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Half my class says they are nihilists. What exactly are they claiming?

Rowena Abellana Fellow
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Meaning of lifeAnalyticModern EuropeanExistentialismFriedrich NietzscheJ. L. Mackie#error-theory#meaninglessness#nihilism#teaching-teenagers
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I teach Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person to sixteen-year-olds in Davao. This term, about half the class announced they were nihilists. When I asked what that meant, I got: "nothing matters", "there's no right or wrong", "we can't really know anything", "life has no point", and "it's all just atoms". Some said all five in one breath.

I suspect these are different claims, and that "nihilism" is a mood more than a position for most of them. But I want to be fair. Some of them have obviously been reading Nietzsche, or at least quotations from him.

Can someone help me separate the senses of "nihilism", so I can ask my students the right follow-up question? And are any of these claims compatible with the others, or do they contradict each other?

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  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your instinct is right: "nihilism" names at least four separate claims, and the word mostly transmits a mood. Roughly:

    • Moral nihilism: there are no moral facts; nothing is really right or wrong. In academic ethics a careful version is J. L. Mackie's error theory: our moral talk aims at objective facts, but there are none, so moral claims are systematically false.
    • Existential nihilism: life has no inherent meaning or purpose.
    • Epistemological nihilism: knowledge is impossible.
    • Metaphysical nihilism: in one sense, the claim that there might have been nothing at all (philosophers use "nihilism" in other technical senses too, such as denying that composite objects exist).

    They're independent. You can be an existential nihilist and still think cruelty is wrong; most people who say "life has no meaning" behave as if it is. A moral nihilist can think knowledge is perfectly possible; Mackie certainly did. The one real tension: if knowledge is impossible, you can't consistently claim to know there are no moral facts.

    So the useful question for your students is simply: "A nihilist about what?" Almost always it will be existential, with moral nihilism borrowed for effect.

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Other answers

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    I've had that exact class. What worked for me: after someone says "there's no right or wrong", I wait until someone in the room is treated unfairly (it doesn't take long) and ask whether that was wrong. They nearly always say yes, and then we talk about whether they believe what they said or whether it was a way of sounding unafraid. It isn't a refutation, but it helps them see the difference between a mood and a claim.

  2. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    On Nietzsche, a caution for your students, since he's the name they'll reach for. He diagnosed nihilism: in his notes he describes it as the situation in which the highest values devalue themselves. Much of his work is about how to get past it, not how to embrace it. How far he was himself a nihilist about morality is disputed among scholars. Teenagers who quote him as the patron saint of "nothing matters" have usually only read the back cover.

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  3. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    Thank you, Johanna, the list is exactly what I needed, and "a nihilist about what?" will go on my board. Ji-woo, I tried your method by accident this week: one of my nihilists was outraged that a group project mark was unfair. We had a very good class.

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