Table Of ContentTHE ESSENCE OF NIHILISM
THE ESSENCE OF NIHILISM
EMANUELE SEVERINO
TRANSLATED BY GIACOMO DONIS
EDITED BY INES TESTONI AND ALESSANDRO CARRERA
This translation was supported by the University of Padua, with
thanks to the master’s program in Death Studies & the End of Life,
directed by Ines Testoni, and special thanks to rector emeritus
Vincenzo Milanesi and rector emeritus Giuseppe Zaccaria.
Verso Books acknowledges the support of the Ugo Di
Portanova Fund for Italian Studies at the University of Houston,
directed by Alessandro Carrera, for editing this book.
This English-language edition published by Verso 2016
Originally published in Italian by Paideia as Essenza del nichilismo
© Adelphi Edizioni 1982
Translation © Giacomo Donis 2016
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-611-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-610-6 (HBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-612-0 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-613-7 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text UK, Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
FOREWORD
Severino’s Magical Castle
by Alessandro Carrera
Fear of Death? What about Eternity …
by Ines Testoni
INTRODUCTION
The Structure of Western History and the Supersession of
the Alienated Critique of Alienation
PART ONE
I. Returning to Parmenides
II. Returning to Parmenides (Postscript)
PART TWO
I. The Path of Day
II. The Earth and the Essence of Man
III. On the Meaning of the “Death of God”
IV. Alienation and the Salvation of Truth
PART THREE
Aletheia
Concluding Remark (1982)
Notes
Index
Foreword
SEVERINO’S MAGICAL CASTLE
BY ALESSANDRO CARRERA
Emanuele Severino has fashioned a philosophical system that works like a
magical castle. The Essence of Nihilism is the key to the main entrance, but
the reader must be warned: it will take quite some time to explore the whole
building. You get in, lose yourself in its hallways and rooms, and even if
you do not agree with the architecture, which is perhaps too solid for your
postmodern sensibility, you do not want to get out. The next turn will open
up an unexpected view on the interior; the sudden shift of a window curtain
will allow you to glimpse outside. From those impregnable walls, you will
be able to look from a distance at what the modern world has become. See
over there the sad fate of religion dissecting God to bits and pieces for
ungodly purposes; witness from a balcony the inevitable decline of all
totalitarian systems, including planetary capitalism; get a chill from the next
window down the corridor while you watch the military parade of
technology passing by. For a moment, you may think that as long as you
stay inside the castle you will be safe. Outside, everything is transient and
destined to decay. Inside, everything is incontrovertible, eternal, joyous, and
glorious.
Then Severino himself, like the gentle host he is, will come to tell you
that you are mistaken. There is no safe haven from the pervasive nihilism of
a civilization embracing the unquestioned belief that “all things must pass.”
You should welcome the opposite notion instead, that nothing passes and
everything is eternal inside and outside the castle. To be more accurate:
everything goes beyond, everything crosses the threshold of what appears,
fading away into the invisible land of what does not appear. What no longer
appears, however, stays; and stays forever, because there is no place where
what has been, is, or will be can cease to exist. You object that the wisdom
of the world says the opposite. It says that there is no place where that
which does not appear could reside. But Severino will give you no quarter.
Can Being turn into nothingness? Can nothingness really turn into Being?
Do you really believe that?
Nietzsche was elated and terrified at the intimation of the Eternal
Return. Heidegger despaired over the inadequacy of language to
conceptualize the Event that changes the history of Being. For his part,
Severino will suggest that the terror at the idea that nothing goes away, or
the cry over the impossibility of rationalizing the logic of Becoming, must
be superseded by the realization that our transience and our pains, as great
as they are, are already comprehended in the glory of All-Being, whose
fundamental emotion is Joy.
Firmly anti-Nietzschean and anti-Heideggerian, Severino has always
opposed Being’s submission to the tyranny of time. In his vision, the
ultimate nihilism of our civilization has been (and is) to reduce Being to a
product of time. Aiming to counter such “Western folly,” Severino argues
for a triple eternity: eternity of the entity, eternity of the horizon where the
entity appears, and eternity of the Order where entities hide or show
themselves against the horizon of appearing. The anti-Platonic edifice that
Severino has built is not meant to demonstrate that the everyday world is
just an appearance and that we live in the Matrix. On the contrary,
Severino’s point is that every appearance is, no matter how deceiving, since
it could not reside outside of Being. That everything exists forever and
everything is eternal does not mean that the empirical you and I are
immortal in time (eternity is not immortality), but that each moment, every
slice of reality is, and therefore is forever, since whatever is cannot come
into being or cease to be.
Initially billed as “Neoparmenidism,” Severino’s philosophy is an all-
encompassing critique of the “wrong path” taken by post-Parmenidean
metaphysics, namely, the assumption that time and becoming are self-
evident, need no demonstration, and consequently, in violation of
Parmenides’ sharp distinction between Being and non-being, it is
acceptable to think that beings come into being or emerge from nothing
only to disappear into nothingness after their time has run its course.
Paraphrasing King Lear, Severino wants you to understand that “nothing
will come of nothing.” Beings cannot “come into being”; either they are or
they are not. Not only that: beings cannot be created. The very act of
creation implies that things can emerge from nothing by virtue of an
external agency and, as long as they have been brought into the world, can
be annihilated too. In the 1960s, Severino’s criticism of the nihilistic core of
creation led him to a long and painful dispute with the Vatican hierarchy
and the Catholic University in Milan, where he was an associate professor.
The controversy culminated in 1970 with a verdict of heresy from the
Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (now the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith) and the termination of his appointment.
The assumption that beings come into being and return to nothingness,
either by creation or by production, gives rise to the notion that the world
can be produced or destroyed as it pleases God or man. Yet, if all beings
exist eternally (in a sense that has nothing to do with the religious notion of
eternal life or eternity imagined as time stretching into infinity), they cannot
be annihilated. Equally critical of Catholic creationism and Heidegger’s
emphasis on time and ontological difference at the expense of Being;
equally critical of communism and capitalism (both based on a nihilistic
faith in the infinity of production), Severino’s philosophical enterprise has
commanded respect, not to mention fascination, even among thinkers who
could not disagree more with him.
The greatest challenge in The Essence of Nihilism is the problematic
connection between destiny and agency, i.e., between the implied absence
of possibilities on the part of human agents and the chance of overcoming a
destiny that is stronger than any personal or historical chance. We will not
deny that Severino’s positions may encounter resistance and refutations.
Coming from a phenomenological-hermeneutic background, we too feel
challenged by Severino’s criticism of interpretation, possibility, and
decision. Yet Severino asks questions that cannot be easily dismissed, and
he does so with an extraordinary logical and stylistic consistency.
His account of Plato’s creation of “the world” bears a striking
resemblance to the emergence of the primal signifier in Lacan’s Seminar,
Book VII. Plato’s parricide of Parmenides did not open up “a” world but
“the” world—the world of appearances and ideas, the world where we
constantly negotiate between the imaginary and the symbolic. Plato’s world
is the signified of the signifier that summons the fullness of Being into the
light of Appearing—the light of the phenomena. The price Plato paid,
however, was the nullification of Being’s Oneness. Plato reduced the
absolute Real of Parmenides’ Being, where there was no place for the
nuances of possibility and impossibility, to the disposable remainder of pre-
dialectic times.
Severino has taken upon himself the Herculean task of bringing back
the Real of Being, knowing very well that his “discourse in the Real of
Being” cannot but look paradoxical and untenable to the “discourse of
philosophy,” which has established itself precisely on the dismissal of that
Real. When Severino says that every totality of appearing is eternal (every
moment, every segment of each thing that is happening in any moment in
time), what exactly is he saying? Let’s put it this way: if we could take a
picture of the whole universe in a specific moment, and if we could discern
in that picture each thing that is actually happening (not unlike the vision
haunting the narrator in Borges’s “The Aleph”), what we would see would
not be “the world,” because the world is made of visible and invisible
things, of beings and ideas, of the past that is no more and the future that is
not yet.
What would we see instead? We would see a piece of the Real, of “the”
Being without the reassuring barriers of the symbolic order. A synchronic
picture of every totality of appearances that has disappeared from the
horizon of appearing, and of every totality of appearances that will appear
within the horizon of appearing, including the totality of appearing that
appears in the moment the picture is taken, would be perhaps a not
inadequate approximation of Severino’s Being. Possibly, it would be
something akin to the synchronic vision of Rome that appeared to Freud at
the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents.
Severino’s salvific message, beginning with Destino della necessità:
Katà tò chreón (1980/1999) and continuing today, does not rely on an easy
ecumenism. It is a salvation without God, but not without Gnosis, and
Gnosis requires initiation. We sense Gnostic overtones in Severino’s use of
theologically charged terms such as “Joy” and “Glory.” His assertion that
becoming is a state in the horizon of appearing that is always-already
overcome by eternity, and that all the evil in the world is always-already
overcome in the eternal Joy, is akin to a Gnostic claim. To be sure,
Severino’s Gnosis includes neither a clumsy Demiurge (unless, in an ironic
reversal of Plato’s Timaeus, the Demiurge is Plato himself) nor a
renunciation of the world of the flesh. Yet there are many paths to Gnosis,
and one of them is the exaltation of the “divine spark” preceding or
replacing creation, present in every soul, and exempt from annihilation
because it coexists with God. It is the “dew of light” of Isaiah 26:19 that
becomes the eternal shine in the Corpus Hermeticum and among the
Valentinians. God, as Severino has often pointed out, is not the same as
Being. Very much like God, however, Severino’s Being is causa sui. Was it
the old specter of Gnosis that in 1970 scared the Holy Office into declaring
him a heretic?
FEAR OF DEATH? WHAT ABOUT ETERNITY …
BY INES TESTONI
Emanuele Severino’s journey starts at only eighteen years of age, in 1947,
when in his thesis Heidegger and Metaphysics, against the dominant
interpretations, he defends the idea that Heidegger can be viewed as a
metaphysician. And although this is one of his first significant
contributions, his perspective does not yield to the phenomenological
fashion of the day, from which he distances himself immediately. In those
years, after the predominance of Benedetto Croce’s and Giovanni Gentile’s
neo-idealism, Italian intellectuals were developing a strong interest in other
European philosophies like phenomenology, existentialism, logical
empiricism, pragmatism, and Marxism. However, none of these
philosophies was compelling enough to influence the trajectory of
Severino’s thought.
Severino’s academic and intellectual career was very precocious as well
as brilliant. When he was only twenty-two, he obtained a lecturer position
in theoretical philosophy. Later, after serving as full professor in moral
philosophy at the Catholic University in Milan, he became full professor of
theoretical philosophy at the University of Venice, where he is now
emeritus. Drawing the attention of the Holy Office, he became one of the
last thinkers to undergo an inquisition process and to be convicted for his
ideas. Later in life, he became a member of the prestigious Accademia dei
Lincei,1 and he was nominated Cavaliere di Gran Croce by the president of
the Italian Republic. He still teaches courses in Fundamental Ontology at
