u/WackyConundrum

S06E01

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I finally finished Mainländer's *The Philosophy of Redemption*, and I wanted to write up a review here along with my own very personal take on it, hopefully as a starting point for a good discussion.

One note before I start: I read it in translation, and the edition I have merges the final two sections, so my chapter order may not match yours. The original runs Analytic → Physics → Aesthetics → Ethics → Politics → Metaphysics; I'm treating politics and metaphysics/ethics as overlapping, which is how my edition presents them. I judge each section by fairly different standards, so I'll go through them one at a time.

**The theory of the cognitive faculties**

Right from the first chapter the book goes on the attack, picking up exactly where Kant and Schopenhauer left off. Where they treated space, time and causality as fixed structures of the mind, Mainländer places those faculties inside biological and material evolution.

He arrives remarkably early at things we would now call cognitive neuroscience, the mind doesn't "discover" the world, it simulates it through experience, and at evolutionary epistemology of the kind Konrad Lorenz would only formulate in the 20th century, and at perceptualism and constructivism, again in a biological key. There's even something structurally analogous to the uncertainty principle: he describes an act of violent fragmentation of identity the further you push the act of observing reality. I'm not claiming he predicted Heisenberg, the analogy is structural, not historical, but the shape of the thought is genuinely striking.

And he does all of this in a very conversational, descriptive tone, almost as if you were having lunch at a bar with a friend you've known forever.

**Physics**

He then moves into physics proper, where he lays out ideas tending toward entropy and toward something like a cosmological beginning, which he frames as the literal fragmentation of God. He demolishes Schopenhauer's very concept of the will to live and inverts it into the *will to die*, precisely in line with the laws of entropy: everything tends to dissolve and to separate from itself over time.

Here he gives us a striking image to grasp it. The more limited our faculty of perception is, the more solid the world appears to us; and as our perceptive faculties — the spirit, in this case, keep expanding over the course of a life through knowledge, passing from one state of matter to the next, the more the atoms tend toward dissolution and mutual distancing. Today we'd add that those atoms are sooner or later destined to collapse inward.

**Aesthetics**

Not much to say here, except to acknowledge his genius all over again.

Where for Schopenhauer art was a temporary truce from the pain of the world, a momentary escape from the will to live, for Mainländer aesthetic experience has an active and devastating cosmic function. It turns art from an instrument of abstract contemplation into a biological and physical accelerator of the destruction of the universe, by way of the individual's attempt to expand their own faculties of knowledge. I find all of this very close to art today and the direction it's taking.

**Politics**

This is the point where I was more stunned than by anything else I have ever read, and it's something I'll carry with me forever.

He doesn't only talk about how the concept of God, through the norms of the individual village, created a circle of individuals who then became sedentary. He argues that the very concept of the modern state was born under the name of the various gods of the past. In his view, every village thousands of years ago formed an ideological circle of personal and collective knowledge, but the one thing that couldn't be known with any certainty was what lay above; and to that we attributed the fragmented morality of God, shaped according to our own ideas and given form through us.

Through wars and disputes, though, the circles of cultures and myths, even just of customs, ended up mixing, creating a larger circle, and then a larger one still, all the way to contemporary society and to the society to come, where in his view history is destined to end in total cosmopolitanism. Whether we're actually still moving in that direction is arguable, the last decade cuts both ways, but the mechanism he describes is, I think, the real insight.

In the end, holding the political sympathies he did and looking to the federal republic of his own time as a stage on the road to a stateless cosmopolitan order, he thought we would arrive at the annihilation of the ego as human beings, no longer waging wars or generating conflicts among ourselves, thereby reaching the one true attempt at redemption, toward ourselves and toward God. I'll come back to this in my conclusions.

**Metaphysics**

Here the text takes on a markedly more tragic, apophatic and, to my mind, almost evocative character. It doesn't add anything particularly new in terms of ideas; it revisits the logical deductions made in the previous chapters, draws his final considerations from them, and ties them all back to the single true necessity of rejoining God through death.

**Final thoughts**

The text is brilliant. The way he manages to anticipate ideas by a century and a half is astonishing, because he does it with a precision that has few equals in the history of philosophy.

The text maintains a single unbroken flow of thought throughout: it leaves you no way out, constantly chaining one "therefore" onto the next, which on a logical level makes him conceptually airtight, self-sealing, almost. In the first chapter, as I said, he starts out in a very conversational, friendly register, which then tapers off from the second to the fourth chapter into a tighter but very astute rhetoric, almost certainly the product of the sleepless nights during which he wrote the first volume while serving in the army at Halberstadt.

The last chapter, on the other hand, is something more solemn and quite far removed from the style a reader may have got used to at first, very heavy going, on top of that, and not really conclusive.

Overall, though, and much as it pains me to admit it, I found the work quite boring. That's despite insights that were, for the work and for its time, genuinely revolutionary, and despite the fact that the section on the history of humanity completely changed me as a person. He's an author who gave the whole of himself; and rather than letting the reader move through him, he's something you're forced to undergo passively. You don't read Mainländer, you endure him. And because his style of logical chaining is so identical to itself throughout, I could see where he was going with extreme ease, even skipping ten pages ahead, though I recognise that this is a limitation of mine and not something to hold against the author.

**The crucial question: do I accept his account of redemption?**

To be clear about what I'm rejecting: I know the redemption he describes is collective and works primarily through chastity and non-generation, not simply through the individual act. My objection is aimed at the structure of the whole thing, not at the caricature version.

And no, I don't accept it, not out of fear, but because I think the act is self-defeating on his own premises.

Going back to the politics chapter: once cosmopolitanism is reached, the ego would vanish, and we would desire nothing but reunion with the will of God. But the ego just *is* the act of acting. If you act on yourself or on someone else voluntarily, you are already reasserting the very thing you meant to abolish. And this principle of non-action is something he himself concedes in the final chapter, which in practice means he'd be contradicting himself spectacularly within the same work. Phenomenologically speaking, that's an unsolvable problem for his redemption.

What follows instead, I think, is that you simply accept that every breath you take, every step, even your own ageing, is part of the natural, passive wearing-away of matter, inexorable as it is. This is where the idea collides head-on with absolute determinism and with Taoism: we're going to die out sooner or later anyway. It's just a matter of actually following the natural course of history, without the individual will that's steeped in us.

**TL;DR** Brilliant, airtight, and exhausting. The section on the origin of the state out of local god-circles is the best thing in the book. But his redemption requires a willed act to abolish the will, and that's a performative contradiction he half-concedes himself. The consistent conclusion isn't the act, it's *wu wei*.

P.S. I don't speak English, but speak italian, so I used AI to translate this. The ideas and the argument are my own, apologies for any awkward phrasing

In VF6 we see some special effects on some hits. I'm attaching examples. What do you think about them? Do you like them? Would you rather they be removed?

VF6 is supposed to be more realistic, which is why we won't have crazy juggling, but those effects are quite strong, somewhat similar to those in other games (Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter).

Aren't they too strong? Are they fine?

From the video description:

>Steve dives into Louis Theroux's "Inside the Manosphere" documentary, pointing out how the acclaimed filmmaker missed the most crucial question: why are millions of young men, facing declining education, work, and connection, being funnelled into toxic communities by algorithms? He breaks down how figures like Myron Gaines and Sneako exploit a generation desperate for answers, and why dismissing their followers only makes the problem worse. This isn't just about influencers—it's about a structural collapse leaving young men unmoored.

The "lady" in the video tries to convince us that (nearly) all men are evil to a lesser or greater degree, with only 15.8% of men being somewhat or very good.

This is what feminism does to a woman's brain.

I was largely impressed by this video. I was worried that they would see all problems suffered by men, and turn it around on men again.

But they didn't, and overall its a clear eyed look.