As flores do nada: o niilismo como horizonte histórico do ocidente no século XIX

Abstract

The present work aims to examine nihilism in the nineteenth century, through the thinking of some authors of the time. Nineteenth-century Europe is divided between scientific optimism and cultural pessimism, both of which stem from a break with traditional values, marked by Christian morality. In this environment of great transformations, the thoughts of Karl Marx (1818-1883), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Fiodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) will be objects of this study, in the sense of showing through of them as nihilism went through history, but especially the century in question. The notion of value devaluation, malaise in culture and individuals marks the relationship between these thinkers and modernity, so that each one approached the modern world and pointed out, in his own way, the problem and alternatives to nihilism. In this perspective, it is intended to show nihilism as a historical horizon of Western thought in the period, since the nineteenth century is the one that opened the time to the nihilism, where nihilism itself appears as that which stands at the edge of the gaze and thought of the time, configuring history and explicitly modernity, as its atmosphere.