When someone is labeled a nihilist, it isn’t usually meant being a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, actually, ‘an ideology of nothing at all.’ Is usually nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that lifestyle is nothing at all? Or the fact that the values we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to acknowledge the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can figure out how to distinguish what is meaningful from what’s meaningless. In about Nihilism this addition to the MIT Press Necessary Understanding series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western idea from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Although the term ‘nihilism’ was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz demonstrates the idea can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, among others. It is Nietzsche, nevertheless, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche’s believed. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism-pessimism, cynicism, and apathy-and why; he explores theories of nihilism; he considers nihilism as a means of understanding aspects of everyday life; and he reflects on the continuing future of nihilism. We have to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.