Severino Was Right

Nonbeing doesn't exist

The other day I was engaged in some deep philosophical mulling. By mulling I don’t mean a kind of vague pointless stewing, so much as a kind of brewing of healthful, slightly intoxicating, spicy and complex wine, though admittedly it could have gone either way. Swampy irresolution is always a possibility.

In any case, as I was mulling, an insight suddenly flashed into my mind like lightning: Severino was right!

The Severino I have in mind is the great 20th century Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino, who has gradually been coming more to the attention of the English speaking world over the last couple of decades. I previously wrote an essay on his ontological thought here.

It is his ontological thought I think he was right about. Severino argued that there is an essential error in Western thought (and that of much of human thought, though he focused on the Western tradition). This error is the belief that things don’t exist, then exist, and then again don’t. That realities cease to be. That things outside of the present moment don’t exist.

To comprehend Severino’s basic insight about this one has to follow a fairly simple train of logic while actually being open to being convinced that our language and usual habits of thought may have led us into false beliefs.

Here is the argument: a thing, once existing, cannot be deprived of existence. To assert that something that exists then later doesn’t is utterly meaningless. It is also true that something that will eventually exist- something whose eventual existence logically, or causally, follows from the totality of causes currently present and their inevitable interaction¹ already possesses existence.

Before digging into the logic a little more here I want to take a moment to help ease you into Severino’s point of view further by pointing out that this is the picture suggested by physics and affirmed by Einstein. Many physicists will affirm what’s called the “block universe” theory, which follows from Einstein’s thought. In its simplest form, this is the idea that the future interplay of all existing causes is just as certain as the past interplay of them. What definitely will be- because it follows from the laws of physics- already is. This coheres with the assertion of physicists that the laws of physics play out in the same way forwards and backwards, and in a sense time is an illusion.

For those tempted to yell “Quantum!” at this point, I’d argue that the indeterminate, probabilistic state of unobserved—or future— energy (i.e. particles, waves) is just the way things looks to us—mathematically— from the vantage of the present moment. From where we stand, future moments are indeed “fuzzy” on a sub-atomic level, consisting of probabilities which “collapse” when observed. From the standpoint of eternity, though, the probabilities have all collapsed in to the form they were always determined to by the play of events from the beginning- or, if you prefer, from the end of time.

I find the science of the block universe compelling. I am also convinced that at least the eternal logical existence of past and present follows from Spinoza’s simple argument that causality, properly understood, means determinism. What won me over to Severino’s vision though was simply pondering what it means to say that something exists, and what it would mean to say then that it does not. I think that Severino is right— as was Parmenides— in asserting that to say something exists is to say that it always exists.

I’m going to sidestep the inevitable concerns with free will that come up here and direct you instead to my essay on Spinoza’s understanding of this issue here.

For now I want to keep our eyes trained on the big picture and Severino’s argument. Ask yourself this: once something exists, what would it mean to say that a moment later it does not exist?

Certainly it has ceased to appear to us, but in every other way it is still real and exerts force on reality just like any other thing or event. The fact that it arose in the chain of events is part of every subsequent moment of the universe, and there is no way— either retroactively, or with regards to causality— to now say that it does not exist. Basically what Severino is saying is that objects don’t disappear when we’re not looking at them.

Further, as Young Sheldon so sagaciously realized (below), nothing - the concept “nothing” does not exist. Nothing, or non-existence, is a logical, not ontological, entity. It is imaginary. It is the affirmation of negation. It plays a a needed role in logic and math, but there is, well, no such thing as “nothing.”

For Severino, to perceive things under the aegis of reason would be to understand that already existent things come into view and then disappear from view while continuing to exist. For Severino, this is a happy vision:

“The Whole rejoices because its completeness is not perishable, but eternal. This eternity is the foundation of all joy. But all is eternal. All, in the most intense and richest of senses: each of the things and each form, appearance, state, gesture, shadow, mention, startle, relation of theirs. Each of the things and their staying all together gathered within the Whole.”

As I wrote in my other piece on Severino:

“We turn back some millennia,” writes Severino, “and things- for instance, voices coming from the street- have always been there, together with the rain that surrounds them this evening and the lamp suffusing the room with light. We move onwards for millennia, and they are there forever, just as they now appear, in their entirety.”

According to Severino we already know this in our depths. Our denial of this truth feeds our obsession with control and our pursuit of imaginary salvations from a nothingness that doesn’t exist. “We are Joy,” he writes, pointing not to a passing emotion but a deep feeling more akin to the Vedantic concept of ananda which one feels in the presence of the infinite. “The word does not indicate a psychological feeling: it indicates the rejoicing of the Whole for its being Whole. Fulfilment of every need, liberation from every pain, filling up of every lacuna.” 

Reading this I can’t help wonder about events which no intelligent being was aware of at the time. If no one ever witnessed the birth of our sun, then it was never experienced. If it was never experienced, did it ever appear from out of the occulted depths of the existent but non-appearing? Does it ever arise from having the same status that a past event has for a conscious being into the status that a remembered or experienced event has?

It seems the answer is no, although of course an event like that still has eternal existence, and may, millennia later, even become an experience for a being as when millions of humans, learning about such a theoretical but actual event, then imagine it.

If, however, the universe is panpsychic —which I think it is— then such an event was conscious of itself! Not in a complex, intellectual way, of course— unless the sun really is a god. Saving that, however, the birth of a sun would occur within the very basic, non-self-conscious —because lacking a nervous system— awareness of atoms and light beams.

And So?

As I wrote in my other essay on Severino, this still leaves us with a question: do we care?

Well, I do. I find Severino’s view soothing, beautiful, and explanatory. For the deterministic aspect—which is important to me— I would again direct you to my work on Spinoza, but I find the above three things to be true even with regards to the ontological aspect.

The view of the universe as an unchanging, eternal, complete mansion of being which effectively we walk through, I find beautiful. Severino’s assertion that something about this vision offers us a joy which overcomes all pain resonates with me, although I can’t explain exactly why this should be so.

I do like to think that the most beautiful aspects of my childhood still exist, not lost to time or non-being, but rather eternally existent and preserved, forever part of the unchanging fabric of the All. Like one of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians², one can find comfort in the fact that the dead will always live, and choose to enjoy the still-existent delightful moments of one’s life, making them a home for the mind.

What do you think?

Photo by Johannes Plenio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-brown-trees-1632790/

1. Here I am showing my Spinozist undershirt.

2. In Slaughterhouse-Five.