My definition expands to include secular forms of absolutism.
I acknowledge the origins in psychology, which develops into spiritual nihilism - religions like Abrahamism’s triad - and then evolves into secular forms, like post-modernism, Marxism, etc.
I trace the origins back to emerging self-consciousness, exposing the ego - lucid part of self - to a reality that distresses it, producing existential anxiety.
It gradually becomes aware of how it compares to other, producing insecurity and vulnerability, which nihilism acts as a defence against.
What does existence deny existence to?
Absolutes, i.e., certainty, perfection, completion, wholeness, omniscience, omnipotence, or any term understood as an absolute, including ‘god’, ‘truth’, ‘morality’, ‘self’…
Absolute = indivisible, immutable, singularity.
The mind fabricates these concepts - abstractions - and then demands them to be in existence - projecting them as already existing.
When it fails to discover them, or when faces with the possibility that they be entirely of tis own making, it calls the cosmos a ‘negative’.
So, nihilism, the concept itself, is an expression of nihilism.
A cosmos void of a one-god, universal morality, universal purpose, is not a negative but a positive, because it makes life possible, and because it exists, as it is, without requiring these noetic absolutes.
The projections themselves, if taken literally, and as what they are, becomes expressions of nihilism as they would negate the cosmos as it is.
But my positions proposes a cleansing of language from these corruptive elements and the appropriate definition of words, by understanding what language is and why it evolves.
For example, the concept of ‘morality’ need not a one-god to have meaning, nor is it entirely subjective, but refers to a kind of behaviour we witness in many species, and not only in the homo sapient.
What is common between these species?
They all use cooperative survival and reproductive strategies, necessitating tolerance and sympathy to facilitate the process and to overcome an already present fight/flight mechanism.
Morality does not require a god, nor is it subjective, or a social construct.
We must differentiate ethics from moral behaviour, as we have between genetics and memetics.
I use ethics to make the distinction clear.
Ethics evolves as an addition to the already evolved moral behaviour, as a way to facilitate coexistence on a human scale - and not a tribal one.
But this requires unpacking.
My position claims that much of modern language use is infected by nihilistic understanding, due to the effect of Abrahamism over the past 2,000 years.