Nihilism – By Branch / Doctrine – The Basics of Philosophy

Introduction | Types of Nihilism

Nihilism is the philosophical position which argues that Being, especially past and current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. It asserts that there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator, that a "true morality" does not exist, and that objective secular ethics are impossible. Therefore life has, in a sense, no truth and no action is objectively preferable to any other.

The term "nihilism" was first popularized by the novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818 - 1883). Art movements such as Dada and Futurism, and philosophical movements like Existentialism, Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism and Deconstructionism have all been identified by commentators as "nihilistic" at various times in various contexts. Nihilism differs from Skepticism in that Skepticism does not reject claims to truth outright, it only rejects these claims if there is insufficient empirical evidence to support them.

Nihilism is most often associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, although he never actually advocated Nihilism as a practical mode of living and was typically quite critical of it. He was, however, one of the first philosophers to study nihilism extensively. Nietzsche's criticism of nihilism was mainly on that grounds that it can become a false belief, and lead individuals to discard any hope of meaning in the world and thus to invent some compensatory alternative measure of significance. He also asserts that Nihilism is a result of valuing "higher", "divine" or "meta-physical" things (such as God), that do not in turn value "base", "human" or "earthly" things, and that any form of Idealism, after being rejected by the idealist, leads to Nihilism. According to Nietzsche, it is only once nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive.

Similarly, Jacques Derrida, whose Deconstructionism movement is commonly labelled nihilistic, did not himself make the claims often attributed to him. In fact, Deconstructionism can be seen not as a denial of truth, but as a denial of our ability to know truth (i.e. it makes an epistemological claim as opposed to Nihilism's ontological or metaphysical claim).

Nihilism is one of the few branches of philosophy that allows for the possibility of absolute nothingness. By making three apparently plausible assumptions - that there are a finite number of objects in the world; that each of these objects are contingent (i.e. that although they exist, they might not have existed); and that the objects are independent (i.e. the non-existence of one thing does not necessitate the existence of anything else - then the "subtraction argument" runs that each contingent object can be subtracted from the world, one by one, until absolutely nothing is left. However, it is not clear that the independence assumption is justifiable, and in practice (whether it be in an imaginative thought experiment, or in the hard scientific world of particle physics) subtracting an object from a particular scenario actually does have repercussions, however small, for the world as a whole. Rather, nothingness appears to be a limit or asymptote that can be approached but never quite reached.

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Nihilism - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy