Nihilism - Early History Of The Term, Nihilism In Russia And As A Russian Export, Nietzsche And Nihilism
employed centuries
In a history that spans more than two and a half centuries, the term nihilism has been employed to denote a wide range of phenomena. It has been variously used to express contempt or horror on the one side, approval and admiration on the other. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has almost always been an emotional and axiological term, frequently employed to cut off debate on a moral issue by representing a particular position as absolute, totalizing, and extreme.
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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 c…
The term nihilism (nigilizm in Russian) had been used in Russia early in the nineteenth century, but it burst on the scene with particular force and with an entirely new meaning in January 1862, when Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) published Fathers and Sons. Turgenev's hero, Evgeny Vasil'evich Bazarov, is a man of science, a member of the new generation who has decided that, at lea…
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 writin…
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 …
If the word nihilism during the twentieth century was frequently used to denote the condition—and the accompanying feeling of despair—that arises when established and fixed moral values are missing, it is not surprising that it gained currency at a time when much of the world was dominated by ideologies that rejected such values or openly embraced destruction. At the turn of the cent…
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower. London: H. Hamilton, 1953. Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. What Is to Be Done? Translated by Michael R. Katz. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Crosby, Donald A…
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