Although nihilism is commonly defined as a form of extremist political thought, the term has a broader meaning.
Nihilism is in fact a complex intellectual stance with venerable roots in the history of ideas, which forms the
theoretical basis for many positive assertions of modern thought. Its essence is the systematic negation of all
perceptual orders and assumptions. A complete view must account for the influence of two historical
crosscurrents: philosophical skepticism about the ultimacy of any truth, and the mystical quest for that same
pure truth. These are united by their categorical rejection of the “known”.
The outstanding representative of the former current, David Hume (1711-1776), maintained that external reality
is unknowable, since sense impressions are actually part of the contents of the mind. Their presumed
correspondence to external “things” cannot be verified, since it can be checked only by other sense
impressions. Hume further asserts that all abstract conceptions turn out, on examination, to be generalizations
from sense impressions. He concludes that even such an apparently objective phenomenon as a cause-andeffect relationship between events may be no more than a subjective fabrication of the observer. Stanley Rosen
notes: “Hume terminates in skepticism because he finds nothing within the subject but individual impressions
and ideas.”
For mystics of every faith, the “experience of nothingness” is the goal of spiritual practice. Buddhist meditation
techniques involve the systematic negation of all spiritual and intellectual constructs to make way for the
apprehension of pure truth. St. John of the Cross similarly rejected every physical and mental symbolization of
God as illusory. St. John’s spiritual legacy is, as Michael Novak puts it, “the constant return to inner solitude, an
unbroken awareness of the emptiness at the heart of consciousness. It is a harsh refusal to allow idols to be
placed in the sanctuary. It requires also a scorching gaze upon all the bureaucracies, institutions, manipulators,
and hucksters who employ technology and its supposed realities to bewitch and bedazzle the psyche.”
Novak’s interpretation points to the way these philosophical and mystical traditions prepared the ground for the
political nihilism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rejection of existing social institutions and their
claims to authority is in the most basic sense made possible by Humean skepticism. The political nihilism of the
Russian intelligentsia combined this radical skepticism with a near mystical faith in the power of a new
beginning. Hence, their desire to destroy becomes a revolutionary affirmation; in the words of Stanley Rosen,
“Nihilism is an attempt to overcome or repudiate the past on behalf of an unknown and unknowable, yet hopedfor, future.” This fusion of skepticism and mystical re-creation can be traced in contemporary thought, for
example as an element in the counterculture of the 1960s.
The passage implies that the two strands of nihilist thought
Section: Verbal Reasoning
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