Emanuele Severino: il cerchio dell'apparire

On the occasion of Emanuele Severino’s death this paper intends to call attention to one of his theories that is both important and original but has been little taken into account by the critics: it is his denial of the empirical givenness of becoming as commonly conceived, i. e. as a passage from nothing to being or from being to nothing. According to Severino becoming is unquestionable, but if all is eternal and immutable it may only involve appearing and disappearing of beings, not rising and failing of them. Nevertheless if all is really immutable even the existence of something like appearing and disappearing of beings seems hardly possibile. Maybe Severino succeeds in warding off this objection because he in one way manages to outline a universe where all is eternal and immutable even though some beings appear and disappear, but he can only do this at the cost of a complete objectification of the individual subject and so he neglects a basic phenomenological datum.