In terms of style and content, Severino is closest to Heidegger, whose name comes up frequently. Both see technology and what Heidegger calls “calculative thinking” as preeminent threats. Critics have long pointed out that, at least semantically, Heidegger’s notion of Being is consistent with what philosophers have traditionally termed God, and Severino explicitly states as much about his own use of the word Being (albeit some 80 pages into the book). Yet, Severino’s text is an implicit challenge to Heidegger regarding, for instance, anxiety, which for Severino would be an emotional response to a spurious metaphysics founded on the belief that beings are nothing. Being, and therefore being-there, is eternal. “The body’s disintegration is not its annihilation, but is the way in which it stably leaves the horizon of the appearing of Being.”

¶ 4:55 PM