(Note: Information on Mainländer has been very difficult to come by so I am forced to cite Wikipedia and the r/Mainlander subreddit’s partial-translation of his works. Also, I have done my best to explain certain speculative realist concepts as I have seen Graham Harman and Timothy Morton do in their lectures before they move on to their main topics. However, I cannot go into an in-depth explanation so here is a quick introduction to SR.)

Philipp Batz, better known as Philipp Mainländer, was born in Offenbach am Main, Germany in 1841. He was a dedicated student of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and, as I argue, a precursor to speculative realism. He does not seem to retroactively fall into a specific category of speculative realism but rather has ideas that appear in several different schools such object-oriented ontology, speculative materialism, etc. In the following months I intend to write several partial pieces on the different proto-speculative realist aspects of Mainländer’s work. The following is on the subject of time and space:

Schopenhauer, following Kant, holds that infinite space and time are internal and imposed upon the external world by the human mind. Unlike Kant, he realizes that without space and time nothing can be differentiated so there can be no things-in-themselves only a single thing-in-itself. He christened this the Will. Schopenhauer’s conclusion asserts that objects are mere figments of the mind but also consist of some fundamental substance. This is seemingly what Graham Harman refers to as “duomining” in which objects are both overmined and undermined. For those unfamiliar with Harman and OOO, overmining is when it is posited that “objects are a falsely deep and reactionary holdover from olden times in philosophy, based on superstitions generated by noun-verb Western grammar, or whatever.” Undermining is when one says that “objects are a shallow fiction of common sense, and that the real action happens at a deeper level.” Both are attempts at removing objects from the discourse around the natural world.

Mainländer, in opposition to his idol, asserts that there are things-in-themselves. He reaches this conclusion by rethinking both space and time. He writes that the human concept of time is “nothing without the underlay of time, or in other words: the real succession would also take place without ideal succession. If there would be no cognizing beings in the world, then the unconscious things-in-themselves would nevertheless be in relentless movement. If consciousness emerges, then time is only the prerequisite for the possibility of cognizing motion, or also: time is the subjective measuring rod of motion.” In this sense, time—meaning the tool of measurement—is (at least largely) internal, but time—meaning the occurrence and duration of objective relations—is external.

On the subject of space, Mainländer asserts that “matter is not movable in space, but substances move in substances and motion in general is only possible due [to] the different [bodies’] so-called states of matter, not because an infinite space encompasses the world.” His ideas bear some resemblance to those of Alfred North Whitehead, another thinker deemed a proto-speculative realist. Whitehead explains that “the passage of events and the extension of events over each other, are… …the qualities from which time and space originate as abstractions.” Mainländer argues that space does not lie infinitely within us a priori but is rather a means by which we can understand the motion of the external world.

Unlike both Kant and Schopenhauer, Mainländer separates the notions of passage/extension—as Whitehead puts it— and space/time, with the former existing and occurring in the absence of a subject. In this way he conceptually undoes the Schopenhauerian Will and restores things-in-themselves. This is the first step towards undoing Schopenhauer’s correlationism—a term coined by Quentin Meillassoux, which he defines as consisting of “disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”—which is necessarily also the first step towards speculative realism.