I’ve read different blogs as well as chapters from philosophy books about these three terms. But if I’m asked to explain it in simple words, I still stutter to make a distinction between these three philosophical terms. Any simpler explanation that covers some core ideas of these terms, like being-in-itself or being-for-itself and others, will be very meaningful to me to get clarity.
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It is important to understand that these are *not* three competing philosophical movements. Existentialism is a genuine, but loose, philosophical movement and its individual thinkers can be theistic or atheistic. It got off the ground in 19th century Europe with a Christian thinker (Kierkegaard) and in the early 20th century its definitive statements were Heidegger’s **Being & Time** (1927) and Sartre’s **Being and Nothingness** (1943).
In the essay **The Myth of Sisyphus** (1942) Albert Camus described the human condition as ‘absurd’ because we crave some sort of transcendent meaning for our lives but, alas, the universe we inhabit cannot provide one. Camus was a close friend of Sartre and de Beauvoir, but unlike them he resisted being labeled an ‘existentialist’. I’m not aware of him ever calling his views ‘absurdism’, but he did use terms like ‘the absurd man’. So there really isn’t a philosophical movement called ‘absurdism’.
‘Nihilism’ is a vague term often used as an insult to dismiss various worldviews. It is certainly not a philosophical movement and I’m at a loss to name any major European thinker who proudly adopted this label (the Russian thinkers in the 19th century who *did* refer to themselves by this term weren’t philosophers, just rebels unimpressed with religion and impressed with science).
*Note: When the scholar and translator Walter Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche to America as a serious thinker (circa 1950) he emphasized aspects that made Nietzsche sound like a 19th century existentialist. Also, many people think Nietzsche’s writings were ‘nihilistic’ because of his slogan ‘God is Dead”. But for Nietzsche that was a sociological observation about 19th century culture, not a metaphysical claim. Nietzsche was neither an existentialist nor a nihilist.*
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