Nihilism, Perfectionism, Historicism

Desdemona’s Lie: Nihilism, Perfectionism, Historicism

Paul Franks

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Volume 44, Issue 2, Summer 2013,pp. 225-245 (Article)

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Journal of nietzsche studies, Vol. 44, no. 2, 2013.

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225

desdemona’s lie

nihilism, Perfectionism, historicism

Paul Franks

abstract: does the eighteenth-century spinozism debate, in which Jacobi popularized the term “nihilism,” illuminate nietzsche’s conceptions of nihilism and genealogy? frederick Beiser interprets Jacobian nihilism as radicalized cartesian skepticism, according to which even the subject of ideas is unknow-able. Bernard reginster distinguishes two senses of nietzschean nihilism: a metaethical antirealism about our highest values and an ethical despair arising from the sense that our highest values are unrealizable. if both are correct, then juxtaposition is unilluminating. i argue that Jacobi and nietzsche understand nihilism as a disruption of the formation of the subject capable of epistemic or ethical agency, operating in the dimension that stanley cavell calls moral perfectionism. Jacobi’s alternative to nihilism is lived historicity. the young nietzsche realizes that critical historiography undermines this alternative and celebrates the annihilation of personal subjecthood in his inaugural lecture. in the Genealogy, nietzsche seeks to develop a historiography empowering his readers to avoid nihilism by actively forming personal subjects. Genealogy’s effectiveness does not require truthfulness.

emilia: o, who hath done this deed? desdemona: nobody; i myself.

—shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.147

i

“Yea, i am the atheist and the godless one, who, against the will that wills nothing, will tell lies, just as desdemona did when she lay dying.”1

there is a distinctively nietzschean ring to this sentence, which is taken from friedrich heinrich Jacobi’s open letter to fichte in 1799, the text in which the term “nihilism” seems to have been used in a philosophically significant way

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for the first time. there is, in particular, an unmistakable resonance between the sentence quoted from Jacobi and the thought that begins and ends the third essay of GM: the thought that “man . . . prefers to will nothingness than not will” (GM iii:1; KSA 5:339)2 along with the idea that our best defense against nihilism may demand of us something other than the truth.

in this article, i want to begin exploring ways in which early discussions about nihilism around the turn of the nineteenth century—which have been fundamental for my own previous work on German idealism—can be brought into fruitful conversation with what nihilism means to nietzsche and with his project of genealogy. i argue that nietzsche’s conception of nihilism is related to Jacobi’s conception; that the historicism in which nietzsche was educated was conceived in part as a response to the threat of nihilism thematized by Jacobi; that nietzsche discovered a nihilist threat internal to historicism; and that his genealogical method was designed to counter that threat with the very resources that he took to give rise to the possibility of nihilism. some of cavell’s contributions to ethics and epistemology provide the essential links between these claims, because, in the sense that is operative in both the Jacobian and nietzschean segments of my argument, nihilism concerns exactly the dimension of ethics illuminated by what cavell calls perfectionism.

ii

Jacobi is noticeably absent from recent english-language discussions of the meaning and significance of nihilism for nietzsche.3 in a much-cited article, alan White writes, “What makes the term ‘nihilism’ philosophically vital is not its history, but rather its use by nietzsche.”4 of course, Jacobi’s use of the term does not determine nietzsche’s, and the differences are undeniably significant. it would be obtuse to ignore nietzsche’s own remarks in the Genealogy about the difference between origins and purposes, and about the repurposing that is the dynamic of human history. Yet these remarks hardly entail that what matters is only the present use of a term or concept and not its history.

an exception to the neglect of Jacobi is Michael allen Gillespie’s book, Nihilism Before Nietzsche. to those who situate nietzsche’s conception of nihilism against the background of, say, turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, he use-fully points out that “the russian debate over nihilism is an extension of the German controversy.”5 to my mind, however, Gillespie sees more discontinuity between Jacobi and nietzsche than there really is. this is because he focuses too heavily on fichte as Jacobi’s target, ignoring Jacobi’s more general confrontation with spinozism and its descendants. Gillespie writes, “in contrast to all of his predecessors from Jacobi to turgenev, nietzsche . . . sees nihilism as the con-sequence of human weakness and not as the result of a Promethean striving for the superhuman.”6 as we shall see, however, Jacobi’s diagnosis runs deeper than


DesDemona’s lie 227

this: Promethean striving is only one symptom of nihilism. Moreover, Gillespie does not explore a further continuity between Jacobi and nietzsche: the thought that the antidote to nihilism is nothing other than a certain practice of history.

Jacobi goes unmentioned in Bernard reginster’s book, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. i do not say that reginster is obliged to mention him. But i do suggest that, in fact, reading nietzsche and Jacobi together, along with cavell, brings out a sense of nihilism quite different from those discussed by reginster, who helpfully distinguishes between two senses: the nihilism of disorientation and the nihilism of despair.7 nihilism as disori-entation is metaethical in character: it involves antirealism about our highest values, along with the conviction that our highest values are valuable only if the proper account of them is realistic. in contrast, nihilism as despair is ethical in character: assuming that our highest values are indeed valuable, it finds that they are unrealizable, and consequently judges that the world ought not to exist. as reginster is quick to point out, these senses of nihilism are not only in contrast, but also in conflict.8 the second assumes exactly the worthiness of our highest values that the first denies. this is a conflict that reginster seeks to accommodate within his account of nietzsche’s strategy.

i have no wish to deny that “nihilism” in both of the senses identified by reginster may be encountered in nietzsche’s writings, and i do not explore the relevant passages here. however, i want to suggest that there is a third— arguably more fun-damental—sense of nihilism, brought out by reading nietzsche alongside Jacobi. in this sense, nihilism is neither ethical nor metaethical. rather, it operates within the dimension of ethical life characterized by stanley cavell in terms of perfectionism.9

cavell writes, “[P]erfectionism is directed at the precondition for moral thinking.”10 i take the precondition in question to be one’s own identity as an agent capable of moral—or, more broadly, ethical—thinking. Many ethicists have taken some interest in the formation of the subject required for ethical agency, but much of ethical theory assumes that moral agency is already formed, focusing on how such agents should act or reason. this, i believe, is what cavell means when he says, “Perfectionism, as i think of it, is not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought.”11 in other words, perfectionism does not offer a competing account of moral reasoning or action.

But this does not mean that perfectionism does not impinge on theories of ethi-cal life at all. for a distinctive feature of what cavell calls perfectionism is the idea that the subject formation of ethical agency is not achieved once and for all, and that some crucial questions of one’s life concern one’s very identity as an ethical agent. such questions are invisible to theories of ethical life such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, which assume that the formation of the subject is complete. But perfectionism focuses precisely on these questions, which arise at moments of crisis. the crisis may be individual, as when one finds oneself confused about whom one should marry or be married to, hence about whom one should be


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intelligible to, hence about whom one should aspire to be. “Perfectionism . . . recognizes difficulties in the moral life that arise not from an ignorance of your duties, or a conflict of duties, but from a confusion over your desires, your attrac-tions and aversions.”12 or the crisis may afflict an entire culture:

[M]an has as it were suffered a setback (another fall, one could say), which has left him everywhere less than human (Mill will say: distorted, crippled; nietzsche will say: degenerated), and in such a way that he is incapable of the necessary condition of morality (according to Kant, the capacity to stand on his own, that he be autonomous). (if moral perfectionism can be understood as meant to repair this setback, to establish the condition of moral agency, and if one understands perfectionism as the moral impetus of Plato and aristotle, then it is as if at the establishment of Western philosophy there was already the recognition of the possibility of human setback, that the soul, like the state, was capable of a lapse back into animality, unfit for the conversation of justice.)13

cavell understands what nietzsche calls nihilism to be a setback of this kind, a collapse of the subjectivity required for ethical agency: “nietzsche’s word for the spreading inability to want the world is nihilism.”14 note that this is neither of reginster’s two kinds of nihilism. it is neither metaethical disorientation nor ethical despair. Both assume not only that we want the world—that we evaluate it in specific ways—but also that we have distinct evaluative rankings, so that we may be said to have highest values. What cavell understands by “nihilism,” however, is the threat internal to perfectionism, the threat of lapsing into an inability to value altogether, let alone to have a ranking on which some values are highest. if the only problems visible to ethical theory are either ethical problems of judgment or metaethical problems about how to understand ethical judgment, then nihilism in cavell’s sense—which, i contend, is also Jacobi’s and nietzsche’s sense—will be invisible.

iii

i turn now to Jacobi’s 1799 open letter to fichte. here is the seminal passage in which Jacobi speaks of nihilism:

since outside the mechanism of nature i encounter nothing but wonders, mysteries, and signs; and i feel a terrible horror before the nothing, the absolutely indeter-minate the utterly void, (these three are one: the Platonic infinite!), especially as the object of philosophy or aim of wisdom; yet, as i explore the mechanism of the nature of the I as well as of the not-I, i attain only to the nothing-in-itself; and i am so assailed, so seized and carried away by it in my transcendental being (personally, so to speak) that, just in order to empty out the infinite, i cannot help wanting to fill it, as an infinite nothing, a pure-and-total-in-and-for-itself (were it not simply impossible!): since, i say, this is the way it is with me and the science of the true, or more precisely, the true science, i therefore do not see why i, as a matter of taste, should not be allowed to prefer my philosophy of non-knowledge to the philosophical knowledge of the nothing, at least in fugam



vacui. i have nothing confronting me, after all, except nothingness; and even chimeras are a good match for that. truly, my good fichte, i would not be vexed if you, or anyone else, were to call Chimerism the view i oppose to the Idealism that i chide for Nihilism.15

note first that Jacobi sees the nihilism with which he charges fichtean idealism as of a piece with a mechanistic understanding of nature. this may sound odd to con-temporary ears. But Jacobi is not alone in viewing transcendental idealism, rather than some methodologically naturalistic doctrine, as the philosophy required to underwrite modern natural science.16 as Jacobi explains in a passage from the second (1789) edition of his seminal spinoza book, which he also appended to his 1799 letter to fichte, it is characteristic of modern natural science to concep-tualize nature in a way that facilitates purely quantitative analysis and expla-nation. Qualitative features of nature must be, in Jacobi’s words, “objectively annihilated.”17 Jacobi expresses no objection to this scientific procedure as such, which renders nature manipulable. What he objects to, in the first place, is the mistaking of the lifeless scientific concept for the actuality of nature, as if nature itself were lifeless.

i find it significant that, in an appendix to his letter to fichte about idealism, Jacobi publishes material from the second edition of his earlier open letter to Mendelssohn about spinozism. some readers have failed to connect Jacobi’s indictment of idealism with his earlier indictment of spinozism, but i regard them as intimately connected. Gillespie’s reading, which focuses on the fichtean absolute will as definitive for what Jacobi calls nihilism, has already been mentioned. another example is frederick Beiser’s epistemological read-ing.18 noting correctly that Jacobi fails to distinguish transcendental idealism from empirical idealism, hence from a sort of mental representationalism, Beiser infers that views of this kind are the principal targets of Jacobi’s nihil-ism charge.

if i am right that Jacobi’s attack on the nihilistic character of fichte’s idealism is an extension of his attack on spinozism, then nihilism should not be char-acterized in terms that apply only to fichte’s idealism, which would sever the connection to Jacobi’s earlier attack. spinoza rejects the idea of absolute will, as Jacobi is well aware, so Gillespie’s interpretation of nihilism is problematic.19 Moreover, Jacobi explicitly acknowledges that spinoza is not a representa-tionalist who has an epistemological problem about what these representations represent, so Beiser’s interpretation does not pass the test either.20

is there another interpretation of nihilism that applies both to fichte and to spinoza? i have argued in various publications that there is.21 here my rehearsal of the argument will be brief. the crucial point is that, although Jacobi does not use the term “nihilism” before 1799, he speaks explicitly about annihilation in the material reprinted from the second (1789) edition of his letters on spinozism, and this draws in turn on the idea of negation in the first (1785) edition. Jacobi draws attention in both editions of his spinoza book to a doctrine that is mentioned


230 Paul Franks

only in spinoza’s letters: “‘determination is negation, or determination does not pertain to a thing in virtue of its being’ [Determinatio est negatio, seu determi-natio ad rem juxta suum esse non pertinet].22 individual things therefore, so far as they only exist in a certain determinate mode, are non-entia; the indeterminate infinite being is the one single true ‘real being, that is, it is all being, apart from which there is nothing’23 [ens reale, hoc est, est omne esse, & praeter quod nullum datur esse].”24 Jacobi seems to assume that a genuine individual must have both intrinsic properties and relational properties. finite modes, as spinoza understands them, have no intrinsic properties, while the infinite—God or sub-stance—has no relational properties. consequently, neither can be a genuine individual. the annihilation of individuality, which cannot, in Jacobi’s view, be conceptualized—i.e., converted into a quantifiable and manipulable mecha-nism—is, on my interpretation, at the heart of Jacobi’s conception of nihilism.

later Jacobi tells us more about what an individual is. in his 1787 dialogue con-cerning david hume, he tells us, “all truly actual things are individuals or singular things, and, as such, they are living beings (principia perceptiva et activa) that are external to one another.”25 to be alive, moreover, is to be a purposive agent:

Whatever lives in time must first generate its present consciousness, its temporal life, acting alone within itself through combination. hence the form of life, and the drive for life, and the life itself are in actuality only one. the object of the unconditional drive, which we call the fundamental drive, is immediately the form of the being whose drive or efficient faculty it is. to retain this form in existence, to express oneself in it, is its unconditional goal and the principle of all self-determination in the creature, so that no being can propose a goal for itself except in virtue of, and in conformity with, its drive. In general, drives refer to need. everything alive in nature moves with purpose, that is, according to relations of needs.26

for present purposes, i set aside the question, recently discussed, whether spinoza can, after all, accommodate teleology. on Jacobi’s interpretation, as on Jonathan Bennett’s, he cannot.27 strikingly, neither—on Jacobi’s view—can the fichtean idealist. to be sure, the idealist helps himself to the notions of will and purpose. But he does so within a system that remains structurally spinozistic: the infinite is immanent within the whole of the finite, and the finite is what it is by means of negation. Without intrinsic and relational properties, there can be no indi-viduality. Without individuality, there can be no will and purpose, hence no life.

in a passage that i have already cited from the 1789 edition of the spinoza book, republished in the 1799 letter to fichte, Jacobi sees the annihilation of the individuality of natural beings as a fundamental feature of the mod-ern rationality manifest in mathematical natural science’s relationship to its objects.28 this is not in itself nihilism. the further step to nihilism is taken when the individuality of the subject is annihilated. and Jacobi sees this further step taken both in spinoza’s thoroughgoing naturalization of the will and in



fichte’s thoroughgoing idealization of the will. a human individual is neither a mode of spinoza’s divine substance, nor a mode of fichte’s absolute i that is striving for absoluteness. neither conception acknowledges as essential to a particular human the irreducible peculiarity of his or her personality, that unrepeatable nexus between intrinsic gifts and defects, and familial and social context.

as i have argued elsewhere, i do not take Jacobi’s point to be merely that spinozistic or idealistic systems cannot accommodate individuality at the level of theory. if this were so, then nihilism would be a merely theoretical threat. i take it rather that nihilism is or can be a practical threat to individuality. nihilism can be lived. or, rather, life can annihilate itself. We can see this, not only in the passion with which Jacobi draws attention to the nihilism implicit in philosophy, but also in his novels. for example, the character edward allwill is, as his name announces, all will. he pours himself passionately into each moment. this makes him immensely seductive. But it also makes him immensely dangerous, both to women and to himself. he is incapable of constancy, of fidelity, and it is unclear whether even love can save him. full of Sturm und Drang, this proto-romantic is in truth no individual. despite his sophistication, he lacks the conditions for ethical subjectivity.29 similarly, one who becomes obsessed with the quest for a grounding in first principles that will satisfy the skeptic, can lose the faith in one’s capacity to perceive facts as reasons, a faith without which proper functioning as an epistemic subject is impossible.

What Jacobi calls nihilism has, therefore, many manifestations. it is found in spinozism, with its rationalistic systematization of nature, mind, and God. it is found in allwill, with his seductive but undisciplined passion. and it is found also in fichtean idealism and in Kantian morality, with their focus on the pure will.30 any annihilation of individuality—of the formation of the subject that is a necessary condition for the possibility of agency—counts as nihilism, whether the agency in question is epistemological, ontological, or ethical. and this annihilation can occur either in virtue of the overreaching of the dogmatist or through the anxiety of the skeptic.

at this point, i want to adduce the passage in the 1799 open letter to fichte from which my opening quotation was extracted:

i . . . admit that i do not know the good in itself, as i do not know the true in itself, but that i have only a distant intimation of it. i declare that i become furious whenever they want to impose on me the will that wills nothing in its stead, this hollow shell of self-subsistence and freedom in the absolute indeterminate, and accuse me of atheism, of true and genuine godlessness, if i resist accepting it in exchange. Yea, i am the atheist and the godless one, who, against the will that wills nothing, will tell lies, just as desdemona did when she lay dying; the one that will lie and defraud, just as Pylades did when he passed himself off for orestes; will murder, as timoleon did; or break law and oath, like epaminondas, or John de Witt; commit suicide like otho, perpetrate sacrilege like david—yea, i would


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pluck ears of wheat on the Sabbath just because i have hunger, and the law is made for man, not man for the law. i am this godless man, and i scoff at the philosophy that calls me godless on this account.31

Jacobi would rather acknowledge a limitation of his epistemic access to the good or the true in itself, than claim a knowledge whose price is nihilism. this sounds Kantian, but it is clear elsewhere that Jacobi does not conceive this limitation in an idealist manner. We are directly acquainted with the in itself, in something like the way that we are perceptually acquainted with external objects. if this acquain-tance—which, in the passage cited above, Jacobi calls “intimation [ahnung]”—does not amount to knowledge, this is only because it cannot be justified according to the demands of philosophers, through grounding in first principles.

not long after, Jacobi continues,

don’t teach me what i know and understand how to demonstrate perhaps better than you might like, namely, that if a universally valid and rigorously scientific system of morality is to be established, one must necessarily lay at its foundation that will that wills nothing, that impersonal personality [unpersönliche Persönlichkeit], that naked selfhood of the i without any self—in a word, pure and bare inessentialities.32

he concludes,

if the highest that i can recollect in me, that i can intuit, is my i, empty and pure, naked and bare, with its self-subsistence and freedom, then reflective self-intuition is a curse for me, and so [is] rationality . . . i curse my existence.33

in a striking anticipation of nietzsche, Jacobi sees, at the culmination of modern nihilism, not the absence of willing exemplified, on his reading, by spinozism, but rather the will that wills nothing. this is exemplified, on his reading, by Kantian moral philosophy and fichtean idealism.

it is not that Kant and fichte are more nihilistic than spinoza. it is rather that Kantian moral philosophy and fichtean idealism display more transpar-ently than spinozism the force that manifests itself in all versions of nihilism.34 spinozism, as Jacobi interprets it, can make no serious attempt to account for the conditions of its own production. German idealism, in contrast, can offer an account. this account, however, appeals to an “impersonal personal-ity,” to a “selfless self.” in its attempt to meet the philosophical demand for rationality—for ultimate justification and systematicity—it unwittingly turns life—specifically, humanity—against itself. the will that wills nothing is still a will, but it is a will directed at its own self-destruction. the human who, recoiling from his or her own humanity, experiences a lapse into animality, does not become a nonhuman, but instead becomes inhuman, a possibility available to humans alone.

from the onslaught of images in Jacobi’s prose, i extract desdemona’s death because it also frames the conclusion of part iV of cavell’s major work on



skepticism, The Claim of Reason. although cavell does not explicitly connect his thinking about skepticism with his thinking about perfectionism, one way to see their linkage is to note that nihilism emerges in both as a threat that can be invisible to dominant ways of philosophizing within the academy as it is currently constituted.

on dominant ways of thinking about skepticism, it is a family of problems arising for the theory of knowledge and other epistemic states. there may be parallels between these epistemological accounts and ethics—say, between epis-temic and ethical virtues—but skepticism does not have, on such ways of think-ing, a directly ethical dimension. at the conclusion of Claim of Reason, however, othello comes into view as the representative of a skepticism about other minds that runs deeper than a merely epistemological conception of skepticism can allow. to doubt another mind is not merely to encounter a problem in the theory of knowledge. it is to fail the ethical demand to acknowledge another individual as another individual. this has “the consequent implication that there is . . . a standing possibility of death-dealing passion, of a yearning at once unappeas-able and unsatisfiable, as for an impossible exclusiveness or completeness.”35 What moves othello to murder is not an epistemic lack, but rather a failure to acknowledge that desdemona, on whom he has staked the meaning of his life, if not of the world, is separate from him. he does not acknowledge her individual-ity, and it is this figurative annihilation that is literalized by his murder of her.

i leave aside for present purposes the question cavell raises at this point about whether skepticism about the external world could also be understood in this way. What matters to me here is that cavell’s description of othello marks a crucial moment in the development of a characterization of skepticism that draws explicitly on nietzsche to figure humanity as self-denying. thus cavell asks,

is the cover of scepticism—the conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack—a denial of the human or an expression of it? for of course there are those for whom the denial of the human is the human. call this the christian view. it would be why nietzsche undertook to identify the task of overcoming the human with the task of overcoming the denial of the human, which implies overcoming the human not through mortification but through joy, say through ecstasy.36

it is but a small step from here to cavell’s explicit use of the term “nihilist” in his account of Winter’s Tale:

let us go back to my claim that leontes’ wish for there to be nothing—the skeptic as nihilist—goes with his effort, at the cost of madness, not to count. the general idea of the connection is that counting implies multiplicity, differentiation. then we could say that what he wants is for there to be nothing separate, hence nothing but plenitude. But he could also not just want this either, because plenitude, like nothingness, would mean the end of his (individual) existence.37

i hope it is clear that cavell is now in recognizably Jacobian territory: both the wish for there to be nothing but plenitude and the wish for there to be


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nothing—both the will to all and the will to nothingness—have the same core: a failure to acknowledge individuality that threatens to translate itself into a lived destructiveness.

iV

What alternative to nihilism does Jacobi propose? What lies does he tell? Jacobi sometimes seems to recommend nothing more than a voluntary rejec-tion of the skeptical demand for justification that, in his view, initiates the quest for foundations that ultimately leads to nihilism. this is the famous “leap of faith”:38 a leap back to the innocence of everyday life, to what Jacobi calls “the faith of natural reason.”39 But it is unclear how our innocence can be restored, how we can stop—not only responding but—feeling the need to respond to the demand for justification. When it comes to therapy, Jacobi has little to offer.

however, near the end of his spinoza book, he makes some pregnant remarks. there he valorizes sperchis and Bulis, two spartans who—according to herodotus—went voluntarily to their deaths at the hands of King Xerxes, in order to atone for the spartan murder of two Persian ambassadors.40 Jacobi admires not only their steadfastness but also their rejection of Persian demands for justification:

they did not try to teach [the Persians] their truth; on the contrary, they explained why this could not be done. nor did they become more intelligible when they stood before Xerxes . . . sperchis and Bulis probably had less facility in thought and reasoning than the Persian prefect. they did not appeal to their understanding; to their fine judgment, but only to things, and their desire for them. nor did they boast of any virtue; they only professed their heart’s sense [Sinn], their affection. they had no philosophy, or rather, their philosophy was just history. and can living philosophy ever be anything but history?41

to amplify Jacobi’s question: if a “living philosophy” is the expression of the unreflective, almost instinctive ethical convictions of the people of a con-crete time and place, then is herodotus not an exemplary writer of antinihilist philosophy? is the modern desdemona . . . a historian?

something like this position is articulated in one of the crucial links between Jacobi’s account of the threat of nihilism and the historicism in which nietzsche was educated: Wilhelm von humboldt’s 1821 address to the Prussian academy on the task of the historian. humboldt regarded himself as a student both of Jacobi and of the classical philologist friedrich august Wolf, whose impor-tance for nietzsche we will see shortly.42 although humboldt does not say so explicitly, this founding document of historicism seems designed to show how the study of history could counter the threat of nihilism thematized by



Jacobi, and thus why the study of history—rather than either theology or philosophy—had been placed at the heart of the new university of Berlin. for the aim of the historian is both to grasp individuality and to form his or her readers as individuals.

to be sure, “the historian’s task is to present what actually happened. . . . an event, however, is only partially visible in the world of the senses.”43 this is because events are immanently purposive singularities involving individu-als, and individuals are actualizations of ideas or forms that are not given to the senses. like the poet, the historian must employ imagination. like the philoso-pher, however, the historian must thematize ideas.

Just as philosophy seeks the ultimate reason of things, and art the ideal of beauty, so history strives to attain the vision of man’s fate in its complete truth, its living abundance and pure clarity—a vision conceived by a soul so fixed upon its object that the opinions, feelings, and claims of personality [die ansichten, Gefühle, und ansprüche der Persönlichkeit] lose themselves in it and dissolve.44

in order to achieve this goal of grasping the human as such, hence constituting an impersonal individuality, the historian must steer between the scylla of poetry and the charybdis of philosophy. the historian must be creative, employing reflective judgment, but must resist the temptation of historical fiction. he or she must thematize the immanently purposive patterns of ideas, but must not impose on events an external purpose drawn from abstract reasoning, such as “dead institutions and . . . the concept of an ideal totality.”45 history writing is a fragile business. if it is to be faithful to actuality, then it cannot confine itself to narrating the visible facts, and it is threatened on both sides by the possibility of collapse into outright lying.

if these dangers are avoided, however, then so—it seems—is nihilism: the historian grasps just the individuality in human life that is missed by the spinozist and his various descendants, and, in so doing, the historian constitutes himself or herself as an individual—not, to be sure, an individual like sperchis and Bulis, whose heart expresses the way of life of a single polis, but an individual who expresses humanity as such from the standpoint of the historically self-conscious culture of late modernity.

nietzsche explodes this comfortable account of the relationship between nihilism and historicism. Whereas Jacobi associates nihilism with natural-ism, viewing historicism as a salutary alternative, nietzsche sees with painful clarity that historicism can in fact be another—non-naturalistic—version of nihilism. in his earliest work, this seems to be a source of nietzsche’s attraction to historicism, specifically to classical philology or alterthumswissenschaft. his inaugural lecture, given at the tender age of twenty-four, celebrates both the destructive and the creative power of philology, crossing every line that humboldt had carefully drawn to safeguard the writing of history.


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from exactly those circles upon whose support we have to count with the greatest certainty—the artistic friends of antiquity, the warm venerators of hellenic beauty and noble simplicity—disgruntled sounds sometimes become audible, as if the philologists themselves were the real opponents and destroyers of antiquity and of ancient ideals. schiller accused the philologists of having ripped up homer’s laurels. it was Goethe, himself earlier a supporter of Wolf’s views regarding homer, who declared his defection in these verses: “sharp-witted, as you are, you freed us from veneration. and we conceded far too freely, that the Iliad is but a patchwork [flickwerk].” (KGW ii 1.252)46

nietzsche points here to a tension within the German relation to Greek antiquity. on the one hand, there is the constructive ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”—the harmony of feeling and culture—thematized by Winckelmann and celebrated by poets. on the other hand, there is the destruc-tive force expressed by Wolf’s argument that the works ascribed to homer were produced by many hands over many years, and not by an individual.47 regardless of whether Wolf is correct or not, this destructive turn is highly sig-nificant: “once historical criticism has, with complete confidence, seized upon the method of letting apparently concrete personalities evaporate [scheinbar konkrete Persönlichkeiten verdampfen zu lassen], it is permitted to point to the first experiment as an important event in the history of the sciences, quite independently of whether it succeeded in this case” (KGW ii 1.255). in its annihilation of the idealized individuality of the authors to whom texts were traditionally ascribed, critical philology of the Wolfian variety—unleashed on classical Greek texts and on the hebrew Bible—showed itself to be no less nihilistic than natural science.

of course, philologists did not simply accept this dissolution. in response, they sought to identify the Urtexte of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which they could still ascribe to an individual homer. But, according to nietzsche, their reconstructions showed more about them than about antiquity:

all those excesses, everything dull or substandard which one believed one had found in the homeric poems, were attributed to unfortunate transmission. What was left of the individual-homeric? nothing but a series of beautiful and prominent passages, chosen in accordance with subjective taste. the sum total of aesthetic singularity which the particular scholar recognized with his own artistic gifts, he now called homer. this is the central point of the homeric errors. namely, from the beginning, the name of homer has no necessary connection, either to the concept of aesthetic perfection, or to the Iliad and the Odyssey. homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not an historical tradition, but rather an aesthetic judgment. (KGW ii 1.263)

in short, the supposed discovery of the original, individual homer was in fact an aesthetic construction of individuality on the part of the historian. so philology has not only destructive but also constructive power, which nietzsche will later exploit.



But this constructive power transgresses one of humboldt’s boundaries: historical truth has become poetic fiction. and the proposal with which nietzsche concludes his inaugural lecture transgresses the other border:

even for a philologist it is appropriate to press the goal of his endeavor and the way to it into the brief formula of a confession of faith; and so, let this be done insofar as i reverse the saying of seneca: “philosophia facta est quæ philologia fuit [where philology once was, philosophy now is].”48 By this, i wish to express that each and every philological activity should be enclosed and surrounded by a philosophical world-view, according to which everything individual and isolated [alles einzelne und Vereinzelte] is evaporated as something reprehensible, and only that which is whole and unitary [das Ganze und einheitliche] remains. (KGW ii 1.269)

if philology cannot be the recovery of individuality, as humboldt would have wished, and if it has instead become nothing more than the aesthetic construction of individuality, then the young nietzsche proposes to unleash philology’s nihilistic force, so that the ideas underlying actuality become visible in their unalloyed universality. Philological nihilism thus becomes the prolegomenon to philosophy.

there is a striking parallel between the attitude to nihilism taken by the young nietzsche and the attitude taken by hegel in his early Jena writings. like nietzsche in his inaugural lecture, hegel does not want to defend his discipline against nihilism. instead, he wants to let nihilism loose so that it can purify the discipline, allowing true philosophy to emerge. Jacobi’s greatness, in hegel’s view, consists in his discovery of nihilism. his limitation consists in his inability to see that nihilism is not opposed to faith, but is rather its prerequisite: “[the faith of Jacobi contrasts with] true faith [in which] the whole sphere of finitude, of being-something-on-one’s-[own]-account, the sphere of sensibility sinks into nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal. the thinking here becomes one with the intuiting, and all the midges of subjectivity are burned to death in this consuming fire, and the very con-sciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified.”49 at this early stage, hegel regards nihilism solely as the preparation for philosophy, as the anni-hilation of subjectivity that allows the untainted ideas to be intuited. a major step in the development of hegel’s mature philosophy, however, consists in the overcoming of this separation between the prolegomenon to philosophy, and philosophy proper—or, in hegel’s terminology, between logic and meta-physics. Beginning with the Phenomenology of Spirit, there will be no such separation: nihilism, allowed to run its course without any impediment what-soever, will effect not only purification but also the constitution of a higher subjectivity that hegel calls absolute spirit. negation becomes determinate.

and here too there is a striking parallel. for the mature nietzsche also comes to see nihilism, not only as purification, but also as an eventual self-affirmation or individuation. this is evident, i argue, in GM.


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V

nietzsche does not offer a definition of “nihilism” in GM. this is hardly surprising, since he says there that “only something which has no history can be defined” (GM ii:13; KSA 5:317). But every articulation of nihilism in the book seems to me compatible with the core meaning that is already to be found in Jacobi: the annihilation of the individuality required for agency. What is distinc-tive of nietzsche’s time is just that now justification is demanded, not for some piece of putative knowledge or for the maxim of some will-determination, but rather for humanity itself: “But from time to time grant me . . . a glimpse of a man who justifies man himself, a stroke of luck, an instance of a man who makes up for and redeems man, and enables us to retain our faith in mankind! . . . the sight of man now makes us tired—what is nihilism today if it is not that? . . . We are tired of man . . .” (GM i:12; KSA 5:278). like the mature hegel, nietzsche sees that self-negation is not merely the preparation for self-affirmation, but can be and has been the vehicle of human self-affirmation. Without self-denial, which has reached its apogee in modern morality and science, there can be no sovereign will. however, just as the greatest threat from hegel’s perspec-tive is a self-negation that is abstract rather than determinate, leading precisely nowhere, so the greatest threat from nietzsche’s perspective is a self-negation so thoroughgoing that it leads to the negation of human life itself, a “suicidal nihilism” (GM iii:28; KSA 5:411).

against this threat, nietzsche offers us a genealogy. this is plainly a descendant of the Jacobian strategy of an antinihilistic “living philosophy” or “history.” But nietzsche is not trying naively to restore us to the golden age of spercis and Bulis, of unreflective self-affirmation even unto death. What does nietzsche mean when, early in GM, he complains that the english psychologists lack “historical spirit” (GM i:2; KSA 5:258)? What is the “historical spirit” that can help to overcome nihilism?

in one respect, the grounds of nietzsche’s complaint seem obvious. the english psychologists explain historical processes, but the explanatory factors they employ are themselves ahistorical. the maximization of utility and the formation of habits are understood by these psychologists—as by the ratio-nal choice theorists who are their contemporary descendants—as timeless features of human nature. But “modern historiography”—by which nietzsche surely means mainstream German philology and the extension of its methods, supported by von humboldt, from antiquity to modernity—fares little better. he repeats his youthful insight that it too is a form of nihilism, framing that insight within the account of asceticism in GM iii: “or did the whole of mod-ern historiography take a more confident position regarding life and ideals? its noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror, it rejects all teleology, it does not want to ‘prove’ anything any more, it scorns playing the judge, and shows good taste there,—it affirms as little as it denies, it asserts and ‘describes.’ . . . all this



is ascetic to a high degree, but to an even higher degree it is nihilistic, makes no mistake about it!” (GM iii:26; KSA 5:405). What, then, is genealogy if it is to employ both genuinely historical explanatory factors and to do so in a way that helps to overcome nihilism?

since i cannot offer a full answer here, the following points will have to suffice. the will to power is conceived by nietzsche as a genuinely historical explanatory factor, an immanent purposiveness that actively repurposes existing formations in the quest for mastery over circumstances and counterforces that are always local: “the ‘development’ of a thing, a tradition, an organ, is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost,—instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results too, of successful countermeasures. the form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ even more so” (GM ii:12; KSA 5:315–16). it is crucial to note here that, when nietzsche rejects teleology, he is rejecting both external teleology—purposiveness that presupposes a mental representation of purpose—and global teleology—purposiveness that moves toward a single goal over the whole of history. here he differs decisively from hegel, whose teleol-ogy is also, to be sure, immanent and not external, but is nevertheless global. in any event, where there is a will, there is purposiveness, hence always a goal, however local it may be, and this is the central point in nietzsche’s criticisms of darwin.50 even nothingness is better than no purpose at all.

Guided by “historical spirit,” genealogy of morality must show us the succession of subjugations and transformations—of repurposings—whereby modern subjectivity has become what it is. in this sense, it is a successor to Wolfian philology, which performs a similar operation on the idea of subjectivity to which the name of homer has been attached. in both cases, the result is partly destructive: history of this kind can help to break the hold of ideas whose grip on us depends in part on the presupposition that they have no history.

like any historical endeavor, genealogy is possible only by means of a certain asceticism: nietzsche’s work is the product of much dedicated self-denial. But the objective is not self-effacement before the facts, as it is for those whom nietzsche calls the modern historiographers. the point of nietzsche’s genea-logical self-discipline is self-affirmation. he wants to exemplify in his writing a subjectivity emerging from the self-denials of christianity, morality, and their latest successor: the will to truth, whose arrival at self-consciousness, he does not doubt, will destroy morality (GM iii:27; KSA 5:411). here too, we can see what has become of nietzsche’s youthful and heretical version of philology. it was once his complaint that the philologist’s homer was a reflection, neither of facts nor of ideas, but rather of the philologist’s subjectivity. But it is now no complaint to say that nietzsche’s GM is a self-portrait.


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the work, however, is necessarily incomplete. for nietzsche recognizes that, thanks to his own philological Bildung, he can achieve only a self-affirmation that remains within the ambit of the will to truth. he can revaluate morality genealogically, but he can call only for a revaluation of truth, raise the question of its value. this is why he can hope only for a glimpse of “another, younger man, one ‘with more future,’ stronger than me” (GM ii:25; KSA 5:337).

Vi

the truthfulness of nietzsche’s account of the development of late modern subjectivity is not, therefore, the most important dimension in which it should be assessed. for it is written, not to impart truth to ready-formed readers, but rather to contribute to the formation of its eventual readers. in an emersonian formulation quoted by cavell, “truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provo-cation, that i can receive from another soul.”51 does it follow that nietzsche, like desdemona, tells lies against the will that wills nothing? let us first consider desdemona herself. emilia, at the sight of desdemona dying, asks, “o who hath done this deed?”52 desdemona replies, “nobody; i myself.”53 it is othello who calls her “a liar, gone to burning hell.”54 should we take his word for it?

on the one hand, what she says is surely false. she has not committed suicide. othello has murdered her. Yet, on the other hand, there is a seed of truth in what she says. othello has become “nobody.” he has stripped himself of his human-ity in the way that only humans can. and when desdemona says “i myself,” is she merely protecting her husband? or is she implicating herself, assuming responsibility for what has become of her love, and thereby constituting herself as an individual—not merely the object of tragedy, but in some sense its sub-ject? of course desdemona speaks untruly. But nietzsche would surely have us ask whether her lie is honest or dishonest (GM iii:19; KSA 5:386). is it a lie that grows from her with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree (GM P:2; KSA 5:250)?

at least as important is the question of the effect of desdemona’s lie. at first, othello takes refuge in it: “You heard her say yourself, it was not i.”55 But the lie very soon solicits a more honest response: “she’s, like a liar, gone to burning hell: ’twas i that kill’d her.”56 Perhaps othello simply cannot stand the thought of acknowledging desdemona as capable of telling the truth. in any event, her lying act solicits from him an assumption of responsibility; his denial of her self-affirmation produces a counteract of self-affirmation. this brings him one step nearer to the realization of what he has done, of what he has become.

similarly, we readers may conclude that nietzsche’s genealogy is untrue, that it does not pass the test of “modern historiography.” But it is not intended



to “mirror” the facts. it is intended rather to exemplify a subjectivity that moves beyond good and evil by means of a reflection on how it has become what it is. if, in countering nietzsche’s story, we take responsibility for what we have become—as if to say of humanity, in othello’s words, “’twas i that kill’d her”—then nietzsche’s hope will have been partially achieved. But only partially. for the danger will not yet have been averted that we will end the story, like othello, by literalizing our self-annihilation.

Yale [email protected]

notesi thank fred Beiser, stanley cavell, James conant, hindy najman, and Benjamin Pollock for helpful conversations. i am also grateful for the support of the senator Jerahmiel s. and carole s. Grafstein chair in Jewish Philosophy and the Jackman humanities institute at the university of toronto.

1. friedrich heinrich Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte (hamburg: friedrich Perthes, 1799), 32–33; Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel allwill, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s university Press, 1994), 516.

2. translations are from nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith ansell-Pearson, trans. carol diethe (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 1997; rev. student ed., 2007).

3. there is a German-language literature that relates nietzsche to Jacobi. see, e.g., dieter arendt, Nihilismus. Die Anfänge von Jacobi bis Nietzsche (cologne: hegner, 1970); Wilhelm Weischedel and alexander schwan, eds., Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus (darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975); and the work of Wolfgang Müller-lauter, including Nietzsche. Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. david J. Parent (champaign: university of illinois Press, 1999). for a useful overview of the German literature, see stephen Wagner cho, “Before nietzsche: nihilism as a criticism of German idealism,” Graduate Faculty Journal 18.1 (1995): 205–33.

4. alan White, “nietzschean nihilism: a typology,” International Studies in Philosophy 19.3 (1987): 29–44, 29.

5. Michael allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (chicago: university of chicago Press, 1996), 138. on the appropriation of German idealism and discussions of pantheism and nihilism, see Jonathan r. seiling, “from antinomy to sophiology: Modern religious consciousness and sergei n. Bulgakov’s appropriation of German idealism” (Ph.d. diss., university of toronto, 2008). i do not know of any indication that nietzsche was aware of the German background.

6. Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, 179.7. Bernard reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (cambridge,

Mass.: harvard university Press, 2006), 25–28.8. reginster, Affirmation of Life, 33–34.9. see stanley cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (chicago: university of

chicago Press, 1990) and Cities of Words (cambridge, Mass.: harvard university Press, 2005). the central figure for cavell is emerson, and nietzsche’s debt to emerson is certainly significant. see George J. stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (athens: ohio university Press, 1993). on the contested relationship between nietzsche’s perfectionism and emerson’s, see John rawls, A Theory of Justice (cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1971; rev. ed., 1999), 285–92; cavell,


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Conditions, 33–63, and Cities, 208–26; James conant, “nietzsche’s Perfectionism: a reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. richard schacht (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 2000), 181–257; thomas hurka, “nietzsche: Perfectionist,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian leiter and neil sinhababu (oxford: oxford university Press, 2007), 9–31; Vanessa lemm, “is nietzsche a Perfectionist? rawls, cavell, and the Politics of culture in ‘schopenhauer as educator,’” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 34.3 (2007): 5–27. My argument here is independent of the degree of similarity between nietzsche’s perfectionism and emerson’s, and in particular of the question whether nietzsche is an elitist.

10. cavell, Cities, 222.11. cavell, Conditions, 2.12. cavell, Cities, 42.13. cavell, Cities, 217.14. cavell, Cities, 17.15. Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte, 39–40; Main Philosophical Writings, 519.16. see, e.g., the works of hermann cohen, Paul natorp, and ernst cassirer.17. see Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn,

2nd ed. (Breslau: Gottlob löwe, 1789), 419–20n; and Jacobi an Fichte, 64; Main Philosophical Writings, 373–74n: “We comprehend a thing whenever we can derive it from its proximate causes, or whenever we have insight into the order of its immediate conditions. What we see or derive in this way presents us with a mechanistic context. for instance, we comprehend a circle whenever we clearly know how to represent the mechanics of its formation, or its physics; we comprehend the syllogistic formulas, whenever we have really cognized the laws to which the human understanding is subject in judgment and inference, its physics, its mechanics; or the principle of sufficient reason, whenever we are clear about the becoming or construction of a concept in general, about its physics and mechanics. the construction of a concept as such is the a priori of every construction; and at the same time our insight into its construction allows us to cognize with full certainty that it is not possible for us to comprehend whatever we are not in a position to construct. for this reason we have no concept of qualities as such, but only intuitions or feelings. even of our own existence, we have only a feeling and no concept. concepts proper we only have of figure, number, position, movement, and the forms of thought. Whenever we say that we have researched a quality, we mean nothing else by that, save that we have reduced it to figure, number, position, and movement. We have resolved it into these, hence we have objectively annihilated the quality. from this we can easily perceive, without further argument, what must in each case be the outcome of the efforts on the part of reason to generate a distinct concept of the possibility of the existence of our world.”

18. see, e.g., frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (cambridge, Mass.: harvard university Press, 1994), 82: “the most important point to note about Jacobi’s use of the term [‘nihilism’] is that he uses it to designate a specifically epistemological position. the term is virtually synonymous with, although slightly broader than, another term of Jacobi’s: ‘egoism’ (Egoismus). according to the early Jacobi, the egoist is a radical idealist who denies the existence of all reality independent of his own sensations. he is indeed a solipsist, but a solipsist who disputes the permanent reality of his own self as much as the external world and other minds. in his later writings, however, Jacobi tends to replace the term ‘egoist’ with ‘nihilist.’ like the egoist, the nihilist is someone who denies the existence of everything independent of the immediate contents of his own consciousness, whether external objects, other minds, God, or even his own self. all that exists for the nihilist is therefore his own momentary conscious states, his fleeting impressions or representations; but these representations represent, it is necessary to add, nothing.” Beiser repeats this interpretation in other works, including Hegel (london: routledge, 2005). i discuss it in “ancient skepticism, Modern naturalism, and nihilism in hegel’s early Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion



to Hegel and the Nineteenth Century, ed. frederick Beiser (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 2008), 52–73.

19. see spinoza, Ethics, pt. 1, prop. 33, scholium 2.20. see Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch

(Breslau: Gottlob löwe, 1787), 108; Main Philosophical Writings, 292: “You noted earlier that spinoza’s doctrine on this point is really quite different from hume’s skepticism, and you were perfectly correct about that. for although the representations only accompany actions according to spinoza, still the two implicate one another; they are inseparably joined together in one and the same indivisible being and consciousness.”

21. see Paul franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism (cambridge, Mass.: harvard university Press, 2005); “serpentine naturalism and Protean nihilism: transcendental Philosophy in anthropological Post-Kantianism, German idealism, and neo-Kantianism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian leiter and Michael rosen (oxford: oxford university Press, 2007), 243–86; “ancient skepticism.”

22. Jacobi draws the phrase “determination is negation” from letter 50. see spinoza, Opera, ed. carl Gebhardt (heidelberg: Winter, 1925), 4:240; Complete Works, trans. samuel shirley, ed. Michael l. Morgan (indianapolis: hackett, 2002), 892: “With regard to the statement that figure is a negation and not anything positive, it is obvious that matter in its totality, considered without limitation, can have no figure, and that figure applies only to finite and determinate bodies. for he who says that he apprehends a figure, thereby means to indicate simply this, that he apprehends a determinate thing and the manner of its determination. this determination therefore does not pertain to the thing in regard to its being; on the contrary, it is its non-being. so since figure is nothing but determination, and determination is negation, figure can be nothing other than negation, as has been said.” here Jacobi is discussing geometrical figures, not things in general, and it is controversial whether, as Jacobi and hegel think, his view of determination can be generalized. see Yitzhak Melamed, “‘omnis determinatio est negatio’: determination, negation, and self-negation in spinoza, Kant, and hegel,” in Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. eckart förster and Yitzhak Melamed (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 2012), 175–96; and my chapter, “nothing comes from nothing: Judaism, the orient, and Kabbalah in hegel’s reception of spinoza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael della rocca (oxford: oxford university Press, forthcoming). although the gloss on the phrase is given by Jacobi in latin, it appears to be his own formulation rather than a quotation. it is also Jacobi who draws the consequence that individuals are non-entia.

23. here Jacobi quotes a fragment of a passage concerning “the origin of nature” from spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. see spinoza, Opera, 2:29; Complete Works, 21: “But since, as we shall later see, the origin of nature can neither be conceived in an abstract or universal way, nor can it have a wider extension in the intellect than in reality, nor has it any resemblance to things mutable, we need fear no confusion as to its idea, provided we possess the standard of truth as before shown. for this entity is unique and infinite; that is, it is total being, beyond which there is no being.”

24. Jacobi, Über die Lehre (Breslau: Gottlob löwe, 1785), 131; Main Philosophical Writings, 219–20.

25. Jacobi, David Hume, 174; Main Philosophical Writings, 317–18.26. Jacobi, “to erhard o**,” in a supplement to Allwills Briefsammlung (Königsberg:

f. nicolovius, 1792), 297–98; Main Philosophical Writings, 489.27. see, e.g., Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (indianapolis: hackett, 1984),

chap. 9; edwin curley, “on Bennett’s spinoza: the issue of teleology,” in Spinoza: Issues and Directions, ed. edwin curley and Patricia Moreau (leiden: Brill, 1990), 46–50; Michael della rocca, “spinoza’s Metaphysical Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. don


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Garrett (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 1993), 192–266; don Garrett, “teleology in spinoza and early Modern Philosophy,” in New Essays on the Rationalists, ed. rocco J. Gennaro and charles huenemann (oxford: oxford university Press, 1999), 310–35; Martin lin, “teleology and human action in spinoza,” Philosophical Review 115.3 (2006): 317–54.

28. see note 17 above.29. see Jacobi, Eduard Allwills Briefsammlung, herausgegeben von Friedrich Heinrich

Jacobi, mit einer Zugabe von eigenen Briefen (Königsberg: nicolovius, 1792), translated in Main Philosophical Writings. this is the fourth edition of a novel that has a complex textual history. see Jan ulbe terpstra, ed., Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis Allwill (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1957).

30. see, e.g., the following passage from Jacobi, “to erhard o**,” in a supplement to Allwill, 295; Main Philosophical Writings, 488: “as little as infinite space can determine the particular nature of any one body, so little can the pure reason of man constitute with its will (which is evenly good everywhere since it is one and the same in all men) the foundation of a particular, differentiated life, or impart to the actual person its proper individual value.”

31. Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte, 32–33; Main Philosophical Writings, 516.32. Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte, 33; Main Philosophical Writings, 516.33. Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte, 35; Main Philosophical Writings, 517.34. spinozism must, in Jacobi’s view, become idealism if consistently and rigorously

developed. see Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte, 3; Main Philosophical Writings, 502: “speculative materialism, or the materialism that develops a metaphysics, must ultimately transfigure itself into idealism of its own accord; since apart from dualism there is only egoism, as beginning or end, for a power of thought that will think to the end.”

35. cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (oxford: oxford university Press, 1979), 452.

36. cavell, Claim of Reason, 493.37. cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (chicago:

university of chicago Press, 1988), 89. for the relation between leontes and othello, see cavell, Claim of Reason, 479–80.

38. Jacobi, Über die Lehre (1785), 32–33; Main Philosophical Writings, 195. note, however, that it is lessing who describes Jacobi as recommending a “leap.”

39. Jacobi, Werke, ed. friedrich von roth and friedrich Köppen (leipzig: Gerhard fleischer, 1815), 2:36; Main Philosophical Writings, 552.

40. see herodotus, The Histories, 7:129.41. Jacobi, Über die Lehre, 1st ed. (Breslau: Gottlob löwe, 1785), 181–83; Main Philosophical

Writings, 238–39.42. on humboldt’s relationship to Jacobi, see frederick Beiser, The German Historicist

Tradition (oxford: oxford university Press, 2011), 175–83. on his relationship to Wolf, see 183–87; and on humboldt’s 1821 address, see 207–13.

43. humboldt, “Über die aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers,” in Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Königlich Preussische akademie der Wissenschaften, 1903), 4:35; “on the historian’s task,” History and Theory, 6.1 (1967), 57.

44. humboldt, “Über die aufgabe,” 39; “on the historian’s task,” 60, translation modified.45. humboldt, “Über die aufgabe,” 46; “on the historian’s task,” 64.46. translations from “homer und die klassische Philologie” are my own. on the lecture and

its background, see James i. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (stanford: stanford university Press, 2000), 32–79.

47. see friedrich august Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum (halle: e libraria orphanotrophei, 1795); Prolegomena to Homer, trans. anthony Grafton, Glenn Most, and James zetzel (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1985). Wolf was indebted to a study of the text of the hebrew Bible that drew on the textual criticism of the Jewish masoretes in the way that Wolf learned to draw



on the textual criticism of the alexandrian scholiasts. see Johann Gottfried eichhorn, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 5 vols. (leipzig: Weidmanns erbe und reich, 1780–83); Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament, trans. c. G. reeve from the 4th ed. (london: spottiswood, 1888).

48. a daring reversal of seneca’s lament that philologia facta est quae philsophia fuit: where once philosophy was, there is now (nothing more than) the love of words. see seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, 108.23.

49. hegel, Werkausgabe, ed. eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (frankfurt am Main: suhrkamp, 1970), 2:382; Faith and Knowledge (1802), trans. Walter cerf and h. s. harris (albany: state university of new York Press, 1977), 141.

50. see John richardson’s very helpful book, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (oxford: oxford university Press, 2004), which should be supplemented by an account of immanent purposiveness in German idealism, romanticism, and historicism in the wake of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. for Kant’s impact on German biology, see timothy lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (chicago: university of chicago Press, 1989).

51. ralph Waldo emerson, “the divinity school address,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. robert e. spiller and alfred r. ferguson (cambridge, Mass.: harvard university Press, 1971–), 1:80. according to cavell, Conditions, 37–38, emerson seeks to provoke into being the american scholar, who does not yet exist.

52. shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.146.53. shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.147.54. shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.153.55. shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.151.56. shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.154.


Nihilism, Perfectionism, Historicism

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