The Silence of Becoming Severino, Husserl and Time-Consciousness

Abstract

With its several problems and its aporetic nature, the absolute intimacy between consciousness and time highlighted by Husserl’s reflections rightly belongs in the discussion of the dimension of profound persuasion, the unconscious faith in the becoming of time and its rootedness in the Essence of Western Nihilism, described by Emanuele Severino in his works: the nihilistic unconscious that things are nothing, the unconscious persuasion that there is a time in which being and nothing coincide, a time in which the impossible is given, that a being is and also is not, that the self is different from self. As regards the Nihilistic meaning of Becoming, the faith in becoming different of the beings, is the continuous process of the death of what becomes different until real death, physical death in the sense of the extinction of any Becoming. And this brings us back to the crucial topic of the phenomenology of Husserlian time. The remerging through memory, the re‐presentation of the present past of time‐consciousness is not simply a ghost of what has been. But this becoming, the repetition of the present in something else through the retentional modification enacted by memory, inevitably stops in the face of death, the absolute modification of no long being able to become.