[1] If God does not exist, is human existence bereft of ultimate meaning and significance? If immortality is impossible, if there is no afterlife, what explains fear of death or being posthumously forgotten by the world? Are ethical norms and values simply groundless and pragmatic conventions? These represent some of the perennial problems associated with nihilism, commonly understood as the view that nothing, including human existence, possesses ultimate meaning or significance. An expert on Søren Kierkegaard and the broader intellectual context of the nineteenth century, Jon Stewart proposes a new reading of the historical and philosophical development of nihilism and its subsequent, diverse expressions in nineteenth-century literature.
[2] Methodologically, Stewart considers the problems of nihilism through the history of ideas. He aims to present a more comprehensive account of the philosophical emergence of nihilism, one which incorporates some neglected authors and considers historical origins of nihilism in a new light. The authors grapple with what Stewart calls “the broad constellation of problems that are usually associated with nihilism: meaninglessness, anxiety, despair, atheism, and immortality” (31).
[3] Stewart proposes five distinct theses (32–34). First, while other treatments might explain the emergence of nihilism through political revolution and/or the waning influence of religion during the Enlightenment, Stewart argues that a third, concomitant factor in the nineteenth century helps explains this emergence: rapid advances in science and the growing trust in the power of scientific knowledge. This is clearly the book’s central thesis. Second, the problem of nihilism is ubiquitous across global philosophical traditions, not simply a regional phenomenon in Continental Europe after the French Revolution. Third, historians of philosophy have not sufficiently attended to literary—especially dramatic—representations of nihilistic themes, and this ignores something important about nihilism’s broader cultural context and expression.
[4] Fourth, according to Stewart, the problem of nihilism is “more widespread than has been acknowledged in the past” (33). This thesis motivates his ambitious engagement with a range of figures, several of whom have received little attention in other philosophical treatments of nihilism: Klingemann, Büchner, Møller, and Shelley, for example. Stewart’s final thesis is that nineteenth-century engagements with the problems of nihilism, “anticipate almost all the key topics of the existentialist movement” (33). These theses develop through Stewart’s chronological survey of thinkers from the German Romantic Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) through the twentieth century.
[5] Better known by his pseudonym “Jean Paul,” Richter was the son of a Lutheran pastor, and he briefly studied theology at Leipzig before becoming a novelist. His novels contemplate life without the existence of God or the possibility of immortality, two issues which consume a significant portion of his work. Jean Paul argues that if humans are not immortal, then the universe is meaningless. He reflects on the meaninglessness of life without God in his 1797 novel Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces, especially in the work’s haunting vision of “The Dead Christ,” where Christ announces the non-existence of God in a dream of the narrator. Stewart interprets the absence of God here as a vision of a world shaped by eighteenth-century scientific progress, a world in which ordinary people struggle to reconcile newfound scientific insights with many of their traditional, sacred beliefs (62–63).
[6] Similarly, the dramatist August Klingemann (1777-1831) associated the purely naturalistic scientific account of the world emerging in the Enlightenment—a world in which “we all just turn to dust in death”—with the inevitable meaninglessness of existence in his novel The Nightwatches (98). For both Jean Paul and Klingemann, it is a short trip from the impossibility of immortality to nihilism, and Stewart’s comparative assessment of the two thinkers makes this connection especially clear. Unlike Jean Paul, Klingemann does not offer a positive solution to the problem of nihilism beyond accepting the inherent meaninglessness of the universe.
[7] While Jean Paul “attempts to terrify people into rejecting nihilism and thus convince them to return to traditional belief in God, immortality, and so on” (118), Klingemann anticipates Nietzsche in his critiques of both the abstractions of German Idealism and of the myopia of scientists who fail to acknowledge how paradigm shifts in science correlate with a nihilistic outlook: these shifts can have a destabilizing effect on traditional belief systems.
[8] Stewart explores anglophone expressions of nihilism in the work of Lord Byron (1788-1824) and Percy Shelley (1792-1822), noting similar associations between scientific developments and nihilism (117–125). Byron’s 1817 tragedy Manfred anticipates the twentieth-century existentialists, especially Sartre, through Manfred’s strong, rebellious affirmation of human freedom as a solution to the problem of meaning. Unlike Manfred, Shelley’s 1818 sonnet “Ozymandias” suggests that the vastness of the cosmos and the relative insignificance of human lives should produce humility, causing humans to despair at the vanity of our existence.
[9] Despite the absence of the term “nihilism” in his published works, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) stands as a torchbearer for nineteenth-century nihilism. For Schopenhauer, accepting a scientific account of the universe raised the problems of meaning and suffering, to which he responded with ascetic renunciation of the will. Since the will is a source of great suffering, ascetic discipline functions as a practical aid for bearing the weight of that suffering (140–143). Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was famously influenced by Schopenhauer, but he was also vehemently critical of Schopenhauer’s ascetic proposal. Schopenhauer believed that everything is without meaning in the absence of traditional, ultimate values. In tandem (denial of the will and the destruction of traditional values), Nietzsche thinks Schopenhauer cannot escape nihilism. By inverting Schopenhauer’s denial of the will, Nietzsche affirms the will to power and the capacity to create new values as an answer to nihilism. Yet Stewart questions whether Nietzsche successfully answers this challenge. Nietzsche’s revaluation of values, together with his suspicion of appeals to objective truth and religious or philosophical authority, risks collapsing into a self-undermining relativism (275–279).
[10] Published near the end of the tragically brief life of Georg Büchner (1813-1837), Danton’s Death illustrates the tragic character of human existence through its dramatization of the trial and execution of French Revolutionaries, particularly Georges Danton. Stewart treats Danton’s declaration, “The world is chaos, nothingness its due messiah,” as the central expression of Büchner’s drama (169). Büchner sees humans as biological entities who, like all other animals, are intent upon fulfilling their desires. Contra Schopenhauer, Büchner sees fulfillment of sensory pleasures as a solution to the problem of meaning. In Stewart’s analysis, this quasi-Epicurean strategy for confronting a world without meaning “seems to ring hollow” (167–172).
[11] Stewart is one of the leading anglophone translators and historians of philosophy from the Danish Golden Age, which is evident in his exposition of P.M. Møller (1794-1838) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Møller was a respected professor at the University of Copenhagen, a dear friend and mentor to his student Kierkegaard. Møller died just five years before Kierkegaard published two of his most important works, Fear and Trembling and Either/Or. Møller holds that belief in immortality, specifically a robust theory of immortality, is essential for mitigating nihilism.
[12] The systems of Hegel, Spinoza, and Leibniz all terminate in nihilism because, in Møller’s estimation, theories of immortality are either entirely absent from their work, as in Hegel, or metaphysically dubious, as in Spinoza and Leibniz (174-182). Stewart sketches Møller’s argument for immortality, which depends on the idea of a personal God, specifically the Christian God (191-193). Kierkegaard likewise wrote extensively about nihilistic tendencies of his culture. He too opted for a Christian alternative to nihilism, though Stewart stresses the important differences between Møller’s academic “solution” to nihilism and Kierkegaard’s existential rebellion against it (201). This distinction is particularly important for understanding Stewart’s treatment of Kierkegaard, whose Christian response to nihilism cannot be reduced to a theoretical defense of immortality.
[13] Stewart weaves together topics ranging from the social criticisms of the tragic Aesthetic figure from Either/Or to Kierkegaard’s philosophical and devotional reflections on death, in order to present Kierkegaard as one of the more nuanced figures in the volume. Stewart’s representation of Kierkegaard can be summarized as follows: while we lack a clear-cut solution to nihilism, we should not despair. The certainty of our deaths should spur us to “be reflective and sober about the inevitability of our own deaths and ask ourselves what this means to us as individuals” (235).
[14] Kierkegaard primarily addresses problems associated with nihilism against the backdrop of human mortality. Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), by contrast, addresses these problems as political phenomena in Russia, locating them partly in the conflict between one older generation of progressive, cosmopolitan Russians and another emerging generation critical of “the previous hierarchical structures that dominated Russian society” (238). Turgenev’s celebrated 1862 novel Fathers and Sons illustrates these political dynamics of nihilism through the fictional character of Bazarov, whose nihilism can be distinguished, in one light, by its moral seriousness and its sympathetic attention to the plight of peasants (256).
[15] Stewart concludes by noting two commonalities between the seemingly disparate authors in his scope: they all endured some form of personal tragedy that motivated their reflections on nihilism, and they all “had a common concern for the new secular conception of nature and the universe” (282). In the twenty-first century, where scientific and technological innovations seem to outpace our collective capacity to assess the accompanying ethical and material implications, questions of ultimate meaning remain at the fore of our daily lives. Stewart’s volume therefore offers an accessible and wide-ranging account of nineteenth-century nihilism, one that will be valuable not only to scholars of philosophy and intellectual history but also to readers interested in the continuing theological significance of questions about God, death, meaning, and human existence.
Charles Duke is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on the history of modern philosophy and the philosophy of religion. Additionally, he has served as an adjunct instructor at Harding University, Felician University, and as a teaching fellow in philosophy of religion at Yale Divinity School. He lives in Tampa, FL with his wife and daughter.