1. That the metatheoretical ground of weak thought is quite strong is by now an established point. Cf. Aldo Magris, “I forti impegni del pensiero debole. Un seminario di Gianni Vattimo a Venezia,” aut-aut 273–274 (1996). Magris emphasizes the fundamentally Hegelian premises of Vattimo’s discourse, an aspect to which I shall return, and which Vattimo confirms at pp. 57–59. See also Dario Antiseri, Le ragioni del pensiero debole: Domande a Gianni Vattimo (Rome: Borla, 1993); Gianfranco Basti and Antonio Perrone, Le radici forti del pensiero debole: Nichilismo e fondamenti della matematica (a special issue of Con-tratto, 1992); Anne Staquet, La pensée faible de Vattimo e Rovatti: Une pensée fable (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).
2. This is the critique legible between the lines of the final pages of the essay by Luigi Pareyson, “La filosofia e il problema del male,” Annuario filosofico 2 (1996).
3. See essentially the following texts: Vattimo, “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole,” in Il Pensiero Debole, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983); Vattimo, Oltre l’interpretazione: Il significato dell’ ermeneutica per la filosofia (Rome: Laterza, 1994). English translation: Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Vattimo, “Le deboli certezze,” in Alfabeta 67 (1984); Vattimo, “Perché ‘debole’,” in Dove va la filosofia italiana?, ed. J. Jacobelli (Rome: Laterza, 1996.
4. [Oltrepassare and oltrepassamento, words the author uses frequently in this essay, mean both “to surpass, the surpassing,” and “to overtake, the overtaking.” But as used here they also have the connotation of “leapfrogging,” a recurrent pattern or play of overtaking and being overtaken, and while I avoid “leapfrogging” as a translation, readers should bear that in mind. WM]
5. Unlike Vattimo, I think that there does exist an “objectivity” of certain (good or bad) philosophical “discoveries,” like dialectic. I believe that in this context, by which I mean the tendency of the third philosophical level to collapse back to the first, Hegel’s dialectic constitutes an objective acquisition. This applies to philosophical arithmetic: if the terms of reference are changed, and we focus on existentiality, for example, then of course matters stand differently. At p. 67 Vattimo comes close to admitting that dialectic has a certain objectivity, albeit subordinated to historico-linguistic premises.
7. That of Stanley Fish, for example, who is still perhaps the most radical defender of the position that “all is interpretation” (or ones analogous to it). See his recent The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
8. Claudio Ciancio, in Il paradosso della verità (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1999), has clearly illustrated this triple level of discourse, showing how the viewpoint of hermeneutic ontology (the background or framework of the thought of Pareyson and of Vattimo himself) is not and cannot be the simple disavowal of all objectivity, but if anything the collocation of objectivity at a different level, in a meta-discourse of a particular kind.
9. “Philosophy at the start of the millennium” was the title of the collection in which this book first appeared in 2000.
10. [Or the zizania, darnel, vetch, or tares, according to the Bible version one is using. The reference is to the parable of the weeds and the wheat in Matthew 13:24–30. WM]
11. Vattimo may be defined, with a few qualifications that will emerge in what follows, as a typical “ironic” philosopher as delineated by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
12. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 6.
13. Vattimo’s 1964 Royaumont conference paper appears as chapter 4 of his Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Royaumont was followed by the renowned 1972 Nietzsche conference, lasting a week, at Cerisy-la-Salle.
14. The impact of neostructuralism in American philosophical culture is responsible both for the postmodernist wave and the success of Derridean deconstruction: two philosophical (and cultural) tendencies that have unquestionably contributed to a harshening of relations between analytical philosophy and continental philosophy, causing a shift at a certain point from tranquil indifference to polemical opposition.
15. One of the best critique of neostructuralism or poststructuralism is Pascal Engel’s “The Decline and Fall of French Nietzscheo-Structuralism,” in European Philosophy and the American Academy, ed. Barry Smith (LaSalle, Ill.: The Hegeler Institute/The Monist Library of Philosophy, 1994). Engel develops the point partly by expressing regret for the missed opportunities in the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought. Vattimo briefly sets out not-dissimilar views in his introduction to the 1998 reprint of the Italian translation of Derrida’s L’écriture et la différence (1967), La scrittura e la differenza, trans. Gianni Pozzi, introduction by Gianni Vattimo (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).
16. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, rev. ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Original title: Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 2005; first published 1962).
17. Perhaps the only really coherent position in polemics of this type is that of personalities like Antonin Artaud, who ultimately lived out with temerity, and in person, contradictions of this kind.
18. The point is emphasized in Enrico Berti, Le vie della ragione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 176–178.
19. Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires with the assistance of Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). [I modify the Blamires translation, in some cases extensively, in the passages quoted. WM] Italian original: Le avventure della differenza: Che cosa significa pensare dopo Nietzsche e Heidegger (Milan: Garzanti, 1980).
20. On difference in ontology, theology, and logic, see Virgilio Melchiorre, ed., La differenza e l’origine (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1987).
21. Published in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976; rev. ed. 1996; vol. 9 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe). (For full details on the volumes of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, see http://www.klostermann.de/heidegger/gesamt.htm.) English translation: Pathmarks, ed. and trans. William McNeil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). “On the Essenceof Ground” is McNeil’s translation of “Vom Wesen desGrundes.” An alternative English translation, the one used by the translators of Vattimo’s The Adventure of Difference, is “The Essence of Reasons.”
22. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 63.
24. See especially Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 2008; first published 1968); Critique et clinique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993). In Difference and Repetition and Critique et clinique, Deleuze displays his unwillingness to accept the particular post-Kantian dimension within which Heidegger’s ontological proposition is located. See Vattimo’s critique of Deleuzian ontologism in his Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger, e la ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), 31–32. On the problematic of difference in con temporary French philosophy, see C. Sini, “Identità e differenza nella filosofia francese contemporanea,” and F. Borutti, “Il nichilismo ontologico” in Melchiorre, La differenza e l’origine. [Books in English by and about Gilles Deleuze published by Columbia University Press include Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (2006), with an entry on “difference.” WM]
25. Emanuele Severino’s most important texts on this theme are Gli abitatori del tempo: Cristianesimo, marxismo, tecnica, 3rd ed. (Rome: Armando, 1989; 1st ed., 1978); La struttura originaria, new expanded ed. (Milan: Adelphi, 2007; 1st ed.,1958); Essenza del nichilismo, new expanded ed. (Milan: Adelphi, 1995; 1st ed., 1972).
26. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 64–65.
27. See above all Vattimo’s introductory essay, “L’ontologia ermeneutica nella filosofia contemporanea,” and his afterword, “Postilla 1983,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Verità e metodo, trans. Gianni Vattimo (Milan: Bompiani, 1983; originally published in 1972); and “Hermeneutical Reason/Dialectical Reason,” and “Dialectic and Difference,” both in The Adventure of Difference. On this topic, I note the evolution of Vattimo’s views from a position of what I would call latent and not-so-latent sympathy for Hegelianism, to a marked distancing from Hegel (coinciding perhaps with Vattimo’s closer contact with French philosophy), and finally an ever more pronounced turning back to Hegel. On the profoundly Hegelian intonation of weak thought in Vattimo’s version, see Magris, “I forti impegni del pensiero debole.”
28. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 166.
31. Vattimo and Rovatti, Il Pensiero Debole, 8. From the editors’ introduction.
32. The divergences and affinities between Vattimo and Rovatti in the acceptation they give to the term “weak” are well expounded in Staquet, La pensée faible de Vattimo e Rovatti.
33. Pier Aldo Rovatti in Il Pensiero Debole, 50.
34. Elsewhere Rovatti gives a more strictly ethico-aesthetic version of weak thought; see Pier Aldo Rovatti and Alessandro Dal Lago, Elogio del pudore: Per un pensiero debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989).
35. Umberto Eco in Il Pensiero Debole, 79.
36. Gianni Carchia in Il Pensiero Debole, 89.
37. On Gödel’s idealism and the nexus of dialectic and recursivity, see M. Kosok, “La formalizzazione della logica dialettica hegeliana,” in La formalizzazione della dialettica: Hegel, Marx, e la logica contemporanea, ed. D. Marconi (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1979); Palle Yourgrau, The Disappearance of Time: Kurt Gödel and the Idealistic Tradition of Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); H. Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
38. Vattimo, “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole,” in Il Pensiero Debole, 12.
41. “… la questione della riappropriazione e del proprio (coerenza-consistenza).”
42. On the evolution of the rational antinomy as an alternative to Hegel, see Claudio Ciancio, Il paradosso della verità (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1999).
43. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. with an introduction by Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). [I modify the Snyder translation, in some cases extensively, in the passages quoted. WM]. Italian original: La fine della modernità: Nichilismo ed ermeneutica nella cultura post-moderna (Milan: Garzanti, 1985).
44. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 23.
47. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979); English translation: The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
48. On postmodernism in philosophy and Vattimo’s stance in particular, see especially Giovanni Fornero, “Postmoderno e filosofia,” in Nicola Abbagnano and Giovanni Fornero, Storia della Filosofia, ed. Nicola Abbagnano, vol. 4.2 (Turin: UTET, 1996).
49. [See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 8: “Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X.” (“X” stands for “the unknown.”) Kaufmann’s note directs readers to Genealogy of Morality 3.25 for an elaboration of the thought. WM]
50. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 164.
53. This point is emphasized especially in Antiseri, Le ragioni del pensiero debole; see also Fornero, “Postmoderno e filosofia.”
54. Vattimo, “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole,” in Il Pensiero Debole, 21.
56. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Italian Original: Oltre l’interpretazione: Il significato dell’ermeneutica per la filosofia (Rome: Laterza, 1994).
57. Vattimo, “Diritto all’argomentazione” in Filosofia ‘92, ed. Gianni Vattimo (Rome: Laterza, 1993).
64. The book was given a flat title in English: Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Italian original: Credere di credere (Milan: Garzanti, 1996).
65. Read at the conference 2000 ans après quoi? in Paris, December 1999.
66. I have attempted to clarify the extent to which this aspect should be regarded as a specific novelty with respect to the evolution of philosophical praxis after Kant in my “Theoria, teoria, transtheoria,” in Lettera Matematica Pristem 30 (1999). My observations here about nihilism should be enough, I think, to refute the analogy which might come to mind between this form of hermeneutic Hegelianism and the pragmatic Hegelianism of Richard Rorty. See as well Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Vattimo gauges the distance between himself and Rorty at p. 99.
67. For more detailed analyses, see Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology after Metaphysics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Giovanni Giorgio, Il pensiero di Gianni Vattimo: L’emancipazione dalla metafisica tra dialettica ed ermeneutica (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2006); T. G. Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (New York: Continuum, 2009); and see as well the essays in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, eds., Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutic of Gianni Vattimo (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).
68. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy; and Jean-François Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Bourgois, 1980).
70. On the differences and similarities see Zabala, The Remains of Being.
71. Vattimo, “Introduction” to Franca D’Agostini, Analitici e continentali (Milan: Raffaello Cortina 1997).
72. In Jeff Malpas and Santiago Zabala, eds., Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years after Truth and Method (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010).
73. The ontological bases of weak thought are specifically investigated in Zabala, The Remains of Being.
74. Gianni Vattimo, La vita dell’altro: Bioetica senza metafisica (Lungro di Cosenza: Marco Editore, 2006). See also the essay of M. G. Weiss, “What’s Wrong with Biotechnology? Vattimo’s Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Media,” in Benso and Schroeder, Between Nihilism and Politics.
75. Hilary Putnam, Ethics Without Ontology (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press 2004).
76. I have tried to develop the question of the public role of nihilism along these lines in Franca D’Agostini, The Last Fumes: Nihilism and the Nature of Philosophical Concepts (Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publications, 2009).
77. Gianni Vattimo, Addio alla verità (Rome: Meltemi, 2009).
78. See Franca D’Agostini, “Vattimo’s Theory of Truth,” in Benso and Schroeder, Between Nihilism and Politics.
79. Gianni Vattimo, Ecce comu (Rome: Fazi, 2007).
80. See specifically Arendt’s Responsibility and Judgement, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003).
81. I wish to thank William McCuaig for giving me the opportunity to review and substantially revise his draft translation of the introduction I wrote in Italian in 2000; and for reviewing my English draft of this postscript.
1. PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE
1. [The contrast adduced in the original Italian is between una scienza and un sapere. The word scienza has the same range of generic and specific meanings as “science” in English: it literally and generically means “a knowing,” and by extension and specifically, one of the knowledge disciplines. Un sapere means the same thing as un savoir in French, and I usually employ an expansion such as “form of knowledge” or “way of knowing” to translate it. Un sapere in turn contrasts with una conoscenza (une connaissance), which means “acquaintance, familiarity, knowledge as cognizance,” but the contrast is harder to maintain in English, where normal usage requires that conoscenza/connaissance be translated simply as “knowledge.” WM]
2. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–73 and appendices, 73–85. [“Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (1938), in Holzwege, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977; revised edition 2003; vol. 5 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe vol. 5), 75–96, and 96–113.]
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981). [Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft: Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).]
4. Gadamer, “What is Practice? The Conditions of Social Reason,” in Reason in the Age of Science, 85. [“Was ist Praxis? Die Bedingungen gesellschaftlicher Vernunft,” in Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft, 74–75.]
5. In The Adventure of Difference I had this to say about the meaning of Ge-Stell in Heidegger: “In German the word Gestell ordinarily has the meaning of ‘pedestal, shelves, framework,’ but Heidegger treats it as though it were a compound of Ge and Stell…. Ge-Stell is the ensemble of the [meanings of the verb] stellen, ‘to set in place.’ The technological world is the world in which Being is posed/disposed/imposed/composed.” The Adventure of Difference, 169. [I have modified the Blamires translation considerably. WM]
6. Martin Heidegger, “Der Satz der Identität,” 27, in Identität und Differenz (Neske: Pfullingen, 1957), 9–30, here at 27. (Identität und Differenz is also published in vol. 11 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, 2006). “Der Satz der Identität” consists of the “unchanged text” of a lecture delivered by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau on June 27, 1957.
7. Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, trans. and intro. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 23–41, here at 38. Note Stambaugh’s translation of Ge-Stell as “frame.”
8. See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, 72–73. [“Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (1938), in Holzwege, 95–96.]
9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “I fondamenti filosofici del XX secolo,” in Filosofia ‘86, ed. Gianni Vattimo (Rome: Laterza, 1985); original German text: “Die philosophischen Grundlagen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts” (1965) in Gadamer, Neuere philosophie II (Mohr: Tübingen, 1987; vol. 4 of Gesammelte Werke), 3–22.
10. Gianni Vattimo, “Histoire d’une virgule.: Gadamer et le sens de l’être,” in Revue internationale de philosophie 54 (2000): 499–513. The Italian text: “Storia di una virgola. Gadamer e il senso dell’essere,” in Iride 2000, no. 2: 323–336.
11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzuge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972), 450 (italics in the original).
12. In fact the published Italian and English translations both leave them out: “L’essere che può venir compreso è linguaggio.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Verità e metodo, trans. Gianni Vattimo (Milan: Bompiani, 1983), 542. “Being that can be understood is language.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edition, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 470.
13. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977; vol. 2 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe vol. 2), 304.
14. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 211. [I follow the common practice in English of capitalizing the noun “Being” when it translates Sein and using the lower-case “being” when it translates das Seiende. Joan Stambaugh, the distinguished translator of Heidegger, rejects this practice for reasons she explains in her foreword, but for the sake of consistency I have modified her translation here, capitalizing “Being.” In Italian, or Vattimo’s Italian anyway, Sein is translated by essere, and das Seiende by esseri (“beings”) or ente (ens, thing in existence), while Dasein is translated by l’Esserci. In the case at hand, Vattimo adapts “Sein–nicht Seiendes” into the form “essere-nonente.” WM]
15. Gianfrancesco Zanetti, Felicità amicizia diritto (Rome: Carocci, 1998).
16. An English translation of Edmund Husserl’s Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft is available in Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 71–147.
2. PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY, LITERATURE
1. “Truth and Rhetoric in Hermeneutic Ontology” (1984), in The End of Modernity, chap. 8. See also chap. 1, “An Apology for Nihilism.”
2. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 22.
3. [“Sciences of the spirit” translates as Geisteswissenschaften. WM]
3. LOGIC IN PHILOSOPHY
1. An Italian-born mathematician and student of phenomenology, he taught at MIT for many years and died in 1998; see Giancarlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts, ed. Fabrizio Palombi (Boston: Birkhauser, 1997).
2. See Carlo Ossola, Le antiche memorie del nulla (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997); and Nathan J. Jun, “The letter of Fredegisus of Tours on Nothingness and Shadow: A New Translation and Commentary,” Comitatus 34 (2003): 150–69.
4. TO SPEAK THE TRUTH
1. “You have redeemed us, Lord God of truth.” Psalm 31:5–6. In the Latin Bible, or Vulgate, from which Vattimo quotes, this is Psalm 30.
2. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). [Mention may also be made of Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel, What’s the Use of Truth?, ed. Patrick Savidan, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). WM]
5. THE VOCATION TO PHILOSOPHY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
1. [See Gianni Vattimo with Piergiorgio Paterlini, Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) for an account of the philosopher’s youth. WM]
2. Credere di credere (Milan: Garzanti, 1996); Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
3. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, ed., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78, here at 4.
4. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See esp. chap. 6, “From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida,” 122–137.
5. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 125.
6. Published as Il concetto di fare in Aristotele (Turin: Giapicchelli, 1961); in Vattimo, Ermeneutica. Vol. 1, Opere Complete. Edited by Mario Cedrini, A. Martinengo, and Santiago Zabala. Meltemi: Rome, 2007, 19–180.
7. Luigi Pareyson, Estetica: Teoria della formatività, 2nd ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 1988; 1st ed. 1954).
8. “Man kann den Philosophen vielleicht als denjenigen bezeichnen, der das aufnehmende und reagierende Organ für die Ganzheit des Seins hat…. einen Sinn für die Gesamtheit der Dinge und des Lebens.” Georg Simmel, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (New York: Albert Unger, 1920), 12.