I have been having a debate with a friend on what is actually the concept of Nihilism, and ended up entirely confused on it’s meaning after our conversation. I thought Nihilism meant believing that everything is meaningless and hence not doing anything. My friend says that it is more like Nihilism is questioning the meaning behind everything and accepting that we are the ones giving meaning. My take makes Nihilism seem like a bad thing, his take makes it seem really endearing. But what does it actually mean? I did check out earlier posts on this , but did just end up becoming more confused.
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Nihilism is a way of thinking which rejects concepts, meaning, or life. It is a philosophical position or condition. Nihility means “nothingness”, and “nihil” is the Latin word for “nothing”. Nihilism can mean the belief that values are meaningless ideas. It can also mean the belief that nothing has any meaning or purpose. In fact, there are many different beliefs that can be called nihilism.
The German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche wrote many things about nihilism. What he wrote is often called the most important explanation of nihilism. Nietzsche wrote that nihilism comes from questioning traditional values until they fall apart. This is called “value destruction”.
The Russian thinker Mikhail Bakunin inspired a lot of nihilists because he believed this kind of destruction was good. The word “nihilism” was then made popular by a Russian novel called *Fathers and Sons* by Ivan Turgenev. The hero of the story is a nihilist named Bazarov. Some other Russian thinkers such as Dmitry Pisarev also wrote good things about this kind of destruction. Russian nihilism inspired many revolutionaries, such as Sergei Nechaev and Vladimir Lenin. The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky was almost also a nihilist. But he became an anti-nihilist after ten years in exile. He wrote about nihilism in many novels such as *Crime and Punishment*.
Nietzsche thought value destruction could not be avoided, even though it has bad results. He also thought Christianity was a source of this value destruction, and was therefore a kind of nihilism. According to the French writer Gilles Deleuze, he thought Christianity was nihilistic because it was life-denying, meaning it has a negative and unhealthy attitude towards living. Religious thinkers have instead thought that nihilism comes from rejecting religion. Some parts of Buddhism have also been called a kind of nihilism, even though other parts strongly reject nihilism. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the word “nihilism” was mostly used against people who rejected religion or believed in nothing. Either way, nihilism is often seen as a word for life-denying beliefs.
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