Nihilism

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**Nihilism** is a way of thinking which rejects meaning, concepts, or life. It can be a  or a . Nihility means "nothingness", and "" is the Latin word for "nothing". Nihilism can mean the belief that values are meaningless ideas. It can also mean the belief that nothing has any meaning or purpose. There are many different beliefs that can be called nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German thinker who wrote many things about nihilism. What he wrote is often called the most important  of nihilism. Nietzsche wrote that nihilism comes from questioning  values until they fall apart. This is called "". The word "nihilism" was also made popular by a Russian novel called *Fathers and Sons* by Ivan Turgenev. The hero of the story is a nihilist named Bazarov. Russian nihilism inspired many revolutionaries, like Sergei Nechaev and Vladimir Lenin. The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky was almost also a nihilist. But he became an  after ten years in exile. He wrote about nihilism in many novels such as *Crime and Punishment*. The people who assassinated the Russian emperor, Tsar Alexander II on 13 March 1881, are often called nihilists too.

Nietzsche thought value destruction had bad results but couldn't be stopped. He also thought Christianity had made value destruction happen, and called it a type of nihilism. He thought Christianity was nihilistic because it was , meaning it has a negative and unhealthy attitude towards living. Religious thinkers have instead said that nihilism comes from rejecting religion. Sometimes people think parts of Buddhism are like nihilism, even though other parts reject nihilism. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the word "nihilism" was mostly used against people who rejected religion or believed in nothing. Either way, nihilism is often seen as a word for life-denying beliefs.

## Important terms 
* ***anti-nihilism*** — *Anti-nihilism* means to be against nihilism. It was also a genre of Russian literature in the 19th century. Examples of people who have been called anti-nihilists are Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, But in one way or another, many anti-nihilists have ended up helping nihilism.
* ***life-denying*** — If something is *life-denying* it means it has a  and unhealthy attitude towards living. It is the opposite of being "life-affirming". Gilles Deleuze says that denying life and existence is what Friedrich Nietzsche calls "nihilism". Soon, the word was also used in English. It probably came from the French, German, or Late Latin form of the word.

"Nihilism" first became a philosophical word in German, and then in Russian. These two meanings were combined by Friedrich Nietzsche. A Swiss thinker called Jacob Hermann Obereit also used the word in 1787, and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi did in 1799. This is where it first became part of philosophy. The belief that no one can know true reality is what Obereit called "nihilism". He used this definition to call Immanuel Kant a nihilist. This was because Kant said people cannot be certain of real things, but can only be certain about their  of real things. Jacobi also used this definition to say Kant and his followers were nihilists. For example, he famously called Johann Gottlieb Fichte a nihilist. Jacobi thought German idealism and humanism were kinds of nihilism that came from the Age of Enlightenment. According to him, these  rational philosophies were the total opposite of rational.

Around 1824, a German journalist called Joseph von Görres used the word "nihilism" in a political way. He said that rejecting social structures was nihilism. But the word "nihilism" almost died out during this time. For example, the German thinker Max Stirner is called one of the first true nihilists but he never used the word. He wrote most of his works in the 1840s.

### Russian nihilism 
 was a main Russian nihilist of the 1860s|thumb|left|upright=0.75]]

Russian nihilism was an early kind of nihilist philosophy. It was also a subculture that sometimes mixed with revolutionism. Russian nihilism is often wrongly called a kind of political terrorism because of this. The nihilists in the book say they are people who reject  that they can. Even though Turgenev was more of an , many young people started to call themselves "nihilists" because of this book. He says nihilism is when someone thinks that what  exist is not what  exist. For example, some people want a perfect world to exist instead of the real world. But nihilism isn't just about wanting it all gone — Nietzsche says that nihilism is also trying to attack and destroy everything that exists.

## Related pages 
* Absurdism
* Cynicism
* Egoism
* Existentialism
* God is dead
* Pessimism
* Postmodernism

## References