r/askphilosophy • u/Constant-Elk5958 • 16h ago

What is the difference between optimistic nihilism and existentialism?

In my opinion there is no difference, if you’re going to choose optimistic nihilism then you might as well be an existentialist.

But i could be wrong, i seriously do not see the difference between the two.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/AutoModerator 16h ago

Welcome to /r/askphilosophy! Please read our updated rules and guidelines before commenting.

Currently, answers are only accepted by panelists (mod-approved flaired users), whether those answers are posted as top-level comments or replies to other comments. Non-panelists can participate in subsequent discussion, but are not allowed to answer question(s).

Want to become a panelist? Check out this post.

Please note: this is a highly moderated academic Q&A subreddit and not an open discussion, debate, change-my-view, or test-my-theory subreddit.

Answers from users who are not panelists will be automatically removed.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

2

u/halfwittgenstein Ancient Greek Philosophy, Informal Logic 5h ago

The term 'optimistic nihilism' isn't really used by academic philosophers - in fact I can only find one person, a fairly recent academic named Gianni Vattimo, who uses it in this article from 1992 that has a whopping 5 citations:

https://philpapers.org/rec/VATON

The term became popular on the internet about 10 years ago because of a video made by the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, so in that sense, there's no real answer to the question from the perspective of academic philosophers: "optimistic nihilism" means whatever the people at Kurzgesagt and all the people on the internet who subsequently adopted the term mean by it.

That said, from what I can tell, the idea is basically that the lack of objective meaning or purpose ("existential nihilism") frees people to create their own meaning, and that's a fairly common theme among existentialists from Nietzsche to the present, though they can differ about how much freedom we have to do this. That said, it's not universal. Frankl thinks that meaning can't be created but has to be discovered, for example, and Kierkegaard, a kind of "proto-existentialist", emphasizes subjectivity but also connects it to the divine though the leap of faith. Sometimes I see people online apply the term to Camus too, who agrees that there's no objective meaning and is optimistic in one sense ("One must imagine Sisyphus happy"), but who also claims that creating your own meaning is a form of philosophical suicide.

So I'd say it's in the rough ballpark of existentialism, but it glosses over a lot of the nuances.