asdjkl
@efilist
85 okur puanı
Kasım 2019 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
Another central pillar of Mainlander’s philosophy of redemption is its nominalism, i.e. its belief that only particular or determinate things exist. The pillars of immanence and nominalism support one another. Everything in our experience, everything that we sense, feel or intuit, is particular; references to abstract entities—species, ideas, universal or archetypes—are transcendent because we cannot have any experience of them.
Reklam
Mainlander’s pessimism divides him utterly from the neo-Hegelians. He finds their optimism naive. For him the chief sources of suffering lie in existence itself; even in the best state, and even with the greatest progress of the sciences, the main forms of suffering will remain. There will always be the traumas and troubles of birth, sickness, age and death (206-7).
The true mystic learns that salvation comes not with belief in a supernatural realm that satisfies our desires but in the complete renunciation and eventual extinction of desire; only then do the troubles and torments of life cease to matter to him.
It is in this context that we should understand Mainlander’s paradoxical doctrine of the death wish. The inner striving of the will is for death because it is only in death that we find true happiness, which is the highest good for every human being. Such happiness resides in complete tranquillity and peace, which comes only with death, the utter nothingness of annihilation. If Mainlander describes life as a means toward death that is because death promises what life really wants: tranquillity and peace.
Mainlander saw the purpose of his philosophy as the formulation of a modern doctrine of redemption, a doctrine that should be completely consistent with the naturalistic worldview of modern science. His philosophy, he was proud to say, would be “the first attempt to ground the essential truths of salvation on the basis of nature alone” (223). The only doctrine of redemption consistent with a modern scientific view of the world, Mainlander maintained, is that which preaches utter nothingness, the complete annihilation of death.
The heart and soul of Mainlander’s philosophy lies in its gospel of redemption. That gospel is very simple, and it can be summarized in two propositions: (1) that redemption or deliverance comes only with death; and (2) that death consists in nothingness, complete annihilation. All of Mainlander’s philosophy is devoted to the explanation and defence of this gospel.
Reklam