Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism
The birth of Modernity’s Meaning Crisis and two responses to it
In the 19th and 20th centuries, modernity came into its fullness and with this maturation, the vestiges of the religious worldview began to fall away revealing a crisis of meaning that we’ve come to call Nihilism.
This emergence of Nihilism prompted philosophers to ask in earnest once again the long-since clichéd philosophical question — what is the meaning of life?
Out of this renewed engagement with meaning, three trends emerged. There was the root problem — Nihilism i.e. the realisation that there is no objective meaning to our lives. And wrestling with this problem we have two responses: Existentialism and Absurdism. In this episode we are going to explore what Nihilism is and how these two schools of thought have attempted to manage the crisis it represents.
A Divine Purpose
For the religious individual, life has an objective meaning.
In the Judaeo-Christian traditions, the history of this world is bookended by God’s creation on one end and the Judgement Day of Heaven and Hell on the other. For the Buddhists and Hindus there is the story of karma and the endless cycle of birth and rebirths that it results in. The end point in…
