In his posthumously recognized “The Philosophy of Redemption” (1876), Philipp Mainländer proposes one of the coolest metaphysical theories that I’ve ever heard of. It follows that the universe began as a single, perfect, omnipotent Being (which he equated with God) but this Being found existence so unbearable that it fragmented itself into the universe as we know it. The ultimate goal of our universe, in his view, is to extinguish itself, thus completing what he saw as God's suicide [1]. Though a more obscured philosopher, at least compared to his teacher Arthur Schopenhauer, the pessimism in Mainländer’s tex..