Nihilism is a life position that denies traditional moral values and ideals. The term comes from the Latin nihil - nothing. The single root word is "zero" - the mathematical designation of the concept of "nothing".
There are several types of nihilism:
- cognitive (agnosticism) denies the fundamental possibility of knowing the truth;
- legal - rejects the need for law and order, denies the rights of the individual;
- moral (immoralism) - denies generally accepted moral norms;
- state (anarchism) - rejects the need for state power and state institutions;
etc.
The term "nihilism" was coined by the German philosopher Jacobi in 1782. Later this worldview was developed in some Western European philosophical movements as a reaction to crisis phenomena in the life of society.
In our homeland, the term "nihilism" became popular after 1862, thanks to Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, who in the novel "Fathers and Sons" defined his hero Bazarov as a nihilist. The revolutionary-minded youth of the common people who advocated the abolition of serfdom, the democratization of political life and the revision of traditional moral norms, for example, the need for church marriage, began to be called nihilists.
Dmitry Pisarev, a prominent representative of the populist revolutionaries, wrote: “This is the ultimatum of our camp: what can be broken must be broken; what will withstand the blow is good, what will be destroyed to smithereens is rubbish: in any case, hit right and left, there will be no harm from this and cannot be."
The last nihilists in Russia can be called the representatives of Proletkult, which ceased to exist by 1935.
The idea of destruction in the name of the future was further developed by Friedrich Nietzsche ("Merry Science", 1881-1882). He considered nihilism to be the main tendency of Western philosophical thought. The reason for the emergence of nihilism was a person's awareness of the absence of a higher power, the Creator, and, accordingly, the need to reassess values. Nothing outside of human life makes sense. The will to power should be the main value.
The German idealist philosopher Otto Spengler believed that every civilization, as a person, goes through childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age in its development. Accordingly, he defined nihilism as a characteristic feature of Western culture, which has passed the zenith point and tends to decline ("The Decline of Europe", 1918).