Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 German Idealism: The Thought of Modernity
- 2 European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch
- 3 History, Tradition, and Skepticism: The Patterns of Nineteenth-Century Theology
- 4 The Young Hegelians: Philosophy as Critical Praxis
- 5 Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation from Locke to Sidgwick
- 6 Capital, Class, and Empire: Nineteenth-Century Political Economy and Its Imaginary
- 7 Positivism in European Intellectual, Political, and Religious Life
- 8 European Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century
- 9 European Socialism from the 1790s to the 1890s
- 10 Conservatism: The Utility of History and the Case against Rationalist Radicalism
- 11 The Woman Question: Liberal and Socialist Critiques of the Status of Women
- 12 Darwinism and Social Darwinism
- 13 Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche
- 14 Philology, Language, and the Constitution of Meaning and Human Communities
- 15 Decadence and the “Second Modernity”
- 16 Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Conditions of Modernity
- 17 Civilization, Culture, and Race: Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century
- 18 The Varieties of Nationalist Thought
- 19 Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy
- 20 Rethinking Revolution: Radicalism at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century
- Index
16 - Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Conditions of Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2019
- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 German Idealism: The Thought of Modernity
- 2 European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch
- 3 History, Tradition, and Skepticism: The Patterns of Nineteenth-Century Theology
- 4 The Young Hegelians: Philosophy as Critical Praxis
- 5 Utilitarianism, God, and Moral Obligation from Locke to Sidgwick
- 6 Capital, Class, and Empire: Nineteenth-Century Political Economy and Its Imaginary
- 7 Positivism in European Intellectual, Political, and Religious Life
- 8 European Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century
- 9 European Socialism from the 1790s to the 1890s
- 10 Conservatism: The Utility of History and the Case against Rationalist Radicalism
- 11 The Woman Question: Liberal and Socialist Critiques of the Status of Women
- 12 Darwinism and Social Darwinism
- 13 Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche
- 14 Philology, Language, and the Constitution of Meaning and Human Communities
- 15 Decadence and the “Second Modernity”
- 16 Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Conditions of Modernity
- 17 Civilization, Culture, and Race: Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century
- 18 The Varieties of Nationalist Thought
- 19 Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy
- 20 Rethinking Revolution: Radicalism at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century
- Index
Summary
Nihilism and pessimism are concerned with the conditions under which we make normative claims in a world that is inherently meaningless. Friedrich Nietzsche aptly summarized this problem in The Gay Science (1882, second edition 1887): “The total character of the world … is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called … Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: … Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word ‘accident’ have a meaning.” Nihilism offers a glimpse into the fundamental paradox of normativity that is central to modern European thought at least since the later eighteenth century: There are no external authorities that safeguard the binding force of the normative commitments we make, both epistemically and morally, and yet we cannot escape, or deny, normative claims. We can live in a world without meaning, but we cannot live in a world without normativity.
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- The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought , pp. 372 - 397Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019
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