Few words in philosophy are used as loosely as nihilism. It is thrown at teenagers, at terrorists, at stockbrokers and at the whole of modern civilization. It is claimed, with some pride, by people who mean only that they are tired. It has been made into a fashion, a slogan on a shirt and an aesthetic of black clothes and blank faces.
Underneath the noise there are at least four distinct positions that have gone by the name. They differ in what they deny, in why they deny it and in what they propose to do next. This essay separates them, because the confusion between them is not merely untidy. It allows a reasonable observation about the world to be used as cover for an unreasonable desire.
The radical: nothing is sacred
The word gained its modern currency from a Russian novel of 1862, in which a young medical student announces that he accepts no principle on faith, however much it is revered. He believes in what can be dissected. Everything else, art, religion, family feeling, the old order, he regards as sentiment to be cleared away.
The novel's readers took the type and ran with it. Over the following decades "nihilist" became the name for a generation of radicals who rejected the authority of church, tsar and tradition, some of whom went on to violence. For them nihilism was not despair. It was demolition, and demolition was hopeful: the old structure had to come down before anything could be built.
This first nihilism denies the authority of inherited values. It does not deny values as such. Its adherents were often fierce moralists, and their contempt for the old order was powered by a conviction that the order was unjust. It is the least nihilistic of the four.
The diagnosis: the highest values devalue themselves
The second position is the one most associated with philosophy, and it was developed by a German writer in the 1880s who regarded nihilism not as a doctrine to be adopted but as a condition to be faced. Its famous formula is that God is dead. That is not a boast about atheism. It is a report about a culture.
For centuries, the argument goes, European values rested on a foundation outside the world: a God who guaranteed that truth, goodness and meaning were real. The pursuit of truth, which those same values demanded, eventually undermined the foundation. The values remained in use for a while, like coins still circulating after the bank has failed. But one by one they were revealed as human inventions, and people began to feel that nothing was worth anything.
The diagnosis distinguished two responses. Passive nihilism is weariness: the retreat into comfort, small pleasures and the avoidance of risk, a life in which nothing is believed strongly enough to be suffered for. Active nihilism is the will to destroy what is already dying, as a prelude to the creation of new values. The diagnostician hoped for the second and feared that the first would prevail. Looking around, it is hard to say that he was wrong to fear it.
The values remained in use for a while, like coins still circulating after the bank has failed.
The cosmology: an indifferent universe
The third position is not about culture at all. It is about the cosmos, and it draws its authority from science. The universe, on this view, has no purpose. It was not made for us and does not notice us. Life is a local and temporary chemical event on a minor planet, and the whole of it, galaxies and all, is running down toward a final cold in which nothing will happen ever again. A physicist of the 1970s summed up the mood in a sentence often quoted since: the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
This is the nihilism of horror fiction, discussed in The Pleasures of Dread, where the scholar reads too far and learns that humanity does not matter. It is also, often, the most serene of the four. Those who hold it frequently report that it brings relief. If nothing is at stake cosmically, then one's failures are not cosmic either.
Its weakness is a slide from one kind of claim to another. That the universe does not care is a statement about the universe. That nothing matters is a statement about mattering, and it does not follow. Mattering was never a property of galaxies. It is something that happens between creatures who can be hurt.
The desire: the thirst for dissolution
The fourth position is the newest and the most dangerous, and it arrived dressed as philosophy. In the late twentieth century some readers of the transgressive tradition, and of the theory of expenditure set out in The Curse of the Sun, took a further step. Beneath every human value, they argued, lies a deeper drive toward release, loss of self and dissolution into the impersonal flow of energy. The self is a dam; the dam will break; the honest response is not to mourn but to want it.
The writing in this vein is often thrilling. It is ecstatic rather than despairing, and that is the danger. Where the second nihilism saw the death of values as a crisis to be survived, the fourth treats every collapse, of persons, institutions and societies, as an occasion for celebration. Some of its readers have since found their way to politics that welcome breakdown and regard the people crushed by it as so much obstruction.
The objection is simple. A desire is not made true by being deep. That something in us is drawn to annihilation, as the theories of the death drive and the limit-experience had already proposed, tells us something about our nature. It does not tell us to obey it. To move from "we long for dissolution" to "dissolution is good" is the same slide as the cosmologist's, run the other way, and it is made in the full knowledge that other people will be dissolved first.
What survives
The four positions share a premise: that values need a foundation, and that without one they are worthless. The radical knocks out the old foundation, the diagnostician watches it crumble, the cosmologist finds that the universe never supplied one, and the ecstatic dances on the rubble.
Pessimism, as described in Pessimism: A User's Manual, makes a different and more useful move. The pessimist values things intensely and finds the world unequal to them. That is a judgment, and it presupposes standards. It is in this sense the opposite of nihilism, though the two are constantly confused.
There is a further possibility, which is that the premise was wrong. Values may not be the kind of thing that needs a foundation. A promise binds without a guarantor. A kindness is a kindness whether or not the stars approve. The night shift that typed The Furnace Hymnal in the last years of a dying plant had no illusions about cosmic meaning, and wrote anyway, for the day shift, because the day shift needed it more.
That is not an answer to nihilism in the philosopher's sense. It is something more ordinary and more durable. As The Slow Apocalypse argues, the end rarely arrives on schedule, and in the long meantime people go on doing things for one another. Meaning, it turns out, is less a foundation than a habit. It can be lost, and it can be kept up, and a great deal depends on which.