School of thought

Nineteenth-Century European Nihilism

Intellectual current

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Classification

Period
c. 1862-1900 CE
Regions
Europe (origin)
Domains
Ethics, Metaphysics

Overview

Nineteenth-century European nihilism names two distinct but historically overlapping developments rather than one shared doctrine. In Russia, the term was popularized by Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) and attached to a loose anti-authoritarian current. Nietzsche later diagnosed European nihilism as a crisis in which inherited moral, religious, and metaphysical values lose their authority. He did not advocate that crisis; he sought to overcome it through a revaluation of values. This historical current is distinct from Existential Nihilism, the position that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.

Key ideas

  • Death of God: Nietzsche's phrase for the collapse of belief in the Christian God. He traced it to Christianity itself: its morality's ever stricter demand for truthfulness, refined into the scientific conscience, made the belief untenable, and the morality built on that belief lost its foundation.
  • Devaluation of Values: Nihilism emerges when the highest inherited values cease to command belief or provide an authoritative purpose.
  • Overcoming Nihilism: Nietzsche treated the crisis as a challenge to create and reassess values rather than as a conclusion to accept passively.

Key figures

Friedrich Nietzsche · Ivan Turgenev · Dmitri Pisarev

Questions engaged

  • The Meaning of Life

    The current's answer is a diagnosis rather than a doctrine: the inherited religious and metaphysical sources of meaning have lost their authority, so the question cannot be answered in the old terms. Nietzsche treated that collapse as a crisis to be overcome by a revaluation of values, not as the conclusion that nothing matters — which is why this current is not itself the position that life has no meaning.

Later connections

  • Absurdism Influenced by this tradition
  • Existentialism Influenced by this tradition

    This is the twentieth-century existentialists' engagement, not Kierkegaard's, whose work came first. Sartre and Beauvoir took the diagnosis that inherited religious and moral values have lost their authority as the predicament a free person must answer by creating values, not as proof that nothing matters.

References