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.