Nihilism is the philosophical confrontation with the claim that life, the universe, or human values have no inherent meaning, purpose, or foundation. The term derives from the Latin nihil (nothing) and entered philosophical discourse primarily through Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of the “death of God” — the collapse of the metaphysical and religious frameworks that had grounded European moral and intellectual life.
Nietzsche distinguished between passive nihilism and active nihilism. Passive nihilism is the exhaustion that follows the loss of meaning: if nothing matters, there is no reason to act. Active nihilism is the destruction of old values as a creative act — clearing space for new values that do not depend on transcendent guarantees. For Nietzsche, passive nihilism is the disease; active nihilism is the beginning of recovery, though never a return to the certainties that were lost.
The political extension of nihilism through anarcho-nihilism takes this further: if no transcendent meaning guarantees the success or rightness of resistance, then resistance must be grounded in the conditions it responds to, not in hope, progress, or faith. Serafinski’s analysis of concentration camp resistance in Blessed is the Flame is the limit case of this position. The connection to hospicing humanity is direct: care through civilizational decline does not require optimism about the outcome, and the refusal to require optimism is itself a nihilist commitment.