Nihilism

Ivan Turgenev coined "nihilist" in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons to describe a new type of Russian radical who rejected all authority. His character Bazarov was meant as social commentary, but young Russians embraced the label so enthusiastically that Turgenev lamented creating it. Within a decade, self-proclaimed nihilists were attempting to assassinate the Tsar, transforming a literary term into a revolutionary movement that terrified Europe.

Nietzsche didn't advocate for nihilism—he diagnosed it as the inevitable consequence of killing God in European consciousness. He argued that once Christianity's metaphysical scaffolding collapsed, the West would enter a crisis where "the highest values devaluate themselves," leaving nothing to believe in. His project was actually to overcome nihilism through revaluation, making him more of a nihilism therapist than a nihilist philosopher, though popular culture constantly confuses the two.

Nihilism's power comes from its slipperiness between describing a condition and prescribing an attitude. Is it saying "nothing matters" as an observation about the universe, or as a recommendation for how to live? This confusion means the same word can describe a depressed teenager, a hardened revolutionary, a sophisticated philosopher, and a cultural mood—which explains both its staying power and why arguments about nihilism often talk past each other.

Contrary to popular assumption, nihilism has been philosophically generative rather than merely destructive. The existentialists (Camus, Sartre) built entire philosophies on responding to meaninglessness with self-created meaning. Postmodernists used nihilism's critique of grand narratives to open space for marginalized voices. Even in everyday life, confronting the possibility that nothing has inherent meaning can paradoxically free people to invest their own significance into relationships and projects without waiting for cosmic permission.

Not all nihilism leads to despair or destruction—Nietzsche distinguished between passive nihilism (exhausted collapse into "nothing matters, why bother") and active nihilism (energetic destruction of old values to make room for new ones). This distinction matters practically: recognizing that inherited meanings don't work anymore can lead either to depression or to the exhilarating freedom of authoring your own values. The same diagnosis, radically different treatments.

Every generation since the 1860s has declared itself uniquely nihilistic, from Victorian commentators horrified by Darwin, to Cold War anxieties about the atomic bomb, to contemporary hand-wringing about social media. This repetitive pattern suggests nihilism functions less as an accurate philosophical description and more as a recurring cultural story we tell when traditional authorities weaken—a way of naming the vertigo that comes with increased freedom and decreased certainty about what matters.