Tag: Nihilism
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The Difficult Truth
On the Chasm Between Severino’s Eternity and the Human Condition Introduction: The Philosopher’s Paradox This is a peculiar phenomenon observed in the halls of academia: a philosopher can achieve a masterful command of the necessary truth of eternal being, a truth whose logical framework Severino demonstrated, and yet display anxiety over a career milestone, vehement…
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Truth Does Not Need Defenders
After following the path that led truth from certainty to suspicion, from shared horizon to provocation, one temptation remains. The temptation to defend truth. It is understandable. If truth has been relativized, dismissed, or treated as dangerous, it seems natural to want to restore it, to argue for it, to protect it from distortion. Yet…
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Why Truth Keeps Reappearing
If truth has been so thoroughly questioned, relativized, and displaced, a natural question arises. Why does it keep coming back? Despite repeated declarations of its demise, truth remains indispensable. It returns in places where it was supposed to be irrelevant. Science relies on it. Ethics invokes it. Justice presupposes it. Even movements that explicitly reject…
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Why Truth and Freedom Are Not Opposites
One of the deepest assumptions shaping modern thought is the idea that truth and freedom stand in opposition to one another. Truth is associated with constraint, limitation, and obligation. Freedom, by contrast, is understood as openness, choice, and self-determination. To be free is to decide for oneself. To accept truth is to submit. This assumption…
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Dialogue After Truth, and Why It Fails
In a culture that has learned to distrust truth, dialogue is often presented as the alternative. Where truth is seen as rigid or exclusionary, dialogue is offered as open, inclusive, and humane. The idea is simple. If no one can claim to be right in any definitive sense, then conversation can remain fluid and non-threatening.…
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Nihilism Without Drama
When the word nihilism appears, it often evokes dramatic images. Despair, meaninglessness, moral collapse, or a refusal of all values. But the form of nihilism that shapes much of contemporary thought is far quieter and far more pervasive. It does not announce itself. It hides behind reasonable assumptions about change, freedom, and openness. At its…
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What Truth Ultimately Concerns
Up to this point, we have clarified what truth is not. It is not opinion, belief, consensus, usefulness, or sincerity. But this still leaves the central question open. If truth is not any of these things, what does it actually concern? At its most basic level, truth concerns what is. This may sound trivial, almost…
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Truth Is Not an Opinion
One of the most common misunderstandings in contemporary discourse is the idea that truth is simply a stronger version of opinion. According to this view, people have beliefs, preferences, interpretations, and values, and truth is just what someone happens to hold more firmly, or what a majority happens to agree upon. This assumption is so…
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The Unspoken Rules of Intelligence
Before asking what is true, or even whether truth exists, there is a more basic question that often goes unnoticed. What makes intelligent dialogue possible at all? We usually think of discussion as something natural. People talk, disagree, exchange views, and sometimes reach understanding. But none of this is automatic. Dialogue only works because certain…
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When Truth Disappears, Emotion Takes Its Place
When truth no longer functions as a shared reference point, something else inevitably fills the gap. In contemporary culture, that something is emotion. This is not because emotions are new or suddenly more intense. Human beings have always felt anger, fear, empathy, pride, and shame. What has changed is their role. Emotion has shifted from…
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From Truth to Perspectives: How Postmodernism Reframed Reality
To understand why truth has become so problematic, we need to look at a profound shift in how reality itself has been understood in recent decades. This shift is often gathered under the broad and somewhat vague label of postmodernism. Postmodernism did not begin as an attack on truth. It emerged as a reaction to…
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Why Truth Has Become a Provocation
There is hardly anything more divisive today than the claim that there is truth. To say it out loud is often enough to trigger suspicion or outright dismissal. One risks being labeled reactionary, dogmatic, authoritarian, even dangerous. The mere suggestion that something might be true—not just personally meaningful or emotionally resonant, but true—has become deeply…
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Introduction
The word truth comes from the Greek aletheia. It does not mean correctness, accuracy, or agreement. It means unconcealment, unveiling, what is no longer hidden, what shows itself. For the Greeks, truth was not something one invented or possessed. It was something that happened. Something that emerged when what is allowed itself to be seen…
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Beyond Faith and Reason – 3: Reason Triumphant – The Collapse of the Sacred and the Rise of the Isolated Mind
Introduction: The Crown of Reason There is perhaps no moment more decisive in Western consciousness than the exaltation of reason in the modern age. It arrives with fanfare and confidence, casting off the veils of superstition and declaring the dawn of enlightenment. For many, this marked a liberation from the oppressive dogmas of the past.…
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The Wound of Time – 3: The Self as Timeline — Identity in the Prison of Becoming
We are taught to think of ourselves as stories. From childhood, the self is described as a process — something that develops, grows, matures, breaks, heals, changes. We are told to “become who we are,” to “work on ourselves,” to trace our identity through our memories, our traumas, our achievements, our transformations. In this view,…
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The Wound of Time – 1: The Appearance of Time and the Fear of Disappearing
There is a fear that runs deeper than all others — one that haunts every joy, waits at the edge of every accomplishment, and whispers beneath even our happiest moments. It is the fear that what is will not last. That we, and all we love, will vanish. That time will take everything. This fear…
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Male & Female 1: The Polarity of Being – Male and Female as a Fundamental Structure
Polarity is woven into the fabric of reality. From the forces governing the cosmos to the tiniest particles in physics, the universe operates through the tension and balance between opposites. One of the most fundamental and enduring polarities is that of male and female. This polarity isn’t just a social or cultural construct—it reflects a…
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Know Thyself – 7: The Culture of Self-Making and the Tyranny of Becoming
You can be whatever you want to be.” But what if that is the root of our confusion? Modern culture does not ask us to know ourselves; it demands that we make ourselves.This shift, often hailed as liberation, has become a new tyranny. We are no longer born with a destiny to recognize, but with…
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Know Thyself – Introduction
The Crisis of Identity and the Return to Being We live in an age where identity is everything, and nothing. It is affirmed, debated, deconstructed, weaponized, and endlessly remade. To belong or to be excluded, to find one’s “true self” or to reject the very idea of a fixed self; these now lie at the…
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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: These questions have driven metaphysics,…
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The Unfolding of Truth – 8: Modernity – From Substance to Subject and the Collapse of Metaphysics
The Turning Point: From the World to the Self With the collapse of the medieval synthesis, the philosophical gaze shifted dramatically. No longer anchored in substance metaphysics or a transcendent order, modernity turned inward, to the thinking subject as the new foundation. This was not merely a shift in emphasis. It marked the beginning of…
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The Unfolding of Truth – 7: Scholasticism and the Domestication of Metaphysics – The Final Attempt Before the Fall
The Afterglow of Revelation and the Return of Aristotle As the Middle Ages matured, a remarkable convergence took place: the truths of revelation were increasingly systematized through the lens of Greek metaphysics, particularly that of Aristotle. The fusion promised much: clarity, coherence, and the ability to defend faith through reason. Yet behind this synthesis lay…
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The Unfolding of Truth Through the History of Thought – Introduction
Throughout the history of human thought, there has been a persistent intuition, often obscured, often contradicted, yet never entirely extinguished, that reality is not what it seems. From the first metaphysical inquiries in ancient Greece to the contemplative insights of Eastern sages, from the mystical speculation of late antiquity to the rational rigor of modern…
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Christianity and the Structure of Being– Conclusion: Christianity Was Never Meant to End in Dualism
The Return to What Has Always Been True Throughout this series, we’ve traced a path—one not of rejection, but of return. Not a return to doctrine as it has been taught, nor to metaphysics as it has been inherited, but to the truth Christianity has always carried within itself: that what-is cannot not be. That…
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Christianity and the Structure of Being– 3: The Persistence of the Platonic Framework
From Augustine to Modernity: How Christianity Carried the Logic of Annihilation By the time Christianity emerged as the dominant religious force of the Roman Empire, the seeds of a deeper metaphysical tension had already been sown. The Christian proclamation of the eternal had fused with the Platonic suspicion of time, matter, and change. The result…
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Christianity and the Structure of Being – 2: The Infiltration of Platonism
How Greek Metaphysics Entered Christian Thought In its earliest centuries, Christianity encountered a world saturated with Greek philosophy. Among the many schools of thought that shaped late antiquity, none was more influential—or more seductive—than Platonism. Plato offered a majestic metaphysical vision: a realm of eternal, unchanging Forms—the true Being of which all sensible things were…
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Christianity and the Structure of Being– Introduction to the Series
From Dualism to Destiny For centuries, Christianity has offered the Western world its deepest intuitions about the eternal: that life does not end in death, that the person is sacred, that love is stronger than the grave, and that a kingdom without end is not only possible—but promised. And yet, these luminous insights have long…
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The Final Non-Duality 2 – Buddhism: Emptiness and the Movement Beyond Suffering
The Eternal Structure Misread as Impermanence Among the spiritual paths of the world, Buddhism stands out for its analytical clarity and radical focus on the problem of suffering. Its foundation — the Four Noble Truths — begins not with metaphysical speculation but with existential urgency: dukkha, the suffering that characterizes life, and the promise of…
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The Last Dualism 3 – Awakening Without Becoming
The Contradiction of Enlightenment in the Light of Eternal Being The modern non-dual discourse is saturated with the language of awakening. One is said to awaken from illusion, from ego, from time, from the false self. This awakening is often described as a shift, a transformation, a sudden recognition, or the end of seeking. For…
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The Last Dualism 2 – The Myth of the Body’s Illusion
Plato’s Legacy and the Persistence of the Great Dualism In the midst of today’s non-dual revival, a strange contradiction persists. While the language of unity, presence, and wholeness is widespread, the body—this visible, touchable, vulnerable being—is often spoken of as an illusion, a veil, a mistake. In countless spiritual teachings, the body is subtly or…
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It Is What It Is 