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The will to live is most apparent in the sex drive; and in acting on that drive, we perpetuate suffering by creating another human being. Only through chastity, then, do we break the cycle of desire and end the suffering of mankind. But Mainlander’s emphasis on chastity is sometimes extreme; he went beyond the demand for chastity and called for nothing less than virginity, which was for him the only certain sign of self-denial (219). There is, of course, a great difference between chastity and virginity: a chaste person has learned to control his or her sex drives, though he or she has perhaps indulged in them; a virgin, however, has never acted on his or her sex drives. Mainlander insists on nothing less than virginity because—in a world of uncertain birth control—this alone ensures that life does not perpetuate itself. The demand for virginity caught the notice of Nietzsche, who dismissed Mainlander as the “sentimental apostle of virginity”.
Reklam
If moral actions have to be selfless, Mainlander argues, then there are no moral actions, because all actions, even the most holy or saintly, derive from self-interest.
But in Mainlander’s version we are all saved in the end, goats and sheep alike, simply because we all die. All of humanity is saved in this generous eschatology, not despite death but because of it.
Mainlander sees this process of cosmic death taking place all throughout nature, in both the organic and inorganic realms, and he goes into great detail about how it takes place everywhere in the universe. The gases, liquids and solids of the inorganic realm all reveal an urge toward death. A gas has the drive to dissipate itself in all directions, i.e. to annihilate itself (327). Liquids have the striving for an ideal point outside themselves, where, should they ever reach it, they destroy themselves (327-8). Solids, or fixed bodies, have a longing toward the centre of the earth, where they too, if they ever reach it, will eliminate themselves (328). The plants and animals of the organic realm also show a drive toward nothingness; they have a will to life, to be sure, but it coexists with a will to death, which gradually and inevitably triumphs over the will to life (3313). Although Mainlander has in general little sympathy for the teleological conception of nature, it is remarkable that he still attributes a strange kind of purposiveness to everything in nature: namely, the striving toward self-destruction and death.
In his earlier chapters of his book, in the discussion of physics, ethics and politics, Mainlander wrote about the individual will to life as the very essence of everything, not only of every human being, but also of every thing that exists, whether inorganic or organic. Now in metaphysics, however, we see that this was only a limited perspective, because the striving for existence or life is really only a means for a deeper goal: death (331,333,334). We live only so that we die, because the deepest longing within all of us is for peace and tranquillity, which is granted to us only in death. In this longing of all things for death, we are only participating, unbeknownst to ourselves, in the deeper and broader cosmic process of the divine death (355). We long to die, and we are indeed dying, because God wanted to die and he is still dying within us.
Reklam