Nihilism
philosophy of negation towards concepts, meaning, or life
Nihilism is a family of philosophical views that reject the existence of any objectively meaningful purpose, moral value, truth, knowledge, or related concepts. Nihilistic views span several branches of philosophy, including ethics, value theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. Nihilism is also described as a broad cultural phenomenon or historical movement that pervades modernity in the Western world.
Existential nihilism asserts that life has no objective meaning or purpose. The idea that all individual and societal values are ultimately pointless has been associated with various responses. They range from general indifference and existential crises to transformative reinterpretations of established ideals and a creative embrace of personal meaning-making. Moral nihilism, a related view, denies the objective existence of morality, arguing that moral evaluations and practices rest on misguided assumptions without any foundation in external reality.
In epistemology or the theory of knowledge, nihilism challenges knowledge and truth. According to relativism, knowledge, truth, or meaning are relative to the perspectives of specific individuals or cultural contexts. This implies there is no independent framework to assess which opinion is ultimately correct.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q80968. The Library of Congress control number is sh85091922. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nihilism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.