The feeling of nihilism, specifically existential
nihilism, is something many of us have experienced during our life.
Existential nihilism is the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning or value to it. Existence,
including all action, feeling, and suffering, is ultimately senseless, completely without purpose.
On the journey to understanding how to overcome nihilism, if it’s even possible,
one ought to examine the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was the first thinker
to write about nihilism seriously, dedicated much of his life to understanding the concept,
thinking about how to overcome it, and studying the human condition as a whole.
This video will first go over what, specifically, Nietzsche thought nihilism was,
the steps he believed one should overcome, how to know for sure one has successfully overcome
nihilism, and my thoughts on whether his ideas are still relevant for today.
Note that what follows is just one interpretation of his work.
First, what is nihilism?
Nietzsche saw nihilism as the outcome of repeated frustrations in searching for meaning
and purpose in religion, specifically Christianity.
Thanks to science and the Enlightenment period,
Christianity began to be seriously questioned as truth. Plus, Nietzsche believed his own
psychological insights into why humans feel the need to create things like religion
lead him to believe Christianity is something people need to, and eventually will, give up.
Because of this, the false Christian values and beliefs that used to give our life meaning,
like living for God, now have no purpose for the rational thinking individual.
People may fall into despair since it appears that we’re just regular
animals in a universe with no objective bigger meaning to it.
He wrote
“...Nihilism appears at that point, not that the displeasure of existence has become greater
than before but because one has come to mistrust any ‘meaning’ in suffering, indeed in existence…
it now seems as if there is no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain.”
This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose he believed
will be highly destructive to individuals but could be overcome and needed to be
overcome. He thought of nihilism as a transitional stage in life or a disease.
Why must it be overcome? Because man suffers like all the other creatures
but is unique as he needs meaning and purpose to why he suffers, he believed.
So how does one overcome nihilism?
First, Nietzsche believed that not everyone had it in them to overcome
nihilism. He differentiated between active nihilists and passive nihilists.
“A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit:
as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit:
as passive nihilism.” (The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche)
Passive nihilism recognizes there will never be any meaning in the world,
and passive nihilists should try to separate themselves from their wills and desires to
reduce suffering as much as possible. He called this a ‘will to nothingness’.
Ultimately, though, this ‘will to nothingness’ is still a will,
and thus will end up being a futile attempt that ends in deep despair.
The individual may end up embracing a ‘herd mentality’
once more and joining another mass movement like organized religion
that tells us what to believe, like a cult, a political party, etc..
On the other hand, one can be an active nihilist and interpret life
in a self-promoting way. He called an individual that strove to overcome nihilism a Higher Man.
Higher men are are individuals who actively destroy our old, fake false values like those
in Christianity and begin constructing our own subjective values and interpretations of meaning.
Like a sculpture, we bash away false meaning and start to chisel out our very own identity.
Throughout Nietzsche’s works, he gave us analogies, teachings,
and psychological tools to help us create our own subjective meaning and values.
One of the most notable was the Ubermensch or Overman.
In his greatest work ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Zarathustra descents from the mountains where
he has become enlightened and announces to a village nearby. "I teach you the overman. Man
is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
The Overman is a psychologically superior being of the future individuals of today
should strive to become to keep them motivated on the quest toward overcoming nihilism.
Instead of living comfortably in the moment going about life hedonistically,
a concept he called the last man, an overman is about responsibility and growth,
an individual who’s studied and masters his greatest deficiencies and fears.
However, it’s important to understand that we’re not suppressing or discarding our emotions like
fear, envy, jealousy, or suffering on our path to becoming a Higher Man and realizing the Overman.
In fact, we do the very opposite, as Nietzsche could be thought of as a
psychologist long before the advent of psychology.
He believed Christianity was poisonous to individuals, not just because it was
paradoxical but because by accepting imposed meaning and values, it forces
us to suppress important emotions and feelings we all have within us.
Powerful feelings like suffering are not bad,
in fact, they are needed for a meaningful life he thought.
He wrote in the Gay Science...
"Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us
‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound."
And in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“It is out of the deepest depth that the highest must come to its height.”
See, most people when they go to find their own meaning, values,
or passion in life have no idea where to start or what to do.
Most of us are not born with a single passion we know we want to pursue or main purpose to life.
Suffering, envy, pain, and more are like lights in a tunnel of darkness.
They give us an indication of what we uniquely want in life at that moment.
If you feel envious of a great athlete,
maybe it’s time to take up a sport yourself and start training.
Do you feel intense pain toward cruelty toward animals?
Perhaps it’s time to volunteer at an animal shelter and become an activist.
The more we study our emotions and perceived deficiencies and work to
create our own values and meaning, the faster one can overcome nihilism.
How do we know when we’ve overcome nihilism?
One way is to pass the psychological test of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
Nietzsche describes it as such in The Gay Science
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness
and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once
more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your
teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment
when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
Essentially what he’s asking us to do is imagine that we were told we’d have
to live our same life over and over again for eternity. If you respond as he wrote
“Was that life? Well then! Once more!" in a positive manner despite the pain,
suffering you’ve experienced, you’ve significantly overcome nihilism.
A higher man doesn’t wish for the peace of death,
but to experience the exact life he’s lived complete with all its struggles again and again,
forever. He celebrates life as a miracle and embraces even the most dark and tragic
aspects of it as he understands the greatest moments in life were born out of them.
When we’ve done this, we’ve enter into a state of Amor Fati or ‘love of fate’. It
is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life,
including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary. We’ve become life-affirming
and have risen out of world of false values, false meaning, and existential nihilism.
Perhaps the most striking image Nietzsche gives us for what it takes to overcoming nihilism
is the a lesson in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which a shepherd gags on a snake.
“A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black
snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face?…
My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then
it cried out of me: “Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!”.. The shepherd, however, bit as my cry
counseled him; he bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake—and he jumped up.
No longer shepherd, no longer human—one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human
being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter.”
Here one can interpret the shepherd as initially the last man, then,
higher man as he begins to bite the snake, and finally an overman. As nihilism rushes down our
throat we have no choice but to bite it’s head off or choke to death, the meaning in our life
snuffed out. As we bite we become the higher man working to carve our own meaning and eventually,
in a rapturous moment perhaps, the Overman himself fully life-affirming.
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So that is what Nietzsche had to say, in a nutshell, about nihilism and overcoming it.
Of course, there’s much much more to his work so I recommending reading it for yourself. So today his
core philosophy is still important to a degree. When we allow others to dictate our purpose,
meaning, and values in it almost always leads to a poor quality of life. Studies continuously
how that having a meaning greater than just fleeting feelings of happiness is important for
higher subjective well-being. When we aren’t in touch with our feelings and aren’t working to
create our own meanings and values quality of life seems to suffer including in some cases, leading
to serious clinical depression. Nietzsche’s ideas of course aren’t the only and necessarily best
way to toward achieving human flourishing, as I’ll be exploring more thoughts on this coming up soon.