The Future of Religion

CONTRARY TO THE polytheism of antiquity, when gods did not manifest themselves without mediators, the Christian God donated his word directly to the community of the believers, instituting not only the “Age of the World-Picture” but also that of “two cultures,” the quarrel between science and religion that divided the culture of the West into opposing sides: the natural and human sciences, atheism and theism, analytic and continental philosophy. Today, at the end of this epoch, we are witnessing the dissolution of philosophical theories such as positivist scientism and marxism that thought they had definitively liquidated religion. After modernity, there are no more strong philosophical reasons either to be an atheist refusing religion or to be a theist refusing science; the deconstruction of metaphysics has cleared the ground for a culture without those dualisms that have characterized our western tradition. In this postmodern condition, faith, no longer modeled on the Platonic image of the motionless God, absorbs these dualisms without recognizing in them any reasons for conflict. The rebirth of religion in the third millennium is not motivated by global threats such as terrorism or planetary ecological catastrophe, hitherto unprecedented, but by the death of God, in other words, by the secularization of the sacred that has been at the center of the process by which the civilization of the western world developed.

If the task of philosophy after the death of God—hence after the deconstruction of metaphysics—is a labor of stitching things back together, of reassembly, then secularization is the appropriate way of bearing witness to the attachment of modern European civilization to its own religious past, a relationship consisting not of surpassing and emancipation alone, but conservation, too. Contrary to the view of a good deal of contemporary theology, the death of God is something post-Christian rather than anti-Christian; by now we are living in the post-Christian time of the death of God, in which secularization has become the norm for all theological discourse.

It is in the “weak thought” of Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo that the new postreligious culture, which is to say the future of religion after the deconstruction of western ontology, is taking shape. In contemporary philosophy, Rorty represents the postempirical pragmatism of North America, and Vattimo, the postmodern direction of Latin Europe, as Michael Theunissen points out. From John Dewey’s neopragmatism and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Rorty and Vattimo both take not just the critique of the objectivistic self-understanding of the human sciences but also the concept of culture (Bildung). Culture, according to Rorty and Vattimo, no longer stems from the assumption of a heredity but from an ever new self-description culminating in an existential self-creation that replaces the ideal of handed-down knowledge. “Weak thought” is an invitation to overcome metaphysics by involving it in a relation of reciprocity that is different from the Hegelian Aufhebung because “innovation” prevails over “conditioning.” Overcoming the theological and platonic distinction between the “eternal and the temporal,” between “the real and the apparent,” between “Being and becoming” means that there exists an intermediate way between entrusting oneself to a divine substitute and entrusting oneself to individual preferences: this way consists of weakening and dissolving the ancient European concept of “Being” and the very idea of “ontological status.” This new, weak way of thought not only opens up alternative directions, it also recovers tradition: the relationship between the believer and God is not conceived as power-laden but as a gentler relationship, in which God hands over all his power to man. Rorty himself says that in “a future Gadamerian culture, human beings would wish only to live up to one another, in the sense in which Galileo lived up to Aristotle, Blake to Milton, Dalton to Lucretius and Nietzsche to Socrates. The relationship between predecessor and successor would be conceived, as Gianni Vattimo has emphasized, not as the power-laden relation of ‘overcoming’ (Überwindung) but as the gentler relation of turning to new ‘purposes’ (Verwindung).”¹ Since the weight historically borne by the figure of God cannot be made to vanish by the deconstructive gesture of philosophy, we had better accept its historical influence and reconsider its presence with the appropriate irony.

Rorty and Vattimo start from the fact that before the Enlightenment humanity had duties toward God, whereas after the Enlightenment it also had them toward reason. However, both the “Age of Faith” and the “Age of Reason” traveled down the wrong road, not because they did not manage to seize the true nature of things, but because they did not take into account the importance of the new forms of life that humanity itself had in the meantime produced with a view to greater happiness. The present book starts from the position that humanity has entered the “Age of Interpretation,” in which thought is dominated by concerns that do not pertain exclusively to science, philosophy, or religion. The new culture of dialogue inaugurated by Rorty and Vattimo invites us to follow, on the one hand, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida in their drastic deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence and, on the other, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Hans-Georg Gadamer in going beyond that same metaphysics. The difference between these two groups is more a question of temperament and emphasis than one of doctrine. What unites all of them is the conviction that philosophical questions regarding Being and nothingness, language and reality, and God and his existence are pointless because they presuppose that philosophy can be practiced independently from history and that examination of our present way of proceeding might give us an understanding of the “structure” of all possible ways of human proceeding. For all these philosophers, objectivity is a question of “intersubjective linguistic consensus” between human beings and not some sort of accurate representation of something that transcends the human sphere. The ultimate goal of philosophical investigation after the end of metaphysics is no longer contact with something existing independently from us, but rather Bildung, the unending formation of oneself. This renovation of philosophy through the surpassing of metaphysics has a linguistic outcome in the idea that the linguistic a priori is the form in which our experience is structured. If this experience is essentially linguistic and our existence essentially historic, then there is no way to overcome language and to accede to the “whole” as reality. A passage from historical situatedness to a condition outside history is made impossible by the historicity of language itself, which always develops on the terrain of interpretation, in which there are no facts other than linguistic facts. “Hermeneutics,” says Vattimo,

is more than the koiné of the end-of-the-century humanistic culture and of the human sciences in general; it is also a true “ontology of actuality,” a philosophy of that late-modern world in which the world really dissolves, and more and more so, into the play of interpretations. Insofar as it is assumed as a responsible historical project, hermeneutics actively grasps being’s vocation of giving itself, and increasingly so, as the truth of human language, and not as thing and datum, Gegenständigkeit. It is by following this thread that it also finds the ground of ethical choices and it offers itself a true critical theory.²

The word “deconstruction” takes the measure of our whole stratified metaphysical tradition. This deconstruction, carried out mainly by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, consists above all of retracing the history of western ontology destructively, in other words, the history of that conception, common to western metaphysics from Parmenides to Nietzsche, that identified “Being” with “beings.” This deconstruction entails a speculative anamnesis of the history of thought, which does not aim to relativize the various conceptions of Being by referring them to the conceptual matrices out of which they arose in history but rather to isolate a common thread linking them, which Heidegger has called the “history” or “destiny of Being.” This deconstruction of truth as intuitive evidence represents above all the end of logocentrism, that is, the end of the privilege accorded by metaphysical thought to presence and voice as incarnations of the Logos, capable of rendering Being available to a finite subject. In the course of this deconstructive assault on metaphysics, a sort of suspension of judgment, or epoché, has always been evoked, which leaves humanity without guidance and which ends by idealizing an unrealizable situation.

But what, for Rorty and Vattimo, are the historical events that have contributed to the deconstruction of metaphysics? The French Revolution (solidarity), Christianity (charity), and romanticism (irony). Thanks to these three events, the spiritual progress of man has consisted principally in the creation of an “I” that is larger, freer, and above all not fearful of losing the identity out of which it grew. It was Dewey’s merit to have argued that we achieve full political maturity only at the moment when we succeed in doing without any metaphysical culture, without the culture of belief in nonhuman powers and forces. Only after the French Revolution did human beings learn to rely increasingly on their own powers; Dewey called the religion that teaches men to rely on themselves a “religion of love” (the complete opposite of a “religion of fear”) because it is virtually impossible to distinguish it from the condition of the citizen who participates concretely in democracy.

Croce, for his part, in showing that “we cannot not call ourselves Christians,” emphasized the necessary presence of Christian dogma and ethics in today’s secularized culture. This position does no more than acknowledge how secularization has consumed the religious tradition of the West. Croce has taught us to look upon the secularized world as one in which weak identities mingle with the legacy of dogma left to us by Christianity; in other words, it is thanks to Christianity too that we are atheists.

Finally Gadamer delineates a contemporary culture of dialogue and fusion, in which “knowledge” is replaced by “Bildung” (formation of the self or “edification”), in other words by a renewed awareness that not everything demands to be explained scientifically. In this way, religion becomes a universal ethos, an antidogmatic stance that constitutes the presupposition not only of hermeneutics but even of democracy itself. It is through developing its own laic vocation that Christianity can become a universal religion and promote the renewal of civil life. Thanks to Dewey, Croce, and Gadamer, in whom the history of objective spirit found more convinced defenders than in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, religion may resume its role without masks and dogmatism, may once again take its place in the modern world alongside science and politics, without aspiring anymore to the absolute.³

The weak thought of Rorty’s neopragmatism and Vattimo’s hermeneutics inherits the task of the deconstruction of metaphysics: the Verwindung operated by weak thought aspires to a twisting continuation or tracking of the metaphysical tradition, as when an illness that has been overcome still remains present during the convalescence.⁴ The difference between deconstruction and hermeneutics lies entirely in the modality of the overcoming: either one gets past metaphysics by showing that nothing remains of our past, or one gets past metaphysics by recognizing that this overcoming is itself a revisitation of the metaphysical past. It is easy to see how today’s culture, governed by science, philosophy, and theology, has less and less to do with actual “discoveries”; its sphere is rather that of “analysis,” according to the program of a purely linguistic analysis not determined by any ontological prejudice.⁵

According to Rorty and Vattimo, if truth does not occur at the level of facts but only at that of propositions, this corresponds to a cultural juncture at which the end of traditional metaphysics coincides with the dialogue between natural and human sciences, analytic and continental philosophy, atheism and theism; the meeting ground for this dialogue is language. If the dispute between religion and science has gradually dissolved, it is because both parties have gradually taken their distance from the rationalistic motivations of modern culture and from its exclusive predilection for the problem of knowledge. As soon as one realizes, thanks to hermeneutics, that every critical thought comes about within a historical condition that makes it possible and supplies its substratum and framework—realizes, that is, the “historicity” of all knowledge—the division between scientific and humanistic culture becomes less consistent. To surpass metaphysics means, according to Rorty and Vattimo, to stop inquiring into what is real and what is not; it means recognizing that something is better understood the more one is able to say about it. Problems are resolved with irony, privately exercised vis-à-vis one’s own predecessors rather than vis-à-vis their relation to truth.⁶

Wherever there is an authority that, in the guise of a scientific or ecclesiastical community, imposes something as objective truth, philosophy has the obligation to proceed in the opposite direction: to show that truth is never objectivity but always interpersonal dialogue that takes effect in the sharing of a language. Sharing a language does not mean sharing objectivities but agreeing on some preferences. The agreement reached through these preferences can give rise to a new paradigm, a new “language game” with the ability to free research from imprisonment within a single vocabulary. When Huxley, as Rorty says, challenged nineteenth-century Oxford in the name of empirical science, his intention was the same as that of Erasmus in his challenge to the academic institutions of his epoch—a challenge that aimed at surpassing the authority of intellectual institutions. The “skepticism” of Erasmus, made possible by humanism, and the “social hope” of Huxley, suggested by laboratory science, are not seen as progress toward truth, but as perspectives that humanity can reasonably prefer to others, new attempts by human society to resolve its own problems. This conception is common to both pragmatism and hermeneutics; indeed, both movements arose not merely in revolt against all authoritarian theories of truth but were also impelled by the intention to improve the way in which men understand one another.

Postmetaphysical thought fundamentally aims at an ontology of weakening that reduces the weight of the objective structures and the violence of dogmatism. The task of the philosopher today seems to be a reversal of the Platonic program: the philosopher now summons humans back to their historicity rather than to what is eternal. Philosophy appears dedicated more to the progressive edification of humanity than to the development of knowledge. This movement of thought might call to mind the Hegelian dialectic, were it not that in Rorty’s and Vattimo’s intentions the final vision of an absolute spirit, containing within itself the whole process, is absent; for the point is not to hold onto a place within traditional philosophy but to continue that conversation that since the beginning has characterized the West. Philosophy does not propose to demonstrate some truth but only to favor the possibility of a consensus that could be seen as truth.⁷

The principal characteristic of the “Gadamerian culture of dialogue” is no doubt the nihilistic and skeptical character imparted to it by the achievements of deconstruction. Truth of any kind is not attained with the help of “method,” and in fact any idea of method is looked upon with suspicion. Rorty and Vattimo would not wish to be seen as bearers of new concepts, nor would they want to present their thought as anything more than a form of skepticism about all possible concepts, including the ones they themselves use and propose to us. Therefore, the analysis of today’s philosophical direction outlined by John Paul II in his encyclical letter Fides et ratio is correct, although obviously it moves from the opposing point of view:

Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned. This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread skepticism. Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today’s most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. … Hence we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being’s great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence. In short, the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has dwindled.⁸

With the end of metaphysics, the aim of intellectual activity is no longer knowledge of truth but a “conversation” in which every argument is fully entitled to find agreement without recourse to any authority. The space left open by metaphysics must not be filled up by new philosophies claiming to exhibit some foundation external to the “conversation.” In contemporary culture, this position is represented not only by hermeneutics but also by scientists such as Thomas Kuhn and Arthur Fine, by philosophers such as Robert Brandom and Bas van Fraassen, and by theologians such as Jack Miles and Carmelo Dotolo, for whom the question of the demonstrability of the positions they maintain remains completely open because these positions are pragmatically and hermeneutically aimed at edification rather than knowledge.⁹

In the view of Rorty and Vattimo, secularization is nothing other than the history of weak thought: it is indeed secularization that teaches us that questions about the nature of God are useless because of the weakness of our reason.¹⁰ We are not told that God does not exist, only that it is not clear what it actually means to affirm or deny his existence.¹¹ Postmodern man, who has lived out the end of the great unifying syntheses produced by traditional metaphysical thought, manages to live without neurosis in a world where God is no longer present, therefore in a world where there are no longer stable and guaranteed structures capable of supplying a unique, ultimate, and normative foundation for our knowledge and for our ethics.¹² In other words, postmodern man, no longer needful of the extreme, magical reassurance supplied by the idea of God, accepts the probability that history is not on his side at all and that there is no power capable of guaranteeing him the happiness he seeks. Postmodern man has thus learned to live without anxiety in the relative world of half-truths. The ideal of an absolute certainty, of a totally founded knowledge and of a world rationally arranged is for him only a reassuring myth proper to humanity’s early stages, when powerlessness and fear in the face of the forces of nature became the predominant outlook and ended, as the old saying went, by creating the gods. Thanks to secularization, man breaks free of the hierarchy of creation and from all limits, whether those of cosmology (as predicated in the Greek vision of the world) or those of theology (as predicated by the Church). In this sense, would a weak concept of reason no longer be consonant with the evangelic preaching of love? Paul himself does not hesitate to affirm “when I’m weak that’s when I’m strong.” It is the fragmentation of reason, typical of postmodern thought, that provides man with an open space in which, to avoid getting entangled any more in contradictions, the Church ought henceforth to proclaim its own message of faith.

This man of postmodernity, if he submits fully to the weak condition of Being and of existence, may finally learn to live together with himself and with his own finitude, apart from any residual nostalgia for the end of the absoluteness of metaphysics. Accepting the constitutively divided, unstable, and plural condition that belongs to our own Being, destined to difference, to impermanency, and to multiplicity, means being able to actively practice solidarity, charity, and irony. The man who withdraws his attention from the supernatural world and concentrates on this world and this time (“saeculum” means also “this present time”) exerts himself to realize the ideals of pluralism and tolerance and to prevent any particular vision of the world from imposing itself by means of the authority attributed to it. The “death of God” (an expression that originally belonged to Luther) today refers to the incarnation, the kenosis (from the verb “kenóo [I empty]”) with which Paul alludes to the “emptying out of itself” accomplished by the divine verbum that has lowered itself to the human condition in order to die on the cross. All this propels us toward a less objective and more interpretive conception of the revelation, which is to say, toward a conception of the weakness proper to “the last God.”

Today we can no longer think of God as the motionless foundation of history because the truth of such a God is no longer among the goals of knowledge: in place of the search for truth, we seek solidarity, charity, and irony. Thought must abandon all objective, universal, and apodictic foundational claims in order to prevent Christianity, allied with metaphysics in the search for first principles, from making room for violence. Hermeneutics has been the friendliest philosophy toward religion because of its critique of the idea of truth as conformity between propositions and objects. From the point of view of the return of religiosity, the prominence of hermeneutics in contemporary culture seems to indicate, much more than in any previous epoch, that the road to salvation does not pass through description and knowledge but through interpretation and edification. The role that notions such as “communication,” “globalization,” “dialogue,” “consensus,” “interpretation,” “democracy,” and “charity” have gained in our contemporary culture is not casual but indicates a movement of modern thought toward conceiving of truth more as charity than as objectivity.¹³

Weak thought looks for compatibility only with religious faith that is trying to “privatize” itself, not with religious faiths that found churches and adopt political positions. If laicism amounts to no more than anticlericalism, in other words the tendency to affirm the complete autonomy of cultural, social, and political life from any church, then the future of religion, according to Rorty and Vattimo, will depend on the ability of today’s ecclesiastical authorities to allow religion to transform itself into something private.¹⁴ The problem of sin also ceases to be something public, something so oppressive as to drive certain individuals to suicide. If religion were to succeed definitively in becoming a private question in today’s age of interpretation, linked solely to individual capacities, then postmodern man would become an agent responsible no longer to God but to himself and others. Democracy, hermeneutics, and Christianity, from a postmetaphysical point of view, are not methods of discovering truth, and they deliberately bracket all questions regarding truth. Whatever future awaits us will depend on the capacity of culture to annul all the reasons for conflict and to assume the program of secularization as its task. Thanks to this program, it is much more difficult today to resort to religion in order to legitimize political positions or “just” wars.¹⁵ It may indeed be the case that the preferred philosopher of President George W. Bush is Jesus Christ, but it is far from likely that the preferred president of Jesus Christ is a politician who improperly enlists him as an ally in wars against the fundamentalists of other religions.

The truth that shall make us free (John 8.32) is not the objective truth of theology and the natural sciences: the scriptural revelation contains no explanation of how God is made or how to save ourselves through knowledge of the truth. The only truth that the Bible reveals to us is the practical appeal to love, to charity. The truth of Christianity is the dissolution of the metaphysical concept of truth itself. Christianity without God represents a faith free from the objectivistic metaphysics that believed in its own ability to demonstrate, on the basis of “sound natural reason,” the existence of a Supreme Being. The main challenge undertaken by the Catholic Church in modernity was the same as the one undertaken by science: both wished to prevail as the only source of truth. Debates concerning the proofs of the existence of God, or of miracles, always turned on the idea that the truth that will set us free is the objective truth.

The disputes on the problems of bioethics and on the significance of sexuality constitute the terrain on which, at present, the Church’s claim to speak in the name of humanity and not of a positive revelation is most strongly asserted. But the problem of the relationship to science is not the only one: the demands for emancipation of vast sectors of the faithful also constitute a problem that the pope does not address on historical grounds. The refusal of women’s priesthood, for example, is motivated by the loyalty of the church to a “natural” vocation of woman that can only be taken seriously within a metaphysical, rigid, and medieval frame of reference. In the postmodern condition it is precisely this doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary function that Christianity can no longer carry out; the most it can hope for is to participate in the confrontation between cultures and religions by insisting on its own specific orientation to laicity. This orientation already manifested itself, in contrast to other religions, in the strong missionary component of early Christianity, when the apostles were sent to preach the gospel to all communities; then, during the terrible wars of religion in Europe, Christian universalism discovered the idea of tolerance, of laicity. These profound historical experiences still emerge in phenomena such as Christmas or the cross, which have become holidays and signs for everyone, even those who do not believe. From this perspective, the pope has no good reason to complain that Christmas has become too laic and worldly a holiday or that the cross has become an ornament that no longer represents an affirmation of Christian identity.

The fact that today most practicing Catholics find their own sexual ethics contrary to the ones preached by the Church amounts to an appeal for the privatization of religion. If the church continues to present itself with the force of authority, it risks marginality and indirectly obliges its own believers to privatize their faith. Today, there are few Catholics who do not favor freedom of decision regarding birth control, the marriage of priests, the ordination of women, the free election of bishops by priests, the use of condoms as a precaution against AIDS, the admission to communion of divorcees who remarry, the legalization of abortion; above all, there are few who do not believe that it is possible to be a good Catholic and publicly disagree with the teachings of the Church. If the Catholic Church is to have a future as an institution in the twenty-first century, it will require a papacy that is not above the world, as the head of the Church, but in the Church as, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, the “servant of the servants of God.” The Catholic Church no longer needs primacy in law and honor; it needs a constructive pastoral primacy, in the sense of a spiritual guide, concentrating on the duties required by the present. It should no longer be a patriarchal Eurocentric church, but a universal and tolerant one, guarantor of the autonomy of national, regional, and local churches—as Hans Küng several times suggests. An immeasurable number of Christians, in communities and groups throughout the whole world, are living out an authentic ecumenism centered on the gospel regardless of any resistance by the ecclesiastical hierarchy: the challenge of the future will be to convince the Church that charity must take the place of discipline. Yet while all these believers are participating fully in the life of their own postmodern times and consider the Hebrew-Christian revelation as an appeal for a dialogic culture, the pope and his bishops tend to remain entrenched in authoritarian positions.¹⁶

The texts and the dialogue that compose this book sketch out the map of a faith without precepts and, most of all, without the image of a metaphysical God. Rorty’s text, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” explains how, with the end of metaphysics, being religious no longer means dependence upon specifically observable phenomena regarded as intuitively evident. Commenting in detail upon Vattimo’s book Belief, Rorty observes that objective metaphysics has dissolved along with thought that identified the truth of being with the manipulability of the objects of science; the way for an anti-essentialist religion was thus finally opened. This religion, grounded exclusively on private motivation, is destined to realize the promise of the gospel that from now on God regards us not as servants but as friends. Rorty, who calls himself a “laic anticlerical” points out that we cannot try to legitimize these postmodern interpretations of Christianity because the concept of “legitimacy” is not applicable to what each of us does in his own solitude. Vattimo’s text, “The Age of Interpretation,” starts by showing how hermeneutics has changed the reality of things, historicizing philosophy and putting the distinction between natural and human sciences completely out of bounds. Hermeneutics becomes the very enunciation of historical existence in the age of the end of metaphysics, since it affirms that the thesis that “there are no facts, only interpretations” is in turn an interpretation. According to Vattimo, this recognition has come about thanks in part to Christianity, which introduced into the world the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into one of “listening to and interpreting messages”; this hermeneuticization of philosophy freed religion from metaphysics at the moment when it had identified the death of God, announced by Nietzsche, with the death of Christ on the cross narrated by the Gospels. If today we still believe in the salvific significance of this death, it is because we have read it in the Gospels, certainly not because we have objective proofs of the historical fact of the resurrection. Invoking Croce, Vattimo concludes by observing that the antifoundational pragmatism of Rorty is itself only possible because we live in a society that has its roots in the biblical message. Pragmatism and hermeneutics have become philosophies capable of going beyond the metaphysical Logos, toward a culture of dialogue no longer driven by the search for truth. Finally, in the dialogue, “What is Religion’s future after Metaphysics?” the future of religion is analyzed together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our postmodern society, in the hope that one day solidarity, charity, and irony will become the only law.

2. G. Vattimo, “Gadamer and the Problem of Ontology,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, and J. Kertscher, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002), 305–6. Rorty and Vattimo think that hermeneutics prevents the space left open by the end of metaphysics from being filled up by another foundational philosophy and, above all, that the goal of philosophical research is no longer contact with something that exists independently from us, but only the formation of ourselves, Bildung. For an accurate analysis of the meaning of hermeneutics for philosophy, see R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1979); and G. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).

the Western Rationalistic Tradition as a secularized version of the Western Monotheist Tradition—as the latest twist on what Heidegger calls “onto-theology.” We pragmatists take the same dim view of Absolute Truth and of Reality as It Is in Itself as the Enlightenment took of Divine Wrath and Divine Judgment. … Dewey was happy to admit that these distinctions had, in their time, served us well. In their time, they were neither confusions nor repressive devices nor mystifications. On the contrary, they were instruments that Greek thinkers used to change social conditions, often for the better. But over a couple of millennia, these instruments outlived their usefulness. Dewey thought that, just as many Christians had outgrown the need to ask whether the sentences of the Creed correspond to objective reality, so civilization as a whole might outgrow the supposed necessity to believe in absolute truths. Dewey learned from Hegel to historicize everything, including Hegel’s own picturesque but outdated story of the union of subject and object at the end of History. Like Marx, Dewey dropped Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit, but kept his insight that ideas and movements that had begun as instruments of emancipation (Greek metaphysics, Christianity, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Hegelian System) had typically, over the course of time, turned into instruments of repression—into parts of what Dewey called “the crust of convention.”

R. Rorty, Truth and Progress

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76–78.

the idea of a thinking that is more aware of its own limits, that abandons its claims to global and metaphysical visions, but above all a theory of weakening as the constitutive character of Being in the epoch of the end of metaphysics. If, indeed, Heidegger’s critique of objectivistic metaphysics cannot be carried forward by replacing the latter with a more adequate conception of Being (still thought of as an object), one will have to think Being as not identified, in any sense, with the presence characteristic of the object.

G. Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb

(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 35.

we will always be held captive by some picture or other, for this is merely to say we shall never escape from language or from metaphor—never see either God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality face to face. But old pictures may have disadvantages that can be avoided by the sketching of new pictures. Escape from prejudice and superstition, Dewey thought, was not escape from appearance to reality, but escape from the satisfaction of old needs to the satisfaction of new needs. It was a process of maturation, not progress from darkness to light. On this view, escape from the Western Rationalistic Tradition would indeed be an escape from error to truth, but it would not be an escape from the way things appear to the way things really are.

Rorty, Truth and Progress, 80.

know that some interpreters and radical continuators of Heidegger, Jacques Derrida in the lead, deny that it is still possible to speak of Being because this would be a sort of lapse back into the metaphysics of foundations. Yet to continue to speak of Being and ontology is not an excessive claim; it is rather an expression of modesty on the part of this philosophy, which knows that it is not obliged to respond to truth but only to the need to recompose the experience of a historical phase of humanity that is living through the fragmentation of the division of labor, the compartmentalization of language, the many forms of discontinuity to which we are exposed by the rapidity of the transformation (technological above all) of our world. On the contrary, you can only set Being to one side if you neglect this modest task and suppose that you must in any case still answer to an objective truth of things, which would exclude just such a “simulation” as being too vague and too rigid at the same time.

Defined as the ontology of actuality, philosophy is practiced as an interpretation of the epoch, a giving-form to widely felt sentiments about the meaning of being alive in a certain society and in a certain historical world. I am well aware that defining philosophy as the Hegelian spirit of the age is like reinventing the wheel. The difference, though, lies in the “interpretation”: philosophy is not the expression of the age, it is interpretation, and although it does strive to be persuasive, it also acknowledges its own contingency, liberty, perilousness. It is not just Hegel who seems to be returning; empiricism is playing a part as well. The epoch and the widespread sense of what it means are perhaps no more than experience, to which empiricists once sought to remain true—experience interpreted philosophically, meaning in continuity with and employing the same instruments as a certain textual tradition. Within this tradition certain elements, aspects, and authors are of course privileged over others, but it remains present in its totality as background, as a possible source of alternative interpretations.

G. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation:

Ethics, Politics, and Law,

ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. W. McCuaig (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2004), chapter 7.

the point is that some of us (not everybody) cannot circumvent the metaphysical logos without mutilating ourselves, without curtailing our knowledge of what made us what we are (including the mutilations that made us what we are), and thus our knowledge of what we are. If so, the point is not that there is an exceptionally adhesive substance called “philosophy” (one whose properties are understood by Derrida but not by his nominalistic competitors in the antimetaphysics business), but rather that Derrida and Bennington are, following Heidegger, using “philosophy” as a name for the sequence of “words of Being”—the words that, had they not been uttered, would have resulted in our being different people. Some people may not be able to walk away from the metaphysical logos or from the Greek-Jew contrast without losing their sense of where they are. That was why Heidegger insisted that denken ist andenken, and it may be why Derrida and Bennington view nominalistic pragmatists like me as light-minded escapists.

Rorty, Truth and Progress, 343–44.

6. Rorty explains that it was Hegel who first criticized his predecessors not because their propositions were false but because their language was obsolete, and he “broke away from the Plato-Kant sequence and began a tradition of ironist philosophy which is continued in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. These are the philosophers who define their achievement by their relation to their predecessors rather than by their relation to the truth.” R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 79. He also maintains that no

matter what one’s opinion of the secularization of culture, it was a mistake to try to make the natural scientist into a new sort of priest, a link between the human and the non-human. So was the idea that some sorts of truths are “objective” whereas others are merely “subjective” or “relative”—the attempt to divide up the set of true sentences into “genuine knowledge” and “mere opinion,” or into the “factual” and “judgmental.” So was the idea that the scientist has a special method which, if only the humanist would apply it to ultimate values, would give us the same kind of self-confidence about moral ends as we now have about technological means. I think that we should content ourselves with the second, “weaker” conception of rationality, and avoid the first, “stronger” conception.

R. Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37.

one might ask how we can rationally argue once we forgo the claim of grasping an ultimate foundation that would be valid for all, above and beyond any cultural difference. To this one might answer: the universal validity of an assertion can be constructed by building consensus in dialogue, though without claiming any right in the name of an absolute truth. Dialogical consensus may be reached by acknowledging that we share a heritage of cultural, historical, and technological-scientific acquisitions.

G. Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. L. D’Isanto

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 5.

9. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Bas van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2001); and Carmelo Dotolo, La rivelazione cristiana: Parola, evento, mistero (Milan: Paoline, 2002). On the return of religion in the third century see Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion, trans. David Webb and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Nancy K. Frankenberry, ed., Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Mark Wrathall, ed., Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

10. Vattimo specifies that “philosophy can call the weakening that it discovers as the characteristic feature of the history of Being secularization in its broadest sense, which comprises all the forms of dissolution of the sacred characteristic of the modern process of civilization. If it is the mode in which the weakening of Being realizes itself as the kenosis of God, which is the kernel of the history of salvation, secularization shall no longer be conceived of as abandonment of religion but as the paradoxical realization of Being’s religious vocation.” Vattimo, After Christianity, 24.

god is dead, if philosophy has recognized that it cannot with certainty grasp the ultimate foundation, then philosophical atheism is no longer necessary. Only an absolute philosophy can feel the necessity of refuting religious experience. … Nietzsche writes that God is dead because those who believe in him have killed him. In other words, the faithful, who have learned not to lie because it was God’s command, have discovered in the end that God himself is a superfluous lie. However, in light of our postmodern experience, this means: since God can no longer be upheld as an ultimate foundation, as the absolute metaphysical structure of the real, it is possible, once again, to believe in God. True, it is not the God of metaphysics or of medieval scholasticism. But that is not the God of the Bible, of the Book that was dissolved and dismissed by modern rationalist and absolutist metaphysics.

Vattimo, After Christianity, 5–6.

helped make respectable the idea that politics can be separated from beliefs about matters of ultimate importance—that shared belief among citizens on such matters are not essential to a democratic society. Like many other figures of the Enlightenment, Jefferson assumed that a moral faculty common to the typical theist and the typical atheist suffices for civic virtue. … He thought it enough to privatize religion, to view it as irrelevant to social order but relevant to, and possibly essential for, individual perfection. Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not “fanatical.” That is, they must abandon or modify opinions on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.

Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth, 175.

it has become increasingly difficult to use religion to sanctify oppression. (This seems to me one almost entirely good thing which Westernization has done for the East, though I admit that the Western colonialists tried to use Christianity to legitimize their own oppression when they first arrived.) It has become increasingly easier for the weak and the poor to see themselves as victims of the greed of their fellow-humans rather than of Destiny, or the gods, or of the sins of their ancestors.

R. Rorty, quoted in Balslev Anindita Niyogi,

Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty

(New Delhi: Indian Institute of

Advanced Study, 1991), 100.

what, from a Christian point of view, and in general from a “Western” point of view, one can and should do in order to escape from the miscomprehensions of the wars of religion, is to start to live our own religiosity outside the schema dear to rationalistic illuminism which foresees only two possibilities: either the fanaticism of blind faith (credo quia absurdum), or the skepticism of a reason without roots and without an effective grip on the world. Concretely, an attitude of recovered religiosity free from power concerns, therefore also free from any temptation of violent imposition, would mean that today’s West, instead of preparing for an endless war for the triumph of its own “faith,” should take seriously the historical reasons for its clashes with the so-called third world. These are mainly reasons of economics, of inequality, of exploitation, disguising themselves as reasons of faith and of culture exclusively in aid of self-interested ideological manipulation by those who hold wealth and power. May we hope to find in the other interlocutors in our dialogue, especially our Muslim and Hebrew friends, the same spirit? Rather than seeking the triumph of one faith over the others, the task facing us all is to rediscover—after the “metaphysical” age of absolutisms and of the identity between truth and authority—the possibility of a post-modern religious experience in which the relation with the divine is no longer corrupted by fear, violence, and superstition.

G. Vattimo, Vero e falso Universalismo cristiano

(Rio de Janerio: Editora Universitária Candido Mendes, Academia da Latinidade, 2002), 16.

religion is less important now than 100 years ago. The tide of faith has ebbed. Lots of people are commonsensically secular in a way that their ancestors couldn’t have been commonsensically secular. I certainly don’t think we have to get back to Christianity, or Marxism, or any other absolutist view in order to get anything political done. … [And ] like the priests, they like to think they have a privileged relation to reality. I doubt they do, but one might expect that they would resent it if told they don’t. When the priests of the 19th century were told by practitioners of philological higher criticism of the Bible that they were in the service of middle-eastern creation myths, they didn’t like it. In the middle of this century, the physicists didn’t like it when Kuhn told them they were just trying to solve puzzles.

Richard Rorty, in R. Rorty, D. Nystrom, K. Puckett,

Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies:

A Conversation with Richard Rorty

(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002), 59–61.