Nihilism

Nihilism is the view that life, values, or knowledge lack objective foundations or meaning. Its forms differ in what they deny and what, if anything, they permit in their place.

Existential nihilism: The view that human life has no inherent or objective meaning. It is the form most directly concerned with whether life itself has meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche: A German philosopher whose work examined the collapse of inherited moral and religious foundations. His diagnosis of nihilism and attempts to overcome it shaped later discussions.
Pessimism: The disposition or philosophical view that emphasizes suffering, loss, or unfavorable outcomes. Pessimism judges life negatively; nihilism denies objective meaning or value.
Existentialism: A philosophical tradition emphasizing individual existence, choice, and responsibility. Existentialist thinkers respond to absent predetermined meaning by stressing human choice.
Moral nihilism: The view that there are no objective moral facts or truths. It applies nihilistic doubt specifically to morality.
Ivan Turgenev: A Russian novelist whose 1862 novel Fathers and Sons popularized the word “nihilist.” His character Bazarov made nihilism a defining label in Russian cultural debate.
Cynicism: Distrust of people’s motives, often expressed as belief that self-interest drives behavior. Cynicism distrusts motives without necessarily denying objective values or meaning.
Emotivism: The metaethical view that moral judgments express attitudes rather than state objective facts. It shows how moral discourse can be understood without objective moral properties.
Epistemological nihilism: The position that knowledge, or the possibility of justified knowledge, is fundamentally undermined. It shifts the question from meaning and value to whether anything can be known.
Russian nihilist movement: A nineteenth-century Russian intellectual movement that rejected religious authority and inherited social conventions. It gave nihilism a concrete political and generational meaning beyond abstract philosophy.

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