Nihilism

Had it not been for Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), nihilism—the word and what it came to designate—would no doubt have been very different from what it in fact became. We find an enigmatic reference to "nihilism according to the Petersburg model" (an apparent reference to Turgenev) in part 5 (1887) of The Gay Science, but the term occurs in his published writings mostly in connection with philosophies that Nietzsche views as world-or life-denying. In The Genealogy of Morality (1887), for example, he offers the term nihilism as a synonym for Buddhism, meaning a renunciation of the affairs of the world. In The Anti-Christ (1888), nihilism is essentially synonymous with "denial of life," and Nietzsche defines pity, the root sentiment of Christianity, as "the praxis of nihilism."

The bulk of Nietzsche's comments on nihilism, however, appear in unpublished writings (the Nachlass, or "literary legacy") from the 1880s. It is here that Nietzsche describes nihilism as a condition in which "the highest values devaluate themselves" and in which the answer to the question "Why?" is missing. There are two possible responses to this condition, Nietzsche explains in a notebook he kept in 1887. We may rise up in strength and recognize that existing goals are no longer adequate, establishing new values in place of the older ones, or we may resign in weakness ("Buddhism," as Nietzsche puts it), thus failing to generate new values. The first response is called "active nihilism," the second "passive nihilism."

There has been some debate over the years about whether Nietzsche himself was a nihilist. The debate is misguided. A cursory reading of what Nietzsche says on the subject shows that for him nihilism is alternately a lamentable and a potentially fruitful condition, but in either case a temporary one. Anyone inclined to construe the proclamation that God is dead as an expression of nihilism should remember that Nietzsche declared the religion whose God was allegedly dead to be itself a form of nihilism. Nietzsche's true legacy was the association Conspiracy in Russia: A Nihilist Meeting Surprised. Illustration, 1880. In late nineteenth-century Russia, nihilism was often used as a pejorative term meant to characterize certain left-wing radicals as dangerous and amoral, but supporters appropriated the same term to refer to the Russian revolutionary movement in a positive fashion. © BETTMANN/CORBIS of nihilism with values (their absence, their rejection, their synthesis). Future social commentators who invoke the term nihilism to mourn the loss of traditional morality may blame or not blame Nietzsche; what they wittingly or unwittingly owe him is a definition that is at least implicit in what they say.