“Nihilism” is a term mostly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. But it precedes him by nearly a century. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi coins it in 1799 to name what he regards as philosophy’s inescapable error.

1. PSR and Individuality

According to Jacobi, philosophy demands total intelligibility and refuses to accept anything on faith. For philosophy, there can be no brute facts. But Jacobi claims that total intelligibility is established only through the exceptionless use of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which states that everything has an external condition, which itself has an external condition, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, ex nihilo nihil fit.

It follows from the PSR’s exceptionless use that a thing’s capacities and properties depend on external conditions and so are not intrinsically borne by that thing. However, Jacobi defines an individual as something that bears certain intrinsic capacities and properties, namely, freedom and purposiveness. Only individuals can determine their actions independently of external causes and act for the sake of final causes independently of efficient causes. But then philosophy’s denial of intrinsically borne capacities and properties entails its denial of individuals. This latter denial, Jacobi holds, is nihilism. Thus, if nothing comes from nothing, then nothing exists.

Before coining “nihilism,” Jacobi speaks of philosophy’s annihilation of individuals. He sometimes calls nihilism “fatalism,” signifying that, in virtue of an already given infinite series of external conditions, a thing’s capacities and properties are a fait accompli. Crucially, whereas atheism denies God’s existence and acosmism denies the world’s existence, nihilism denies the existence of both. Hence, Jacobi describes philosophy as reducing God and the world alike to fabrications, dreams, and ghosts.

2. Salto Mortale

For Jacobi, nihilism is the symptom of academic perversion. Philosophy’s demand that the knowledge of things is mediated by the knowledge of their external conditions is an erudite distraction from our ordinary conviction in the immediate givenness of individuals, whether natural or divine. In an attempt to dissolve being into knowledge, philosophy recedes from actual things into logical abstractions, thereby reducing individuals to non-entia. By explaining things, it explains them away.

Against philosophical knowledge, Jacobi asserts what he calls “non-philosophical non-knowledge.” His position is non-philosophical in that it polemicizes against the practically unacceptable consequences of philosophy’s pursuit of total intelligibility. And his position defends non-knowledge by insisting that inferential cognition of things’ mediating conditions presupposes perceptual faith in things’ immediate givenness. The PSR’s use thus cannot be exceptionless, since it takes for granted that individuals bear certain capacities and properties intrinsically.

Philosophy’s refusal to accept anything on faith unmoors us from everyday faith in individuals’ existence. Jacobi’s solution to the disorienting effect of philosophy is to invite us to perform a salto mortale, a humane reversal that returns our feet to the solid ground of common sense. From this standpoint, we exhibit a pre-reflective belief in our own intrinsic freedom and purposiveness. We are not passive witnesses to the pointless change of a mechanism of external conditions, but are genuine sources of meaningful action. As individuals, we are where the spade of explanation turns.

In Doctrine of Spinoza (1785/1789), David Hume (1787/1815), and Divine Things (1811), Jacobi identifies a range of thinkers with nihilism. He claims that the PSR’s exceptionless use is the spirit of Spinozism and so charges Baruch Spinoza with annihilating the individuality of both God and the world. Jacobi also attributes nihilism to Immanuel Kant, F.W.J. Schelling, Giordano Bruno, and, in the open letter (1799) in which the neologism first appears, J.G. Fichte. Ignoring the matter of the accuracy of these accusations, Schelling regards Jacobi as a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, one who condemns the fruitless desert of a nihilistic age, but who just barely peers into the promised land of German idealism.

3. German Idealism

The German idealists take Jacobi’s diagnosis of nihilism very seriously. They are committed to defending philosophy’s ability to show that the world both is totally intelligible and contains free and purposive individuals. To this end, Fichte claims that our rational autonomy, which he calls “the I,” is the first principle of philosophy. He argues that philosophy’s distinguishing scientific task is to autonomously generate the categories of possible experience. On pain of skepticism, the categories cannot be contingently inherited from experience, but must be necessarily deduced from and by the I.

Moreover, Fichte argues that whereas idealism is self-consistent, Spinozism is self-refuting, since the latter’s use of the PSR rules out our freedom and purposiveness and so rules out the first principle of the philosophical science that it presumably purports to be. He concludes that idealism is the sole philosophical system that can jointly satisfy the demands for intelligibility and individuality. Schelling and Hegel follow Fichte in producing their own idealistic systems, departing from him in important respects.

4. Phenomenology

The Jacobian origin of “nihilism” sheds light on the emergence of German idealism. But it also helps to clarify idealism’s kinship with phenomenology. In a 1915 letter to Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl counts the German idealists as allies against a common adversary, namely, naturalism, against which they serve the same ideals in a way that is indispensable for philosophy. How should we understand the three aspects of this declaration of affinity?

First, German idealism and phenomenology’s common adversary is, at base, nihilism. Second, the ideals that they serve against nihilism are freedom and purposiveness. Third, these ideals constitute the ultimate condition of philosophy. We find that this is so when we consult Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigourous Science” (1910) and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954).

5. Naturalism and Positivism

Husserl defines “naturalism” as the view that nature is a totality of fundamentally physical entities governed exclusively by efficient causation. Such a view apparently satisfies the cultural demand for a rigorous explanatory system. Crucially, Husserl claims that Spinozism is naturalism par excellence. The implication is that contemporary naturalism follows its exemplar by using the PSR to rule out the existence of free and purposive individuals. Husserl accordingly identifies naturalism as a danger to culture, indeed, a nihilistic danger.

Moreover, following Fichte’s critique of Spinozism, Husserl argues that naturalism refutes itself. By naturalizing consciousness, naturalism reduces to efficient causes the putative final causes for whose sake we consciously think, act, and feel, namely, truth, goodness, and beauty. But then naturalism rules out its own purpose: to make nature intelligible. As Husserl says, the naturalist demands intelligibility yet denies what such a demand presupposes, namely, the freedom and purposiveness of individuals.

Naturalism is thus a guise of nihilism. So, too, is positivism, another apparently culturally satisfying system that Husserl defines as the view that science is strictly empirical. While naturalism sees only physical entities, positivism sees only empirical phenomena, which rise and fall like waves. But such an oceanic nature must lack any abiding properties. Hence, it is bereft of the intrinsic freedom and purposiveness of the thinking, acting, and feeling subjects that we all are, the positivist included. The positivistic crisis, then, is the mutual estrangement of science and subjectivity and, indeed, the positivist’s estrangement from themselves.

6. Life-World

For Husserl, nihilism is symptomatic not of academic perversion, but of cultural degradation. Naturalism and positivism’s apparently satisfying refusal to accept anything beyond efficient causation obscures our pre-reflective absorption in free and purposive action with others. Husserl’s solution to the self-opacity of nihilism is to invite us to perform a philosophical version of Jacobi’s salto mortale, a humane reversal that returns our feet to the solid ground of the life-world. This is the world of autonomously interacting individuals, for whose questions alone science can ever have meaningful answers. Science presupposes the life-world as its condition of possibility, the milieu in which it is always already situated.

According to Husserl, whereas naturalism and positivism are self-refuting, phenomenology is self-consistent. This is because its account of the life-world identifies the ultimate condition of philosophy, whose answers, too, are only ever meaningful for autonomously interacting individuals. To be sure, Husserl’s account of the life-world departs in important respects from Fichte’s pioneering deduction of the categories. Nevertheless, the phenomenologist shares with the idealist both a sensitivity to the threat of nihilism and a commitment to jointly satisfying the demands for intelligibility and individuality.

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