ABSTRACT

It became a common complaint early on that the Enlightenment was better at destroying than creating. Among its early opponents it is not at all difficult to find examples of the claim that the philosophes contributed to the collapse of the moral and political order of Europe in the eighteenth century by attacking Christianity and encouraging scepticism towards traditional beliefs and institutions without putting anything positive in their place. It was Jacobi, Hamann’s friend and ally, who first coined the term nihilismus in German in the early nineteenth century to refer to the ultimate consequences of rational enquiry when taken too far, particularly in matters of faith, as he believed had occurred in Frederick II’s enlightened state.2 In the wake of the French Revolution, Hegel’s ‘darkest and deepest work’,3 the Phenomenology of Spirit, portrayed the Enlightenment as pervaded by negativity, wholly incapable of constructing anything positive of its own to replace the faith that it destroyed with such ruthless efficiency. What began in the eighteenth century as ‘a glorious mental dawn’ heralding human emancipation ended for Hegel in the ‘sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive’ during the Reign of Terror.4 Nietzsche’s dramatic and highly influential account of the nihilistic collapse of meaning in modern Europe following the ‘death of God’ belongs to this same Germanic current of thought.5