Emanuele Severino and the lógos of téchne: an introduction

ABSTRACT

Following Heidegger, Severino called ‘technology’ the lógos that interprets the world according to our fundamental belief in téchne. He considered Giacomo Leopardi to be the only thinker who brought this ideology to its logical conclusion: if we can transform the world, then everything is meaningless. We try to escape this conclusion, but if Severino is right, we cannot. His philosophy thus reminds us that we still aren’t aware of the fundamental meaning of our beliefs. Confronting its arguments may help us become more self-aware and, perhaps, even move us to question the unquestionable.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology
• death
• becoming
• absolute truth
• metaphysics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) was an Italian philosopher. He wrote around eighty or more books but, as of today, only two have been translated into English: The Essence of Nihilism (2016) and Law and Chance (2023). English readers can also find a collection of his essays entitled Nihilism and Destiny (2012). The present paper introduces only one facet of Severino’s discourse. All titles and passages from Severino’s works quoted here are original translations. The bibliography lists these in alphabetical order according to their original Italian title. In case of interest in other facts of Severino's philosophy, please see Pitari, ‘Emanuele Severino on the Meaning of Scientific Specialization: An Introduction' (2019); Pitari, ‘Martin Heidegger and Emanuele Severino: A Dispute on the Meaning of Technology' (2022); Pitari, ‘Aeschylus at the Origin of Philosophy: Emanuele Severino's Interpretation of the Aeschylean Tragedies' (2022); and Pitari, ‘Dostoevsky's Philosophy: A Critical Overview of Its Interpretations and a Definition of Its Contradiction' (2023).

2 Severino dedicated three works to Leopardi: Nothingness and Poetry: At the End of the Age of Technology, Leopardi (Il nulla e la poesia: alla fine dell’età della tecnica, Leopardi, 1990), Mysterious and Wonderful Thing: The West and Leopardi (Cosa arcana e stupenda: l’occidente e Leopardi, 1997), and On the Road with Leopardi: The Final Game on the Fate of Humankind (In viaggio con Leopardi: la partita sul destino dell’uomo, 2015).

3 This is, e.g., the sense of this passage from Severino’s Around the Meaning of Nothingness (Intorno al senso del nulla, 2013): ‘the will – that is, conscious power – makes use of means to realize ends … from its genesis … to the advent of the civilization of technology’ (ISN 57).

4 The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy provides evidence for the appropriateness of Severino’s historical analysis when it states that ‘a permanent philosophical urge is to diagnose contingency as disguised necessity (Leibniz, Spinoza), although especially in the 20th century there have been equally powerful movements, especially associated with Quine, denying that there are substantive necessary truths, instead regarding necessity as disguised contingency’ (ODP 247).

5 Two further examples: (1) in Practical Ethics (1979), Peter Singer proposes that ‘killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person’ (PE 191). Do you find this abhorrent? If so, what justifies your moral intuition? Isn’t Singer’s techno-scientific rationality coherent? Won’t the disabled infant only suffer miserably and create more suffering for those around it?; (2) in George Saunders’s ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ (2013), a group of scientists tortures some dozens of humans to produce perfect psychoactive drugs that will secure absolute well-being for the future of humankind, eternally. This could not have been done without torturing them, and the scientists succeeded. Do you find this torture immoral? How can you justify your will to stop the scientists? Wasn’t theirs a perfect cost-benefit analysis? The suffering of some dozen human beings cancelled the suffering of billions. If you stopped them, wouldn’t you be guilty of condemning billions to suffering?

6 Severino, Oltre il linguaggio, 71. And in Téchne: The Roots of Violence (Téchne: le radici della violenza, 2002), Severino adds that: ‘according to contemporary culture, the traditional forms of philosophical-theological knowledge – i.e. the knowledge that intended to determine the truth – must not anymore be regarded merely as the delusions of a social class out of touch with reality, but as morally blameworthy activities that intended to legitimize and rationalize the violence perpetrated by the dominating political classes, as well as the suffering and misery of the dominated. ‘Definitive truth’ is an action guilty of presenting as definitive and untouchable historical (contingent and emendable) convictions that establish the power of the dominant classes. The ‘definitive truth’ is guilty because it is the theoretical side of violence’ (T 71).

7 Severino, Oltre il linguaggio, 72.

8 What argument can our ideology offer against Redbeard? On what right do Human Rights stand? Redbeard tells us what we all take for granted: that there are no rights in nature, that the only natural truth is power, that everything else is delusion. He does nothing but turn our scientific beliefs into moral principles: nature is the survival of the fittest; therefore, we should act accordingly. If there are no rights in nature, so there aren’t amongst human beings. Then, the powerful decide what is right. The powerful are beyond good and evil. Just like the strongest lion is. Life is war, and the world is the battlefield.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; Freie Universität Berlin; Università Ca' Foscari Venezia.