Nietzsche on Nihilism, Superman, and Modern Morality

Introduction to Nietzsche's Nihilism

"Nihilism" was the term used by Friedrich Nietzsche to describe what he considered the devaluation of the highest values posited by the ascetic ideal. The age in which he lived was viewed by the German philosopher as one of passive nihilism, which he defined as the unawareness of the fact that religious and philosophical absolutes had dissolved with the emergence of 19th-century Positivism. Since traditional morality collapsed, along with its metaphysical and theological foundations, the only thing that remained was a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness.

The triumph of meaninglessness coincides with the triumph of nihilism, captured in the slogan "God is dead." Nietzsche believed that people would begin seeking absoluteness in nationalism, just as they had previously done in philosophy and religion — a conception that later led to catastrophic consequences.

Nihilism is most often associated with Nietzsche. The philosopher felt that there is no objective order or structure in the world except the subjective ones each person imposes upon it. Consequently, the nihilist ends up discovering that all values are baseless and that reason is powerless. "Every belief, every considering something-true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world," Nietzsche writes in his Will to Power. He also argues: "Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys" — which is equivalent to saying that all imposed values and meanings must be repudiated.

Under the scrutiny of nihilism, "the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer," the philosopher writes in his Will to Power. Nihilism will eventually expose all beliefs and commonly recognized truths as mere symptoms of a declining Western illusion. Meaning, relevance, and purpose shall collapse in an all-destructive event, resulting in the greatest known crisis of humanity. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: "What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end."

Believing that Nietzsche's evaluation was accurate, artists and philosophers further developed his thoughts. Oswald Spengler observed in his book The Decline of the West (1926) that religious, artistic, and political traditions were severely weakened and destroyed by the workings of distinct nihilistic postures. For instance, he stated that the Faustian nihilist "shatters the ideals," the Apollinian nihilist "watches them crumble before his eyes," while the Indian nihilist "withdraws from their presence into himself." Western civilization is crumbling, Spengler argued, because its epistemological authority and ontological foundation are gradually destroyed by nihilism. He also found that modern Western Epicureanism and Stoicism might be associated with the negation of reality and resignation, popularized by Eastern religions.