Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless & that nothing can be known or communicated.

The idea is that life is meaningless and has no intrinsic value.

It is often associated with extreme pessimism & the radical skepticism that condemns existence.

A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, & no purpose other than the impulse to destroy.

"Nihilism" comes from the Latin “nihil”, or nothing. It appears in the verb "annihilate," meaning to bring to nothing, to destroy completely.

“nihil” nothing "annihilate"

There is often a distinction made between ontological nihilism (the metaphysical claim about the nothingness of reality) and existential nihilism (makes claims about the lack of meaning in human existence).

It is guided by the rejection of objective moral values and the hope of the eternal.

Essentially, it is guided by the rejection of PLATO’s Idealism!

Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, the movement is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious & metaphysical convictions, precipitating the greatest crisis in human history.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we

have killed him.“

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885)

The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it.

The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals.

In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism.

This nihilism is what Nietzsche worked to find a solution for by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values. He would find a basis in the "will to power" that he described as "the essence of reality.“

Others are the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960).

Both Sartre and Camus were affected by the catastrophic world wars.

The two of them proposed the utter hopelessness of life.

Camus compared life to the Greek myth of Sisyphus who was eternally condemned by the gods to push a heavy ball up a slope, only to have them kick back down... rendering all of Sisyphus’s actions pointless and useless… a quintessential Nihilist point of view.

Sartre suggested that there was no purpose to the “accident” of human existence.

This is the nihilist that has quit trying to push the rock up the hill.

Life has continued to give him lemons, and spat out his lemonade.

So, the passive nihilist “floats” through life, doing nothing, because…what’s the point?

Life is random: it doles out bad things to good people and good things to bad people.

= ABSURDISM

According to Nietzsche: