Beyond Alienation: Severino’s Removal of Pathological Contradiction

Based on a significant reflection by Emanuele Severino on contemporary philosophy (i.e. Severino 1996), this article explores the concept of “alienation” and its evolution from Hegelian theory to psychology/psychiatry and social science studies. The purpose of this article is to highlight the continuity between certain assumptions of Severino’s original framework and the comprehensibility of diagnostic aspects inherent to the state of alienation, particularly in cases of schizophrenic spectrum disorders. Severino was a philosopher who presented the most radical understanding of alienation, in line with the concept of nihilism and involving the identification of “being” in relation to its absolute other – that is, “nothingness”. The fundamental aim of this essay is to proceed along a path of investigation that considers Severino’s thought as the foundation of the epistemology of a new science: one that does not start from the fideistic assumption of the oscillation between nothing and being.