"Metaphysics, he tells us, gives us a view of the world as a whole, so that all the partial perspectives of the earlier chapters of his book now appear as a single vision. That vision is, to put it mildly, macabre. We now enter the darkest recesses of Mainländer’s imagination, which fabricate for us a grim cosmology of death. What the metaphysician sees from his exalted standpoint of the whole of things, Mainländer attests, is that everything in nature and history strives for one thing: death. There is in all things in nature, and in all actions in history, “the deepest longing for absolute annihilation”. In his earlier chapters of his book, in the discussion of physics, ethics and politics, Mainländer wrote about the individual will to life as the very essence of everything, not only of every human being, but also of every thing that exists, whether inorganic or organic. Now in metaphysics, however, we see that this was only a limited perspective, because the striving for existence or life is really only a means for a deeper goal: death. We live only so that we die, because the deepest longing within all of us is for peace and tranquillity, which is granted to us only in death. In this longing of all things for death, we are only participating, unbeknownst to ourselves, in the deeper and broader cosmic process of the divine death. We long to die, and we are indeed dying, because God wanted to die and he is still dying within us."