Editing Meaning of life (section)

====Nihilism====
[[Nihilism]] suggests that life is without objective meaning.

[[Friedrich Nietzsche]] characterized nihilism as emptying the world, and especially human existence, of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value; succinctly, nihilism is the process of "the devaluing of the highest values".<ref name="Bindé">{{Cite book |author=Jérôme Bindé |title=The Future of Values: 21st-Century Talks |publisher=Berghahn Books |date=2004 |isbn=978-1-57181-442-5}}</ref> Seeing the nihilist as a natural result of the idea that [[God is dead]], and insisting it was something to overcome, his questioning of the nihilist's life-negating values returned meaning to the Earth.<ref name="Reginster">{{Cite book |author=Bernard Reginster |title=The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism |title-link= |date=2006 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-02199-0 |author-link=Bernard Reginster}}</ref>

To [[Martin Heidegger]], nihilism is the movement whereby "[[being]]" is forgotten, and is transformed into value, in other words, the reduction of being to exchange value.<ref name="Bindé"/> Heidegger, in accordance with Nietzsche, saw in the so-called "[[God is dead|death of God]]" a potential source for nihilism:
<blockquote>If God, as the supra-sensory ground and goal, of all reality, is dead; if the supra-sensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory, and above it, its vitalizing and up-building power, then nothing more remains to which Man can cling, and by which he can orient himself.<ref>Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche," 61.</ref></blockquote>

The French philosopher [[Albert Camus]] asserts that the [[absurdity]] of the [[human condition]] is that people search for external values and meaning in a world which has none and is indifferent to them. Camus writes of value-nihilists such as [[The Stranger (Camus novel)|Meursault]],<ref>Camus (1946) ''L'Etranger.''</ref> but also of values in a nihilistic world, that people can instead strive to be "heroic nihilists", living with dignity in the face of absurdity, living with "secular saintliness", fraternal solidarity, and rebelling against and transcending the world's indifference.<ref>Camus (1955) ''The Myth of Sisyphus.''</ref>