Introduction

what's in a name?

pp. 1-10

in: Shane Weller, Literature, philosophy, nihilism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

Despite the many obvious differences, at once philosophical and political, between Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger, differences upon which the former insists so polemically in his major works of the 1950s and 1960s, these two thinkers are nonetheless in unqualified accord on at least two — far from unrelated — points, namely the first appearance of the term "nihilism" (Nihilismus) within the discourse of Western philosophy, and the privilege to be accorded to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin for what they both take to be its power of resistance to, and even its surpassing of, that which would go by the name of "nihilism". In his 1940 lecture course Nietzsche: The Will to Power (II. European Nihilism), first published in the two-volume Nietzsche (1961),¹ Heidegger follows Otto Pöggeler's lead when he identifies Friedrich Jacobi as the first to have put the term "nihilism" to "philosophical use" (philosophische Verwendung) (Heidegger 1982b: 3). Five years later, in Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno also identifies Jacobi as the thinker who "first put the term to philosophical use [philosophisch verwendete]", adding that Nietzsche "adopted it, presumably from newspaper accounts of terrorist acts in Russia" (Adorno 1973: 379).