DE Weekly: Augustine, Sartre, & Ex Nihilo
Creatio ex nihilo is a Latin phrase which means “creation out of nothing.” In a religious context, it infers that God created the universe and everything in it out of absolutely nothing: no pre-existing materials. It differentiates the act of creation in the human sense (say, me creating this newsletter) from God’s creation.
St. Augustine of Hippo, one of my favorite writers, once said that in light of this creatio ex nihilo, every creature on the earth carries with it the heritage of nonbeing. In other words, there is a palpable sense of true nothingness that haunts us and every other finite thing in this world.
DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, & Being-in-the-World
One could raise a valid critique that the most glaring weakness of existentialism is that it is too abstract; it could be said that it deals too much in theory, is too complicated, and not grounded enough to be useful in everyday life. However, not every existentialist thought the same way. Some even challenged that same abstractness, including one Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty was a twentieth-century French philosopher who is often grouped with his contemporaries––especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he studied alongside at the École Normale Supérieure––as an existentialist. Being strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger helps bolster this notion.
DE Weekly: Meaning, Ex Nihilo, & the Chasm of Existence
For those not entirely familiar with existentialism, a pervasive mistake that can be made is to conflate the philosophy with nihilism, and to associate the beliefs of one with the other. In fact, even if you do have a solid understanding of existential philosophy, the two can sometimes bleed into one another.
The reason I like to differentiate between the two and really hammer home the fact that existentialism is not nihilist in its underlying beliefs is that I really do not have patience for nihilists and nihilism in general.