Is nihilism depressing? What philosophers say

Not necessarily. Nihilism, as philosophers use the word, is a claim about what is the case: that nothing gives life a meaning built into it. It does not say how you should feel about that. The thinkers who took it seriously reacted very differently, from anguish to calm, and some argued that a life can still have meaning without a built-in purpose.

What nihilism claims

The kind people usually mean is called existential nihilism: the view that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. Philosophers who write about the meaning of life put it in a slightly more careful way. For them, nihilism says that whatever would make a life meaningful cannot be had by any of us.

Either way, it is a statement about the facts. A statement about the facts does not come with a mood attached. There are other kinds of nihilism too, about morals, knowledge and politics, and this page is only about the first. You can read about all of them on the nihilism page.

Why some people find it painful

Nietzsche described the moment when the reasons we gave for valuing things stop working. The highest values, he wrote, undermine themselves: the aim is missing, and the question "why?" finds no answer. He thought this was coming and said he was describing the history of the next two centuries. He also thought humankind could, at a terrible price, work its way through it.

The existentialists, who took the same problem further, saw both sides in it. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, nothingness is the source not only of absolute freedom but also of existential horror and emotional anguish. So for the people who lived with the idea most closely, the answer to the question in the title was sometimes yes.

Why others do not

Camus is the best known example of someone who accepted that the world gives no meaning and did not conclude that life is empty. He called the gap between our need for meaning and the silence of the world the absurd, and he said the right response is to keep facing it, not to give up and not to invent a comforting answer. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states his position directly: for Camus, accepting the absurd does not lead to nihilism but to its opposite, to action and participation. Our page on absurdism versus nihilism sets the two side by side.

The existentialists as a group answered with what the same source calls passionate commitment together with impassive stoicism. It does not treat that as the last word. In its judgment, looking back, it was an answer tinged with desperation, because in an absurd world there are no guidelines.

Some later thinkers describe something lighter again, which the encyclopedia calls cheerful nihilism: an easy-going acceptance of meaninglessness, endured with composure instead of anguish.

The way out the definition leaves open

Whether a world without a built-in purpose is empty depends on what you think meaning needs. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy separates two views. Supernaturalists hold that meaning requires God or a soul. Naturalists hold that an ordinary physical life can be meaningful without them.

The two views are about what meaning needs, not about whether God exists. Someone can think there is no God and also think meaning requires one. That combination does lead to nihilism. Someone who thinks there is no God and that meaning does not need one does not end up there.

Naturalists give two main accounts of where meaning comes from. On the first, a life is more meaningful the more it achieves the goals its owner ranks highest. On the second, meaning comes from things that are valuable whatever anyone thinks, such as morality, inquiry and creativity. We look at this choice, given or made, on the page about whether meaning is given or made.

So is it depressing?

Philosophy cannot settle how a claim will feel to you. What it can say is that the claim itself does not force a mood. People who accepted it ended up in horror, in revolt, in calm and in a quiet search for what they themselves care about.

If this question is not only a philosophical one for you at the moment, a philosophy page is not the right help. Talk to someone you trust, or to a doctor.

If you want to see where your own views sit, you can take the walk and see how its questions about meaning place you on the map.