Toward the ‘Never-Born’: Mainländer and Cioran

In his Philosophy of Redemption (1876) Philipp Mainländer transforms the Schopenhauerian will-to-life into his own concept of will-to-death, preceding Freud’s investigations into the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Mainländer’s post-Schopenhauerian conception that non-being is preferable to being anticipates Cioran’s discussion of suicide from A Short History of Decay (1949) and his vision of the “catastrophe” of birth from The Trouble with Being Born (1973). If, from a Nietzschean perspective, Mainländer’s and Cioran’s obsession with death was a symptom of passive nihilism, their thanatophilia may resonate with our anxious crepuscular mentality, prefiguring contemporary Antinatalism.