Volume 35, Issue 4

The American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson published his essay “Experience” in 1844. Two years earlier Emerson had been thrown into a spiritual crisis with the death of his young son Waldo. In his essay Emerson finds himself enjoined to rethink his world-view and the meaning of human existence. He gives a rich portrayal of the experience of nihilism by means of a series of personified concepts which he refers to as the “lords of life.” Emerson’s essay can be seen as his attempt to formulate a response to nihilism and meaninglessness. He proposes a few possible solutions to the problem, such as urging his readers to abandon tedious intellectual discussions and abstract thoughts about the human condition and simply focus on their projects and pursuits in the world. The present article argues that despite Emerson’s appreciation of the depths of the nihilism, his proposals to remedy the problem are unsatisfying.

I will outline the understanding of the world in Eugen Fink’s cosmological philosophy in relation to modern nihilism. What impact does a particular conception of the world have on the understanding of what a human being, a community, a morality, or an ideal, is? Is a meaningful life possible after the collapse of traditional metaphysical interpretations of human existence? I will try to explain why, according to Fink, nihilism should not be seen purely negatively. What this means in terms of emerging ‘intelligent’ technologies and the destabilizing effects of the misinformed response to the environmental crisis as these affect possibilities for human freedom?

This article is an investigation into Hermann Rauschning’s 1939 book The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West in which he claims that the Nazis should be viewed, not as driven by ideology, but as driven by nihilism. According to Rauschning, who was himself a former official in the Nazi Party, the Nazis had no goal or purpose other than to seek destruction for the sake of destruction, and thus were nihilists. As this view goes against both the standard understanding of Nazism (as driven by racist and nationalist ideologies) and of nihilism (as individualistic rather than political), this paper first investigates Rauschning’s arguments and then compares them against the analysis of Nazism offered by Hannah Arendt. Contrary to Rauschning, Arendt argues that Nazism was driven by a very specific racial ideology and she thus warns against viewing the Nazis as nihilists. By comparing and contrasting the arguments of Rauschning and of Arendt, this paper concludes by offering a better understanding of Nazism and of nihilism.

In the light of Heidegger’s use of Dostoevsky at the start of his lectures on European nihilism, the article considers and evaluates Heidegger’s and Dostoevsky’s respective accounts of the nature of European or Western nihilism and how this may be overcome.

Girard has argued that in the opposition between “Dionysus” and “the crucified,” Nietzsche contrasts Christian martyrdom that resolves violence through pacifism with pagan festivals that affirm violence by ritualizing it. In agreement with Girard, this article shows how Heidegger’s discussion of nihilism fails to ethically confront the violence of Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, a criticism that applies equally to Deleuze. However, I argue that Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche confronts the violence in a manner that Girard fails to appreciate. Bataille interprets ritual sacrifice as a drama communicating the loss of identity experienced by those who contemplate the spectacle. Bataille demonstrates the complicity between Dionysian and Judeo-Christian martyrdom insofar as both implicate human beings in the violence of evil that the death of God consummates.

Georges Bataille’s significance as a philosopher can be disputed, but his relevance for the study of laughter cannot be overlooked nor should the role he gives to nothingness be underestimated. To appreciate the 20th-century French thinker’s view of the divinity of nothingness, a presentation of his complex reflection on laughter is in order. I attempt to provide as coherent an account as possible, so that in assessing the originality and viability of Bataille’s theory of laughter we may enlighten his views on the divinity of nothing. The interest of Bataille in the relation between philosophy and laughter is explicitly stated: He declares that insofar as he is a philosopher, he is a “philosopher of laughter”; he considers laughter the puzzle which “at all costs” he “would solve” because if solved, it “would of itself solve everything”; and he maintains that “laughter is the central given, the first given, and perhaps even the final given behind philosophy.” Following his extraordinary experiences with laughter, in which, “illuminated convulsively,” he discovered that laughter was revelation, that it “opened up the depth of things,” Bataille declared laughter divine and confessed to his fear of being ultimately “LAUGHTER ITSELF!” Defining himself a mystic in line with the mystics of all times, I argue that his thought and practice of laughter consist of a mysticism of laughter rather than a laughing mysticism. The originality of this view reduces its viability: it is intrinsically connected with Bataillean experiences of laughter and with his argument that one should lose rather than save oneself.

This paper seeks to explain Blanchot’s original and compelling, but frequently overlooked, interpretation of nihilism. It focuses on the philosophical, rather than the literary which has had primary focus in previous commentaries. It focuses on two dimensions – the personal, examined through Blanchot’s writings on finitude and death, and the general, examined through his confrontation with Nietzsche’s notions of the overman and the eternal return. Blanchot problematises the possibility of overcoming nihilism through a pure affirmation of life, seeing the problem of meaning in life as ultimately intractable. The paper positions Blanchot’s engagement with nihilism as one of a number in the historical tradition that have questioned the viability of overcoming nihilism. Its unique significance, however, lies in Blanchot’s suggestion of a more oblique response which might mitigate nihilism without overcoming it.

The paper considers the nihilism of history in relation to the concepts of the “crisis of modernity”, “the end of history” and our “contemporary situation”. The problem is that the disposedness of nihilism itself determines our existential and coexistential situation, since it erases its historical horizon. On the other hand, the pressure of the situation demands that we adopt an open attitude towards our own contemporaneity, which includes not only ourselves but also the world between and around us. Finally, in relation to Hegel’s introduction to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the question of the immanent historicity of philosophy and the nihilism of history is raised. In this context, I also discuss some of the assumptions of Jon Stewart’s historical-philosophical consideration of nihilism in his book The History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century from 2023.

The article deals with the treatment of nihilism in the philosophical oeuvre of Ivan Urbančič, which has lasted nearly 50 years. In the first part I try to show how Urbančič’s early consideration of nihilism in the 1960s and the 1970s is closely connected with confrontation with socialist ideology in the former Yugoslavia. This situation, which required him to take a personal philosophical standpoint, had a considerable impact on Urbančič’s reflection upon the contemporary position of philosophy in general. In the second part of the article, I turn to Urbančič’s extensive project, started in the 1990s, which deals with the problem of nihilism in the context of the entire legacy of philosophy. The key conclusion is that in the gap of scientific, capital, and political domination of the world, the presence of nihilism remains obscured, but therefore even more determining for the understanding of the meaning of humanity today.

This paper explores Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism by centering on the neglected lens of the will to nothingness. Contrary to dominant interpretations that reduce nihilism to the modern crisis of meaninglessness following the death of God or to the logic of metaphysics, this paper argues that the will to nothingness corresponds to the very logic of nihilism, and studies its continuing role in contemporary capitalist civilization. Sketched in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), then, the will to nothingness emerges as a paradoxical volitional response to surplus suffering in early human history: a will that seeks power by rejecting power, justifying existence through moral and metaphysical gestures of world-denial. This paper then explores how this paradox informs the self-weakening unfolding and broader historical dynamics of nihilism, situating Nietzsche’s insights in dialogue with Heidegger’s metaphysical interpretation of nihilism and other related perspectives, like Deleuze’s recuperation and elaboration on the notion. Ultimately, the will to nothingness is rescued as the driving paradox of nihilism and thus as an overlooked element of Nietzsche’s broader civilizational critique and project of revaluation that demands renewed attention in our contemporary context.

The belief that ‘Life is meaningless’ may at first seem incompatible with a theistic point of view. However, Meister Eckhart, a mystic member of the Dominican order, showed already in the 13th-14th Century that the innermost divine essence follows a “logic” that prescinds from the logic of “whys” – whereby everything needs an explanation (causal or otherwise) – and eludes any representation, thus leading to nothingness . God does not correspond, then, to the holder of an absolute meaning that is inaccessible to humanity. Eckhart’s thought, marked by a fundamental negativity, does not only involve the divine side: nothingness, in fact, also concerns creatures and their living. Godhead, that is God’s purest essence, consists precisely of this originary nothingness. Although divine nothingness is unrelated, it follows a dialectical movement: this paper will show how the divine essence (conceived as a “double negation”) is gained by negating creatures, to which the ‘nothingness’ of single negation corresponds. ‘Nothingness’ thus works on several levels and is never overcome by an ontological positivity represented by God – though this does not exclude the God of manifestation, the creator which “carries” attributes.

This paper provides an overview of Jakob Hermann Obereit’s introduction of the philosophical term nihilism from 1787 up to 1791. It argues that this introduction is part of a project called the desperate metaphysics, which is partly a response to the reception of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of pure Reason , but also an assessment of the rise of a focus on individual responsibility, development and autonomy that had been put forward during the Enlightenment. In this sense, nihilism is introduced in response to a philosophical discussion that is understood as drawing out the depths of these Enlightenment demands and the untenability of traditional metaphysics, explaining the immediate appeal of the term and its rapid spread beyond philosophy.

While pre-modern intellectual cultures are recognized to have engaged with pessimism, nihilism is, by contrast, often understood to be a distinctly modern phenomenon. The sources of nihilism should then be traceable to or reflected in certain differences between modern and pre-modern thought. This paper identifies one such difference: a conceptual category for large-scale social and political phenomena understood as the product of human activity but not of human design. The paper briefly sketches the development of this concept in the Scottish Enlightenment and its development of a diachronic dimension in Hegel’s philosophy of history. It then points out the implications of this conceptual category both for our understanding of human beings as historical agents and for theories of normativity and the justification of social and political norms. These implications are identified by way of a contrast to the intellectual culture of Classical Greece. Finally, it is argued that this concept contributed to the development of trends in thought and culture commonly associated with nihilism by weakening notions of the historical agency of both individuals and groups.