Nihilism — From Latin nihil (“nothing”), nihilism is the position that denies the existence of objective values, truths, or meanings: nothing has any ultimate foundation, and beliefs that once seemed absolute turn out to be groundless. The term already circulated early in the nineteenth century — Friedrich Jacobi used it to criticize transcendental idealism — but it was popularized in literature by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), whose character Bazarov embodies the skeptical rejection of all authority and tradition. It was Friedrich Nietzsche, however, who gave the concept its deepest philosophical weight, diagnosing nihilism as the inevitable consequence of the “death of God”: the collapse of the metaphysical and moral foundations (God, absolute truth, the supreme values) that had sustained Western civilization. Nietzsche distinguishes two forms of this experience. Passive nihilism is resignation, pessimism, and weariness before a world that has lost its meaning — a decline of vital energy. Active nihilism, by contrast, is a force of creative destruction: it tears down exhausted idols to open space for something new. For Nietzsche, overcoming nihilism does not mean restoring the old values but creating values out of life itself, a task tied to the figures of the Overman (Übermensch) and the will to power. The problem runs through later existentialism, especially in reflection on the absurd and the search for meaning without metaphysical guarantees.
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