Nihilism

Active and Passive Nihilism

We argue that there exists two basic ways of approaching nihilism as a philosophy:

a) Passive Nihilism: Nihilism seen as an end in itself, meaning one strips the outlook on life to reject all established morals, values, and truths, thus finding oneself in a void of emptiness where nothing is real, and thus nothing is worth doing.

b) Active Nihilism: Nihilism seen as a continuous process, meaning one strips the outlook on life of all values, and then create new values out of the void, thus turning nihilism into a form of mental weapon, that one can use to examine different interpretations of reality.

The passive nihilism is essentially what a philosopher would call fatalism; there exists no reality and no truth, thus we as human individuals are trapped within an illusion. One could say this is a form of extreme depression or extreme passive outlook on life, as it claims that the individual lacks any form of free will, since it cannot act upon something that doesn't exist. Passive nihilism can therefore be seen as us giving up on life, rejecting our potential in acting upon the world, regardless if it is ultimately "real" or not.

This conclusion, that we don't need to "objectively" affirm everything in order for it to become worth believing in or acting upon, leads us to the nihilism that will be discussed here; the active nihilism. The active nihilist sees nihilism as a sort of mental filter, that kills established norms and values, to examine and re-create an interpretation of an idea, that is closer to reality. Nihilism bypasses moral conventions to study ideas from a causal perspective.

Read more about Nihilism here.