Vinsent Nollet

Are events necessary to conceive of history? For a while, historians generally answered "no". Some authors, in particular Francis Fukuyama, even went as far as saying that history as a process of key events determining its direction was simply over, since no event could undo the universal road to liberal democracy. Today, curiosity about the nature of historical events is on the rise again, perhaps due to the tumultuous times we live in. We feel history shaking underneath the weight of events. But what exactly are events and how do they structure our view of history?

Abstract: Once the boundaries between immanent existence and transcendence have been drawn, a typically modern undertaking, all we are left with is the sensible, whereas the supersensible becomes synonymous with the illusionary. This predicament does not have to be inherently problematic, at least from a religious point of view. For philosophy, however, it has often been understood in terms of a disaster, addressed with the ambiguous notion of nihilism. This is particularly true of post-Nietzschean philosophy, in which a holistic understanding of the notion of nihilism is often adopted to argue for the impossibility of both philosophy and transcendence. In this master’s thesis I investigate the relationship between nihilism, philosophy and transcendence as it came about in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). This 20th century German thinker took great interest in the concern of the captivity of the immanence of thought and formulated creative answers to the question of transcendence after the alleged death of God. For Jaspers, the problem of nihilism was perennial to philosophy, and in the course of his life he devoted many pages to an attempt of overcoming it.

First, this thesis analyses the problem of nihilism on its own, in its pre-Nietzschean and Nietzschean manifestations, to come to terms with its alleged threat to philosophy. With regard to the vastness and richness of the notion, some topics are inevitably left out, such as the religious nihilism of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, or the extensive elaborations on nihilism in contemporary continental philosophy, for example on the divergence between the interpretations of Martin Heidegger and Emanuele Severino. Second, we turn to Jaspers’ own understanding of nihilism. Jaspers defined the nature and value of philosophy through its confrontation with nihilism, which, for him, represented a kind of anti-philosophy. Philosophy had to go through nihilism to become true philosophizing. Jaspers proposed an ingenious argument that separates nihilism from philosophy, existence from immanence and truth from knowledge. To make this case, we primarily turn to Jaspers’ Von der Wahrheit, Der philosophische Glaube and his books on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Nietzsche und das Christentum, for example, Jaspers argued that Nietzsche at times separated the figure of Jesus from Christianity. In this separation, Jaspers argued, a possible way of overcoming Nietzsche’s nihilism in a philosophy that originates in love was already made possible by the fundamental distinctions of Nietzsche’s own critique of Christianity, for example his dismissal of all contradictions.

Grade: 18/20
Wordcount: 21.837

(Full text in Dutch)

Twenty years after 9/11, this thesis examines its construction as a historical event. After all, the event holds a remarkable position in contemporary conceptions of history, where a whole host of political, cultural and religious fault lines meet. In fact, 9/11 poses an outstanding problem for historians: how can we understand such a dramatic and contested event at all? This objective is split into two main components. On the one hand, the operation of the historical event itself is examined. The idea of the historical event occupies a central place in the idea of history, since it makes history conceivable. At the same time it also constitutes the very locus of the disruption and contestation of history, and thus makes history inconceivable. On the other hand, this thesis investigates what the idea of a historical event tells us about the historian's craft.

By means of an examination of existing theoretical research into the idea of a historical event, this thesis also develops its own position. It examines the way in which the historical event operates in a political manner, as well as its relationship to the modern historical discourse. It then examines the complex relationship between the constructive and disruptive nature of the historical event from the perspective of the philosophy of history of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamins philosophical characterisation of the relationship between history and politics is an excellent paradigm for dealing with the problem of the historical event. On the basis of Benjamins philosophy, on the one hand, a conceptual framework is developed to deal with the disruptive activity of the historical event. On the other hand, a renewed philosophical position on the nature of history is also derived from it that can serve as a charter for the historian: a nihilistic historical discourse.

This thesis also argues in a more general sense about the discipline of history that the traditional distinction between speculative and critical philosophy of history is not tenable. From a renewed autonomy of a philosophical consideration of history, the nihilistic historical discourse puts forward three main principles: an expansion of the representability of history, a more reflexive space for a critical interaction with historical thought and its presuppositions, and a rehabilitation of the value of speculation.

Grade: 16/20
Word count: 52.687