Nihilism

From 1936 to 1946, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) wrote the component parts of what became a two-volume study of Nietzsche. A simple glance at the chapter and subchapter headings will show to what extent nihilism, in Heidegger's eyes, was fundamental to Nietzsche's thinking. World War II and the period immediately preceding it were an appropriate backdrop for Heidegger's sense that we must view Nietzsche's nihilism in the broader context of what he calls "the end of metaphysics" in Europe. He defines this end as "the beginning of a taking-seriously of that 'event,' 'God is dead.'" As Heidegger sees it, nihilism is one of five "principal headings" (Haupttitel) in Nietzsche's thought, the other four (with which it is inseparably connected) being the revaluation of all prior values, the will to power, the eternal recurrence of the same, and the superman. If Heidegger's comments on Nietzsche's nihilism are partly a comment on the contemporary European situation, they are also partly a comment on his own earlier work. In his chapter on the five principal headings, for example, Heidegger defines what he calls Nietzsche's "classical nihilism" as "that bringing-to-completion of nihilism in which nihilism considers itself to be released from the necessity of thinking precisely that which its essence constitutes: nihil, nothing—as the veil of the truth of the Being of that-whichis [ des Seins des Seienden ]." A passage like this is probably helpful more to the student of Heidegger's Being and Time (1926) than to the student of nihilism.

World War II and the entire history of totalitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century provoked one of the most forceful uses of nihilism as a moral and political term. In 1951, Albert Camus (1913–1960) published L'homme révolté (Man in revolt; translated into English as The Rebel). As Camus put it in the first few pages of his book, "If our age easily allows that murder can have its justifications, it is because of that indifference to life that is the mark of nihilism." The central question becomes whether it is possible to offer a rational justification for murder, as is done in this "age of ideologies." Nihilism has to do with values, as it did for Nietzsche. When Camus comes to show the inner contradiction in "the absurd" (his term for the attitude born of nihilism or "absolute negation"), he has this to say: The absurd is a contradiction "because it excludes value judgments while still wishing to preserve life, whereas to live is itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge." One might argue that this position represents a petitio principii (begging the question), but even so, it is obvious that, to Camus, it serves as a palliative in a world still reeling from the Stalinist purges and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Outside Russian revolutionary circles, nihilism has been a term whose alleged exponents rarely embrace it, particularly because it is seldom used favorably. Some scholars have attempted to classify it into several subtypes. Donald A. Crosby, in The Specter of the Absurd, sees five types of nihilism: political (essentially the Russian revolutionary sort), moral (in which all moral judgments are rejected as individual or arbitrary), epistemological (in which all truth claims are seen as purely relative), cosmic (in which the cosmos is seen as meaningless), and existential (in which human existence is seen as pointless). Karen L. Carr, in The Banalization of Nihilism, proposes a similar taxonomy. In her view, there are five types of nihilism: epistemological ("the denial of the possibility of knowledge"), alethiological ("the denial of the reality of truth"), metaphysical ("the denial of an independently existing world"), ethical ("the denial of the reality of moral or ethical values"), and existential or axiological ("the feeling of emptiness and pointlessness that follows from the judgment, 'Life has no meaning'").

With categories as broad as these, nihilism can be applied to a host of phenomena associated generally with a loss of values or centeredness. One might even say that nihilism as a label became so popular in the second half of the twentieth century that it was often left unspoken. A famous issue of Time magazine in 1966 posed the question "Is God Dead?" in stark red letters against a black background on its cover. In the article, whose immediate inspiration was the rise of the "deathof-God theology" practiced by a particular group of American theologians, John T. Elson reflected on his age as "a time of no religion," cited Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Nietzsche as prophets of modern godlessness, and offered this comment on modern art: "From the scrofulous hobos of Samuel Beckett to Antonioni's tired-blooded aristocrats, the anti-heroes of modern art endlessly suggest that waiting for God is futile, since life is without meaning."

Many, however, have not hesitated to name the illness. In 1987, for example, Allan Bloom (1930–1992) published his assault on American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind. He titled Part 2 of that book "Nihilism, American Style," taking aim at a pathological condition he saw in America both inside and outside the academy: "value relativism." The ultimate culprit is none other than Nietzsche. As Bloom saw it, Nietzsche's target was not only God but modern democracy. Displaying Nietzsche's own fondness for unsubstantiated, sweeping claims, Bloom declares, "Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss."