The Horstmann of the Apocalypse: Das Untier (The Beast) - In English

February 3, 2026 12:54 PM Subscribe

Some of you may have read the Ligotti’s "Conspiracy Against the Human Race", gained an interest into pessimism and writings like those of Philipp Mainländer, and found the community around him on reddit. In this community you can find a link to an English translation of his infamous work "The Philosophy of Salvation" which is a dense, pessimistic treatise on human existence, dealing with Kant and Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant (a critique of a critique if you will). Be forwarned it is a REAL philosophy book, and despite the pop descriptions of it being a bleak work which posits (as is commonly phrased by Ligotti) the cosmos as "the rotting body of God" it is much more dense and rich than that suggests. His is a teleology of Will to Death (as opposed to Schopenhauer’s more positive "Will to Life" or Nietzsche’s "Will to Power")... It could be seen as an early form of understanding of Entropy arising not too distant from the era when Boltzmann was doing his establishing work towards the foundation of modern statistical mechanics. It ties Christian Theology, modern physics, and philosophical concepts into one difficult to follow narrative, that finds redemption in the ultimate void of nothingness, the ultimate fate of all in a unified single whole of cosmic silence. But that’s nothing like Ulrich Horstmann...

Horstmann is, as wikipedia puts it in the intro:

Ulrich Horstmann (born 31 May 1949 in Bünde)[1] is a German literary scholar and writer who has also written under the pseudonym Klaus Steintal. Frequently described as a philosopher in the tradition of philosophical pessimism, he is perhaps most notorious for his view, often regarded as extreme even among other pessimist philosophers, that voluntary human extinction ought to be achieved by way of intentional global thermonuclear annihilation. Horstmann developed an idea of anthropofugal[2] (from greek "anthropo" - human, "fuga" - fleeing) thinking in his philosophical essay "Das Untier" (1983)[3] (literally meaning "The Beast").

Here is a better introduction to him and his thinking than I could ever do.

For years it has been very difficult to find translations of this work into English with only fragments showing up (this is similar to Mainländer (and another favorite in the opposite tendency A.A. Bogdanov)).

I do not believe there is still any official English translation, but Robert Sebastian Castellanos Rodriguez posted this translation on Medium.

* I am assuming it may have been helped via things like Google Translate (and possibly ML techniques (there is no particular info on how this translation was done, but it reads fairly closely to what I was getting when I tried Google Translate, just a bit smoother/cleaned up).

** Bonus: Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo bring us the song The Beast (unrelated to the philosophy, but still a great song)

*** Bonus Bonus: θηρίον (Greek for "The Beast") is a diminutive form (second declension; I do not speak Greek, so this is amateur fun word play)...

In this sense it can mean "lesser than" or "dear to" (as in "my little beast"). It can also mean something like "worm/maggot/grub" (e.g. small beast). (feel free to correct me if this is wrong, but it’s a fun interpretation. There’s so much fun to be had with "The Beast")