In this chapter I will provide a brief history of nihilism by providing a brief history of philosophers who revealed in their work some essential aspect of nihilism. The figures I will focus on did not (for the most part) identify their work as concerned with nihilism, but their arguments have helped to shape what has since come to be known as nihilism.
The word “nihilism” dates back to the eighteenth century and, in particular, to debates that took place among German philosophers over the implications of the metaphysics of the Enlightenment. However, the history of what nihilism represents can be traced back much further, for if a self-righteous individual is someone who tries to get others to realize that they believe in nothing and is in turn accused by others of believing in nothing, then Socrates was perhaps not only the “father of philosophy” but also the father of self-righteousness.
The Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates would walk around the Athenian marketplace, asking people to define concepts central to everyday life, concepts like love, honor, piety, knowledge, and justice. Once a fellow Athenian would give Socrates a definition, Socrates would test the definition, not only challenging Athenians to prove that what they believed to be true could actually withstand any and all attempts at refutation but also challenging Athenians to admit their beliefs to be false if Socrates’s refutations were successful. In other words, Socrates went beyond merely trying to engage members of society in debate, as he was trying to force Athenians to question the beliefs their society was built upon, to question whether their society was based on the solid foundation of knowledge or on dubious foundations like custom and opinion.
The ultimate example of Socrates’s foundation testing can be found in Plato’s Republic, where Socrates goes from asking about the grounds of the concept of justice to burrowing down to what possibly lies beneath such grounds. In Book VII, Socrates asks his fellow Athenians to imagine prisoners who have been trapped in an underground cave since birth, given nothing to experience, nothing to learn, nothing to talk about, other than shadows. After describing the horrible lives of such prisoners, lives spent never knowing anything other than shadows, lives spent never knowing of the world beyond the cave, lives spent never knowing that they even are prisoners, Socrates declares, “They’re like us.”1
With this declaration Socrates makes clear that he is not merely asking his listeners to entertain a thought experiment, but is challenging his listeners (and, thanks to Plato, Socrates is also challenging us) to take seriously the possibility that everything they think they know about reality is an illusion. According to Socrates, we are like prisoners in an underground cave, not only because we accept as reality whatever we have grown accustomed to but also because, having grown accustomed to this reality, we would reject any challenge to this reality that was presented to us. Socrates wants us to realize not only that seeing is believing but also that believing is rejecting (or, as Sigmund Freud will later put it, believing is rationalizing). In other words, Socrates wants us to realize that we are nihilistic.
From the Socratic perspective, nihilism is a danger both epistemologically and existentially, for Socrates argues that the prisoners would not only continue to believe in shadows even if counterevidence was presented to them but would kill anyone who brought them this counterevidence, anyone who tried to convince them that their beliefs were false, anyone who tried to liberate them from their prison. The prisoners, not knowing that they are prisoners, would not see the cave as prison, but as home, just as the prisoners would not see the person who wants to take them out of the cave as a liberator, but as a madman. Whereas Socrates bases this argument on human nature, Plato further supports this argument with human history, as any reader of the Republic would know that Socrates had been put on trial and executed by the people he was trying to liberate for the crime of trying to liberate them.
From the Athenian perspective, Socrates was a heretic and a dangerous corruptor of the youth. Plato presents this perspective in his dialogues, as many of Socrates’s interlocutors accuse Socrates of never putting forward his own beliefs and of instead merely trying to attack the beliefs of others. This view is indeed in keeping with the famous story of Socrates having been told by the Oracle of Delphi that he was the wisest man in Athens because he alone knew that he knew nothing. Whereas Socrates’s interlocutors, such as Meno, liken Socrates to a torpedo fish, to a creature that numbs anyone who comes into contact with it, Socrates instead likens himself to a gadfly and to a midwife, suggesting that his purpose is not to confuse but to motivate and to help. Socrates therefore admits that his aim is to weaken people’s certainty in their beliefs but argues that he does so in order to inspire them to replace their beliefs with knowledge. As Socrates says during his trial (in order to prevent them from trying to punish him by commanding him to stop questioning people’s beliefs and thus to force them to instead punish him by execution), “The unexamined life is not worth living.”2
Socrates thus helps us to recognize many of the characteristics that will later be used (centuries later once the word is invented) to identify an antinihilist. Socrates challenges people to defend their beliefs. Socrates erodes people’s faith not only in what they believe to be true but in what they believe truth to be. Socrates withholds his own views and offers views that are radically inconsistent with views commonly held in society, leading others to accuse him of being a contrarian and of having no real views. Socrates tries to get people to embrace an alternate understanding of reality, and he is consequently accused of heresy and of attempting to corrupt society. Socrates inspires people to follow him, including people who will seek to violently overthrow society. Socrates inspires people to attack him, including people who will seek to execute him. Socrates inspires people to emulate him, including people who will seek to pursue his views to conclusions even more radical than those of Socrates.
Socrates led people to question the foundation of their beliefs, and he was executed for it. Plato, however, continued to spread Socrates’s ideas, both through his dialogues and through creating an Academy to train others how to think and argue like Socrates. Plato’s most famous student was Aristotle, who—as is depicted in Raphael’s The School of Athens—ended up opposing Plato’s views. Aristotle’s critiques of Plato, and his conservative political views, helped to shift philosophy away from challenging people to question the foundations of everyday life to instead engaging in rigorous conceptual analysis. Aristotle’s analyses helped to create new methods and fields of research, for which reason his name is on the first page of just about every college textbook. Aristotelian methods and ideas came to dominate intellectual research in Europe and remained dominant for centuries—that is, until Descartes came along.
The French soldier, mathematician, and philosopher René Descartes was educated in the Aristotelian tradition. But he was not satisfied with Aristotelian philosophy, in particular the marriage of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology known as Scholasticism. Descartes, like Socrates, was concerned that what was commonly claimed to be knowledge could not be accepted as knowledge unless we could be certain of the foundations of such claims. Yet whereas Socrates sought to test the foundations of knowledge through debate, Descartes instead preferred introspection, especially in the form of meditation.
Inspired by three dreams he had in a hot room on a wintry night on November 10, 1619, Descartes set out to revolutionize philosophy and science by reestablishing them on the foundation of certainty. Descartes carried out this revolution in several works, but it was his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) that was his most famous and influential work. Descartes begins the Meditations by lamenting the number of falsehoods he had believed to be true in his life, and he argues that in order to avoid making such mistakes we must reject as false any beliefs that are held on the basis of uncertain foundations. Consequently, Descartes tests the certainty of every accepted foundation for knowledge and concludes that none can be trusted.
Our senses deceive us, so we cannot trust knowledge based on perception. We cannot distinguish dreams from waking life, so we cannot trust knowledge based on experience. Most famously, Descartes argues that unless we can somehow rule out the possibility of the existence of a malevolent God-like being—a being who could have convinced us that a false world is real, that nonexistent objects do exist, that 2 + 3 = 5 when perhaps it doesn’t—then we cannot trust knowledge, even mathematical knowledge, based on God’s benevolence.
Yet what is most important for our purposes here is not what Descartes argues, but rather what he confesses. For after having come up with reasons to distrust the foundations of all possible knowledge claims, Descartes reveals that he nevertheless cannot maintain his distrust. Custom and habit have such a powerful effect on him that he finds that he cannot reject the knowledge claims he has believed in for so long no matter how untrustworthy he finds their foundations to be.
In other words, Descartes discovers that the most untrustworthy foundation of knowledge is not perception, experience, or faith, but himself. Or to be more precise, his nihilism. As Descartes concludes the First Meditation,
I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised.3
It is hard not to read this as Descartes returning to the cave from Plato’s Republic, and imagining himself as one of the prisoners Socrates described. Yet whereas Socrates suggested that the prisoners would believe in the truth of what they see only because they do not know their predicament, Descartes suggests instead that the problem of belief goes even deeper. Descartes knows of his predicament, but knowledge of his situation is not enough to help him escape from it. Indeed Descartes admits that knowledge of his predicament only drives him to cling more desperately to the illusions he has found comfort in for so long, regardless of his knowledge that they are illusions.
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Descartes has examined life and yet finds that the unexamined life was more “pleasant,” more “peaceful,” more worth living. The reason for this, as Descartes suggests, is that the examined life not only requires “toil” and “hard labour” but also may lead to “inextricable darkness” rather than to “the light” that Socrates promised would be waiting for anyone who left the cave. By raising the possibility of the existence of a malevolent God, Descartes brings skepticism to a new extreme, to an extreme that went beyond Socrates’s cave. For Socrates, we are all in the cave together, and debating ideas with each other can lead us to the freedom of truth. But for Descartes, there is no we; there is only himself, only his doubts, only his uncertainties, because his thought that a malevolent God could exist has left him with nothing else.
Both Socrates and Descartes were antinihilists insofar as they both tried to inspire others to question and ultimately reject the foundations of their beliefs. But whereas Socrates was an antinihilist who accused others of nihilism, Descartes was an antinihilist who accused himself of nihilism. Descartes confesses that his rejection of the foundations of his beliefs is only temporary, for he cannot fight his urge to believe. Socrates presented the war between illusion and reality as a war between the unenlightened and the enlightened, but Descartes instead presents this war as a war within himself, as a war between his desire for happiness and his desire for knowledge.
Descartes, like Socrates, tries to combat nihilism by attacking its attachment to a world of illusions. Socrates did this by arguing that there is a better world beyond the world of experience, what he described as the world of the Forms, the world of truth, of understanding, of freedom from illusions. Descartes also fights nihilism with dualism, but unlike Socrates, Descartes describes a dualistic reality not outside of himself but within himself. For Descartes we embrace illusions because our reach exceeds our grasp, because our desire to know (the will) exceeds our power to know (the intellect).
Though his mind/body dualism is what gets the most attention, it is Descartes’s will/intellect dualism that is far more important with regard to understanding nihilism. For Socrates, the key to combatting nihilism was to escape from the physical world into the intellectual world, and such escape was to be achieved either through debate or through death. For Descartes, the key to combatting nihilism is to escape from willful striving into scientific certainty, and such escape is to be achieved through both self-restraint and through rule following. If Socrates gave us the model of the antinihilist as a social reformer, then Descartes gives us the model of the antinihilist as a self-reformer.
Descartes revolutionized philosophy by trying to ground it in the power of the intellect. Though Descartes discovered that the intellect could destroy all faith in knowledge by coming up with an idea like the “Evil Demon,” he also demonstrated that the intellect could replace faith with certainty, first by proving that he existed (“I think therefore I am”) and then by proving that God existed. Or so he thought. For Descartes inspired a young Scottish philosopher named David Hume not only to carry out his own work of Cartesian skepticism—A Treatise of Human Nature (1738)—but to show that Descartes had not gone far enough with his skepticism.
According to Hume, Descartes’s cosmological proof of the existence of God relied on a conceptual foundation that he had left unquestioned, the conceptual foundation of causality. Hume argues that if you really tried to build knowledge back up from the most basic elements of human nature (e.g., perception), then you could not claim that causality is something we can know to be true rather than something we can only believe to be true. Though we may see one event follow another, and see this sequence of events happen over and over again, it is impossible to see that this sequence of events must happen. In other words, we cannot experience necessity.
As Hume argues further, if we cannot experience necessity, then causality cannot be a basis for knowledge claims. For Hume, causality is a matter of probability (“The Sun will most likely rise tomorrow”) rather than of certainty (“The Sun will definitely rise tomorrow”). So if we cannot know causality to be true, then we cannot have knowledge, as Descartes required, with regard to any claims made on the basis of causality (like Descartes’s claim that God must exist because only an infinite being like God could have been the cause of his idea of an infinite being like God).
Having pushed Cartesian skepticism further than Descartes intended, Hume’s empiricism destabilized the foundations of philosophy and science that Descartes had established on the basis of rationalism. Hume argues that much of what we believe to be true is so believed not because of the power of reason, but because of the power of experience. If we have a strong feeling about an idea, and we have a repeated experience of that feeling, then we can be led to elevate that idea to the rank of knowledge even though it has no greater certainty than an opinion.
Consequently, Hume likens philosophy to art, concluding that we must accept that our philosophical arguments are founded more on aesthetics than on rationality. As Hume writes,
Thus all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ’Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.4
Hume here suggests that what we experience as discovering something to be true may in reality be the experience of discovering something to be preferable. We may think we are engaging in rational argument, but if our arguments are only agreed to or rejected based on “taste and sentiment,” then we cannot distinguish facts from feelings, or progress from prejudice. In other words, supporting an idea may not be so different from supporting a sports team; we identify with a side, we take this identification to be meaningful rather than contingent upon factors beyond our control (like where we were born), and, most importantly, we want our side to win.
We may think we are engaging in rational argument, but if our arguments are only agreed to or rejected based on “taste and sentiment,” then we cannot distinguish facts from feelings, or progress from prejudice.
As Hume pursues the consequences of empiricism further and further, not only does he find that knowledge concerning causality unravels but so too does knowledge concerning himself. For Hume finds that his experiences are in a constant flux, a flux which does not suggest the existence of a stable “soul” or “self” or “mind,” but which instead suggests that the flux is all there is, that he is nothing more than a “bundle of perceptions.” Our memories create a narrative from out of these perceptions, a narrative based on the idea there must be a “self” who was the cause of this narrative, but having removed causality as a foundation for knowledge, it cannot function as a foundation for identity either. Descartes’s skepticism led him to solipsism. But for Hume, it’s doubtful whether his own “ipse” even exists.
Faced with such radical skepticism, with the idea that the self is a “fiction” our memories create for us, Hume concludes,
I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable conditions imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.5
From a Socratic perspective, nihilism can be overcome by enlightenment. From a Cartesian perspective, nihilism can be overcome by self-restraint. But from a Humean perspective, nihilism cannot be overcome. It is simply a product of human psychology. Hume, finding himself in the cave, in the “deepest darkness,” does not try to debate or reason his way out, but instead plays backgammon. Like Descartes, Hume discovers nihilism within himself. Unlike Descartes, he does not fight his nihilism, he embraces it. Nihilism is, as Descartes described, a comfort, a way to remain safe, a way to “obliterate all these chimeras,” even if only by helping us to try to ignore them.
Though Hume may have been happy to remain within the warm grip of his nihilism, he nevertheless helped to inspire others to abandon their nihilism. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said, it was Hume who awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Seeing that Hume had demolished the foundations of knowledge, leaving mere probability in its place, Kant was inspired to take up the challenge of resurrecting knowledge on new foundations. Kant achieved this task, not by showing that Hume was mistaken in the conclusions he drew from empiricism, but by arguing that Hume was mistaken in his methods, in trying to reconstruct knowledge by using empiricism. For Kant, we cannot begin from experience, as Hume tried to do, because experiences are not something we have, they are something we create.
According to Kant, Hume was doomed to end up lost in darkness and chimeras because causality simply does not operate in the way Hume imagined. Using the example of melting wax, Kant points out that though we cannot know what was necessarily the cause of the wax melting, we nevertheless know that something caused it. Kant thus criticizes Hume for having mistaken the inability to apply the law of causality with the inability to prove that the law of causality exists. Since causality and necessity are vital not only to knowledge but to how we experience the world, Kant suggests working backward, starting from what we do experience (e.g., the law of causality) and then trying to explain how experience must operate in order to have such experience.
Kant argues that Hume was correct that the necessity upon which causality depends cannot be found in experience, but this is because necessity is part of the conceptual apparatus our minds use in order to shape experience. In response to the skeptical question of how we can know that our subjective experiences of the world conform to the objective truth of the world, that what I see as red really is red, Kant makes the revolutionary claim that such conformity can be known because the world of experience is constructed by the mind. Space and time are not out there; they are in us—they are how we perceive reality. The matter of spatiotemporal objects that we receive through the mental faculty of sensation are formed in accordance with the mental faculty of the understanding. According to Kant, perception, and knowledge based on perception, are possible only because of the spontaneous activity of these faculties working together in harmony.
Kant’s “Copernican revolution” thus rescues knowledge from Hume’s arguments that we can never go beyond what we experience, and that what we take to be knowledge is in reality contingent upon what we have experienced up until that point. Kant instead creates the possibility for science to again be based on universal truths that are independent of experience (what Kant calls “a priori”) rather than on merely contingent claims that are dependent on experience (“a posteriori”). We can have a priori knowledge because reason can discover universal truths—truths like every effect must have a cause—but the cost of such knowledge is having to accept the idea that experience is shaped by us rather than given to us.
Thanks to Kant, we don’t have to worry about the empiricist problem of induction that Hume raised, the problem that claims based on past experience could be falsified by future experience, since experience is consistent in how it is (and always will be) shaped rather than in how it had (so far) been given. But this raises the idealist problem of invention, the problem that experience is human experience, or even just my experience, and that nonhuman experience, or non-me experience, may be completely different without our ever being able to know. If Hume’s empiricism drove us to skepticism, then Kant’s idealism could drive us to madness.
Kant’s solution to this problem is to try to combine empiricism and idealism in what he calls “transcendental idealism.” As Kant puts it, experience is transcendentally ideal, but it is also empirically real.6 In other words, what we experience is based on our mental faculties but is based on our mental faculties operating in conjunction with reality. Kant distinguishes between things as they appear to us, and things-in-themselves, arguing that though we can only have knowledge about appearances, these appearances are nevertheless real rather than figments of our imagination.
Kant argues that reality exists both “phenomenally” (appearances) and “noumenally” (in itself), and that though we do not have access to the noumenal world, its existence is certain. Without an external world, we would have nothing to experience, not even ourselves, for which reason Kant refutes Cartesian idealism by showing that experience does not rest on the “I”; rather the “I” rests on experience. In other words there must be a noumenal world so that the phenomenal world can exist, since without the noumenal world the “I”—the “I” of Descartes, the “I” that exists only so long as it is thinking, which means only so long as there is something to think about—would not exist. If experience depends on my existence, and my existence depends on experience, then there must be something that exists that is both beyond me and beyond experience since otherwise we’d be trapped in a chicken-and-egg paradox.
It was Hume’s nihilistic acceptance of skepticism that awoke Kant’s quest to reestablish knowledge. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, it was Kant’s attempt to overcome such nihilism that actually led the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi to famously use the word “nihilism”7 in a letter he published in 1799 to publicly repudiate the philosophy that Kant inspired. Similarly, in 1801, the novelist Heinrich von Kleist described, in letters to his fiancée, the crisis (“My sole, my highest goal has been destroyed, I no longer have one”8) that he experienced after reading Kant’s philosophy. For both Jacobi and Kleist, to divide reality into the phenomenal and the noumenal, to divide things as they appear to us from things as they are in themselves, is to reduce life to nothing.
Jacobi and Kleist both read Kant as having essentially imprisoned us back in the cave of the Republic. Whereas Socrates’s prisoners did not know they were prisoners staring at shadows, Kant’s prisoners do know they spend their lives staring at shadows, but they are expected to accept such seemingly meaningless lives since escape from the cave (knowledge of the noumenal) is impossible. In other words, Kant solved Hume’s crisis, but his solution inspired a new crisis. Thanks to Kant, we can reestablish knowledge on the grounds of rational certainty, but at the expense of undermining our certainty in the meaningfulness of experience.
Hume may have left us with skepticism, yet it was a skepticism we could overcome by hanging out with our friends. But Kant leaves us instead with skepticism about our ability to even have friends, to know who our friends truly are, who our friends are in themselves rather than as they appear to be. Kant leaves us not even knowing who we truly are, who we are in ourselves as opposed to who we appear to ourselves to be. Kant made science meaningful, but he inspired a wealth of new questions about what makes life meaningful. Kant thus moves us away from what we could call epistemological nihilism (believing that knowledge is impossible) and instead moves us toward what we could call existential nihilism (believing that life has no meaning).
Yet we can find a response to the threat of existential nihilism in Kant’s moral philosophy. Wanting to save morality from skepticism, from the skepticism produced by basing moral claims on contingent grounds like the existence of God or human experience, Kant argues that morality can be based instead on the certain grounds of rationality. Using the “purity” of reason, Kant discovers in rationality a “pure” moral law, a law which would hold for any rational being, in any situation, at any time. Actions are moral, according to Kant, if they can be universalized without creating a logical contradiction.
Kant provides a moral law free from the contingencies of human traditions and human experiences. Its truth, like the truth of the laws of science, is a priori. Yet, as Kant is forced to concede, humans are not perfectly rational beings, and thus the “impurities” of being human prevent us not only from being able to automatically obey the moral law but from being able to even prove that anyone has ever obeyed the moral law, including ourselves. An a priori moral law cannot, by definition, be proven in experience, just as the a priori law of causality could not be proven in experience. Hence, just as Kant preserved science from skepticism by removing its truth from experience, so too does Kant preserve morality from skepticism by removing its truth from experience.
Consequently, the meaningfulness of morality appears to have been removed by Kant just as he removed the meaningfulness from science. Kant reduces morality to a math problem, and like a math problem, Kant claims that we should not concern ourselves with whether it makes us happy, but with whether it is true. In fact Kant goes so far as to claim that we should obey the moral law even if it makes us miserable, even if it kills us, because, to the extent that we are rational beings, it is our “duty” to obey rational laws, and thereby, according to Kant, do we retain not our happiness, not our lives, but our “dignity.” What is rational must be obeyed no matter the consequences, as consequences, like human experience, human happiness, and human traditions, are merely contingent, impure, phenomenal, and undignified.
Even “freedom” is obedience for Kant, as freedom is defined by “autonomy,” which means that we are free only when we are obeying the laws (“-nomy”) of the self (“auto-”). Oppression is thus defined by “heteronomy” or being forced to obey the laws of another (“hetero-”). But importantly the “self” that is to be obeyed is only the rational self, as obedience to desire, even to one’s own desires, is for Kant to be heteronomous, not autonomous. As desires are not within our control (e.g., liking something is a discovery, not a choice), it doesn’t make sense to Kant to associate desire with freedom, and thus Kant instead describes desire as heteronomous, as something forced upon us. For Kant, morality, dignity, and freedom can only be understood coherently if they are understood to be nothing other than obedience to reason. Consequently, the meaning of life is not to be found in happiness, but in duty, for, as Kant argues, it would make no sense that we are born with reason, with a faculty that is so often in conflict with our desires, if we were meant to be happy.
Just as Kant’s answer to epistemological nihilism opened the door to existential nihilism, his answer to existential nihilism opened the door to what we could call political nihilism (believing that traditional human values are worthless because they are contrary to genuine human freedom). And indeed this form of nihilism became very popular in the wake of Kant’s philosophy, as German, English, and Russian literature became filled with figures who were willing to reject anything seen as merely human in strict obedience to what was seen as a higher cause. Goethe’s Faust (1808), Byron’s Manfred (1817), and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1861) all featured protagonists who sought freedom in the form of overcoming human attachments, a freedom that they sought at any cost. In Russia, these figures existed not only in literature but also in the aforementioned political movement of self-identified “Nihilists” (1860–1881). These Nihilists sought to emancipate Russian society by destroying it, as they believed that only what could survive destruction was worth saving. And it was around this time that the most famous nihilist, Friedrich Nietzsche, similarly declared, “What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”9
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche—the philosopher most associated with nihilism—was born in 1844 in Röcken, Germany. Nietzsche grew up in the shadow of both the Church of Lutheranism and the Church of Kantianism. Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor who died when Nietzsche was five. At school he began to study classical languages, which ultimately led Nietzsche to pursue a career in philology. Though he was appointed as the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel when he was only 25 years old, his ill health, and ill-received publications, kept Nietzsche from maintaining an academic career.
Nietzsche traveled throughout Europe for the rest of his life in search of a place where he could breathe more easily, both literally and metaphorically. However, Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, married a German nationalist and anti-Semite who tried unsuccessfully to start an Aryan colony in Paraguay called “Nueva Germania,”10 and when it failed he killed himself. After Nietzsche fell ill (literally, he collapsed in Turin while trying to protect a horse from being beaten) in 1889, Elisabeth became the caretaker of both Nietzsche and his legacy. Thanks to her promotional efforts (and editorial distortions, which included forging letters and rewriting passages), Nietzsche is identified not only with nihilism but with Nazism. However, unlike his sister and brother-in-law, Nietzsche rejected German nationalism and opposed anti-Semitism, as he instead described himself as a “Good European.”
Before Nietzsche fell ill, he was planning to write a book on nihilism. After she became his caretaker, Nietzsche’s sister collected together his notes and published them after his death as The Will to Power (1901). These unpublished notes provide us with a vast variety of analyses of nihilism that Nietzsche had written in his notebooks over several years. For example, in Nietzsche’s notes we can find such analyses and definitions of “nihilism” as the following:
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure: it is an error to consider “social distress” or “physiological degeneration” or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and compassionate age. Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e., the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted.11
What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.12
Nihilism represents a pathological transitional stage (what is pathological is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all): whether the productive forces are not yet strong enough, or whether decadence still hesitates and has not yet invented its remedies.13
Nihilism. It is ambiguous:
- A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.
- B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.14
The philosophical nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain. But whence this: there ought not to be? From where does one get this “meaning,” this standard?—At bottom, the nihilist thinks that the sight of such a bleak, useless existence makes a philosopher feel dissatisfied, bleak, desperate. Such an insight goes against our finer sensibility as philosophers. It amounts to the absurd valuation: to have any right to be, the character of existence would have to give the philosopher pleasure.15
However, as these notes were unpublished during his lifetime, we have no way of knowing what Nietzsche’s ultimate view of these notes was, whether he considered them all to be part of his diagnosis of nihilism, or only some of them, or maybe even none of them. Yet because these notes were written while he was writing works he did publish, we can try to piece together his views on nihilism by comparing his notes with his publications. I will here focus primarily on his On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), as it was his most systematic work, a work written at the same time as many of his notes on nihilism, and a work that he had hoped would help to spread ideas from his other works to a larger audience.
In the preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes that, as a child, when he wondered about the origin of evil, he reasoned that God, as “father” of all creation, must also be the “father of evil.”16 But, due to a “peculiar scruple,” a scruple that he says put him at odds with his upbringing, with his heritage, with his culture, with everything that could be described as his “a priori,” he learned to stop looking “behind the world” for answers to such questions. Using his philological training, Nietzsche instead looked at the world itself and, in particular, looked at the languages of the world. There he discovered that the further back he traced the language of morality—the language of “good” and “evil,” the language that Kant took to be pure, to be rational, to be free of any empirical impurities like human history or human psychology—the more evidence he found that morality was not pure, but was the result of a struggle for survival.
Morality—or at least what the Europeans of Nietzsche’s day took to be morality—was not absolute and universal as Kant believed but was rather the end result of a war between rival moralities. The discovery that “good” as a value had been applied by different cultures in different ages not only to different ways of life but to opposed, to contrary, ways of life revealed that there was no guarantee that what was accepted as “good” was good, nor that what was accepted as “morality” was moral. Having shown that Kant was wrong to have held that morality had a priori foundations, foundations whose truth would be independent of experience and thus independent of evolution, Nietzsche asked his readers to take seriously the idea that morality was not only a posteriori, was not only one morality among many possible conflicting moralities, but that morality was dangerous, that morality was hostile to life.
In the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche uses his philological research to trace the etymological evolution of moral values back to its pre-Christian roots, back to a time when there were at least two competing value systems: “master” morality and “slave” morality. Before Nietzsche, Hegel had discussed the idea of ethical life arising from a struggle between equals, a struggle that resulted in the winner becoming “master” over the “slave,” over the one who lost by being the first to flinch in their game of chicken. For Nietzsche, however, who is a master and who is a slave is determined not by struggle but by birth, by who is born strong and who is born weak. The strong rule simply because they can, for which reason they become stronger while the weak become instead smarter, as they are forced to outwit rather than outfight the masters. Thus, while the masters see themselves and their physical qualities as “good” and see those who do not share their qualities as “bad,” the slaves instead see the masters and their activities as “evil” and see those who do not participate in such activities—that is, themselves—as “good.”
Though Nietzsche is describing a time early in human history, it is not hard to see a similar pattern in our own early lives, as the masters are essentially jocks and the slaves are essentially nerds. Jocks take, while nerds plan. Jocks see themselves as good because they are strong and attractive, whereas nerds are weak, ugly, and therefore bad, fun to torment, but otherwise not worth thinking about. Nerds, on the other hand, hate the jocks, hate everything the jocks do, and define themselves as good by contrast, believing themselves to be capable of doing anything the jocks do, but to be too good to do such things.
Aside from the masters and slaves, Nietzsche identifies a third group, the “priests.” The priests are those who were born as strong as the masters but who instead value cleanliness or “purity” above anything dirty or “impure.” Thus on our Nietzschean playground, along with the jocks and the nerds, we also find the preppy kids, the rich kids, the kids who, like the nerds, see themselves as too good to participate in the activities of the jocks, but who, unlike the nerds, are not weaker than the jocks.
The fundamental question Nietzsche raises in the Genealogy is this: How did the slaves defeat the masters? According to Nietzsche, the values of the slaves, the values of humility, of abstinence, of self-denial and of self-sacrifice, are the values that won, the values that have become what we now accept as moral. We are the product of the victory of the slaves over the masters, a victory that was so decisive that we no longer even recognize that there was such a victory, that there was once competing value systems and competing moralities. It is for this reason that Nietzsche argues that we do not know who we are, as we take morality for granted, not recognizing the history and bloodshed behind it. Without knowing how the slaves defeated the masters—a defeat as improbable as nerds becoming more cool than jocks, or comic books and video games becoming more popular than sports—we cannot know who we are and why we value what we value.
Nietzsche’s answer to the question of how slave morality won is that the slaves did not defeat the masters by destroying them, but by converting them. This conversion involved three elements: motive (“ressentiment”17), means (“instruments of culture”18), and opportunity (“Jesus of Nazareth”19). “Ressentiment” is Nietzsche’s term for the psychology of the slaves, as the slaves did not merely resent the masters, but they hated the masters, they blamed the masters for their slavery, not only in the sense of their having been born into oppression but even in the sense of their having been born weak, vulnerable, and mortal. In other words, the slaves expected that if they defeated the masters, then they would finally become masters themselves. Consequently, as Nietzsche points out, early descriptions of Heaven by priests and even by saints made it clear that the reward of eternal bliss for having lived a “good” life was the knowledge that one’s enemies, those who had lived an “evil” life, were receiving eternal torture in Hell. This perhaps helps to explain why religious art seems to be far more consumed with depictions of Hell than of Heaven.
Of course, telling someone who is oppressing you that he or she is going to go to Hell would likely not be enough to convince that person to stop. But with the arrival of Jesus, with the arrival of God in the flesh, the idea that Heaven and Hell actually exist was made far more real. As Blaise Pascal would later argue, the very possibility that Heaven and Hell are real should be sufficient for one to “wager” that it is safer to live as if they are real rather than risk finding out too late that you had bet wrong. More to the point, Jesus was portrayed as ushering in a new religion, a religion of love and redemption, a religion which would allow the masters to be forgiven for their “sinful” (warrior) lives and go to Heaven if they simply stopped being “sinners” (masters) and instead became “moral” (slaves). It was this portrayal which, according to Nietzsche, allowed the slaves to use Jesus as “bait” to convert the masters to the slave religion of Judaism by simply rebranding it as “Christianity.”
With the conversion of the masters, it was possible for masters and slaves to live together and form a society. However, in order to achieve social stability, the former masters and the former slaves had to learn how to live in a society. This is how the priests rose to power. The priests taught the masters to live like slaves, to live in accordance with Judeo-Christian values, which led to the idea that being “moral” required learning how to repress one’s instincts. In much the same way that schoolchildren are brought to museums in order to learn how to look and not touch, so too did the priests use what Nietzsche calls “the instruments of culture” in order to teach society how to think and not act. By convincing people that they had a soul, a soul which could be held accountable for their actions and which could be eternally rewarded or punished, the priests developed in humanity the ability to remember, to reason, to make promises, and, most importantly, to feel guilty. According to Nietzsche, memory, rationality, promise keeping, and guilt are not natural, but are rather the products of centuries of punishment and torture, not unlike how scientists use pain to condition lab animals to act rationally, to safely navigate the maze the scientists constructed for them.
And indeed, as Nietzsche argues, the priests created a world that was much safer for humanity than the world of masters and slaves. But this safety came at a high price. According to Nietzsche, repressing an instinct is not the same as removing that instinct, as instinctual urges cannot simply disappear but must instead be acted upon. Instinctual urges contrary to Judeo-Christian values—such as the urge to take pleasure in being cruel toward others—were repressed by being redirected, and since it was “immoral” to be cruel to others, members of society could only maintain their morality by redirecting their cruelty at themselves. This self-cruelty is what became known as “guilt,” or what Nietzsche also describes as “the bad conscience,”20 and it was by inventing guilt that the priests were able to maintain society. In other words, the moral society that the priests created was a safe society not because the morality they preached led people to stop being cruel, but because morality led people to associate being “good” with being cruel to oneself. And thanks to Jesus dying for our sins, this self-cruelty, this guilt, is inexhaustible, as our debt to God can never be repaid. Thus, for Nietzsche it is not an accident that the German word “Schuld” means both guilt and debt.
If self-cruelty is good, then self-denial and self-sacrifice are the highest good. These values, which we still today hold up as models of moral behavior, are what Nietzsche calls our “ascetic ideals.”21 The victory of Judeo-Christian values led to a society where instead of wanting to become masters, people should want to become monks. Not hurting others, not acting dangerously, not drinking, not smoking, not having sex, not being selfish, not being self-centered, and not being self-aggrandizing are all examples of monkish traits that are identified with the moral life. Yet, as Nietzsche points out, human nature is much more animalistic than monastic, for which reason trying to live a moral life requires that we try to live unnaturally, that we try to live lives that are contrary to life.
As Nietzsche points out, human nature is much more animalistic than monastic, for which reason trying to live a moral life requires that we try to live unnaturally, that we try to live lives that are contrary to life.
Nietzsche defines life as “the will to power,”22 as life is for Nietzsche focused on change rather than stasis, on becoming rather than being, on improving oneself through struggle rather than stagnating for the sake of mere survival. The will to power is thus another way of saying the will to will, as seeking power has no purpose other than the ability to seek more power. Thus, to want to not grow, to not change, to not improve, to want to remain who one is, is essentially to will to not will. Yet, according to Nietzsche, this willing to not will is precisely what the priests require of us in order to maintain social stability, in order to keep society safe, which we can now see means being safe from human instincts, safe from human nature, safe from human life. Judeo-Christian values and ascetic ideals aim at preserving society by championing self-cruelty, self-denial, and self-sacrifice. In other words, what we think of as “morality” was not discovered in pure reason by Kant but was designed to ensure that the meek shall inherit the Earth, an aim which just happens to be shared by both Christianity and by Kantianism.
The priests (a class which we can now see includes both Saint Paul and Saint Kant) created an ascetic society that has helped us to stay alive. But our survival has been achieved by encouraging us to avoid living. It is for this reason that Nietzsche argues that the priests replaced the danger of the masters with the disease of nihilism. Likening himself to a cultural physician, Nietzsche diagnoses this nihilistic sickness that he sees all around himself. This is the sickness that comes from living in a society that breeds mediocrity, in a society where humility is a virtue and pride is a sin, in a society that defines “progress” as learning to not act on one’s instincts and to instead be civilized, to instead be passive-aggressive. If Nietzsche were alive today, he might see our “civilized society” as something like a giant bus, where everyone is motionless, praying for the ride to end quickly, sitting beside a bag strategically placed to avoid sitting next to anyone else, holding a smartphone to avoid looking at anyone else, and wearing earbuds to avoid hearing anyone else. In other words, we have come to see life as something to endure rather than enjoy and have come to see humanity as something to loathe rather than love.
Nietzsche sees the loss of the masters as the loss of not only a source of danger but also a source of pride. The masters represented what humans could achieve, and thus they provoked fear at the same time that they provoked admiration. With the conversion of the masters to Christianity, it was God who became this symbol of fear and admiration. But as Karl Marx similarly pointed out in his essay “Alienated Labor” (1844), the more powerful God became, the less powerful humanity became. Whereas the slaves wanted to be like human masters, Christians want to be like superhuman masters, asking no longer what humans can do, but instead, “What would Jesus do?” Living in the shadow of the masters forced the slaves to become clever enough to defeat the masters, but living in the shadow of an omnipotent supernatural being forced members of society to become repressed enough to be judged worthy of enjoying life after death.
The elevation of the supernatural and the reduction of the natural were for Nietzsche the primary causes of nihilism. The belief in a world beyond the world of experience, in a life after death, justified the asceticism preached by the priests, as self-cruelty, self-denial, and self-sacrifice were far easier to accept as ideals so long as one believed that the self that one tortured, denied, and sacrificed was not one’s true self. And yet, though the priests taught that this life and this world were meaningless compared to the life and the world to come, in order to preserve society the priests also taught that suicide was a sin. In other words, whether one is a follower of Socrates or of Jesus, humans are to be understood as prisoners, forced to live meaningless lives in a meaningless world. The key difference though is that, with Christianity, we humans know who has imprisoned us, that our jailer is a good and perfect God, a God who created this prison even though its only purpose seems to be to test whether the prisoners can get released for good behavior.
As we have already seen, the more powerful God became, the more powerless humanity became. But it was also the case that the more powerful God became, the more contradictory the idea of God became. For why would God create such a prison? If God was good, then why torture his creations? And if God is all-knowing, why would God need to test his creations? It was because Christianity inspires such questions that Nietzsche associates nihilism both with the claim that “God is dead”23 and with the claim that “the highest values devalue themselves.”24 To make God responsible for everything is to make humanity responsible for nothing, which is to make human existence meaningless, which is to make God’s judgment of our existence meaningless, which is to make God’s existence meaningless. The idea of God served to convert the masters and to create a civilized society, but the idea that God is all-powerful and all-knowing—an idea which was necessary to perpetuate the repression necessary to preserve society—could not ultimately sustain itself, as the repressed were eventually led to see God as nothing but the one to blame for their repression.
If the slaves hated the masters for their lowly existence, they had all the more reason to hate God, particularly as the destruction of the masters did not turn them into masters, but instead turned all of humanity into slaves. For this reason, according to Nietzsche, the priests strove to find methods to divert and to distract humanity from the growing dissatisfaction with the society the priests created. These methods aimed to again channel humanity’s destructive impulses toward constructive activities, like destroying oneself rather than God or society. In the third essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche describes five of these methods: self-hypnosis, mechanical activity, petty pleasures, herd formation, and orgies of feeling.25
To make God responsible for everything is to make humanity responsible for nothing, which is to make human existence meaningless, which is to make God’s judgment of our existence meaningless, which is to make God’s existence meaningless.
Self-hypnosis is a way to avoid pain by putting oneself to sleep, such as by meditating, drinking, or watching YouTube. Mechanical activity is a way to avoid making decisions by following the orders of others, such as by obeying a boss, obeying a routine, or obeying a Fitbit. Petty pleasures are a way to avoid the feeling of powerlessness by making oneself feel powerful, such as by volunteering, donating, or swiping on Tinder. Herd formation is a way to avoid solitude by joining groups, such as by being on a team, being on a committee, or being on Facebook. Orgies of feeling—which Nietzsche singles out as “guilty” as opposed to the relative “innocence” of the previous four—are a way to avoid accountability by participating in a large outburst of emotions, such as by rioting, raving, or rage posting on Reddit.
It is the use of these methods that Nietzsche identifies as having prevented the destruction of society, but at the cost of having worsened our nihilism. Nietzsche thus likens the priests to bad doctors. The priests recognized that trying to be civilized beings living in a civilized society was making humanity sick. But rather than try to cure the sickness, the priests instead only tried to treat the symptoms and did so by merely prescribing more and more painkillers. These priestly medications thus helped to numb the sick, but this numbness only produced more nihilism, for numbness, like asceticism, is a rejection of life. To avoid pain, decision-making, powerlessness, solitude, and accountability is to avoid being human. To become numb therefore is only to become more sick, particularly as being surrounded by other numb humans is to be led to further loathe what has become of humanity. By making the sick sicker, the priests only made the nihilistic more nihilistic.
While priestly medications have made us sufficiently numb to remain in society, to remain bound to the values that society upholds, according to Nietzsche the result of this increasing nihilism is that society and society’s values come to feel increasingly meaningless. God is still invoked, but “God” does not mean what it used to mean, much like when we say “God bless you” after someone sneezes, but as a reflex rather than as a meaningful act. Yet Nietzsche points out that though our nihilism “killed” God, we have not abandoned the role that God played in society. When God no longer fulfilled the role of the superhuman source of meaning in our lives, we did not try to give our lives meaning on our own, but instead merely sought out new superhuman sources of meaning. In this way we maintained our religious fervor even if that fervor did not remain attached to any particular religion.
Nietzsche thus argues that science is not the enemy of religion, but is instead a new religion, a new source of meaning, with its own priests, rituals, sacred texts, and life-guiding values and ideals. The priests of science (e.g., positivists) elevated scientific values like “objectivity” to superhuman heights, leading society to feel “enlightened,” to feel that it had progressed beyond the “dark ages” of Christianity. “Good” and “Evil” may seem antiquated compared to the scientific values of “Objective” and “Subjective,” but scientific values still serve the same purpose as religious values. Both sets of values have in common that they lead to an ascetic way of life, to a life of self-denial and self-sacrifice, to a life of repressing instincts whether because they are “sinful” or because they are “irrational.”
That the death of God did not lead to the death of religion is what motivates Nietzsche’s increasing focus on nihilism in his work. We can now see that though Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism was very complex and wide-ranging, Nietzsche’s primary concern was with the idea of nihilism as the evasion of what it means to be human. Nietzsche identified such nihilistic evasiveness in Christianity, in Buddhism, in philosophy, in art, in science, and in culture. Nietzsche’s diagnosis was that what these various versions of nihilistic evasiveness have in common is that they are a result of the repression required to live in civilized society, to live in peace rather than risk living in fear.
Nietzsche tried to get us to recognize how slave morality is self-destructive, how the morality of Judeo-Christian values and of ascetic ideals is hostile to life. But he was not advocating—contrary to what many of his followers and his critics believed—for the destruction of society and for the return to a life of fear, for the return to master morality. Nietzsche saw that replacing self-destruction with social destruction would do nothing to reduce our nihilism, as the death of God simply led us to seek out one new God after another. It is for this reason that Nietzsche’s concern was less political than personal, as no political movement could solve our nihilism so long as we continued to reject life rather than embrace it.
After Nietzsche, nihilism became more and more seen as a topic worthy of philosophical exploration. Nietzsche had shown that while nihilism is destructive, its role in everyday life is to motivate activities that are commonly understood to be constructive, activities like meditating, exercising, volunteering, socializing, and partying. For this reason, Nietzsche inspired philosophers to investigate nihilism by investigating everyday life. Such investigations were aimed at revealing that nihilistic behavior is much more mundane than we realize, as popular culture came to be seen as a vehicle for promoting nihilism. Identifying nihilism thus came more and more to be viewed as not just an academic exercise but rather as part of a political struggle against the normalization of self-destructive practices, and against the demonization of anyone who would criticize what is normal.