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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From my understanding:
**Nihilism** is a rejection of there being a ‘true’/valid moral framework or intrinsic meaning to the world. That, any meaning we impose on *anything at all* does not come from nature or reality, but is placed there artificially for arbitrary reasons. It is essentially summed up as “nothing is moral” and “nothing is meaningful”, and to believe otherwise is to believe the subjective is objective (untrue and fooling yourself).
**Existentialism** is a further point on this that essentially states that, meaning is thus defined by humans. We are actors thrown into a chaotic world without intrinsic meaning, therefore the meaning we are beholden to is the meaning we are destined to assign to things–meaning is defined *internally* through the active process of *assigning* things meaning, not externally or as an inherent property.
**Absurdism** is the belief that the human nature of trying to assign meaning to an intrinsically meaningless world is doomed to fail, but we should embrace it all the same. Things will always be meaningless, but we will struggle to give them meaning anyways according to our base nature–meaning will always be the immaterial thing we chase and impose over our world despite never succeeding in making it “real”.
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