http://www.arasite.org/WL3/nietnihil.html#_ftn1It (nihilism) is the continued destruction of all meaning and signification. It is the belief that nothing really matters any more, because nothing really has any meaning. We have no system of beliefs or values which could orientate us. The old systems of belief, like religion and morality, still exist, but at best we only follow them half-heartedly, and at worst, think that they have no meaning whatsoever. They exist only the edges of our lives and consciousnesses. But it isnt just the world that doesnt have any meaning anymore. We ourselves dont have any meaning to ourselves. Why should we choice one course of action over the other? What does it really matter anymore, since no-ones individual life really has any significance in the grand scheme of things...
Nothing is worth much anymore, everything comes down to the same thing, everything is equalized. Everything is the same and equivalent: the true and the false, the good and the bad. Everything is outdated, used up, old dilapidated, dying: an undefined agony of meaning, an unending twilight: not a definite annihilation of significations, but their indefinite collapse.
By rejecting intrinsic value, one is not abandoning the quest for value but certifying the absence of value. Faith demands we not accept the world as it is. Faith provides an ideal and asks us for ethical perfection. It is a goal we fall far short of a world to strive for. Nihilism provides none of these things for at its heart it is a philosophy of emptiness.
The quote is about moral nihilism, that has become the popular image of nihilism through movies and other pop-culture, but there is an important distinction between it and what I was refering to. For philosophy, nihilism is foremost the metaphysical nihilism, that is a nihilism in ontology and epistemology (there is no eternal ontological ground, in theistic terms, world doesn't have a creator, in any sense, and therefore has no unity as the world, this lack of unity, this unity is the concept of the world, therefore onlogical nihilism can claim that there is no world, just things). Again, this should not be cofused with the simplistic claims that there is nothing, and we can't know anything as theists intepret it, but as its own metaphysical ground capable of producing rational ontology, epistemology and morals without succumbing to spiritualism. On this basis what we can say is that there is no intrinsic value, and therefore valuing is required as a finite process among other, succeptible to context and change, and because of that capable of progressing. To take values as fixed, therefore only blocks the potential progress of values and robs them of their rational basis, that they always possess in some form. It doesn't even mean there isn't an objective basis of values, just that they aren't inherent to mere objectivity itself. As an analogy, we can take mathematics, that has an objective basis, yet isn't inherent in things themselves, but has to be created in order to describe them.