Would you rather be an absurdist or an existentialist? Here’s the difference between the two.

Existentialism and absurdism are two of the most popular philosophies in the world, particularly on social media. Existentialism is often represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, while absurdism is often represented by Albert Camus. All were French intellectuals active in the decades following World War II, and they knew one another. They drank, they danced, and they laughed together. But absurdism and existentialism are not the same.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the philosopher and writer Laura Kennedy about Camus. Camus is often misidentified as an existentialist, and he is even on record as saying he was not one. In fact, as the years went on, the relationship between Sartre and Camus got frostier and frostier. So, behind the bitter op-eds and vitriolic letters, what was the problem? What separated absurdism and existentialism philosophically?

Starting from the same place

Both existentialism and absurdism start from the same point. They both say that there is no higher power looking after us and that no purpose has been handed down. The meaning of life is not chiseled on stone tablets, nor in what your dad told you growing up. There is no one objective, correct way to do this life thing.

“There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it,” Sartre wrote.

He adds, “The existentialist finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven… There is no longer any good a priori, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men… Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn … he discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.”

Imagine yourself happy

From here, the philosophies part ways. Absurdists say we have to make peace with the fact of a meaningless universe. We have to accept that life is an incoherent mystery. As Camus put it, “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

The only option is just to keep on going and never hope for anything more. We can still relish life for what it is. In fact, recognizing that there is no higher meaning and that this life is all that we will ever have — however pointless — allows us to commit to it.

“If there is a sin against life,” Camus wrote, “it consists not so much in despairing as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this one.”

There is often a kind of gallows humor to absurdism. We have to pause and appreciate the dark humor of all this. We are meaning-seeking creatures thrown into a meaningless world. We are wired to look for something we cannot find. And this kind of gallows humor and ironic laugh might be all we have to get us through.

Create your own adventure

Existentialists go a different way. They do so by challenging the idea that “meaning can only be found outside or beyond this world.” Meaning doesn’t have to be objective. There doesn’t need to be something out there telling us how to live. We all possess what Sartre calls “radical freedom,” which is a kind of existential ability to give ourselves a purpose. We all have to create our own meaning.

Each of us has to sit down, or pull close a good friend, and thrash out what it is we stand for. Do my kids give me purpose? Does my job? Does training for that competition, traveling the world, reading books, cooking food, or singing songs define who I am? We have to direct our radical freedom in carving out both who we are and what we stand for. To be human is to write ourselves into existence.

“Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring,” de Beauvoir wrote. “It is the original condition of all justification of existence.”

Both existentialism and absurdism have their appeal and are represented by very cool intellectuals. But which one do you like the most?