Nihilism

What was nihilism for Nietzsche?

Nietzsche saw nihilism not as his own doctrine but as the sickness of the coming age. A note of 1885–1886 begins: "Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?" A note of autumn 1887 gives the short definition: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves. The goal is lacking. The answer to the question 'what for?' is lacking."

Was bedeutet Nihilismus? – Daß die obersten Werte sich entwerten. Es fehlt das Ziel. Es fehlt die Antwort auf das »Wozu?«.

The key word is "themselves". In Nietzsche's view Christian morality taught truthfulness as the highest virtue, and truthfulness pushed to its end led people to discover that God and morality were themselves inventions. The highest values were not toppled by an outside enemy; they undid themselves by their own logic. That is why the same note declares it a mistake to look for the cause of nihilism in "social distress", "physiological degeneration" or corruption. Suffering admits many interpretations, and nihilism lay hidden "in one quite specific interpretation, the Christian-moral one". The death of God was the decisive moment.

in einer ganz bestimmten Ausdeutung, in der christlich-moralischen, steckt der Nihilismus.

How do active and passive nihilism differ?

Nihilism, Nietzsche wrote, "is ambiguous". On one side is "nihilism as a sign of the increased power of the spirit: active nihilism"; on the other, "nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: passive nihilism". The first is the state in which the spirit has grown so strong that the previous goals and convictions no longer fit; here nihilism reaches its maximum "as a violent force of destruction". The second is the "weary nihilism that no longer attacks", and Nietzsche named Buddhism as its most famous form.

A. Nihilismus als Zeichen der gesteigerten Macht des Geistes: der aktive Nihilismus.

B. Nihilismus als Niedergang und Rückgang der Macht des Geistes: der passive Nihilismus.

Nietzsche himself held that nihilism had to be lived through to the end and gone beyond. Instead of mourning the collapse of the old values in resignation, or hurrying to fill the gap with new idols, one should accept the collapse and create new values oneself. The project he called the "revaluation of all values", and the thoughts of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, all served this overcoming. These notes, however, are unpublished notebook material. After Nietzsche's collapse his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast bound them into the compilation The Will to Power, changing their order and context; only after Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari's critical edition could scholars read them in the order in which they were written.

How do the Russian nihilists differ from Nietzsche's nihilism?

The word is older than Nietzsche. In the philosophical sense of making negation absolute it was first used by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in a letter to Johann Gottlieb Fichte in 1799, and in the 1840s the Young Hegelians were called nihilists because of their atheism. The word spread across Europe after Ivan Turgenev called his hero Bazarov a nihilist in the novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Young Arkady explains: "A nihilist is a man who does not bow before any authority and does not accept a single principle on faith, however much respect that principle may enjoy." The old aristocrat Pavel sneers: "There used to be Hegelians, and now there are nihilists."

Нигилист — это человек, который не склоняется ни перед какими авторитетами, который не принимает ни одного принципа на веру, каким бы уважением ни был окружен этот принцип.

The Russian nihilists were the generation of the 1860s, the "men of the sixties", who appeared after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 disappointed hopes. They mocked the aristocratic liberals of the 1840s and, armed with natural science, materialism and utilitarianism, attacked religion, the family and autocracy. Dmitry Pisarev called the position "realism", and Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) became the generation's textbook. Their negation was not a negation of value as such but an effort to clear away old authorities and build a new society on science and the interests of the people, almost the opposite direction to the nihilism Nietzsche described, the collapse of the highest values.

This current flowed into the Narodnik movement of the 1870s. Many activists of the "going to the people", Land and Liberty and People's Will were heirs of the nihilists of the sixties, and conspirators such as Sergei Nechayev came out of the same milieu. After People's Will assassinated Alexander II in 1881, Western Europeans called any Russian revolutionary a nihilist, and the word became a synonym for political terror; the revolutionaries themselves mostly called themselves social revolutionaries. Nietzsche knew this Russian usage and began to use the word as his own concept from around 1880.

How did Marxism deal with nihilism?

Russian Marxism inherited the nihilist generation. Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin credited Chernyshevsky with a "massive" and an "overwhelming" influence on them respectively; that is why Lenin gave his 1902 book the same title as Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done? For Marxists the negation of the nihilists of the sixties was the negation of the Enlightenment against feudal authority.

Judgements of Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism diverged. Nietzsche insisted that nihilism was not caused by social distress, but Marxists read him from exactly the opposite direction. In The Destruction of Reason György Lukács traced a genealogy of irrationalism from the late Schelling through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Lebensphilosophie to fascism, and interpreted Nietzsche's nihilism as the worldview of an imperialist bourgeoisie that had lost its way out in the face of class struggle. The collapse of values was, on this view, not a fate of the history of spirit but the result of a particular class losing its historical prospects.

Martin Heidegger, by contrast, saw nihilism as the history of Western metaphysics as a whole and placed Nietzsche at its peak: by positing the metaphysical principle of the will to power, Nietzsche had not overcome nihilism but completed it. From the mid-twentieth century on, nihilism remained a key word for diagnosing modern civilisation in existentialism, in the Frankfurt School and, from the 1980s, in the debates over postmodernity.