How to know if a person is a nihilist

The common use of language tends to identify the nihilism with pessimism. A person who sees everything badly, who does not see the future, who does not believe that things will go well is a pessimistic person, but not a nihilist.

Which is pessimism? THE Royal Spanish Academy he defines it like this: “Propensity to see and judge things in their most unfavorable aspect. Synonyms: defeatism, discouragement, negativity, desperation, hopelessness, demoralization, catastrophism, disillusionment. Antonyms: optimism”.

THE psychology and psychiatry They frame pessimism as a state of mind, a negative attitude towards life, a symptom of depression. Pessimism comes from the Latin pessimum meaning “the worst.”

And nihilism, what are you talking about? From the nothing (nihil, in Latin).

First difference: nothingness is not the worst thing. The worst always refers to something, not to nothing. Second difference: nihilism It’s not a state of mindit is a philosophical system that had its literary origin in the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

How a nihilist thinks

Let’s go back to Royal Spanish Academy. Someone who is nihilistic is “skeptic, denier, anarchist”. Every transcendent religious, political and social principle is denied, there are no foundations or purposes that can support man’s thought and action. There is no God or objective moral principles, these are ideas generated by humans among thousands of other possible ones.

Nietzsche decreed that “God is dead”: perhaps this is the most popular phrase on which this doctrine is based denial of supreme values. God dies together with the moral concepts of Good and Evil, Reason and absolute Truth.

A nihilist maintains that the development of humanity is subject to a continuous struggle of forces, man only shows his “will to power” (another iconic phrase by Nietzsche, title of one of his books).

The philosopher questions rationalism which interprets phenomena in a mechanistic and mathematical way, creating an idea of ​​balance, order and immutability, when in reality life and the universe are the result of a struggle of chaotic and unequal forces.

“Being, as a will to power, is a perpetual becoming, a plurality of changing forces, which offer infinite possibilities of interpretation”, thus writes the Laboratory of Concepts of Council of Andalusia.

Religion, morality and science are just some of the infinite possible perspectives for observing man, the world, the universe and the evolution of time. No perspective has the truth and, at the same time, all have it. “The absolute truths of metaphysics or science are only perspectives, they are partial fictions that cover the rest of equally valid perspectives,” adds this Spanish publication.

To be a nihilist is to assert that it is not God, Morality, or Reason that guides our actions or those of the world, or that these ideas are just a few among many other intricate forces, such as passions, desire, and art, that battle between them. each other and temporarily prevail over each other. Evolution is chaotic, it is a struggle of unordered forces to or from a purpose..

To be a nihilist means not to believe in a supreme order and organizer. It means understanding that our evolution as humanity is not linear, balanced or harmonious, but rather responds to the chaotic character of nature. And this is neither good nor bad, much less a state of mind. AND a vision of the world which has nothing to do with depression or desperation.