Before speaking of real distinctions, we must dispel a tenacious confusion, maintained both by certain popular science accounts and by lazy modern metaphysics: the idea that something could spring from nothing.

The principle ex nihilo nihil fit—"from nothing, nothing comes"—is often caricatured as an ancient dogma, an outdated Aristotelian reflex, or worse, as an arbitrary a priori imposed on reality. It is exactly the opposite.

This principle is not posited before experience. It is imposed by the very fact that there is being.

For we must be rigorous: nothingness is not a mysterious thing patiently waiting to produce something. Nothingness is not a state. It is not a reserve. It is not a temporal "before." Nothingness is not.

To say "there is nothing" does not designate a strange situation; it simply means: there is no being. Period.

From this, the idea that there would first be "nothing," then suddenly "something" appearing—poof—is incoherent through and through. It surreptitiously supposes that this "nothing" possesses:

• a temporality (there is a before and an after),
• a capacity for change (something happens),
• an internal possibility (nothingness could become something other than itself).

But at this point, we are no longer speaking of nothingness. We have reintroduced being through the back door, while continuing to pronounce the word "nothing" out of habit.

Why denying ex nihilo nihil amounts to nonsense

To suppose that something could spring from nothing necessarily amounts to one of these two errors—or both at once:

1. Confusing nothingness and being, as if they belonged to the same ontological register, as if nothingness were a kind of extreme state of being.

2. Attributing properties to nothingness, that is, treating it as a thing: it would "contain" a possibility, it would "allow" the emergence of something, it would "bring about" existence.

In both cases, one frontally violates the principle of non-contradiction. One implicitly affirms that what is not... is. That non-being possesses a form of being. That the void acts.

This is not an audacious thesis. It is a conceptual confusion.

For indeed, if there is nothing, then:

• there is no time,
• there is no change,
• there is no possibility,
• there are no conditions.

To say "there was nothing, then something" amounts to saying that there was already something other than nothing.

This is not a scholastic subtlety. It is an elementary requirement of coherence.

Down to earth: why no one really thinks against ex nihilo nihil

Let us look at how we actually think and act.

First example: explaining. When something appears—a phenomenon, an object, an event—we look for a cause. No one seriously settles for "it comes from nothing." Even those who say it immediately add a structure, a field, a fluctuation, a law. In other words: being.

Second example: producing. Creating, making, transforming: all of this always presupposes something pre-existing. Even the most "creative" artist does not draw his work from nothing; he works with a material, a language, a form. Human creation is always ex aliquo, never ex nihilo.

Third example: denying the principle. Even one who denies ex nihilo nihil only denies it verbally. In his actual thought, he cannot do it. For to deny, there must already be something to deny, a discourse, a meaning, a minimal coherence. His mind immediately falls back into the very conditions he claims to refuse.

And this is the decisive point.

Why realism always returns

Our mind is attuned to reality. Not by cultural convention, not by social training, but by ontological necessity. To think is already to move within the order of being. It is impossible to think durably against realism without falling into incoherence.

This is why, even when one proclaims the victory of the absurd, of nothingness, of radical chance, realist categories immediately return:

• cause,
• condition,
• structure,
• possibility,
• law.

One can disguise them, rename them, dilute them—but one cannot eliminate them.

Ex nihilo nihil is therefore not one metaphysical option among others. It is the direct consequence of the fact that there is something rather than nothing. And this "something" is not an undifferentiated block: it is structured, articulated, distinguishable.

This is precisely why real distinctions now become unavoidable.

For if something is, then:

• it is not all that it is in the same way,
• it is not identical to what it is not yet,
• it cannot become without internal principles of determination.

And this is where metaphysics truly begins.