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Emanuele Severino

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Emanuele Severino

Emanuele Severino (26 February 1929 – 17 January 2020) was an Italian philosopher, a disciple of Gustavo Bontadini.

Quotes

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  • The individual Severino, still inhabited by the will to power, can succumb to all the weaknesses to which immortals abandon themselves. But the authentic Severino, who like everyone else has always been open to the truth, and is therefore something infinitely greater than God, cannot be afraid of death.
  • From Corriere della Sera, 4 August 1981.
  • If we already take for granted what madness is, philosophy becomes completely superfluous.
  • From La filosofia contemporanea (Contemporary Philosophy), Rizzoli, 1986, p. 28.
  • The position of Parmenides is unique because it is also the point of greatest contact with the East.[...] Parmenides' radical solution is this: becoming no longer threatens, it cannot be harmful because it does not exist. [...] Everything that is distressing, terrible and horrendous in the world is illusion; this is the meaning of Parmenides' “'doxa”'. Well, this is also the path taken by the East: the “”Vedas“”, the “”Upanishads“”, the Buddhist revival of Brahmanism are all great themes that converge on this point: man is unhappy because he does not know he is happy, because he does not know that pain is outside him, and that he is a pure gaze that is not contaminated by the pain that passes before him, just as the mirror is not contaminated by the image reflected in it.
  • [...] if we “start” from a belief in the existence of “history” (as the history of freedom), all the immutable, eternal, gods, fixed and rigid structures that have appeared and reappeared throughout Western history are constraints that suffocate humanity: in this sense, certainly, the history of the West is a history of progressive liberation from the immutable. This movement of emancipation is analogous to the liberation of servants from their masters, to refer to the famous figure of Hegel“s ”'Phenomenology of Spirit'“: the 'immutables” here are the masters, and becoming is the movement of liberation through which the servants rise up against their masters. In this story, however, both servants and masters are in agreement and solidarity “in essence”: they both have faith in the existence of history (in the existence of becoming) and in the existence of forces capable of “making history”, capable of creating and destroying the things of the world.
    Instead, we need to think of a dimension different from that in which the great “masters” and great “servants” of our culture are placed: a different dimension, in which we become aware of the extreme folly of the original faith that animates the entire history of the West. When we become aware of this madness, a sense of the “eternal” emerges, which is completely different from that for which the “masters” of our culture are “eternal”. If one has faith in the existence of creation and annihilation, then the “masters” and “gods” rise up; but when one sees the madness of that faith, then, with the “servants”, all the “masters” decline. The “eternal” is no longer the master, but the “heart” of things.
  • The whole of Western civilisation says: “Things are not nothing”. But the West adds: “However, they become”. This attitude is based on faith in becoming, the fundamental faith of our civilisation, which, while “opposing” things to nothingness, also “identifies” them with nothingness; since to think that they, in becoming, come out of nothingness and return to it means to think that they are nothing. From the beginning, Western culture has had an ontological meaning. It has this even when it is unaware of it. But it is ontology that identifies being with nothingness. This identification is the very essence of Madness. Non-Madness is the appearance of the eternity of all things. The becoming of the world is not the creation and annihilation of being, but the story of the appearance and disappearance of the eternal. Precisely for this reason, we (and everything) are “eternal and mortal”: because the eternal enters and exits from appearance. Death is the absence of the eternal.
  • From In cammino verso il nulla (On the Way to Nothingness), in Filosofia al presente (Philosophy in the Present), pp. 37-38.
From an interview by Antonio Gnoli, “Vi racconto il mio scontro con la Chiesa cattolica (I'll tell you about my clash with the Catholic Church), repubblica.it, 31 October 2001.
  • It can be said that the only thing denied to the people of the “paradise of technology” is the truth of paradise. A paradise without truth can be a deception. The suspicion that it is so makes it a hell.
  • From “'Tecnica e architettura”' (Technology and Architecture), edited by Renato Rizzi, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003, p. 52.
  • But Bruno's agreement with Parmenides is also agreement with Heraclitus, for whom, Bruno recalls, all things are One. Just as episteme is about to abandon its faith in the immediate ability of thought to grasp the deepest meaning of truth, that faith finds one of its most powerful and grandiose expressions in Bruno's philosophy.
  • From “'La filosofia dai Greci al nostro tempo. La filosofia moderna”' (Philosophy from the Greeks to our time. Modern philosophy), BUR, 2004, p. 34.
  • As the destiny of necessity, truth is the appearance of the being of the being as such (i.e. of every being); that is, the appearance of its not being other than itself, i.e. of the impossibility of its becoming other than itself, i.e. of its eternal being. The appearance of the being is the appearance of the totality of the entities that appear [...] The parts are a multiplicity. The appearance of a part is the relation of transcendental appearance to a part of this totality [...] This means that there is a multiplicity of these relations. In this sense, not only is the content that appears manifold, but so is its appearance.
  • From Fondamento della contraddizione (The Foundation of Contradiction), Adelphi, Milan, 2005.
  • Since the USSR no longer controls the grassroots movements against global wealth and Islam has taken their place, the survival of the rich world is in danger.
  • From “'La Seconda Guerra Fredda”' (The Second Cold War), “'Corriere della Sera”', 17 August 2006, p. 1.
  • It is completely misleading to condemn the “West” and capitalism for dominating and exploiting the rest of the world. Peoples have no morals. Have you ever seen one sacrifice itself for another? When they have power, they impose themselves on the weaker ones, just as nature fills the void.
  • From “'Due fedi, la stessa crisi”' (Two faiths, the same crisis), “'Corriere della Sera”', 26 February 2006, p. 26.
  • The civilisation of technology is what I call “the most rigorous form of extreme madness”. Even more quietly: extreme madness is believing in the ephemeral, temporal, contingent, random nature of man and reality: it is the conviction that everything comes from nothing and returns to it. However, the supreme defence against the anguish aroused by this conviction – the defence that in tradition is ultimately constituted by God – has become technology. Everywhere, technology is becoming the most radical form of salvation, which today has supplanted any other form of remedy against death.
  • Technology tends to enter into symbiosis with the last two hundred years of philosophical thought, which pushes towards the light its terrible spirit of destruction of the past, showing that the past can no longer have the right to oppose the process that removes it. Truly powerful and successful technology is closely linked to the wise, philosophical, terrible and destructive message of the “death of God”. “If God is dead, then everything is permitted,” said Fyodor Dostoevsky. But this is not the case: if God is dead, there is no chaos, because power establishes a hierarchy in which the weaker powers are subordinate to the stronger ones. In other words, we are moving towards a time when the greatest power, the technical-philosophical one, is subordinating all other forms of power from the past (including the power of Islam) to itself, hierarchising them.
  • When there is a conflictual situation – Christianity versus democracy and capitalism; yesterday, capitalism versus communism – fuelled not only by words but also by deeds, with the greatest form of power available, namely technology guided by modern science, then an inexorable mechanism is set in motion. This is the mechanism whereby every force has an interest in ensuring that the instrument it uses to achieve its specific goals functions optimally; so that when that force moves in this direction, in which it has every interest in ensuring that its own purpose prevails – let us call it “ideological” without giving this word a negative meaning – and therefore to make its instrument function optimally, then a decisive reversal occurs – or at least a strong tendency towards reversal – whereby the instrument with which it attempts to achieve its goal becomes so indispensable that it itself becomes the goal of those forces, which therefore become something instrumental. [...] If this is the mechanism, whereby the forces that use technology tend to attach such importance to the tool they use that it actually becomes the goal, gradually renouncing more or less decisive parts of their original goal, then we can imagine a process in which it will no longer be the West – capitalism, communism, Islam – that will use technology, but technology that will use the West; a process that will also involve social aggregates such as Islam or China.
  • When [...] the Church condemns divorce, abortion, euthanasia, labour exploitation, profit as the primary goal of economic activity, the annihilation of man in a totalitarian state (and so on, up to the refusal to consider unstable unions and, even more so, homosexual couples as “families”), the Church condemns something that, for it, is not only a denial of the supernatural truth of Christianity, but also a denial of those “natural truths” that every human being, even non-believers, can know and practise.
  • From “'Il declino del capitalismo”' (The Decline of Capitalism), Bur, Milan, 2007, chap. 33, “'Tam evidenter”'.
  • But, one might ask, what about science? Is science faith?! Yes. In order to have power over the world, science has long since renounced being “truth” in the sense attributed to this word by philosophical tradition. Science has become hypothetical knowledge. It knows that it is not absolute knowledge (“truth”, in fact) – and in this sense it is not faith but doubt –; however, in order to have power over the world, it must have faith in its own ability to transform it; and it is within this faith that it elaborates, resolves or confirms its doubts.
  • From “Le fedi e la lotta per il potere” (“Faiths and the struggle for power”), Corriere della Sera, 24 May 2007, p. 40.
  • This Pope, as a good shepherd, is trying to change things. But I would not want us to lose sight of the fact that the underlying “corruption” is the “evasion” of the world from the past of the West. I would like to say that the process in which the structures of the past are falling apart is like a fever: if you didn't have it, you couldn't recover. We are moving towards a world governed by technological rationality; and it is likely that Italy, precisely because it has had the problems we have mentioned, will be ahead of other, less feverish nations.
  • Whether we should rely on science or religion or some other form of wisdom or experience cannot be determined by science, religion or anything else. Answering this type of question has always been the task of philosophy. Those who would like to set it aside should remember that getting rid of it is and always has been a form of philosophy. And again: are we really sure that there is such an irreconcilable opposition between “spirituality” and “technology” and that, beneath their opposition, they do not have a common soul?
  • The being to which Heidegger [...] reasonably thinks, is [...] that which differs from all determinations, differs from entities and is precisely [...] this difference [...] – it is the central figure of Heidegger's discourse – which Heidegger calls ontological difference [...] inasmuch as being is the appearance of entities, inasmuch as it differs from entities, it is non-entity, and Heidegger explicitly says it is nothingness; being is nichts, but when he introduces this nothingness, he intends to introduce precisely that which is in no way an entity, but not that which – and here Heidegger is quite explicit – is constituted as nihil negativum, that is, nihil absolutum. I have expressed my opinion on the relationship between Heidegger and nihil absolutum several times, saying that it is strange how Heidegger treats the concept of nihil absolutum with arrogance and rarely asks himself [...] what the historical derivation of this concept is. He is particularly keen to emphasise that being [...], das Sein, Being is not entity and in this sense is nothing, but not nihil absolutum. Now, when Heidegger speaks of entity, he explicitly characterises it as not nihil absolutum: the tree, the wall, the house are not absolute nothingness. [...] once with Gadamer [...] precisely on the subject [...] of the ontological difference, I tried to show him the necessity that above the ontological difference between being and entity, there was a more original plane of the entity that includes what Heidegger calls entity and what Heidegger calls Being. And the observation I made to him was this: but if it is being, nichts, if being is nothing, being that is nothing in the sense indicated is not a nihil absolutum and if, in turn, entity is not a nihil absolutum, then the two that constitute the ontological difference, however radically different, agree in their not being a nihil absolutum, so that then the trait of not being a nihil absolutm unites [...] the radically different; if this step is taken, then we see that [...] the traditional concept of being as a common feature of the totality of differences, properly thought out, is capable of encompassing within itself that ontological difference which, for Heidegger, should radically and definitively lead [...] outside the classical concept of being as koinón [...], as the commonality of differences; therefore, koinón lies [...] in not being an absolute nothing on the part of Sein [Being] and on the part of Seiendes [Entity].</ref>.
  • From Emanuele Severino: Heidegger e la Metafisica (Emanuele Severino: Heidegger and Metaphysics), Video, available on YouTube, 2015, at min. 14:39-19:01.
  • In the past, the thesis that this conversation is eternal sometimes provoked a few chuckles, but then I realised that it was worth remembering that Einstein's relativity, although with a logic very different from mine, says that future and past events are no less real than present ones. So much so that when Popper spoke with Einstein, he called him Parmenides. Interviewer: The English physicist Julian Barbour asserts that time does not exist and that events are like postcards hanging on a clothesline, all present at the same time... Severino: Yes, he slightly varied the image that Popper used with Einstein of frames wrapped in a reel. But neither of them can explain the camera or the movement of the gaze that passes from one postcard to another. To do so requires a logic [...] that science cannot provide. In general, science believes that the mind is a special thing among things. This is where the theory of experience, which scientists tend to neglect, comes into play. Experience is the transcendental mind; it does not enter or exit a field of vision but is the place where everything enters and exits. To understand what the unwinding of the frames or the gaze that flows over the postcards is, we need to introduce the concept of transcendental consciousness, which was glimpsed in some way by idealism, that is, the place within which the eternal occurs. The so-called becoming of the world cannot be the beginning of being and the cessation of being, but is the appearing and disappearing of the eternal in that transcendental consciousness.
  • Today, the philosophical and scientific cultural climate, not to mention literature, has moved away from the concept of definitive, incontrovertible truth. Today's “truths” serve to transform the world according to certain plans. No one says anymore, as Galileo did, that man knows mathematical truths as God knows them. [...] Greek thought understands the definitive truth of things as an oscillation between non-being, being and non-being. If the things of the world, according to the belief of humanity today, did not and will not exist, it is inevitable that no definitive truth exists.
  • Why is it that today, when not only philosophical but also scientific culture rejects the idea of a stable state of being, of stable knowledge... why is it that in this situation there is someone who proposes the absolutely stable, the Absolutely Existing? The elimination of all definitive knowledge stems from the way in which Greek philosophy took its first steps. Destiny calls those first steps into question. So, by questioning them, the claim to take a look at the Absolutely stable becomes less paradoxical.
  • I am the first to recognise this. When I began to develop this way of thinking – but let's go back a long way – I was the first to realise that I should leave that university. Interviewer: However, you never broke off your personal relationship or esteem for your teacher, Gustavo Bontadini? Emanuele Severino: We loved each other, and I still get emotional when I think about it. I remember when he was in his last days... ah, what a dear man... I went to see him in Via Stradella – he lived in Via Stradella, near Corso Buenos Aires – and I said to him: “Maestro, I am Emanuele Severino”. He, who had not opened his eyes for days, gave a start and opened his arms to me. We embraced for a long time. Then he let go of my arms and I left him.
  • Interviewer: Do you watch football matches? Severino: I'm not a fan, but I'm passionate about the World Cup. And fencing, do you know why? My father was a fencing master and led his military team to victory before the First World War. It was the only sport I was any good at; until recently, I could have disembowelled someone. Interviewer: How should life be taken, with kisses or slaps? Severino: Giving me my wife was a big kiss, taking her away from me was a big slap. Interviewer: One last question: what is love? Severino: Ah, love is still a form of will, but it always leaves you dissatisfied: so ending a programme with this phrase leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mouth.
  • From Gigi Marzullo's interview on “'Sottovoce”', 17 August 2019. Quoted in Adriano Sofri, [https:// www.ilfoglio.it/piccola-posta/2019/08/07/news/emanuele-severino-la-trasmissione-e-la-vita-268648/Emanuele Severino, the programme and life'], “ilfoglio.it”, 7 August 2019.
  • Interviewer: The piano as a percussion instrument. Are we right in thinking that your point of reference was Stravinsky? Severino: Yes, I was steeped in Stravinsky's phonics and formulas, but perhaps above all in Bartók's. Interviewer: But who introduced you to music? Severino: My brother, who was eight years older than me, was an excellent pianist. I loved listening to him, and then, when I could, I would sit down at the piano myself and “compose”. Ever since I was a boy, I have always been attracted to the world of sounds, to the combination of sound relationships. Maestro Guastalli, my brother's teacher, who disapproved of my way of playing and urged me to study regularly, but I stubbornly preferred to combine sounds. To tell the truth, in later years I did study with a certain regularity, but not always continuously. So I remained a modest pianist.

Emanuele Severino: «Un tedesco mi consegnò il mitra e scappò»

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Pier Luigi Vercesi, Corriere della Sera, 30 December 2018
  • Interviewer: Can you explain, in the simplest way possible, what your philosophy consists of? Severino: We are kings who believe ourselves to be beggars. I question not only Christianity, but the whole of Western civilisation and its philosophy, according to which we come from nothing and end up in nothing. This is the essence of nihilism. No, each of us is a god with the conviction of being contingency, the shadow of a dream. Man is a poor thing: Pindar says so, Shakespeare and Leopardi say so, it is the climate created by Bertolt Brecht. In reality, we are the eternal appearance of destiny. Our dead await us as the stars in the sky await the passing of the night and our inability to see them except in the dark. We are destined for a Joy more intense than that promised by the religions and wisdoms of this world. The beggar is our conviction, for example, that I am raving, because real things are this world, Europe, Italy, economic, legal and sexual relationships. Whereas the essence of man consists in his absolute permanence. With death, we overcome the state of beggary: death allows us to transcend the sense of nothingness.
  • Even for atheists, things come from nothing and return to nothing: God's friend is a madman who believes he needs a master, a lord, a creator; the atheist is a madman who believes he does not need one, but both belong to the same soul.
  • The most rigorous form of madness today is technology: we are living in a time of transition from tradition to this new god. Authentic globalisation is not economic, it is technological. We make the mistake of believing that capitalism and technology are the same thing: no, they have different purposes. Capitalism aims at the infinite increase of private profit, technology at the infinite increase of the ability to achieve goals, or power. Technology will kill democracy, starting with the weakest states such as Italy. This process will then also affect the US, Russia and China. At some point, the United States will prevail, but not as a nation, rather as the primary managers of technological power. We are now struggling to understand this because we are in an intermediate period. We are like a trapeze artist who has let go of one piece of equipment (tradition) and has not yet grabbed hold of the other (technology, the new god). We are suspended in mid-air and feel lost.

Hemingway, il nichilista che sapeva uccidere

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Corriere della Sera, 28 September 2008
  • Hemingway had learned that the pleasure of life is inseparable from pain: life is a struggle – it is “war”, said the ancient Heraclitus.
  • Hemingway conceived sincerity as the supreme moral commandment. This applies above all to writing, which must not hide what man truly feels.
  • Is not the height of madness to think that being is nothingness? And is not “nihilism” first and foremost to think that being is nothing? And is it not because of this ancient thought that all the radical destructions that mark the history of the West have been able to mature?
  • If Christians are convinced that Jesus is the holiest, they must believe that nature, disposition and impulses are the most evil in him and that he is the holiest precisely because he alone is able to overcome them. The crudeness of certain expressions of Jesus may be a symptom. The first step in overcoming what is “terrible and fearsome” in each of us is to look it in the face.

L'intervista a Emanuele Severino

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Tommy Cappellini, Il Giornale, 7 January 2009
  • In the West over the last two hundred years, relativism – a term that is so widely used today thanks to the Church – is a phenomenon that runs deeper than we might think. It concerns the outcome of history. Let us consider two periods: the first, that of philosophical tradition tout court up to Hegel, is followed by that of the twilight of the gods, or rather the inevitable dismantling of this tradition. This is the era of relativism. Interviewer: Why is dismantling inevitable? Severino: Because it is not a change in taste, that God is dead because people have lost the taste for believing in him. That would mean he could be reborn. I am talking about inevitability, about incontrovertibility. The conferences will overturn a still prevalent way of thinking, attributable for example to Marx, which holds that it is the existence and life of man that transforms the world. As if to say that philosophy is only a superstructure placed on top of a basic reality. This is not the case. Contemporary philosophical discourse has its own invincibility.
  • It is believed that there is opposition between Islam and Christianity, but they are on the same side. Their enemy - as the Pope has pointed out - is the destruction of Western tradition. This is the real clash of civilisations, which is not between the two religions, which share a relationship with the God of the philosophers – the Greeks – and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Intervista a Emanuele Severino. Per capire perché la civiltà della tecnica «ha bisogno di mostrare la necessità della "morte di Dio"»

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Lugi Amicone, tempi.it, 16 March 2014
  • However, it is necessary to understand – and this is far from easy – what the reasons are behind technology and those behind the forces that attempt to resist it. But can we understand their reasons if we do not know what “reason” means and what constitutes the “power” that supports it? What support can we rely on to find out? Whether we should rely on science or religion or some other form of wisdom or experience cannot be determined by science, religion or anything else. Answering these kinds of questions has always been the task of philosophy. Those who would like to set it aside should remember that getting rid of it is and always has been a form of philosophy. And again: are we really sure that there is such an irreconcilable opposition between “spirituality” and “technology” and that, beneath their opposition, they do not have a common soul?
  • The friends of determinism and the friends of freedom are two ways of expressing the same soul: the soul of faith in which one believes that – either inevitably or freely – things come out of nothing and return to nothing. Non-Madness lies outside this opposition. It also lies outside the opposition between the friends and enemies of God. The unforgettable instant is the non-Madness of truth – eternally outside of oblivion. It is not the possession of a privileged few. It resides and shines in the depths of every human being. Even those who do not know they are its manifestation.

«Il mondo cambia: sopravviverà solo chi lo sta capendo»

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bresciaoggi.it, 16 aprile 2017
  • Interviewer: He also said that salvation in the future lies in cultural elevation. Do you still think so? Severino: There is a clash underway. On one side is tradition, which believes in a definitive meaning of the world. On the other is contemporaneity. I am thinking of the vision that has taken shape over the last 200 years, which does not believe in the existence of a unified meaning, but considers the world to be a collection of fragments.
  • Interviewer: In May 1974, after the massacre in Piazza Loggia, you put your warning against fascism down on paper. Is this still a current danger? Severino: That opposition to Fascism has been replaced by that between democratic capitalism and communism. Which, in turn, has weakened over time. Communism is also coming to an end in China. A new protagonist has emerged, one that I believe is not given enough attention: it is called technology. The forms of power of the past are fading, and soon it will be technology that will make use of the forces in the field that delude themselves into thinking they control it.
  • Interviewer: Can philosophy and politics still walk hand in hand? Severino: A lofty question... If we go back to ancient Greece, politics arose as a desire to conform to the truth as discovered by philosophical thought. For the Catholic Church, politics cannot be an arbitrary invention, but must adhere to revealed truth, philosophical thought considered authentic. Therefore, even for the Church, politics must be based on philosophical competence. Then, however, a procedural democracy took hold that disregards the truth: laws are written and observed as the result of a majority vote, which decides and determines.

Emanuele Severino: "Come fu che Martin Heidegger studiò la mia tesi di laurea"

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Silvia Truzzi, ilfattoquotidiano.it, 8 June 2019
  • Interviewer: Professor, why didn't you send your thesis to Heidegger? Severino: I was a young man, and by nature I am not one to promote myself. It was also a different time, it wasn't customary. Interviewer: At that time, the German philosopher was little known in Italy. Severino: Not as well known as he deserved to be. At 19, I had to come to terms with Sein und Zeit. I knew German because I took German lessons from a Jesuit, Father Auer, at secondary school. And Father Auer knew Hitler. I remember him telling me about Hitler's contortions when things didn't go his way.
  • Interviewer: How did you become a lecturer at the age of 21? Severino: I graduated young, I had skipped the first year of high school. After the war, there was a desire to do everything right away. In the winter of 1950, Esterina, who would become my wife the following year, saw a small note in Corriere saying that anyone who had graduated less than five years earlier could take part in the competition for a teaching qualification that year.
  • Interviewer: When did you decide to study philosophy? Severino: My brother, who died in the Alpine Corps during the last war, was a student at the Normal School in Pisa and had Gentile, [Armando] Carlini, Russo and Calogero as teachers. At home, he talked about his studies, and I adored him. So I would say that my first contact with philosophy was through what my brother said about Gentile, which seemed extremely intelligent to me, even though I understood little. Interviewer: You were a child! Severino: Yes, yes, I was a child. I sensed that when I went to secondary school, I would understand more. But when I had to decide what to do, I was undecided between physics, mathematics and philosophy.

Che cosa fanno oggi i filosofi?

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Norberto Bobbio, Umberto Cerroni, Umberto Eco, Italo Mancini, Paolo Rossi, Emanuele Severino, Gianni Vattimo, Che cosa fanno oggi i filosofi?, Bompiani, Milano, 1982
  • Philosophy is inevitably heading towards its own decline, that is, towards science, which is nevertheless the way philosophy exists today. [...] Everyone can see that philosophy, on a global scale, is declining in scientific knowledge.
  • Science is the development of techniques to achieve certain goals in an optimal way. [...] Given certain goals, science indicates the most suitable means to achieve them, but it does not indicate which goals should be pursued.
  • Being born means [...] coming out of nothingness; dying means returning to nothingness: the living is that which comes out of nothingness and returns to nothingness.

Il parricidio mancato

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Emanuele Severino, Il parricidio mancato, Adelphi, Milano, 1985
  • The great philosophy of the beginnings does not appear on the foundation of tragedy, but it is the great Attic tragedy that appears on the foundation of the space opened up by the testimony of the ontological meaning of becoming.
  • The cry. It is at the beginning of the life of man on earth. The cry of hunting, of war, of love, of terror, of joy, of pain, of death. But animals also cry out; and for primitive man, the wind and the earth, the cloud and the sea, the tree, the stone, the river also cry out. But only man gathers around his own cry, in the absence of the events that provoked it. The decisive aspects of existence are linked to the cry, and in the evocation of the cry, the most ancient human communities not only see the fabric that forms them, but also permanently tie the threads of the fabric, that is, they establish and confirm themselves as human communities. The entire life of the most ancient peoples revolves around the evocation of the cry, that is, around song; and song envelops the living much more closely than the warmth of the fires around which they gather. (p. 41).
  • The cry indicates in a simple and powerful way that the inflexibility of the world has yielded at one point. The enemy killed, the animal captured and devoured, the woman possessed, but also the looming death and the defeat suffered and the body and soul torn apart are, since mortals appeared on earth, the cardinal points where the inflexibility of the world gives way. Until that moment, the inflexible order of the world is a wall that cannot be scratched, or at least one hopes it cannot be scratched: the points where the inflexible is bent, flexed, are both outside and inside the screamer. The cry is the crash of the wall cracking, just as thunder is the crash of lightning cracking the crystal of the sky. The crack – the bending of the inflexible – tears the cry from the mortal, just as lightning tears thunder from the sky. Crack and cry are one and the same, in the sense that the cry is not the object of a decision.
    But the cracking of the inflexible is the becoming of the world. The bending is the “work” that generates the world. The points of bending are the various ways in which the world becomes. The cry indicates the becoming of the world, expresses it, mirrors it, just as thunder mirrors lightning. It is the primordial word. But it is also ambiguous. (p. 47)
  • Music is the birthplace of the word, but only the words that come to light in this house recognise it as their birthplace and as the evocation of the cry.
  • The history of the essence of nihilism (i.e., the belief that being is nothing) begins with Parmenides, who also affirms the eternity of Being and therefore the impossibility that it, in becoming, is not, i.e., is nothing. It is with Parmenides that the separation of beings from Being begins.
  • To prevent nothingness from being, Parmenides asserts that things are nothing. Parmenides, who first appears on the path of Day, which runs far from the path that the West has travelled, takes the first step along the path of Night in the West, the path along which things are thought and experienced as nothing. Parmenides is the tragic sower who sows both the seed of truth and the seed of Madness. (p. 77)
  • Quoted in Aldo Stella, “'The concept of 'relation” in Severino's work starting from “The Original Structure”, GoWare and Edizioni Angelo Guerini e Associati, 2018, p. 363, note 443. ISBN 9788881952960.
  • Every civilisation, especially the Western one, has been nothing but edifying – even and especially when it has produced the extreme of destruction and horror. Can man ever fail to be edifying?
  • Adam would have been victorious over his own sin only if he had eaten the forbidden fruit.

La filosofia futura

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Emanuele Severino, La filosofia futura, Rizzoli, BUR Saggi, Milano, 2006, p. 121. ISBN 88-17-00946-6
  • One can propose to control, modify, produce, or destroy the things of the world only if one has faith that they become, that is, that they can dissolve their bond with being and nothingness, that they can be and not be. Only if one believes that things are flexible, oscillating between being and nothingness, can one propose to bend them and control their oscillation. If the will to power is the will to dominate the world, the original form of the will to power is precisely the belief in the existence of the dominable, that is, the belief in the existence of becoming. The civilisation of technology is the most rigorous form of this belief. (chap. I, p. 17)
  • L“”'epistéme“” is [...] a contradiction in two senses. On the one hand, it is an affirmation of the infinite difference (or opposition) between being and nothingness, and at the same time (insofar as it is an affirmation of the existence of becoming) it is an affirmation of the identity of being and nothingness. On the other hand, it is an affirmation of the infinite difference between being and nothingness, and at the same time (insofar as it is the Law of the Whole, to which even that which does not yet exist must conform) it is the entification of nothingness, that is, it transforms that which does not yet exist into something that exists. [...] In its own subsoil, “episteme” is the violation and denial of what it itself affirms on its own surface: the infinite difference between being and nothingness. (chap. VI, pp. 56-57)
  • [...] there, where prediction is intended to be incontrovertible – as is the case in “episteme” and in the epistemic residues of modern science – prediction cancels out the becoming from which it seeks to defend – treating as unreal the danger against which it seeks to provide shelter – and it is therefore inevitable that the shelter itself will prove to be unreal and illusory.
    If one believes that the danger exists, but prepares a shelter that makes one lose sight of the danger, the shelter is illusory. Sooner or later, it is dismantled by the danger in whose existence, despite everything, one has faith. If the epistemic evocation of the Immutables causes one to lose sight of becoming (making it impossible and apparent), it is inevitable that faith in the existence of becoming will unleash forces that escape the dominion of the Immutables and thus make it apparent and illusory. (chap. VII, p. 69)
  • For the Greeks, “'epísteme”' is the ornament on the bow of a ship. It is the symbol of the bow imposing itself on the threatening fluidity of the sea. The “'epistéme”' is the “'epístema”' of the bow of domination. It imposes itself on the swirling and unpredictable fluidity of becoming. (chap. XIII, p. 121)
  • Every individual believes and doubts; they are a tangle of faith and doubt. But the truth is not only not what individuals think of the world, it is a doubt infinitely more radical than those of which they are capable, because it questions all of man's convictions – and yet its content remains unchanged.
    And again: since truth is the negation of error, without error there would be no truth. Error is irreplaceable; it has the greatness, power and even beauty of the irreplaceable. And it takes the great geniuses of the West to bring it to light. “Our” civilisation has brought error to light. The “madness” of the West is therefore precious, and it is impossible to propose to “annihilate” error and act to annihilate it. Error is also eternal. It is therefore a question of understanding – beyond all our cultural habits – what it means to “go beyond error” [...]. (chap. XXX, p. 295)
  • In its essential meaning, “ontological difference” is the way in which Heidegger's thesis of Kant's synthetic character of existential judgements [...] and, in general, the fundamental principle of Western thought that the unity of being and existing has an accidental character, is presented. For Heidegger, “being” (unlike the absolute, divine “Being” of the metaphysical tradition) “has no power over entities”; it is a letting-be of entities. But both traditional “Being”, which has power over entities, and allowing entities to be have the same foundation: faith in becoming; and becoming is that with respect to which one can take a position either through the power of metaphysical Being (or the scientific-technological apparatus) or by allowing it to be in its freedom and “naivety”. Even the “impotence” with which “being”, according to Heidegger, lets being be is based on the absolute will to power, that is, on the will that wants the existence of becoming. (chap. XXXIII, p. 318)
  • Our entire past is an eternal lamp that appears in relation to that eternal will to turn on and off the eternal lights of being – that is, the belief that we have the power to turn them on and off. Concomitant with this will – when this will wants to extinguish the lamp of being – appear the darkness of pain and anguish. The pain of the world is the darkness that appears when one believes one has the power to extinguish the lamp of being: it is the eternal star of the night with which destiny responds to the provocation of Madness. [...] In the affairs of peoples, no force can extinguish the lamps of the past, it does not have the power to extinguish them: the darkness of the pain of the world is destiny's response to the provocation of mortals. Provocation wants the impossible [...] and obtains ambiguous answers [...]. Destiny always sends something other than what mortals want and delude themselves into obtaining. [.. .] The sending is not a “choice” or a “decision”; it is the inevitable passing, in the vault of appearance, of the eternal constellations of being. However, it is possible that fate will bring the madness of the will to power to an end and that, after the constellations of Night, the constellations of Day and Joy will arrive. (chap. XXXIX, pp. 361-362)
  • Nihilism, that is, the belief in the existence of becoming – and therefore the entire history of the West – is not the only possible form of negation of destiny, and yet it is the dominant negation. In its unconscious, this belief is the persuasion that being is nothing. This persuasion is the essence of nihilism. By denying the non-nothingness of being, it is therefore a denial of itself. But in the Western belief, destiny does not appear; it does not stand before it, but behind it. Western philosophy “sees” (that is, believes it sees) the becoming of being. Behind it is destiny, which “sees” that the affirmation of the becoming of being is, in its own unexpressed unconscious, the affirmation that being is nothing. It is in the eyes of destiny that Western faith appears as a denial of destiny and as nihilism, that is, as a denial of itself. (chap. XXXIX, pp. 363-364)

La follia dell'angelo

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Emanuele Severino, La follia dell'angelo, Rizzoli, Milano, 1997
  • Democracy is a faith.
  • Ethics is one of the extreme forms of violence, because it is the administration of becoming, with a view to achieving the goals that are considered suitable for the full realisation of man.
  • Pride is a quality of those who are powerless. It is from God's point of view that Lucifer sins with pride. But God's victory over Lucifer is an illusion of God.
  • Taking refuge in nature is to shut oneself up within the walls of violence.
  • It is a matter of understanding that construction and destruction have the same soul...

Quotes about

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  • [Addressing Emanuele Severino] You know that many critics say: Severino is brilliant, but he says things that are neither here nor there. And so they continue to sleep peacefully at night. Very often this is the attitude of hypocrites, of the ignorant.
  • A lesson in humility springs from Severino's philosophy, however one may judge its Parmenidean assumptions: humility which, if it makes man more a spectator than an actor, is nevertheless indispensable to him as knowledge of his own measure. And the second lesson that can be derived from this philosophy is respect for the world and for the things of the world which, if they are authentic realities, cannot be reduced to nothing by human endeavour. Finally (and this is certainly not the least important thing), the philosophy that Severino defends places the recognition of truth, whatever it may be, even if painful and unpleasant for man, as the supreme value. Humility, respect, fidelity to the truth are not values that are commonly recognised and defended in the contemporary era. I do not know whether it is essential to go back to Parmenides in order to rediscover them. It is certain, however, that in this age the fascination of nothingness, which is expressed, among other things, in violence and destruction, plays a dominant role: and that those who fight it, by bringing its hidden sources to light, render a service not only to truth but to mankind itself.

Bibliography

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