Nihilism

In laymen's terms, nihilism refers to the experience of having lost a sense of meaning or purpose in life. It also relates to the belief that nothing is valuable or desirable. The philosophical understanding of the term, though related to its popular use, is somewhat more complex. Over past centuries, philosophers have debated the cause of the loss of meaning in life vigorously and have, therefore, come to define nihilism in many different ways. These philosophical nuances provide us with important insights into the manifestations of nihilism in the business realm.

One of the prominent distinctions that philosophers make when discussing nihilism is what may be described as the difference between explicit and implicit nihilism. Explicit nihilism could be defined as the absolute repudiation of worth, purpose, or desirability. It is often the result of the realization that the truth, values, or purposes that we as human beings use to give our lives structure or to legitimize our decisions and actions lack irrefutable ground. Ethical or moral nihilism is a certain type of explicit nihilism that is the result of the realization that values refer to nothing more than bias or taste. Another form of explicit nihilism that most closely resembles the popular use of the term existential nihilism refers to the feeling of emptiness or pointlessness, or the experience that “life has no meaning.”

Implicit nihilism is quite different from explicit nihilism. Its main proponent, Nietzsche, argued that implicit nihilism is the most extreme form of nihilism—one that results from an uncritical acceptance of certain truth claims as irrefutable. In fact, implicit nihilism is the result of operating under the assumption that one's values and truth statements are rooted in a transcendental source, such as God or some ideology. Implicit nihilism often goes hand in hand with a devaluation of life and a negation of a mortal existence in favor of the pursuit of a spiritual realm, an afterlife, or realization of some ideological ideal. One can distinguish many forms of implicit nihilism: Transcendental nihilism is the nihilism of “absolute values” or “absolute spheres,” that is, the belief that God, or its representative on earth, defines what is right or wrong. Nietzsche believed that this leads to a “slave morality” or “herd mentality,” whereby human beings lose their ability to judge for themselves. After the rise of Modernity, the God's sanctioning of values and truths fell away because of the Enlightenment's emphasis on the use of reason and autonomous thinking. This, however, merely led to a new kind of nihilism: passive nihilism. Passive nihilists are so disillusioned by the dismantlement of their certainties that they tend to feel that they have neither the energy nor the right to create any truths or goals for themselves. However, a worse response, according to Nietzsche, is that of reactive nihilism, which entails replacing transcendent foundationalism with an alternative universal truth. An example of reactive nihilism is found in socialism, which replaced God with yet another “moral superstructure” and, in that sense, was merely an ironic reenactment of transcendental nihilism.

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