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Late antique Gnosticism and Heidegger’s Existentialism are usually counted among the main theoretical targets of Hans Jonas’s philosophy of life and responsibility, since they are supposed to share the dualistic and nihilistic attitude the philosopher deemed most mistaken and pernicious. In particular, Gnosticism is commonly understood as the exact opposite of what Jonas strove to accomplish in his work. However, I think it is simplistic to relegate Gnosticism to a merely antagonistic role in the development of Jonas’s philosophy. My claim is that Gnosticism, being a non-nihilistic form of dualism, might have been a relevant source of inspiration – although not the only one – for amending the flaws of Heidegger’s Existentialism. By taking a closer look at the essay Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, this article aims to clarify the critical and constructive role that Gnosticism might have played in shaping some of the major traits of Jonas’s thought. The first part of this essay deals with Jonas’s ‘gnostic reading’ of Heidegger’s Existentialism and highlights the positive insights drawn from such interpretative strategy. The second part focuses on three main motives in Jonas’s philosophy that may be traced back to the gnostic narrative: value objectivity and vulnerability, human responsibility and involvement in the history of being, and the sense of belonging to a wider dimension capable of providing orientation and meaning to human life.

The idea of nihilism continues to figure prominently in philosophical debates about the problems of modernity. The aim of this article is to consider how Richard Rorty’s work might advance these debates. The article begins with a discussion of the problem of nihilism as it appears in the recent exchange between Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. It then brings Rorty into the conversation by considering his reflections on egotism and his proposed antidote to it: self-enlargement. I propose that self-creation and solidarity, two key ideas of Rorty’s earlier work, should be understood as redemptive paths to self-enlargement. With this interpretation in place, Rorty can be seen as offering an alternative perspective on the problem of nihilism, one that compares favourably with those put forward by Taylor, Dreyfus and Kelly.

Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the nothing that results from the devaluation of the highest values. There is widespread agreement with Nietzsche’s claim that the apostle Paul was the great devaluer of the values of the ancient world, even to the extent of breaking the history of the world in two. Yet the mode of Paul’s devaluating nihilism is contested. Using Nietzsche’s three types of nihilist, I frame this debate over Paul as giving us, respectively, Paul the reactive nihilist (Nietzsche), Paul the active nihilist (Taubes) and Paul the overman (Badiou). I then read Agamben’s messianic Paul as a way to avoid the problem of nihilism tout court, which the two earlier accounts, despite releasing Paul from Nietzsche’s charge of passive nihilism, do not. I finish by arguing that while Agamben’s construction of the Pauline messianic vocation does indeed break with Nietzsche’s categories of nihilism, nihilism remains necessary to a genealogy of both Paul’s and Agamben’s messianism.

‘Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism’ (published in Social Research, 1952) is indeed one of Hans Jonas’ most famous essays, to which its author reserved very deep attention during his philosophical career. As a former pupil of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, Jonas started to deal with religious topics, and specifically with Gnosticism, from the very outset of his philosophical career in the 1920s. After gaining recognition thanks to his remarkable philosophical-existential interpretation of Gnosticism, he returned to the modern age and its philosophical characters. Principally, Jonas discovered that modern philosophy up to Heidegger and Sartre suffered from a peculiar spiritual disease – namely, nihilism – that he had already traced in ancient Gnosticism and that he intended to reject. Therefore, Jonas’ acquaintance with ancient religion and thinking gave him a deep insight into the modern age and provided him with a first glimpse of what was later to become his biological philosophy. However, whoever could imagine that the idea of tracing similarities between Gnosticism and modern thinking came to Jonas at the beginning of 1950 from the famous philosopher and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy? In this article, I shall endeavour to demonstrate this thesis by quoting from unpublished documents. However, I shall also try to prove that Jonas did not follow von Bertalanffy’s advice completely. The overall aim is, therefore, both to highlight the origins of an essential turning point in the thinking of Hans Jonas, and, on such a basis, to outline the innovation and originality of his philosophical contribution.

The core argument in this paper is that, to reconstruct the last unwritten section on Judging in Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind , it is necessary to address what Arendt was doing with the book as a whole and how the different parts relate internally to one another. This is no easy matter, especially as the existing sections on Thinking and Willing are quite different in tone from one another. My proposition is that the work should be read as a critique of the life of the `modern' mind, and especially of the differentiation of the modern mind into distinct and reified faculties. The work as a whole is an attempt to understand the distorted forms of modernization that result from the division of the life of the mind into opposing faculties. It is, so to speak, a critique of the combined and uneven development of the life of the modern mind. While Arendt famously argues that the activity of thinking itself conditions people against evildoing, the spectre that informs her analysis of both thinking and willing is the danger of nihilism inherent in these mental activities. The work raises vital questions concerning the conditions under which this danger is actualized and the means by which it might be averted. What this entails for our reconstruction of the missing section on judgment is that, rather than see it as the core of Arendt's contribution to political thought or as the promised solution to an impasse, we should explore the equivocations of judging. This aporetic reading of the text helps clarify Arendt's concerns over the separation of the life of the mind from the world and the role of both judging and understanding in renewing its connections to the world.

Using the notion of subjectivity as a guiding thread, the article explores the implications of European nihilism for the theoretical debate about peace. Most of the continental peace theories have been inspired by schools of thought associated with German Idealism and Marxism and assume a ‘strong subject’ as a precondition for the social construction of peace. However, the recent debates around ‘humanitarian interventions’ suggest that a critique of violence that fails to embrace the weakening of the subject is ineffective. Drawing upon the emancipatory interpretation of Nietzsche provided by Gianni Vattimo, the article seeks to recover a critique of violence that is based on a weak notion of subjectivity and no longer invokes any ultimate foundations. Instead, it appreciates the emancipatory and non-violent potential of nihilistic aesthetic experience. From this perspective, peace can only be thought as separate from security, and emancipation as incompatible with violence.

Critics of Hans-Georg Gadamer maintain that his philosophical hermeneutics is unduly conservative: supposedly, Gadamer too readily accepts tradition and too quickly assumes that a text has a unified and understandable meaning. Critics of Jacques Derrida, meanwhile, declare that deconstruction leads to nihilism: if the meaning of every text is undecidable, then a text can mean anything at all - no one meaning is better or worse than any other. And if there is no ground to stand upon, these critics add, then how can we normatively evaluate others (or ourselves)? In this essay, I respond to the critics of both Gadamer and Derrida by arguing that philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction should be understood as complementary postmodern philosophies, as mutually supportive descriptions of the hermeneutic situation. As such, deconstruction counters the charge that philosophical hermeneutics is conservative: instead, a Derridean view uncovers the radical political potential that resides within Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Meanwhile, philosophical hermeneutics counters the charge that deconstruction is nihilistic and cannot support ethical or political critique. A Gadamerian view explains how deconstruction assumes the possibility of understanding meaning and maintaining values that can engender critique.

Pessimism today is poorly understood. Indeed, such is the disdain that pessimism engenders, that it often has difficulty being taken seriously as a theoretical position. Yet pessimism, which is distinct from skepticism and nihilism, has much to offer those who have discarded the Enlightenment’s expectation of progress. Through an examination of Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Unamuno, this paper traces out some of the common themes of pessimistic thought. Pessimism, it is argued, is concerned with the burden of time and with the problem of organizing the best kind of human life in the absence of a promise of progress, happiness, or salvation for society as a whole. But it need not urge passivity or resignation in response to these conditions. The figure of Don Quixote, first appealed to in this context by Unamuno, illustrates pessimism’s capacity to craft a positive ethic of personal conduct for life in a disordered and disenchanted world.

Etude de la relation entre les problemes de l'hermeneutique philosophique et les problemes que rencontre la gauche politique dans nos societes democratiques modernes. Examinant le fondationnalisme metaphysique et la conception du monde comme conflit des interpetations, l'A. souligne la nature complementaire du pluralisme de la societe de marche et du retour aux fondationnalismes (ethniques, religieux, communautaires) a la lumiere de la situation politique en Italie