"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."
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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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