The Philosophy of Redemption

Philipp Mainländer set down in his Philosophy of Redemption an ambitious philosophical vision. He claimed not only to confirm the teachings of Buddhism and Christianity but also to reconcile religion with science and put atheism on a scientific foundation. All this he integrates with a cosmology that reads the universe as the emanation of a primordial event, which he construes as God’s self-destruction. The universe is therefore the disintegrating relic of a divinity, a discordant unity of individual beings, egoistic manifestations of a will to death all striving for absolute annihilation. Mainländer’s bleak but rapturous prognosis is here published in English for the first time.