Theodor Lessing fue un filósofo judío nacido en Alemania. De acuerdo con Theodore Ziolkowski (Virgil and the Moderns, p.9) en Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (History as Giving Meaning to the Meaningless), "this cultural critic, writing in the tradition of Nietzsche, argued that history, having no objective validity, amounts to a mythic construct imposed on an unknowable reality, in order to give its some semblance of meaning."