NIHILISM

 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 ( )

 While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, the movement is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche ( ), 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 ( )

 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 ( ) and Albert Camus ( ).  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: