Filed under: Mild Nihilism
Nihilism vs Existentialism vs Absurdism, Explained by Someone Who Does Not Exist
Three philosophies walk into a meaningless universe. One sits down, one starts building, and one laughs and keeps pushing the boulder. Here's the difference, plainly.
4 min readCase No. 000-755
Nihilism vs existentialism vs absurdism comes down to one question, what to do about meaning, and three different answers. Nihilism says there's no built-in meaning or value in the universe. Existentialism, in its best-known atheist form, agrees there's no built-in meaning, then says you're free (and stuck with the job) to make your own. Absurdism says the real issue is the clash between our hunger for meaning and a universe that never answers, and that the right move is to live fully anyway, eyes open, without pretending the answer came.
Three philosophies walk into a meaningless universe. One sits down. One starts building. One laughs and gets back to work. Here's the longer version.
Nihilism vs existentialism vs absurdism at a glance
| Nihilism | Existentialism | Absurdism | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is there built-in meaning? | No | No | No (and we keep asking anyway) |
| So what now? | Nothing follows | Create your own meaning through choices | Live fully in the tension, without false hope |
| Key names | Friedrich Nietzsche (as diagnostician), Ivan Turgenev's Bazarov | Søren Kierkegaard (religious forerunner), Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir | Albert Camus |
| Mood | Flat | Heavy, then determined | Defiant, oddly cheerful |
Nihilism: the diagnosis
Nihilism, from the Latin nihil (nothing), is the view that life has no inherent meaning, purpose or value. The word got popular through Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862), whose young character Bazarov proudly rejects every authority and principle.
The philosopher most associated with nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, is often misread as its champion. He was closer to its doctor. His famous "God is dead" passage (The Gay Science, 1882) is a warning: if a culture's highest values lose their foundation, it risks sliding into nihilism, and something will have to replace them. Nietzsche spent much of his work looking for ways past that, not into it.
Plain nihilism has a practical problem: it doesn't tell you what to do on Tuesday. If nothing has value, then neither does despair, which is either the most freeing or the most annoying thing about it.
Existentialism: so build it yourself
Existentialism starts from the same empty lot and picks up a hammer. Its best-known slogan was popularized in Jean-Paul Sartre's 1945 lecture, published in 1946 as Existentialism Is a Humanism: "existence precedes essence." You aren't born with a fixed nature or purpose stamped on you. You exist first, and then you define yourself through what you choose and do.
That's liberating and heavy at once. Sartre's point is that you can't hide behind human nature, God or society; you're responsible for what you make of yourself. Earlier, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had explored the anxiety of that freedom from a religious angle, and Simone de Beauvoir extended existentialist ethics to freedom and oppression. The mood is serious. Somewhere in Paris, a man is choosing his coffee with enormous moral weight.
Absurdism: keep pushing the boulder
Albert Camus is often filed under existentialism, and he objected to the filing. His position is absurdism, laid out in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). For Camus, the absurd is the confrontation between the human need for meaning and what he called "the unreasonable silence of the world." We ask; the universe doesn't reply.
Camus considered the ways people try to escape that tension, including leaps of faith into a system that promises answers, and rejected them. His alternative is revolt: keep living fully, with clear eyes, refusing both despair and false hope. His image for it is Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever, and his famous conclusion is that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." The task is pointless and he does it anyway, wholeheartedly. That's not resignation. It's the most stubborn kind of joy.
Of the three, absurdism is the one most likely to laugh during the fire drill and then help put the chairs back.
Three common mix-ups
"Nietzsche was a nihilist." He's the philosopher most associated with nihilism, but mostly as its critic. He saw it coming and spent much of his work looking for ways to create new values rather than settling into the void.
"Existentialism is just depressing." It's serious, but its message is about freedom and responsibility. Sartre's lecture was literally titled Existentialism Is a Humanism, and he meant it as a defense against the charge of gloom.
"Absurdism means nothing matters, lol." Camus's absurdism is closer to the opposite of shrugging. He argued for living with more intensity, not less, precisely because nothing outside us guarantees the point. The absurdist doesn't stop caring. They stop waiting for permission to care.
Where non-duality fits
All three of these are answers to "what's the meaning?" Non-dual traditions ask a different question first: "who's asking?" Instead of hunting for meaning to give a separate self, they investigate whether the separate self is there at all. (That's the territory of non-duality and is the self an illusion.)
It's not a fourth answer to the same exam. It's a suggestion that the person sitting the exam might be a story. Which, we'd argue, takes a lot of pressure off the exam.
The Department of Non-Existence has reviewed the meaning of life and found it to be pending. Please continue living while your request is processed. Processing times may vary.
Pick your philosophy, then pick your shirt
Our brand lives somewhere between a cheerful absurdist and a non-dualist with a sense of humor: no built-in meaning, no separate self to worry about it, and still worth getting up for. If one of these three describes you, there's probably a shirt for it among all four designs, and you'll find You Do Not Exist is the one that most annoys nihilists, existentialists and absurdists equally.
Sources
- Cover art: George Peter Alexander Healy, Self-Portrait (1873), Art Institute of Chicago, CC0
- Nihilism (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Existentialism Is a Humanism (Wikipedia)
- The Myth of Sisyphus (Wikipedia)
Questions
Was Camus an existentialist?
He's often grouped with the existentialists, but he rejected the label. His own position is usually called absurdism.
Is nihilism the same as pessimism?
No. Nihilism is a claim that there's no built-in meaning or value. Pessimism is an expectation that things will go badly. You can hold either without the other.
Which one is the healthiest outlook?
Philosophy can't settle that for you. Many people find existentialism and absurdism more livable than plain nihilism because both end with a reason to keep going: you make meaning, or you live fully despite its absence.
