This chapter addresses why and how, if it is true that pessimism is a psychological condition as opposed to a philosophical belief, Nietzsche takes there to be a requirement to combat pessimism in ways other than the rational-dialectical manner prevalent among philosophers hitherto. The chapter first offers a conceptual analysis of the closely related but distinct notion(s) of ‘nihilism’, before then arguing how the notorious idea of ‘eternal recurrence’ is, contrary to some contemporary interpretations, specifically deployed by Nietzsche as a response to pessimism. The chapter ends by elucidating Nietzsche’s reversion to the view of The Birth of Tragedy that aesthetic experience is solely capable of facilitating life affirmation, and how aesthetic value is not only distinct but also in tension with moral value.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

Gary Saul Morson provides an overview of the ideological ferment of the Russian intelligentsia, the quasi-religious devotion that Russian progressives brought to new dogmas of nihilism, populism, atheism, and scientism, while emphasizing Chekhov’s status as the most steadfast of major Russian writers in his rejection of the ideological fanaticisms of his contemporaries among the intelligentsia.

Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter examines Jacobi’s critique of traditional philosophical theology and what he considered to be its conceptual annihilation of the reality of God. What emerges is that Jacobi had a refined understanding of the seductive workings of instrumental reason, proposing an alternative philosophical theology by which immediate faith in God must be confirmed in reflection.

According to Paul Franco, Nietzsche constructed TSZ as a political drama in which the protagonist overcomes his reluctance to rule and accepts his political responsibility. His reluctance to rule springs from his compassion for the suffering that his disciples will have to endure as a result of his teaching. And his political responsibility is to teach eternal recurrence as a cultivating philosophical idea that creates a new ruling class that will help bring about his goal of the Übermensch – a collective goal that will rescue modern Europe from its nihilistic democratic trajectory. In this essay, Franco explains how Nietzsche’s “great” politics presents a radical challenge to our usual assumptions about the need for a common political life and for politics in the mundane and institutional sense.

Prior to Hegel’s portrayal of the French Revolution’s “fanaticism for destruction,” F. H. Jacobi criticized the impoverished, abstract conception of reason that he sees realized in the politics, philosophy, and broader intellectual culture of the era.Inaugurating a tradition of reflection in German thought, Jacobi labels this conception “nihilism.” While Jacobi identifies and analyzes both the theoretical and the practical sides of nihilism, its basic sense is practical.Practical nihilism equates ideal rationality with the realization of a pure form, minus the “way of sensing [Sinnesart]” that allows us to see what is at stake in any situation. Jacobi further argues that one’s “way of sensing” is the source of individuality and so of one’s irreplaceable value as a person. For Jacobi, the otherwise diverse group including the French philosophes, Kant, and Fichte all exemplify practical nihilism in some manner or other.This account starts from Jacobi’s initial reactions to the French Revolution, eventually captured by the letter “To Erhard O.” (1792). This discussion establishes the core of Jacobi’s objection to his era’s dominant conception of rationality.The open letter “To Fichte” (1799) in which the charge of nihilism first appears is explicable against this decades-old concern on Jacobi’s part.

The Epilogue reflects upon the meaning of history in the light of the presence of evil within it. It examines religious providence, secular progress, cosmic nihilism, and apocalypticism as potential solutions to the problem of meaning in history. It ends with a reflection on ethical eschatology at the personal level.

This introduction explains (1) these authors’ fascination with Greek tragedy, (2) their modern reenvisioning of it in contrast to consolatory philosophies of tragedy and science, (3) their representation instead of a natural world that is a source of terror, and (4) their stand against nihilism in the face of such terror. My contention is that for Hardy, Woolf, Camus, and Beckett, tragedy is not a genre that defends or valorizes pain. Tragedy is a genre of insurrectionary truth-telling. I suggest that their tragic fiction models or incites desire for solidarity in the face of inhuman time scales and the destructiveness and chanciness of natural history. These writers recognize, too, that modern European history acts as (rather than banishes) tragic fatality. Engaging with tragedy, these authors devise strategies to evoke and indict both natural accident and manmade violence.

Camus takes a Woolfian message of human limitation and solidarity – not domination and hierarchy – from his vision of nature and from his reading of Greek tragedy. Camus argues that modern European history “has put on the mask of destiny”; this history behaves as the divine or natural fatality that it claimed to supersede. Grounded in Camus’s writing on the Greeks and tragedy in his lectures, interviews, essays, and infamous dispute with Jean-Paul Sartre, this chapter explores Camus’s ethics of tragedy. Camus's ethical paradigm – cognizance of injurious power accompanied by lucid revolt – is on offer in The Plague, the lyrical short story “The Adulterous Wife,” and his unfinished novel The First Man. Finally, this chapter argues for Camus’s fierce indictment of genocidal politics in The Stranger and The Fall.

Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable spurns both tragedy’s undeserved pains and the counter-tragic theology and philosophies (Christianity, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism) that aim to rationalize or overcome pain. Beckett’s character tries and fails to negate his humanity, imagining devolution to insentience. This chapter challenges Beckett scholarship that understands the Unnamable to be in search of mystical wordlessness and self-dissolution. Against the grain, it contends that the more Beckett’s narrator wages war on embodiment and language, the more he severs himself from all attachment to the world. His strategies, I suggest, might kindle the opposite desire in readers. This chapter proceeds to argue that Beckett rewrites this nihilistic character in Company, revisiting his tactics but supplying an alternative to them. Company’s narrator admits the attraction of a suicidal narrative strategy yet opts to resuscitate bonds with others by way of lyrical moments of memory.