The Identity and Eternity of Every Being

Abstract

What Western thought regards as the ultimate evidence – namely, becoming understood as that process by which beings pass from nonbeing to being, and viceversa – is the ultimate folly. Severino shows that thinking of a time in which any given being does not exist means slipping into the deepest contradiction. Nonfolly coincides with the appearing of the necessity that any being, qua being, should exist – a necessity resting upon the indisputable appearing of the originary structure of that being: its appearing as what is identical to itself and other from what is other than itself. The impossibility that any given being qua being might not exist coincides with the very eternity of that being. The succession of events itself is something eternal that occurs by necessity. And the varying of the content of experience, which indisputably appears, coincides with the supervening of eternals in the eternal circle
of appearing, and their leaving it.