What is nihilism? The idea that nothing matters, examined

Nihilism is the view that something people take to have value or grounding actually has none: most often, that life has no built-in meaning or purpose. It comes in several kinds. Existential nihilism says life has no inherent meaning, moral nihilism says nothing is objectively right or wrong, and epistemological nihilism says nothing can truly be known. The word comes from the Latin nihil, "nothing".

In short

• Nihilism is a family of views, and they don't stand or fall together: doubting that morality is objective is a different claim from saying life is pointless.
• Friedrich Nietzsche is linked with nihilism because he warned it was coming, not because he recommended it; he wanted something to replace the old values.
• The main replies, from existentialism and absurdism to Stoic and religious views, mostly accept that meaning isn't handed to us and differ on where it comes from.

What are the kinds of nihilism?

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on nihilism separates several kinds. They are often blurred in conversation, which causes much of the confusion.

Kind	The claim	An example of the thought
Existential	Life has no inherent meaning or value	"In a billion years nothing I do will have mattered."
Moral	There are no objective moral facts	"Cruelty isn't really wrong; we just dislike it."
Epistemological	Knowledge and truth are impossible	"Nothing can be justified, including this sentence."
Political	The existing order must be destroyed before anything better can come	The Russian radicals of the 1860s

A person can hold one without the others. Many philosophers think morality isn't objective but live full, meaningful lives; many religious believers think morality is objective but feel, in bad moments, that their life lacks purpose.

Where did the word come from?

The German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi used it around 1800 as an accusation: he argued that the philosophy of his day, followed to its end, dissolved everything into nothing. The word spread after Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons in 1862, whose young hero Bazarov calls himself a nihilist, a man who accepts no authority and no principle on faith. In Russia the label then attached to a political movement that rejected the state, the church and the family.

What did Nietzsche say about nihilism?

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the 1880s, is the thinker most tied to nihilism, and most often misread. He did not argue that people should believe nothing matters. He argued that it was about to happen to Europe, and he called the coming crisis a danger.

His diagnosis ran like this. For centuries, Christian belief had given European life its values and purpose. But the same culture had trained people to value truthfulness, and truthfulness, turned on religion, was eroding belief in it. In The Gay Science (1882) a madman announces that "God is dead", meaning that belief in God was no longer able to anchor European values, though most people had not yet noticed. When they did, the values resting on that belief would lose their footing, and the result would be nihilism: "the highest values devalue themselves," as he put it in his notes.

Nietzsche saw nihilism as a stage to pass through, not a place to stay. His answer, sketched rather than finished, was a revaluation of values: people creating values that affirm life, rather than inheriting ones grounded beyond it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Nietzsche sets out how his positive project grew from that diagnosis.

Is moral nihilism true?

This is the most technical kind, and philosophers still argue it seriously. Its best-known modern form is the error theory set out by J. L. Mackie in his 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. On this view, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, moral statements try to state facts, but there are no moral facts for them to state, so they are all untrue.

Worked example: Mackie's argument, step by step

Mackie's main argument, the argument from queerness, can be laid out as premises.

1. If there were objective moral facts, they would be very strange things: facts that by themselves give everyone a reason to act, whatever they want.
2. Nothing else in the world is like that. A fact about mass or temperature gives you a reason only if you care about something.
3. We would also need a strange faculty to detect such facts, unlike any sense we know of.
4. When a hypothesis requires entities and faculties unlike anything else we know, we should doubt it.
5. So there are probably no objective moral facts.

To answer it, you have to reject a premise. Moral realists deny premise 2, arguing that reasons are part of the world too, as in logic or mathematics, where we accept facts we can't see. Others deny premise 1, saying moral facts are less strange than Mackie claims. Notice too that premise 4 is a form of Occam's razor, and whether it applies to values is itself in dispute.

Still argued

Most professional philosophers reject moral nihilism, but not all. In a 2009 survey of philosophers at 99 leading departments, reported by David Chalmers, 56% accepted or leaned toward moral realism, the view that there are objective moral facts, and 28% toward moral anti-realism, which includes error theory alongside other views. On whether life has meaning, there is no survey to point to, only competing answers.

How have people answered nihilism?

Most responses accept part of the nihilist's point, that the universe doesn't hand us meaning ready-made, and then disagree about what follows.

Response	Its answer	Key figures
[[what-is-stoicism	Stoicism]]	Meaning lies in living by reason and virtue, which no outside event can take away
Religious answers	Meaning and value come from God or the sacred, and are real	Many traditions; Søren Kierkegaard
Existentialism	We exist first and define ourselves by our choices; meaning is made, not found	Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
Absurdism	The clash between our hunger for meaning and a silent universe can't be solved, only lived with defiantly	Albert Camus
Nietzsche's revaluation	Create values that say yes to this life, without appeal to another world	Friedrich Nietzsche

Camus put the absurdist reply most memorably. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), he compared human life to the Greek king condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever, and concluded that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy": the struggle itself can fill a life. At the other pole sits Plato, for whom goodness is the most real thing there is, the sun outside the cave in his allegory. Between them lies most of the history of philosophy on value.

When the question feels personal

Asking whether anything matters is one of the oldest questions in philosophy, and thinking it through is normal. But sometimes the thought comes less from an argument than from a heavy stretch of life, when nothing feels worth doing. That is worth talking about with someone, not only reading about. In the United States, calling or texting 988 reaches the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour; elsewhere, a doctor or local helpline can help.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name three kinds of nihilism and say how a person could hold one without the others.
• Why is it a misreading to call Nietzsche a nihilist who wanted people to believe nothing matters?
• Pick one premise of Mackie's argument and say how a moral realist would challenge it.

Sources

• Nihilism — Alan Pratt, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Friedrich Nietzsche — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Moral anti-realism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Existentialism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Why isn't there more progress in philosophy? — David J. Chalmers, Philosophy, 2015
• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline