The Truth of War: Emanuele Severino

War and violence appear to hold sway over the earth with an impetus and force that are cause for stupor among the most ‘civilised’ peoples of the globe. And yet, the origin of those wars and that violence are sought for the most part at an empirical level – or, equivalently, at a level of cause and effect: namely, as the historical axes that have determined the particular outbreak of a conflict, as the political conditions that have prepared the ground for a certain discharge of violence, as the psychological factors that have entailed the accumulation of material and mental tensions, and so forth. Regardless of the coordinates of these enquiries – namely, regardless of how ‘essential’, ‘fundamental’ or even ‘philosophical’ the origin of war and violence should appear to be (as the anthropological essence of the human, the entropic law of matter, the will to power of life itself, etc.) – all these attempts take place as part of the same matrix of meaningfulness and signification: namely, the same matrix of what it means to be a meaning or a being. What, however, if that very matrix had always already determined the very meanings of war and violence (and yet, in no ‘empirical’ or ‘ontic’ way)? If war and violence were the essence of every action and every thinking (every praxis and every theory), then both every belligerent act and every pacific one, every justice and every injustice, would in fact partake of the same essence of violence. The very means through which every pacific and pacifist act were to try to bring about peace would have in fact always already been acts of war and violence. War would be the truth of everything that has ever been or appeared.

Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) has devoted more than six decades to the study of that matrix (the structure of everything that is and appears), its primary determinations and its essential meanings (among which the ones of ‘war’, ‘violence’ and ‘technics’). War: Violence and Technics in the West (London: Bloomsbury, 2026) is the latest volume published in the series of The Works of Emanuele Severino, and it includes some of the essential elements entailed by that matrix or structure. ‘War is the mother of all things’, writes Heraclitus in fragment 53;1placeholder what if, Severino asks, one were on the contrary to assert that ‘the thing is the mother of all wars’? Namely, what if the matrix in accordance with which every thing (every meaning, every being) acquires its meaningfulness were also the origin – i.e., the matrix, the mother – of all violence? What if the meaning of the Thing were the meaning of War?

This is indeed what Severino had been trying to show at least since his groundbreaking essay ‘Returning to Parmenides’ (1964), then included in the volume The Essence of Nihilism (1972; London: Verso, 2016) – but in fact, already since his first and in many ways most important work, The Originary Structure (1958; London: Bloomsbury, 2025). The Thing – every thing – consists in an oscillation between being and nothing: an epamphoterízein, writes Plato in the Republic (479c). Every thing is a thing insofar as it can be other than what it is at present: every thing is a thing insofar as it becomes. It is of course true that, throughout its history, metaphysics has posited an immutable being – an entity, a god, an idea, a law, a principle, a concept, an institution – as guarantor of the non-contradictory existence of becoming (Aristotle, and Plato before him, had already understood that ‘no becoming may be possible if there exists nothing eternal’; Metaphysics, 999b 5); those immutable meanings and beings, however, have had to capitulate to the most manifest and indisputable self-evidence of every experience: the becoming-other of everything that is and appears. The history of Western metaphysics comes to an end with Hegel and Nietzsche precisely because there can be no absolute and immutable being that would not be dialecticised by the ‘unrest’ of Spirit or interpreted by the will to power. There are no facts, only interpretations – nor are there any gods – precisely to the extent that every necessary being must give up its independent and in-itself meaning by submitting to the mediation that ‘I’ am. The possibility of being-other than itself constitutes the originally self-evident essence of every thing, being or meaning.

And yet, according to Severino, thinking that there is a time in which something-that-is no longer or not yet is constitutes the most incontrovertible meaning of impossibility; believing in the possibility and actuality of becoming constitutes the original alienation of the West: the ‘folly’ of nihilism – the belief that something that is may become, and therefore be, nothing. One will reply that – surely – a being is (‘Socrates is here’) when it is, and it is not when it is not: this is the content of the principle of non-contradiction; being is when it is and it is not when it is not. There is nothing more uncontroversial.

When being is not? If one were to assert that there is a time in which the circle is square, this would immediately appear as a manifest impossibility; and yet, affirming that there is a time in which something that is becomes, and therefore is (not only something other than itself, but) that absolutely other – nothingness, non-being – with which an entity can share no semantic dimension, this appears to constitute the most self-evident meaning of every experience. Severino writes: “The struggle between being and nothing is not like those fought in ancient days, when armies made war by day, while at night the enemy leaders drank together in their tents – enemies, therefore, if and when they were on the battlefield.”2placeholder Every being, meaning or thing consists in this original War between being and non-being (epamphoterízein, éris). There is something like a manifold – there is a ‘world’ – precisely insofar as Plato, through the original violence of the ‘parricide’, states contra Parmenides that “we are going to have to insist by brute force [biázesthai] both that what is not somehow is, and then again that what is somehow is not” (Sophist, 241d). This impossible identification of being and non-being constitutes the original Violence (bía) that grounds the appearance of every empirical war.

The original War is therefore not the one among states or individuals; the original War coincides with the essence of the Thing – every thing – and consists in that original ‘folly’ constituted by the belief in the appearing of the becoming-other of what is: the being-nothing of beings. The truth of war is in fact its impossibility: there has never been and there will never be any war or any violence. The history of the essential alienation in which the human consists – an alienation that in the first place makes humans ‘mortals’3placeholder – is not the history of the actual appearing of that impossibility, but the history of the belief in that appearing: humans believe in the appearing of becoming – this belief is and appears, but the content of that belief (becoming, the contradiction of every becoming-other, the identification of being and non-being) is not; it is impossible. Every belief is a belief in the impossible: the impossible is not and it does not appear; the belief in the impossible is and appears.

Every action – every poíesis and every prâxis – constitutes an instance of this impossibility (“The cause of everything that passes from non-being to being is a kind of poíesis”; Symposium, 205b; Sophist, 219b, 265b). The age of technics (“The productions of every téchne are a kind of poíesis”; Symposium, 205c) is that age that accompanies the destruction (Abbau, Destruktion, deconstruction) of every Immutable being or meaning; as part of this age, every limit that would constrain the possibility of transforming, creating and destroying what is comes to be eliminated. The Greek meanings of being and non-being now ground a civilisation that holds sway over the entirety of the earth. Every war, and every peace, must make use of the means afforded by the apparatus of technics, and they must therefore be themselves instruments of the original (and impossible) War constituted by every Thing. As part of this framework, contemporary philosophy is that theoretical endeavour that aims to secure the necessary impossibility of any meaning or being that would limit the expansion of the power of the Apparatus of technics: namely, that theoreîn that aims to guarantee the conditions of possibility of the practical appropriation and expropriation of being.

The unconscious of every meaning and being that appears as part of this original alienation is the meaning of nothing: the essence of nihilism. A being is insofar as (separated from its being or truth) it appears to be able to become, and therefore be, nothing; the history of nihilism is the history of the appearing of the meaning of nothing (nihil). The unconscious of that unconscious, however, is that ‘place’ that has always already refuted the attempt at making it be something other than what it is; that is to say, that nothingness is the negation or refutation of ‘something’ that has always already made that negation impossible, ‘something’ which stands prior to that nothingness, to that belief in making it be other than what it is. Severino refers to that “place,” which is the unconscious of that nothingness, as the “destiny of necessity”: that which stands (de-stiny); that which has never been other than what it is. One of its primary determinations is precisely the negation of becoming: the eternity of every being (not just the totality of being, but the eternity of each and every being). Every being is and appears insofar as it is eternal – and this includes that being constituted by the belief in the appearing of becoming. If Aristotle states that “no becoming may be possible if there exists nothing eternal,” Severino replies that “becoming is possible only if everything is eternal.”4placeholder The history of humans is not the history of the becoming-other of what is, but the history of the gradual unfolding of the eternal beings, none of which issues from nothing or returns to it, but all of which have always already been saved in the concrete totality of being. The eternal beings enter and leave the stage of appearing, without anything of their eternity having been created or lost, but having always been saved in the eternal totality of being (something that Severino refers to as the “Joy”). This Joy is the ‘place’ that is concretely, always, already and forever safe from every war and every violence (phûsis aeì sozoméne).

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All of this, ‘according to Severino’ – this account, however, which when recounted through these few words may appear to be a wishful narrative or a fanciful mythology, takes instead the form of an ‘incontrovertible’ discourse that is neither the logos or ratio of the history of philosophy nor the faith or myth of any religion. The form of that discourse is indissociably connected to a specific notion of ‘incontrovertibility’, by virtue of which that semantic dimension constitutes ‘that the negation of which is self-negating’; Severino’s works aim to unfold the determinations of this originarily irrefutable and Necessary semantic core. The appearing of this incontrovertible and self-standing (complex) meaning, Severino argues, may in no way be attributed or ascribed to his (or any) empirical person. Hence, he comes to state that he is merely “testifying” to this semantic dimension, and his “philosophical thought” aims to be a testimony of that Necessity (a “language that testifies to the destiny of Necessity”).5placeholder