The word carries a lot of atmosphere, and it is worth separating the claim from the mood. As a philosophical position, nihilism is a set of negative theses — that there is no inherent meaning, or no objective moral truth — and these have arguments behind them. Whether accepting them should make anyone despair is a completely separate question, and the interesting one.
Existential nihilism is the most familiar form. Its argument is straightforward: meaning requires a purpose-giver, and if the universe has no author and no plan, nothing is here for anything. Human life then has no more built-in significance than a rock formation. Notice that this is a claim about inherent meaning, and it is compatible with lives that are meaningful in a different sense — which is where most of the interesting responses live.
Moral nihilism denies there are objective moral facts. The error theory holds that moral statements genuinely attempt to describe moral facts and are all false, since no such facts exist. Expressivism holds that moral statements do not attempt description at all but express attitudes, so they are not false so much as not truth-apt. Both are serious metaethical positions defended by serious philosophers, and neither entails that its holders behave badly — a point worth making, since the assumption otherwise is common.
NietzscheThe diagnosis, not the prescription.
Nietzsche is routinely described as a nihilist, and he was closer to its most acute critic. His claim that God is dead is a description of a cultural situation: the foundation on which European values had rested was no longer credible, and most people had not registered what that implied. Nihilism, for him, was what would follow — the collapse of value once its ground was removed — and he treated it as a catastrophe approaching rather than a conclusion to embrace. His project was the revaluation of values, an attempt to find a footing for value that did not depend on the vanished foundation.
ResponsesWhat can be said against it.
Meaning may not require a purpose-giver. The nihilist argument assumes that meaning must be conferred from outside. Existentialists reject the premise: Sartre argues that having no given essence is precisely what makes us free to create one, and that the absence of a script is a condition of authorship rather than its refutation.
Absurdism accepts the diagnosis and refuses the despair. Camus agrees that the universe is silent and that we crave meaning anyway. His conclusion is that we should live in that tension rather than escape it through suicide or through belief — revolt, freedom and passion being the response to an absurd condition rather than resignation.
Moral nihilism faces the practical objection. Even granting no objective moral facts, we still have to act, and the question of how to live does not disappear. Many antirealists argue that moral practice can be reconstructed on other grounds — agreement, shared attitudes, contractual reasoning — and that the loss of metaphysical grounding changes less than it appears to.
Self-undermining forms. Epistemological nihilism has trouble stating itself, since claiming that knowledge is impossible looks like a knowledge claim. The stronger versions of nihilism generally have to exempt themselves from their own scope, which is a familiar difficulty for global negative positions.
These questions can weigh on people personally as much as intellectually. This page is a philosophical guide, not a substitute for support — if the question of meaning is bringing you real distress, talking it through with someone you trust is a good and very human next step.