Emanuele Severino

"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."

"If we already take for granted what madness is, philosophy becomes completely superfluous."

"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."

"Cornelio Fabro essentially drew on Thomas Aquinas, while someone like Bontadini was first and foremost a Gentilean."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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].."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."