Forget atheism. Let's talk about nihilism.

Almost everyone has heard of atheism, but few have heard of nihilism.

Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that the universe, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following: There is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator, a true morality does not exist, and secular ethics are impossible. Thus, life has no truth, and no action can be preferable to any other.

Exisentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that the death of God leads to nihilism. Without God, there can be no objective base for values. Nietzsche predicted nihilism would be wave of the future.

Therefore, one could argue that embracing atheism leads to nihilism. I'm sure that this is not always the case, however.

Friedrich Nietzsche's later work displays a preoccupation with nihilism. Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. He hints that nihilism can become a false belief, when it leads individuals to discard any hope of meaning in the world and thus to invent some compensatory alternate measure of significance. Nietzsche used the phrase 'Christians and other nihilists,' which is in line with his low estimation of Christianity in general.

While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. In most contexts, Nietzsche defined the term as any philosophy that results in an apathy toward life and a poisoning of the human soul?and opposed it vehemently. He describes it as "the will to nothingness" or, more specifically:

"A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos ? at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists."

? Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 585, Walter Kaufmann

Nietzsche asserts that this nihilism is a result of valuing nonexistent or non-extant "higher," "heavenly," or "divine" things (such as God). The nihilist who began by holding these values, after rejecting them, retains a belief that all "lower," "earthly," or "human" ideas are valueless (or so little valuable as to be essentially valueless) because they were considered so in the previous belief system. In this interpretation, any form of idealism, after being rejected by the idealist, leads to nihilism. Moreover, this is the source of "inconsistency on the part of the nihilists." The nihilist continues to believe that only "higher" values and truths are worthy of being called such, but rejects the idea that they exist. Because of this rejection, all ideas described as true or valuable are rejected by the nihilist as impossible because they do not meet the previously established standards.

In this sense, it is the philosophical equivalent to the Russian political movement called Nihilism: The irrational leap beyond skepticism ? the desire to destroy meaning, knowledge, and value. To him, it was irrational because the human soul thrives on value. Nihilism, then, was in a sense like suicide and mass murder all at once. He considered faith in the categories of reason, seeking either to overcome or ignore nature, to be the cause of such nihilism. "We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world" (WP 12b). He saw this philosophy as present in Christianity (which he described as "slave morality"), Buddhism, morality, asceticism and any excessively skeptical philosophy.

As the first philosopher to study nihilism extensively, however, Nietzsche was also quite influenced by its ideas. And while he would endorse neither its modern definition nor the definition given above, he certainly was a nihilist in an imp

 

Interesting. I think most of my life I always assumed that all athiests would be nihilists. I suppose that if I ever totally lost faith in God, then I could become a nihilist. I don't think it is necessarily true, especially for those that never believed. An atheist could believe that while there is no ultimate point to everything, it is a good idea to make yourself and those you care about as happy as possible.


As a pessimist, I think nihilism is the only real alternative to my faith. I suppose it is possible to find value in other things, but that is a choice I can make, if I choose not to find value in stuff then I would probably just eat a lot, drink a lot, and play a lot of video games.

 

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At my saddest and most depressed times, I've flirted with a watered down form of nihilism. You know, that typical teenager "What's the point? My world is over because I just got dumped" reaction or what have you.

Call it my unfamiliarity to the philosophy, but it always seemd somewhat self-defeating. If there's no point to anything, what's the point of living? But then, if there's no point to anything, what's the point of killing yourself? Why do anything? Because you want to? Well, isn't that a reason right there, thus defeating the idea of nihilism?

*shrug* Maybe I'm completely wrong about what nihilism is.



DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA!

 

Call it my unfamiliarity to the philosophy, but it always seemd somewhat self-defeating. If there's no point to anything, what's the point of living? But then, if there's no point to anything, what's the point of killing yourself? Why do anything? Because you want to? Well, isn't that a reason right there, thus defeating the idea of nihilism?

I think that instead of there being no point to anything, there is no point to improving the world. I no expert on nihilism, but a Nihilist would only do things to benefit himself/herself because a Nihilist would think that he/she has only one life and enjoy it as much as possible, not bothering with improving him/her self or anything around him/her.

Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that the universe, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value.

That, by far, is the best definition of nihilism that I have come across to date. No objective meaning shows that the individual doesn't have anything s/he needs to do and improve the world. Where as Christianity and other religions state that one must actively pursue a better world (In Christianity, it's called the "Kingdom of God"), nihilism is the exact opposite. If there is no value to life, why protect it? Why fight evil? Why stop corruption?

Nietzsche asserts that this nihilism is a result of valuing nonexistent or non-extant "higher," "heavenly," or "divine" things (such as God).

In my opinion, nihilism cannot exist unless it states that there is no divine being (such as God). If there was a divine being, it would be hard to state that life has no reason because a divine being would have created life for a reason. The divine being wouldn't just have woken up one day and said "I'm bored, let me create the universe and life and taxes." There would have been a reason that life was created if life was created by a divine being.

Nietzsche assertion is the fundamental pillar of nihilism because nihilism would be logically impossibe to argue unless there wasn't a divine being.

 

My question is what is supposed to replace nihilism? Isn't looking foward to the arrival of the ubermensch the same as any other future utopian ideal? If one refutes the higher and detests the lower, can anything be done?

 

Vivec, some deists would argue that, after God created the Universe and got everything started, He/She either ceasted to exist or no longer was relevant. If such a thing were true, then that, combined with Nietzsche's belief in the "eternal return," could arguably lead to nihilism. However, I believe God care about humanity and does sometimes intervene in the world. I'm a compatibilist (meaning that I believe in a reconcilition, or midway point, between determinism and unbound free will).

Overlord, I'm not sure what Nietzsche wanted to replace nihilism. It could be said that he believed that God became man so man could become God. Not literally, certainly. He thought that we would have to become superhumans. However, if each human being were to become so ruthless, egocentric, and power-hungry, society would not be able to function. It would be far too individualistic and would therefore be based on absolute anarchism.

 

That seems contradictory since a divine deity can't die. Thats the whole idea of "divine." Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end. Unending.

I guess I could describe myself as a compatibilist (haven't heard that term used in this context before).

I do believe that God does intervene, but only in the most dire moments. Definitely not what Voltaire believed.

 

Nihilism is as much a lament to the general failure of all philosophical frameworks for ethics as it is a lament to the nonexistence of God. The end game of 2500 years of philosophy in western literature is that human ethics can have no meaningful philosophical underpinning. But we need not conclude that the absence of objective morality implies the absence of value.

Nietzche I don't think believed in eternal recurrence. He posited it as a theoretical call to action: act as though your life were perpetually etched on the universe rather than a meaningless, vanishingly fleeting one time event. Consequently, Nietzche elevates creative self-optimization as an ultimate value.

Personally, I find nothing wrong with human behavior that evolves without reference to objective truth for morality. Morality is perhaps better understood as an organically evolving byproduct of human interaction than something that can be characterized or guided by a philosophy of ethics.

 

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Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
Walter Sobchak: No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.

 

Interesting... for the record, I'm an atheist but *definitely* not a nihilist. Not only do I believe keenly in the Golden Rule, I think understanding the universe has value in and of itself, however we got here. Make your own reason to live and all that.

 

Yeah, I know it's strange, Vivec. But believe it or not some deists believe that. I don't know if it's literal to them or not. I've only read about it. I have yet to meet a deist who believes that. The only deists I've met thus far have actually been Jewish and Muslim, which was pretty unusual especially the latter category.

Ms. Jedi here is a good example of an atheist who does believe in morality. The stereotype that atheists are evil and such is way overblown.

Jabbadabbado, you pretty much explained what Nietzsche said about the eternal return. In Dharmic religions, Classical antiquity, and during the Renaissance it had different meanings. I'm going to draw from a paper I wrote about Nietzsche last April to explain what he meant by this:

The thought of eternal recurrence is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Heidegger pointed out, Nietzsche never speaks about the reality of "eternal recurrence" itself, but about the "thought of eternal recurrence." Nietzsche conceived of the idea as a simple "hypothesis," which, like the idea of Hell in Christianity, did not need to be true in order to have real effects. The thought of eternal recurrence appears in a few parts of his works, in particular §125 and §341 of The Gay Science and then in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is also noted for the first time in his posthumous fragment of 1881 (11 [143]). The experience of this thought is dated by Nietzsche himself, in the posthumous fragments, to August 1881, at Sils-Maria. In Ecce Homo (1888), he wrote that the thought of the Eternal Return was the "fundamental conception" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Several authors have pointed out other occurrences of this hypothesis in contemporary thought. Thus, the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, who revised the first catalogue of Nietzsche's personal library in January 1896, pointed out that Nietzsche would have read something similar in Eugen Dühring's Courses on philosophy (1875), which Nietzsche readily criticized. Lou Andreas-Salomé pointed out that Nietzsche referred to Ancient cyclical conceptions of time, in particular by the Pythagoreans, in the Inactual Considerations. Henri Lichtenberger and Charles Andler have pinpointed three works contemporary to Nietzsche which carried on the same hypothesis: J.G. Vogt, Die Kraft. Eine real-monistische Weltanschauung (1878), Auguste Blanqui, L'éternité par les astres (1872) and Gustave Le Bon, L'homme et les sociétés (1881). However, Gustave Le Bon is not quoted anywhere in Nietzsche's manuscripts; and Auguste Blanqui was named only in 1883. But Vogt's work, on the other hand, was read by Nietzsche precisely during this summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria. Blanqui is mentioned by Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), a book closely read by Nietzsche.

Despite his reading of Vogt, Nietzsche's conception of the eternal recurrence of all things differs from other seemingly similar hypotheses, insofar as it is intrinsically related to Zarathustra's announcement of the Ãœbermensch and the ethical imperative of overcoming nihilism. On a few occasions in his notebooks, Nietzsche discusses the possibility of eternal recurrence as cosmological truth, but in the works he prepared for publication it is treated as the ultimate method of affirmation. According to Nietzsche, it would require a sincere amor fati (Love of Fate) not simply to endure, but to wish for, the eternal recurrence of all events exactly as they occurred ? all the pain and joy, the embarrassment and glory.

Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing," and says that its burden is the "heaviest weight" ("das schwerste Gewicht") imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon wh

 

So this nihilist handed me a piece of gum, and it didn't taste like anything.

 

That's actually somewhat amusing.

 

I've never been a fan of nihilism or Nietzsche (he has some interesting things to say about morality and ethics in the sense of "Why let someone else determine your moral system"), but I've not been impressed with his other claims (e.g., you can't understand Goethe if you only focus on Faust and/or a few other major works; attempting to leapfrog through history by only studying it's peaks risks losing some very important lessons). As an Aristotelian and agnostic theist, I tend to think that there is something transcendent (and that a compelling case can be made for a transcendent human nature). I've also encorporated a bit of Sartre into this model (which may seem odd, given the antimony between the "existence --> essence" and "essence --> existence" schools of thought), but the idea of a completely empty and meaningless existence I find uncompelling and lazy.

 

Depends on what part of his point you are considering. The question about simply submitting to social norms of morality is very compelling, and ties into questions of human nature and the civil state. His ideas about attitudes towards history and key figures therein, however, is a weakness - we learn more, IMO, from historical trends than historical outliers, so his idea of dialogue with other "transcendent" individuals (and focusing on their greatest achievements) ends up ignoring a lot of important background detail (e.g., how these "giants of history" got to that status).

 

I like to reference Kurt Vonnegut's note on nihilism:

"Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done."

 

This make much more sense in my head than typing it down, so please bear with me as I try to explain it.

I see nihilism and many religions to have a certain similar thought/assumption which to me makes no sense. That is that if there is no absolute reason to do something, then there is a problem. Either we shouldn't do it or there is then no reason at all to do something. I understand that for judging another person or applying some sort of moral standard this may be important. But just to live and do stuff, to have fun, to get through the day we don't need some magical/supernatural/divine reason for our actions. Subjective reasons work well enough for nearly all the things we do in life.

Nihilism, as first presented here as the idea that there is no proof or sufficient evidence of Truth or objectively absolute standards. What I don't get is the later steps that life suddenly is without any value. I agree that it is without any absolute or objective value, but that doesn't mean it has no value what so ever. That value is different from and to person to person, but my point only is that there can still be value in so much as there can be value.

It comes down to this; if you think that there is no objective absolute Truth then you need to stop thinking in those kinds of terms and move on to subjective standards. Instead of striving for the absolute answer to things we can strive for enough understanding to be able to get a good enough idea for whatever problem we are trying to answer.

Here is a question I have for nihilism to explain; we can still be happy. For as pessimistic as nihilism can be we can still find some joy and happiness. How does that work in a nihilistic framework? (**** that sounds like some sappy feel good sound bite, but it is a good question I think).

One more point; nihilism to me is just a belief; it is not a belief system like a religion. At its core it is just a belief that there is no objective Truth. Any conclusions drawn from that core belief is in general getting away from that core belief and is becoming whomever's personal beliefs system. For example, the conclusion that there must not be any divine power is not supported by nihilism; there could be a god and he/she/it just never got around (or couldn't) make any sort of magical Truth. So to conclude that is to go away from just the belief and turn it into whatever you personally believe. It is turning what is just a belief into a belief system; and that is basically a straw man.

 

I'm so glad I found my way back to the forums here!

I think nihilism is a good place to start. The universe has no inherent meaning. Life has no inherent meaning. So what now?

Now I decide what the universe means to me, and what I feel is my place in it. I decide for myself what meaning to find within my life, my family, and my community. I decide where to base my moral values--which, for me, is with my family. My husband and daughter are the most important part of my life--they are my life--and therefore they come before everything else.

The commentary that Christianity is nihilistic is fascinating. I'd never thought of it exactly like that, but I can definitely understand it. (Probably a lot of "recovering Christians" can.)

Thanks for posting this!

 

Here is a question I have for nihilism to explain; we can still be happy. For as pessimistic as nihilism can be we can still find some joy and happiness. How does that work in a nihilistic framework?

I'm not sure Nihilism itself has an answer to that question -- seeing as how meaningless nihilism would take this to be -- but I think Nietzche's philosophy does.

From what I gather, Neitzche believed that Nihilism was a step, and a necessary one, for one to become "transcendant". Not in any mythical Godly way, but to just overcome what has become normal weaknesses that people often inherit from thier society.

I'm not sure if Nietzche wished to hasten Nihilism's departure... I think he advocated over coming it to take as long as it took... but that it was something to be overcome. However, I think he also regarded it with more respect in terms of a challenge than ordinary "slave morality" religion, which as he said found value in people for what they were not, and what they refrained from doing, rather than what they were and what they did.

Mind you he also gave large respect to the creators themselves of such a religious system for creating something that appealed so much more broadly than the "master morality" of elites. Just not respect to those who actually followed it.

Back to your question, Nietzche does mentino something in terms of the "Ubermensch" in the importance of joy, and having that as one of the goals of the Ubermensch. Of finding value in yourself and also in others and if I'm not mistaken, uplifting others to the same awareness. Those who have such potential anyway, and would not get perpetually lost in either slave morality or nihilism.

Part of the difficulty here ends up being twofold with people's assumption about Nietzche: first, a sort of knee-jerk reaction to his mental instability near the end of his life, which results in some giving him this sort of Lovecraftian boogeyman status of the man who thought too much and asked too many questions than his mind could bear. Yeah, whatever.

The second is getting taken in by how the Nazis hijacked his message. This poses even more difficulties because not only did the Nazis promote him, but his own sister promoted him within the Nazi party and claimed they were a living embodiment of what Nietzche spoke of. Nietzche himself wanted nothing to do with the Nazis and by every indication I know of thought they were just a new "slave morality". He particuarly criticized thier (and I think, his friend Wagner's) penchant for anti-Semitism, saying that although the Jewish tradition created the first "slave morality", it proved superior for those Jews that created it, so it made little sense to hold them in any more, if not less disdain than Christians who imported ideas that were not thier own.

Still, this doesn't earn Nietzche a lot of friends among the Jewish community, becuase even if it says the Nazis are funadmentally wrong and that oppressing the Jews is senseless, it's still not a particuarly compassionate reasoning towards them. It just happens to be less compassionate towards the Nazis.

 

I think when exploring and debating Nihilism it is important to get into the origin of the word. It did not come from Nietzche or any of the German philosphers, but rather from Russian literature. The term was coined by the novelist Ivan Turgenev in the novel Fathers and Sons and was used (with some irony, I may add) to describe the character and philosphy of Bazarov, a fictional representation of the "new man of the 1860s" (the "sons" of the title) who rejected the European liberalism of the "men of the 40s" (the "fathers" of the title) after becoming dissillusioned by the failed European revolutions of 1848. The origins of this tradition are actually somewhat unique to late Tsarist Russia. Another great literary investigation of Nihilism (roughly contemporary with Nietzche) can be found in Fyodor Dostoeyevski's novel The Possessed (sometimes translated as The Devils. In most of these Russian accounts the word is used ironically and pajoritively. At the time, the people being labeled "nihilists" by their critics would not have embraced that name; they called themselves (mostly) socialists and anarchists and their main concern was the destruction of the old, corrupt order of Russian society and believed in quite a lot of Utopian philosophy. However, they were often much clearer in what they were against than what they were for, hence reactionaries were able with great success to label them "nihilists" and destructive. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Revolution came out of movement that Tsarist reactionaries labelled "nihilist".

 

Nietzsche said as much. The 'first' nihilism is Christianity, because, by its very nature, it relegates the importance of this world to nothing more than a test that is to be endured and anxiously awaited to end.

Solution 1: Atheism. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

The 'second' nihilism is the more conventional. Without a deification of purpose, life has effectively no purpose whatsoever. There are no values, life is finite, and our very existence is absurd.

Solution 2: Existentialism. Meaning is subjective and to be discerned individually.

Has anyone read Elizam Escobar's essay on the subject? It is a fresh perspective on nihilism, albeit a Marxist one. He concludes that the solution to the 'second' nihilism is the ultimate emergence of a classless society.

<[-]> Saber

 

Life has a purpose. Everything has a purpose. We are all here for a purpose. If there is no purpose, we would not exist.