THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE IS NOT MINDING NOTHING:

Bazarov impressed Nietzsche in part because the myopic and migraine-besieged German had felt alone in a world blinded to the calamity about to befall it. "Until now I have endured a torture: all of the laws by which life unfolds appeared to me to be in opposition to the values for the sake of which we endure life," Nietsche wrote in a short fragment in 1888. "This does not appear to be a condition from which many consciously suffer." And like the madman in "Thus Spoke Zarathusta," who declares that God is dead, Nietzsche warned his contemporaries that the religious, moral and even scientific stories they lived by were a pack of lies. The acid of reason had eaten away not only at the roots of faith, but its very own foundations as well. Like viewers seeking nature on the Discovery channel, all we are left with are interpretations of the world. As Nietzsche understood, this is thin gruel for those in need of transcendental sustenance.

What, then, are we to do? Celebrate, according to Nietzsche. After Bazarov's rebellion against an oppressive and obscurantist state, Nietzsche called for a rebellion against an oppressive and obscurantist set of illusions about the world. A world emptied of lasting meaning is infinitely more terrifying than a world filled with czarist prisons. But this realization is the first step to the nihilist's cure: Once we recognize this monstrous state of meaninglessness, we are free to recreate ourselves. "The world is not worth what we believed," Nietzsche scrawled in "The Gay Science" in 1862, adding: "It could be worth much more than we believed."

And, as we now know, it could also be worth so much less. More than a century later, nihilism isn't what it used to be. Unlike with the heroic challenges issued by a Bazarov and Zarathustra, we live in an age where meaninglessness is, well, meaningless. For some, this is quite as it should be. As literary theorist Terry Eagleton observed in his 2007 book "The Meaning of Life," while all men and women ponder the meaning of life, "some, for good historical reasons, are drawn to ponder it more urgently than others." Our age, Mr. Eagleton believes, lacks the urgency for such philosophical pondering--a situation that he views with equanimity.

Even contemporary philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, who think there is something real and uncanny to the concept of nothingness, are unperturbed by it. In his 1971 essay "The Absurd," Mr. Nagel admits that nihilism "attempts to express something that is difficult to state, but fundamentally correct." This sentiment reflects something true and enduring about our lives: the shock we feel, when stepping outside ourselves and adopting the "view from nowhere," when we suddenly confront the dissonance between the great importance we devote to our daily activities and their ultimate inconsequentiality.

Yet this state of affairs, as Mr. Nagel adds, is hardly reason for the romantic and heroic posturing of a Bazarov or Nietzsche--or, for that matter, a Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. Instead, he says, an ironic "What? Me, worry?" is the proper response to the cosmic unimportance of our situation. My life, in short, is little more than a cosmic episode of Seinfeld: rather than watching a show about nothing, I'm a walk-on in a life about nothing. Laugh tracks are optional.

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