The Death of a God
Vanitas with Crucifix and Roses, by Neal Auch
We are living in the aftermath of God’s suicide. That is, at least, according to the work of an obscure philosopher and poet named Philipp Mainländer. In his Philosophy of Redemption, the young German constructed a remarkably bleak vision of reality inspired by the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, along with Mainländer’s own particular interpretations of Buddhism, Christianity, and the natural sciences. At the heart of this text is an unwavering commitment to the idea that human life has negative value. Over hundreds of pages of strained argumentation, Mainländer made the case that non-existence is vastly preferable to the alternative.
Philipp Mainländer hung himself on the very same day his magnum opus was published. Some readers have characterized this act of self annihilation as a testament to the strength of the philosopher’s commitment to his own ideas. It would be just as easy to argue that this poor man’s philosophical output amounted to little more than an elaborate rationalization for an untreated mental illness. In either case, the result is the same: an inventive and idiosyncratic mind was permanently erased from this world at just 33 years of age.
As I have already alluded to, Mainländer went so far as to concoct a creation myth to accompany his dour philosophy. Our death-haunted universe, he argued, is the aftermath of an act of divine suicide. “It seems that existence was horror to God,” as Thomas Ligotti summarized in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. “Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, He shattered Himself—Big-Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years.” In this view of creation, the transience of all things—both the animate and the inanimate—is a kind of divine inheritance. We are all the children of a suicidal God and, consequently, we are all imbued with His desire for nonexistence.
One can find a curious resonance between Mainländer’s strange creation myth and certain speculative ideas in modern cosmology. Glossing over a substantial amount of technical detail, the theory of an eternally inflating multiverse posits that our universe is just one of infinitely many “baby” universes, each born from a maelstrom of quantum fluctuations in some rapidly expanding supercosmos. Theoretically, most of the baby universes born in this way would collapse back unto themselves almost immediately. Others would expand so rapidly as to preclude the formation of any kind of cosmic structures such as galaxies; those realities will forever remain lifeless and barren. But a few baby universes—universes like ours, for example—might expand at a leisurely enough pace to sustain stars and planets. And on some of those planets, perhaps, there might even evolve fleshy creatures clever enough to raise their faces from the toil of life, gaze upon the night sky, and speculate about how it all began.
Viewed in its totality, this hypothetical supercosmos would exhibit a curious kind of steady-state equilibrium, in the same way that the surface of the ocean appears smooth over long enough distance scales. In this sense, the supercosmos seems vaguely analogous to Mainländer’s conception of God as a timeless and motionless entity which “bears no resemblance to any kind of being with which we are familiar.” However, if we zoom in on a small patch of the supercosmos, the story is very different. Like the surface of the sea, we have the “impression of dynamics and change, of waves heaving up and down,” as John Horgan put it in The End of Science. “We humans, because we live within one of these heaving waves, think that the entire universe is expanding.” Those heaving waves are, of course, the aforementioned “baby universes,” each one spawned from this strange cosmic progenitor.
The “baby universes” of eternal inflation theory are something like the shattered fragments of God which Philipp Mainländer imagined as the aftereffect of His divine suicide. Each baby universe does, in fact, inherit a kind of will-toward-death from its creator: the arrow of time. Since the work of Ludwig Boltzmann in 1877, physicists have understood that the passage of time is inextricable from the tendency toward disorder. A system which does not tend toward ruin is, by necessity of the second law of thermodynamics, a system wherein nothing interesting happens. Entropy is what “points the arrow of time,” as physicists like to say. The fact that entropy increases in each baby universe is both the reason life might be possible and, at the same time, the reason that all life must be cursed to die.
Creation myths are valuable not because they offer a mathematically predictive description of the universe we inhabit. They are valuable because they convey, with some poetic flourish or another, deep truths about the human condition. This is true of the Christian creation myth with the apple and the talking snake. And it’s true of Philipp Mainländer’s strange cosmology. The insight of that German poet—echoed in the cosmological theory of the multiverse—is that nowhere among all the infinite possible realities does there exist even one that is free from the ravages of time. Decay and death are universal, it would seem. “There are ships sailing to many ports,” Fernando Pessoa wrote in The Book of Disquiet, “but not a single one goes where life is not painful…”
For pessimists like Mainländer, the only sensible response to all this suffering is to hope for universal extinction. Faced with the same set of facts, a great many other philosophers have concluded differently. There is probably no reason to weigh one argument against the other; to a large extent, even the most brilliant thinkers on this subject appear to have started from their desired conclusion and worked backwards to find a suitable justification. For my part, I am happy to study Mainländer’s strange mythology, even as I cannot accept his nihilistic conclusions. I count myself among those who intuitively believe that existence, flawed though it might be, is generally preferable to the alternative.
The universe we happen to inhabit is, for whatever reason, amenable to the formation of galaxies and planets and sentient creatures like us. If the laws and constants of nature were evenly slightly different, perhaps this would not have been the case. The whole of creation is a steady march toward cosmic disaster, to be sure. But the journey is a leisurely enough to accommodate moments of reflection here and there. And there is beauty to behold, for those would look for it.
I Wrote a Book!
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you might enjoy the book I wrote about still life, mortality, and philosophy.
The book is 412 pages, contains about 250 full-colour still life pictures, and about 27k words of analysis. There’s also an inexpensive e-book version available, if that’s your thing.