What Is Nihilism? Meaning, Types, Nietzsche and Why “Nothing Matters” Is Only Half the Story

Last updated: November 2, 2026

Nihilism, in simple terms, is the view that there is no built-in meaning, value or truth holding the world together. The word comes from the Latin nihil, “nothing”. A nihilist about life says the universe has no purpose for you. A nihilist about morality says there are no objective rights and wrongs. A nihilist about knowledge says nothing can really be known.

That is the textbook answer, and it is only half the story. The more interesting half is what people do after they say “nothing matters”. Some give up. Some smash things. Some, like Nietzsche, treat nihilism as a disease of a whole civilisation and go looking for a cure. And many, like the train driver in the meme above, discover that their nihilism and their hunger for meaning are racing toward each other on the same track.

The Rulebook Was Written in a Garage

Imagine you find out that the rulebook of a game you have played your whole life was written by some kids in a garage, as a joke. The game still exists. The pieces are still on the board. But the feeling that the rules had to be this way is gone. That moment of “wait, so none of this is official?” is the nihilist moment.

Philosophers say the same thing more drily: nihilism is the denial that something we normally take for granted has a real foundation. Which something decides which nihilism you are dealing with. Deny that life has an objective purpose and you are an existential nihilist, which is what most people mean by the word. Deny objective right and wrong and you are a moral nihilist. Deny that anything can be known and you have reached epistemological nihilism, and if you doubt that the things around you exist at all, metaphysical nihilism. These are independent of each other. You can be a nihilist about one and perfectly confident about the rest.

In everyday speech “nihilistic” has drifted further. A band can be nihilistic, a film can be nihilistic, your teenage cousin can be going through a nihilistic phase, and in each case the word carries a tone of despair or aggression that the philosophical position does not need. Nihilism is a claim about what is out there, not about what you feel. You can believe the universe is indifferent and still love your dog, your friends and your morning coffee. Whether you are entitled to love them, if nothing is objectively valuable, is the question that has kept philosophers busy for two hundred years.

An Insult, a Novel and a Bomb

The word began its career as an insult. In 1799 the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi wrote an open letter to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who had been accused of atheism. Jacobi said the charge was wrong: Fichte’s philosophy was not atheism, it was something worse, Nihilismus. A philosophy that tries to build everything out of pure reason and the thinking self, he argued, ends up cut off from anything real. Follow reason all the way down and you are left holding nothing. Jacobi did not invent the word, but his letter made it stick, and the shape of his complaint keeps returning: nihilism is what you get when a way of thinking eats its own foundations.

The word went mainstream through a novel. In Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) a young medical student called Bazarov comes to stay at his friend Arkady’s family estate. He dissects frogs, sneers at poetry and refuses to respect anything just because it is old. Asked what Bazarov is, Arkady proudly answers that he is a nihilist, “a person who does not bow down to any authority” and accepts no principle on faith. Notice that this is not a man who believes in nothing. Bazarov believes in science, usefulness and his frogs. What he rejects is authority. Then he falls helplessly in love, which his own theory dismisses as romantic nonsense, and discovers that some things matter to him whether he approves of them or not. It is the oldest objection to nihilism, and a novelist got there first.

After Turgenev, young Russians proudly called themselves nihilists, and part of the movement turned violent. In March 1881 the revolutionary group People’s Will killed Tsar Alexander II with a bomb in St Petersburg, ironically the tsar who had freed the serfs twenty years earlier. From then on, in European newspapers, “nihilist” meant something close to “terrorist”, and Dostoevsky had already written a whole dark novel, Demons, about a revolutionary cell that destroys itself in the name of destroying everything else. That is why the word still has two sounds. In a seminar a nihilist holds a sceptical thesis about values. In a headline a nihilist wants to burn it all down.

Nietzsche and the Death of God

Nobody is more tied to nihilism than Friedrich Nietzsche, and nobody is more misunderstood about it. Nietzsche was not trying to convince you that nothing matters. He thought Europe was already sliding into nihilism and wanted to understand why. His notes from the 1880s, published after his death as The Will to Power, open with “Nihilism stands at the door”, followed by the most useful definition ever written: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”

Read that slowly. Nobody attacked our values from outside. They undermined themselves. Nietzsche’s favourite example is truthfulness. Christianity taught Europeans to value truth above everything, and centuries later that same love of truth produced science, historical criticism of the Bible and Darwin, which in turn undermined the beliefs that had taught it. The values did not lose a fight. They lost their footing.

The most famous scene in his work makes the same point with theatre. In The Gay Science (1882, section 125) a madman runs into the marketplace on a bright morning with a lantern, shouting that he is looking for God. The people standing around are atheists anyway, and they laugh: has God got lost, has he emigrated? Then the madman turns on them: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” How could we drink up the sea, he asks, or wipe away the whole horizon? Nobody understands, and he smashes his lantern and says he has come too early. The scene is aimed at comfortable unbelievers who think you can drop God and keep everything else, the same morality and the same sense that life has a point. It is not a celebration. It is closer to panic, a diagnosis whose patient is Western culture itself. We have told the full story of that sentence in what “God is dead” really means.

Nietzsche also distinguished two ways of living through it. Passive nihilism is weariness: the values collapse and you sink with them, into cynicism, comfort and distraction, until you become his “last man”, who wants nothing great, only a little pleasure for the day and a little pleasure for the night. Active nihilism is a demolition crew rather than a funeral. You knock down the hollow values to clear the ground for new ones, which is what he meant by the “revaluation of all values” and by the Übermensch, the one who creates values instead of receiving them. Calling Nietzsche “the nihilist philosopher” is like calling a doctor who writes about cancer a fan of cancer.

From Error Theory to Heat Death

Nihilism did not stay in the nineteenth century. In 1977 the Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie opened his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong with the blunt sentence “There are no objective values.” His view, called error theory, says that when you claim “torture is wrong” you are trying to state a fact, the way you would say water boils at 100 degrees, but since there are no moral facts, all such claims are strictly false. His reasons were that moral disagreement runs much deeper than disagreement about chemistry, and that an objective value would be a very strange thing, a property that both exists in the world and tells you what to do. Mackie, incidentally, thought we should keep morality going anyway as a useful human invention, a bit like traffic rules. If you want the popular version of that debate, read whether everything is permitted without objective morality.

The other kinds have their own champions. The ancient sophist Gorgias argued that nothing exists, that if anything did it could not be known, and that if it could be known it could not be communicated, which is epistemological nihilism with a showman’s flair and the obvious problem that it saws off the branch it sits on. The worry behind it is real, though, and it has a wonderfully silly name: the Münchhausen trilemma. Some metaphysicians today defend mereological nihilism, the view that only the smallest particles exist and that there is no chair, only particles “arranged chairwise”. Your chair is fine, by the way. You can still sit on the particles. And then there is cosmic nihilism, existential nihilism with a telescope: the stars burn out, the universe drifts toward heat death and every human achievement ends as scattered energy. It has its own literary tradition in Lovecraft’s horror stories and its own post on our blog, Cosmic Nihilism and Entropy.

Even the Bible got there early. Ecclesiastes sighs “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, and the Hebrew word hevel literally means vapour or breath: everything under the sun is like breath on a cold morning, there and then gone.

Is Nihilism Real, and Is It Dangerous?

Do people really hold it? Certainly. Error theory is a respected position in academic ethics, and plenty of people outside universities would call themselves existential nihilists. Is it a real cultural phenomenon? Also yes, in the sense Nietzsche meant: many people live without a shared religious framework, and the old answers to “what is all this for?” no longer feel binding. Whether nihilism is true is the open question. Its defenders point out that science describes a universe of particles and forces in which neither “purpose” nor “ought” appears. Its critics answer that some things, like torturing a child for fun, seem more certainly wrong than any argument that says otherwise, that nihilism is hard to state without values (“you should face the truth”), and that meaning made by people is not fake just because the universe did not supply it. A song is not meaningless because the universe did not write it. The fairest summary: nihilism is very good at showing that meaning and morality are not given. It is much weaker at showing that they are not real.

Is it dangerous? Critics have worried about that since Turgenev, and the line usually attributed to Dostoevsky, “if God does not exist, everything is permitted”, has haunted moral philosophy ever since. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi camps, believed that the Holocaust was prepared intellectually by thinkers who taught that a human being is “nothing but” heredity and environment. On the other hand, most mass violence in history was committed by people who believed far too much, in a nation, a race or a utopia, not by people who believed in nothing. Fanatics are rarely short of values. And if nothing is objectively good, cruelty is not objectively good either. Max Stirner, often called a nihilist himself, warned in 1844 that sacred ideas like “the Nation” can become tyrants demanding sacrifices, and called them spooks. Nihilism becomes dangerous mainly as a pose that excuses whatever you already wanted to do. As an honest question, it is no more dangerous than any other.

One thing it is not is depression. Nihilism is a philosophical view, depression a health condition. A depressed person may speak in nihilistic language, and a cheerful error theorist may be the happiest person at the party. If “nothing matters” is less a thesis you are testing than a weight you carry every day, please take that seriously and talk to someone you trust, a doctor or a therapist. Philosophy is a good companion for thinking about meaning, not a replacement for help.

The Dude, Rust Cohle and Optimistic Nihilism

Pop culture loves nihilists, mostly because they make great villains and better jokes. In The Big Lebowski (1998) three Germans in black announce that they believe in nothing and then demand a million dollars, which is the joke, and Walter delivers the verdict: say what you like about National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos. In the first season of True Detective (2014) Rust Cohle gives long, bleak speeches about consciousness being an evolutionary mistake while working harder than anyone to catch a killer. His actions contradict his speeches, which is Turgenev’s point about Bazarov all over again. And in Rick and Morty, Morty consoles his sister with “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die”, and then invites her to come watch TV.

That last scene is already halfway to what the science channel Kurzgesagt called “optimistic nihilism” in a hugely popular 2017 video. You are tiny and temporary, nothing you do matters cosmically, and that is good news: there is no cosmic exam to fail, so you might as well enjoy the ride, be curious and be kind. Philosophers point out the wrinkle. The moment you say “so be kind”, values are back. Optimistic nihilists are really nihilists about cosmic meaning who still think joy and kindness are worth something, which puts them very close to the next two neighbours.

Nihilism vs Existentialism vs Absurdism

All three start from the same bad news, that the universe comes without a built-in meaning. They split over what to do next.

A simple way to remember it: nihilism is the diagnosis, existentialism and absurdism are two different treatments. Camus wrote The Rebel (1951) largely against nihilism, because he believed “nothing matters, so anything goes” had helped produce the political murders of his century. His answer was revolt, refusing both the comforting lie and the despair, and we unpack it in Are Absurdists Just Nihilists With Stockholm Syndrome? and One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy. Sartre and Beauvoir agreed there is no meaning in advance and concluded that this is exactly why we are free and responsible. Beauvoir added that your freedom only makes sense if you also want freedom for others, which is a long way from “nothing matters”. Nietzsche, for his part, offered amor fati, the love of fate, and the test of eternal recurrence: could you want this exact life again, forever? And Buddhism, which nineteenth-century Europeans liked to call nihilistic, explicitly rejects both a permanent self and the view that everything is simply wiped out, and puts compassion at the centre, as we explain in the First Noble Truth and Buddha vs Schopenhauer.

Viktor Frankl and the Empty Fridge

The most moving answer to nihilism came from someone who tested it in the worst conditions imaginable. Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist, was deported in 1942 with his family to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz and subcamps of Dachau. His father died in the ghetto, his mother and brother were murdered, and his wife Tilly died in Bergen-Belsen. Within a year of his liberation he published the book known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). Its central observation is quiet and devastating: the prisoners who still had something to live for, a person waiting, a book to finish, a task, had a better chance of holding on. Frankl liked to quote Nietzsche: if you have a why for your life, you can bear almost any how.

His school of therapy, logotherapy, sidesteps the nihilist argument with real elegance. Frankl grants that no general meaning of life can be handed to you, and says that “what is the meaning of life?” is the wrong question. Life is asking you, every day, in concrete form: what will you do with this situation, this person, this hour? You answer by creating something, by loving someone or something, and, when suffering cannot be avoided, by the attitude you take toward it, which he called the last of the human freedoms. He also had a name for what happens when the question goes unanswered: the existential vacuum, and its weekly variant, the “Sunday neurosis” that sets in when the busy week stops and the emptiness shows through.

Which brings us to the second meme: a man leaning into an empty fridge at three in the morning, asking the universe once again for meaning. As compensations go, a fridge raid is harmless. Frankl’s point is that the answer is not in the fridge. It is in the things that pull you out of yourself: something to do, someone to love, and the way you carry what you cannot change. Our post on philosophy in psychotherapy shows how logotherapy is used today.

If you want to read further, start with Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, which is short and funny, then section 125 of The Gay Science, two pages after which you will never read “God is dead” on a T-shirt the same way again, then Camus and Frankl. Mackie is the classic for the hard philosophical case. And if you think nihilism is bleak, try it with a telescope: When the Universe Doesn’t Care.