The Problem of Nihilism

Inquiring into negation and the structure of thought

Zdzisław Beksiński, ‘AA78,’ 1978 ()

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §146

Introduction

Nihilism, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche forecast, would represent the greatest crisis mankind has yet faced. He devoted significant thought, including virtually the whole of his notes published posthumously as The Will to Power, to the problem of nihilism. In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky posited that “without God, everything would be permitted.” Voltaire wrote that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Søren Kierkegaard devoted a book to the exploration of despair, postulating that “despair is sin.” In the epigraph to his essay “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Jacques Derrida quotes Kierkegaard as saying that the “instant of decision is madness.”

Nihilism represents, we might surmise, the negation of abstraction — whether metaphysical, ethical, or more generally philosophical. Nihilism is, in short, the denial of…