A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness

In his latest contribution to Cambridge University Press intellectual histories of the nineteenth century—entitled A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness—Jon Stewart explores the theme of nihilism, arguing that its modern emergence originates from significant perceptual shifts caused by the scientific advancements of the times. While his 2021 CUP book Hegel's Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution gives an account of Hegel's legacy by tracing the concept of alienation over the course of two generations of Hegel's students, Stewart's new book portrays the spirit of the nineteenth century as one characterised by meaninglessness, finitude, and loss of faith. In the introduction to his book, Stewart claims that many different problems fall under the same heading of ‘nihilism.’ There is a set of problems surrounding our attitudes towards death, including a loss of confidence in the afterlife, the fear of total annihilation, and the feeling that life is suffering. These attitudes led to a collective anxiety about being forgotten, being finite, and being infinitesimal. The term ‘nihilism’ also defines a set of problems aimed at traditional religious values, exposing a lack of trust in Judeo-Christian assumptions about God. This gave way to unsettling philosophical questions about the uncertainty of truth, which, in turn, contributed to the popularity of relativism and to a rejection of moral, cultural, and ontological absolutes (pp. 2–15). While other histories of nihilism focus primarily on one or another of these problems, Stewart's work is unique in that it comes to terms with nihilism as a complex set of problems and thereby offers a comprehensive approach to the topic. By introducing new readers to the multiplicity of the concept, Stewart offers a fresh account that is at once a conceptual study of nihilism's myriad problems, a genealogy of its modern origins, and a comparative analysis of its figures. Readers come away from the book having been introduced to the issues and proposed solutions of nihilism as well as to the interdisciplinary trajectory of philosophical, religious, and literary engagements.