For no reason, he replied. There is no necessary connection so my life is an absurd fact. The existentialist, like Nietzsche I suppose, said yes, there is a way out of nihilism. Nihilism is not the end but the means to an end. If there is only a particle of hope, it lies within human consciousness itself.
Man exists so man can react.
Even in despair man always holds to the possibility of creating new values. For Albert Camus, the world is absurd. But the world could not be absurd unless man judged it to be so. So, this sense of the absurdity of life, this awareness that life is without meaning, this, for the existentialists, is the starting point of all philosophy. Nor do we exist because of Reason.