Ethics before nihilism

Abstract

This study is a tribute to the memory of Prof. Saturnino Álvarez Turienzo. The article develops the main line of thought of his essay: Absence of God and Man’s Insecurity, where the process of secularization is followed up to the present condition of a precarious position in life under the attitude of insecuritas. The development of this transition goes back to the sources of posthegelian materialism and the impact of Nietzsche’s nihilism in diverse movements
of the XX century, such as Sartre’s existentialism and the literature of the Absurd. The new kind/s of humanism propounded by nihilist views of different sorts have driven Western man to abandon all care for transcendent aspirations and lie now in a period of relativism.