Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900
Frederick C. BeiserSözler ve Alıntılar
In the beginning, there was indeed a primal unity, a single universal substance, which was an undifferentiated, indivisible oneness. However, that unity no longer exists; its existence lies entirely in the past. The original unity of the world, the single universal substance, gradually split into a multiplicity of individual things; there is enough of its unity left for their interconnection, but not so much that they cannot be independent. The process of the world is therefore from unity to difference, from one to many, where that original oneness gradually and continually differentiates itself, splitting into many fragments, which are more independent units (94, 107). The individual is then partly free or independent, according to how much the original unity has dissolved, and partly interconnected and dependent, according to how much unity still remains. Freedom and necessity are partial truths, because the individual acts upon the world and changes it, just as the world acts upon the individual and changes it.
It is in this context that Mainlander introduces his dramatic concept of the death of God (108). This primal unity, this single universal substance, has all the attributes of God: it is transcendent, infinite and omnipotent. But since it no longer exists, this God is dead. Yet its death was not in vain. From it came the existence of the world. And so Mainlander declares in prophetic vein: “God is dead and his death was the life of the world” (108).
P. Mainländer, metaphysics, death of GodKitabı okudu
Because many Nietzsche scholars are ignorant of his context, they tend to ascribe an exaggerated originality to him. The ideas of nihilism, the death of God, ressentiment, for example, were not coined by Nietzsche.
A critical idealism is for Mainlander one that recognizes the subjective sources of our representations of space and time, and that refuses to ascribe mathematical space and time to things-in-themselves. A transcendental idealism is one that includes an empirical realism, though an empirical realism in a full-bodied sense, i.e. it assumes that experience gives us some knowledge of things that exist independent of our representations of them, namely, knowledge of
their extension and movement. Such idealism is “transcendental” in the sense that it gives us knowledge of the objective properties of a thing, i.e. properties that transcend our own consciousness of the thing, that exist in the thing itself, apart from and prior to awareness of it (12,21)
It is another great advantage of pantheism, Hartmann contends, that it can provide a foundation for ethics. Ethics, he insists, cannot be separated from metaphysics. An ethics without metaphysics simply “hangs in mid air” (84). Moral principles require that we surrender the claims of egoism, that an individual cease to put self-interest first, and that he or she recognize the equal claims of others. Pantheism satisfies this requirement, Hartmann argues, because it is a form of monism, according to which the identity of each individual is connected with that of everyone else, and according to which all particular individuals are really only one self (84, 116-17). One individual cannot harm another, then, without also harming his deeper and better self.
Schopenhauer argues that someone who commits suicide has not really triumphed over the will to life but only fallen victim to it. The suicide affirms the value of life, but protests against the circumstances in which he finds himself; just because he cannot achieve happiness in his present circumstances, he kills himself. With his death, not the will itself, but only one manifestation of it, that which appears under his tragic circumstances, is destroyed.
In stressing that only the individual will exists, Mainlander is disputing the existence of this cosmic will and the hope for immortality based upon it. Having banished the cosmic will, Mainlander is then in a position to maintain that death will really bring redemption. With the destruction of the individual will, there will be only nothingness.
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.