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Accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist? The Worldview Tree Browse All Entities The Schism Register The Diptych: Compare The Christian AssessmentInstruments for working with the collection: set two worldviews side by side, read an entity against the Christian faith, trace a tradition through its divisions, and search the whole site.
All Tools The Diptych: CompareThe Nihilism stream of the Nihilism timeline.
The Nihilism dataset follows the idea and the movement from Turgenev's naming of the nihilist and the Russian movement of the 1860s through Nietzsche's diagnosis and prophecy, the twentieth century's reckonings, and the idea's late academic fortunes.
Its eleven events stand across three eras, from the Russian movement to the philosophy that named the age's condition.
Sources: Gillespie, Michael Allen. Nihilism Before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.; Crosby, Donald A. The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.; Reginster, Bernard. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Streams: All of Nihilism Nihilism
In 1862 Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons gives the word nihilist its public currency in the figure of Bazarov, the young materialist who bows to no authority and takes science as his only creed. The name, from the Latin nihil, nothing, had circulated in philosophy before; Turgenev fixes it to a generation, and both admirers and enemies take it up.
In 1863, writing from the Peter and Paul Fortress where he is imprisoned, Nikolai Chernyshevsky publishes What Is to Be Done?, the novel of the new people: rational egoists who reject marriage, property, and faith as arrangements of a corrupt order. The book becomes the handbook of the Russian nihilist generation and, later, of revolutionaries who read it as a manual.
In 1866 Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had himself passed through the radical circles and a Siberian sentence, publishes Crime and Punishment. Its hero Raskolnikov acts out the nihilist logic that some men stand beyond good and evil, and the novel follows that logic to confession. The record stands as the movement's greatest literary examination, written from inside its questions by its sharpest critic.
On 13 March 1881 members of Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will, assassinate Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. The organization's members came out of the nihilist and populist milieu, and the killing marks the point where the denial of the old order turns to systematic political terror; the repression that follows scatters the movement.
Between 1883 and 1885 Friedrich Nietzsche publishes Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophetic poem in which his spokesman announces the death of God and calls for the revaluation of all values. Nietzsche's diagnosis is that European culture, having lost its faith, holds values it no longer believes: the condition he names nihilism, and the book is his summons to overcome it.
In 1887 Nietzsche publishes On the Genealogy of Morals, three essays tracing modern morality to resentment and the ascetic ideal. He argues that the will would rather will nothing than not will at all: nihilism is for him not an opinion but the inner logic of two thousand years of Western valuation, now arriving at its conclusion.
In 1918, as the Great War ends, Oswald Spengler publishes the first volume of The Decline of the West, arguing that cultures are organisms that age into mere civilization and die. The book's vast readership takes it as the philosophy of an exhausted Europe, and its fatalism becomes a standing exhibit in the century's arguments about nihilism.
In 1927 Martin Heidegger publishes Being and Time. His analysis of anxiety and the nothing, and his later lectures on Nietzsche, frame nihilism as the destiny of Western metaphysics itself: the forgetting of Being completed in the age of technology. Heidegger's account becomes the most influential philosophical treatment of the theme in the century.
In 1942 Albert Camus publishes The Myth of Sisyphus, opening with the claim that suicide is the one truly serious philosophical problem. Camus names the absurd, the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and the world's silence, and answers it not with escape but with revolt: Sisyphus, condemned to his rock, is to be imagined happy.
In 1949 the Romanian exile Emil Cioran publishes in Paris his Précis de décomposition, in English A Short History of Decay: aphorisms denying progress, faith, and every system, written in a style its author called a slap in the face of consolation. Cioran becomes the postwar period's purest literary nihilist, admired precisely for refusing every remedy.
In 1987 Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, a University of Chicago professor's indictment of American higher education, becomes an unlikely bestseller. Bloom argues that relativism, which he calls nihilism American-style, has closed the student soul to the great questions. The book carries the word nihilism into the center of the culture wars, where it remains a term of diagnosis and of accusation.
