Nihilist viewpoints traditionally receive bad press and blunt condemnation for being the root cause of what people perceive as widespread cultural and moral malaise.
But Tracy Llanera, who is a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Sydney and assistant research professor at the University of Connecticut, is still passionate about nihilism and believes it's very misunderstood.
"Defending it really makes me feel like the madman in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science," said Llanera. "You know, 'You've come too early! It's not yet time! Don't rock the boat!' But we think that it's about time and that's why we're making the case."
The philosophers' case depends on separating the premise that life has no cosmic meaning from the many negative conclusions people tend to draw as a result.
A common fear is that a person who considers life ultimately meaningless will embark on a destructive rejection of life itself, potentially endangering others or at least falling into despair.
But Llanera finds no compelling logical connection between nihilism and antisocial behavior or a choice to waste one's life on trivial, unrewarding obsessions.
And while a lack of ultimate sources for the meaning of one's life cannot directly justify good behavior either, it can release people from harmful mistaken beliefs and damaging mindsets.
Llanera hears often from students that they consider themselves "not religious, but spiritual," a description she personally believes can be concerning.
"It strikes me that people are always looking for something to hold onto — tarot cards, the luck of the stars. I think [that's] being used to fight against this threat that life will become meaningless," Llanera said.
She criticizes some non-nihilist philosophers for spreading the message that the best way to respond to a sense of meaninglessness is to tap into non-human sources, such as a sacred entity or a magical realm. According to her, this amounts to misdiagnosing the problem.
"The problem is egotism," Llanera said, "our attitudes of wanting to have an authority controlling and giving us answers, rather than being responsible for our own lives."
Despite her passion for defending nihilism, Llanera sees the central point of life's meaninglessness as neutral, rather than good or bad news. She hopes that more people will simply outgrow their sense that the cosmic meaninglessness of their lives poses a threat. In her view, life does not need a larger context of meaning to add weight to a private or social sense of morality or joie de vivre.
