FIRST THEY DENY HUMAN NATURE...:

The essence of Russian nihilism wasn't the absence of values or an assertion of the meaninglessness of life. Far from it. Russian nihilism was a philosophy of individualist liberation and progress. In the emptiness of the cosmos and the socially constructed morality imposed upon Europe by Christianity, the nihilists were arguing that once humans realized the meaninglessness of life and the social construction of all values, revolutionary progress could create a new meaning of life and a new moral and social and political order that would exceed the darkness, superstition, and oppression of the prior system. Nihilism in its intellectual credo asserted two things: the intrinsic meaningless of life but also that all values are man-made, socially created, without reference to Transcendence or Divinity. It was the latter which preoccupied the minds of the nihilist intellectuals and writers--the belief that a new world could be made out of the ash-heap of the old by those courageous enough to build from nothing. 

What Russian nihilism entailed, then, was the heroic (revolutionary) concept of man. Man, as an individual, would liberate himself from the system that oppressed him and kept his creative and erotic ambitions and desires from manifesting itself. In this heroic liberation of the self out of the old order, the liberation of the self would necessitate the destruction of the older order and begin the process of ushering in a new creation. "Heaven on earth," if you will. Individuals, in this process of liberative struggle, would be able to create their own world and their own happiness and become man-gods in the process. It was the dream of Adam and Eve without the Fall.

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