Nietzsche, Mainländer, and Jensen
A Critical Review
Abstract:
In his 2023 article, “The Death and Redemption of God: Nietzsche’s Conversation with Phillip Mainländer,” Anthony Jensen seeks to analyze Phillip Mainländer’s influence on Nietzsche through an intuitive, abstract synthesis of Nietzsche’s primary leitmotifs as antithetical conclusions to these philosophers’ shared, problematic ontological premises. This attempt is largely successful. Particularly impressive is his reconciliation of the problem of “pesky time” — in comparing Mainländer’s entropic, pessimistic Will to Death with Nietzsche’s expanding Will to Power — through a cosmological exploration of Nietzsche’s concept of cyclical time: the Eternal Return. However, Jensen’s considerable exploration of positivistic-influential rigidity appears superfluous, and doesn’t serve to bolster his already sinewy synthesis of Nietzsche’s ideas as antithetical refutations of Mainländer’s conclusions to their shared premises. This essay will examine Jensen’s overall effectiveness and, most importantly, take to task his bizarrely presumptuous moralizing of Nietzsche’s motives.
Jensen’s Method:
Jensen begins by elucidating the dichotomy of positivistic vs reflective, intuitive interpretations of one philosopher’s influence on another: a posteriori vs a priori critical analysis of influence, respectively. Jensen posits that “positivistic assignations of influence in Nietzsche studies” are handicapped by their empirical chains: there must be concrete evidence that X influenced Y. A paucity of evidence can lead scholars to dismiss outright more abstract synthesizing of conceptual influence, purely based on a lack of hard data explicitly revealing that one philosopher read another philosopher’s work — regardless of how linked their ideas appear conceptually.
Paradoxically, while Nietzsche’s era saw a burgeoning appreciation for empirical, scientific truths, the philosophical domain often still favored intricate metaphysical speculation, a trend that has since shifted towards a more positivistic emphasis on concrete evidence. In Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878) Nietzsche profoundly and presciently says of science: “Science bestows on him who labors and experiments in it much satisfaction, upon him who learns its results very little. As all the important truths of science must gradually become common and everyday, however, even this little satisfaction will cease: just as we have long since ceased to take pleasure in learning the admirable two-times-table. But if science provides us with less and less pleasure…through casting suspicion on the consolations of metaphysics, religion and art, then that mightiest source of joy to which mankind owes almost all its humanity will become impoverished...” (Aphorism 251)
Affirming one’s own values, creating new meaning by burning through the fog of comfortable errors is a Nietzschean pursuit. Nietzsche was a visionary. His insight into the evolutionary trajectory of observable truths, bolstered by his respect for the scientific method, exposed the broader shifts that would occur in the coming century: human beings demand hard evidence. Nietzsche championed the idea that the intellectually honest pursuit of truth — mining reality for the treasures of knowledge — often results in grim, sobering conclusions: reality is always grayer than the colorful errors legions of philosophers have projected onto it, and that includes complex metaphysics that rely on a priori truths. The only reality available to humanity — observable reality — filtered through as unbiased a lens as conceivably possible, was quickly becoming the cutting edge of philosophy. Nietzsche’s own philosophy helped pioneer this shift through his eschewing of convoluted metaphysical systems (like Mainländer’s) — what he amusingly referred to as cobweb-spinning.
However, the pendulum can swing too far, often to the detriment of creativity and abstract insight, and that’s exactly what Jensen is concerned with in his critique of overly rigid positivistic boundaries. Jensen accuses positivistic assignations of influence — in this case, Mainlander’s influence on Nietzsche — of myopically focusing on the “whether” and “when” (concrete evidence) while ignoring the “how” and “why” (abstract, theoretical evidence); almost as if they have a tendency to be mutually exclusive. Presumably anticipating this chink in his armor, Jensen syllogistically concedes that the latter must presuppose the former, but emphasizes that the rigidness of the former often detrimentally precludes the latter. One might think that this logic is obvious, but Jensen’s argument intimates that it’s all too often taken for granted, and consequently dispensed with.
Jensen argues that Nietzsche’s empirical allusions to Mainländer are so sparse that the latter’s influence on the former has been wholly neglected in academia. However, Jensen makes a solid case that Nietzsche was at minimum familiar with Mainländer, as the few examples where Nietzsche does refer to Mainländer are quite the smoking gun: “Or could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that cloying apostle of virginity, Mainländer, as a genuine German? In the end he must have been a jew (All jews become cloying when they moralize)” (GS 357; KSA 3, pp. 601–2).
Jensen’s Bizarre Moralizing:
This brings us to the first example of Jensen’s moralizing of Nietzsche: Jensen assigns a negative value to this aforementioned contemptuous reference, going so far as to call it anti-semitic. Based on the myriad of textual evidence for Nietzsche’s anti-anti-semitism, his close friendship with Paul Rée, and his unparalleled insight into the genealogy of morality, it’s reasonable to give Nietzsche the benefit of the doubt here and attribute his pejorative tone to a more general criticism of abrahamic moralizing: would Jensen have felt the sting as sharply if Nietzsche had substituted “Christian” for “Jew”? One doubts it.
Jensen again flirts with the error of assuming mutual exclusivity when he says: “What is lacking when a positivistic historian articulates the ‘what’ and ‘when’ are the ‘how’ and ‘why.’ The fact that Nietzsche read a text… does not illuminate what motivated his reading and what he may have thought about that text.”
Indeed, such illuminating is Jensen’s job, and he does just that. Again, all of this seems like it should be a given, but apparently Jensen has found no other way to reconcile the glaring lack of scholarly attention paid to Mainländer’s conceptual relationship with Nietzsche. Perhaps Jensen is simply the first to see the pattern, rather than it being a consequence of the alleged detrimental rigidity of positivistic assignations of influence. Perhaps he’s simply too timid to unabashedly take credit for this insightful connection, or perhaps he’s preemptively shielding himself from anticipated accusations that his synthesis lacks positivistic warrant: Jensen’s synthesis of Nietzsche’s leitmotifs as antithetical answers to premises shared with Mainländer could stand on its own without the need for insisting that the heretofore lack of this synthesis presupposes positivistic rigidity. Paradoxically, this obfuscation of his own motives casts a spotlight on Jensen’s apparent need to project his own motivational insecurity onto Nietzsche by baselessly assuming and moralizing Nietzsche’s motives. Jensen’s dog and pony show appears bizarre and unnecessary next to his robust synthesis of Nietzsche’s leitmotifs with Mainlander’s, and consequently betrays a lack of confidence perniciously manifesting itself in his work.
Jensen states: “Nietzsche’s motivations were, frankly, often less than innocent. Often they were less concerned with truth than with ‘winning’ an argument with a text, or impressing upon an audience — namely, us readers — the force of his rhetoric. Often they led Nietzsche to cover over influences, maybe out of jealousy or maybe out of a desire to appear more iconoclastic, original, or world historical than he was.”
Maybe indeed, Anthony! Conjecture abounds!
These kind of jarring value judgements interrupt Jensen’s otherwise sober analysis, appearing rather unwarranted and absurd: do motivations need to be innocent? Are we now (laughably) assuming that motivations should be unegoistic?
Moreover, one could make a reasonable case that Nietzsche detested those who inordinately valued ‘winning’ arguments: he boldly repudiated dialectic for its own sake, as evidenced in the section ‘The Problem of Socrates’ from Twilight of The Idols (1889): “With Socrates Greek taste undergoes a change in favor of dialectics: what is really happening when that happens? It is above all the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top. Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was compromised by it. Young people were warned against it. And all such presentation of one’s reasons was regarded with mistrust. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods.” (Aphorism 5, p41)
Jensen goes on to speculate that Nietzsche’s “less than innocent” motivations call for “…more attention from Nietzsche scholars as to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ Nietzsche read what he read, beyond just the ‘what’ and ‘when’ he read.”
While Jensen’s call to arms is agreeably tenable, the conjectural, value-laden reasons he posits for this call to arms are unnecessary, speculative and weak.
Jensen continues to speculatively moralize when he criticizes conventional philological reconstructions of influence: “Especially with Nietzsche, one must consider influences as a sort of conversation, wherein ideas are tested, refined, and expressed from a variety of not-always-forthright motives.”
Must we assume psychological forthrightness from our philosophers? As Nietzsche himself understood, this is a tall order.
Nietzsche often referred to himself as a psychologist and was primarily concerned with the individual’s existential orientation towards life. He championed probing the abyssal psychological depths so that one may exercise greater insight, always aware that philosophers, just like all humans, are strangers to themselves. Nietzsche’s Four Great Errors, as outlined in Twilight of The Idols, incisively defined the tendency for humans to create their motives after the fact, as they justify and rationalize their behaviors and (falsely) experience themselves as total causal agents of their actions — undermining the unconscious mind’s role in human behavior that Nietzsche so presciently explored. Jensen seems to be truly reaching into the ether here when he asks: “Was it jealousy, resentment, anti-Semitism, or closed-mindedness that led Nietzsche to cover over and declaim Mainländer’s influence?”
Does it matter? Will we ever truly know? Does Jensen understand his own motives for moralizing Nietzsche? One doubts it. At minimum it seems entirely reasonable to dispense with anti-Semitism as the motive for Nietzsche’s alleged “declaiming” (it would seem Jensen misspoke here, and meant something closer to “repudiate”) of Mainländer’s influence on him, lest Walter Kaufmann roll over in his grave! Such intellectual dishonesty appears unbecoming of a scholar as accomplished as Anthony Jensen. Perhaps Nietzsche simply felt that directly addressing Mainländer’s cobweb-spinning was more or less beneath him. One certainly understands that Nietzsche’s leitmotifs were not created merely as refutations to Mainländer: they simply conveniently function as such; it is far more likely that they were conceived as responses to Schopenhauer’s influence, regardless of whether Nietzsche and Mainlander shared additional premises (mutually competing wills) that ultimately seem arbitrary. However, this doesn’t negate Jensen’s rather robust synthesis. As stated, Jensen’s synthesis of Nietzsche’s leitmotifs as antithetical conclusions to premises shared with Mainländer is distinct from his bizarre moralization of Nietzsche’s motives.
Jensen’s Sinewy Synthesis:
Nonetheless, Jensen successfully argues that, contrary to Schopenhauer, Mainländer’s pessimism aligned with Nietzsche on the premise of mutually competing wills, but is diametrically opposed to him in its conclusion to that premise.
Jensen elucidates that Mainländer’s metaphysics is conceptually supported by the scientific law of entropy. Mainländer posited that God existed as a singular power source that wanted to destroy itself, but couldn’t. Through attempting cosmological seppuku, God spilled his innards, morbidly birthing life: life in the image of a God that wills to die and is thus constantly losing energy and decaying. This cosmic scattering of divine intestines eventuated in legions of mutually competing wills, damned to die meaninglessly from the outset. Jensen lucidly showcases that while it otherwise may be tempting to join Mainländer in getting high on the reek of God’s burning remains, one should probably wear gloves when handling such a macabre, decadent metaphysics: one might catch something!
In all seriousness, Jensen’s prose is clear, eloquent and edifying in his summary of Mainländer’s ridiculous metaphysical cobweb-spinning: “God’s act of self-annihilation and the obstacle to its execution itself is the entire sum of individuals and of movements that constitutes our world.”
Mainländer posits that God’s goal is non-being, and through the scientific concept of entropy “The entire universe, in imitatio Dei, progresses gradually but inexorably toward nothingness, wills its own death,” (Jensen)
Mainländer’s solution is somewhat typical of pessimists. To quote the character Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) from MAX’s True Detective: Season 1: “I think the honorable thing to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction. One last midnight. Brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
Any true Nietzschean gets a healthy laugh out of this. The free-spirit knows what Nietzsche would scream: decadence! Nothing more than the impotent manifestations of a degenerate psyche!
Jensen points out that Nietzsche also entertains the death of God, but that humanity metaphorically killed him by unfettering itself from the psychological chains of Christian tyranny. Consequently, humanity now faces the new problem of averting nihilism. Jensen rather convincingly argues that Nietzsche’s concepts of the Ubermensch and the Will to Power conveniently and effectively counter Mainlander’s Will to Death as the conclusion to the ontological problem of a dead/dying God.
Where Mainländer likened the will’s decaying expenditure of energy — the Will to Death — to the concept of entropy, he also incorporated Rudolph Clausius’ contributory concept of heat death vis-à-vis the concept of lost energy. Similarly, Jensen argues that Nietzsche’s reading of W.H. Rolph’s Biologische Probleme (1884) encouraged his concept of the the Will to Power, giving it a “certain naturalistic plausibility that living things are aggregates of competitive forces that, as they compete, are procreative and additive to the totality of organic striving.”
Jensen argues that both Mainländer and Nietzsche are “marshaling contemporary literature in different scientific fields,” to imbue their philosophies with naturalistic validity. It would seem this at least puts the Will to Power’s naturalistic plausibility on equal footing with Mainländer’s Will to Death, raising the question: is this marshaling of late 19th century scientific literature arbitrary? If it is, it would seem Nietzsche’s is the psychologically healthier choice of the two.
However, Jensen argues that Nietzsche’s (to quote Walter Kaufmann) dialectical monism of the Will to Power suffers from the problem of “pesky time.” This is where Jensen’s real strength truly manifests itself. Jensen posits that: “Whatever previous wills had willed in the past bring about conditions that today’s wills cannot but inherit, such that the will’s longing and freedom is necessarily constrained by a past it cannot effect…Time is the dwelt-in space of reality’s very existence, and its passage marks in moments our unceasing and unavoidable march unto the Nihil Negativum”(Mainländer’s inexorable cosmological oblivion).
Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Return is endorsed as the reconciling leitmotif here, with its concept of cyclical time. Jensen’s juxtaposition of Nietzsche’s Will to Power with Mainländer’s Will to Death is the highlight of his piece, as the former does conveniently serve as a direct counter to Mainländer’s naturalistically supported entropic pessimism: the Will to Power, bolstered by the concept of the Eternal Return, is directly antithetical to Mainländer’s Will to Death and subsequent conclusion that human beings should minimize suffering at all costs while they hasten their nonexistence.
Whether Nietzsche meant the concept of Eternal Return to serve as an existential test for one’s comportment towards life, or as a literal cosmic hypothesis is still debated. Syllogistically, one can understand that it’s definitely the former, and debatably the latter. Nietzsche’s concepts of the Will to Power and the Eternal Return are direct, life-affirming existential answers to Mainländer’s life-negating pessimistic conclusions. Nietzsche would argue that Mainländer’s degenerate comportment toward life and depressive temperament lends itself to indulging such dreadfully pessimistic cobweb-spinning, and understandably so.
Conclusion:
What’s bizarrely ironic is Jensen’s elucidation of Nietzsche’s courageous response to pessimistic moralizing while simultaneously moralizing Nietzsche’s motives. Jensen does a commendable job of interpreting Nietzsche’s leitmotifs as antithetical conclusions to premises shared with Mainlander, but dispensing with the needless, unwarranted moralizing, as well as the less than cogent exploration of positivistic evidence (or lack thereof) being responsible for the absence of scholarly acknowledgement of Mainlander’s influence on Nietzsche would have served Jensen better.
Works Cited:
Jensen, Anthony K. “The Death and Redemption of God: Nietzsche’s Conversation with Phillip Mainländer.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, Spring 2023, pp.22–50. Penn State University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/885222/summary
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, [1996]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of The Idols and The Anti-Christ. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, [1990]
