Nihilism by Nolen Gertz

May 10, 2026

Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism is part of MIT Press’ Essential Knowledge Series, which includes books about citizenship, waves and the mind-body problem as well a number of less essential topics such as cloud computing, open access and school choice. If I had read the full list of “Essential Knowledge” titles, I might have been more prepared for what this book had to offer. I was expecting something like a college intro or mid-level textbook. Instead, the book is a sometimes meandering essay that includes an overview of nihilism throughout the history of Western philosophy, and a scathing attack on contemporary Western culture.

Nihilism is the belief that, in the end, everything is meaningless, including not only human life, but meaning itself. The author shows how some forms of Western thought, including the philosophies of Descartes, Kant and others, when taken to their extremes, can point, unintentionally, to the utter futility and meaninglessness of human life.

Much of Western philosophy, both ancient and modern, aims to avoid or transcend this demoralizing belief. The author points out that in Plato’s Republic, Socrates is unable to defeat the nihilist Thrasymachus’ nihilistic argument that there is no ultimate moral ground for humanity to stand on. The world simply consists of the strong abusing the weak and then inventing “morality” to justify their actions. A cursory look at the world will tell you this is true.

Socrates has a somewhat religious response to Thrasymachus, arguing that we live in a shadow world, and that though Thrasymachus’ rules may apply down here in this realm of illusion and deception, they hold no sway in the “real” world of ideal forms. In essence, Socrates invents a better world than this and asserts that true meaning lives there.

The author goes on to show how both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche exposed the social mechanisms of nihilism in the nineteenth century. The roles and constraints Western culture imposes on us and on our way of thinking reduce our lives to meaninglessness by make us suppress our instincts and desires. We try to escape from an awareness of that meaninglessness through distraction, and as the author points out, modes of distraction have increased as the social, emotional and spiritual rewards of modern life have decreased. We’ve traded meaning for iPhones, social media and Netflix.

The most interesting assertion the author makes is that, unlike other philosophies that are more personal, nihilism is contagious and therefore more of a social philosophy than an individual one. A Platonic idealist and a Cartesian rationalist and a Kantian ethicist can live side-by-side with a laissez-faire Taoist and a French existentialist, and though they may understand there is a difference of opinion among them, they may never know the true depths of their philosophical differences, nor will they ever need to.

But when a nihilist enters society with the belief that neither his actions nor their consequences matter, he pollutes the foundation of both society and philosophy in a way that directly affects others and their belief systems. Nihilism, if you get stuck in it, appears to have no way out. Both Descartes and Hume learned this the hard way when they pursued their beliefs too far.

The author then goes on to describe what nihilism is not. It is not cynicism or pessimism or apathy. Cynicism’s disdain and pessimism’s despair both imply a system of values, suggesting the world is not nearly as good as it could or should be. Nihilism has no “good” and no “should” and no concept of “value.”

Apathy, which is a lack of feeling, is also not nihilism. “The apathetic individual understands perfectly well that other people feel differently insofar as they feel anything at all. And because the apathetic individual feels nothing, the apathetic individual does not feel any desire to convince others that they should similarly feel nothing.”

The nihilist, on the other hand, like Thrasymachus, feels he must infect others with his beliefs. Or else his actions, with their disregard for or denial of meaning, undermine all other religious and philosophical systems which take as their foundation the fact that meaning exists. This is where nihilism becomes a social philosophy, and Gertz spends much of the second half of the book describing how Western social and political institutions embody nihilism and inflict it on their citizens. This section of the book is unabashedly political, and if it’s sometimes vague, it also provokes a lot of thought.

Gertz paints a picture of Western society that looks very much like the world that Thrasymachus described to Socrates: the strong and powerful do as they please and then make up a morality to justify their actions. You can see this system clearly at work in the United States, where the vast majority of citizens exhaust themselves with meaningless work, wasting the bulk of their lives on tasks that don’t interest them while neglecting the parts of life that do interest them, all in the hopes of one day becoming as rich and powerful as the people who have subjected them to this very system of waste and destruction.

Gertz is a little more eloquent and insightful than that, and he does a good job of portraying a society that is spiritually sick and morally in decline. Our schools, he notes, are built to churn out uniform workers to be cogs in the machines of the wealthy, and if the cogs don’t find much meaning or joy in this, the rich don’t care because the current system serves them well. The cogs have but one choice to make: succeed and become like the people who did this to you, or fail and sink.

Summarizing all of Gertz’s arguments and insights in beyond the scope of this review, but it is worth reading, not only as a commentary on our current culture, but as an example of how a philosophy, when put into action through the institutions of law, education, religion, and industry thoroughly shapes the lives of the people whose worlds are shaped by those institutions. Again, Gertz’s book is not simply a college primer; it’s a thought-provoking read that gives you much to reflect on about our world.