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Crime And Punishment Nihilism Analysis

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Crime And Punishment Nihilism Analysis
Nihilistic Tides
Like waves ebbing and flowing from coast to coast, one moves through day to day life without question or conscious recognition or belief of what is happening. This parallels with the waves of thoughts boiling in the minds of nihilists. The philosophical process of nihilism is defined as “the belief in nothing or a rejection of objective truth, social conventions, and moral meaning” (“Nihilism”) A wave of nothingness crowds the shores of minds with a state of utter emptiness. To discover the depths and breadths of nihilism, one must take in the history, meaning, and application of what it truly means to lead a nihilistic life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most famous German philosophers, once stated, “God is dead” to begin …show more content…
Take the character of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov as a lead example. In the famous novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s character completely alienates himself from society at points in time, and never shows sentiment to others and objects around him. His character is not one to care for how others feel; he cares for himself and his personal gain in the world. Raskolnikov’s climax in the novel crashes in as he commits the murders of Alyona and Lizaveta Ivanova. However, along with being a nihilist, Raskolnikov practices utilitarianism, so he believes that committing those murders will be justified in the end due to the fact that a thousand good deeds will come from that one tragedy. (Dostoevsky) Nonetheless, nihilism is found in real life as well as novels. Picture a wife, coming home from work early one day to find that her husband is in bed with another woman. The wife is at a point in her life where she will have to reevaluate the things most essential to her everyday life. Most likely, she will make the choice to leave her husband and begin a new life on her own. From her decision, she chose the most basic of needs, what nurtures and drains the springs of hope in her life. She chose to reject the objective truth, one of the basic principles of nihilism. Nihilism happens is found in many events through life, not just in the form of an atheist, but in examples of a wife leaving her husband, a man losing his job, a son leaving his abusive parents, and so on
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