Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Phoenix Poets

by Michael Allen Gillespie

In the twentieth century, we often think of Nietzsche, nihilism, and the death of God as inextricably connected. But, in this pathbreaking work, Michael Gillespie argues that Nietzsche, in fact, misunderstood nihilism, and that his misunderstanding has misled nearly all succeeding thought about the subject.

Reconstructing nihilism's intellectual and spiritual origins before it was given its determinitive definition by Nietzsche, Gillespie focuses on the crucial turning points in the development of nihilism, from Ockham and the nominalist revolution to Descartes, Fichte, the German Romantics, the Russian nihilists and Nietzsche himself. His analysis shows that nihilism is not the result of the death of God, as Nietzsche believed; but the consequence of a new idea of God as a God of will who overturns all eternal standards of truth and justice. To understand nihilism, one has to understand how this notion of God came to inform a new notion of man and nature, one that puts will in place of reason, and freedom in place of necessity and order.

Genres: Philosophy

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

6/30/2006

God becomes Man, Man becomes Insane

This is an extremely impressive entry into the (seemingly) never-ending contest to come up with the most coherent 'story of modernity'. As such it should be read alongside not only the accounts of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger but also those of philosophical historians of modernity like Hans Blumenberg, Karl Lowith, Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Yack.

The story that our author wants to tell begins with the rejection of the rationalism (i.e., Aristotelianism) of the falasifa (i.e., al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes), Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas by the Latin Theologians. Today, we tend to think of Latin Scholasticism as a monolithic structure with Aquinas somehow serving as both foundation and capstone. But this is only a confession that one hasn't read the medievals at all. Indeed, the (now infamous) Condemnation of 1277 was in fact aimed not only at exponents of 'radical Averroism' like Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia but also Aquinas himself. In the wake of this ill-conceived condemnation the thought of (most of the) significant subsequent thinkers in the Latin West (i.e., Duns Scotus, Ockham) turned ever more decisively to the God of Absolute Will and His nominalistic World, i.e., the via moderna. Even thinkers who consciously thought of themselves as Thomists (Suarez, for instance) in fact turned away from crucial aspects of Thomistic thought. I should add that we do not even know if the Papacy had a hand in the Great Condemnation or if the Bishop of Paris, Tempier, acted on his own because much of the documentation seems to have been 'conveniently' lost.

But I have gotten ahead of myself! At first blush comparing the present study to those of Blumenberg, Lowith and MacIntyre might seem quite a stretch. One might think that this book is a very focused study of an extremely narrow aspect of the relentless march to modernity. But Gillespie doesn't see it that way and I agree. For instance. in contrast to Blumenberg ('Legitimacy of the Modern World') Gillespie argues that the modern concept of Will is but the secularized version of the Will of the God of (nothing but) Divine Omnipotence. This medieval conception of God originates in the wake of the Great Condemnation and, in its rejection of the limits that Reason imposes on Omnipotence, is (I think) but the Latin form of Arabic Kalam (i.e., speculative theology). Gillespie also maintains, against Blumenberg, that the modern conception of Will (self-assertion to Blumenberg) leads, thanks to the rejection of rationalism it inherits from the medieval divines, to the de-legitimacy of modernity. Indeed, arguing against Yack ('The Longing for Total Revolution), Gillespie points out that the problem with modernity isn't perpetual longing for goals but rather the "repeated rejection of all attained goals as limitations on human freedom". ...Moderns can thus never be satisfied; and this would indeed be nihilism. A caveat though: Gillespie doesn't think this understanding exhausts the possibilities of modernity; indeed, he holds out the hope that a chastened liberalism can yet learn to 'muddle through' and stand up to the various supermen (whether reactionary, revolutionary or postmodern) that want to ever "create the world anew through the application of infinite will." ...Good luck Mr. Gillespie!

Now back to our story. As we have seen, nihilism (contra Nietzsche) did not rise due to the 'death of God' but, according to our author, rose thanks to the inception of an entirely new way of understanding (the Omnipotence of) God by the late medieval nominalists and their followers. For Scotus, "who asserted that de potentia absoluta God could do everything that was not contradictory, concluded that even if God did act inordinata, it would entail the immediate creation of a new order." But for Ockham, even this isn't enough. "Indeed, Ockham even maintains that God can change the past if he so desires." Thus there is no longer any (necessary) Order to God's Power. It is this God, whose Will is indescribably 'free', that ends up as the deceiving god of Descartes. However, after his 'conquest' of doubt, Descartes takes this unmoored Will, freed by God's reduction (thanks to the Cogito) to the role of Guarantor of Science, and ties it to the Human Project of the Conquest of Nature. Thus Divine Omnipotence became an anthropological category. ...But what of Reason? "To think, for Descartes, however, is ultimately to will." ...And what of the Cartesian God? Gillespie will say that, "[H]e cannot deceive us and as a result is irrelevant for science." In the end one can perhaps then best understand the scientific project as the declaration of war against God: Where God was Man shall be.

Of course, Gillespie doesn't simply maintain that all this is Descartes position. "While this potentiality was latent in the thought of Descartes, it was counterbalanced by the rational element in his thought." The next major philosopher that Gillespie discusses in detail is Fichte. Naturally Gillespie begins this discussion with Kant. "For Kant the fundamental philosophical problem is the antinomy of freedom and natural causality." Kant 'solves' this, to almost no ones satisfaction, by positing the phenomenal and (unreachable) noumenal realms. "For Fichte, the I is all." By this Gillespie means the "absolute I of the general will or practical reason." This I is limited by the phenomenal realm of nature. "The I is thus alienated from itself." First through reason (theory) and then through Will the absolute I will attempt to overcome this alienation. But, as we see in most dialectical thought, one term is sacrificed to the other. "The I is thus the source of the objective world. This recognition that the not-I is only a moment of the I, however, does not produce reconciliation and perfect freedom." At first blush one might think this anarchistic egotism. Not so! We all participate in the absolute I, and thus 'experience' perfect freedom and absolute power, through the "feelings and emotions of the people"! Thus the Absolute I attains a most pedestrian view.

At the beginning of modernity Descartes struggles against omnipotent Divine Will (the deceiver god) but Fichte's absolute I embodies, to a frightening degree, this all-powerful caprice. This refusal to recognize anything beyond itself is what Jacobi called nihilism. In the space that Amazon provides it is impossible to go into more detail about this book. Suffice it to say that, for Gillespie, Nietzsche doesn't overthrow modernity; he exaggerates its most dubious component - the Will. He takes the omnipotent irrational Will of his predecessors and offers it to anyone Willing to take it. It would now seem that nihilism is not the death of God - but rather the Nietzschean Overman's irrational Imitatio Dei (Imitation of God).

I have given, in this review, perhaps undue space to the beginning of Gillespie's story because most people today entirely ignore medieval philosophy and I wanted to show its importance. Gillespie divides up his book neatly into three sections: Descartes, Fichte and Nietzsche. Suffice it to say that in a brief review like this one cannot even hope to bring out the rich detail of Gillespie's argument. I found the section on Fichte especially eye-opening. This is a superb book, four and a half stars!

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-written and at times gripping account of the nihilistic consequences of our continued philosophical, political, and artistic efforts at elevating man to the place of God. Gillespie is sure to spell out that nihilism, as we have seen it develop, is not about atheism, the "doing away" of God, but rather it is about the apotheosis of man, making us into God, replacing Him and becoming Him ourselves.

Gillespie's story begins with medieval Nominalism's conception of God and its readiness to elevate certain characteristics of God above others out of a desire to separate theology from philosophy. But in this effort to magnify God's omnipotent will, the well-ordered cosmos of the medieval realists and neoplatonists gradually gave way to the arbitrary and uncertain world of the God who wills. In Descartes, one sees a philosophical effort to make sense of this terrifying God and man's place before Him. For Descartes, it is the willing subject who establishes certainty by his own will, his own mind, and therefore his own existence, leading to a duality between mind and matter as well as humanity and God that was to impact all of modern thinking. In Fichte (1762-1814) this "I" becomes all powerful, and the goal of thought and life itself is for the "I," the original willpower, to overcome the "not-I" (nature). Schopenhauer (1788-1860) decided that this Fichtean development is a corruption of Indian philosophy, and that the proper response to monism is ascetic denial and despair. Nietzsche (1844-1900), picking up from where Fichte and Schopenhauer left off, declared that existence was chaos, a continual collision of opposites, and that man needed to rise above petty squabbles and metaphysics in order to embrace this reality and shape it according to the Dionysian will.

In the midst of all this Gillespie devotes a chapter to Russian nihilism in the nineteenth century, focusing especially on Turgenev, Chernychevsky, Bazarov, and Nachaev. I found it riveting and could not stop reading once I had begun. In it, Gillespie shows how the elevation of man's will above all else lead various Russians to destruction and terrorism.

It is a whirlwind of a book, fascinating and bold at every turn. Gillespie shows sufficiently well that nihilism, the philosophy of negating, is best understood as something that, perhaps, found its characteristically 'modern' expression in Nietzsche, but it predates him in every respect. (Even Nietzsche's conceptions about Dionysius were inherited, or stolen, from a bunch of German writers who were Fichteans and left-Hegelians.) Rather, nihilism - the reality of negation - is unleashed in the late Middle Ages, unbeknownst to those pious, yet unfortunate, Franciscan schoolmen. But the argument is, as Gillespie forms it, that if God is understood primarily under the terms of power and will rather than love and order, thought essentially falls apart. It's not a great leap from Nominalism to Descartes, for Descartes was suffering from the philosophical uncertainty that Nominalism unleashed; the logic is, "God can do absolutely anything He wants whenever He wants, which leaves me, the thinking human subject, radically separated from Him; yet in my willpower I share the chief characteristic of God, and so I am a creating and destroying force myself." From this it is perhaps not a far leap to the reductive idealism of Fichte, and from Fichte to Nietzsche. Then from Nietzsche to the post-modernism of Deleuze.

What is lost is analogical thinking, participation, procession and return, fellowship. All is in conflict and all is in flux. All is one and yet all is nothing. What matters is will, power, force, and exertion - not cooperation, gentleness, and love. In Nietzsche's thought these are signs of a weakness of willpower, a divergence from a pure Dionysian religion into a backward religion of slavery. Nietzsche's work is fascinating but so utterly one-sided. One gets the feeling that if he had had sex and produced children with a loving wife he would have thrown most of his ideas away. What is the overman in the face of a gorgeous infant daughter? What is a Dionysian bacchanal compared to gathering around the hearth with one's family? All of Nietzsche's other ideas were in a flux and morphed as his life changed; I expect that if he had lived to see World War I he would have become a Lutheran clergyman like his father and grandfathers.

The philosophers of the flux, of chaos, of change, usually live conventional lives within city states or nation states, earning a living, paying their taxes, making love, raising children. Nietzsche challenged the very notion of philosophizing at all and so, in a way, he destroyed and nullified himself and his own thought. So what will remain? What will happen next? The Nietzschean and Bolshevist nihilism(s) will burn into small cinders and people will once again read and trust Plato.

[LS · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating book offers an explanation for how nihilism came to permeate Western thought, passing through William of Ockham, Descartes, Fichte, the Russian Nihilists, Schopenhauer, etc., concluding with a surprisingly meaty section on Nietzsche himself. Discarding the commonplace notion that nihilism is "the result of the degeneration of man and his concomitant inability to sustain a God." For Gillespie it is "rather the consequence of the assertion of an absolute human will that renders God superfluous and thus for all intents and purposes dead."

His narrative begins with the scholastic debates over the nature of God, out of which nominalism was born (belief in distinct, non-categorical things). Allowing for God's radical agency, his ability to produce miracles, it solved a theological headache: sovereign over all things, God was not bound by natural law. But as a consequence humans were left in a state of uncertainty. How were we mere subjects to orient ourselves?

Accepting that the universe was ruled by a fundamentally arbitrary -- and even times deceptive -- God, Descartes concluded a philosopher must rely on one's own investigations: the human ego being the only grounds for knowledge. One was necessarily limited by one's senses, but with sufficient reason a bastion of sorts could be raised, from which the nature of reality could be discerned. However the "I" of this "I think...", Gillespie maintains, made credible a sort a solipsism, which only became radicalised once Fichte and the German Idealists entered the scene. In order to outwit God and reclaim a semblance of certainty, henceforth the world was to be deduced *from* the subject. Producing what Max Horkheimer long before identified as "subjective rationality", man had to mimic and reproduce God's ways in order to conquer His nominalist creation (a fitting accompaniment to capitalism, a topic on which Gillespie remains silent).

From here readers are treated to a discussion of the Russian Nihilists, which, for me at least, offered enough genuine insight to overlook the author's political bias (I regret to inform you, dear readers, that Michael Allen Gillespie is indeed a lib). And finally, the book culminates in a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche, in particular his commitment to a Dionysian renewal. Others have written negatively about the treatment the Anti-Christ receives here -- Nietzsche as the arch-nihilist -- but I would recommend potential readers who remain sceptical to explore Gillespie's treatment for themselves. It is dense and thoughtful, and at the very least offers many extracts from the great man himself to reflect upon.

5/5: A must-read for those interested in Western nihilism.

[Clayton · Rating 2 out of 5]

While there are some particular bits in the argument that are definitely worth checking out and objectively good scholarship (especially the chapters on Descartes and to a lesser extent the chapter on the Russian nihilist movement), the book as a whole serves an ideological exercise by an end-of-history liberal by willfully misinterpreting Nietzsche in the service of producing anticommunist propaganda.

Here's what I mean: The crux of Gillespie's argument, that Nietzsche fundamentally misunderstood nihilism and was one himself (lol) rests on what is admittedly one of the worst parts of his philosophy, the value-creation ex nihilo that characterizes the early draft, so to speak, of the Übermensch that does have a genealogical connection with the Byronic hero and the Russian nihilists. HOWEVER, unlike actual substantive feminist critiques and the fact that it kind of contradicts the entire point of his philosophy, it also fails on the first count, as Nietzsche only traces back nihilism AS A COLLECTIVE CULTURAL DISEASE to the Death of God--for him nihilism in general at least goes back as far as Socrates. Furthermore, the account Gillespie gives of nihilism, of the detached intellect and will trying to reshape the world to bring about a perfect world, fits perfectly into Nietzsche account of nihilism writ large

The whole book seems to me Gillespie throwing a fit over the fact that Nietzsche DARED to criticize bourgeois society and so labels him as a nihilist because he...thinks that the world doesn't perfectly conform to human reason and that existence doesn't have to be degrading? Considering that Nietzsche's WHOLE PHILOSOPHY is based around life-affirmation and the acceptance of the fact that humanity might not be the terrestrial subject, trying to cast him as an Ivan Karamazov type is incredibly wrong.

[Mz · Rating 4 out of 5]

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