All Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Norberto Bobbio, Umberto Cerroni, Umberto Eco, Italo Mancini, Paolo Rossi, Emanuele Severino, Gianni Vattimo, Che cosa fanno oggi i filosofi?, Bompiani, Milano, 1982."

"I have submitted myself to this process according to the rights that are accorded in my position. And I hope that you have taken it in all good faith that that is my intent to defend dignity and independence of the judiciary."

"It's an original ball for an original guy. It's the Marty Supreme Ball, not the Marty Normal Ball."

"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)"

"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."

"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)"

"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..."

"[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."

"Emanuele Severino, Il parricidio mancato, Adelphi, Milano, 1985."

"Emanuele Severino, La filosofia futura, Rizzoli, BUR Saggi, Milano, 2006, p. 121. ISBN 88-17-00946-6"

"Emanuele Severino, La follia dell'angelo, Rizzoli, Milano, 1997."

"I came to understand certain things after many years of study and research, and through my experiences. Afterwards, reintroducing myself to society was not easy. I had trouble recognizing human beings when I was on the street or on the tram. It was strange: I didn't understand if I was crazy or a mystic. But I realized that the journey on this planet is decisive. We must escape the rules of the universe."

"If you are unable to watch something different from yourself, it is because you need an enemy. Italian politics has influenced certain attitudes in this regard. In Venice, it has always been this way since Fellini onwards. Once, the police had to rescue Carmelo Bene because they wanted to kill him. They uprooted the chairs in the cinema."

"The crisis in human beings is decisive, otherwise existence is useless. I have taken refuge in what is called metaphysics because I am someone who believes that human beings are immortal."

"(Speaking of Giorgio Gaber) In the mid-1970s, we spent wonderful evenings talking and playing poker until morning. Giorgio was an impressive listener. He was extremely intelligent, curious, and open-minded. Being a perfectionist, he could not stand (and in this he was fierce) incivility, incompetence, sloppiness, delinquency as a philosophy of life... And then there was corrupt politics. [...] The passing of such a man in our midst was, for me, yet another proof that life is not a matter of chance."

"Inner evolution has no party. Those who want me on one side or the other do not appreciate my music, and if they think they do, it is a misunderstanding. In 1982, during a concert in Verona, I sang “Centro di gravita' permanente” and found myself surrounded by four thousand outstretched arms: it was mind-blowing. However, the left has committed crimes as horrible as those of the right throughout the world."

"I am naturally a contemplative person. Scents and the air are like a remote control that turns off the world for me."