Nihilism Explained: Principles, History, and Catholic Insights
This is the tenth article in a series. To learn more, see: “The -Isms Encyclopedia: Historical and Philosophical Ideas Explained” by Mr. Phillip Campbell.
What is Nihilism?
I was a teenager when I first encountered the word nihilism. It wasn’t in a philosophy book or lecture, however, but in the bawdy (and not family-friendly) 1998 Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski. The film’s villains were a cabal of eccentric, turtle-neck-wearing Germans who called themselves the Nihilists and went around proclaiming (in comedic, exaggerated German accents) that they “believe in nothing.” What a strange thing to believe in nothing, I thought. Were there really people out there who advocated for “nothing”?
It was not until college that I learned that nihilism was, indeed, a real thing. Nihilism is a philosophical worldview that holds that existence is meaningless. Associated primarily with 18th- and 19th-century Germany and Russia, nihilism is characterized by a fundamental negation of the primary aspects of existence. (Nihilism derives from the Latin word nihil, meaning “nothing.”)
Man comes to understand existence through three primary means: knowledge, meaning, and morality. Knowledge tells us what exists, meaning creates relationships of relevance between what exists and ourselves, and morality tells us how we ought to act within these relationships. Nihilism essentially negates each of these: knowledge is impossible, meaning is illusory, and moral values are baseless.
Outside of philosophy, nihilism was strongly reflected in postmodern art and literature.
Principles of Nihilism
It is not difficult to explain the fundamental idea behind nihilism—nothing matters and nothing is certain. Therefore, there’s no point in making absolute statements, whether in politics, religion, morality, or any other facet of human life. Because it is such a broad concept, however, nihilism encompasses a variety of philosophical positions that challenge or outright reject specific elements of reality.
Each variant of nihilism targets a different aspect of existence. Existential nihilism, for instance, holds that human life lacks any inherent or transcendent purpose. Moral nihilism maintains that objective moral facts or values do not exist. Epistemological nihilism doubts or denies the possibility of genuine, objective knowledge. And political nihilism calls for the dismantling of existing social and political structures. Because the term is used in diverse ways, its exact meaning remains contested, and numerous other forms and interpretations of nihilism have emerged across various philosophical schools of thought.
Who’s Who of Nihilism
Some aspects of nihilism have their roots in ancient Greek or Indian philosophy, particularly among those schools of thought that rejected the possibility of attaining certainty. For example, the Greek Sophist Gorgias (d. 375 BC) famously taught the maxim, “Nothing exists. Even if something did exist, it would be impossible to know it. Even if it were possible to know about it, it would be impossible to communicate it. Even if we could communicate it, others would not understand it.” And in ancient India, there was the Chervaka school of philosophy (c. 900 BC), which rejected all claims of certainty about life and held that all belief systems were human constructs with no objective validity.
Today, however, nihilism is mainly associated with the work of a few German and Russian philosophers dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. A few of the significant figures in the history of nihilism are:
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) was a German philosopher and socialite who was deeply immersed in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling. Jacobi argued that Enlightenment philosophy—especially the epistemology of Immanuel Kant—had proven that it was impossible to ever know truth in itself. For Jacobi, this led necessarily to nihilism, the idea that nothing was certain.
Jacobi said that, at best, we could have “faith” that the world was as it seems, but that this faith cannot be grounded in any certainty. He rejected the Enlightenment’s exaltation of reason and coined the term “nihilism” to explain the consequences of its rationalism. Rationalism, according to Jacobi, led to a denial of objective reality, resulting in a situation in which nothing (Latin: nihil) could be known with certainty. Jacobi coined the term “nihilism” to explain his view, which rejected all “dogmatism,” that is, any attempt to explain reality in terms of absolute principles. The external world and everything we perceive had to be accepted on faith.
Ivan Turgenev
Unlike the philosopher Jacobi, the Russian Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) was a novelist whose works popularized Russian literature in the West. Turgenev’s literature encapsulated the nihilist ideals of Russia’s mid-century youth, who, living through the revolutions of 1848 and the turmoil that followed Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, had come to doubt the certainties of previous generations.
Turgenev profiled this emerging nihilism in his 1862 book Fathers and Sons. While the novel is not pro-nihilist, it does take a nuanced view of the beliefs animating the nihilist youth. The novel’s protagonist, Bazarov, is a nihilist who is quite idealized. Real-life nihilists saw Fathers and Sons as providing a role model for their movement, while conservative critics accused Turgenev of glorifying nihilism. Turgenev would withdraw from the literary world as a result of this controversy, which popularized nihilism in the West, even if not deliberately.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Today, most people associate nihilism with the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), for whom it was a central part of his thought. Nietzsche’s beliefs about nihilism are complex and bound up with his ideas about Christianity and religion. Nietzsche believed that Christianity had been created to counteract nihilism—the dogmas, disciplines, and moral surety of the Christian faith provided a scaffolding of metaphysical and moral certainty against the chaos of meaninglessness. But with Christianity increasingly dismantled under blistering attacks from modern science and philosophy, there was nothing to counteract the sense of modernity’s pervasive meaninglessness. The modern world was essentially nihilistic.
For Nietzsche, the advent of nihilism was an occasion for purification, for man to overcome it by finding new meaning beyond traditional morality. This is important to understand—while Nietzsche saluted the arrival of nihilism as a struggle to purify and ultimately elevate our way of thinking, he did not view nihilism as an end in itself. For Nietzsche, modern nihilism is a crisis that must be surmounted, not something to be wallowed in. Nietzsche wrote:
“I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism’s] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes a master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!”lkdf
It is only when nihilism is overcome that society can truly flourish. If Nietzsche wished to hasten the emergence of nihilism, it was like a person hastening a necessary surgery so they could get it over with as quickly as possible and begin recovery. Thus, while nihilism is a central facet of Nietzsche’s thought, he does not see nihilism as a workable ethos upon which to build a society. Rather, he views it as a transitional stage to help mankind develop a new ethos, centered on the vitality of life rather than a series of “thou shalt nots.”
Nihilism in Practice
Not being a political philosophy, there has never been anything close to a political or social system grounded in nihilism. We can perhaps point to certain historical subcultures at different times and places that exemplify a nihilist attitude towards life. For example, the punk rock subculture of the 1980s and 90s, with its glorification of anarchy and moral relativism.
If we turn to the world of literature, however, we can find a frightening portrayal of a nihilist society in the work of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), whose 1872 novel The Possessed studies the inner workings of a nihilist revolutionary movement and paints a chilling picture of how the ideals of nihilism would translate as a political movement.
For Dostoevsky, nihilism in practice appears as a contagious spiritual plague that begins with fashionable intellectual rejection of all authority, tradition, and moral restraint—“nothing is true, everything is permitted”—and rapidly descends into real-world chaos. The nihilist radicals manifest all sorts of destructive behaviors: cynical manipulation, deliberate destruction of social bonds, orchestrated scandals, betrayal of friends, and finally cold-blooded murder. The characters’ lives are characterized by an absolute boredom, an inability to love or feel anything genuine, random acts of cruelty performed almost experimentally, and an eventual suicide that is less about despair than the logical conclusion of a life in which nothing ultimately matters.
The novel shows nihilism not as an abstract philosophy debated in drawing rooms but as a demonic force that possesses individuals, turns society upside down, and drags a provincial town down into meaningless anarchy—all while the perpetrators mouth revolutionary slogans they themselves treat as jokes. It’s interesting that the Russian title of this work, Бесы, translates as “Demons.”
Criticism of Nihilism
As mentioned above, nihilism has taken many forms, ranging from the metaphysical to the epistemological and moral, each with its own assertions and criticisms. In general, though, the chain that connects every variant of nihilism is the rejection of certainty—nothing can be known or asserted with any surety, and therefore all absolute statements are doubtful. The best we can do is maintain a detached agnosticism about the external world and all truth claims.
The strongest philosophical critique of nihilism comes from phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, and others), who argue that nihilism is self-refuting. Meaning is not some extra add-on we discover in the world. Instead, it is integral to the way a conscious subject perceives everything.
The moment someone is alive and awake, things already appear as mattering—useful, painful, beautiful, urgent—and even the nihilist’s bold act of declaring “nothing matters” relies on implicit meaning: they care enough to express it, they expect their expression to be understood, and they choose their words, tone, etc. based on the assumption that communication has some objective point. Even if they are professing nihilism just for shock value, shock value is still a value, and it is assumed that people’s reactions matter. In short, the very act of proclaiming nihilism is already a purposeful act, demonstrating significance and engagement with a world that matters. Nihilism contradicts itself in the very act of being professed.
This is why some philosophers argue that it is better to understand nihilism as a “mood” or rhetorical gesture, never a genuinely livable philosophy of life.
From a Catholic Perspective
It should go without saying that nihilism is fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism, which teaches that the world and everything in it exists according to a fundamental order that reflects the Logos, the uncreated wisdom of God incarnated in Jesus Christ (cf. John 1:1). Being is inherently good, meaningful, and ordered because it is created and sustained by a personal, loving God. Against the nihilists who argue that existence is meaningless, Catholics contend that being is good, true, and beautiful, and that these qualities are objective realities inherent in everything that exists.
While sin may have wounded our nature and made it difficult to adhere to moral standards, our ethical principles are no less real just because we sometimes struggle to keep them. The moral law is written on the human heart (cf. Rom. 2:14-15). The Catholic view is realistic about human evil yet insists that conscience, the pull toward truth and goodness, and the sacraments continually testify that meaning and moral obligation have not been annihilated; they are wounded but constantly offered healing through God’s grace.
Ultimately, the cross is the strongest answer to nihilism: God became man, suffered, died, and rose again. The Word becoming flesh means that matter, history, suffering, and the apparent meaninglessness of life are all taken up into the life of God Himself. Nihilism’s claim that “nothing matters” is refuted by the fact that God judged every human tear and every moment of pain to be worth redeeming in person.
Continuing the Discussion
Homeschool Connections has a course in our recorded catalog, How to Battle Relativism, Nihilism, and Other Errors with Dr. Sam Nicholson, that discusses many of these issues from a philosophical perspective.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Join me and other homeschooling parents at our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group to continue the discussion.
