Recently I’ve been pondering nothing—or rather, nothingness. Perhaps this is partly due to the weather. In the throes of a bone-cold Colorado February I tend to find that Instagram’s @officialsadbeige account just really gets me, you know? But aside from the existential despair of frigid Costco runs and ice-packed driveways, I have an actual reason. In preparation for the upcoming Close Reads retreat on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I have been pouring over Russian literature. Hence my current preoccupation with nihilism in literature and life.
The term nihilism comes from the latin nihil, which means “nothing.” The word is apt, because nihilism is the belief in nothing. Nihilists reject the notion of any fundamental meaningful reality. To nihilists, no-thing exists. There is no God, no truth, no goodness, no beauty, no meaning, no purpose, no knowledge, no morality, no reality, no-thing. If this meaninglessness sounds terrifying, many agree. Nietzsche, the great prophet of nihilism, acknowledged that “mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair.”
But despair is not the only response to meaninglessness. According to nihilist doctrine, casting off the restraints of fundamental meaning is the ground-of-being for true human freedom, identity, and creativity. Russian revolutionary Mikhael Bakunin wrote: “Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life–the passion for destruction is also a creative passion!”
Nihilism began as a triumphant call to social action based on materialist assumptions. After all, if there is no ultimate spiritual meaning, then I reign supreme over my existence. I construct, rather than conform, my identity.
Nihilism is a comprehensive way of being, holding within itself a broad spectrum of psychological and social experiences ranging from despair to triumphalism. And it is no fringe philosophical framework. In the treatise Nihilism, Father Seraphim Rose argues that the West is now a fundamentally nihilistic society. The assumption of inherent meaninglessness is in the air we breathe, permeating politics, entertainment, education, therapy, economics, and more. We dwell in the “nihilism of the commonplace,” which ranges from exultation to despair in every facet of life. Contemporary fiction portrays this “everyday nihilism” in myriad ways on screen and on paper. If you have the stomach to watch this on screen, look no further than Paramount’s 2022 mini-series 1883, which is perhaps the most accurate portrayal of Nietzche’s nihilistic dogma I have ever beheld. On paper, our current Close Reads novel The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen also fits the bill. The winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the novel examines Jewish identity in a nihilistic culture. The two main characters, narrator Ruben Blum and a fictionalized version of the famous (or infamous) Benzion Netanyahu, embody two manifestations of twentieth-century Jewish identity, both deeply nihilistic.
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