The Responsibility of the Philosopher

There exist thinkers—Kierkegaard and Hannah Arendt come especially to mind—whose propensity for singularity and antitheory is grounded in precise and rigorously theoretical reasons. This to a certain extent is Gianni Vattimo’s case too, and the primary aim of what follows is to bring out the strong reasons for Vattimo’s commitment to “weak thought” (pensiero debole), and to an “attenuation” or “lightening” of the structures of traditional philosophical discourse.¹

Attenuation and lightening are not self-explanatory notions when applied to philosophy. To lighten or pare down a theory generally means strengthening the logical power of the theory itself (a point made promptly by acute critics of Vattimo like Carlo A. Viano and Enrico Berti). Actually, when the formula was coined, it conveyed a meaning more associative than argumentative. The expression “weak thought” was quite clearly a catchphrase meant to characterize, and render historically intelligible, the aftermath of an unpleasantly shallow and cruel climate that had come about in philosophy and political thought in the second half of the 1970s.

At that time, the analyses of such neostructuralist thinkers as Deleuze and Foucault were picked up in Italy and fused into an “explosive mixture,” in which a fundamental aestheticism, cut-rate and insouciant, was coupled with a certain facility in taking up arms, or rhetoricizing about the “armed struggle.” What was going on, and what did it mean, philosophically speaking? Vattimo’s answer was both radical and reasonable: following Nietzsche and Heidegger, he applied the term “nihilism” to this historical mix of aestheticism and terrorism, and weak thought was put forward as philosophy’s response in the face of this state of affairs. Weak thought is thus, very simply, the right way to do philosophy in the epoch (and amid the contingencies) of nihilism. Weak thought and nihilism are two basic notions with which some familiarity is needed in order to grasp Vattimo’s philosophical position. They sound oddly strident if taken together, and yet, right there lies the key, I believe, to the meaning of just what it is that Vattimo is proposing with this thought-combination. The nihilist temperament is an icy passion, passionless out of inner passion, while weak thought seems like the soft but calculated negation of any passion at all—or any iciness either. The two attitudes may be reciprocally corrective, or either may be promoted at the expense of the other. So while Vattimo’s theoretical stance may be vulnerable to a charge of elasticity,² its roots are anything but arbitrary and irresponsible, and it comes into sharp focus if we return to the meaning of “lightening” and ask ourselves: what would it signify to weaken, not this or that theory (so incurring the well-founded objections of Viano and Berti), but to weaken that vaste and vague metatheoretical horizon to which our tradition gives the name “philosophy”? To put it another way: what would it mean to posit that there is a specific weakness of philosophy in the epoch of realized nihilism, and that this debility ought to be embraced on compelling (if not “strong”) metaphilosophical grounds?

By “weak” Vattimo seems to mean essentially two things: pluralistic and incomplete.³ Each term corresponds to a critical axis of theoretical discourse; each is a possible path to the dissolution of theory. The first evokes synchronicity (many theses, many “truths,” many interpretations are simultaneously legitimate) the second diachronicity (no text, no truth can be said to be definitive and conclusive), hence they correspond to two classic forms of relativism: epistemological and historical.

But there is more to it than that. Weak thought isn’t some sort of amalgamated, all-purpose relativism; it’s a calculated combination of different modes of relativism in order to get to somewhere else beyond relativism. The meaning of this “beyond” is what Vattimo, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, is seeking. And the (transtheoretical) theory that results should be read primarily, and precisely, as a specific interpretation of “beyond,” of what it is in philosophy to surpass and be surpassed, of the way in which, in philosophy, every rigorous surpassing never achieves a higher level, but falls back into the surpassed.⁴ Or rather: in philosophy, as soon as you attain a second level, any further attempt to surpass that level tends to fall back into the first, such that philosophical arithmetic would comprise no more than three terms, of which the third is just a new first.⁵ This is a basic dialectic, which can be seen as the leitmotiv of all Vattimo’s work, and more generally of hermeneutics.⁶

Actually, what makes philosophical discourse specifically weak in Vattimo’s sense is not properly the double constatation of the plurality and incompleteness of truth, but rather the constatation of the incompleteness and plurality of this constatation as well. Weak thought in this sense is a third-level description, well synthesized in aphorism 22 from Beyond Good and Evil (to which Vattimo himself refers below), in which Nietzsche maintains that all is interpretation (because “each thing follows its own rule”), and if someone objects that this too is an interpretation, the answer will not be to argue back, but to say: so what?

From the perspective of weak thought, we then have three theses arrayed in reflexive steps:

V₀ = “everything is interpretation”

followed immediately by:

V₁ = “V₀ is also an interpretation”

and finally by the admission, the typical starting point of weak thought, that:

V₂ = “we must inevitably think this self-refuting game”

The unaccomplished nihilist, according to Nietzsche, is he or she who stops at the first thesis; the accomplished nihilist is he or she who dares admit the second as well. The typical intonation of hermeneutic nihilism corresponds to the third position, which evidently moves the plane of the discourse beyond the simple description of facts (V₀ does in effect tell us something about the structure of reality, even if what it tells us is rather discouraging for any project to describe reality) but also beyond the description of descriptions. (The critico-transcendental level, indicated here by V₁, does ultimately tell us something about the way we describe reality, even if what it tells us is particularly discouraging for any project aimed at transcendental description.)

V₂ is actually a description of facts, like V₀ (in this respect we can be said to have “fallen back” to the first level), but the facts in question are no longer the simple facts of knowledge and experience, but rather historico-linguistic events: what the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Dilthey identifies in the Hegelian “objective spirit.” V₂ says to us: nihilism, that is to say the play of overtaking (all is interpretation, this too is an interpretation, so what?) is folded as an intrinsic necessity into every rigorous and “accomplished” attempt to speak the modes of our experience of reality, of the world, and of Being.

Readers will have spotted the reversal, or better the transvaluation, performed with V₂: “we must inevitably” signifies “we cannot not—,” or “we are compelled to recognize that—.” Hence it signifies that there is a theoretical, philosophical necessity to be reckoned with, even if the necessity in question is of a quite particular kind (not for nothing does it arise “coherently” from the ubiquity of interpretation, in other words from thesis V₀). This, I believe, is where Vattimo’s antifoundationalism diverges from other forms of post-modern and deconstructionist antifoundationalism.⁷ At just this point, and unexpectedly, weak thought rejoins the Kierkegaardism of Luigi Pareyson, which was the opposite of “weak” (in the everyday sense of the term).⁸ Here lies the strong ground of weak thought, and the generative core of Vattimo’s philosophical work.

The passage schematized above with V₀, V₁, V₂ is virtually self-refuting; to regard it as the point of departure of a certain (if not a “new”) philosophical practice in the contemporary (technological) world is both a courageous move and a piece of dialectical subtlety of a specific kind. It is not surprising that Vattimo should feel particularly drawn to Christianity from a philosophical point of view: in a way, the strictures to love one’s enemy, and to let the weeds¹⁰grow, find a good, albeit highly decontextualized, application here.¹¹

Because “weak” is such an equivocal term, and for other contingent reasons, Vattimo’s philosophical project has often run the risk of being misunderstood precisely where its best qualities lie. In fact, if the outcome of his work were only a generic attenuation of theoretical discourse, then a lot of effort was expended for a meager result. But since 1983, the date when the famous collection of essays bearing the title Il pensiero debole was published, Vattimo has focused exclusively on elaborating his position and marking it off from a generic attenuation of theory.

The first chapter of Beyond Interpretation, entitled “The Nihilistic Vocation of Hermeneutics,” is in this respect quite an important text, because it shows clearly how far from “weak” the horizon that justifies the option for weak thought is. Vattimo endeavors to show the irreducibility of hermeneutics to a vague philosophy of culture, and manages this not by emphasizing the Kantism of the philosophical roots of hermeneutics (normally, bringing neo-Kantians back to Kant means bringing philosophies of life, history, and culture back to their good old transcendental—that is, properly and rigorously “philosophical”—roots), but by demonstrating that these philosophical roots cannot be traced back to a Kantian or neo-Kantian sense of objectivity. Vattimo writes:

In other words: from the constatation of the interpretative structure of human existence, taken not as a descriptive constatation, but as itself an interpretation, there emerge the conditions of a “rigorous reflection.” “Accomplished” nihilism does not stop at the nihilistic nature of theory, but pushes further and accepts the nihilistic nature of metatheory. The upshot is not in the least a dissolution of theoretical discourse, but on the contrary, and explicitly, the paradoxical “rigor” of weak thought. The necessity of doing away with any metaphysical description leads to contradiction (as this same necessity ought to require a descriptive ground). But it is the awareness of this fact that locates philosophy on the narrow, “risk-laden” crest of interpretation. This, you might say, is the force majeure that dictates the thesis of weakening.

The concept of nihilism has been methodologically prominent from the outset of Vattimo’s philosophical trajectory and confrontation with Nietzsche, a confrontation that brought him, while still a young man, to the conference at Royaumont in 1964, at which the postwar Nietzsche Renaissance was, so to speak, institutionalized.¹³ The current of thought later labelled neostructuralism or poststructuralism emerged clearly at that meeting for perhaps the first time, and went on to become dominant in Europe and subsequently in North America, exerting considerable influence on the theoretical and political evolution of Marxism in that period. It also had a profound influence on what, by the end of the 1970s, began to be seen as a divergence or contrast of philosophical styles: the so-called continental style, as opposed to the analytical one.¹⁴ It was Vattimo’s deep awareness of the meaning of nihilism (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) that set him apart ever more clearly from poststructuralist theory, immunizing him in particular against the risk of aestheticism. This risk thinkers of unquestionable importance like Deleuze and Derrida chose to incur, and while it imparts a quite distinctive esprit to their writings, it also leaves them marked by a coquetterie of a somewhat outdated and geographically restricted kind.¹⁵

Like Deleuze, Vattimo aimed from the start at an affirmative interpretation of the Nietzschean discourse on nihilism. So Vattimo and Deleuze can both claim to be “affirmative nihilists” (with the full weight of contradiction that this obviously entails). But there is an important difference. Deleuze (since Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962¹⁶) pursued a critique of culture that ultimately turned into culture itself, that is to say into the encyclopedic reconstruction he went on to undertake with Mille Plateaux. Vattimo appears to take the affirmative interpretation of Nietzsche proposed by Deleuze (and Lyotard) in a nonvitalistic and nonnaturalistic sense. Affirmativity for him is saying yes to the logoi, to language and its capacity to express Being, rather than saying yes to “life”—a notion that in this setting seems to be at least as abstract as that from which it wants to distinguish itself. This stance, fundamentally Hegelian and Gadamerian, saves Vattimo from the sort of suicidal contradiction typical of anti-intellectual positions, and detectable in certain pages of Nietzsche himself. (What’s the ultimate purpose, one asks oneself, of employing so much force of intellect and language and logos to destroy the logos and demean the intellect?¹⁷)

Thus the interpretation and use that Vattimo makes of nihilism (and of Nietzsche in general) assume their own distinct profile vis-à-vis the French thinkers, and in contrast to the French thinkers, as he searches for some deeper theoreticophilosophical “coherence.”¹⁸

A first essential step is taken by the essays collected in The Adventure of Difference in 1980.¹⁹ Here, especially in “Nietzsche and Difference,” Vattimo illustrates a certain development of the notion of difference in Heidegger: from a plane we may call “metaphysical” to a plane that we could call logical or methodological.²⁰ Vattimo notes that in Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time), and in the subsequent essay “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (1929; “On the Essence of Ground”),²¹ Heidegger defines difference essentially as the widening bifurcation between “ontic” and “ontological.” In other words: difference is primarily the divergence of Being from beings (existent, present things), such that the truth of things (a-letheia) lies in its “not-being-concealed.” From this elementary, structural datum, there evidently follows the distinction between two modes in which truth eventuates, the ontic (concerning the being of single individuated things “at the disposal” of humans for use and manipulation) and the ontological (concerning Being as such). Hence—as in the Heideggerian démarche overall—an essential linkage arises between ontology and methodology, which leads to a radical redefinition of both: ontic designates an analysis focused on the way of being of some present thing or other in front of me (Vorhandenheit), while “ontological” is the understanding of “Being qua Being.” Vattimo interprets the relation of Heidegger to the French school in light of this connection between ontology and method, showing how French philosophy of difference errs in its interpretation and use of Heidegger (and Nietzsche). He writes:

Hence we are apparently dealing with a metaphysical perspective, that is to say a description of reality “as such,” “in itself.” But it should be noted that the descriptivity involved here is of a transcendental type (corresponding, that is, to level V₁). Here difference is not established between the existent thing and another “thing” to which we could apply the term “Being,” but rather between existent things and Being as their transcendental, as the “open aperture that makes possible the very appearance of existent things.” Vattimo is thus careful to take Heidegger’s neo-Kantianism into account, whereas this seems to have eluded the French thinkers, with consequences we shall see.

Here Vattimo palpably decouples Heidegger’s discourse from any onticizing misunderstanding. In so doing he steers the question toward a dimension no longer properly ontological, but rather logical, or even “functional.” What counts in difference is the differing itself, not the instances that may eventuate on either side of the differing. But note: French thinkers, Deleuze as much as Derrida and each in his own way,²⁴ also promoted a similar shift, discussing the ontological rigidification of differing in Heidegger. Deleuze especially questioned Heidegger’s “Oedipal” affection for the sole difference, the one between Being and existent beings, where closer attention to difference as “differing,” would immediately have revealed that there are many differences, and many ways of differing, as difference itself is indeed the principle of multiplicity and pluralization.

On this matter, Vattimo adopts a different stance. His evocation of the last part of Sein und Zeit and the question of why difference is—and ought not to be—forgotten shifts the discourse conspicuously. You could say that, through his critique of French neostructuralism, Vattimo succeeds not so much in resolving as in repositioning the question of difference. From his point of view, it is no longer a question of a purely descriptive remembering of the existence of a difference “as a matter of fact” (the simple fact that Being differs from beings), nor of the right stance to take with respect to this fact (for example, as Emanuele Severino suggests,²⁵ coming out resolutely in favor of Being). It is no longer even a question of the assumption of difference as a methodological and metaphysical principle (as we see in Deleuze, who not only aims, through Nietzsche, at a Leibnizian metaphysics of “singularities,” but also defends difference as a sound methodological principle alternative to dialectic). The further step taken by Vattimo is this:

Here we see that in taking his distance from French “philosophy of difference,” Vattimo is also pointing to a subtle ambiguity in Heidegger’s ontological discourse, which remains the fulcrum of his interpretation of Heidegger: Is the forgetting of difference a “fact”? In what sense is it, and in what sense is it not? In other words, is it distinct from the world of ontically arrayed facts? In this regard, it is legitimate to suppose that Heideggerian ontology ought to achieve completion in some form of Hegelianism, more precisely in that form of Hegelianism rethought in linguistic terms that is hermeneutics for Vattimo.²⁷ The peculiarity of Vattimo’s point of view, in this respect, is clearly revealed in “Dialectic and Difference,” the last essay in The Adventure of Difference, where the “actuality” of Heidegger is measured by emphasizing the divergence between recalling (ricordare) as “Er-innerung” in Hegel and remembering (rammemorazione, literally “rememoration”) as “An-denken” in Heidegger. The former, Vattimo notes, is an act of appropriationinteriorization, while the latter (albeit also grounded in a paradialectic nexus of memory and forgetting) is configured within an “event” which is the “death of God,” and so cannot be appropriation because, elementarily, there is no individuated object or mnemonic datum to be (re)appropriated. Once again Vattimo takes his distance from neostructuralism: “We cannot speak of difference, in other words begin to surpass metaphysics, except by describing the conditions under which it comes to pass that it summons us peremptorily.”²⁸

The question is now put in its essential terms: how to speak of difference? Which means: how to speak of a possible transformation, meaning the emancipation of mankind from its own perverted humanism, and of philosophy from metaphysics (in the derogatory sense)? The French thinkers, who conceive the surpassing of metaphysics as the surpassing not only of the subject but also of historicity, end by talking about difference forgetting that it has been forgotten. In effect, difference is neither (just) the static and structural distinction between Being and beings (existent things) nor the functional divergence produced by thought. It is first and foremost:

Evidently, it is not subjective historicity that is renounced by the Heideggerian sense of the relation between memory and forgetting. To avoid the twofold memory loss of French thinkers, it is thus essential to understand that the history of which we speak when we suggest recalling difference “is a history of messages,” of calls and responses, but such that “the response never exhausts the call.” Hence the transition to hermeneutics, meaning in this case the dialogization of ontology and history. Yet, notes Vattimo (in what is clearly the indication of a program), “the full implications of this hermeneutic modelling of history have not yet been clarified, either by Heidegger himself or by his interpreters and followers.”³⁰ Even Derrida, who also stressed the temporality of difference, ultimately reduces the divergence to the simple evidence of historical traces, so in a way he promotes a reontification of temporality.

It was in this context, and with these premises, that weak thought came to seem a viable option. All the essays in the 1983 collection Il pensiero debole, planned and edited by Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, either touch on or deal directly with the destiny of dialectic and the themes of difference and/or dialectic. This indicates that the movement of weak thought concerns epistemology, as well as aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphilosophy, as dialectic and difference are formal principles that concern all these fields. But on a deeper level, as Vattimo’s own essay in the book indicates, it designates a metatheoretical stance in the wide sense, an attempt to respond to the question: what orientation is imposed on thought, after the consummation of the dialectical horizon, which has dominated a wide swathe of European philosophy in the twentieth century?

The introduction coauthored by Vattimo and Rovatti traces a short history of twentieth-century dialectical and postdialectical philosophy, and describes the current status of the question. By the 1960s, the search for a new foundation had arrived at two tentative solutions, conflicting ones in certain respects. The first was the search for structures “free of any center or finality” (“subjectless”); the second was the search for a subjectivity “unsubstantial, more fluid, in course of becoming.” It is not hard to see that they are referring to the structuralist and phenomenological traditions, respectively. By contrast, in the 1970s Vattimo and Rovatti see the emergence of a new negativity: structuralist theory and philosophies aspiring to a new subjectivity both turned out to be fundamentally “totalizing.” “The tone of the debate changed, with the ongoing, albeit unwelcome, intrusion of a tragic [or] irrational element.”³¹ The upshot was reactionary or nostalgic theories about the “crisis of reason,” and deconstructive and anarchic epistemologies.

The book avowedly takes this situation (a good fit with Nietzsche’s theory of reactive-active nihilism) as its point of departure. But what exactly did Vattimo and Rovatti intend when they chose the term “weak”? For Rovatti,³² it would appear, the prescription or indication contained in the formula refers primarily to the way a certain number of quite common logico-political and cognitive experiences lie close to the limit, and, so to speak, bleed into one another:

Rovatti arrives at a definition of weak thought as a dialectic without synthesis, a thinking of the discrimination between two paths that never definitively opts for one or the other.³⁴ Umberto Eco’s point of view is entirely different: he approaches the problem on the semantic and epistemological plane, and interprets weakness as connoting pluralistic, scientifically prospectivistic. For Eco the constitutive nucleus of a “weak” epistemology is a semantic model based on the figure of the labyrinth in its various formulations, especially that of the “encyclopedia.” “Thought of the labyrinth and the encyclopedia is weak, inasmuch as conjectural and contextual, but reasonable because it allows an intersubjective control and leads neither to renunciation nor solipsism.”³⁵

Other authors in the collection (see particularly the article by Gianni Carchia) rightly redirect the entire problem back to the Hegelian question of mediation. If in Hegel, Carchia writes, “the Zusammengehen of subject and predicate in the copula” presents itself precisely as a new form of mediation that avoids the suppression of finiteness to which the philosophy of reflection leads, Heidegger’s move consists in affirming the irreducibility of Being to the copula, in recognizing the more, the “unaware,” that operates between subject and object. In this Heidegger is following Kant’s lead, and it is the Kant of the theory of judgment, according to Carchia, who points the way toward resistance against the dialectical scheme, toward the premises for a “nonjudgmental, and therefore logically weak, thought.”³⁶

But what is the meaning of this emphasis on the “logical” that runs more or less explicitly through the essays in the collection? It’s a fairly interesting question, I think, because one thing we can stipulate is that weak thought is and has been above all a response to the great limitative results of philosophical logic (in the sense of “logic of philosophy”) after Kant, and between Kant and Hegel. In the text you are about to read, Vattimo indirectly puts this question right from the start in addressing the problem of the Kant-Hegel nexus. Now the tenor of these limitative results may also be described as specifically logical, given that the well-known results of Gödel and Tarski (the divergence of completeness and consistency, the necessity to distinguish between language and metalanguage) were actually anticipated in preformal terms precisely by Kant and Hegel. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant manifestly “discovers” the incompleteness of theoretical reason, and Hegel attempts to remedy this “discovery,” or rather to make it the beginning of another way of proceeding in theoretical contexts (exactly like the so-called pioneers of recursivity). Hegel in this regard figures as the equivalent, in a philosophical and preformal setting, of Gödel and the recursivists.³⁷

Vattimo’s own essay for the volume is entitled “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole.” In my view the most interesting aspect of the hypothesis he sets forth is that weak thought is defined on the basis of the categories of totality and adequation, characterizing both in such a way as to render them respectively comparable to the Gödelian concepts of completeness and coherence. It is important to note that in this essay the question is presented in a frankly metaphilosophical and logico-political perspective:

In a comment on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vattimo notes that dialectic is characterized by two principal notions: totality and reappropriation. He portrays both as metaphors or instances, respectively, of completeness, and descriptive conformity (or adequacy or correspondence). But considering that Vattimo’s intellectual horizon is that of being-time-language, a continuum independent of any external referent, “descriptive conformity” amounts to the ontological equivalent of the notion of coherence (within an immanentistic horizon, coherence and correspondence are ultimately the same).

It is interesting to see how Vattimo deduces the debility of both principles from the failure of the dialectical program. The vacillation of the dialectical method is especially visible in Sartre when he demonstrates the “mythological” character of the Lukàcsian solution to the problem of totality—the imputation of a “total” vision to the proletariat, or more precisely to its intellectual vanguard, and to the party. In Adorno, Benjamin, and Bloch, the idea of totality is made to display its full range of ideological violence and falsity.

The importance and fascination of thinkers such as Benjamin, Adorno, and Bloch consists not so much in their having rethought dialectic, incorporating into it the critical exigences of micrology, as in their having valorized those exigencies even to the detriment of dialectic itself and of the very coherence and unity of their own thought. They are thinkers not of dialectic but of its dissolution.³⁹

Benjamin perceives the violent and dogmatic nature of totalizing thought primarily in the way it blankets with silence all that might have come about but didn’t, all that did not produce concrete, striking historical outcomes: the cult of historiography is eminently bourgeois, and dialectical effectualism (the real equals the rational) is its unmistakeable symptom. “From the elementary viewpoint of the living being, Adorno was right: wholeness is a falsehood”⁴⁰ (with an allusion to the way Lukàcs the revolutionary is deployed against Lukàcs the defender of totality in Benjamin and Adorno).

Still, Vattimo observes, the micrological instance defended by the enemies of totality gives way to the second problem, the question of reappropriation and the proper (coherence-consistency).⁴¹ There is no guarantee that the “damned part,” that which the dominant culture excludes, can in fact be uttered. Nothing assures us that, in attaining effectuality, the ineffectual does not also become the voice of domination and imposition. At this point there emerges the “thought of difference.” Its similarity to negative and (post) dialectical Frankfurt thought is explicitly noted. From the vantage point of the philosophy of difference, in particular as elaborated by Heidegger, the critique of totality demands to be supplemented by a critique of appropriation (read: of adequatio, but also of descriptivity). Not only is the totalizing claim of metaphysical logic, and of dialectic itself, false and a vehicle of repression and violence; the critique of this claim must also address the unsustainability of the adequative and descriptive relation purportedly established between language (thought) and Being.

The critique of the claim to totality, in other words, must be combined with the critique of the confirmative-adequative claim to fix Being in terms of the presence of that which “there is.” The adequative claims of critical-negative thought, its wish to be taken for a “better” version of dialectic should also be defeated. Vattimo here appears to read Heidegger’s intimation about the temporalization of the a priori, and his reflection on the relation of Being and language, as a response to the need to “open up” logic as ontology (the question of the “uttering” of Being).

Now it is this aspect that determines the key difference between weak thought (in this variant) and any logical weakening whatever of procedures and principles (in fact, any discovery of paradoxes and limitations in the domain of logic translates, or may effectively translate, into a weakening of language of some kind). The difference between ontological weakening (in the Heideggerian sense) and any other logical weakening may then be formulated as follows: 1. Weak thought does not aim to avoid contradiction, but lies in the recurrence of contradiction, in its constitutive self-presentation as a structural requisite of the language of Being.⁴² 2. Weak thought is also the idea of a suprapersonal destiny of the logos which disallows any logical decision. This second aspect is especially telling: if this thesis is true, strictly speaking one could not even decide in favor of contradiction, and this is what distinguishes weak thought from any logic whatsoever, even of a “paraconsistent” or in general “nonclassical” kind.

Moreover, since the point at issue concerns the modalities of discourse and thought, it is clear that the Heideggerian thesis retroacts on itself, that it presents itself as a proposal for the overcoming of metaphysics and dialectic that also proposes a new way of understanding the very notion of “overcoming.”

The problem of the prefix Über-is the dominant motif of Vattimo’s thought in his engagement with Nietzsche, Heidegger, the French thinkers, and the dialectical tradition, as it evolves in the 1970s and the early 1980s. It was during these years that the solution grew expansive and comprehensible in all its details. The essays in the 1985 volume The End of Modernity⁴³ make especially clear the way in which the surpassing of metaphysics (and the subject) is undertaken by Vattimo with what Berti calls “greater coherence” in comparison to the French thinkers. And it is this coherence that drives weak thought toward that particular asymptotic dialectic (“vertiginous” logic, he calls it) that remains the “strong” core of Vattimo’s work. The first essay, entitled “An Apology for Nihilism,” highlights the fundamental impasse of twentieth-century thought with respect to nihilism:

Not even what Vattimo calls the Wittgensteinian “mystical,” and which (quite singularly) he views as expressed in the theory of “local” truths, escapes the pathos of authenticity.

Vattimo, we observe, assimilates French differentialism to any other antinihilistic “reaction.” In the technological world, which Vattimo views as the world of nihilism, there simply is no theory or philosophical thesis—not even differentialism or the metaphysics of “singularities” and “simulacra”—that succeeds in accounting “more authentically” for experience, “because authenticity—the proper, reappropriation—has itself subsided with the death of God.”⁴⁶

The Heideggerian concept of Verwindung becomes, then, the key term for the whole theory of surpassing, and a preliminary indication for a contemporary practice of philosophy that could succeed in operating under conditions of the loss of “the proper” and of “totality.” But it was the theory of postmodernity, especially as formulated by Lyotard (perhaps the most philosophically significant statement of postmodernism, along with that of Hassan), that now offered Vattimo an ideal terrain on which to frame the discourse on difference, nihilism, dialectic (and weak thought), and definitively valorize this idea of a weak difference (“weak” in the sense of verwunden) as a good alternative to dialectic.

Lyotard defines postmodernity in terms not very remote from those sketched by Vattimo in the essay in Il Pensiero Debole: as the collapse of the grands récits (overarching narratives), and of the local principles of conformity and adequacy.⁴⁷ In the postmodern age everything plays out and comes about in terms of performativity: exactly as in the world of nihilism, in which Being is reduced to exchange value. So one sees how well the theory fits the theses that Vattimo had formulated and was continuing to formulate in those years.⁴⁸ If “modern” is the Cartesian foundation, “postmodernism” is nihilism in the sense of mankind “rolling from the center toward X.”⁴⁹ But postmodernism is also Heideggerian re-memorative thought, which captures difference beyond the claimed objectivations and decisions of the subject (this connection is, among other things, one of the reasons Vattimo discerns a certain consonance between nihilism and the thought of the late Heidegger, detecting in Heidegger “a nihilist tone”). If modern equals “metaphysical,” if it equals the latest “name,” the latest version of metaphysics, then postmodern equals postmetaphysical, but on the basis of that mode of surpassing that, as Heidegger says, is in reality not the elimination but the “repetition” of metaphysics. If the “modern” is “objectivating” thought, claiming to describe “stable structures of being,” postmodernism is pre-eminently thought that doesn’t make that claim.

However, in virtue of the same principle by which, as Nietzsche says, “all is interpretation” is also an interpretation, the surpassing indicated by the prefix “post-” is of a special kind. As Vattimo puts it in “Nihilism and the Post-modern in Philosophy,” the final essay in The End of Modernity: “[Verwindung] is nothing like dialectical Aufhebung, or the way we ‘turn our backs’ on a past that no longer concerns us. Precisely this difference between Verwindung and Überwindung can help us to define in philosophical terms the ‘post-’ in ‘post-modernism’.”⁵⁰

It should be recalled that the problem of difference, like the problem of dialectic, is ultimately a problem of “passage”: a problem of critical distance-taking from the past, but also a problem of logico-theoretical and ontological distinction (of the difference between Being and beings, or of differing in general). Vattimo explains that this problem was resolved by Nietzsche in a way that anticipates the meaning of Heidegger’s theory of Verwindung, and the “post-” in “postmodernism.” In Human, All Too Human the question of how to break free of the historical malady, or more precisely, “how to get free of modernity,” “is posed in a new way” by Nietzsche: “Human, All Too Human operates a genuine dissolution of modernity through a radicalization of its own constitutive tendencies.”⁵¹ So what we have is a dissolution-surpassing that is primarily acceptance and radicalization.

Quite clearly, this attitude is justified by the fact that modernity itself is essentially the age of surpassing/overtaking, and so to surpass it means to actualize it, reconfirm it per-formatively. Modernity is the age of “the new that ages,” of a whirlwind of novelties each overtaking the last, “in a movement that discourages all creativity even as it demands creativity, and imposes it as the only form of life.” So obviously “no way out of modernity can possibly be found in terms of an overcoming of it,” and “another way must be found.”⁵²

The “other way” suggested by Vattimo is a peculiar declension of the concept of Verwindung in a Nietzschean key. It is evident that Verwindung is both a semantic and pragmatic principle.⁵³ It indicates how the categories of classical metaphysics are to be understood and used. At the same time it is an ethico-pragmatic and methodological principle, in the sense that it indicates the attitude to adopt in the face of the decline of metaphysics. Verwindung appears, moreover, to be a dialectical notion, but with a few salient differences. It is characterized by two terms: “remission to” in the sense of “entrusting oneself to” and “remission from” in the sense of “recovering from” a disease. It bears the connotations of declining-twisting apart, overcoming-distortion, repetition-intensification, and so on. In “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole,” Vattimo writes:

So we observe the idiomatic speculative effect of the notion of Verwindung: it speaks the prosecution-twisting apart of modernity, and at the same time performs that which it speaks and describes. So the notion of Verwindung is not just a critique of metaphysical descriptivity, it also exhibits an alternative form of description. Verwindung describes the movement of Being as Überlieferung and Ge-schick, and is at the same time “the mode in which thought thinks the truth of Being understood as Überlieferung and Ge-schick.”⁵⁵

This also leads to a structural variation in the type of duality that characterizes the semantics of Verwindung with respect to the semantic duality of dialectical notions. Here the second meaning, that which is simultaneously implied along with the primary signified, is not simply the opposite but the different in the temporal and spatial (or structural) sense. Hence the oblique relation that is established between the terms in play: distorsion is certainly not the opposite of prosecution, rather it indicates a modality of prosecution. “Remission to” in turn indicates a modality of “remission from”: to recover from an illness, but with an attitude of abandon, not violent opposition, without trying to halt the course of the malady by resisting it. In this sense Verwindung may also be seen as a reinterpretation of Aufhebung, but corrected in the direction of the historical empiricism that is typical of hermeneutics.

In Beyond Interpretation (1994)⁵⁶ the nihilistic orientation imparted to hermeneutics by Vattimo assumes a characteristically circular, reflexive, and more properly speculative nature. Circularity here plays a methodological as well as a thematic role. The point of departure is a historico-epochal thesis, which soon finds itself outstripped by a metatheoretical commitment. Nihilism is the vicissitude of western ontology, the trajectory of the gradual growing lighter/emptying out of the traditional philosophical categories, and the progressive weakening of the Aristotelian notion of Being. The stance corresponding to this factual condition (the verification of which is overtly historical-interpretative) is that kind of affirmative nihilism that defines the assimilation between Verwindung and the “post-” in “post-modernism.” So there is a matter of fact, given by the progressive “self-consummation” of Being (to use Vattimo’s expression); and there is a consequent behavior, the lightening of the traditional categories, the weakening of thought. Note, however, that the second aspect is reflexive and retroactive, in other words it brings significant variations in meaning to the first. In fact the weakening of theoretical discourse is also and primarily, as we have seen, an attenuation of the descriptive nexus between philosophical language and states of affairs, hence the descriptive premises from which the discourse proceeds:

- cannot be configured as if they were premises in the pre-Hegelian sense of the term

- cannot be evaluated as if they were a theory or a Weltanschauung, a position staked out regarding the structure of the world.

This solution (or rather acceptance) of the antinomy of modern reason shows itself far from “irrational” when we turn to the attempt to delineate the principles of hermeneutic argumentation that Vattimo briefly undertook in a 1993 essay, “The Right to Argument.”⁵⁷ Two essential data emerge: philosophy’s right still to be, albeit in changed circumstances, discourse on (the) totality, and the link between argumentation and provenance.

The right that philosophy asserts vis-à-vis totality, Vattimo says, cannot be framed as a right to the “expression” of a Weltanschauung, nor propose itself as arbitrary “creation.”⁵⁸ Yet it must arise in a relation of fidelity or consequentiality with respect to something: and in fact no first philosophy is really that, since any posing of a problem or formulation of a question is the fruit “of answers received, inherited, already available,” and on the same basis no philosophy can (as science can in certain cases) “pronounce conclusively (i.e., experimentally)” (which simply means: there is no absolute beginning or absolute termination of discourse).⁵⁹

As a tentative response to questions “received, inherited, already available,” every theory, every “argumentative enterprise,” is based on an array of heterogeneous presuppositions, and so is constitutively “impure.”⁶⁰ A variety of questions and answers come to us from the past, and our interpretation of them, as well as the selective choice of which of them to answer, are “ordinative” and constitutive. The task of interpretation is ultimately to order and put into dialogue (or put itself into dialogue with) that which our tradition hands down.⁶¹ But since what we have available is provenance, the same a priori of which we make use is “provenient” and therefore cannot be fixed once and for all, nor portrayed descriptively (the a priori elements of knowledge “are inscribed in natural language—profoundly marked by historicity—into which the Dasein is thrown time and again”).⁶² So there is no given order of the a priori of which we make use in interpreting provenance. The peculiar work of philosophy, if it is to keep faith with the endless coming-about of tradition, is thus not objectivation, but reversion to the “eventual” conditions that anticipate any objectivation and “open” the conditions of truth.⁶³ Finally: both the form and the content of this reversion are the fruit of participatory and dialogic work; the criteria of the deconstruction and reordering of the past are themselves found in participatory and dialogic terms.

The relation between argumentation and provenance then arises out of what Gadamer calls “a hermeneutically educated consciousness”: the only way we can argue is to take into account the paths already trodden historically; more specifically, history teaches us the ways down which “we must no longer go.” We can only argue if we recognize that argumentation belongs to a tissue of opinions and conventions already operating beneath our awareness, and only if we ask ourselves what the times “require” (and avoid offering them what they already have more than enough of). Finally, we cannot argue exclusively on the arbitrary basis of predilections, or even on the basis of what seems to be simply evident (hence the extramethodological and at the same time selective nature of this point of view).

The singular aspect of the whole approach, however, is that this apparent “urbanization” of Heideggerian ontology is defended as logically and historically necessary. The opening of philosophical discourse to historico-pragmatic, political, and social implications is (appears here to be) the response to a request implicit in the very “opening” of traditional ontology sought by Heidegger. The question of totality here becomes, inevitably, the heeding of totality.

For Hegel the preliminary totality, philosophy’s universe of reference, is the contradictory totality, inclusive of Being and non-Being (the “Boolean” world defined by the principle “X and not-X together exhaust the universe”). For Heidegger and Jaspers it is the omnicomprehensive horizon of Being, inclusive of human life and its specific paradoxical structure. For this hermeneutic ontology, the totality to which philosophy refers is an open domain, not pre-describable, in which history, and language, and the various cultural contaminations of both, supply the pensandum, the material for thought to work. The universe of reference is no longer only the commixture of Being and thought, ideal and real, affirmation and negation, etc., nor is it only the structure of existence in the paradoxical form described by Kierkegaard and inherited by existentialism; it is a heterogeneous entity, a multiform and fundamentally “discrete” totality which Vattimo identifies in the Being-history-language of hermeneutic effectuality.

The two questions that arise at this point predictably concern the normativity and identifiability of provenance. In what sense can we operate selectively on provenance? In other words: which voices from the tradition should be heeded and which discarded? Furthermore: who can decide whether the “response” to tradition is authentic, or just an arbitrary construct? In the face of these questions, the Heideggerian-hermeneutic solution consists in pointing to the extramethodological nature of interpretation. The very theory of provenance entails the hermeneutic assumption that theory never completely dominates that with which it thematically and methodically deals. In other words, the burden of metatheoretical and methodological decision is transferred to the object: it is actually the theme that decides the nature of the method; it is the choice of Being that determines the heterogeneity and impurity of the historicoexistential foundation, and the particular dialectic-without-synthesis that weak thought unfurls. Just as, in Hegel, it was ultimately the idea of the world of the spirit as bivalent totality (the idea of totality as a concrete synthesis of affirmation and negation, subjective and objective, finite and infinite, etc.) that determined the choice of dialectic as the methodology of thought, likewise it is the thematic choice of Being as heterogeneous totality that determines the methodology of provenance, and participation.

Vattimo is certainly one of the “philosophers of technology,” which is to say the thinkers who have tried to understand contemporaneity in its technical-scientific development, neither condemning it nor condemning its outcomes, but as he would put it, “heeding its call.” His work along these lines can today be described as accomplished with Beyond Interpretation, which is the last firmly and unequivocally “philosophical” book he has written. Subsequently, with Belief in Belief (1996),⁶⁴ Vattimo set off down an entirely new path, which has led him to a profoundly different kind of philosophical militancy. His style has grown much simpler, losing many links with technicalities and references to the philosophical tradition that once characterized it.

It is important to emphasize—and the book you are about to read will confirm it—that this turn has not, properly speaking, been a form of reactive compensation, or a detachment from philosophy, but the fulfillment of a certain process: the natural fulfillment, as I see it, of a process typical of a certain kind of philosophy, the one practiced by Vattimo, which can legitimately be called (the name brings to mind the time when Marxism was in bloom) “concrete theory.”

Moving into politics (or “taking a dive” into politics, as he ironically puts it here), Vattimo has simply developed one of the facets of the speculativity (reflexivity, or commixture of interpretativity and praxis) which is proper to the categories of his thought, and which in it constitutes an original reinterpretation both of the Hegelian dialectic and of the postdialectical speculativity of the second Heidegger. So there is a philosophical necessity or fate (just as, notes Vattimo, there is a “logic” to the semantic slippages and fugues to which nihilism subjects the categories of classical metaphysics) expressed in this apparent shift to the “ontic,” and the pages that follow supply many suggestions, I believe, for understanding this necessity.

The discourse unfolds in three movements. Vattimo initially makes clear the reasons why his vision of philosophical practice, while distancing itself from science, does not seek any assimilation to literature, sociology, the sciences of culture, or any form of artistic-literary arbitrariness. What I see as important in Vattimo’s work is this clear vision of philosophy as something apart from the sciences (formal as well as natural), and from the humanities and art: but “apart” precisely inasmuch as profoundly compromised in the fundamental problematics of all of them, and bound by a thousand links of affinity and overlap with every cultural practice.

Secondly, Vattimo here specifies his interpretation of the concept of truth. If for Aristotle one must choose truth or friendship, here we clearly see a preference for friendship, but grounded in the belief that the philosophical theory of truth cannot break the ancient link with the polis, the terrain from which it grew and to which it speaks. So Vattimo speaks of “fidelity” (rather than descriptive adequacy) to Being as event, and of a subject that is above all dialogue (or as I have called it: participation).

This does not in the least entail a move away from logic and toward rhetoric, nor is this an irresponsible choice in terms of its theoretical and historical motivations. In a recent text entitled “Les raisons que la raison ne connaît pas” (“the reasons that reason knows not”),⁶⁵ Vattimo develops the question, showing (once again) how the defense of the “reasons of the heart” is well undergirded in his case by intense intellectual labor. Many contemporary European thinkers actually agree on the relative dominance of friendship or pietas over truth (meaning the putative adequacy of thing and discourse); so does Christianity in a “Dostoyevskyan” mode. Levinas emphasizes respect for the “other,” Habermas emphasizes Hegel’s youthful doctrine of love and the communicative practices of the lifeworld. But as Vattimo sees it, only a precise ontological choice can prevent these stances from sliding into some form of surreptitious dogmatism, obliquely transforming “the other” into the transcendent “Other” in the case of Levinas, or obliquely reaffirming an absolute reason through the imperative of absolute communicative transparency in that of Habermas. This ontological choice, as we have seen, privileges Being as event, privileges the “eventuality” of Being. It is thus evident, and these pages confirm it, that Vattimo thinks of friendship (of participation, of the metekein to which Gadamer assigns the foundational task of theory) as precisely the ambit in which the “paradoxes of truth” always find, again and again, realization and solution. Note the subtle but decisive variation with respect to the primacy of practical reason: here we have the primacy of participative reason.⁶⁶

In the final section of the present text, on the responsibility, vocation, and destiny of philosophy, Vattimo supplies us with a clue for understanding how much the tensions in contemporary philosophical practice (between historians and theorists, between journalist-philosophers and professor-philosophers, between philosophical specialization and the philosopher’s mission as “functionary of humanity”) are in his eyes both comprehensible and completely “lived-out” by a philosophy that assumes the burden of its own finiteness, and elaborates this same finiteness politically (as emancipation) and religiously (as redemption). These pages conclude with what could be called (if the irony of weak thought allowed it) a theory of the religious-political-historical sublime, meaning the disproportion and, at the same time, familiarity that the viewpoint of the polis always imposes on thought. It would seem that one cannot be fully a philosopher, according to Vattimo, except by continuously confronting the vision not of totality (whether understood in the ontological or logical sense, in the political or the religious sense), but how far we are from totality. But in this sense everyone ought to be able to call themselves, and able to be, “philosophers.” Everyone should have this privilege of “seeing themselves” in their own limits: a privilege that is, says Vattimo, typically “European.”

The essay here presented was written around ten years ago. It is not outdated, actually, because the theoretical bases of Vattimo’s philosophical work were already clear at that time. The aim of the essay was to present these bases in a synthetic and comprehensive way, locating them within the horizon of continental philosophy in the last three decades of the twentieth century. However, a few further words are now in order, mainly referring to developments in Vattimo’s philosophical program. So in what follows I will briefly summarize the path I traced, and then consider some recent acquisitions of Vattimo’s philosophy.⁶⁷

After a preliminary specification of the meaning of “weak” in the expression “weak thought” (to which I will return below) the essay lays out Vattimo’s trajectory, beginning with the interpretation of Nietzsche he presented in Il soggetto e la maschera (1971) and other writings. This interpretation brought Vattimo’s philosophy into systematic confrontation with French neostructuralism, namely with Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Vattimo shares Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s affirmative interpretation of Nietzschean nihilism⁶⁸: nihilism is not simply the shared acknowledgment of the end of all values (“all extreme values lose their value”), but rather the condition of science “that dances with light feet,” and the age of philosophers able to accept “the dangerous maybe.” However, Vattimo does not share Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s vitalism, and offers instead a Heideggerian and hermeneutical interpretation of the theory.

In this interpretation Heidegger’s notion of difference plays a central role, as we see in The Adventure of Difference (1980) and his writings from around the end of the 1970s. Like Derrida, and Deleuze as well, Vattimo refuses the too strictly ontological conception of difference (between Being and beings) posited by Heidegger, and adopts an idea of difference in the sense of differing, that is to say, the operation of keeping one’s distance from traditional metaphysics, with its rigid conception of Being. He also stresses, like Derrida, the temporal nature of differing: difference is actually deferment, postponement. But unlike Deleuze and Derrida, Vattimo points out that, as Heidegger rightly maintained, difference has been forgotten: we have lost the static difference between Being and beings, as well as the dynamic differing of Being from itself. Consequently, what we have lost is the very possibility of acting against this oblivion, the very possibility of constructing some alternative vision of Being that we might set against the traditional metaphysical vision. Finally: we have lost the very possibility of political action against the oppressive system grounded in that traditional vision.

Heidegger’s conception of Verwindung is adopted by Vattimo to solve the problem. The concept involves a specific idea of “overcoming plus distortion,” leave-taking, and preserving. It is similar in a way to Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, but it also bears the connotation of “recovery from a disease.” So we have to verwunden metaphysics: maintaining it, at the same time “healing over” its structural oblivion of Being and difference. This idea finds a specific application in the interpretation of the meaning of the “post-” in “postmodernism.” Vattimo’s interpretation of postmodernism, as presented in The End of Modernity (1985), is in fact a confrontation with Lyotard’s diagnosis of The Postmodern Condition from the perspective of the Heidegger-Nietzsche nexus from which his own philosophy emerged. More specifically, the notion of Verwindung is employed by Vattimo to express the idea of overcoming implicit in the concept of postmodernism. “Precisely this difference between Verwindung and Überwindung can help us to define in philosophical terms the term ‘post-modernism’.”⁶⁹

Vattimo’s use of the notion of Verwindung also represents a definite stance in relation to the conception of dialectic developed in the so-called western Marxism of Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Horkheimer. This is evident in the essay “Dialettica, differenza e pensiero debole” (1983), where Vattimo clearly explains that weak thought originates in the failure of the dialectical program. He stresses that the program failed because of the ambition of “totality and reappropriation” that drove it. In this sense the importance of thinkers like Benjamin or Adorno lies in their destruction of the totalizing-appropriative nature of dialectical thought, which could have supplied the philosophical premises for an antitotalitarian communism, something which was systematically devalued by the effective applications of Marxism.

Thus the path is traced: the structural bases of Vattimo’s thought are broadly these. What needs to be added, and indeed was already evident in the whole development, is first the metaphilosophical inspiration of Vattimo’s stance, then the political outcome of these premises.

As to Vattimo’s metaphilosophical commitment, something has been already suggested, in section 7 above, about the combination of “argumentation and provenance” proposed by Vattimo as a cipher of hermeneutic philosophy. The commitment to both clarity and historical awareness is exactly the reason why Vattimo then considered a possible combination of analytic and continental philosophy within a weak, hermeneutical horizon. Analytic philosophy is in fact renowned for its attention to argumentation, and continental philosophy (especially the Italian strain) is characterized by attention to history. Karl Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat, and Richard Rorty have, at different times and in different ways, been the best-known bridge builders between the two traditions. In particular, Vattimo has established a dialogue with Rorty, who in that period was close to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. There are some differences between Rorty’s and Vattimo’s perspectives,⁷⁰ but perhaps the main point concerns the idea of philosophy. In the polemical climate of the years around the beginning of the new millennium, and specifically in the controversies about the “drift” of postmodernism and poststructuralism, Rorty focused on the opposition of realism and antirealism, or as he put it: the opposition between fuzzies and techies. Vattimo’s main concern in the discussion has instead been the metaphilosophical question. “After distinction and contrast, this is the time of recollection and global reconsideration,” Vattimo wrote,⁷¹ and the aim was to combine analytical attention to argumentation with continental awareness regarding history.

So what basically distinguishes Vattimo’s point of view from Rorty’s is precisely the former’s attention to the destiny of philosophy, especially in the public sphere. Vattimo does not seem to share the condemnation of “philosophy” by Rorty and Heidegger as being “antidemocratic” (Rorty) or “objectifying” (Heidegger). But in what sense, and on what grounds, should a comprehensive notion of philosophy be retained, overriding the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy? Is Vattimo’s only an irenic attitude, to be set against the ironic attitude, defended by Rorty? Vattimo’s answer is here for the reader to find in the pages of The Responsibility of the Philosopher, and has become more and more relevant in subsequent years, involving the public, political destiny of philosophical discourse.

In a recent essay on “The Political Outcome of Hermeneutics,”⁷² Vattimo defends the idea of the fundamentally political vocation of hermeneutics. This specific political bent—so Vattimo thinks—is already evident in Gadamer’s conception of the primacy of art in the experience of truth (though Gadamer’s philosophy was strictly nonpolitical, and Gadamer’s political attitude was rather conservative). Benjamin, Marcuse, and Adorno specifically gave a political sense to the “aesthetization of experience” typical of the world contemporary to them (not to be confused—thus Benjamin—with the “aesthetization of politics” evident in totalitarian fascist regimes). And in this combination of aesthetics and politics we find the most authentic inspiration of hermeneutic philosophy.

The intuition of the ultimately political commitment of hermeneutics is especially important nowadays, in Vattimo’s view. Specifically, two aspects of public debate are now to be hermeneutically viewed and treated. The first “consists of bioethical and environmental problems, which concern the public relevance of science, and religion.” The second involves “the multicultural society in which we live.” Both multiculturalism and biopolitical problems, in Vattimo’s view, call for a hermeneutic approach to politics. (The reader should bear in mind that in Italy the public sphere is occupied almost daily by both bioethical controversies and debates about immigration.)

But of what should this approach specifically consist? What is the specific import of hermeneutics in the debate about these delicate and controversial topics?

Two terms should be carefully taken into consideration: the first is metaphysics, and the second is truth. As regards the first, it should be noted that Vattimo’s thought belongs to a tradition in which the term metaphysics does not simply denote a philosophical discipline, that is the attempt to inquire into the nature of Being and beings, but rather the dogmatic (wrong) version of this same discipline. “Metaphysics,” in Heidegger’s view is the realistic, descriptive orientation of science, involving the dogmatic claim to capture reality in its proper nature. In Heideggerian terms, this methodological realism is based on an implicit oblivion of Being (of the difference between Being and beings), which ultimately expresses itself in the nihilism and subjectivism of modernity. As we have seen, Vattimo does not totally endorse Heidegger’s negative attitude toward nihilism: his idea is rather that there is a progressive lightening (a growing lighter) of Being in history, and this is not bad in itself, as it works as a guarantee of freedom.⁷³

The weak conception of Being (typically expressed by Gadamer’s hermeneutics) is seen as an alternative to metaphysics (in the derogatory sense). And it can profitably be applied in contemporary discussions about life and human beings (euthanasia, abortion, stem cells). The basic insight is that, as we ultimately do not know the exact point at which a person begins being (or stops being) a person, any attempt to impose an idea of “human life” meant to guide the drafting of legal statutes in this regard is dogmatic, antidemocratic, and basically antiphilosophical in principle.

The idea of “bioethics without metaphysics” advanced by Vattimo in La vita dell’altro. Bioetica senza metafisica (2006)⁷⁴ is not to be confused with the idea of Ethics Without Ontology defended by Hilary Putnam⁷⁵ in his book of that title: there is no drive to minimize or criticize ontology in Vattimo’s stance (and in general hermeneutic philosophy, in all its versions, has always presented itself as an ontological perspective). Rather, there is the attempt to save philosophical ontology, by distinguishing it from scientific and religious ontologies. It is the philosophical perspective, with its specifically nihilistic (free, non-dogmatic) attitude, that can usefully deal with ontological discussions in the public sphere.⁷⁶

As to the notion of truth, Vattimo has recently produced a book on the subject, summarizing his ideas as developed over thirty years: Addio alla verità (2009; Farewell to Truth).⁷⁷ In Vattimo’s conception of politics, we may say that there is a sort of mobilization of truth. The point is basically that even though there are many truths about which we haven’t significant doubts (say: “2 + 2 = 4,” “Napoleon died on St. Elena,” and so on), in controversial contexts truth tends to fade away. Any appeal to truth in such contexts is doomed to incur the charge of dogmatism (which is to say, in his terms: metaphysics). (In this sense, Vattimo’s criticism of truth is perfectly consistent with the tradition of scepticism in its mature version, the one elaborated in the synthesis of Sextus Empiricus.) But the point is that these controversial contexts are the only politically relevant ones, and the only ones that truly call into question the notion of truth. So the philosophical-political attitude toward truth ought to be characterized by a sort of methodical nihilism: a philosopher should systematically mobilize truth, in critical contexts.

We can see then that Addio alla verità does not properly suggest some effective refusal of truth, but rather presents a theory of truth, in which a singular form of coherentism based on the Christian principle of agape is combined with radical scepticism (or rather methodical nihilism).⁷⁸ We can also see how this attitude toward truth may profitably be applied when we come to deal with problems of immigration and multiculturalism. The point is that in controversial contexts (the ones in which truth is really relevant) there is no possible search for truth if we are not interested in a strong form of agreement that is to be identified as friendship. Metaphysical truth is based on a vision of the world that will turn into dogma in these contexts. Logical truth is based on constructed domains or worlds, which will be useless in controversial situations in which the construct itself is at issue. Properly philosophical-hermeneutic truth instead is concerned with truthful/friendly ways of constructing these visions, domains, or worlds. And it is this constructing which is at stake in multicultural contexts. In this sense, there is in fact a primacy of friendship over truth: not because the former should substitute for the latter, but because the latter is politically grounded in the former.

Exactly this idea is the philosophical premise at the basis of Vattimo’s antitotalitarian communism (see Ecce Comu, 2007).⁷⁹ And it involves, as I have tried to show, a complex revision of the dialectical (logical) and metaphysical (ontological) bases of philosophical discourse, especially when assumed in its political, public, applications. At the basis of it is the idea of the third-level awareness mentioned in section one: “everything is interpretation, and this is an interpretation too, and we should not forget this fundamental frailty (weakness) of truth.” Here we also find a close connection to Hannah Arendt’s idea of moral responsibility in controversial political contexts.⁸⁰ Arendt repeatedly stressed, in fact, that “respectable people” generally did not oppose Nazism and fascism, whereas marginal, nonsocially integrated people refused the “alignment” without hesitation. Being without faith and values, being free of societal bonds, is thus a good premise for truth in morally controversial contexts. One might posit that in those cases, while Heidegger asserted that “only a God can save us,” it may be nihilism, instead, that will lead us to salvation.⁸¹