The legacy of the philosopher Emanuele Severino
Technology has taken the upper hand over ideas, or at best has replaced them with ephemeral opinions, but one feels the absence of an extended rationality that gives back to man and his thought the possession and sure dominion of the paths to take and the awareness of the common good to be preserved. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali
At the foot of the gigantic pluri-ideological construction erected until the end of the 1900s sits a tired and confused humanity: globalization has wrapped up in a dusty limbo the fragments of the colossal cultural boulders which, fighting against each other, roll downstream disintegrating. Three years after his death we can explain the present using the powerful metaphor of the philosopher Emanuele Severino: Christianity, Islam, capitalism, communism, democracy are the gigantic boulders in constant conflict, drawn to collide as in a pile of rubble by the force of gravity cancels their mutually disruptive force. A role-playing and co-presence game – mind you – deprived of ethical taxonomies.
The dominion of technique over philosophy is capable of dissolving all ideologies: according to Severino, technique "is a giant capable of touching the sky with a finger", while its waste penetrates the anthropological dimension up to its ontological marrow, being it gets confused with existing, the wait-and-see attitude and nihilism of an existential condition emptied of strong motivations make us anxious and dissatisfied, under the weight of impending dangers, to the extreme nothingness of an indefinable 'cupio dissolvi'.
The moment is the new prevailing time dimension: in an instant by pressing a button the planet can be pulverized with nuclear destruction, in an instant – through unconsciousness or lucid madness – one can dispose of one's own life and that of others, in a nanosecond viruses mutants make us vulnerable to unstoppable pandemics. The sustainability between man and nature, the demographic and generational one and the balance which, between the thousands of difficulties that exist in things and the resistance and inner anxieties, could lead us for better or worse to a stable landing place are slowly dissolving the reassuring certainties we have painstakingly conquered. From whatever point of view one observes the planet and its humanity in constant and uncontrolled growth, one perceives, mainly, the conflicts and diasporas that ethical relativism does not recompose to unity: technology has taken over ideas, at most it has replaced with ephemeral opinions, but one feels the absence of an extended rationality that restores to man and his thought the possession and sure dominion of the paths to take and the awareness of the common good to be preserved: these are the values that ennoble the man and life.
Interculture and coexistence are discussed with ill-concealed euphemism knowing full well that they are reduced to assuming a summative value: there is no unanimously shared dimension since it would only be achieved under the strict control of a single economic and military superpower, which expresses the opposite of freedom and rampant subjectivities. It is therefore rather a multi-cultural dimension historically present but in constant conflict.
For this reason dictatorships have unlimited expansive aims and it is for this reason – as Prof. Vittorio E. Parsi pointed out – that “the defense of domestic democracy passes through the leadership of democracies in the world”.
What is happening in this first quarter of a century can become the radical, totalitarian, irreversible denial of a historical process that began at the end of the eighteenth century and ended after the last war: the progressive, slow, configuration of a world order based on the plurality of cultures and their different historical roots, subsequently on the consolidation of the principle of national identity and international relations in a framework of reassuring certainties and respect for the principle of self-determination of peoples that only the delusion of omnipotence and the violation of individual and social freedoms they can compress to destruction.
The succumbing of the individual is achieved through the denial of inalienable individual rights, the humiliation of diversities, gender identities, while the succumbing of a people – with the availability of destructive weapons that annihilate domestic, harmless everyday life – has the appearance of a renewed Holocaust that brings back the hands of that History that we had promised ourselves not to relive but which reappears in disguise – tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis – with renewed and changing delirium and unacceptable oblivion, in a now aware collective consciousness and participant, now closed and indifferent.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/leredita-del-filosofo-emanuele-severino/ on Sat, 22 Apr 2023 05:44:09 +0000.