Nihilism (from the Latin: nothing) is a term most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably the most pivotal philosopher of the European post-Kantian era, and with his infamous allegation in Also Sprach Zarathustra that:  

“God is dead! And we have killed him!”

Nietzsche did not coin the term. Ivan Turgenov’s novel Fathers and Sons most famously used it earlier in the century for those who rejected all political authority. My focus, though, will be on Nietzsche’s usage and its implications. Then I will attempt an informal evaluation.*

What did he mean by nihilism?

Not that a being named God had in some sense died, but that the combination of the rise of science and Enlightenment philosophy had destroyed the credibility of belief in God for educated people.

What Nietzsche really illuminated was that the situation was worse. Enlightenment philosophers from Kant down to the British utilitarians had clung to conceptions of morality that drew their strength from Christian sentiments such as humility, love, and the need for sacrifice. Nietzsche’s radical answer: if God is dead, than so is everything God’s existence gave meaning to, including morality as philosophers had understood it for over two thousand years.

This conception of morality began with the idea that morality needs a transcendent source, a source outside the spatiotemporal world of experience. To the Christian, God is the source of morality, and His rules are binding upon all. If this transcendent source was removed from the philosophical conversation, then all of what depended on such a source was invalidated.

Science, as it was increasingly seen in the latter nineteenth century when Nietzsche penned his most important work, surely seemed to have invalidated the idea of the transcendent. It couldn’t be seen, heard, tasted, touched, smelled. No claims about it could be empirically tested. It seemed to have no causal efficacy or consequences in the commonplace world of men and women conducting their affairs, the stories they’d told each other about a transcendent God and His love notwithstanding. There was great suffering in the world, after all. At least since Hume’s Natural Religion, and surely after Voltaire’s Candide, philosophers had wondered: what was one to do with that realization?  

As science continued to rise to dominance, Nietzsche felt, such sentiments would continue to be felt. They would spread to every corner of society. (Arguably, he was right.)  

Secular moralities such as Kant’s deontology and the utilitarianism of British thinkers were too Christian in their basic premises and sentiments even if their authors would have loudly protested this characterization. Kant’s ethics are absolute, binding all rational agents; Mills’s call for sacrifice in the name of a “greatest happiness principle,” and to serve “the greatest good for the greatest number.”   

If God was dead, that is, then morality as Westerners understood it was also dead, and there was nothing viable able to replace it. Nothing that stood up to philosophical analysis. Nothing that fully faced our biological mortality in the face of a godless and indifferent cosmos.

Nietzsche thus warned, especially in his later writings, of an advent of nihilism.

The coming struggle with the consequences of the death of God would inaugurate a dangerous epoch if the right philosophical moves weren’t made.

He thus advocated a revaluation of all values: a total housecleaning, taking out the old as trash, as it were, and bringing in something not seen before: a morality suited for human life in a world devoid of a transcendent source for meaning: furthered, moreover, in a world most of whose people would be unable psychologically to accept God’s death and the end of transcendence.

Only the overman — whose psychology made this possible and faced it squarely — would be able to assert himself courageously and boldly against the universe’s emptiness. Only the overman would be capable of creating moral valuation rooted in health, struggle, strength, and standing resolutely — defiantly, even! — against the darkness (thinking here of Walter T. Stace’s essay “Man Against Darkness” penned more recently**).

The overman would overcome nihilism in two ways. (1) He could accept that morality is a human creation, not a discovery and not something revealed by a god. (2) He would create the morality necessary for the future of a species of sentient but mortal beings in a godless universe.  

What would this new morality really amount to, though? What dangerous doors did the idea open that we’ve had a very difficult time closing again (arguably we haven’t succeeded in closing them)?

One such door is eugenics. How was this door opened?

Note the reference above to humanity as a species. This is what biologists following Darwin were beginning to do. Darwin’s own cousin, Francis Galton, drew eugenic consequences from the theory of evolution by natural selection and from the very Nietzschean idea that human beings could not take charge of their own evolution.

Nietzsche was what we might call a species collectivist, as opposed to someone who spoke of classes as did Marx, or races as did racialists, or sexes as do the ideologists of “gender” today. He became interested in what advanced the cause of the human species.

His answer came down to: a capacity for intelligent dominance over one’s environment.

The congenitally strong could do this. The weak, the infirm, the deformed, could not. They could only become a drag on the advancement of the species. “Commoners” weren’t quite as bad, but they would not be strong enough to lead.

The overman was the essence of strength, and defiance of the universe’s indifference.

The last men would be those who followed: strong enough to labor and thus worth keeping around so long as they worked, of course. As for those who couldn’t contribute to the system for whatever reason, they did nothing to grease the wheels of advancing modernity.

They were expendable. Hence eugenics, which went as far as denying the weaker groups any right to breed.  

In The Will to Power, the collection his sister put together after he went insane, we find this note:

734. “Society, as the trustee of life, is responsible for every botched life before it comes into existence, and as it has to atone for such lives, it ought consequently to make it impossible for them ever to see the light of day: it should in many cases actually prevent the act of procreation, and may, without any regard for rank, descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have recourse to castration.”

And lest some think his sister was up to something here — as she was on some points, but not this one — from The Genealogy of Morals:

“The magnitude of a “progress” is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires: humanity as a mass sacrificed to the prosperity of the one stronger species of Man — that would be a progress.”

So there’s “good” sacrifice after all! That being the sacrifice ordained by the overman! That higher type of man who fully faced his status in the universe.

Thus arises a worldview able to justify unabashed elitism and rule by elites … in many respects echoed by what was happening when Nietzsche was living and what has happened to an even greater degree during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Overcoming nihilism, in this case, means recognizing and accepting as a necessary future the unabashed elitism of the overman … or overmen, perhaps … and their morality that is just as unabashedly a creation rather than a discovery.

I hope I don’t need to spend much time recounting where such ideas have led us … are still leading us. They aren’t leading us to freedom; they aren’t even leading us to prosperity, though at one time it might have seemed such. They aren’t even leading us to happiness, although doubtless Nietzsche would have questioned whether happiness either is or should be a goal of life in the world as it is.

The world as it is?

More like: the world as materialists conceived of it. A world which rejects all transcendent realities, not just Christianity’s God but a morality which transcends human history and the vagaries of circumstance as well.

The sad irony: this way of looking at the world didn’t have to happen.

It happened because of a certain interpretation of the scientific enterprise that had come about by the time Nietzsche was living, and which he absorbed: the same enterprise as that of Comte, which rejected both the gods and the abstractions of the first two stages in favor of the empirical-only methods of the third stage.

This was not the interpretation of the founders of modern science. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, Newton, and other great figures at the foundations of modern science were all Christian theists, even if their take on Christianity differed from that of the Church on crucial points (they understood the need to discard what we would today call Biblical literalism as well as the Aristotelian elements Aquinas had introduced — and sometimes paid a steep price for the stands they took!).

In short, they maintained the presupposition of the truth of the Christian worldview in its essence: God the Creator exists, created man in His image among other kinds, with all that follows.

They might have understood the argument that only Christianity made sense of the ideas that the universe was ordered and not unpredictable, that it was intelligible to the human mind, and that we could create and improve a knowledge base that began with Newtonian physics.

The Christian worldview postulated that the universe had been created by a rational God (Logos) who had created us “in His image” as rational if finite agents: a world which ran according to explicit rules which we prospered if we obeyed and came to harm if we disobeyed (Ethos).

Absent this view, how sure are we that we’ve discovered “laws of nature” (originally called that because they were God’s laws, His governance of the natural order, as opposed to human laws written for the governance of civil society).

This is very abbreviated, of course. There is much more to be said. But had those who pursued the sciences not developed increased hubris, thinking they could further the enterprise without any “God hypothesis” (Pierre LaPlace: “I have no need of that hypothesis.) it is conceivable that the intellectual crisis Nietzsche diagnosed would never have come about, and neither would we have seen the crisis the philosophical enterprise found itself in as decades past: a crisis not of nihilism specifically but of irrelevance, while those “overmen” who thought solely in terms of money and power went about their merry ways.

In other words, contrary to the spirit that motivated Nietzsche, it wasn’t modern science that “killed God.” It was a specific philosophy of science, or more exactly, a worldview, a set of metaphysical denials and assertions not inferred from any scientific discoveries, individually or in aggregate. Whether one believes or one choose to disbelieve, I do not think this conclusion avoidable.

*These short pieces are not intended to be academic journal friendly, of course. I lost patience with academic journal tedium years ago.

**I’d link to the original, but sadly, it has gone behind a paywall. Sign of the times….