We explain what nihilism is, what was the origin of this famous term and what Russian nihilism consisted of.
What is Nihilism?
When talking about nihilism, it is usually allusion to the denial of the traditional forms of the moral values and religious, or any form of thought May he find guiding principles in life. Formally, nihilism is a philosophical and also artistic current, whose fundamental axis was precisely the denial that the existence make any intrinsic sense.
The latter means the denial of any idea of transcendence, of order and of mission in life, and may even consider it as something irrelevant, capricious, deep down as something superfluous or insignificant.
Forms of nihilism can be identified in countercultural currents such as punk culture or even in the anarchism, and sometimes the term was used in a derogatory way by the more traditional sectors of the society, to indicate that some person or movement lacked ethics or scruples.
However, nihilism is not comparable to any form of terrorism or criminal denial of life (especially other people's), nor is it really a belief "in nothing". Nor is it necessarily pessimistic.
It is simply the opposition to the deterministic and / or hierarchical accounts that traditionally give human existence a mission in the Earth, a series of guiding commandments or some form of transcendent explanation, as do for example the religions.
Origin of nihilism
The term "nihilism" comes etymologically from the Latin word nihil ("Nothing"), and was used for the first time in a letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to the philosopher Fichte, in the late 18th century, in which the ideas of Immanuel Kant were criticized.
The term later became popular thanks to the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and sons , in which he explains it as a political position similar to anarchism: opposed to all authority and all forms of faith. The term soon spread throughout imperial Russia, being frowned upon by conservatives and embraced instead by revolutionary sectors.
In the philosophical field, nihilism is linked to the work of two great German philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The first used that term to describe Christianity: by denying the meaning of everyday life, preferring the promise of an afterlife in which there is no suffering, no mortality, no suffering, Christian thought would have a great emptiness in the center, which Nietzsche called "the death of God."
For his part, Heidegger described nihilism as a state of being in which "nothing in itself" remains, which would be equivalent to reducing being to a mere value, to a thing. Heidegger saw this denial as the construction of a new starting point.
Russian Nihilism
Russian nihilism is the name by which a generation of young artists of imperial Russia (in the midst of Tsar Alexander II) was known. They took advantage of the granting of some civil liberties, such as that of the press, to attack the religious, moral and idealistic ideas that the conservative class held.
Thus, they proceeded to ridicule and combat them by means of asincerity stark, using texts considered "bad taste" and through a contemptuous and sustained provocation. Are attitudes were the ones that inspired Turgenev for the generational portrait made in his famous novelFathers and sons.