A brief history of Nihilism

Nihilism is the philosophical belief of extreme skepticism. It is the tension created by how we want the world to be and how it appears to operate. Nihilists in general reject fundamental aspects of human existence such as knowledge, morality, or meaning. Many nihilists see humanity playing out in their own self-interest and are often plagued with the knowledge of seeing the worst outcomes that will eventually play out. It

Nihilism was first recorded in the 5th century B.C.E in the Theravada, Buddhism’s oldest text. Philosophers such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Søren Kierkegaard pushed the movement forward as a counter to the church and further developed concepts such as rationalism and leveling to the point of losing one’s identity. In the 1860s the Russian Empire experienced a major wave of nihilism. In fact, the Russian word nigilizm meaning ‘nihilism’ came from the Latin word nihil which means “nothing.” As documented by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism had swept through the western frontier. An interesting quote from EP Goodwin, a missionary from 1880 remarks, “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx.” This all cumulates in 1882 when Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead.”

When the rug has been pulled it is only natural to follow a path of self-destruction. To numb the pain that is felt. The betrayal that people feel when everything they are taught is fiction. As a result, values begin to fall. One by one everything that was once held sacred and dear simply seems pointless when staring into the abyss of the universe. As physicist, Brian Cox has pointed out, “Paradoxically whilst we are definitely physically insignificant—the Earth is one planet around one star amongst 400 billion stars in one galaxy (The Milky Way) amongst two trillion galaxies in a small patch of the (known) universe. So we are definitely small. You can’t argue with that. We’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms, some as old as time. The other ones, everything else other than hydrogen in our bodies, is made in stars. All cooked over billions of years. And we are in this pattern that can think so suddenly as the great Carl Sagan said, ‘You have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself which is us.”

Nietzsche’s great insight was this: If you kill all your established values you will in effect destroy your whole existence. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives … What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” The answer to this great contradiction, this great problem of establishing meaning and existence, and confronting nihilism is to transcend it. It isn’t the elimination of value systems but to replace them.