Nihilism vs Existentialism vs Absurdism: What Each Really Says

Nihilism vs existentialism comes down to whether meaning can be had at all. Existential nihilism says life has no meaning, and stops there. Existentialism says no meaning is given in advance, so each of us makes one through our choices. Absurdism, Camus’s view, says the world offers none, we cannot stop wanting one, and we should live in lucid revolt.

The three are often lumped together as one gloomy mood. They are not the same view; “nihilism” is not even one view; and the thinkers most associated with them — Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus — disagreed with one another sharply. This guide sorts them out, question by question.

Nihilism vs existentialism vs absurdism: a comparison table

The clearest way to compare them is to put the same questions to each. Every question below is a card on The Coordinates, where the full range of rival answers is set out.

Question	Nihilist answer	Existentialist answer	Absurdist answer	Key figures
Does a life need a point, and where would it come from?	There is no point, anywhere	None is given in advance; you make one through choices and projects	None exists, but the demand for one never goes away; live with the tension	Friedrich Nietzsche (as diagnosis), Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus
If everyone approved of torturing children, would it still be wrong?	Moral nihilism: there are no moral facts for it to be wrong by	No values exist before choice, yet choosing commits you: Sartre says you choose for everyone, de Beauvoir that willing your own freedom means willing others’	There is no transcendent ground, yet revolt itself affirms a shared human limit	J. L. Mackie, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus
Can argument alone settle whether God exists?	Usually assumes God is absent; Nietzsche’s “death of God” names the loss of that belief	Divided: for Kierkegaard, faith goes beyond proof; for Sartre, there is no God, and that is the starting point	No; leaping to God, or to hope beyond this life, is “philosophical suicide”	Søren Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus
Could you have done otherwise?	No shared answer; moral nihilism is compatible with either side	Yes, radically: Sartre says we are “condemned to be free”	Freedom is real but limited; the absurd frees you from appeals to a future or a beyond	Sartre, Camus
Can something be bad for you if you are not there for it?	Death confirms that nothing finally matters	Heidegger, often grouped with the existentialists: facing death as one’s own makes an authentic life possible	Death sharpens the absurd, yet suicide is refused	Martin Heidegger, Camus
How do you know you are not being deceived about everything?	Epistemological nihilism: knowledge is impossible	Kierkegaard: the truths that matter most are lived, not proved — truth is subjectivity	Camus starts from two certainties: our longing for clarity and the world’s silence	Kierkegaard, Camus

What is nihilism? Several answers to several questions

“Nihilism” comes from the Latin nihil, nothing. Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) made the word famous through a young hero who rejects every authority, and Nietzsche later made it the name of a cultural crisis. In philosophy today it names several different denials, each answering a different question:

• Existential nihilism: no life has meaning or purpose. It is one of the rival answers on Does a life need a point, and where would it come from?
• Moral nihilism: there are no moral facts, so nothing is really right or wrong. Its closest academic relative is error theory, defended by J. L. Mackie: moral claims aim to describe objective values, but there are none, so they are all false. It answers When you say cruelty is wrong, what kind of statement are you making?
• Epistemological nihilism: knowledge is impossible. This is global skepticism at its most radical, on Can you doubt everything, or only something? It faces the objection that it undermines its own assertion.
• Mereological nihilism: composite objects do not exist; there are only simples arranged table-wise. It is a serious answer, in the metaphysics of parts and wholes, to When do some things make one thing? It has nothing to do with despair.
• Political nihilism: the nineteenth-century Russian current that rejected the authority of state, church and family.

These come apart. A moral nihilist may find life full of meaning; a mereological nihilist may be a moral realist. So when someone says “I’m a nihilist”, the useful reply is: about what?

Nietzsche and nihilism: diagnosis, not prescription

Friedrich Nietzsche is the name most often attached to nihilism, and the attachment is half wrong. He did not argue that life is meaningless and leave it there. He diagnosed nihilism as a crisis coming for European culture: once belief in God collapsed — the madman who announces that “God is dead” appears in The Gay Science (1882) — the values that had rested on that belief would lose their authority, and people would be tempted to conclude that nothing matters.

He treated that conclusion as a danger to be overcome. In his notebooks he distinguished a passive nihilism of weariness from an active nihilism that clears the ground for new values. His positive ideals — a revaluation of values, amor fati (love of fate), and eternal recurrence as a test of whether you could will your life again — are attempts to answer nihilism, not to embrace it.

The care needed is this. On the moral realism card Nietzsche sits with the doubters of objective moral facts: On the Genealogy of Morality traces moral values to human history and psychology rather than to a timeless order, and many scholars read him as a moral anti-realist. But denying objective moral facts is not existential nihilism, and Nietzsche spent his career arguing that life can be affirmed without them. Whether his answer succeeds is still disputed.

Existentialism: Kierkegaard, Sartre and de Beauvoir

Existentialism is less a doctrine than a starting point: the concrete, choosing individual rather than human nature in general. Its shared themes are freedom, responsibility, anxiety and authenticity, and its thinkers disagree about almost everything else, God included.

• Søren Kierkegaard, usually called the first existentialist, was a Christian. He held that truth is subjectivity — what matters most is how one relates to what one believes — and that faith is a passionate commitment no argument can secure. Fear and Trembling (1843) explores this through the story of Abraham.
• Jean-Paul Sartre gave the movement its slogan: for human beings, existence precedes essence. We first exist and then define ourselves by what we do, with no God and no fixed human nature to do it for us. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism he said we are “condemned to be free”; pretending otherwise is what he called bad faith.
• Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) that freedom is not licence: to will yourself free is also to will others free. The Second Sex used existentialist ideas to show how women had been made into the “Other”.
• Martin Heidegger is often grouped with them for Being and Time (1927), with its analysis of anxiety, authenticity and being-towards-death, but he rejected the label and distanced himself from Sartre.

On the meaning card, existentialism sits nearest the subjectivist answer — meaning is made, not found — though de Beauvoir’s insistence on others’ freedom pulls it towards the view that what we choose must also be worth choosing. The thinkers of the existentialist school on the site:

What is absurdism? Camus vs Sartre

Absurdism is Albert Camus’s view, set out in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The absurd is neither the world nor us but the confrontation between them: the human longing for meaning and clarity meets a universe that gives no answer. Camus asks whether that makes life not worth living, and weighs three responses.

1. Physical suicide, which he rejects: it ends the confrontation by abolishing one side of it.
2. Philosophical suicide: a leap to God, hope or a system that promises the meaning the world withholds. He finds it in Kierkegaard, among others, and rejects it as an escape.
3. Revolt: living with the absurd in full awareness, without appeal, with freedom and passion. His image is Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock uphill for ever, and his conclusion is famous: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

So absurdism vs existentialism is a real disagreement, not a family nuance. Camus rejected the existentialist label, publicly and more than once. Where Sartre thought we could create meaning, Camus suspected another leap. Where Sartre’s ethics of commitment drew him towards Marxism, Camus argued in The Rebel (1951) that revolt carries its own limits, and attacked political violence justified in the name of history. The two broke publicly in 1952.

Nihilism vs existentialism on the meaning of life

The deepest disagreement sits on one card. Its rival answers run from supernaturalism, which finds meaning in God or a cosmic order, through objective naturalism, subjectivism and the hybrid view defended by Susan Wolf, to nihilism, absurdism and the view that the question itself should be dissolved. Arthur Schopenhauer, also on the card, held that striving brings suffering, a pessimism Nietzsche set out to overcome.

Position	Meaning comes from
Supernaturalism	A purpose given by God or a cosmic order
Objective naturalism	Engagement with things of real value, independent of attitude
Subjectivism	Whatever the individual cares about
Hybrid	Subjective engagement with objectively worthwhile things
Nihilism	Nowhere; life has no meaning
Absurdism	Nowhere — and the response is not despair but persistence
Dissolution views	The question is symptomatic; the goal is to stop asking it

Laid out like this, existential nihilism and absurdism agree that the universe supplies no meaning. The nihilist concludes that nothing matters; the absurdist refuses that conclusion, holding that the demand for meaning is as real as its absence and that lucid, defiant living is the fitting response. Existentialists think meaning can be made. The question is open, and the card takes no side.

Is Buddhist emptiness nihilism? Resources beyond Europe

Buddhism is often read as nihilism because it teaches no-self and emptiness. Most Buddhist philosophers rejected the charge, though some critics, classical and modern, still press it. The Buddha’s teaching was presented as a middle way between eternalism, the view that there is a permanent self, and annihilationism, the view that nothing continues. Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka says things are empty (śūnya) of intrinsic nature (svabhāva): they exist only in dependence on causes, parts and concepts. That is a claim about how things exist, not a claim that nothing exists. Nagarjuna warned that emptiness wrongly grasped is like a snake seized by the wrong end.

The ethics differ too. A Buddhist who denies a permanent self still holds that suffering is real and that compassion and the path matter; the no-self answer to Are you the same person you were at five? is meant to loosen craving, not to license indifference. Whether no-self can fully account for responsibility is a fair question, and the card records it.

Other traditions have their own resources. In the Zhuangzi, the Daoist doubts that any single standpoint has the final word, and in one story drums and sings after his wife’s death, explaining that her life has returned to the transformations of nature — closer to acceptance than to despair. Qoheleth, the voice of Ecclesiastes, calls all human achievement under the sun hevel, a breath or vapour, yet commends eating, drinking and enjoying one’s work while life lasts. Modern readers often compare him to Camus; both he and the Buddha are named on the meaning-in-life card.

Where to start reading

Begin with Camus: the opening section of The Myth of Sisyphus, “An Absurd Reasoning”, and its short final chapter. Then read Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism for the existentialist reply, and the first essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy to see what diagnosing nihilism involves. If you are new to philosophy, the ten-question beginner path includes the meaning question. Then join the conversation in Meaning, Art & the Good Life, or ask your own question.

Where do you stand?

Every question here has serious answers on more than one side. Pick a card, read the rival answers, then say which you find strongest and why. Members ask, reply and take sides; reading is free for everyone.

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