Nihilism

Nihilism is the doctrine that there are no objective values, no inherent meaning to existence, and no rational ground for moral or metaphysical commitments. The term entered philosophical use through Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in the late eighteenth century and was developed by Russian writers — Turgenev, Dostoevsky — in the nineteenth.

Its most important philosophical statement is in Nietzsche's diagnosis of European modernity. Nietzsche argued that the death of God — the collapse of the religious and metaphysical foundations of Western value — would inevitably produce a long crisis of nihilism: most who lose God collapse into despair or distraction, and only a few are capable of creating new values from their own resources. Twentieth-century existentialists from Heidegger to Camus inherited and reframed the diagnosis. Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus argues that lucid revolt — neither suicide nor false consolation — is the proper response to the absurd silence of the world.

Nietzsche distinguished several forms of nihilism. Active nihilism is the strong response of those who recognize the collapse of inherited values and proceed to clear away their ruins. Passive nihilism is the weakened response of those who recognize the collapse but lack the strength to do anything about it. Reactive nihilism is the form Nietzsche thought characterized late nineteenth-century European morality — a half-acknowledged collapse covered over by humanitarian, scientistic, or aesthetic surrogates for the lost religious foundation.

The twentieth-century existentialist response divides along similar lines. Heidegger reads nihilism as the destiny of Western metaphysics, requiring a fundamental reorientation toward the question of being rather than a new doctrine of value. Sartre treats meaninglessness as the structural condition of human freedom, with authenticity as the project of creating value in conditions one knows to be without given foundation. Camus refuses both the Nietzschean and the Heideggerian responses: the proper attitude is lucid revolt, neither suicide nor false consolation.