Emanuele Severino - The Essence of Nihilism

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 Beings 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, Severinos 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, Severinos 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, Severinos 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 Heideggers 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), Severinos philosophical enterprise has commanded respect, not to mention fascination, even among thinkers who could not disagree more with him.