that all forces have arisen; for whatever they were in the transcendent domain, in the simple unity, eludes our cognition entirely. We can say only this: That they had mere existence. We can further say, apodictically, that they were not, in the simple unity, force; for force is the essence, the ESSENTIA, of a thing-in-itself in the immanent domain. However, what the simple unity, in which everything now existing was once contained, essentially was—that, as we have clearly seen, is for all time shrouded from our minds by an impenetrable veil.’⁷⁴

One is immediately struck here by the similarities between this and contemporary theories within cosmology. What Mainländer is describing here is, in many respects, the big bang. The singularity that gave birth to our universe 13.8 billion years ago, before which we cannot cognise a single thing, as it escapes the laws of the universe. Unlike Schopenhauer, Mainländer fervently asserts the finitude of the universe, ‘a totality of finite spheres of force’⁷⁵, that is on a constant course towards annihilation. Like Schopenhauer though, Mainländer utilises the concept ‘will-to-life’, however he palliates it in a much more Nietzschean fashion into the entropic ‘will-to-death’. Such a will encompasses all things, much like his predecessor, and even in chemical motions he writes that ‘already [there] the truth that life is a struggle becomes obvious’⁷⁶. The broad strokes of Schopenhauer's diagnosis are taken and repurposed for a more all-encompassing will, within which ‘there is in fact no difference between the organic and the inorganic’⁷⁷.

It is also within the Physics chapter where his infamous proclamation is made: ‘God has died and His death was the life of the world’⁷⁸, all of the properties of the pre-worldly unity perfectly match that of God, an infinitely restful and transcendent potency, which our world shows nothing more than his decaying lack. That first primordial motion, the disintegration into multiplicity ‘presents itself as the carrying out of the logical deed, of the resolution not to be, or in other words: the world is the means to the end of non-being, and specifically the world is the sole means possible to that end’⁷⁹. In the infinitely incomprehensible realm of the before, a Kabbalistic deicide gave birth to our suns, our galaxies. It should come as no shock that Mainlander also laments life as a kiln of woe, and that such a realisation is inevitable for the human race as a whole, writing that: ‘the recognition that life is worthless is the blossom of all wisdom’⁸⁰. In a manner that is far closer to the works of Hegel or Hartmann, Mainländer presents a comprehensive evaluation of how foundational metaphysical beliefs evolve throughout time and place. Right even in the Foreword he states that atheism is the logical end to the progression from polytheism, monotheism and then pantheism (further split into religious then philosophical pantheism), and later in the book he uses many historical examples. The polytheism of the Greeks and Hindus, supplanted by neoplatonism, then christianity and judaism, followed by the pantheism of the Scholastics, the well known German Idealists, through to the atheism of Spinoza, Kant and Schopenhauer⁸¹. What his goal is through all this is the achievement of the ‘ideal state’, the closest thing to a socialist utopia on earth, whereby people can devote themselves to broadening their leisure and intellect. However, what they will find at this point is exactly what Schopenhauer saw the individual finding after a satiated desire: ennui. In such an ideal state, only one goal remains: to die. Walking hand in hand into extinction, ‘humanity will make the “great sacrifice” [...] it will die’⁸²; ‘it is humanity’s inexorable, unalterable fate, and happy shall be humanity when it sinks into the arms of Death’⁸³.

The difference between Mainländer and Schopenhauer that I will fixate on in terms of individuation is becoming apparent. Whereas the latter’s individual was nothing but the shadow of an eternal will immanent to the world, the former’s individual is a singular unit of will that is alone alongside its other finite counterparts. Sent into absolute annihilation by the suicidal God it was once a part of, there is no redemption possible in any ascetic renunciation, only in death. The faintest trace of freedom for withdrawal and resignation in Schopenhauer is completely removed in favour of strict necessity, in this respect his philosopher is infinitely closer to the later Nietzsche⁸⁴. Kant’s third antinomy of pure reason is split between the transcendent domain of God and the immanent domain of his corpse. ‘Finally, freedom is now united with necessity’⁸⁵, the world as we know it is the result of God’s free act to annihilate himself, the blooming result of which however is strictly fatalistic. It is perhaps the only philosophy to confront determinism head on, and provide a metaphysical basis for it. This is also why, despite erroneous representations around the internet, he does not completely condone suicide. In a deterministic system, pessimism cannot become prescriptive, precisely because such a prescription is dependent only on whether fate decrees it so. He writes that the immanent philosophy ‘does not demand suicide; but, serving truth alone, it had to destroy terrible coercive countermotives’⁸⁶. This is because, instead of a new illusory life or torment as it is in Schopenhauer, for Mainländer: ‘beyond the world is no place of peace nor one of torment, but only nothingness’⁸⁷. Writing against the sort of position Schopenhauer espouses explicitly, he says: ‘we must declare that the denial of the will to life does not stand in opposition to its affirmation’⁸⁸. There is nothing but this will to death in the universe, concrete and real wills that find no renewal in Styx, that are remnants of the pre-worldly thing-in-itself that continue its primordial motion into the bosom of nothingness.

So to outline the key points of difference between Schopenhauer and Mainländer, individuation in the former consists of an accidental spark in the will to life that has objectified itself into the cognising subject. Said cognition is illusory insofar as it exists only as an abyssal comma at the dead end of the will to life. Since temporality for this subject is in some respects Heideggerian, it only exists as a form of the sensuous present within the abstract concepts thought only by that subject, a mere manifestation of an aimless, eternal and ceaseless will. Swallowing the tears before they showed, Schopenhauer had to provide a compassionate account as to why death was not the end. In the latter, individuation is something that occurred at the dawn of all things, in a divine self-dereliction, and it is precisely this and only this that in virtue of which there are individual wills at all. No Azathothean presence lurking behind the world and puppeteering it in lock step, but one that died and is the individual moments of its own decomposition. Schopenhauer’s will is infinite, finitude is defined against it only as a form of the Idea that the will objectifies itself as, creatures bound by desire and tensed time. What we see is that Mainländer’s cosmology of finitude establishes itself as more theoretically viable when seen under the aspect of current science. Whilst it is clear that the universe extends beyond the 90 billion light year bubble we are able to see, cosmic inflation still holds that the universe had to have begun from a single point, and must end in a state that is singularly and universally the same: thermodynamic equilibrium. Thermodynamics is another point of departure that Mainländer takes wholly in his stride, when he says that ‘everything in the world is will to death’⁸⁹, he is hinting at a more intimate relation with becoming, a becoming that is scaled by the qualitas of the dissipation of heat, of energy. However it is of course key that his conception of our teloi, as Ulrich Horstmann suggests, comes down to a mythopoetic sensitivity and not a knowledge of stochastic physics. Similarly to Freud’s death drive, so commonly misunderstood, what he describes is a hydraulic tendency, a motor of pulsion that is the substance of each individual will.

When combining the two of them, we must select the features with accuracy. With regards to the Will, the concrete multiplicity that is required to be compatible with a notion of universal finitude must be synthesised between the two. Mainländer and Schopenhauer both describe a teleological progression that they failed to see were two sides of the same coin. Insofar as Schopenhauer decrees the will as aimless, he is correct, but insofar as Mainländer decrees the will as propelled towards a single aim by the virtue of its very nature, he is also correct. The actual intensive quality of heat is itself aimless, the grand voyage of all things has one aim and that is nothing, no-thing, as Baudelaire saw. This is not to be confused with what Schopenhauer saw as an absence of a direction, this is precisely a direction that is aimless because its aim extends beyond the bounds of what can be experienced. Just as what preceded the beginning of the universe will never be fathomed by a human mind, the same is the case for what lies after its end. There is simply this same and singular remorseless course of events, from the One to its intensification in the death throes of (=0).

Next there is their combination with regards to the temporality experienced by the individual, the microcosm to the previous macrocosm. We have conceded a universal fatality to all that be, there is no acting, only being acted. Thus, the relationship between a ceaseless renewal of the ‘I’ to the universe it finds itself within is greatly affected by said universe being finite in space and time, like Karl Jasper’s Augenblick. In Schopenhauer, as unravelled before, the innermost kernel of sense—coagulated into an ego—is the noumenal will objectifying itself as a phenomenal subject. A subject that it would not be erroneous to say that there is no difference between one or a trillion instantiations of. However, in the cosmology of Schopenhauer, this finds endless renewal as this is a property of reality itself, an endlessly spinning circle that is constantly striving for its own life. Remove the eternal vacillations of the ‘I’ and what remains? Simply the finite amount of conscious entities that will be produced, the suffocating and linear ipseity that was ordained to unfold in the exact way it has at the beginning of the cosmos. Now. If there is no self to be renewed in a finite universe, then is the ‘deepest yearning for absolute annihilation [...] piercing all the heavenly spheres’⁹⁰ a longing that can ever be realised? Mainländer believes that through the calm thrum of nothingness it can, but in making such an assertion he betrays the Kantian epistemology that, up until now, he was such a vanguard of. The individual wills that shattered at the beginning of creation are thing-in-itself, and so when they die they do indeed meet ‘nihil negativum’, but by its very nature such a construct could never be ‘experienced’. The very notion of nothingness suggests that to experience it is aporetic, it is for this reason that when discussing dreams of such a crystalline absence, Schopenhauer writes ‘I believe we are dreaming them even now’⁹¹. This is not a sentimental longing, but a metaphysical tautology that is nothing but the burn of the auxiliary verb. There is only this, in its most intimate and exact definition, and when we die we won’t be granted rest, not a new day, nor anything that discourse can announce. The black-box of the universe is all that has been imprisoned by ‘isness’ and it is it just, like the orb found in Borges’s ‘Aleph’, all things are locked in spacetime of Parmenidean autarchy. Kant himself came close to this in his later notes before his passing⁹².

The manifold of the All is synthesised by the positing of the critical subject, itself nothing but eternity melted into the shadow of a biological lifetime, all biological lifetimes. The conception of infinity found by Hegel in the Science of Logic is precisely how such a notion of finitude can be articulated, where ‘infinity’ understood as an indefinite succession is replaced with ‘being-for-itself’: ‘it is not in the sublation of the finite in general that infinity in general comes to be, but the finite is rather just this, that through its nature it comes to be itself the infinite’⁹³. Because one term, the pair being paltry pre-enlightenment assertions, contradicts the other perpetually, the dialectical synthesis becomes such that ‘finitude is eternal’⁹⁴. He writes, with the same circular metaphor that entranced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, ‘as true infinite, bent back upon itself, its image becomes the circle, the line that has reached itself, closed and wholly present, without beginning and end’⁹⁵. Closed and wholly present; within such a circle individuation is a singular arc, and seen from outside each moment submerged in the distress of now is equal to any other. This can only be grasped in the same way Deleuze sees the late Plato: ‘like a flash of lightning in the night’⁹⁶, and as we shall see from further inclusions of temporary science, this cornered little block of sensation is all we will ever have. We can never be ‘completely lapsed and gone / and healed from all this ache of being’⁹⁷.

Conclusion — Solid Nothingness

In one of his notebooks, Giacomo Leopardi once wrote:

I was frightened to find myself in the midst of nothingness, a nothing myself. I felt as if I were suffocating, thinking and feeling that all is nothing, solid nothing.⁹⁸

The phrase ‘solid nothing’ perfectly encapsulates the position Eternism puts us in. The aporias of experiencing a time passing when experience is nothing but a passive wound is completely paradoxical. There is solidity in the concrete wills progressing towards oblivion, but they are nothing precisely because this is all they will ever be. For a lucid philosophy in the modern era, critical discourse is required to stray further into metaphysical propositions that often are fatalistic and counter-intuitive to a human in a traditional world post enlightenment. This is precisely why Mainländer and Schopenhauer are so useful in this endeavour. What we have seen throughout this analysis is that Eternism is a complete and thorough fatalism, individuation is a byproduct of a cosmological expansion, the end of which does not exist. The four-dimensional picture of Kantian epistemology laments the transcendental deduction as a condition for what Schopenhauer saw as the dream that is identity, experience is for us what sight is to a stone, chimaerical and completely determined by necessity. Death is nothing for the subject whose imposition is an epistemological eternity within its particular refraction through the universe, not because he will find renewal in death as in Schopenhauer, but a sensuous present that can only be an infinitely deferring loop into one’s own life, again and never.

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1. Young, Marguerite, Miss Macintosh, My Darling (Signet Books: New York, 1967) pp. 559

2. Weyl, Hermann, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, tr. Olaf Helmer (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1949) pp. 116

3. McTaggart, J.M.E., ‘The Unreality of Time’ in The Philosophy of Time, ed. Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993) pp. 23

4. Ibid, pp. 34

5. Sider. Theodore, Four-Dimensionalism, An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001) pp. 11

6. Ibid, pp. 87

7. Ibid, pp. 217

8. Prosser, Simon, Experiencing Time (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2016) pp. x

9. He then quotes several thinkers in a row to show how this has been the case, Ibid, pp. 22

10. Ibid, pp. 27

11. Ibid, pp. 49

12. Ibid, pp. 175

13. Ibid, pp. 195

14. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tr. Walter Kaufmann (Random House Inc.: New York, 1966) pp. 52

15. Schelling, F.W.J., Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, tr. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1995) pp. 18

16. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1995) pp. 66

17. De Casseres, Benjamin, ‘I Dance With Nietzsche’ in The Works of Benjamin DeCasseres Vol. II (Underworld Amusements) 10:528

18. De Casseres, Benjamin, Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man & Against the Rabbis (Underworld Amusements) pp. 46

19. Ibid, pp. 125

20. Land, Nick, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge: London, 1991) pp. 111

21. ‘The fear of death that is natural to all human beings, even the unhappiest or the wisest, is therefore not a horror of dying but, as Montaigne rightly says, horror at the thought of having died (that is, of being dead), which the candidate for death thinks he will still have after his death, since he thinks of his corpse, which is no longer himself, as still being himself in a dark grave or somewhere else. — This illusion cannot be pushed aside, for it lies in the nature of thought as a way of speaking to and of oneself. The thought I am not simply cannot exist; because if I am not then I cannot be conscious that I am not. I can indeed say: "I am not healthy," and think such predicates of myself negatively (as is the case with all verba); but to negate the subject itself when speaking in the first person, so that the subject destroys itself, is a contradiction.’ — Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006) pp. 60

22. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007) pp. 289

23. Kafka, Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923, tr. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg (Schocken Books: New York, 1976) pp. 243

24. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Paul Guyer, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998) A354/B406, pp. 419

25. Ibid

26. Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994) pp. 86

27. Ibid, pp. 87

28. Hegel, G.W.F., The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, tr. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (SUNY Press: Albany, 1977) pp. 113

29. This curious expression, ‘from the other side’, is something I firmly believe invites more critical investigation. However, it is of key importance to not lapse into a form of theosophical speculation that is analogous to the very form of philosophy Hegel lambasted at the beginning of his career when he blocked the road to Schellingian inquiry by terming it ‘the night in which all cows are black’.

30. Hegel, G.W.F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III, tr. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (University of Nebraska Press: Nebraska, 1995) pp. 478

31. Ibid, pp. 481

32. Ibid, pp. 541

33. Ibid

34. Ibid

35. Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, tr, Terry Pinkard (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2018) pp. 29

36. Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books: New York, 1972) pp. 235

37. Fichte, J.G., Lectures on the Theory of Ethics (1812), tr. Benjamin D. Crowe (SUNY Press: Albany, 2015) pp. 85

38. This poem is a stunning illustration of how the ‘will-to-life’ in Schopenhauer shows itself in all things — Thomas, Dylan, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions: New York, 1957) pp. 10

39. ‘No one could ever 'be' a libidinal materialist. This is a 'doctrine' that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body's adaptive regimes, and consuming its reserves in rhythmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating.

Schopenhauer already knew that thought is medically disastrous, Nietzsche demonstrated it. An aged philosopher is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan. How long does it take to be wasted by a fire-storm? By an artificial sun upon the earth? It is only when the blaze in Nietzsche's brain-stem fused with the one in the sky above a piazza in Turin that libidinal materialism touched upon its realization.’ — Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pp. xxi

40. ‘Schopenhauer could certainly sense his own heart-breaking yearning (Sehnsucht) for eternity, that is, his rejection of "transitory life" and his longing for a "knowledge of the eternal truth", which alone can save man from the "horror" of the hazards of life. In other words, it is possible that Schopenhauer, hearing and transcribing Schulze's lecture, identified his own passionate yearning for the Eternal with the particular "predisposition" of the human spirit that, according to Schulze, originates philosophy.’ — Novembre, Alessandro, Young Schopenhauer: The Origin of the Metaphysics of Will and its Aporias, tr. Sarah De Sanctis (De Gruyter: Berlin, 2023) pp. 36

41. Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings, tr. David E. Cartwright, Edward E. Erdmann and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2012) pp. 136

42. Hogrebe, Wolfram, Predication and Genesis: Metaphysics as Fundamental Heuristic after Schelling’s ‘The Ages of the World’, tr. Iain Hamilton Grant and Jason M. Wirth (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2024)

43. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, tr. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010) pp. 29

44. Ibid, pp. 40

45. Ibid, pp. 531

46. Ibid, pp. 123

47. Ibid, pp. 124

48. Ibid

49. Ibid, pp. 125

50. Ibid, pp. 133

51. Ibid, pp. 138

52. Ibid, pp. 188

53. Ibid, pp. 336

54. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation: Vol. II, tr. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2018) pp. 483

55. Ibid, pp. 491

56. Here Schopenhauer advances (only on the side of representation) what McTaggart would refer to as the A-Theory of time, where nothing exists but the present, this is in a contrasting waltz with the B-theory, what we will be exploring later on.

57. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume II, pp. 494

58. Ligotti, Thomas, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press: New York, 2010) pp. 54

59. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, tr. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2009) pp. 251

60. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume I, pp. 426

61. Saltus, Edgar, The Philosophy of Disenchantment & The Anatomy of Negation (Underworld Amusements, 2014) pp. 172

62. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume I, pp. 427

63. Ibid, pp. 428

64. Ibid, pp. 439

65. Ibid, pp. 306

66. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume II, pp. 587

67. Ibid, pp. 518

68. Ibid

69. Beiser, Frederick C., Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2016) pp. 201

70. Mainländer, Philipp, The Philosophy of Redemption, tr. Christian Romuss (Irukandji Press: Brisbane, 2024) pp. 9

71. Ibid, pp. 275

72. Ibid, pp. 19

73. Ibid, pp. 29

74. Ibid, pp. 31

75. Ibid, pp. 35

76. Ibid, pp. 72

77. Ibid, pp. 88

78. Ibid, pp. 95

79. Ibid, pp. 273

80. Ibid, pp. 203

81. Ibid, pp. 195-266

82. Ibid, pp. 263

83. Ibid, pp. 288

84. Specifically in ‘Twilight of the Idols’ where he writes: ‘The fatality of human existence cannot be extricated from the fatality of everything that was and will be. People are not the products of some special design, will, or purpose, they do not represent an attempt to achieve an 'ideal of humanity', 'ideal of happiness', or ideal of morality' , - it is absurd to want to devolve human existence onto some

purpose or another. We have invented the concept of "purpose': there are no purposes in reality ... A person is necessary, a person is a piece of fate, a person belongs to the whole, a person only is in the context of the whole, — there is nothing that can judge, measure, compare, or condemn our being, because that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, and condemning the whole ... But there is nothing outside the whole!’ in: Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, tr. Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005) pp. 182

85. Mainländer, The Philosophy of Redemption, pp. 298

86. Ibid, pp. 293

87. Ibid, pp. 294

88. Ibid, pp. 298

89. Ibid, pp. 281

90. Ibid, pp. 282

91. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume II, pp. 486

92. ‘There is only one space, one time, and one matter, in which all motion is to be found. The real and objective principle of experience which, in its form, amounts to a unified whole, leaves no space (inside or outside itself) unfilled. It contains all moving forces. This composite is not locomotive; nor is it a body. The beginning of its motion is its own eternity.’ – Kant, Immanuel, Opus Postumum, tr. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993) pp. 72 / 21:224

93. Hegel, G.W.F., The Science of Logic, tr. George di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010) pp. 110

94. Ibid, pp. 102

95. Ibid, pp. 119

96. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 128

97. Lawrence, D.H., The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Penguin Books: New York, 1977) pp. 724

98. Leopardi, Giacomo, Zibaldone, tr. Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixo, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, Martin Thom and Pamela Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2015) pp. 82