And who is and should be a pessimist? He who is mature for death and is in no condition to love life, just as the optimist cannot turn away from it. … - Philipp Mainländer
" "And who is and should be a pessimist? He who is mature for death and is in no condition to love life, just as the optimist cannot turn away from it. If he does not realize that he will live on in his children, his procreation loses its horrible character; but if he does realize it, he will recoil in horror from it, just like Humboldt when he noticed that the torments that another being must endure for perhaps eighty years are too high a price to pay for a few minutes of pleasure, and will consider the procreation of children, and rightly so, as a crime.
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About Philipp Mainländer
(October 5, 1841 – April 1, 1876) was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, . In his central work Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption or The Philosophy of Salvation) — according to , "perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature" — Mainländer proclaims that life is absolutely worthless, and that "the will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."
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Philipp Batz
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Filosofía De La Redención: Antología (2011), trans. Sandra Baquedano Jer, chapter II (La ley universal del debilitamiento de la fuerza), page 59, <small></small>
The immanent philosophy does not recognize any miracle and does not know how to account for events in another unknown world, which would be a consequence of the actions of this world. Therefore, there is for it only a completely certain negation of the will to live, which is expressed by virginity. As we have seen in physics, the human being finds absolute annihilation in death; nevertheless, he is only apparently extinguished if he continues to live in his children, for in these children he has already risen from the dead: he has embraced life in them anew and affirmed it for an indeterminate time. This everyone feels instinctively. The insurmountable aversion of the genders after copulation in the animal kingdom manifests itself in the human being as a profound sadness.
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Why did God not immediately disappear into nothingness, if he wished to no longer be? One must ascribe omnipotence to God, for his power was unlimited; consequently, if he had willed to no longer be, he would have exterminated himself at once; instead, the universe of multiplicity arose, a universe of struggle, which is a manifest contradiction. How does one explain this? ... God existed alone, in absolute solitude and, consequently, it is correct to maintain that he was not limited by anything external; his power was, in this sense, omnipotent, since nothing outside of him limited it. However, his power was not omnipotent regarding himself, or in other words: his power could not destroy itself; the simple unity could not cease to exist by itself. God had the freedom to be as he willed; however, he was not free from his determinate essence.
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