Nicholas Davey
Gianni Vattimo (b. Turin, Italy, 4 January 1936) is renowned for his doctrine of “weak thinking” (Il Pensiero debole), which argues for (1) a dialogical non-fundamentalist approach to philosophy, (2) an hermeneutically oriented critique of metaphysics and modernism devoted to unmasking privileged positions of authority and power, (3) a deconstruction of Western philosophy as a pathway to nihilism, and finally (4) a development of hermeneutics as a postmodern defense of Christianity in secularized form.
Vattimo studied philosophy at the University of Turin under the phenomenologist and aesthetician Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991) and researched Heidegger’s philosophy at Heidelberg University working alongside both Karl Löwith (1897–1973) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Heidegger’s arguments concerning the end of metaphysics, nihilism, and a possible phenomenological reappropriation of religious thought set the agenda for Vattimo’s philosophical project. Since 1982, he has held the chair of Theoretical Philosophy at Turin and retained his practical social and religious orientation as a member of the European Parliament. His main contribution to continental philosophy has been the edited collection Il Pensiero debole (1983) and the monographs The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger (1980), Nietzsche: An Introduction (1985), The End of Modernity, Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (1985), and Transparent Society (1989). The express theme is that nineteenth- and twentieth-century (German) philosophy is shaped by a seeming teleology of dissemination dominated by the metaphors of weakening (exposing foundational claims as masks for sectionalist interests) and secularization (demythologizing religious and philosophical truth claims by returning them to open debate).
Vattimo’s work on the secularization of religion stems from Löwith’s claim,
In the real history of the world, as of the spirit, insignificant occurrences very quickly can become significant events; on the other hand, what seems eventful, very quickly can lose all meaning. It is nonsense, therefore, whether in advance or in conclusion, to fix the totality characteristic of an epoch in all its facets. The process of shift of meaning is never concluded, because, in history, it is never determined at the beginning what will result in the end.
(Löwith 1965, vi)
Vattimo concludes that if it is not possible to say whether the modern or the religious epoch is truly over, there is no reason to suppose that the concerns of such traditions do not continue to shape contemporary thought. He rejects the Enlightenment repudiation of religion since it is impossible to claim historically that the issues raised by religion are decisively closed.
Vattimo’s hermeneutical philosophy stands on three axioms. (1) Historiographical knowledge is not a contemplation of received objects but a mode of interpretive interaction that modifies the context from which it both stems and subsequently becomes a part (Vattimo 1993, 22). (2) Historiographical knowledge provides Vattimo with a model for the hermeneutical analysis of all knowledge: “every act of knowledge is already of its essence hermeneutical and cannot be ‘objective’” (Vattimo 1993, 25). (3) Vattimo embraces Gadamer’s axiom: “Being which can be understood is language” (Gadamer 1989, 474). Language is no mere tool for describing “things” but the clearing in which “things” show themselves to humans. “Being is not something more vast than language and prior to it. Being is history, and history of language” (Vattimo 1993, 24). Vattimo’s analyses of nihilism, difference, and religion derive from this hermeneutical ontology.
Vattimo recognizes in hermeneutic philosophy the double effectiveness of philosophical engagement. If all philosophizing is historically situated, the terrain of how we presently think is shaped by an ever-active philosophical inheritance. Vattimo utilizes the historical situatedness of philosophy to create a double dialogue. Philosophical arguments ancient and modern are used to consider the ethical and political dilemmas of the day, while, on the other hand, the cultural concerns of the contemporary epoch are deployed to gain a purchase on previous philosophical positions. Vattimo sharpens the difference between present modes of reflection and those of the past, opening their as yet undisclosed aspects to future development. His questioning of the past is not straightforwardly dialectical: the logical structure of propositions is not contested. Rather, his questioning is hermeneutical: he illuminates more of their subject matter by opening the difference between how such propositions were once and are now understood.
Vattimo repositions Nietzsche’s nihilism with debates concerning modernity and postmodernity. Nietzsche’s analysis of negative and affirmative nihilism sustains Vattimo’s signature distinction between strong and weak thought. “Strong” thought is monologically inflexible in its exclusion of other methods. “Weak” is an invitation to further thought given that substantive methodological claims are treated as discursively open. Loss of faith in absolute foundations and the increasing influence of hermeneutical orientations suggest that, for Vattimo, the weak will indeed inherit the earth. This is not a matter of open-ended systems of thought displacing more determinate ones but concerns traditional metaphysics inverting its key presuppositions according to their own internal logic. Though Vattimo cites Nietzsche’s thesis that in the pursuit of truth, the will to truth calls its own belief in truth into question, he moves decisively beyond Nietzsche’s position, claiming that the advent of nihilism makes it possible to perceive truth as a charitable openness to the discursive negotiability of all truth claims.
Nihilism is an emancipatory way of thinking. In the search for truth, our highest “values devaluate themselves” (Nietzsche 1968, 2). “The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world” (Nietzsche 1968, 15). If, however, the assumptions of traditional metaphysics are renounced, existence is transformed. No longer does it appear as an abysmal nothingness but a nothingness of plenitude (a rich realm of flux and appearing) of ever-emerging possibilities. Anticipating Vattimo’s terms, Nietzsche concludes that, with regard to passive nihilism and its reversal, “Weakness can be an inaugural phenomenon” (Nietzsche 1968, 863).
Nietzsche’s nihilism involves an epistemic incommensurability: knowledge and becoming rule each other out (Nietzsche 1968, 715). Vattimo’s account asserts an ontological excess. If Being as “event” (Ereignis) is primary, it no longer has the stability assigned to it by metaphysical tradition. The necessity of maintaining itself requires that it continually reveals itself (Vattimo 2002b, 21). Because as event Being shows and hides itself, it is always in excess of theory. Unlike Nietzsche, Vattimo does not see nihilism as a Null-Punkt but as a historical accomplishment able to open further understanding.
Vattimo argues that, though all philosophical argumentation is historically situated, it is not contained by context. Arguments have historical effects beyond the circumstances of their emergence. The historical critique of philosophical arguments reactivates the questions which the original arguments addressed. While historical critique is nihilistic in that it challenges the universality of particular knowledge claims, at the same time it universalizes the subject matter by demonstrating that additional views are always constructible. Furthermore, it is always possible to ask whether a current conception of a question improves upon a previous one or if an idealized conception offers a viable critique of a contemporary view. This doubled hermeneutic differentiation allows Vattimo’s hermeneutic to operate as “engaged criticism,” always ready to collide with absolutist claims to power in whatever form they assume. Inasmuch as hermeneutics depends upon the differential between actualization and realization, it drives the “weakening” (i.e., the particularization) of strong truth claims in philosophy and science. This prevents the space opened by the end of metaphysics from being filled by another foundational philosophy.
Vattimo learns from Marxism that claims to truth are claims to power. Ideological critique argues that sectionalist interests disguise their claims as having a reasonable universal legitimacy. This has a tragic flaw. If an institutional claim to universal authority is not to be a violent refusal of the question “Why?”, it must be open to further critical attempts to universalize its message. The universalizing impetus of truth claims weakens institutional ownership of such truths, allowing them to be newly articulated beyond the restraints of their original formulation. Such weakening is the condition of further historical transmission.
Vattimo acknowledges that in the face of globalization, fundamentalist religions betray a neurotic defensiveness. However, fundamentalist pursuits will be undermined by their own drive to universality. He sees in the Christian divinity, a kenotic power which fuels both the historical drive to secular culture and the demand that, as an other-worldly religion, Christianity die by its own hand. Yet, the death of metaphysical religion marks the resurrection of Christianity’s defining message. In the negotiability of truth, the truth of divine love is realized on earth as an everlasting charity toward the other for it is in such negotiation that the human community forms itself. Such secularization is not opposed to religious experience but a realization of its kenotic principle. Vattimo asserts an effective relationship between kenosis and philosophical anti-foundationalism: caritas is the secular fulfillment of Christianity in the form of the positive implications of philosophical nihilism. The quest for religious truth culminates in a post-metaphysical theology that weakens the authority and violent self-assertiveness of received religious structures in favor of constant and open negotiation. This is no end state but a constant social endeavor to reduce violence, to weaken strong identities, and to adopt a charitable disposition toward all beings. The spiritual quest for charitable truth places it at odds with political and religious authority. The hermeneutical driver in this process lies in the active difference between (1) a religious or hermeneutical truth claim whose content is always to a degree underdetermined and (2) a community or tradition that strives to understand and interpret that truth. The latter will inevitably promote new readings of that truth and thereby weaken the exclusivity of previous interpretations of it. Perpetual weakening or reformation is for Vattimo the inevitable outcome of historically pursued truths.
For Vattimo, metaphysical thought has come to the end of its adventure: a philosophy that requires certainties and unique fundamentals for its practice can no longer be presupposed. Being always precedes thought. For Nietzsche, nihilism threatens a catastrophe which can be averted by possession of the strength to knowingly project a meaning on to existence without insisting that it is the only true meaning. For Vattimo, the advent of nihilism is not a catastrophe but an accomplishment, the passing into a more tolerant and openly dialogical historical epoch. To assume that nihilism poses a catastrophe is indicative of despair, a giving up, a “poverty of ascesis, which is still committed to the myth of finding—at the end—the shining kernel of true value” (Vattimo 1988, 161). Accomplished nihilism involves reappropriating truth claims in terms of what they always were, that is, open-ended pragmatic interpretations. Accomplished nihilism is not a refutation of such claims but a recognition of their changed status: they shift from foundational axioms into discursive proposals. Heeding our intellectual heritage does not lead to a devaluation of all values but to “the resumption and continuation of a portion of the content we have inherited” (Vattimo 2004, 45). “Philosophy does not propose to demonstrate some truth but only to favour the possibility of a consensus that could be seen as truth” (Vattimo 2005b, 9). Were accomplished nihilism a repudiation of the illusions of modernism, it would be in bad faith, that is, merely rejecting one set of foundational values in favor of another. Whereas Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values demands a clear break from the past, for Vattimo such a violent severance is impossible. Accomplished nihilism may reject methodological foundations but it does not deny that they reflect a continuous heritage of historical debate about the central cognitive and evaluative issues which bind received intellectual tradition. Vattimo openly embraces Rorty’s precept that “We are a conversation.” This distinguishes his position from Derrida’s deconstructive stratagem. Vattimo’s philosophy of weakening does not seek to dissipate the authority of literary claims to truth but to continuously open them to debate. Truth claims are neither to be accepted as commands, epistemological imperatives placed beyond question. Nor are they to be belligerently denied any credibility (deconstruction). They are charitable invitations to debate and dialogue. “With the end of metaphysics, the aim of intellectual authority is no longer knowledge of a truth but a conversation in which every argument is fully entitled to find agreement without recourse to any authority” (Vattimo 2005b, 11). Weak thought is an expression of strength not in the Nietzschean sense of exhibiting the ability to command and implement a perspective ex nihilo but in the classical sense of being strong enough to have one’s ideas being tested by counsel.
Vattimo’s hermeneutic ontology has practical consequences. His political critique is hermeneutical. Whereas political projects that utilize instrumentalist reason are “claims to power,” the task of hermeneutics is to unmask their sectionalist aspirations. His position retains an element of Ernst Bloch’s utopianism: globalization, if understood as cultural diversification, promises an increasing peacefulness as the overcoming of fundamentalisms displaces the fear of difference which traditionally drives the will to sameness. For Vattimo, the Internet exemplifies the emancipatory power of unrestrained rational exchange freed from such instrumentalism. In Vattimo’s communicative utopianism, what is at issue is not the restoration of any economic equilibrium per se but the defense of every individual’s entitlement to a meaningful existence. This does not involve the realization of an end state but the intensification of the qualitative aspects of existence. “Solidarity rather than competition is implied” and “the reduction of all forms of violence rather than the affirmation of metaphysical principles or the endorsement of scientific models of society” (Vattimo 2004, 36). Progress is not the fulfillment of an anticipated end but the process which makes further development possible.
Vattimo’s social and political perspective has clear theological undertones. The outcome of unending individual qualitative transformation is not arrival in a promised land but graceful acceptance of what humans are: hermeneutic creatures whose essence resides in tireless negotiation and transformation. This position is also informed by an anthropological non-essentialism which favors hermeneutics as a mode of cultural rationale. “Weak thought” does not ascribe any rigid content to the idea of what is and what is not human. Vattimo’s courageous disputes with government and church on questions of sexual preference exhibit his concern about over-restrictive assumptions about what is and what is not properly human. If human beings have no predetermined essence, what they are is the consequence of continuous adaption and negotiation. What they may yet become also depends on continuous exchange and the challenging and extending of the horizons of individual and collective possibility. These theological and anthropological underpinnings push Vattimo into a controversial position. They imply a rejection of any constitutional fixity since permanent legal and political definitions involve a degree of forceful imposition. On the other hand, the anti-constitutionalist’s dependence upon debate and precedence is completely consistent with Vattimo’s hermeneutic orientation.
Vattimo’s revaluation of religion utilizes analogies between Heidegger’s notion of Being as event, the hermeneutic stress on “emergence,” and the kenotic element in Christian thought which renounces self-interest for the sake of allowing the other to flourish. Christian love is characterized by Vattimo as the reduction of violence, the weakening of strong identities, and a charitable disposition to all beings. Vattimo recognizes that involvement in kenotic processes is demanding, for there is no end to negotiating with and opening to the other. The foundation of Vattimo’s view of religion is primarily philosophical: a metaphysics of presence is replaced with a notion of Being as the perpetual appearing and dissolution of beings. His contribution to postmodern theology asserts an effective relationship between the Christian doctrine of kenosis and philosophical anti-foundationalism. Caritas (the practice of open negotiation concerning truth) emerges as the convergence of two historical movements: philosophy’s weakening and the secular fulfillment of Christianity as universal converse in philosophical nihilism. Hence, Vattimo claims that “Nietzsche and the death of God and the Heidegger of the Ereignis are the most radical heirs to the anti-metaphysical principle that Christ brought into the world” (Vattimo 2002b, 108).
Vattimo’s conception of a Christianized discursive pragmatic is consistent with his hermeneutic discourse. Anxiety about human finitude is not surmounted by a heroic Heideggerian resolve to embrace the destiny of received historical projects as our own. Vattimo certainly elects for “choosing what is ours” but by debating the values of our cultural heritage. However, the meaning of life and death is to be argued out collectively so as to allow each person to come to terms with finitude in their own way. The emphasis is not upon a collectively achieved solution but of individually appropriate rapprochements with death brought about via collective exchange. This also distinguishes Vattimo’s position from Gadamer’s notion of learning through suffering (pathei mathos) (Gadamer 1989, 356). Gadamer celebrates dialogue as a corrective to the arrogance of individual judgment, confronting individuals with the fact that they are not gods. In Vattimo, the emphasis is otherwise. Collective negotiation is not conceived as a restraint upon individual hubris, but as Vattimo’s commitment to individual and social Bildung makes clear, a means of bringing the possibilities residing within individuals, communities, and Being itself into greater fulfillment.