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Emanuele Severino

69 quotes

“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we already take for granted what madness is, philosophy becomes completely superfluous.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cornelio Fabro essentially drew on Thomas Aquinas, while someone like Bontadini was first and foremost a Gentilean.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hemingway had learned that the pleasure of life is inseparable from pain: life is a struggle – it is “war”, said the ancient Heraclitus.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hemingway conceived sincerity as the supreme moral commandment. This applies above all to writing, which must not hide what man truly feels.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adam would have been victorious over his own sin only if he had eaten the forbidden fruit.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is a faith.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Taking refuge in nature is to shut oneself up within the walls of violence.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a matter of understanding that construction and destruction have the same soul...”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emanuele Severino, Il parricidio mancato, Adelphi, Milano, 1985.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emanuele Severino, La filosofia futura, Rizzoli, BUR Saggi, Milano, 2006, p. 121. ISBN 88-17-00946-6”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emanuele Severino, La follia dell'angelo, Rizzoli, Milano, 1997.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[...] 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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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]..”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source