Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Psychology of Nihilism

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

a). It is the fear of the loss of meaning.
This is the fear of meaninglessness.
The emotional dynamics are fear + guilt (mode of self-pity). [¹]
This mode of guilt generates the sense of meaninglessness in the person's life.

b). It is the belief in world-denial.
It is the belief that the material world itself has no value. This is the advocacy of meaninglessness.
The emotional dynamics are fear + envy.
Subconscious envy underlies most forms of destructiveness. In the theme of world-denial, envy is more powerful than fear: envy controls and constrains the fear. Envy sustains the belief that it would not matter if the world did not exist.

c). It is the euphoria of egotism.
The euphoria arises from the belief that the individual can create his/her own meaning to life. It is the euphoria that powers the belief that one is free and non-restrained in the creation of one’s own meanings and values. It is the advocacy that there are no barriers to personal achievement.
The emotional dynamism is narcissism (in vanity mode).

Where the meanings link to social values then mania is likely to be present as well. This belief is a feature of some Continental literary theorists (some post-structuralists and post-modernists). It is also a feature of some new age thinking, as when a person believes that we can create our own reality.
I focus on ways (a) and (b). These two represent some forms of experience that I have encountered. I have never been attracted to form (c).

Guilt-based Nihilism

First I consider guilt-based nihilism. It is always guilt in self-pity mode that produces the loss of values, the loss of meanings. When meaning totally vanishes then the fear factor is magnified and the state of catatonia is entered. There are two levels to the problem of the loss of meaning: these are the level of feeling and the level of intellect.

• The Level of Feeling

At the level of feeling there have been numerous people who have attempted to come to terms with meaninglessness in the person's life, especially in the twentieth century. The person cannot understand what is happening to him; all he can do is articulate his predicament and confusion. At this level, meaninglessness is debilitating but not paralysing. When meaning evaporates then life reduces to futility. Nihilism becomes the final removal of all expectation, of all ambition. In a world of futility, values and standards no longer have any function.

Many writers have described this existential condition. For example: Colin Wilson in his book  “The Outsider”; one author whom I especially like is Hermann Hesse [²].

When there is no understanding of the actual problem here, when the person does not struggle against the loss of meaning in his world, then the confusion of this form of nihilism is felt to be final and we witness the gradual slide into catatonic madness.

The desolation of meaninglessness can be kept at bay by the will. In fact, will power can keep all forms of madness at bay if the person’s spiritual or ethical ideals are intense enough. However, nihilism creates a paradox. The paradox is that the use of will requires meaning. If the world is meaningless then ideals also become meaningless. So what is the point of using the will?  What is the point of avoiding madness?
In a meaningless world, sanity has no more value than insanity.

• The Level of Intellect

Only at this level, when the problem is fully understood as a problem, can the transition to madness (in the form of catatonia) be instantaneous. The insight into the problem precipitates sheer fright and terror, and the person may slide very rapidly into a transient state of catatonia within a time of only a few seconds.

I narrate my experience of catatonia. In November 1988 I was contemplating the lack of meaning in my life. This contemplation started as an intellectual analysis, but suddenly my intellectual understanding switched to a psychological understanding of the issue. The emotional impact of realising the lack of meaning in my life was devastating. In the twinkling of an eye I was plunged into catatonia. I switched instantaneously from sanity to insanity. I was filled with very intense fear and guilt (in the mode of self-pity), and my will power collapsed completely. I just sat where I was, in total desolation. I was petrified. My body was immovable. The mental pain was so intense I could not stand it. I managed to resurrect my will power and I withdrew from that state.

What the person desires above all is to find some way of basing his identity, his being, on external values (that is, values that are outside of himself, such as values derived from family, job, politics, fame, social support).  Insight shows him that this cannot be done, and so the world becomes meaningless.  The complete and rapid collapse of external values precipitates instant catatonia.

If the person cannot conceptualise the problem then he cannot use insight to derive an answer. There can be no answer if the question has not been asked. Only the intellect can pose the problem and deliver the answer. When this happens and madness is experienced, then the belief arises that it is not just the world that is futile but also man himself !!

My method of keeping nihilism at arm’s length was to centre myself on my existential mentality, together with the hope that my self-analysis would eventually provide a desirable escape route. By tying existentialism to nihilism I survived the world. I was a nihilist in my subjective world and an existentialist within the objective world of materialism.

When these ideas failed to sustain me, when the dreariness of life became overwhelming, I just wanted to embrace my own dark star: nothingness!

Envy–based Nihilism

Now I turn to envy-based nihilism and the belief in world-denial. This belief underpins the view that there is no meaning in a material life. Also, the advocacy of meaninglessness is the attempt to destroy inherent value, so this is where the factor of envy comes from. The basic premise upon which the advocacy of world-denial arises is fear. The conjunction of envy and fear is the reason that world-denial is adopted as the basis of value and the basis of meaning: one's personal life has no meaning and one's relationships have no value.

The effect of this conjunction depends on which factor is the most powerful. The effect depends on how the person tries to rationalise his limited skills in handling the difficulties of personal relationships.

When envy is highlighted then world-denial is advocated. In this situation there is no need for any relationships. Whereas when fear is dominant then indifference to the world is the norm. Now the person feels the fear of relationships. Either way, the person has found a justification for his limited social skills.

Asceticism

Asceticism and all religions are influenced by the concept of world-denial and so nihilism underpins some features of them.

Theravada (or Pali) Buddhism is an example of an envy-influenced religion. Here only monasticism and solitary effort are worthwhile; there is little meaning in social work. Hence meditation and mindfulness are usually the preferred practices.

In guilt-influenced religions, such as Christianity and the other two Semitic religions, good works and duty are emphasised as ways of trying to fend off meaninglessness; there is little meaning in individual concerns.

Yet Christianity has a powerful strain of envy: as envy begins its ascension to being a dominant influence in consciousness, so monasticism becomes attractive, or else the person’s own conscience becomes the final arbiter of morals. For an historical example, during the Reformation the decision by Martin Luther to promote the private conscience over Papal authority represents the influence of envy (in that it destroys the lawfulness of an external authority). For comparison, the actual practise of individual ethics represents the influence of narcissism, since narcissism does not dispute the usefulness of external authority for other people.

Not all religions centre on guilt or envy. Consider Advaita Vedanta, the doctrine propounded by the Hindu sage Shankara. I consider that the advocacy of the impersonal nature of God to be centred on pride (mode of hatred of other people). For comparison, Christianity emphasises the personal nature of God, whilst I think of Buddhism as emphasising the depersonalised nature of God (though the term Ultimate Reality can be used instead of God).

Nevertheless, all religions advocate the necessity of purity and perfection, and this necessity is powered by guilt. So even when guilt is not the primary emotion in a religion, it will still be a secondary one. And the advocacy of world-denial indicates the influence of deep fear and nihilism.

Usefulness of Nihilism

What function did an envy-based nihilism serve for me?  I indicate the views that I held in the 1990s, when nihilism had its greatest influence on me.

My fate was to explore the dark side of the subconscious mind, the dark side of my personality, the well of confusion and violence that lay under a gentle exterior. The sadness of my fate was always with me. The bitterness of the abreactions of pride made me hate life. The bitterness made me antagonistic to life, antagonistic to my higher self, antagonistic to God, antagonistic to creation and evolution. So nihilism became my revenge on life for all the years of confusion that I experienced. The spiritual word was my home, but fate had made me an outcast from it.

Nothing could make me change my nihilism except insight and understanding. I am what I believe. My idea of the world is what I react to. I affirmed nihilism because I resented being a victim and an outcast. This led me to reject the validity of all external forms of authority, especially those of the spiritual world.

Eventually I achieved the insights that I needed, and so my views changed. But the price of my wisdom was decades of sorrow. My sorrows made me turn my analytical mind onto the problem of good and evil. My nihilism gave me the freedom to assume new ideas about this traditional topic. All past views assume that good and evil are separate. My understanding of the dialectical nature of the subconscious mind allowed me to see that good and evil are linked together. This understanding meant that I had to re-value all my past ideas about ethics and morality. I took inspiration from Nietzsche, who predicted that the task for the modern philosopher was to undertake the revaluation of all past values.[³]

I generalise my use of nihilism to explain the intellectual ferment that occurs at the dawn of a New Age. For example: from artistic and psychological points of view, the period of Modernism (roughly the 1890s to post-1930s) in Europe reflected strong elements of nihilism. Excitement was in the air as artists and thinkers explored the subconscious mind and its ways of working. At such times as these, all traditional views of authority (whether political, moral, religious, artistic, etc) become subject to criticism.

Advocacy of meaninglessness repudiates the authority of other people and of all traditions. If nothing has any meaning then neither has any source of moral authority. In my view, nihilism always arises when existing ideas of moral and spiritual reality have become inadequate or degrading. The need then is for new values, new meanings. However, the attempt to produce new values requires a struggle against the whole weight of tradition. So nihilism is an essential first step that clears the way for new perspectives, new world-views, to come to prominence and fruition.

Ironically, Buddha’s rejection of the Hindu tradition led ultimately to his followers creating a new tradition. And now this tradition needs to be overcome. This irony always occurs when any teacher, any tradition, lacks the intellectual expertise to understand conceptually the problem of meaning. [Christianity was different; Jesus did not reject Judaism, but only added to it. A guilt-influenced tradition does not reject previous authority].

If the advocacy of world-denial is a narrow view, what does the opposite view, that of world-affirmation, lead to?  World-denial inhibits ambition, and so world-affirmation endorses ambition. The binary, or complementary, emotion to fear is anger (which helps to stimulate aggression and so underpins a lot of competition). The binary emotion to envy is greed. And guilt easily switches into the vanity mode of pride. So world-affirmation becomes a capitalistic adherence to aggressive competition, ambition and greed, within a dominant mood of pride. This was the Western world of the twentieth century. This world-view arose as an automatic compensating antithesis to the religious view of world-denial: in other words, if religions had not advocated world-denial, then capitalism would not have become so dominant and unpleasant in modern life. So world-affirmation is a narrow view too.

In my philosophy the material world is just a staging-post for the expansion of consciousness and the exploration of relationships. A material life does not need to be based either on world-denial or on capitalism. We could decide to live in a world where co-operation is key. But perhaps this also is a limited view.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. Books.
Wilson, Colin. The Outsider, Victor Gollancz, 1990.
Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf.
Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha, Picador, 1991. [2]

[³]. Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil,  Vintage Books, Random House, 1966.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals,  Vintage Books, Random House, 1969. [3]

Copyright © 2026 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.