Luke Lea

While pre-modern intellectual cultures are recognized to have engaged with pessimism, nihilism is, by contrast, often understood to be a distinctly modern phenomenon. The sources of nihilism should then be traceable to or reflected in certain differences between modern and pre-modern thought. This paper identifies one such difference: a conceptual category for large-scale social and political phenomena understood as the product of human activity but not of human design. The paper briefly sketches the development of this concept in the Scottish Enlightenment and its development of a diachronic dimension in Hegel’s philosophy of history. It then points out the implications of this conceptual category both for our understanding of human beings as historical agents and for theories of normativity and the justification of social and political norms. These implications are identified by way of a contrast to the intellectual culture of Classical Greece. Finally, it is argued that this concept contributed to the development of trends in thought and culture commonly associated with nihilism by weakening notions of the historical agency of both individuals and groups.

Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth. Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth.