A Farewell to Truth

GIANNI VATTIMO IS one of those rare thinkers in whom thought and action suffer little separation. From his early political activism to his two terms as a member of the European Parliament, he has transformed nihilism into a vocation on behalf of the causes of democracy, cultural pluralism, and human solidarity. For philosophers and politicians alike, however, the title Farewell to Truth risks sounding more like a punch line than a manifesto for political liberation. While the fear might be that such a pronouncement could be mistaken for the expediency of political lies, the more disturbing reality is that all too often in the age of sound bites, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and dwindling attention spans, the invocation of absolutes—religious, natural, economic—has emerged as a common and effective call to arms in the face of an increasingly pluralistic, global society. Paradoxically, the bearers of these absolutes do not simply reject the common idiom of interpretation that Vattimo indicates elsewhere¹ as symptomatic of postmodern Western culture; rather, they are strangely enabled and nourished by it. Having accepted on principle the reality of a relativistic world where there seem to be no facts, only interpretations, they extol the practicality and utility of direct action in the service of an absolute. In such a climate, Vattimo’s farewell to truth is not a woeful resignation but a timely call to extinguish the final flashes of metaphysics and resist the belief that only absolute action and sovereign decision can guarantee peaceful coexistence.

Farewell to Truth is not a flat-out rejection of truth per se but the recognition that truth is something we construct. It is therefore not a descriptive claim about the world as it “really is,” but in a manner similar to Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead,” the farewell to truth is an interpretation that marks “the commencement, and the very basis, of democracy” (xxxiv) as an epochal truth that is “constructed with consensus and respect for the liberty of everyone” (xxxvi). Democracy is not a truth that must be grounded or deduced but is instead a historical inheritance and political reality to which one must respond, either dogmatically or pluralistically. As a hermeneutic thinker and politician, the challenge for Vattimo has been to articulate a call for human liberation that accepts the interpretative character of truth while not taking its own position as absolute. The validity of Vattimo’s position is often criticized as an irresolvable dilemma: either his philosophical commitments are politically expedient and thus merely rationalizations of leftist ideology, or those same commitments are based on a descriptive, and hence unavoidably metaphysical, claim about reality.² The challenge of balancing philosophy and politics, as Vattimo himself confides, is one to which he has yet to find a “satisfactory solution.”³ Yet a resolution emerges within the development of his “ontology of actuality” and the transformation of philosophy into an ethics of interpretation.

Vattimo’s initial “decision to study philosophy was largely a consequence of [his] religious commitment and [his] militant political attitude,”⁴ which in the decade after the end of World War II led Vattimo to write for a number of political journals and to participate in movements such as “Catholic Action.” While Vattimo’s political commitments in the 1950s predate his study of philosophy at the University of Turin, his encounter with his philosophical mentor, Luigi Pareyson, develops and shapes his understanding of the connection that ontology and hermeneutics have with political action. During World War II, Pareyson was an active member of the Partito d’Azione and the broader antifascist resistance movement in the Piedmont region of Italy. With many of his former liceo students actively involved in the resistance, Pareyson conducted lessons on philosophy and politics with selected graduates, instructing them so that they could spread the antifascist doctrine through the Action Party’s underground publications. Pareyson wrote philosophical, as well as political, essays and texts at this time, and was eventually arrested (and quickly released) in 1944, whereupon his teaching was suspended until the end of the war.⁵ Nonetheless, Pareyson looked skeptically upon his pupil’s direct involvement with the religious and political movements of the day: due to its ontological character, philosophy was already and necessarily intertwined with all human activities, politics included.

This attitude is most pronounced in Pareyson’s theoretical masterpiece, Verità e interpretazione (1971). Throughout the mid-1960s, Vattimo worked closely with his mentor on the lectures that form the theoretical core of Pareyson’s hermeneutic ontology. The title of Pareyson’s 1964 autumn lecture, “Expressive Thought and Revelatory Thought,” represents “the idea that thinking is itself a thinking of Being in both the objective and the subjective sense,” whereby revelatory thought is able to interpret Being as a new opening of truth, while expressive thought is merely able to articulate particular truths from within an already established aperture.⁶ Pareyson insists that philosophy “worthy of the name” is simultaneously revelatory and expressive. Vattimo develops and transforms this same distinction into a more profound and ultimately postmetaphysical recognition of the radically historical and eventlike character of Being and its multitude of forms. So while Vattimo agrees with Pareyson that the revelation of Being can only ever occur through its historical expression in the form of an interpretation, Vattimo rejects the still latent metaphysical commitments in Pareyson’s “tragic thought,” which thinks Being under the category of reality, rather than necessity, and “carries in itself the indelible trace of an originary conflict” between the choice for Being or non-Being.⁷ Vattimo calls this “the last great metaphysical misunderstanding of Christian thinking, namely, the idea that there is a radical separation between the history of salvation and secular history by virtue of which the meaning of revelation would be exclusively apocalyptic.”⁸ Tragic thought requires an unquestioning reverence for an ontological origin that is wholly other and inexhaustible. Vattimo’s revision—inspired by his Nietzschean reading of Heidegger—brings this very origin into the flux of history and prepares the way for an ontology of actuality that takes up the present moment as an origin to be emancipated from the essentialisms of metaphysics.

Understood as a way to dissolve philosophy into ethics and “consume” the theoretical experience of metaphysics,⁹ the ontology of actuality carries a twofold significance. “making oneself aware of the paradigm into which one has been thrown” yet “suspending its claim to definitive validity and heeding Being as that which remains unsaid” (32). One reconstructs the sites of ontology in the present while resisting the temptation to consider “the self-consumption of truth in solidarity [as] an objective description of our situation” (134). Here one finds an alternative to the purported dilemma facing Vattimo’s hermeneutics: its origin is neither metaphysical, since it resists any claim to ultimate validity or description, nor purely political, since its motivation is precisely the critique and rejection of simple will to power based on an ideal of charity. The alternative to the seemingly irresolvable dilemma between philosophy and politics is their dissolution into a way of thinking and acting that takes truth as a project for humanity rather than as its ultimate criterion.

The linchpin that unifies this double critique is Being, or more precisely, the ontological difference as a historical inheritance whose origin is present to us only through an interpretation in the here and now. There is no ultimate appeal to Being as the ineffable source of reality; rather, for Vattimo we are always already underway and thrown into a historical context. Thus, the truth of human freedom is not originary as it was for Pareyson (Being is the originary choice for existence, as spelled out in his emblematic Ontology of Freedom)¹⁰ but is something we construct through the remembering of ontological difference—what Vattimo often refers to as the andenkend thought of Heidegger, which has “no origin placed somewhere outside of the actuality of the event” (42). Pareyson’s metaphysical insistence on the originary choice for Being and truth—a “for or against” alternative—represents a species of ontological blackmail no longer tenable if one accepts the end of metaphysics. The ontology of actuality willingly lets go of this final metaphysical limitation and accepts plurality and community, rather than originary conflict, as the trace of Being.

At the end of the second section of Truth and Interpretation, entitled “Ideology and Truth,” Pareyson addresses the problematic relation between politics and philosophy, claiming that a philosopher who engages in politics is merely the product of a “contingent and accidental personal union” and that a philosopher “must do philosophy and nothing else, and right there one finds his civil task and his political relevance.”¹¹ Under the rubric of an ontology of actuality, Vattimo transforms the contingent nature of the philosopher’s union with politics into a vocation—a response to the destiny of Being as its weakening, recovery, and distortion through which the exceptionality of philosophy and politics is dissolved into ethics. Thus, when Vattimo asks, “what becomes of the philosophy-politics relation in a world in which … politics can no longer be thought of in terms of truth?” (41), the task of the philosopher dissolves into ethics and is charged with the responsibility that accompanies every interpretation: to listen, to be charitable, and most of all, to take seriously the risk that accompanies every construction of truth.

In this light, the three prescriptions for the philosopher-politician suggested by Pareyson in Truth and Interpretation take on a “weakened” or nihilistic character. The first commits the philosopher to hermeneutic truth over any ideological commitment that ignores ontological difference; the second warns that philosophy should not furnish criteria for political choices and serve as an expert authority external to practice. These two poles mirror the aforementioned false dilemma that challenges Vattimo’s hermeneutics: “On the one side, the idea that thought precedes action, where practice is lowered to pure and simple ‘application’ of theory, which is a form of dogmatism or fanaticism; and on the other side, the idea that action precedes thought, where theory becomes the lowly instrument of practice, that is, a form of skepticism or cynicism.”¹² However, Vattimo also understands that the philosopher-politician’s relation to truth can no longer be tied to a notion of exceptionality or expertise that serves as an ultimate ground always beyond the reach of interpretation. Vattimo’s ground (if we can speak of one) is itself an interpretation, a never fully given and historical inheritance that provides the philosopher-politician with the context for an ethics. No longer is the philosopher to be the advisor of princes, nor the instrument of the state; the philosopher’s position is “privileged” only to the extent that she, in the manner that Nietzsche suggests, is able to lift herself periodically above the raging waters of history and be “untimely.”

Vattimo therefore interprets Pareyson’s third prescription as a call to dissolve philosophy into ethics: “If philosophy is the verbal and speculative translation of revelatory and ontological thought, its task is to vindicate the revelatory and ontological nature that every human activity, including practical action, can have in itself.”¹³ Vattimo’s ontology of actuality retains the force of this vindication; yet, it is neither a political and thus ultimately dogmatic move that unashamedly prefers one vision of life over another, nor is it, on the other hand, a metaphysical move that seeks its ground in an absolute truth or description of reality. Only as a response to a particular historical opening—what Vattimo argues here is the epochal truth of democracy—does the confluence of philosopher and politician emerge as a vocation to make history by interpreting, and thus constructing, the truth.

The full force of this demand is registered in the short collection of reflections entitled La vocazione e responsabilità del filosofo (2000), where Vattimo claims that the political life of the philosopher is neither contrived nor something that one merely falls into; rather, it is a choice for human liberation that places pedagogy before ideology, the transformation of individual minds before the transformation of the shape of society.¹⁴ Yet one could justifiably critique the impetus, as well as the efficacy, of this philosophical mode of political activism. Vattimo recounts that as the events of 1968 were coming to a head in Europe, Pareyson commented about the students occupying the Sorbonne: “I am much more revolutionary than they are.” Vattimo adds: “I knew just what he meant and felt the same way, because we were reading Heidegger and thinking about metaphysics and how it had to end, and these in their way were projects for radical transformation.”¹⁵ But is it enough to read Heidegger? Is merely “doing philosophy”—let alone Heideggerian ontology—radical enough when it is warranted, if not downright necessary, to confront directly the array of fundamentalisms that threaten the democratic ideals of plurality, solidarity, and freedom?

If Pareyson’s solution preserves the purity and the unity of philosophy in the face of challenges from other realms of human activity, Vattimo’s dissolution of philosophy and politics into ethics represents not only a step beyond his master but an indication of just how “accomplished” Vattimo’s nihilism is. Philosophy and politics are historical projects, and “the basis of any historical project must be negation of the violence that is the heritage of metaphysics, negation of conservatism and domination under the pretexts of truth, the datum, order” (110). In relation to politics, then, the philosopher is not merely the custodian of Being but employs a form of anarchical thinking (literally, one that shakes up the various archai)¹⁶ that Vattimo argues—borrowing loosely from Reiner Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger—is able to remember Being by suspending the present order’s claim to validity. In other words, the philosopher-politician embraces nihilism as a vocation.

The portrait of this philosopher-politician provides a powerful lens through which one can view the particular relevance of Farewell to Truth. Vattimo notes that democracy, understood as an epochal event, is marked by two significant events in the last century: what Heidegger describes as the “end of metaphysics” and the collapse of socialism that gives rise to particularly concrete and pragmatic forms of liberalism. Vattimo even claims that the end of metaphysics has its political parallel in the strengthening of democracy, as the subsequent swapping of party ideology for a model of political consensus is more akin to a play of forces than to an adherence to some absolute “truth.” The interpretation of democracy (loosely construed) as the dominant horizon of political, social, and economic life after metaphysics nonetheless reveals the ultimately “moderate” character of Vattimo’s politics. Whether we associate this stance with Nietzsche’s “Good European,” Rorty’s notion of “commonsense Heideggerianism,” or even Kant’s employment of regulative ideals,¹⁷ the rubric that guides Vattimo’s hermeneutics is neither (as the critique of hermeneutic theories often is) simple tradition and respect for authority and authenticity, nor the simple conflict of interpretations, but rather the basic understanding that one can no longer appeal to essences of any kind as a ground for philosophical truth or political action.

In Vattimo’s estimation, defenders of democracy like Habermas and Apel remain trapped within just such a metaphysical model by attempting to legitimate democracy through an appeal to reason and the essential truths that can be derived from it. The argument for (or perhaps more accurately, of) democracy brings Vattimo’s thinking to a plurality of sites open for revision and interpretation. The first, as suggested above, is Heidegger and the contentious legacy that surrounds his thought. Vattimo’s new trajectory breaks from the strict coordinates of Nietzsche and Heidegger by placing them into a broader (and somewhat contrived) constellation of thinkers who challenge the supremacy of absolute truth. Thus Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought” and Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies are read together as rejections of Platonism and, consequently, challenges to the essentialism and authoritarianism of metaphysical thinking. And while this might on the surface appear to be a deliberate strategy intended to mitigate the thornier political issues associated with Heidegger, his recovery and conversion is possible because of a transformation in thinking. Philosophy can transform the world, rather than just contemplate it, because it is no longer allied with an absolute notion of truth and teaches us that our position is a finite and historical one. If one condemns Heidegger’s Nazism, one must do it for the same reasons that one condemns (as Adorno did) the continuation of totalitarianism in the world of advertising and market propaganda, the imposition of religious ideology by militant extremists, and the forceful exportation of democracy around the world.

For similar reasons, Vattimo, invoking Heidegger’s famous comment to Der Spiegel, suggests that only a “relativistic” or “kenotic” God can save us. The central role that religion plays today in political and scientific discourses underscores the particular relevance of Vattimo’s new reflections on his already developed notion of a weakened or verwunden Christianity. The subjective and interpretative nature of Christianity will welcome the “farewell” to objective truth only when it finally accepts that “the death of god proclaimed by Nietzsche is nothing more than the death of Jesus on the cross” (58). Unfortunately, the Catholic Church remains where it was when it condemned Galileo—convinced of the true “nature” and “essence” of reality such that it can derive norms from what are merely facts of the world. Until the Church embraces the idea, already present in St. Paul’s “truth-speaking,” that truth is something we construct, it will continue to have issues with homosexuality, gender equality, the proper use of biotechnology, and so on because they threaten the Church’s vision of what the world is supposed to be. For Vattimo, Christianity begins with a break from what is perceived to be “natural”: above all else, to love one’s enemies is not what nature prescribes. This awareness also helps to mitigate calls to recognize the Christian identity of Europe (no doubt in the face of ever-increasing populations of non-Christian Europeans). The European Union, itself an artificial union from the start, can benefit from its Christian heritage only if it is interpreted as “a potent summons to disidentification” (81).

Vattimo’s recommendations hold great promise on the other side of the Atlantic, where calls to reinforce the fact that the United States is a Christian nation reflect a similar ideological push against tolerance, inclusion, and dialogue. In fact, the issue of Christian identity seems but one aspect of a broader and consistent appeal to essential natures in politics (one need only consider those who question President Obama’s citizenship), whereby the working myth is that the essence of what “America” or “the West” is faces inevitable ruin from hostile forces. The prevailing response on the left and the right in American politics and media—whether the issue is immigration, the war on terror, or health care—centers on various forms of American exceptionalism, and mutatis mutandis, American sovereignty at home and around the world. And while it would certainly be appropriate to accuse the American right of distorting Heidegger’s comment to read “only a decider can save us now,” the left’s recent appeal to “hope” and “change we can believe in” has also failed to produce any real economic and political pluralism at home and abroad.

At fault is what Nietzsche describes in section 241 of Beyond Good and Evil as “soil addiction.”¹⁸ In the difficult chapter “On Peoples and Fatherlands” (sections 240–256), Nietzsche undertakes a geographical (rather than genealogical) revaluing of values in the attempt to undermine the persistent claim (so present in early theories on race and in various forms of “social Darwinism”) that certain characteristics are necessarily found in peoples of certain geographical regions. This technique is also employed in section 329 of Nietzsche’s Gay Science, entitled “Leisure and Idleness”:

There is something of the American Indian, something of the savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the way the Americans strive for gold; and their breathless haste in working—the true vice of the new world—is already starting to spread to old Europe, making it savage and covering it with a most odd mindlessness. Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience.¹⁹

Nietzsche’s broad point is that the “Americanness” of Americans (and one might surmise today, the European Union) has nothing at all to do with geography or race and everything to do with the construction of that truth as an ethos (in this case, a violent ethos that, now in the age of democracy and relative comfort, requires “a really different humanity for these new conditions, equal to the new situation”).²⁰ To mistake a constructed truth for an essential quality—insert your favorite politician’s appeal to American ingenuity, or tenacity, or values—is the heart of exceptionalism, a “crude obviousness” in all endeavors whereby “the feeling for form itself” and “the melody of movements”²¹ is lost.

Vattimo’s recent call to “re-become” a communist is an attempt to construct a new ethos and break the eternal return of the political pendulum (where left and right have little difference) by challenging democracies everywhere to reject the appeal to essences.²² The most pernicious of these absolutes, and the one at which Vattimo directs his most potent arguments here and in Ecce Comu, is the free market. Along with Being, it seems that Western democracies have forgotten Marx’s central claim that political economy is not a natural science. Vattimo notes that in late capitalism the promulgation of markets seems to resemble the same type of weakening distortion that one sees at the end of metaphysics. The challenge is therefore not to overcome capitalism but to work through its forms and mitigate the claims that the absolute faith in the free market often makes in the face of real poverty and alienation.

Vattimo also brings Marx into the fold of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the attempt to think the ontological difference, a project he first attempted with his works Il soggetto e la maschera (1974) and Al di là del soggetto (1981). While real Marxism has suffered because of its commitment to natural essences, Vattimo preserves Marx’s critique of ideology and his understanding of alienation in order to resuscitate Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: that the task of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to transform it. Vattimo rereads this thesis alongside Heidegger’s claim that “science does not think.” Together, these ideas present a potent critique of philosophy as a specialized and “expert” discipline among others. If this is an epoch when philosophy can transform the world and thus become an ethics of interpretation, thinking democracy must above all entail the thinking of difference rather than the thinking of equality and essences.

As a political gesture, the thinking of difference turns its attention away from the obviousness of the simply present and toward its absence. Difference in its most basic form is always present through the absence of essence. That which differs from me, my way of life, my gender, my species, and so on challenges my perceived essence through its very negation. The ontology of actuality takes up the thinking of difference with the imperative to avoid its own absolutization and overconceptualization (as if there were an “essence” of difference). The unfolding of attualità, the present moment, is difference, and it seems that any other sort of ontology would be condemned to treat its objects as fixed truths or as abstractions. The image of a mechanical river of bottles speeding by on a production line illustrates how the present negates itself through the continual passing of its moments, even with the appearance of sameness. It is not surprising that Chaplin’s Modern Times is one of Vattimo’s favorite references when speaking of the dangers of capitalism and technology. To be caught up in the system is to be lost in a series of essences: alienated, reduced, and equated. The movement and form of the present is the movement of dialectic and negation, but in its weakened sense. Through the thought of difference we find that we are always already alienated, and the task of the ontology of actuality, of ethics, is to reinvigorate the present and bring it up for questioning and interpretation.

In the midst of alienation and negation Vattimo returns to a weakened form of Hegelianism. Vattimo revises his claim from the late 1980s that the expansion of various media into all facets of life has produced a general aestheticization of experience, one so thoroughgoing that it appears not as the concretization of Hegelian Spirit but as its caricature. Vattimo’s appraisal in Farewell is that we must return to Hegel again because there we will find a correlate to the neopragmatic understanding of democracy and truth that Vattimo shares with Rorty. Spirit unfolds not as a progress toward its ultimate realization but as an ever-unfolding and “never totally given, overcoming of every form of alienation” (140). To revise Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where the individual is finally recognized in the State, we could perhaps understand democracy as the never-to-be-completed State, the one that is never real, resists its reduction to essence, and attempts to construct the recognition of the other in the State.

Vattimo recognizes that a democratic project for humanity is “artificial” and constructed rather than based on “natural” essences, and his intellectual and personal biography reads like a careful and sustained interpretation of the shared inheritance of Western society, a response to the protracted and long-overdue farewell to truth. Rather than find truth at the base of authentic human coexistence, Vattimo embraces “the capacity to listen, the respect for the equal freedom of every person (individuals, groups, communities) that is the better legacy of Western culture, betrayed today by those who pretend to be its bearers.”²³

This antiauthoritarian orientation has deep roots in Vattimo’s thinking, a guiding thread that extends from his radical and emancipatory interpretation of Nietzsche in the 1970s to Hermeneutic Communism, his forthcoming collaboration with Santiago Zabala. Farewell to Truth does not mark a new direction in Vattimo’s thinking, nor is it a specialized form of applied philosophy that rises and falls with the tides of the latest crises. One could rightly say that by achieving the end of philosophy in ethics and politics—by accomplishing nihilism—Vattimo finally (to steal a phrase from Nietzsche) “becomes who he truly is.”²⁴ Vattimo’s stance is neither that truth has been lost nor that we should bid it good riddance; rather, his suggestion is that our 2,500-year love affair with truth has run its course. The situation demands that we set truth free, and in so doing, free ourselves.

17. Vattimo makes note of this connection when he discusses the universality of political projects as a construction rather than as an appeal to an absolute: “The idea of universality as a construct, of the universal as task or project or guiding idea—the idea fundamentally driving all of philosophical culture since Kant—must be bound rigorously to a political project. Indeed, it demands to be recognized as a political construct to all intents and purposes.” The Responsibility of the Philosopher, 116–117.