Our homage to Emanuele Severino, the "philosopher of eternal being" who left us in these days: a brief reflection on nihilism starting from the great teaching of the Master.
di Robert Cecchetti
It is not easy, in a brief attempt to celebrate one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, to be able to write something that is not the mere repetition of a part of a thought so deep and rigorous that it wanted to be an expression of the truth. For Emmanuel Severino (1929 - 2020) what mattered was in fact being at the service of the truth: "If truth were something discovered or invented by myself, they would be allowed to get up and leave the classroom".Β This he used to repeat to his students.
I will try, taking up a recent work of mine, to see (certainly in a partial and incomplete way) how on the one hand the philosophy of Severinus in its originality and on the other the philosophical thought which, according to the great philosopher, was now coming to take shape as an expression of that fulfillment of Western philosophy inaugurated by the Greeks and which had to be resolved in that faith in being's return to nothingness which marks the very essence of nihilism.
La technique, according to this way of reading Western philosophy, it would in fact represent the culmination of this journey of thought, of this make mistakes, which finds its highest fulfillment precisely in idealism (especially in the radical idealist version of Dear, that evola turn into magical idealism). In fact, the most intimate meaning of nihilism, heralded by the event of death of god as a revealing expression of the disarming groundlessness of existence, as a place in which the field is cleared of the immutables, that is, from the so-called values ββor categories, it would be nothing more than faith in the becoming nothingness of being. In this path of Western thought, culminating in the nihilistic sense of the becoming of being, of its becoming nothing, not only the authentically violent sense of the will but also the overturning of being into temporality is inscribed, the overturning of being in that becoming which is, in fact, historical becoming.
The heart of the problem, Severino writes, consists of a temporal ambiguity:
Β«[The] being is precisely that which is opposed to nothing, it is precisely this opposition. [β¦] The simple opposition between being (understood as what is) and nothing (understood as what is not) remains in fact in the ambiguity; and in the ambiguity that luxuriant development of concepts begins, which leads Plato and Aristotle to reflect on the positive and the negative. Ambiguous, let's say, that simple opposition, because it can be understood - as in fact it began and continued to be understood - as a law, and albeit a supreme law, which governs being, but which governs it - here we are at heart of the labyrinth - as long as it is. The ambiguity, with these last words, has already become fatal; the sense of being has already waned. "
By introducing temporality, the as long as, the way is already open to the becoming of being that will find its fulfillment with the destruction of the eternals already recognized by Leopardi and then completed with Nietzsche and Gentile.
The path ofepisteme would thus have originated in the moment of "Party" as a primordial attempt to resist with will the nullifying grip of death. Emanuele Severino notes as follows: Β«The feast and everything that comes from it - myth, poetry, philosophy, techniques, science - are the different forms of the remedy devised by the mortal to endure pain and death. In this sense, all these different forms - and above all the party - are technical ".
Regarding the thought of Nietzsche, Severino explains:
Β«After having said that the" creative will "or" will to generate "is something that" liberates ", Zarathustra adds:" Away from God and from the gods this will enticed me; what on earth would be left to create if gods existed? [β¦] It is not a question, but an exclamation. The text says that if gods existed there would be nothing left to create. But why would there be nothing left to create? Zarathustra had said just before that God, besides the "Motionless" and the "Imperishable" is the "Full" and the "Satoll". Full of all reality: satiated with all reality. Not lacking in anything. Omnitudo realitatis. Ens quo maius cogitari nequit. Indeed the essential trait of the God of the Western tradition. But if the whole being is in God [β¦] then there is nothing left to create. And the "creative will" as a dimension other than God is annihilated. The will of this world, in fact, is creative because it draws out of the nothing what it creates. "
Here then is where the West comes with Nietzsche to the question of destruction of the immutable, of the elimination of divinity and even of time as the past, precisely for the purpose of affirming the will and freedom of the individual, who has now become the supreme interpreter and creator of himself and of the world. Either there is God or man's creative freedom. Vholiness of power, eternal return and transvaluation of values they are moments of one aspect and must be seen in their correlation.
And so Martin Heidegger in this text extrapolated from the vast work on Nietzsche on the question of European nihilism he will say that:
βIf the foundation of truth on beings as a whole constitutes the essence of metaphysics, then the transvaluation of all values, as the foundation of the principle of a new position of values, is in itself metaphysics. As a fundamental character of the entity as a whole, Nietzsche recognizes and posits what he calls the "will to power". With this concept it is not only defined what the entity is in its being. This title, "will to power", which has become very current from Nietzsche onwards, contains for him the interpretation of the essence of power. Each power is power only insofar as and as long as it is more-power, that is, enhancement of power. "
At this point it would be interesting to introduce the problem related to the unconscious, a problem that sometimes turns out to be the great implicit of philosophy, something that seems destined not to be adequately thematized.
In other words, we could ask ourselves whether the nucleus of that will now free from the immutables and which is limited in nothing, which turns out to be the center of the human, is a conscious will (of power) or not. If this will were to be unconscious, as the great fathers of psychology try to tell us, this would mean that the re-foundation of values, that is, of the ways of constructing reality, of creating it precisely starting from nothing (or from the unconscious?) , it would not belong at all to the light of consciousness and that the creation of the real would turn out to be idealistically unconscious.
Hence the disaster facing the West. Not only does the context of the West appear to be insane and therefore pathological but the very position of reality on the part of man would be nothing other than the outcome of the unconscious will to power. In this sense, not only has metaphysics generated a madness (that of technology, of capitalism) but on closer inspection it does not seem possible in modernity to free oneself fromoikos, from the home, as a place of the unconscious.
That things arise from war, from the clash with the barrier of reality that opposes and resists, means in a sort of radical idealism as the culmination of the madness of the West, that things, taken in their separateness, like theousia, to de ti, are thought of as a primary relationship between the unconscious as desire and the world as a necessity, or, at a second level, as the opposition and relationship between conscious and active will, aimed at modifying destiny, bringing in this the signs of one's own violence, and the world taken as other than itself, as a separate note. This occurs in that realism in which the relationship between certainty, how certainty ofepisteme, and truth is not yet dissolved by the thought of Descartes and then by the Kantian criticism which precisely breaks the relation of knowability between the ego and phenomena, remaining in any case the foundation of thing in itself unknowable but thinkable. The symbolic world and the real world originate from the first opposition, which later becomes that barrier against which the will will be thrown.
I mention here the question of sense, starting from the thought of Romano Madera, who was a pupil of Severino, for whom sense and orientation are closely connected with the problem of the crisis of the great agencies of sense that collapsed with the end of the patriarchy, which represented that social and economic configuration in which the domination of 'man on man (and not yet of the commodity on man). If indeed, investigating the psychological constitution in the anthropological sense of the human, according to the speculative-empirical experience of Carl Gustav Jung, we can indicate the essence of the unconscious as a desiring will, it must not escape that this will, which resides powerfully at the center of the human, is intertwined with philosophical thought and in particular with metaphysics through which the same history of the West would start as history of nihilism.
As Heidegger points out - in his reconnaissance on the way of understanding the meaning of nihilism, in and through Nietzsche - for Nietzsche the peculiar character of being is none other than the will to power, and in Schopenhauer the first form of nihilism would begin with a pessimistic streak. With reference to Aristotle, Heidegger, returns to the meaning of the word "category", To define it as" calling a thing for what it is, and precisely in such a way that through this calling, so to speak, the entity itself comes to speak in what itself is, that is, come to light and open in the public dimension ".
For Heidegger, another great philosopher with whom Severino has repeatedly confronted himself, the problem is fundamentally of a logical nature: in naming the thing, this thing, the entity, is summoned as tode you, something that is by itself and for itself, which shows itself before any other distinction as something that is, but at the same time, in showing itself as something in its own separateness, it shows itself starting from nothing as the logical foundation of every possible distinction. Now βit is not nothingness that before which the will recoils in fear, but the unwillingness, the annihilation of its own essential possibility. The horror of the void - this 'horror vacui' - is the 'fundamental fact of human will'Β».
The end, the purpose, the sense towards which the human will is directed is the concealment, the concealment of this horror of the annihilation of the will itself, as the will to power. Here then are the values, that is the categories, which would be only ways of grasping the entity through the will of the will to power. The transvaluation of values, as a process, is a historical process that culminates in the position of new values ββfor an afterlife.
The connection highlighted by Heidegger is therefore what allows us to go back to values, through their being placed as categories, Aristotelian and then Kantian (substance, quality, quantity, relationship), by a will to power, which in its process of accretimento cancels the old values ββin order to transvalue them. But it is properly il Logos like apophantic logos, that is logic, judgment as a judgment of the intellect, to grasp the values, or the categories, the sense.
Thus the categories with their intrinsic meaning, on which the development and history of the West depend, would reveal themselves to the will to power itself, which is the essence of that entity which is man, as fictitious constructions of meaning, of domain in the technical sense. The end is no more, the will to power is characterized as the foundation, still metaphysical according to Heidegger, of the categories, that is, of the way in which one refers to the entity and grasps it.
Now a similar will to power which must bear the nullity of the end is, to refer to the thought ofΒ who like Carl Gustav Jung thought, in our view, the dynamics of the unconscious in an idealistic perspective, a desiring will which, as a libidinal desire, must learn to desire according to conscious will in absolute freedom to determine itself. We find that precisely in the Nietzschean formulation of the will to power essential desiring character that connotes the human, and that within the Jungian device represents the very essence of the unconscious understood as a place of production desiring the real.
To conclude this brief attempt to clarify some issues that concern Severinian reading on the one hand and the culmination of Western thought, which already has its presuppositions, on the other.Β in the doctrine and metaphysics of Parmenides and then in Plato and Aristotle, we have already seen how the context of modernity moves in a system of madness, madness which implies that technology has become an end and no longer a means, and madness as a faith in the nientification of being and of the evidence of the becoming of being. In this context, it is first of all necessary to reflect on the possibility of consciously directing the volitional forces that generate reality starting from that dark background which is the unconscious following the indications of the fathers of depth psychology.
The great lesson of Emanuele Severino, in addition to representing one of the greatest and most rigorous efforts to rethink the history of Western thought, it presents itself as which radical alternative to the domination of madness, as a victory of the eternity of the entity in every moment of its appearance, and it is a philosophy that in giving voice to the truth not only still has the courage to name it but gives joy to those who have the strength to listen.Β
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