Nietzsche on Nihilism

Original Text

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book One ("European Nihilism"), note 2; trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 9.

German original: Was bedeutet Nihilismus? Daß die obersten Werthe sich entwerthen. Es fehlt das Ziel; es fehlt die Antwort auf das "Warum?"

Translation

The Kaufmann and Hollingdale translation (Vintage, 1967) is the standard English edition of The Will to Power and established its numbering, which is used in virtually all English-language scholarship. The key verb of the note is sich entwerten — "to devaluate themselves" — which Kaufmann renders precisely: the highest values do not fall because they are attacked from outside, but because they devalue themselves, from within. The second sentence is rendered with equivalent care: das Ziel fehlt — "the aim is lacking" — and es fehlt die Antwort auf das 'Warum?' — "'why?' finds no answer." The note is a definition, not a lament: Nietzsche is diagnosing what he takes to be the inescapable spiritual event of the coming centuries.

Context

The note stands at the beginning of the section "European Nihilism," which Nietzsche planned as the opening of his late, unwritten masterwork. In the outline for the book, Nietzsche writes that "nihilism stands at the door" and that "our whole European culture has been moving for some time, with a tortured tension growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe." The cause, he insists, is not social distress or physiological degeneration but the self-overcoming of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world: Christian morality taught truthfulness, and truthfulness has discovered that the God and the moral order it believed in were human constructions. The famous announcement of the madman in The Gay Science (1882) — "God is dead" — is the same diagnosis in parable form: the belief in the absolute moral and metaphysical order has collapsed, and European humanity has not yet understood what this collapse means.

Nietzsche distinguishes two possible responses. Passive nihilism is the exhaustion that follows the collapse of values: the weary conclusion that since the highest values have failed, nothing is worth anything. Active nihilism, by contrast, is the violent, destructive clearing of the ground — "the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability" — which Nietzsche treats as a force of spiritual history, a destructive but liberating storm. Beyond both stands the task of the revaluation of all values: the creation of new values, willed and affirmed, that are not inherited from the dead God but forged by the individual who has passed through nihilism without being destroyed by it.

Meaning

The definition is precise and double-edged. Nihilism is not, for Nietzsche, the belief that nothing exists, nor the abstract denial of all values. It is a specific historical event: "the highest values devaluate themselves." The values in question — God, truth, morality, the good, the true world behind the apparent world — were the ground on which Western humanity stood. Nietzsche's claim is that these values contain within themselves the logic of their own ruin. The will to truth, pursued rigorously, dissolves every "true world," including the moral faith that produced the will to truth. Christianity, as he puts it in On the Genealogy of Morality, "has dug its own grave": its demand for truthfulness finally turns against the Christian faith itself.

The second sentence names the existential content of the event: "The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer." The collapse of the highest values leaves human life without a telos and without an answer to the question of meaning. This is the experience that twentieth-century existentialism will describe from the inside — the experience of absurdity in Camus, of thrownness in Heidegger, of anguish in Sartre. But for Nietzsche the diagnosis is not the conclusion. Because the values devalued themselves, no external authority can restore them; because the old ground is gone, the only honest response is to create new values in full awareness of their origin in human will. Nihilism is thus both the greatest danger — the possible twilight of human life into passive despair — and the greatest opportunity: the clearing in which the individual can finally become the author of values rather than their inheritor.

Philosophical Interpretation

The note is one of the most influential definitions in modern philosophy, and it frames nearly every subsequent discussion of nihilism and meaninglessness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on nihilism treats Nietzsche's analysis as the origin of the modern philosophical problem of nihilism, and his distinction between the devaluation of values and the possibility of revaluation structures the entire later debate. In the twentieth century, Heidegger read Nietzsche's nihilism as the culminating event of Western metaphysics — the forgetting of Being that leaves only "the will to will" — while the existentialists read it as the description of the human condition. Camus's absurdism is, in effect, a response to the same diagnosis: where Nietzsche proposes the revaluation of values by the strong, Camus proposes the modest but rigorous fidelity to the absurd without metaphysical consolation. What unites them is the acceptance of Nietzsche's premise: the highest values have devaluated themselves, and no return is possible. What divides them is the answer to the second sentence — whether the missing aim can be created, or whether the honest life consists in living without one, lucidly and in solidarity. The note's insistence that nihilism is an event to be passed through, not a conclusion to rest in, remains the most demanding inheritance of Nietzsche's late thought.

Related Concepts

• Nihilism: the historical event in which the highest values devaluate themselves, leaving no answer to "why?"
• The Death of God: the parable of the collapse of the moral-metaphysical order, announced in The Gay Science.
• The Revaluation of All Values: the creation of new values after the collapse of the old, the task Nietzsche assigns to the free spirit.
• Active and Passive Nihilism: the destructive clearing of the ground versus the weary resignation to meaninglessness.
• The Will to Power: the drive Nietzsche posits beneath all valuation, which devalues and revalues in the service of life.
• European Nihilism: Nietzsche's name for the coming crisis of the next two centuries, announced in The Will to Power.

Related Learning Path

Begin with The Gay Science, sections 125 and 343, where the death of God is announced, and then read the notes of "European Nihilism" at the head of The Will to Power. For the moral genealogy of the event, read On the Genealogy of Morality, especially the third essay. For the twentieth-century aftermath, compare Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus and its refusal of the leap, and the existentialist accounts of meaninglessness. In this archive, the nihilism and meaning of life topics, the existentialist wisdom collection, and the pages on nihilism, meaning, and freedom provide further orientation; see also our analysis of Nietzsche on the abyss.