A programme of clearing away, and a word that later changed sides.
Nihilism
That nothing has value, meaning or purpose - a family of distinct claims usually run together.
- Theme
- Life, death and meaning
- Tradition
- Modern
- Term fixed
- 1887
In plain terms
Nihilism sounds like one position and is at least four.
Moral nihilism says nothing is right or wrong. Existential nihilism says nothing matters or has a point. Epistemological nihilism says nothing can be known. Political nihilism, historically, was a programme for destroying existing institutions.
They do not follow from each other. Someone can hold that morality has no objective foundation while caring intensely about their life, and someone can find life pointless while holding entirely firm moral views.
Nietzsche's contribution was to treat it as a condition rather than a doctrine - something that happens to a culture when its highest values devalue themselves, so that people go on using a moral vocabulary whose foundations they no longer believe in. On that account nihilism is not a view anyone argues for. It is what is left.
As a philosopher would put it
Nietzsche's diagnosis is that the death of God is not a liberation but a crisis: Christian morality trained a demand for truthfulness which then turned on the beliefs that produced it, so the highest values devalue themselves from within.
He distinguishes passive from active nihilism - the exhausted acceptance that nothing matters, and the destructive clearing that makes revaluation possible - and treats the first as the danger and the second as a transition.
In contemporary metaethics, moral nihilism is usually error theory: Mackie's position that moral claims purport to describe objective properties and that no such properties exist, so all such claims are false. It is a technical position with technical arguments, and it is compatible with continuing to act morally, which its opponents find unstable and its defenders regard as ordinary.
Existential nihilism is separate again, and the standard responses - Camus's revolt, Sartre's created meaning, Frankl's found meaning - all accept the premise that nothing external supplies it.
Where you meet it
Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862, and his character Bazarov describes himself as a nihilist - a man who accepts no principle on trust, however much respect the principle enjoys.
The word already existed in philosophy but the novel put it into circulation, and a Russian political generation adopted it. The movement that followed was not existential despair. It was a programme: reject inherited authority, take natural science as the standard, and clear away institutions understood to be obstacles. It fed into revolutionary organisations, and the People's Will assassinated Alexander II in 1881.
Turgenev was attacked from both directions - by conservatives for sympathising and by radicals for caricaturing.
What the episode establishes is that the word's most historically consequential meaning is the political one, and that it named an assertive programme rather than an absence of belief. The transfer of the label to the modern sense of finding life pointless happened later, and the two share very little.
What is actually disputed
Whether nihilism can be lived.
The standard objection is performative: someone who genuinely believed nothing mattered would have no reason to argue for it, write about it, or get up. Nihilists reply that this confuses a claim about objective value with a claim about motivation - people are moved by what they care about whether or not it has cosmic backing, and the demand for backing was the mistake.
The error theorist's version is the sharpest. If moral claims are all false, the question is what to do next: abolitionism says stop making them, fictionalism says continue while regarding them as a useful fiction, and conservationism says continue and do not think about it. None is comfortable.
Nietzsche's own position is not nihilism but a diagnosis of it, and reading him as a nihilist is among the commonest errors about him - his whole project was to find what comes after.
Commonly confused with
Defined against
- Meaning of life One is the question and the other is the negative answer, and neither entry can be written without the other
Philosophers
- Friedrich Nietzsche Nihilism diagnosed as a cultural condition rather than held as a view
- Arthur Schopenhauer The pessimist ancestor
- Albert Camus The response of revolt, which accepts the premise
- Jean-Paul Sartre Meaning created in the absence of any given
Works
- On the Genealogy of Morals The self-undermining of the highest values
- The Myth of Sisyphus The response that refuses both suicide and hope
- Being and Nothingness Value as created by a freedom with no ground
- The World as Will and Representation The pessimist case
- Language, Truth and Logic Where moral claims are held to state nothing at all
Schools
- Nietzscheanism Where the diagnosis is made
- Existentialism Where the responses are developed
- Lebensphilosophie Where the crisis of values is analysed
- Vienna Circle Where a technical version arrives via non-cognitivism
- Carvaka (Lokayata) The ancient Indian materialism often labelled nihilist and not accurately
Related concepts
Meaning of life 1942 · Absurdity 1942 · Value 1887 · Despair 1849 · Śūnyatā c. 150
Jacobi uses the term philosophically in 1799; Turgenev's Fathers and Sons popularises it in 1862 for a Russian political generation, and Nietzsche makes it a diagnosis of European culture rather than a position anyone holds.