Nihilism

The word nihilism is constructed from the Latin nihil, "nothing," and the Greek suffix ism. In the compendious Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical dictionary of philosophy), Wolfgang Müller-Lauter gives 1733 as the earliest known date for the occurrence of the German Nihilismus and notes the rise of the word nihilisme in France at the end of the eighteenth century.

From the late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, nihilism followed a course that scholars have already traced in considerable detail. Enemies of German idealism threw the term at Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, protesting against the emptiness of a philosophy that denies the possibility of any reliable contact with the world of things in themselves. As European thought increasingly moved toward dispassionate, secular explanations of religious belief (holding, for example, that such belief is a natural and predictable product of human consciousness or that it reflects a natural, human tendency to generate myths), those seeking to defend traditional faith increasingly leveled the charge of nihilism against secularizing thinkers. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), the famed and much reviled author of Das Leben Jesu: kritisch bearbeitet (1835–1836; The life of Jesus: critically examined), one of the nineteenth century's many biographies of Jesus, and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), the equally noted author of the skeptical Das Wesen des Christentums (1845; The essence of Christianity), were both accused of propagating nihilism. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Johann Caspar Schmidt; 1806–1856), author of the primary gospel of egoism, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845; The ego and his own), and pre-Nietzschean messenger of the death of God, has been described as an early nihilist. All such thinkers, it was felt, had reduced to nothing (nihil) both faith and its transcendent object.