Nihilism

Origin

The word "nihilism" was born as a polemical weapon. It entered European philosophical vocabulary in the late eighteenth century, most famously through Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's 1799 open letter on Fichte's philosophy, in which Jacobi accused the new idealism of dissolving everything real into the activity of the thinking subject — leaving, as he put it, nothing but nothingness. Jacobi's charge was that a philosophy which makes the world a construction of consciousness cannot explain why there is anything at all, and that its deepest consequence is the annihilation of the real. The term was then taken up in Russia, where it named the rejection of inherited authorities by the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s, and in Germany, where it became a diagnosis of a culture that had lost the ground of its own values.

The thinker who made nihilism a central problem of philosophy was Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, nihilism was not a doctrine anyone chose but a fate: the necessary consequence of the collapse of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world. His formula for the crisis — "God is dead" — was not a triumphant atheism but a diagnosis. The highest values have devalued themselves; the ground on which European culture had stood for two millennia has given way, and nothing has yet taken its place. Nihilism, on this account, is the period of transition in which humanity must either invent new values or fall into the will to nothingness.

History

The history of nihilism as a philosophical movement passes through three main stations. The first is the Russian nihilism of the 1860s, associated with figures such as Dmitri Pisarev, which rejected religion, tradition, and the established order in the name of science and the individual — a movement dramatized, and complicated, in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The second is the German crisis diagnosed by Nietzsche in the 1880s, when he planned a systematic "critique of modernity" around the problem of value. The third is the twentieth-century reception, in which nihilism ceased to be a merely destructive term and became a question: given that the traditional grounds of meaning have collapsed, how is a meaningful life still possible?

In the twentieth century the question was taken up by existentialism and by its neighboring movements. Jean-Paul Sartre drew the consequence that existence precedes essence: because there is no pregiven human nature and no cosmic meaning, human beings must create their own values in freedom. Albert Camus transformed the crisis into the problem of the absurd: the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and the silence of the world. And Martin Heidegger, reading Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, argued that the death of God names the completion of a metaphysics of presence whose true question — the question of being — has yet to be asked.

Core Principles

The core principle of nihilism is the denial of intrinsic value, meaning, or purpose. In its metaphysical form, nihilism denies that reality has any objective order that could ground value: there is no God, no teleology, no natural law that tells us how to live. In its ethical form, nihilism denies that moral values exist objectively or are binding on anyone. In its existential form, nihilism denies that human life has any meaning given in advance; meaning, if it exists at all, must be made rather than found.

Nietzsche's most important distinction is between passive and active nihilism. Passive nihilism is the condition of exhaustion and resignation: when the highest values devalue themselves, the passive nihilist concludes that since there is no cosmic meaning, nothing is worth doing. Active nihilism is the destructive or creative response: the active nihilist takes the collapse of old values as an opportunity to destroy what is decaying and to create new values. Nietzsche's own project — the transvaluation of all values — is the attempt to pass through nihilism into a new affirmation, one that says yes to life without the support of any transcendent ground. The danger he identified is a third form, the "will to nothingness": a life that would rather will nothing than not will at all, a resentment that turns against life itself.

Important Figures

Friedrich Nietzsche is the pivotal figure: the first philosopher to treat nihilism as the central problem of modernity and the one who proposed the most radical response to it. Fyodor Dostoevsky, though not a systematic philosopher, dramatized the logic of nihilism in his novels — most famously in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment — and Nietzsche acknowledged him as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. In the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus turned the problem of meaninglessness into the foundation of existentialist ethics, disagreeing about whether freedom (Sartre) or solidarity (Camus) is the right response to the absurd. Martin Heidegger and, in a different register, the later Jacques Derrida transformed the diagnosis of nihilism into a question about the history of metaphysics itself.

Modern Influence

Nihilism is no longer a school with members, but it remains one of the most powerful categories of modern self-understanding. It shapes debates in ethics — where the denial of objective moral facts (moral nihilism) remains a live position. It shapes the philosophy of religion, where the "death of God" is still the standard formulation of the secular condition. It shapes existentialist and post-existentialist thought about meaning, where the question "how can life be meaningful in a world without intrinsic meaning?" has not lost its urgency. And in popular culture, the word has become a general name for the suspicion that our values, our institutions, and our lives rest on nothing solid. The wisdom of nihilism as a concept page examines these themes from the perspective of lived experience; this page treats nihilism as a philosophical school with a history, a set of doctrines, and a body of criticism.

Criticism

Nihilism has been criticized from almost every philosophical direction. Theists and moral realists argue that the premise of the movement — that there is no objective value — is simply false, and that the acceptance of nihilism has corrosive practical consequences. Pragmatists argue that the whole problematic is overdramatized: meaning and value do not require cosmic foundations, because they arise naturally from human practices and needs. Critics of Nietzsche, from Georg Lukács to contemporary commentators, have argued that the distinction between active and passive nihilism is dangerously unstable — that "active" nihilism shades too easily into a politics of destruction. And defenders of ordinary life argue that the question "is life meaningful?" is not best answered by a grand philosophical decision but by attention to the concrete goods of everyday existence. The persistence of the debate is itself evidence of the movement's continuing power to define the modern condition.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Nihilism" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/nihilism)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Nihilism" (iep.utm.edu/nihilism)
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.