School of thought
Nineteenth-Century European Nihilism
Intellectual current
Classification
- Period
- c. 1860-1900 CE
- Regions
- europe
- 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: The Enlightenment undermined the religious foundations of morality, leaving a void that secular reason had not filled.
- 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
Took over the nihilist diagnosis of the collapse of inherited meaning and values as the very predicament that individual freedom must confront and answer.
- Post-Structuralism Influenced by this tradition
References
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nihilism
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §2 and §12 (notes of 1887-1888)
- Fathers and Sons — Ivan Turgenev
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Gay Science — Friedrich Nietzsche