A striking feature of twentieth-century thought is that it is characterized by a greater range and diversity than that of other times. While it is probably impossible to find one common set of governing assumptions which would provide a foundation for the varied contemporary intellectual expressions, this essay will nevertheless suggest that the concept of nihilism provides a unifying principle which connects many -though by no means all -of the manifestations of twentieth-century culture.
The term nihilism is most frequently associated with certain nineteenthcentury Russian social and intellectual movements which opposed the Russian system of orthodoxy and autocracy in favor of positivism, science and enlightenment. 1 In the West one of its earliest uses is found in the writings of Franz yon Baader (1765-1841) who used it to designate the separation of reason from religion, the "atheism" of the natural sciences of his day, and certain anti-intellectual tendencies of early nineteenth-century theology.2 It was above all Friedrich Nietzsche who in the latter part of the nineteenth century gave the word its contemporary meaning, designating by it the view that "there is no answer to the question: 'to what purpose'.'3
The contemporary expression of this question is very frequently posed in the context of statements about the absurdity of life, popularized most dramatically in the writings of Sartre and other French existentialists. 4 The term nihilism has been used to delineate those positions which hold that values are only arbitrary, completely subjective statements of preference with no validity, that a foundation which would support the meaning of terms like good and evil no longer exists. T. S. Eliot succinctly expressed this in The Wasteland (1922):