This study will address the question of whether Nietzsche overcomes nihilism in his philosophical works.
Nihilism is not a concept, which suddenly sprang to life in modern philosophy, as Stumpf notes, but has roots in the work of Gorgias in the era Socrates. Gorgias, affected by the Sophists and their skepticism, finally took a radical view of truth, which ended with his giving up philosophy and concluding that there was no truth at all. He specifically decided that nothing exists, that if anything does exist it is in any case incomprehensible, and that even if in some way it could be considered comprehensible, it was nevertheless not capable of being communicated. He left philosophy for the teaching of rhetoric, using methods of persuasion and suggestion for whatever purposes he chose. Stumpf writes:
Although he did not specifically formulate the same nihilistic attitude towards ethics as he had towards the question of truth, it was inevitable that such a moral nihilism would be the logical outcome of the progressive radicalism of the Sophists (Stumpf 36).
The nihilism of Nietzsche had less to do with a personal ethic or a personal sense of truth than with a world-wide level of reality, a consciousness on the social level, which would be revolutionized by the advent of nihilism related to the concept of the "death" of God. Nietzsche himself was an atheist and clearly considered himself capable of dealing with a world in which God was considered to be absent, but he was less confident of the ability of the rest of mankind to deal with that "death" of God. As Stumpf puts it, Nietzsche was
by temperament an atheist (but) he contemplated the 'death' of God with mixed reactions. He was appalled at the consequences that would follow once everyone had become fully aware of all the implications of the death of God, a cultural event that he said has not yet become apparent to modern man. Contemplating simultaneously the ...