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THE 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