Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6.

This essay has been an itch for me for a while. Maybe because the topic itself, or at least, the first half of it, is rather elusive, even if very self-explanatory for any clever mind, or maybe because I’ve had it sitting in the back of my mind for over a month, trying to make sense of it as I discussed with it with some friends, with myself and with the canon of Great Books composing the Great Conversation in Western thought.

Still, it had to take for my parents to arrive to my city, flying over an ocean and two continents, for me to finally be able to write about it, and even under that marvelous circumstance, it will still be sprinkled by the corrupting influence of German pessimist philosophy, because the joy of having our loved ones close to us is always cut short by the thought of having to see them go at some point.

Maybe for that is that the title of this reflection invokes a contradicting combination: proximity and affection, on one hand, two concepts fundamental for the understanding of love in the classical conservative doctrine, and Philipp Mainländer, on the other, a Prussian socialdemocratic and pessimist thinker known for having been the only coherent (and extreme) enough of the German pessimists to actually having taken his own life, an act paradoxically very consistent with his philosophy.

In any case, with this introduction as a disclaimer, I should add that, while I don’t agree with Mainländer’s overall body of ideas, both in philosophy nor in politics, his life and his one major work, The Philosophy of Redemption, have been major subjects of my interest in my self-study and my intellectual development. Having considered this, let’s dive into the latest contradiction in my personal explorations of love through deep reflection.

We shall begin with proximity and affection, or as I tend to perceive them, as closeness. A conservative maxim is that we love what is close to us, from Edmund Burke, who said that “we begin our public affections in our families“, or as re-stated by Bradley J. Birzer, “we love that which is near, we will never love that which is distant“, to Roger Scruton, who declared that “as another person becomes important to us […] we feel in our lives the gravitational pull of his existence“.

Closeness is a necessary aspect of love since it pre-requires it: you cannot love something you do not know, nor you are not close to. Anything different to that closeness, or the illusion of proximity, in any case, would be admiration at best, infatuation at most, and obsession at worst, and all three of them still share a false idea of closeness, or at least a prospect, an approximation to it (no pun intended).

Now, affection does depend on this element of proximity because as the beloved receives the emotions it sparks in the other, their bond becomes closer (and deeper) since they get to know each other better, in more detail, minutely, that is, to the extent one can know only what is so in front of them they can pinpoint details that would be unknown to the naked eye and to the uninterested subject.

The most classic examples of close bonds are, of course, those between lovers, couples, and those found in family units, like brothers, sisters, siblings. Parenthood and motherhood are also affections built in proximity, but this also falls into familiar affections, so any difference between these other types of close bonds lies mostly in the origin, the degree of separation and the ultimate goal of the goal, with each bond defining also specific kinds of closeness, affection and overall proximity.

But if there is something about proximity, is that it also entails a certain sense of availability in the construction of affections: loving something, someone who is closer is always easier than loving something, someone who happens to be further away. It is not particularly necessary nor mandatory, and there are plenty of examples of strong bonds kept despite physical distance (and also other kinds of distance, like age difference with parents and grandparents and their descendants), but for some kinds of affection, that physical proximity means immediate availability, and thus easier contact.

The timing for this reflection is uncanny because it happens to be around the time my parents, who live in a different country, are visiting me for Christmas and New Year. We have always been close, as in physically close, since I lived with them for pretty much all my life until I left them to pursue studies overseas around a year and a half ago, and since that proximity made us know each other as well as we could, both mentally and emotionally. That is family, after all, the closer of all bonds, the tightest of all networks, the first and stronger of all intermediate bodies.

But the experience of living abroad has given me insights into the meaning of closeness and affection, as I’ve struggled with loneliness and isolation in many ways in different moments, from the starting cultural shock to flatmates I didn’t get along with and lately, to social alienation with my fellow peers in my workplace and the place I live in what seems to be the increasing differences in our ultimate goals and lifestyle choices, even if those can be disregarded at first, or compensated for the most part.

Even though I always find a kindred spirit in my immediate communities, so that loneliness is certainly not as much of a struggle as it might seem, these bonds are not as close as the ones built around family relationships, and so there’s always a little something missing, like a particular kind of affection that cannot be replaced with more available options, because in the end, they are essentially different: family love is different from friendship, and both are different from romance.

This realization that love tends to be finite, both as it is bound by the limits of closeness, in time, space, emotional availability and so on and so forth, is what links my conservative beliefs with my fascination with the dark thought of Mainländer.

You see, conservatism is also a philosophy of pessimism: its doctrine is built on the idea that these things we love, these institutions that allow us to share with our close ones, that project our affections into the larger body politic, that serve us for trade, peace, justice, not only are finite, meaning they have an end at some point, but are also fragile.

We out to preserve them, or more accordingly, to conserve them as much as we can, through laws, through policy, through tradition, because we love them and we want to keep them until our own end (and implicit acceptance of our own mortality) and to pass them on to our descendants.

Scruton himself said that “conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created“. When we apply this to something as fundamental to societal and individual foundations as love and affection, we get to this amazing and terrible realization that the struggle of life lies in finding and keeping this close affections needed for us to thrive and perpetuate in time, so that our existence acquires (a larger) meaning and that that meaning is not lost but becomes transmissible to the future as a legacy.

When you are a young man, like me, working to build a life, trying to find love, community, prestige, the realization of the fragility of human affections and of institutions becomes a spectre, one that can either push you forward as an incentive to outrun it, or one that can keep you down, as a reminder of failures that could not build up into experience through trial and error.

Here’s where the ghost of Philipp Mainländer makes its entrance, since the natural pessimism found in conservatism is not dissimilar to the pessimism of the follower, later critic, of Arthur Schopenhauer, although conservative pessimism perceives the beauty in existence and tries to preserve it as it own object worth of preservation, whereas Mainländer’s pessimism sees existence overall with a certain contempt, not to call it outright disdain.

Mainländer has been for me both a guilty pleasure to read when I’ve felt at my lowest, and a corrupting influence to consider when I’ve decided to engage with ideas outside of my normal, or natural scope of reflection, mostly when it comes to the realm of cosmology and metaphysics.

But as always, these links, that sometimes come as mere coincidences in our intellectual development, are not only the result of a random alignment of stars guiding our destiny, but rather, a loose thread that can be found through series of successive references that go back and forth from one side to the other of the thought spectrum.

Mainländer, for instance, was not a conservative, and he most certainly was not a Christian, like many of his fellow socialdemocrats in XIXth century Germany, but his work is so full of religious analogies and a language of sacrality that it seems paradoxical not to read him as an obscure and apocalyptic theologian instead of only a mediocre pessimist.

His life, just like mine, or maybe that of any reader that finds him or herself in these words, was particularly interesting, and his journey before engaging in philosophy may have been the catalyst for some of his ideas.

A poet, a banker, a soldier, Mainländer was born Philipp Batz, but he changed his last name to honor his hometown, Offenbach am Main. His life was full of loss and intellectual discovery, from a family history of madness, as accounted by famous Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, the loss of his mother during his 24th birthday, and the loss of his hard-earned small fortune during the Panic of 1873, to his discovery of the works of Italian romantic Giacomo Leopardi during his Neapolitan stay during the mid-1850s and of major German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer by 1860.

An obsessive writer, he had composed some works before his major breakthrough, like his epic poem in three parts, The Last Hohenstaufens, but he penned and completed his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Redemption in a mere six months, around which he was also voluntarily conscripted into the Prussian Army by his own request to the German Emperor Wilhelm.

Unlike Schopenhauer, who while also a pessimist, did not live up to his own philosophy and instead was more of a cynical in his personal life, Mainländer was quite miserable while he lived, not because of his condition, but because of the many tragic events that he endured and shaped his worldview.

Mainländer’s philosophy, in that sense, is the extrapolation of the death wish he developed after the death of his mother and the suicide of his older brother, and that he transmitted to his main emotional support, and editor, his sister Minna (who later also renamed herself Melancholia Mainländer) before his own death. It should be worth noting that all the Batz/Mainländer siblings died in the same way, which explains their common condition as a family-shared depression that was best expressed in Philipp’s philosophy.

His main ideas, summarized, are set into a system that explains metaphysical monism in a circular fashion from its start through its own self-destruction, or put in his own words, that the unity of God was to be fulfilled by achieving its own non-existence, realized via proxy through the expansion and entropic collapse of the Universe until it becomes absolute death, eternal nothingness. For Mainländer, this universal will-to-die was redemption, the ultimate goal of the salvation of all creation by its total annihilation.

For such an atheistic perspective, his Philosophy of Redemption is, as previously stated, so full of religious imagery, it results difficult not to consider it close to theology, or at least, to a twisted version of it. For instance, he writes that “the man who has known clearly and distinctly that all life is suffering; that, whatever the way in which it may appear is essentially unhappy and full of pain (even in the ideal state), so that he, like the Christ Child on the arms of Sistine Madonna, can only look into the world with eyes filled with horror, and who then contemplates the deep tranquility, the inexpressible happiness in aesthetic contemplation and, in contrast to the waking state, the happiness of dreamless sleep, whose elevation into eternity is only absolute death, – such a man has to be kindled by the advantage offered, – he cannot do otherwise.“

He also stated that “pessimistic philosophy will be for the historical period that is now beginning, what the pessimistic religion of Christianity was for the one that has passed. The symbol of our flag is not the crucified redeemer but the angel of death with large, placid and clement eyes, supported by the dove of the idea of redemption; in essence, it is the same symbol.”

For this, it should not be surprising that the concept of “the death of God”, so many times wrongly attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, actually originated in Mainländer in the opening lines of The Philosophy of Redemption: “God has died and His death was the life of the world.”

Now, how does all of this relate to the struggle for love and proximity? How does radical pessimism can be considered in the light of the bonds that create community without it meaning the eventual end and collapse of it?

For one, because Mainländer’s philosophy, in its nihilistic tendencies, also includes a call for itw own self-destruction, not only through suicide or general decline, but through the conscious choice of celibacy: “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.”

Given that Mainländer was very consistent with his beliefs, he died single and childless, having decided to forgo that part of the human experience to avoid continuing his presence through his descendants in a world he considered hell just for the sake of existing. Quite a fittingly despondent end for a thinker who rejected life itself.

I compare and contrast this ideas with my own quest for affection because I realize that my natural drive is to try to find a force, the force, love, to build, bind, preserve and expand a community of my own into the future with the ease, the comfort, the sweet delusion of an ascetic life that considers procreation and reproduction as part of the entropy that makes life miserable.

Unlike Mainländer, my conception of existence does not entail a predisposed inclination to suffering due to the imminent destruction of the Universe, but as a sign of its eternal and perennial value: the will-to-live necessarily means a struggle to be overcome, a pain to be cured, a loneliness to be ended by finding the affections needed to make life worth for us and for future generations.

Pessimism such as the one espoused by Mainländer becomes an easy way out when everything seems lost and when we get embraced by the darkness of isolation. To see existence as hell and death as its end would be the easy way out for a loveless life, in which struggle means misery.

But if my own struggle to find the emotional availability to create deep bonds, and my own secure affections, such as the one my dear parents work hard to keep, by travelling land and see to make more proximate, mean something, is that the prize of love is love itself.

Pope Francis, despite his many issues in other areas, has been quite wise in understanding this reality, by simply saying that “God’s tenderness leads us to understand that love is the meaning of life.” It is in love, in proximity, in affection that we find meaning and order, not only for ourselves, but by ourselves in our families, our communities, our small platoons, all up to the whole of humanity and the Universe itself.

Mainländer’s conception of existence was one of a lonely, depressed man who, despite finding some solace in his work, his country and his call to letters, to arms and to politics, could not live up to love more and rise above the losses that permeated his life. And just as death pushed him to take his own life, his ideas remained as a testament of a kind but defeated soul who took his sadness on creation itself, blaming his suffering on the very nature of the universe as a cosmic, decaying corpse who was meant to self-destruct through itself until the end of everything and all.

A Christian, a conservative, and ultimately, a decent human outlook on life and love needs to consider that existence is indeed both a gift and a struggle that we could not reject and from which we cannot back down. Its value is both inherent in its nature and given through its ongoing experience, and love, love is the substance that binds it all together, from its conception to its survival.

We love what is close to us, and we fight to keep it close to us. We value it because it gives meaning to our existence as part of something bigger, of something in which we act not only for ourselves but for others, even to the point of self-sacrifice.

Maybe that’s the lesson we need to keep in mind as we look, fail and get back on our feat in our quest for love. For love itself is what makes life worth living.