Schriften / Die letzten Hohenstaufen

At its appearance, Philipp Mainländer’s Philosophie der Erlösung met with strong reactions. Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard von Hartmann, Johannes Volkelt and others took exception to Mainländer’s anthropofugal theory which surpassed Schopenhauer’s pessimism, describing the universe as the „disintegrating process of a pre-world unity into a real world of multiplicity“. This anticipatory theory characterizes our world as a “transition from superexistence to non-existence” by means of the self-extinction of organic and anorganic matter.
Mainländer’s metaphysics of entropy could be used as a foil for our modern explanation of the world and its origin (Big Bang and chaos theories) as well as certain postulates of history. The two volumes of the Philosophie der Erlösung enable us to meet Mainländer the philosopher, who argued from the materialistic anthropology of his time, also as a poet.