Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By: Spencer Diver

I don’t have patience for pessimists. By this, I don’t refer to the regular cynical Cassandra you may meet in daily life. Instead, I refer to the German-born philosophical adherents who profess that the value of life is ultimately negative. I don’t believe that all pessimist thought is worthless, and I admit that reading one of Emil Cioran’s aphorisms occasionally provokes a laugh in me. Nevertheless, pessimism is a loser ideology. Not only that, but the people who love it heavily skew toward teeth-pullingly repellent, both in personality and personal hygiene. Say what you will about Nietzsche, but at least he understood that there’s nothing worse than a self-pitying German. Occasionally, I find myself reading over different pessimist writings shared on forums by angsty “doomerpilled” 14-year-olds, and usually they all tend towards the basic trends (anti-natalism, nihilism, and some variant of reactionary impulses). However, there is one tenacious thinker that has managed to stay in mind to the point of attaining squatter’s rights, and I believe that at this point, the only way to evict this unique and bafflingly strange man is to write something about him.

Philipp Mainländer, born in Offenbach am Main from which he got his pen name, is not a well-known philosopher. Not much is published on him in English, save for a few chapters in books on German pessimism, the occasional throwaway mention in biographies of his contemporaries, YouTube essays on esoteric writings, and a few unofficial Internet Archive translations that are floating around on forum threads. If he is known for something, it’s for perhaps his most perverse act of philosophical praxis: “On the night of 1 April 1876, the young Phillip [Mainländer], only 34 years old, standing on stacked copies of his just published philosophical work, hanged himself” (Beiser).

Mainländer not only viewed life as having a fundamentally negative value, his metaphysics dictate a grand narrative of death: all creatures in this universe, all social orders, all civilizations, whether they know it or not, are ultimately awaiting their tranquil drop into non-existence: “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.” Alongside this metaphysics is a mythology of creation, in which God, horrified by His existence, but unable to prevent this unwelcome event from immediately ceasing, broke Himself off into a materially decaying world, disrupting His cosmic unity, so that He might eventually decay into nothingness, thus giving us our cosmic striving for annihilation: “We long to die, and we are indeed dying, because God wanted to die and he is still dying with us.” In this regard, Mainländer preempted the notion of the “death of god” over 5 years before the publication of Nietzsche’s The Joyous Science, despite the radically different interpretations of this idea between their two works. Nietzsche, in the previously mentioned book, made his feelings clear on Mainländer in a passage on him and his pessimist peers, calling him “that mawkish apostle of virginity” (250). This is probably a reference to his advocacy for chastity in order to prevent any more beings from coming into existence, though it could also refer to his more-than-slightly Oedipal pledge of virginity to his mother after her passing (it’s probably best if we don’t go into it).

It’s this notion of the rotting carcass of God that stays with me. There is a feeling that resonates in Mainländer’s image, something that feels a little too fitting for a world that has cast out its grand narratives of society and existence and was left with the belief that individuality is the only value to strive for—that personal narrative, personal truth, is more important than a collective one. It’s difficult to shake the notion that we are acting out our political discourses while standing on the corpse of a dead utopia—the naïve idealism of Occupy, the youthful counterculture of the sixties, the militant organisation of the 1910s. I’ll save you the Mark Fisher citations and lamentations over the postmodern age, mostly because it’s become a platitude for the most boring people you’ll ever meet at a party to explain why they have enough self-awareness to understand the existential threats to a better future, but next to no motivation to actually do anything about it. But I also think that these remarks fail to adequately understand our current condition and the potential that lies within it on their own. There is something that attempts to articulate itself in our current structure of feeling, something that reaches through and beyond the linear liberal inch-forward progression of modernity, the categorically confused do-nothing nihilism of postmodernity, and into something that recognizes the need for meaning, the need for narrative, and the need for community. Something that can stand on the rotting corpse of God and start planting flowers for Him to fertilise.

“Watching the hot sunlight falling on the tablecloth covered with sticky blotches and crumbs, Andrei was suddenly struck by the thought of what a genuine tragedy it was for millions of light rays to set out on their journey from the surface of the sun, go hurtling through the infinite void of space and pierce the miles-thick sky of Earth, only to be extinguished in the revolting remains of yesterday’s soup” (Pelevin 8).

The Yellow Arrow moves ever forward. No passengers of the train remember when they boarded it, nor do they remember why. They simply know that they are headed toward a ruined bridge. Victor Pelevin’s novella is clearly an allegory for life in post-Soviet Russia, a nation left in tatters after the agonisingly slow and then frightfully quick death of the dream of a dictatorship of the proletariat, replaced with economic shock therapy and the rise of right populism in the attempt to shore up any meaning left. Meaning is lost in this world as well. The passengers, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic much like the former USSR, are awaiting their deaths, seemingly uninterested in getting off. They live, do commerce, and die on the train, with the corpses dumped out of the moving train and left to rot in the snowy landscape beyond The Yellow Arrow. Andrei, the protagonist of the novel, doesn’t even notice the sound of the train’s wheels rumbling until his friend and philosophical interlocutor, Khan, mentions it to him, encouraging him to acknowledge himself as a passenger: “‘A normal passenger never thinks of himself as a passenger,’ said Khan ‘So if you know you’re a passenger, you no longer are one. They could never imagine that it’s possible to get off this train. Nothing else exists for them, apart from this train’” (18). This realisation is what causes a shift in Andrei, making him desperate to leave the train. Such a thought seems impossible for him to have, and yet he thinks it anyway.

It seems clear that this is a metaphor for a desire to escape Russia; however, it also implies another reading, one that shows the passenger complacency in the face of extinction to be an ideological tool, one shaped to prevent them from being able to question why the train moving towards destruction, or even who is driving the train. Such questions elude even the protagonist, as he ultimately commits to his desire to escape, leaping into a passing embankment and watching The Yellow Arrow’s lights whistle past him, an unbreakable path forward. Such an ending articulates a desire for a break from business-as-usual, but is only able to understand this break as one made by an individual, one that still allows for the machine to keep going forward onto its inescapable collapse. The question is then provoked, is such an act of disavowal resistance, or merely a form of suicide?

Mainländer was developing his ideas alongside the radical Young Hegelians, a philosophical association that would eventually lead to the development of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, and his philosophy is very much influenced by their work. The influence is most felt in his advocacy for a philosophical egoism similar to that of member/belligerent of the Young Hegelians Max Stirner. Like Stirner, Mainländer believes that all human actions are motivated purely by self-interest, going so far as to claim that “there are only individuals in the world” (Beiser), a line that is strikingly similar to Thatcher’s mantra that there is “no such thing as society.” This, of course, is what the postmodern condition demands. We are invited to express ourselves in whatever way we so choose, love what we love, shout out any opinion we so choose, even the most radical ones. So long as you provide a new data point for an information broker, isolated from a true actionable community, you are free. Let the train keep running, let God keep rotting, and all is well. When we are trapped in a world that can only conceptualise actions through the individual lens, it remains to be seen how any political change is possible. Fellow subjects of postmodernity have attempted to answer this challenge, though these attempts have often collapsed into irrelevance or co-opted by the professional managerial class. There is, however, one recent work that has attempted to fight back against this egoism and offer a more constructive message to a world at a crisis point.

Disco Elysium is a video game conceived by an Estonian creative collective deeply influenced by a post-Soviet melancholia, though one that is a few stations past Pelevin’s. The story takes place in Martinaise, a district of the city Revachol, where the apocalypse is simultaneously long past and ongoing. A former breeding ground for revolutionary communists, Martinaise’s era of radical vigour was brutally crushed by liberal anti-revolutionaries. The city is haunted by this violence—bullet holes remain carved into the city’s architecture. René Arnoux, a former soldier for the pre-revolutionary royalist faction, still dresses in his soldier’s garb, serving as a night watchman for the Dockworker’s Union and frequently arguing with his rival/friend Gaston Martin over his desire for Revachol to return to the fascist state of his youth, as well as his resentment over Gaston taking his life-long and now-deceased love, Jeanne-Marie, away from him.

Despite the world already seeming to be lost, it only gets worse as we learn that the world of Elysium is separated by a kind of anti-matter known as the Pale, vast oceans of non-existence that not much is known about, save that this non-existence is only growing larger. We later learn that the Pale is a by-product of human thought, a waste that only grows larger as more people dwell in the past and the futures they’ve lost. To be clear, this apocalyptic force isn’t relevant to the main plot of the story. It’s only floating in the background, waiting to be discovered by the player if they so choose. Nevertheless, the Pale provides a crucial insight into the world of Elysium and how it parallels our own.

There is a certain sentiment that is common in many radical socialist groups, something we might call an imagined nostalgia. Pamphlets are written in the same grandiose language of revolutions past, using the same visual style, and are obsessed with the same figureheads—it’s as if Lenin had never left Finland Station. The citizens of Martinaise, the passengers on The Yellow Arrow are plagued by the same reactionary mindset, the slow collapse of history into destiny, the atomized islands of God’s corpse slowly rotting into non-existence. Like the pessimists, these characters took the suffering of their age for granted as an eternal state of being rather than a problem of social relations and structural oppression. Thus, they turn inward to seek solace, only dooming themselves to perpetuating a world that is unable to bring them meaning. My point could end here, showing two works that express the mental landscape of living today and leave it there. But Disco Elysium has one last twist.

In one of the side quests you obtain if your character expresses enough ideas sympathetic to communism, you meet two student intellectuals, Steban and Ulixes. They invite you into a meeting of their reading group, in which the two of them are the only members. Their dialogue, full of the dogmatic quasi-irony of the young radical, is almost entirely devoted to the discussion of different schools of communist thought, and how ineffectual each theory is in comparison to their own pet esoteric theory. On its own, it’s a funny scene that teases the over-intellectualized theory-reader, but then the conversation becomes more reflective. At the end of the discussion, your character is able to ask the “most important” question about communism, which is some permutation on the following: “If communism keeps failing every time we try it… and the rest of the world conspires to invade and massacre us when we dare to stand up for our beliefs… what’s the point?”

Steban, the leader of the group, looks out of the window of his apartment, towards another building where his mother lives: “communism is a secular version of […] theology, that […] replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future… I think the answer is in there, somewhere.” The students had been working on constructing an impossibly precarious matchbox tower to test their theory of plasm, a matter that is brought into existence by belief. You ask to join them in building another tower, and they agree, meticulously constructing the most delicate structure possible. You build it higher than it’s ever been built before. Impossibly, it holds together, and for a moment, everyone in the room is silent, enraptured by it.

The tower falls. But it did hold, if only for a moment. This revolutionary belief, this plasm, is a counter to the Pale. Where obsession over the decaying narratives of the past tears apart progress, the belief in humanity, the belief in a future, builds it up. It may fall, it may be disrupted, but it is always latent, ready to be produced with enough people and with genuine solidarity. Mainländer’s God may be rotting, but that does not mean we must resign ourselves to death, nor should we simply disavow and turn away from it. Instead, we build towers. We build them, they fall and we keep building them until one finally stands tall, unswaying against the wind.

Works Cited

Beiser, Frederick C. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900. E-book ed., Oxford University Press, 2016.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut. Directed by Robert Kurwitz, ZA/UM, 2021. Microsoft Windows game.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyous Science. Penguin Random House, 2019.

Pelevin, Victor. The Yellow Arrow. New Directions Press, 1996.