I had read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, lived in mountain cave with him, walked with his madman in The Gay Science, traced his critique of Christianity and herd morality. But I was missing something—a shadow behind the text, a photographic negative (shadow) behind the Zarathustra, an earlier voice saying almost the same thing in a different key:[fn1] not that God is dead, but that God committed suicide.[1][2][3]

It was the year I was convalescing from my Le Gray Bastion period and at the end of that year I started comparing Nietzsche’s philosophy with Mainländer. It was daunting fun. I created lots of highlights in different color in both PDFs.

I can’t remember now which article or who first mentioned Philipp Mainländer to me. I was hunting for comparative readings of Nietzsche, trying to map his ideas against his contemporaries, and somewhere in that labyrinthous tab-hell of philosophy blogs and PDFs, I stumbled over a name that meant nothing to me: Mainländer. I was first haunted by a with double eye[fn2] and it lasted for long—that haunting.

The article is gone now—but the line that hooked me has stayed: Mainländer wrote, long before Nietzsche’s madman ran into the marketplace, that God didn’t simply die. God killed himself.[1]

That phrase stopped me. Now I had to find out who killed God first?

I tracked down The Philosophy of Redemption, opened the PDF, and started reading. What I found wasn’t just a gloomy precursor to Nietzsche. It was stranger. Mainländer feels, at times, like a negative (photo-negative) of Zarathustra: same contours, opposite exposure. The more I read, the more I had the unnerving sense that Nietzsche’s phrases were echoing things that had already been whispered in The Philosophy of Redemption.

One of the first places I “smelled” Nietzsche in Mainländer was his descent from man into the animal kingdom. In the Physics section, he writes:

“We now leave man and descend into the animal kingdom, and specifically we concern ourselves first of all with the higher animals, those which are nearest to man, his ‘immature brothers’. Like man, the animal is a combination of a particular will with a particular mind.”[1]

“Immature brothers.” That phrase clung to me. Mainländer goes on to say that animals share our senses and our understanding and even a kind of image-based reasoning; what they lack are concepts, imagination, and the full power of judgment. The difference between man and animal is not some metaphysical gulf, but a matter of degree, of cognitive “incompleteness.”[1]

When I went back to Zarathustra after that, a familiar passage suddenly felt uncanny. Nietzsche has Zarathustra step before the people in the marketplace and say:

“The human is a rope, fastened between beast and Overhuman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great in the human is that it is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in the human is that it is a going-over and a going-under.”[4]

Before Mainländer, I read this as pure Nietzschean bravado: man as transition, man as bridge, man as risk. After Mainländer, those “immature brothers” creep back in. What is Nietzsche’s rope, if not the same continuum Mainländer has already drawn—animal, human, something beyond the human—only stretched over an abyss instead of gently sloping down toward extinction?[4][1] Toward no-nothingness.

Both see us as in-between. Both refuse to treat man as a finished product. But the teleology diverges. For Mainländer, the “motion of humanity” runs toward redemption as disappearance. The higher the consciousness, the more clearly it perceives the superiority of non-being; the long arc is toward absolute death.[1] And For Nietzsche, the rope is not a conveyor belt to nothingness but a dare.[fn3] The Overhuman (Übermensch) is not a redeemed non-being but a more dangerous mode of being.[4]

Once you’ve seen the same ladder in both books, it’s hard to go back to reading Zarathustra as a solitary prophet. I couldn’t do that anymore. The rope begins to look like it has an older, more pessimistic scaffolding.

Mainländer’s most radical move is not ethical or psychological; it’s metaphysical. In the Metaphysics section, after he has argued that there was once a “simple unity” (God), he writes:

“We recognised that this simple unity, God, fragmenting itself into a world, perished and disappeared entirely… We unified the individuals’ half-autonomy and the power of chance in the world… in the transcendent domain, in God’s unitary resolution to pass over into non-being.”[1]

Then comes the sentence that pulls everything into place:

“God has died and His death was the life of the world.”[1]

This is not Nietzsche’s “God is dead” as a cultural diagnosis. This is a cosmic autopsy. God, as premundane unity, wills non-being. But there is a problem:

“God had the omnipotence to carry out His will to be some way or other but He did not have the power not to be all at once. The simple unity had the power to be, in some way or other, other than it was, but it did not have the power suddenly not to be at all… This particular supra-essence… was, as a simple unity, not by means of itself able not to be. This was the obstacle.”[1]

To die, God must become many. Mainländer summarises the logic in a numbered list:

“3. This essence had to disintegrate into a world of multiplicity whose individual essences all strive for non-being…

The whole world, the universe, has one objective: not to be, and achieves it through continuous weakening of its sum of force.”[1]

The universe is God’s slow suicide, his will-to-die[fn4] distributed across matter, plants, animals, history. Creation isn’t a gift; it’s debris. While reading this I was more intrigued by it because in Hindu philosophy we find similar concept of Purasha’s disinteration,[fn5] although its not the same as the ‘God is dead’ or ‘…His death was the life of the world’.

Now put that beside Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science: Then I stumbled into something more confusing.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”[2][3]

Here, No metaphysical obstacle, no detailed story of a divine essence struggling against its own impossibility of non-being. Just a howl in the market square: we did this. We drained God of blood by no longer believing in him. Can you see it now? How could it be so simple disintegration?

Later, in Zarathustra, the formula becomes more compressed and more ruthless:

“Dead are all Gods: now we want the Overhuman to live.”[4]

In Mainländer’s world, God’s death is the beginning—the premundane act that produces everything. In Nietzsche’s, God’s death is the end of a long story of belief, the collapse of the highest values. One God dies because he wants to stop existing; the other dies because we have ceased to believe he exists at all.[3][2][4][1]

Once I had read Mainländer’s sentence—“God has died and His death was the life of the world”—Nietzsche’s madman stopped sounding like a solitary visionary and started sounding like someone arguing over the cause of death.[2][3][1]

There’s another place where the two men seem to be circling the same insight. In the Politics section, talking about social misery and the hunger for luxury, Mainländer describes the poor longing for houses, estates, horses, champagne, “the rhinestones and daughters of the rich,” and then writes:

“Now, give to the poor all this frippery and they will fall as if out of the clouds. They will then complain: We believed ourselves so happy, but in us nothing has essentially changed. All men must be sated with all the pleasures the world can offer before humanity can become ripe for redemption…”[1]

Behind this is the, paraphrased so well: one must have something left to wish for in order not to be unhappy out of sheer happiness. Fulfil every desire, and you don’t get paradise; you get a new form of misery.

Nietzsche, in Zarathustra’s Prologue, stands before the crowd and says:

“I say to you: one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos within you. Alas! The time will come when the human will give birth to no more stars…”[4]

Read on, and the “last human” steps forward:

“We have contrived happiness—say the last humans, and they blink.”[4]

Both are allergic to the fantasy of a finished, perfectly smooth happiness. Both think some remainder—wish, chaos, unrest—is structurally necessary.

But again, the direction splits.

For Mainländer, the fact that even total luxury leaves “nothing essentially changed” is one more argument that life itself is a bad bargain, and that redemption lies in non-being.[1] And, for Nietzsche, the fact that we still have “chaos within” is what makes creation possible; the real horror is the coming of the last human, who has successfully killed not only God but also that inner turbulence, and so can “give birth to no more stars.”[4]

Now I can see same crack in happiness, different conclusion. One turns the crack into a reason to exit; the other tries to turn it into a source of dancing.

The place where the divergence feels most dangerous to me is the deathbed.

In the Ethics section of The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer finally spells out the ethical consequence of his metaphysics:

“The dying man ought to forget everything in view of the fact that he has suffered enough in this life and has already served his sentence in living, and ought only to address his progeny, admonishing them insistently to abandon life, to which suffering is essential.”[1]

Life as a sentence served. The dying man’s last duty is to tell his children: don’t come back; don’t pass this on.

In Zarathustra’s Prologue, you get another dying man: the rope-dancer who falls from that rope over the abyss. He lies shattered on the ground, sure that the Devil is dragging him to hell. Zarathustra tells him:

“On my honour, friend, all you are speaking of does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell. Your soul will be dead even sooner than your body, so fear nothing more!”[4]

The man answers that he has lived in vain, that he is “not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by being dealt blows and meagre morsels.”[4]

Zarathustra replies:

“Not so,” said Zarathustra. “You have made danger your calling; there is nothing in that to despise. Now your calling has brought you down; therefore will I bury you with my own hands.”[4]

Two bedside speeches: Mainländer’s dying man: you’ve suffered enough, you’ve done your time; tell your children to abandon this, because suffering is essential to life.[1] And Zarathustra’s dying man: you made danger your vocation; that is not contemptible. There is no Devil, no Hell. I will carry you myself.[4]

Both see suffering as baked into existence. Neither offers heavenly compensation. But one turns the insight into a prohibition—do not beget more sufferers—while the other turns it into a strange kind of honour: if you must fall, at least have “made danger your calling.”[4][1]

Now, it’s more clear that It’s hard not to feel, under Zarathustra’s hand on the dying man’s shoulder, the pressure of Mainländer’s other hand, quietly pushing in the opposite direction as he mentioned earlier in his Physic part like this:

“…the earth is moved around the sun by two different forces: by an original, the centrifugal force, and by the attractive force of the sun. The former… However, through the combined effect of both forces, the earth describes a curved line about the sun.”

Like, it created something out of that forces.

Once you have read Mainländer, Zarathustra stops sounding like a monologue and starts to sound like part of an argument. Even when Nietzsche doesn’t name him, the problems they share keep lining up:

• the continuum from animal to human to something beyond;[4][1]
• the structural entanglement of suffering with existence;[1]
• the hollowness of “happiness” once desire is fully indulged;[4][1]
• the collapse of God as a live option.

But where Mainländer’s God kills himself, dissolving into the world so that every creature carries a piece of the divine will-to-die,[fn6] Nietzsche’s God is murdered by our honesty, and his corpse becomes a problem: how to live without the old guarantees.[3][2][1][4]

Where Mainländer’s dying man tells his children to abandon life, Zarathustra tells a dying performer that his danger mattered, and then hoists the broken body onto his back like a strange sacrament.[1][4]

Where Mainländer sees the world as the disintegrating relic of a divinity intent on not being, Nietzsche dares his readers to imagine a demon whispering that this life, “as you now live and have lived it,” must be lived again and again, “innumerable times over.”[2][3]

Nietzsche read Mainländer[fn7] and quietly inverted him, line by line (in his library we could find The Philosophy of Redemption).[fn8] Maybe he didn’t, and I’m the one drawing constellations between distant stars. The archival question matters to scholars; it doesn’t change what happens on the page when you read them together.[4][1]

Because once I have seen God’s suicide in Mainländer—God who wanted nothing more than to stop existing, who could only die by becoming us—I can’t unsee the way Zarathustra refuses to let that be the last story. When he stands in the marketplace and says, “The human is a rope…,” I now picture another rope running alongside it, threading through Mainländer’s “immature brothers” and his final counsel to “abandon life.”[1][4]

And when Nietzsche’s madman shouts, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” I hear it as more than a slogan. It sounds like a second verdict being read over the same corpse—a refusal to let the cause of death be written as divine despair instead of human responsibility.[3][2]

Either way, once Mainländer is in the room, Zarathustra doesn’t sound the same. Under every Nietzschean “yes” there is now a faint, persistent “no,” the echo of a God who wanted out and a dying father who tells his children to follow him into nothingness. Under every “dancing star” there is the suspicion that, once all wishing is exhausted, happiness will show its teeth.[4][1]

Reading them together is like listening to a duet where one voice is always descending—toward rest, toward silence—and the other is always trying, stubbornly, to climb.

References

Mainländer, Philipp. The Philosophy of Redemption.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, §125.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes.

Footnotes:

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