Nihilism is not one idea but a whole family of denials
Some nihilists deny that life has any purpose. Others deny objective morality, or knowledge, or even that tables exist, since only particles are real. The word, built from Latin for nothing, was sharpened in 18th-century Germany as an insult and made famous by a Russian novel.
Latin nihil means nothing, the same root found in annihilate. The term took shape in 18th-century Germany, first in literature, then in the hands of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who used it to attack philosophies he thought dissolved meaning or existence. English speakers were using it by the 1810s. In 19th-century Russia it caught fire through Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and the radical movement that took its name, and Friedrich Nietzsche's writings later drove wider interest. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a cultural drift in which secularisation strips away the values that once guided people's lives. Dada, existentialism and postmodern thought all picked up the theme in the 20th century.
Existential nihilism holds that neither individual lives nor the world as a whole have any higher purpose, so effort, joy and suffering are all ultimately pointless. People react in very different ways: indifference, anxiety, crisis, or a creative decision to build personal meaning anyway. Martin Heidegger tied the mood to boredom, when disengagement makes everything seem empty. Moral nihilism, a cousin, says moral judgements rest on false assumptions with no footing in external reality.
The idea stretches into other branches. Relativists hold that truth depends on the viewpoint of a person or culture, leaving no neutral judge; sceptical nihilists deny knowledge exists at all. In metaphysics, one version says there need not have been anything, and no deep reason explains why there is. Mereological nihilism admits only simple things, like elementary particles, not composites. Cosmological nihilism calls reality unintelligible and indifferent to us. Political, semantic and logical versions exist too.
Nihilism overlaps with, but differs from, its neighbours. A pessimist thinks the world is bad; a nihilist denies it carries any value either way. Absurdists add that the hunt for meaning in a meaningless cosmos is itself paradoxical. Cynicism distrusts motives, and apathy simply stops caring. In everyday speech the label gets thrown loosely at anyone seen as destructive, from either side of politics.
Source: Nihilism
