The Unfolding of Truth – 9: Emanuele Severino – The Inevitable Resolution of the Contradiction

The Final Contradiction

The journey of philosophy, from Parmenides to postmodernity, is marked by one recurring drama: the tension between Being and becoming.

Parmenides declared:

Being is; non-being is not.

And yet, all of history, Platonic dualism, Christian creation, Buddhist emptiness, modern subjectivity, has wrestled with the appearance of change:

• How can what is seem to pass away?
• How can something come from nothing, or return to nothing?
• How can identity persist in flux?

These questions have driven metaphysics, theology, and critique. But no system has resolved them. Most suspend the contradiction in mystery; others absorb Being into process; some deny it entirely.

Into this fractured legacy steps Emanuele Severino, not as one more voice among many, but as the clarifier of what has always been true and always misunderstood.

The Core Insight: What Is Cannot Not Be

Severino begins with an uncompromising insight:

Every being is. And what is cannot become nothing.

This is not a dogma; it is the very structure of thought. To deny it is to fall into contradiction. If we say a being can pass into nothing, then we presuppose that non-being exists, which is absurd, for non-being is precisely what is not.

Thus, the belief in becoming, that things come into being and pass away, is not simply mistaken; it is nihilism. It is the hidden assumption that being can become non-being.

But this, Severino shows, is impossible. Not because it’s irrational, but because it denies the most fundamental truth:

That Being is eternal, and no being can fall into nothingness.

Appearance as the Unfolding of the Eternal

If nothing truly ceases to be, then what of change, time, and history?

Severino does not deny them, but he redefines them.

• Beings appear in time, but time does not generate them.
• Becoming is not the creation or destruction of beings, but the appearing and disappearing of eternals in the horizon of experience.
• The “world” is not a flux of temporary things, but a structured appearing of eternal beings.

Everything that appears does so within an ordered totality, what Severino calls the eternal structure of Being. This structure is not imposed from outside; it is the necessary condition of anything appearing at all.

Hence, change is not a violation of identity, but the revealing of the immutable through the play of light and shadow.

The Resolution of Contraddizione C

Severino’s thought culminates in the exposure and resolution of Contraddizione C, the most hidden and most fundamental contradiction in the entire history of Western thought.

Contraddizione C is the belief, present in every tradition, that:

What is can become what is not.

Every act of creation, every concept of annihilation, every notion of becoming assumes this contradiction.

This belief lies beneath:

• Plato’s world of coming-to-be.
• Christianity’s creation ex nihilo.
• Buddhism’s emptiness.
• Modernity’s flux.
• Postmodernity’s fragmentation.

But Severino shows that this contradiction is not just erroneous; it is impossible. It cannot be the case that what is becomes nothing, or that nothing becomes something.

By unveiling this contradiction, Severino does not add a new interpretation; he dismantles the foundation of all nihilism. The world that appears is not born, does not die, and is not contingent.

It is the eternal appearing of what cannot not be.

All Beings Are Eternal

This recognition changes everything:

• The self is not a fleeting subject, but an eternal being appearing in time.
• Nature is not raw material, but a symphony of eternal presences.
• Death is not the annihilation of the self, but the withdrawal of its appearance, never its being.
• Thought is not a generator of truth, but the unveiling of what necessarily is.

Nothing is “merely” possible. Nothing is “only” temporary. Every being, every thing, every event, every self, is eternal.

The world is not a tragedy of loss or a drama of becoming. It is the necessary fullness of Being appearing as history.

Beyond the Myth of the West

Severino shows that the entire trajectory of the West, from Heraclitus and Plato to Christianity, Buddhism, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, has been shaped by one great myth:

That things come to be and pass away.

This myth, the belief in contingency, is the root of nihilism.

Even religion, which seeks to overcome suffering, often unknowingly rests on the assumption that the self could not be—that beings are created, and therefore can not be.

But if what is cannot not be, then:

• Creation is not bringing into being, but the appearing of the eternal.
• Salvation is not rescue from non-being, but the recognition of eternal identity.
• Joy is not escape, but the glory of necessity.

Severino does not refute these traditions by opposition. He shows that they were on the way, but still trapped in Contraddizione C.

The Fulfillment of the Journey

With Severino, the ancient insight of Parmenides is fulfilled, not repeated:

• Being is.
• Becoming is appearance, not being.
• Nothingness has no place.

And so, what seemed a distant metaphysical abstraction is revealed to be the deepest structure of reality.

The history of thought, its detours, tensions, failures, is not in vain. It is the necessary unfolding of the contradiction, so that it may be resolved.

Severino does not offer a system to believe in. He offers the clarification of what is necessarily true.

No longer must we choose between illusion and despair, becoming and annihilation. The truth has always been there:

Everything that is, is eternal.

The final step is not invention, but recognition.