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