The term nihilism is often used in combination with an ‘anomie’ to explain a general feeling of despair under a perception that the existence has no purpose, realizing that there is no need for rules, regulations and laws. (‘anomie’ is a state of cognitive dissonance between the normative expectations and the reality as experienced).

Movements such as Futurism and deconstruction, along with many others were often identified by many as "nihilistic".

Nihilism also assumes different characteristics depending on the historical context in which it fits, for example, sometimes postmodernism has been defined as an nihilist age, and figures of religious authority have often argued that postmodernism and various aspects of modernity, have the rejection of theism, and the non-acceptance of theistic doctrines is one of the cornerstones of nihilism.

Nihilism in itself can be divided according to different definitions and their recurrence is useful to describe philosophical positions that are independent and disjointed, although sometimes is possible a correlation or a consequentiality between the one and the other.

The metaphysical nihilism is a philosophical theory according to which "it is possible" that there are no objective realities in their entirety, or more theoretically, it is believed that there is a hypothetical world in which there are none; at the most that can not exist "concrete" objective realities ; so if each possible word contains objects, there is at least one that contains abstract entities.

An extreme form of metaphysical nihilism is commonly defined as the belief that there is no part of a world self-sufficient. One way to interpret such a statement might be: "It is impossible to distinguish the existence from non-existence, since these two concepts do not have the objective characteristics defined, and an element of truth in that statement can have, so to find a difference between the two. "If there is something that can discern the meaning of" existence "by its negation, the concept of existence has no meaning; or in other words, there is no intrinsic value. The term "meaning" in this sense is used to say that as existence does not have a high level of "reality", existence in itself means nothing. You could say that this belief, combined with the epistemological nihilism, would result in the idea that nothing can be defined as real or true, since these parameters do not exist.

The epistemological form of nihilism can be seen as an extreme skepticism, where every form of knowledge is denied.

Mereological nihilism (also called compositional nihilism) is the position whereby there are no organizations with their identity (not only in space but also in time), but institutions without identity - also known as "building blocks" - and the world as we perceive and experience it and in which we believe there are these entities with identity, are only a product of the fallacy of human perceptions.

The moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is a meta-ethics that supports the non-existence of morality as objective reality; there is therefore no action that is necessarily preferable to another. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing a person, for whatever reason, is not inherently neither right nor wrong. Other nihilists could even say that there is no morality, and if this exists, is a human invention, and then an artificial construction, in which each sense is relative depending on the different possible consequences. For example, if someone kills a person, a nihilist might argue that killing is not necessarily wrong, regardless of our moral principles: that is only because morality is constructed as a rudimentary dichotomy, in which it is stated that a bad thing has a weight far more serious than anything defined as a positive result, killing someone is wrong because it does not let the opportunity to this person  to live. To his living is arbitrarily given a positive sense. In this way, a moral nihilist believes that all ethical statements are false.

The political nihilism is a branch that follows the characteristic points of the nihilistic philosophy, as the rejection of non-rationalized or non-proven institutions: in this case, the most important social and political structures, such as government, family and laws. The Nihilist movement exhibited a similar doctrine in the nineteenth century in Russia. The political nihilism is a school of thought quite different from the forms of nihilism, and is often regarded more as a form of utilitarianism.

With Friedrich Nietzsche the phenomenon of nihilism takes on the ambiguity and ambivalence of real figure of interpretation, both theoretical and practical, of Western civilization. In a more explicit negative sense, it is described as a sign of the times, a sign of the decline faced by civilization. At the same time, positively, the twilight of values and idols "with feet of clay" that dominated the history of the West, and then as a whole there is the announcement of a new "dawn" , the prophecy of a new era, which will rise from the ashes of the dead man as it historically has given, and the God that he has built in his own image and likeness. Prophet and interpreter of this new era will therefore will be no longer man, but a kind of mythical figure, designated as the Superman, able to take upon himself the profound sense of nihilism and overcome it, knowing the author and creator of new values.

In Nietzsche, therefore, the word nihilism designates the essence of the crisis affecting the modern European civilization: for Nietzsche nihilism is an event that brings decadence and disorientation, so as to constitute a kind of disease by which the modern world is affected; the disease would lead to the disintegration of the moral subject, to the debilitation of the will and the loss of the ultimate goal of life (passive nihilism).

To this condition would follow, according to Nietzsche, a resurgence of the human legislative will and an overcoming of the disease condition through a multifaceted appreciation of existence (active nihilism) free of any claim to absolute truth. Ontological foundation of nihilism is the "death of God", a symbol of the loss of each landmark and greatest revelation of the universal ‘nothing’.

Philosopher Emanuele Severino writes that the modern vision of nihilism is wrongly based on the concept of ‘being’ born from nothing, exists, then returns to nothingness.

As observed by philosopher Diego Fusaro, "for Severino  everything is eternal. Not enough: only on the surface it is believed that things come out of ‘nothing’ and in the end in ‘nothing’ precipitate, because in the deep down we believe that the short segment of light that is life itself is nothing. It is nihilism. It is the primary murder, the killing of ‘being’. But it is a contradiction: what is, cannot be ‘not-being’, or may not have been or will ever be ‘nothing’. This contradiction is the folly of the West, and now of all the earth. A wound that needs many comforts, from religion to art, all frescoes on the dark, attempts to hide, medicate the ‘nothing’ that horrifies us. Hence the search for stronger ethics, founded on truth and human dignity.

Luckily the Non-Folly waits  for us, the appearance of the eternity of all things. We are eternal and deadly because the eternal enters and exits from appearing. Death is the absence of eternity. We all have nihilism in blood. (...) Everything is eternal means that every moment of reality ‘is’, that is it does not go out and does not return in ‘nothing’, it means that even to things and events most humble and impalpable competes the triumph that is usually reserved to God. "