Essays on Gianni Vattimo: Religion, Ethics and the History of Ideas [1 ed.] 1443889466, 9781443889469

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Section I: Vattimo’s Return to Religion
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Section II: Vattimo’s Religious Ethics
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Section III: Vattimo and the History of Ideas
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Conclusion
Bibliography

Citation preview

Essays on Gianni Vattimo

Essays on Gianni Vattimo: Religion, Ethics and the History of Ideas By

Matthew Harris

Essays on Gianni Vattimo: Religion, Ethics and the History of Ideas By Matthew Harris This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Harris All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8946-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8946-9

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction ............................................................................................... xii Section I: Vattimo’s Return to Religion Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 God the Father in Vattimo’s Interpretation of Christianity Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 22 Gianni Vattimo and Thomas JJ Altizer on the Incarnation and the Death of God: A Comparison Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Vattimo, Kenosis and St. Paul Section II: Vattimo’s Religious Ethics Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 68 Metaphysics, Violence, and the ‘Natural Sacred’ in Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 87 Vattimo and Otherness: Hermeneutics, Charity, and Conversation Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 105 Vattimo and Caritas: A Postmodern: Categorical Imperative? Section III: Vattimo and the History of Ideas Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 124 Gianni Vattimo on Culture, Communication and the Move from Modernity to Postmodernity

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Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 141 Vattimo, Nihilism, and Secularisation: The ‘Trojan Horse’ Effect of Christianity Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 164 Gianni Vattimo on Secularisation and Islam Conclusion ............................................................................................... 185 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 213

PREFACE

As I write this preface, less than a week has passed since the events in Paris of Friday 13th November 2015. Beginning and ending the year in tragedy, the French capital is reeling from the attacks and is bravely coming to terms with the latest act from the extremist threat. While Hollande orders airstrikes on Raqqa and intelligence services search Europe-wide for the perpetrators, sponsors and supporters of terror, another fight is taking place. This is the cultural battle between the values of liberté, égalité and fraternité on the one hand, and the beliefs of the Islamist extremists on the other. The former values are representative of those held by the French nation, symbolic of the French Revolution. However, the philosopher Richard Rorty would go a step further in saying that, for him, their inauguration into European cultural consciousness came about through a “constellation of events” in history even more profound than the division between BC and AD.1 While Rorty is a pragmatist who knows about the flaws of the Enlightenment project, he nonetheless sees that Europe has a role in “civilising” (to use Rorty’s word) the world through spreading and embodying liberal values,2 even if justification for them in the traditional philosophical sense cannot be found. These values work, allowing for responsible, civil coexistence of people with otherwise divergent views in a democracy. What, though, of the values of the Islamist extremists, particularly Islamic State? The values here are of reduction, of “black and white” thinking in which one is either with them, in submission to a transcendent source of authority, or against them and in need of conversion or destruction. Physical violence is contingent upon metaphysical violence, of fixed first principles and a refusal of conversation. Here one can make an appeal to the importance of Gianni Vattimo’s philosophical project. A number of reasons drew me initially to his philosophical style of “weak thought” (pensiero debole), but important among them was his identification of metaphysics with violence, and that 1

Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “Dialogue: What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 65. 2 Ibid., 72.

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he has attempted to provide a historical foundation for liberté, égalité and fraternité. In fact, Vattimo goes not only further forward than Rorty, but also earlier back in time. For Vattimo, even these three romantic values of the French revolution have been made weaker through the ever-increasing number of interpretations brought into European cities through massimmigration and mass-media. Instead, what we are left with is the value of charity (caritas), which for Vattimo functions like a kind of postmodern Categorical Imperative: the weak thinker should recognise their provenance in Europe of standing in a linguistic and cultural tradition which has the Bible at its root, and the main message of the Bible—to turn inward in faith—is the catalyst of the secularisation which has effected this hermeneutical bazaar of a situation into which we are thrown. By recognising one’s own contingency in this thrownness, one should see that everyone else is in this same situation. As a result, one should be prepared at the very least to enter into conversation with them, with the possibility of generating new Being through what one of Vattimo’s teachers—HansGeorg Gadamer—would have called a “fusion of horizons.” Weak thought is an interrogation, and encouragement, of the irreducible plurality which constitutes the “ontology of actuality” (the way things are) of the West in the latter stages of twentieth, and early parts of the twenty-first, centuries. Its opposite is strong thought, which is closed, metaphysical and reductionist. Given the situation in Paris in 2015 with the victims and the perpetrators, it is straightforward to impute these differing philosophical styles on the parties involved. Even prior to recent political events, Vattimo’s relevance to the way the world is today drew me to his thought and is reflected in some of the essays included here in this collection. “Gianni Vattimo on Secularisation, and Islam,” an article I first started to write in 2013 and was published in The European Legacy in early 2015, deals with some of the issues which have taken centre stage as a result of events in Paris, including a discussion of the merits and demerits of the view that Islam will have to undergo a process of secularisation based on internal principles in order for political reform to transpire. Vattimo has been overtly political for his intellectual life, which is concurrent with his adult life. From Maoism in his earlier years as a young academic through to being a “hermeneutic Communist,” Vattimo has interwoven his reflections on the age in which he sees the West living with theoretical insights about how this age has developed. The latter I explore in my thoughts on his distinction between modernity and postmodernity in the essay from the Journal for Communication and Culture included here, “Gianni Vattimo on Culture, Communication, and the Move from Modernity to Postmodernity,” as well

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as the historical roots of this shift in “Vattimo, Nihilism, and Secularisation: The ‘Trojan Horse’ Effect of Christianity,” originally in Parrhesia. These two essays, along with the essay on Islam, form Section Three of this book, called “Vattimo and the History of Ideas.” The ethical corollaries of these ontological-political shifts are explored in other essays in this volume, especially “Vattimo and Caritas: A Postmodern: Categorical Imperative?” (originally in Kritike), “Metaphysics, Violence, and the ‘Natural Sacred’ in Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy” (from the journal, Humanicus) and “Vattimo and Otherness: Hermeneutics, Charity, and Conversation” (Otherness: Essays and Studies). These three essays form Section Two of this book, entitled “Vattimo’s Religious Ethics.” Both Vattimo’s views on the history of ideas and ethics depend upon “Vattimo’s Return to Religion,” which I discuss in Section One of this name. The second chapter is “Gianni Vattimo and Thomas JJ Altizer on the Incarnation and the Death of God: A Comparison,” my first essay on Vattimo published concurrently with the start of my doctoral research in Autumn of 2011 for the journal Minerva. The two other essays in this section explore Vattimo’s thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in “God the Father in Vattimo’s Interpretation of Christianity” (The Heythrop Journal) and “Vattimo, Kenosis and St. Paul” (International Journal of Philosophy and Theology). From an academic perspective, I hope these last two essays throw some light on an issue that has dogged Vattimo in recent years, namely that he is Anti-Semitic.3 These essays show that if anything Vattimo has toned-down some of the “supersessionist” language in his return to religion over the last fifteen years when it was pointed out by John D. Caputo that his views on Christianity could appear as though it had superseded Judaism.4 Before Section One I will introduce more of Vattimo’s biography and weak thought; I will not outline his return to religion as his return is described in various places in the essays of which this book is comprised anyway, and I do not see the need for duplicating what I have already written. As the three main sections of the book are comprised of essays I have written between 2011 and 2015, I will conclude with a reflective essay assessing the conclusions I came to in these various articles. 3

Severyn Ashkenazy, “A New Exodus?” The European Magazine 4.10.2014 http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/severyn-ashkenazy/9073-resurgence-ofanti-semitism-in-europe Accessed 23.8.15. 4 John D. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 79.

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Although I feel that Vattimo’s work is very timely, I do not uncritically accept his assumptions, methods and conclusions. Furthermore, I have also tried to weave some of my own interests into Vattimo’s arguments, partly because this is the way I interpret him, and partly because I try to address what I perceive to be some of the limitations in his approach to Christianity. Despite being Italian born and bred, Vattimo’s intellectual heritage is primarily German, with Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer being his principal influences. In my formative years Nietzsche was one of my main intellectual inspirations, but then my formal university education was in the typically British Empiricist tradition, where at Oxford Locke, Berkeley, Hume and (Strawson’s) Kant were the order of the day. Moreover, just over half of my undergraduate degree was in Theology, with Medieval Church History as my specialty. My initial postgraduate research at the University of Birmingham was a fusion between Medieval History and the Philosophy of Science, particularly the work of Thomas Kuhn. Eventually this was published as The Notion of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Idea of Paradigm in Church History in early 2011. By then I was teaching Religious Studies at QEH in Bristol and reviewing books for various journals and speaking to my theologian friends to keep me informed of life in the academic world. One friend in particular—Dr Christopher Wojtulewicz—suggested we collaborate on the reception of Meister Eckhart’s quotations in Nietzsche’s work. I had recently reviewed Vanessa Lemm’s Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy for the short-lived online journal Academici, Wojtulewicz’s then-supervisor Markus Vinzent’s project (like a proto-Academia.edu) and had been struck by the use of Eckhart by Nietzsche in a quote I found in Lemm’s book. Wojtulewicz and I wrote various drafts of our collaborative article, and it became something of a running joke between us that we could not come up with a clear angle and – as of writing—we have not even submitted the article to a journal. However, in the course of the secondary research on Nietzsche and the death of God, I discovered Vattimo’s work; I read a chapter from his book Nietzsche: An Introduction and was intrigued. Shortly after the initial research for this collaborative article, I noticed Thomas Guarino’s book Vattimo and Theology on the list of books to review on the Theological Book Review website. Recognising the name “Vattimo” but not quite placing exactly how, I requested the book to review and could not get enough of it. Surveying his work and then going into more depth on his “return to religion,” through Guarino I realised that in Vattimo I had found at last a thinker who crystallised my interests in Nietzsche, the history of Christianity, Kuhn and various other thinkers— such as Joachim of Fiore—who had cropped up along the way in my study

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of Philosophy, Theology and History. I promptly searched the UK for potential doctoral supervisors. At Staffordshire University I found Professor David Webb, who had translated some of Vattimo’s works into English in the 1990s. From September 2011 I have therefore been studying part-time at Staffordshire University, researching Vattimo’s “return to religion.” The articles I have included in this volume constitute the best way I have found to develop my ideas on my thesis, and the result is a modified form of Vattimo’s history of ideas which includes the ideas of John Gray and P. J. Fitzpatrick, two philosophers far removed from Vattimo’s own intellectual biography. I would like to thank the following people for their help in making this book possible. Firstly, I would like to thank Professor David Webb for the many conversations we have had over the last five years. Secondly, I would like to thank Professor Santiago Zabala for his encouragement and interest he has taken in my work on Vattimo. Thirdly, I would like to thank Dr Christopher Wojtulewicz for the many interesting conversations we have had on Philosophy and Theology and for fostering the spirit of collaboration. I would also like to thank Warminster School for the support they have offered me whilst working there, including sponsoring my final year of study. Thanks also goes to Thomas Guarino and Erik Meganck for useful and interesting email exchanges in helping me develop my own ideas on Vattimo’s thought. Finally, I would like to thank CSP for their help in putting this book together.

INTRODUCTION

1. Il pensiero debole Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) is an Italian philosopher and cultural commentator. Vattimo was born and studied in Turin, Italy, with Pareyson, then in Heidelberg under Hans-Georg Gadamer. While Vattimo’s philosophy very much reflects the existentialist and proto-postmodernist influences of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Kuhn, there is also a more “concrete” or politically engaged side to Vattimo which has made him visible outside of philosophical circles, including supporting gay rights and being a Member of the European Parliament. Since the early 1980s, Vattimo has become well known for his philosophical style of “weak thought” (pensiero debole), a term and style deriving from a volume of this name edited by Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti and containing the work of a number of other philosophers.1 “Weak thought” is an attempt to understand and re-configure traces from the history of thought in ways that accord with the lack of centre and foundations characteristic of the postmodern in order to create an ethic of “weakness.” The purpose of this Introduction is to outline the core principles of Vattimo’s thought, analysing their philosophical roots along the way, focusing on Vattimo’s initial statement of weak thought from the volume of that name, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought.” The essays in this volume explore other areas of Vattimo’s work, especially his return to religion and his ethics. While these other essays do include some information on Vattimo’s style of weak thought, they do not go into pensiero debole in much detail, something this Introduction seeks to redress. Vattimo sets out his position as follows: “Weak thought presupposes that, contrary to the heavily metaphysical framework beneath the problem of beginnings (starting from the first principles of Being), and contrary moreover to a historicist metaphysics (in Hegel’s sense, in which Being

1

Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds.), Il pensiero debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983).

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has no first principles but is rather a providential process: to think means to be up on the times), a third way may be possible.”2 Before I explain what Vattimo means by “Being” or “historicist metaphysics,” it is important to note what Vattimo says about the third way. The third way is based on “experience” which is “largely that of the everyday, which is also and always historically qualified and culturally dense.”3 Vattimo is talking here of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as a “thrown project,” which in Vattimo’s eyes is one’s “hermeneutical foundation,” that is, one of interpretation based on thrownness into the world. This notion of Dasein will be explained momentarily. Hermeneutics (interpretation) works like literary and art criticism: “critical discourse and evaluation always arise from a set of canons constituted historically by art and taste.”4 The idea that our experience is constituted somehow by texts will be important later so is worth noting now.

2. Historicist metaphysics and difference Before coming to look at Vattimo’s main argument in which he sets out his own position, it is important to outline briefly his treatment of dialectics. The latter concept has its most famous proponent in Hegel, to which Vattimo alludes in his phrase “historicist metaphysics.” Hegel proposed that “absolute spirit” manifests itself gradually in the world in a process that involves a rational dialectic in which spirit will in the end achieve full unity and self-knowledge. History works dialectically, through thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Through his Marxist background, Vattimo refers to the work of a number of early twentieth century thinkers, such as Benjamin, Bloch and Adorno, who have followed Marx’s dialectical materialism (the view that historical events are outcomes of opposing forces which have material needs as their underlying source of conflict) to an extent, albeit with what he perceives as a “dissolutive” gloss tendency with regards to dialectics.5 For thinkers such as Benjamin, not only the historical process but also the totality constitute expressions of mastery, which in turn lead them to see traces of the past in a dissolutive way. Traces, for Benjamin for example, are “ruins that history has accumulated” at the feet of the angel in Klee’s painting in Thesis 9 of his Theses on 2

Gianni Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” in Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds.), Weak Thought, trans. by Peter Carravetta (Albany: SUNY, 2012), 39. 3 Ibid., 40. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 42.

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History.6 Nevertheless, Vattimo thinks that this dissolutive approach to dialectics represents difference in a way which is complicit with metaphysics as it is linked to the existential idea of “alienation,”7 which is not only a yearning for totality, but also a form of humanism (which, following Heidegger, is also metaphysical). Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God (which Vattimo takes as the end of metaphysics), Vattimo thinks, has exposed the mastery behind metaphysics, for the latter—with its effects of creating feelings of certainty and consolation— are superfluous in the age of modern technology.8 In dissolutive forms of difference, Vattimo sees substitutes for metaphysical consolation, such as Bloch’s utopian thinking. Instead, Vattimo looks for a more “radical” notion of difference in the writings on Heidegger.

3. Being and ontological difference Why is it a problem for Vattimo to think of something—such as a totality or humanism—as metaphysical? The latter is seen as violent, for Vattimo. This position is not explicitly put forward in “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” but it is found in many other places throughout his work. Arguably the most developed assessment on the part of Vattimo on the connection between metaphysics and violence is his essay, “Metaphysics and Violence,” included in the Santiago Zabala edited collection of essays, Weakening Philosophy (2007). Vattimo states that the link between metaphysics and violence is twofold: firstly, metaphysics constitutes a first principle on which “everything” depends.9 Secondly, “once metaphysical beliefs are weakened, there is no longer anything that limits the conceptual nature of existence…but by the mere fact of the strong imposing themselves.”10 Concerning the former, the violence of metaphysics itself is philosophical, it is the “silencing of questions.”11 By positing objective truth (“the” truth) and by creating rational foundations which constitute the universal measure or standard against which knowledge is measured, metaphysics closes down debate. With regards to 6

Ibid. Ibid., 43. 8 Ibid. 9 Gianni Vattimo, “Metaphysics and Violence,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy, trans. by Robert T. Valgenti (Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 403. 10 Ibid., 404. 11 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “‘Weak Thought’ and the Reduction of Violence,” Common Knowledge, 8:3 (2002), 455. 7

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the second of the two reasons Vattimo provides for why metaphysics is violent, he knows that once metaphysics is weakened there are distinctions left between those stratified in society based on the traces of metaphysics, but without any “strong” reasons to reign-in the excesses of judgements passed and power exerted by those higher up in society on the weaker. As Martin G. Weiss points out,12 violence is a speech act for Vattimo. It is not physical violence, even though Vattimo stresses that metaphysical violence can lead to physical violence, such as in the Inquisition where suspected deviation from metaphysically-guaranteed strict orthodoxy had physically painful consequences. What is ontological difference and why is it more radical than negative or utopian thinking? Following Heidegger,13 ontological difference is the difference between Being (Sein) and beings (seinde). The latter are not “self-evident,” to us anymore as we are aware that they appear to us as a “result of a series of ‘positions,’ occurrences…historical-cultured ‘destined’ disclosures that, prior to the object-self-evidence of ‘entity,’ constitute the meaning of Being.”14 These “disclosures” come about through “horizons” being “constructed by a series of echoes, linguistic resonances, and messages coming from the past and from others.”15 Traditionally, metaphysics—the thinking of Being throughout the history of philosophy—has understood Being in the limited temporal sense of stability, of coming to presence. The ontos on in the case of Plato, influencing Aristotle’s Prime Mover, Aquinas’ God, Leibniz’ monads and numerous other examples is the idea of constant presence, of eternity, not least for reasons as insecurity in less developed technological times. However, through the transmission of linguistic messages Being “is” not, but occurs, and it constitutes the a priori temporal (not, versus the NeoKantians, transcendental) horizon for Dasein. As a result, “True Being never is, but sets itself on the path and sends itself, it trans-mits itself.”16 It was mentioned that Being “occurs,” and this is related closely to the idea of the Ereignis (or the “event of appropriation”) in Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger’s thought. The very word Ereignis appears in 12

Martin G. Weiss, “What’s Wrong with Biotechnology? Vattimo’s Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Media,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (Albany: SUNY, 2010), 244. 13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 22. 14 Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 44. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 45.

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“Dialectic, Difference, Weak Thought,” and Vattimo admits that the term has many different meanings and uses in Heidegger’s own significant body of work.17 This is an important issue that, to do it justice, will need a larger section of its own so that it does not detract from the thrust of “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought.” Nevertheless, it can be said now that Being occurs and appropriates Dasein, allowing things to come to being. What, though, is Dasein? Dasein is a Heideggerian term associated most with his most famous work, Being and Time. From “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought” it is possible to ascertain what Vattimo takes over from Heidegger with regards to this concept, which will then be explained. The differences between Vattimo’s position and Heidegger’s will then be briefly outlined. Firstly, Vattimo says about Dasein that “Dasein is thrown project—thrown time and time again. The foundation, the setting out, the initial sending [invio] of our discourse cannot but be a hermeneutical foundation.”18 The term “sending” will be explained in due course, but the important thing to recognise here is the idea of “thrownness.” Vattimo mentions this again later in the essay when he says “The analysis of Dasein, of its thrownness as well as of its continually resituated and qualified nature, leads Heidegger to radically temporalize the a priori.”19 Finally, he says that “truth” is the result of a “process of verification” that only takes place within “the project of the world that constitutes us as Dasein.”20 Here we have a number of terms which need to be explained: “Dasein,” “thrownness,” “project,” “world” and the idea of a “temporal” a priori. The “existential analytic” of Dasein is at the heart of Heidegger’s Being and Time. There have been numerous detailed explanations of the background and argument of this book, so I will not repeat what they have already written. Nevertheless, I will mention enough important points to explain Vattimo’s use of Heidegger. Prior to Being and Time Heidegger had worked along more conventionally phenomenological lines, using the phrase “hermeneutics of facticity” instead, which was a “switch of paradigms…from an intentionally oriented consciousness to a historically situated ex-sistence.”21 In English “Dasein” sounds like a technical term, but Rée reminds us that “the German word Dasein is as colloquial as can be. It is not a technical term, and as Daseins, we are simply entities with an 17

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 40. 19 Ibid., 44. 20 Ibid., 50. 21 Theodore Kisiel, “Hermeneutics of Facticity,” in Bret W. Davis (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 25. 18

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ontological attitude.”22 Heidegger’s main question is the ontological question of the meaning of Being, a topic for investigation which he believed had been neglected: “Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word “being”? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being.”23 Everything “is,” but Being is not another thing or anything like a universal (such as a Platonic form).24 But enquiring about the meaning of Being presupposes a vague understanding which guides our everyday activities, but which nonetheless must start from entities which “are.”25 What, though, about that which is doing the enquiring? Here one gets to Dasein—“there is”—as Heidegger’s starting point, something unique: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.”26 By “ontically,” Heidegger means concerning beings (or things), to distinguish from the more fundamental ontological question. Dasein, unlike other things, is ontological, for every Dasein has at least a “pre-ontology,” that is, an understanding of Being.27 Dasein’s essence cannot be neatly defined, and instead can be understood in terms of its existence, the possibilities open to it.28 Dasein always already belongs to a “world,” which is a context and a pre-ontological understanding of it. This world is made up not only of other Daseins, but also of ready-to-hand equipment with which we engage primarily as tools (such as doors to open, rather than a hinged geometric shape); we are absorbed in this world and are not neutral entities taking a “view from nowhere.” This absorption can, and frequently is, expressed in ways taken from others (“the they”) and not authentically, although Heidegger is at pains to show that these two notions are two sides of the same coin and his seemingly disparaging attitude towards “the they” is nothing moral in character.29 Perhaps this is because of our “thrownness,” that we are born into a world which already has concerns and values and although Dasein is always “mine,” the cares and concerns are inherited and shared with others in the world. What we inherit is not a passive tradition, but a set of concerns which affects our moods, understanding and projects for the future. Nevertheless, if Dasein 22

Jonathan Rée, Heidegger (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 8. Heidegger, Being and Time, 19. 24 Ibid., 22-23. 25 Ibid., 26-27. 26 Ibid., 32. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 32-33. 29 Rée, Heidegger, 24. 23

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completely submits to “the They,” then he or she will be divesting themselves of their responsibility for their own existence, which is what Heidegger called “falling.” Dasein can come back from fallenness through experiencing “angst,” which is an awareness of the contingency of one’s own situation: “Anxiety thus shows up as unifying our thrownness into a world, our particular way of finding ourselves in the midst of entities in the world, with our existential freedom to pursue new possibilities.”30 Authenticity, though, for Dasein can only come from the individualising awareness—linked with angst—of “being-towards-death,” that death individualises Dasein and invites Dasein to take responsibility for its own existence. Here the links with time—which Heidegger takes as “the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being”—become clearer.31 Heidegger discusses what he calls “ecstatic time” in relation to Dasein, by which it means “standing out.” This is why Heidegger says that the “ontological meaning of ‘care’ [which is Dasein’s Being, as it is absorbed in things in the world as a thrown-project] is temporality.”32 Dasein will look forward towards its death which individualises it, having projects for the future, as well as looking back to take responsibility for the traditions and the horizons into which it has been thrown, and stand resolutely in the present allowing the current state of affairs to disclose itself. In an essay entitled “Hermeneutical Reason/Dialectical Reason,” included in the collection The Adventure of Difference, Vattimo explains that Heidegger in Being and Time thought of hermeneutics pertaining to Dasein along the lines of “authenticity/fallenness.” However, “In his subsequent works the affirmation of the Being-language nexus is always linked with the problem of metaphysics as a historical presentation of Being, a presentation that involves an unconcealing/concealing…[which] belongs above all to Being.”33 Being and language are more directly linked to historical destining in works after Being and Time; Vattimo is overstating his case somewhat as the notion of “Ge-schick” (destining) can be found in Being and Time,34 even if it is not a developed here (especially along the lines that the focus is gradually shifted away from Dasein to the 30

Mark A. Wrathall and Max Murphey, “An Overview of Being and Time,” in Mark A Wrathall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 20. 31 Heidegger, Being and Time, 19. 32 Ibid., 416. 33 Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, trans. Cyprian Blamires and Thomas Harrison (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1993), 28. 34 Heidegger, Being and Time, 436.

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history of Being in Heidegger’s thought). It is important to note that Vattimo here wrote that this notion of concealing/unconcealing (particularly the idea of concealment) prevented Heidegger from doing what Gadamer later did, which was to identify Being with language. Later, in another essay within The Adventure of Difference entitled “The Decline of the Subject and the Problem of Testimony,” Vattimo writes: “According to Being and Time Dasein is to be found always, already, primordially, in authenticity. In the ontological perspective that is later developed, this means that truth arises and is disclosed always and only in a setting of non-truth, of epoché, of suspension and concealment.”35 After the so-called “Kehre” (turn) in Heidegger’s thought, common opinion (the “they”) becomes less important now than historical destining. For Heidegger after the Kehre, authenticity is not now a matter of personal choice or responsibility, but a modification of this world through the transformation of one epoch of Being into another.36 In “Dialectic, Difference, Weak Thought,” Vattimo explains how Heidegger’s thought developed in the 1930s to place more emphasis on “the relationship between being and language.”37 Vattimo spells it out when he states that: “What is more radical about Heidegger is the fact that his discovery of the linguistic character of being’s occurrence carries over into his concept of Being itself. Being now ends up stripped of the strong traits attributed to it by metaphysics. Being that can occur does not have the same traits as metaphysical Being with the simple addition of ‘eventuality.’ It offers itself to thought in a radically different way.”38 Liberation can occur through remembering ontological difference as occurrence, by thinking being as a “reappropriation that no longer deals with Being as stability.”39 The latter notion refers to Being “eventuating,” but how does this relate to language? I will look at the importance of language for Vattimo first, tracing how he has taken elements of his understanding from Heidegger: “A historical world—a given order and ‘meaning’ of beings and of man among them—is always born through the institution of language. The sign-meaning relationship can occur solely within an already instituted opening because the establishment of linguistic conventions always comes after the birth of language, which in its origin is never a sign but the becoming world of the world. The

35

Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 49. Ibid., 50. 37 Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 45. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 36

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eschatological character of openness onto the future is worked out by virtue of the artwork’s founding a language and a world.”40 These words of Vattimo’s are taken from his book Art’s Claim to Truth, and they refer to the idea of Being “happening” through language. I have briefly alluded to the idea in Heidegger’s thought that Being “occurs” through openings through which things come to presence. For Vattimo, things come to presence through “the birth of language” which he sees as having its origin in artwork. Before looking at the links to Heidegger’s work, three things need to be said here: 1. The role of “art” and the “artwork” will be discussed in more depth later in the Introduction; 2. Vattimo distinguishes between more and less influential works of art, and even in this text from 1967 (revised in 1985), he sees the Bible as having a privileged role in the history of the West in terms of founding a world and a language41; 3. There is a subtle distinction here between the “birth of language” and the “establishment of linguistic conventions.” Much later in Vattimo’s thought,42 albeit hinted at in The End of Modernity,43 Vattimo makes the link between Heidegger’s notion of the event and the paradigm concept in Thomas Kuhn’s thought, that is, the occurrence of the “birth of language” is the scientific revolution and the working out of convention is “normal science.” The working-out of this ill-fitting KuhnianHeideggerianism in Vattimo’s more recent thought will be outlined later in Chapter Three and discussed in the Conclusion. The specifically Heideggerian roots of Vattimo’s identification of Being with language can be found in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” in which he said “language is the house of Being.”44 Davis puts it slightly differently, that “language demarcates the parameters of a realm wherein humans can meaningfully dwell.”45 How does language demarcate the parameters of the dwelling realm for humans? In the essay “The Turning,” Heidegger writes, “Language is the primal dimension within which man’s essence is first able to correspond at all to Being and its claim, and, in corresponding, 40

Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 121. 41 Ibid. 42 Gianni Vattimo, Della realtà: Fini della filosfia (Milan: Garzanti, 2012); Gianni Vattimo, Heidegger (Milan: Booktime, 2013). 43 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by John Snyder (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1988), Ch. 6. 44 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in David Ferrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 161. 45 Bret W. Davis, “Introduction,” In Bret W. David (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014), 10.

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to belong to Being. This primal corresponding, expressly carried out, is thinking. Through thinking, we first learn to dwell in the realm in which there comes to pass the restorative surmounting of the destining of Being.”46 Man “ek-sists” by dwelling in language which is the house of Being, as Being corresponds to the essence of man by pervading language.47 The mention of ecstatic temporality is important here, as is the idea that man is “guarding” language, and therefore Being. One can relate it to what Heidegger writes elsewhere about man being the “shepherd” of Being.48 Taking the “guarding/shepherding” references and the allusion to ecstatic temporality together, one can link what Heidegger says about language in relation to Dasein to the notions of “transmission” of messages and Andenken, the thoughtful remembrance of traces of Being which Dasein inherits through language in such a way that it relates these traces to their own projectuality. The ideas of “transmission” and “Andenken” will be looked at in more detail in due course. At this point, it is worth noting the contribution Hans-Georg Gadamer had on Vattimo’s thought, something he seems keen to downplay. Jean Grondin puts it as follows: with the Nietzschean axiom adopted by Vattimo, “There are no facts, only interpretations,” Gadamer would rephrase it “There are only facts through interpretations.”49 For Gadamer, “there are no facts without a certain language that expresses them. But he is adamant that it is the Sache, the thing itself (or the ‘facts’), that comes to light through this linguistic unfolding.”50 In Gadamer’s own words: “From the relation of language to world follows its unique factualness (Sachlichkeit). It is a matter of fact (Sachverhalte) that comes into language. That a thing behaves (eine Sache verhalt sich) in various ways permits to recognize its independent otherness, which presupposes a real distance between the speaker and the thing.”51

46 Martin Heidegger, “The Turning,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 41. 47 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 161. 48 Ibid., 159. 49 Jean Grondin, “Vattimo’s Latinization of Hermeneutics: Why did Gadamer Resist Postmodernism?” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy (Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 207. 50 Ibid., 208. 51 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 445.

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Interpretations are of things, but are not external to them. Grondin mentions that Gadamer’s hermeneutics derives from the performing arts, and to interpret a play, for instance, is “to play out the work itself.”52 For Vattimo, this notion of a “work itself” is insufficiently nihilistic. Therefore, with Gadamer’s famous sentence “Being, that can be understood, is language,”53 Vattimo “puts the emphasis on language, which ends up absorbing Being in what can be called a linguistic ontology.”54 When Vattimo was translating Truth and Method into Italian, he made some interesting philosophical choices with this sentence of Gadamer’s. Ashley Woodward notes that “Vattimo chose to translate this phrase maintaining the commas of the original German omitted in the English translation, so that the phrase is effectively: ‘Being, that can be understood, is language.’ This choice allows a reading which radically identifies Being with language.”55 For Vattimo, “there is nothing left of Being as such,” and Being that can be understood is absorbed into language. Therefore, when Gadamer says that “man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic… hermeneutic experience is verbal in nature,”56 for Vattimo this is all there is, for there is not a “Sache” which is worked out through interpretation (for there are nothing but interpretations for Vattimo). Arguably the clearest exposition of the linguistic nature of Being found in Vattimo’s work is located in the “Dialogue” between Vattimo, Rorty, and Zabala in The Future of Religion. In an extended contribution from Vattimo in this exchange, he exclaims: “When we think that (1) “Being” is an event of the Logos, (2) the Logos is ‘dialogue,’ and (3) dialogue is the sum of inter-subjective discourse; then our ontological worry is to be able to ‘found’ Being, not to try to find something that is already there, but construing something that holds, that resists in time.”57 In using the term “Logos,” a term with a varied etymological and philosophical background in ancient Greek thought, Vattimo is again consciously drawing upon the work of Gadamer. “As the place of total mediation,” Vattimo writes, “language is precisely this kind of reason and this logos that lives in the

52

Grondin, “Vattimo’s Latinization of Hermeneutics,” 208. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 474. 54 Grondin, “Vattimo’s Latinization of Hermeneutics,” 211. 55 Ashley Woodward, “‘Weak Thought’ and its Discontents: Engaging the Philosophy of Gianni Vattimo,” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, 15 (2008), 181. 56 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 443. 57 Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, Santiago Zabala, “Dialogue: What is the Future of After Metaphysics,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 66. 53

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collective belonging to a web of living tradition or an ethos.”58 Vattimo’s use of Logos in this Gadamerian context emphasises the social role of language, that tradition is part of the collective consciousness. A living tradition is also one in which interpretation is not merely a passive receiving of tradition, but a dynamic inheritance within an interpretative family, that the collective consciousness is working out new truths through the worn garments of the traditions that have been passed down. With new interpretative events goes new generation of Being. The Logos is not meant to be understood in an objective way as the rational Logos of ontotheology. While the primacy of language “has a kind of metaphysical pre-eminence,”59 it is because we are each thrown into a horizon that is a linguistic tradition; we can understand other people because they use language, too. In The Future of Religion, Vattimo writes, “Being is nothing but the Logos interpreted as dialogue, (Gespräch) as the actual discussion among people.”60 Language, shaped through the tradition which is the heritage into which we are thrown, is Gadamer’s way of resolving the Heideggerian problem of the way in which we can conceive of our pre-understanding as Dasein without resorting to a Kantian a priori. As such, language is required not only for experience, but also as the possibility of thought. Both interlocutors will have language in common behind their own particular horizons, and “the fusion of horizons that takes place in understanding is actually the achievement of language.”61 When interlocutors engage in dialogue (or, as Vattimo prefers to say, a conversation), an “event” of interpretation occurs, generating new Being. The continuity of one’s own horizon is broken by the novelty of the other. More than a simple exchange of ideas occurs, but a “fusion of horizons,” “in which the two interlocutors recognize each other not as they were before but as discovered anew, enriched and deepened in their being.”62 What is important to recognise is that truth is not found, but created in a community.

4. Thinking Being weakly The coming to consciousness of Being as unstable, as groundless does not lead merely to a liberation of difference (what Nietzsche called the liberation of metaphor): “the illusions of dialectics are not simply 58

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 133. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, 148. 60 Vattimo, Rorty, Zabala, “Dialogue,” 58. 61 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 378. 62 Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, 133; emphasis Vattimo’s. 59

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abandoned in favor of difference.”63 This is where Vattimo introduces the notion of Verwindung into his thought as “The dialectical heritage through which difference is declined.”64 Before Verwindung is explained, it is important to understand what is meant by “dialectical heritage.” Here Vattimo draws upon three related terms: Überlieferung, Ge-schick and Andenken.65 As already alluded to, the former term refers to transmission, and is mainly a term Vattimo gets from Gadamer. This term is important as it is the link between openings that allows traces of tradition to link between past and present. In Truth and Method, Gadamer writes, “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated.”66 The mediating, in Vattimo’s interpretation of Gadamer and Heidegger, takes place through the language games in which Dasein is involved which in turn are framed in accordance with the sending (Ge-schick) of the age, which in the case of late-modernity is living after the death of God. In The End of Modernity, Vattimo explicitly states that the “hermeneutic constitution of Dasein” has a “nihilistic character” due to being founded in an epoch in which man rolls from the centre towards X, in other words in which Being “tends to identify itself with nothingness.”67 For Vattimo “tradition” in terms of Überlieferung (transmission) “linguistic messages” which has its importance because “Being, as a horizon of disclosure in which things appear, can arise only as a trace of past words or as an announcement that has been handed down to us.”68 Traces of tradition have an “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschicte) which encompasses not only their power today, but also the way in which tradition has been interpreted in the past.69 This is particularly important when one considers the case of the Bible, not least when I will come to look at Vattimo’s use of the stages of history and “ways” of interpreting scripture according to his reading of the medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore. Wirkunggeschicte, together with the idea of Dasein responding to a series of announcements which constitute the horizon of disclosure in which things appear, will be significant when I come to look at the case of the Bible in Vattimo’s thought. 63

Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 45. Ibid., 46. 65 Ibid. 66 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 290. 67 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 121. 68 Ibid., 120. 69 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 282-283. 64

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Andenken is recollective thought, “it never renders Being present but always recalls it as already ‘gone’.”70 Being is not a presence, but can only be recalled by recalling that which has been passed on. This, Vattimo points out, means that dealing with metaphysical concepts is unavoidable but that one must “twist” them. If “transmission” brings inherited traces of words and concepts from past openings to mind which have an “effective history,” Andenken is recollective thought by which one aims to think Being in its history by meditating on its eventual nature. As Peter Warnek writes, “the history of Being can only be thought of by way of meditative recollection (besinnnliches Andenken), and it is inevitably distorted when it is subjected to any kind of pragmatic planning or calculative control.”71 Remembrance is thinking which is also a thanking (Heidegger’s play on “denken” and “danken”), and it is intimately related to his understanding of poetry. Nevertheless, it can be said that Andenken as a meditative, recollective thought at the end of metaphysics is one in which one is grateful for the traditions into which one has been thrown and one responds accordingly, not engaging in attempts to replicate or renew metaphysical thought, but in letting Being be, to come to disclosure in hermeneutical, interpretative thought which takes the traces of tradition which constitute Dasein’s horizon and thinking forward in ecstatic projectuality. Vattimo sees Heidegger’s philosophical project after Being and Time as representing Andenken: “It is by retracing the history of metaphysics as the forgetting of Being that Dasein decides for its own death and in this way founds itself as a hermeneutic totality whose foundation consists of a lack of foundation.”72 One can see this, for instance, in the way that Heidegger was able to go back to the preSocratics in his philosophical thinking. Indeed, as Vattimo wants to get beyond the language of “authenticity” and “fallenness” of Being and Time, he wrote that he sees Andenken as the way to think after the end of metaphysics rather than anticipatory resoluteness.73 As for Ge-schick (“sending,” or “destining”), this refers to how Being is sent in an epoch. Although how one thinks is dependent upon whether one thinks and speaks as “they” speak or instead authentically in Being and Time, after the “turn” (kehre) in Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s he 70

Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 47. Peter Warnek, “The History of Being,” in Bret W. Davis (ed.), Heidegger: Key Concepts (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 165. 72 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 119. 73 Gianni Vattimo, “Hermeneutics and Nihilism: An Apology for Aesthetic Consciousness,” in Y. Yovel (ed.), Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 451. 71

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places more emphasis on Logos being “destined” by the epoch into which one is thrown. For example, in the essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger talks about the incommensurability of historical destinings,74 and that “Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specification comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed.”75 In this essay, Heidegger contrasts the modern way of thinking of Being as a “world picture” (a representation of something brought before oneself as an object of calculation),76 compared with earlier sendings of Being as the ens creatum in the Middle Ages, or as “that which is” for the Greek man (albeit the notion of the image as eidos is a dormant idea placed in concealment in the thought of Plato, later to be brought into unconcealment in the modern epoch).77 In other words, historical irruptions take the place of the more “a priori” structures found in the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time.78 In addition to the notion that Dasein is the primary locus of the true through disclosedness based upon the existential analytic of Being and Time, this idea of truth as historicallydestined openings is very important to Vattimo as shall be shown in his arguments concerning secularisation and that thought in the epoch after the death of God is fundamentally different to before. Again, more will be said in due course about “events,” particularly the difficulty in distinguishing between “events” and “the Ereignis.” Now that “dialectical heritage” has been explained through looking at Andenken, Ge-schick and Überlieferung, it is now time to look at Verwindung. In the words of Giovanna Borradori in her exposition of Vattimo: Verwindung is “Andenken (to recollect), which allows one to look at the tradition from the point of view of the Ge-schick, destiny or historical destination.”79 Vattimo contrasts Verwindung with an Überwindung (overcoming) of modernity or an Aufhebung (dialectical overcoming in the Hegelian sense). To leave metaphysics behind altogether would be to create a new foundation, whether “locally” or as some sort of new global epistemological foundation, one would be 74

Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 117. 75 Ibid., 115. 76 Ibid., 132-135. 77 Ibid., 131. 78 Heidegger, Being and Time, 272. 79 Giovanna Borradori, “‘Weak Thought’ and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction,” Social Text, 18 (1988), 44.

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repeating the metaphysical tendency to create foundations. Therefore, rather than a dialectical overcoming, Vattimo thinks interpretation should be a Verwindung. This term, little-used by Heidegger, refers to a “convalescence-alteration,” a “distortion” which is also a “resignation.”80 Verwindung means many things for Vattimo, such as being resigned to tradition, yet also distorting or “twisting” it and—as a result—getting better from it as a form of “convalescence.” If metaphysics is not to be overcome, but “twisted,” what does this really mean and how does it happen? Lexically, Verwindung: “is a convalescence (in the sense of ‘ein Krankheit verwinden’: to heal, to be cured of an illness) and a distorting (although this is a rather marginal meaning linked to ‘winden,’ meaning ‘to twist,’ and to the sense of a deviant alteration which the prefix ‘ver—’ also possesses). The notion of ‘convalescence’ is linked to another meaning as well, that of ‘resignation’…Besides these meanings of the term, there is that of ‘distortion’ to consider as well.”81 This notion of Verwindung is related to nihilism as our “sole opportunity.” Vattimo follows Nietzsche in referring to an “accomplished nihilism,” one which aims at creating one’s own values after the highest values have been dissolved. The opportunity of accomplished nihilism is limited by language, and this is where Verwindung comes in: “Tradition is the transmitting of linguistic messages that constitute the horizon within which Dasein is thrown as an historically determined project: and tradition derives its importance from the fact that Being, as a horizon of disclosure in which things appear, can arise only as a trace of past words.”82 What do metaphysical concepts become once they are recollected and twisted? How should we react to them? Vattimo, recalling Benjamin’s “ruins,” calls the traces of metaphysical heritage as “monuments,” and the attitude towards them being “pietas,” which should evoke an attitude of nostalgia, but “primarily mortality, finitude, and passing away.”83 It is worth noting that Vattimo sees monuments as transmitting the form of messages in works of art (in a largely unspecified sense, but working best with poetry). In successive generations these monuments not only carry and bear, but also lose, interpretations as these generations come and go.84 The main implication of pietas is the recognition that “the

80

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 172. Ibid., 172-173. 82 Ibid., 120. 83 Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 47. 84 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 74. 81

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transcendental…is nothing less than transience.”85 Objects are only such because they appear in the open region as described in Being and Time’s existential analytic, and the metaphysical characteristics which used to pertain to these objects strongly have been passed down through tradition according to historical destinings of Being of which we are now aware due to the Ereignis, the event of appropriation.86 Interestingly, in “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” Vattimo sees in pietas the possibility of an ethic based not on imperatives, but on “deeds.”87 He only discusses it in a handful of places and only cryptically. In The End of Modernity, he brings up pietas in the context of discussing the consequences of the recognition that all there is happens to be a history of “sendings” (or “destinings”); would this not lead to thoroughgoing, destructive relativism? “This historicism,” writes Vattimo, “is nevertheless tempered and verwunden by an awareness that the history of such overtures is not ‘only’ the history of errors…but rather is Being itself.”88 Likening this attitude to Nietzsche’s man of “good temperament,” Vattimo states that “The word that best defines this approach to the past and to everything that is transmitted to us (even in the present) is pietas.”89 Pietas as an ethic never really materialised in Vattimo’s thought, perhaps because it is so vaguely expressed in “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought” and The End of Modernity. Nevertheless, this remark by Vattimo shows how even early on in weak thought he held the desire that his “programme” of philosophy should yield an ethic, something to which he returned in his writings on Christianity.

5. Truth The transience of Being and contingent presencing of beings does not mean that truth has to be jettisoned altogether. Vattimo recalls Heidegger’s distinction in section 44 of Being and Time between truth as correspondence and the openings which allow one to make judgements about correspondence. In this section Heidegger distinguishes between the “traditional” conception of truth (in the Thomistic sense of adequatio between idea and thing) and a more fundamental one. Properly speaking, Dasein is primarily true and only secondarily there is truth as Beinguncovering (aletheia). The latter is an existentiale, and is a characteristic 85

Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 47. Ibid. 87 Ibid., 50. 88 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 175. 89 Ibid., 176-177. 86

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of Dasein and is based around the existential analytic. What is uncovered depends upon the care structure of Dasein, about that about which it is concerned based on how it is thrown into the world, whether it is fallen or authentic, and its project, which is more primordial than a relationship between idea and a thing: “The most primordial phenomenon of truth is first shown by the existential-ontological foundations of uncovering.”90 The primordial uncovering is articulated in discourse as a relationship which is both ready-at-hand which can either be fallen (talking about something that has been uncovered in derivative ways) or authentic. Nevertheless, the traditional concept Logos (assertion) does obtain when one talks about that which has been uncovered as present-at-hand, as an object. Heidegger is emphatic that truth can only occur because Dasein is primarily true, that there was no truth—not even Newton’s laws—before Dasein.91 At its heart, Vattimo’s philosophical style depends upon this understanding of truth, albeit with a significant modification. In The Adventure of Difference, Vattimo writes: “According to Being and Time Dasein is to be found always, already, primordially, in authenticity. In the ontological perspective that is later developed, this means that truth arises and is disclosed always and only in a setting of non-truth, of epoché, of suspension and concealment.”92 In other words, Vattimo thinks the Geschick of the epoch into which one is thrown is more crucial for what counts as truth than being “authentic” or “fallen.” The sending alone does not determine how one is able to make judgements pertaining to truth or falsity completely. There are also “forms of life” to consider, too. With regard to making judgements about correspondence, Vattimo likens these open regions to Wittgenstein’s language games. There is correspondence within each “form of life,” but none of these forms of life inhere in some underlying substratum.93 With these forms of life, with their rules and monuments passed down through tradition and sendings, Vattimo sees truth as being “rhetorical,” of an aesthetic sense to truth in which one tries to persuade people from within—and between—forms of life.94 This is a consistently held view of Vattimo’s, for in a much later work—A Farewell to Truth—he writes, “The relation of thought to the truth of Being, to the original aperture of truth, to the milieu into which Dasein is thrown, is in no sense a cognizance, a theoretical acquisition. Rather, it is what Wittgenstein would 90

Heidegger, Being and Time, 263. Ibid., 269. 92 Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 49. 93 Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 49. 94 Ibid., 50. 91

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call the sharing of a ‘form of life’.”95 Vattimo is at pains to say this does not entail some irrationalism, but that the form of life involves “assuming the heritage of the tradition into which we are thrown as a horizon of possibility.”96 Later, Vattimo downplays the aesthetic and rhetorical elements of persuasion and reconfigures the latter notion by wedding it to ideas of consensus and conversation. Vattimo does not foreground his debt to Gadamer, but the latter thinker’s views on a fusion of horizons underlies Vattimo’s ideas on truth, at least in his more recent writings. Truth, for Vattimo is neither correspondence, nor coherence, but consensus created through conversation. Although Vattimo rejects “vertical” transcendence, of the “Wholly Other,” he accepts the necessity of this kind of “horizontal transcendence,”97 of the salvific possibility of the event coming from without historically in order to bring people beyond their own horizon by fusing them closer together. The fusion re-establishes the continuity of the horizon, which is similar and yet different after the dialogue. Of course, in the postmodern age of world pictures, is continuity even possible (or desirable)? Perhaps this is why, influenced by his pupil Santiago Zabala,98 and a debt to Rorty, more recently Vattimo has chosen to use “conversation” than “dialogue.” The latter term in philosophy is reminiscent of the Socratic dialogues in which truth is presupposed from the outset, and continuity is more of an aim than convergence.99 Moreover, dialogue may not be possible with some people because they only want to talk, not listen: apparent dialogue would be a monologue. By contrast, Vattimo and Zabala argue that conversation occurs when truth is not presupposed from the beginning.100 Where there is no epistemic centre and no shared, universal Grund, there are competing traditions with their own claims to truth. Here Vattimo’s primary understanding of truth comes through, and that is of “friendship” and the practice of “persuasion.” Vattimo’s notion of friendship (which shall be interwoven with the idea of caritas in his return to religion), is linked to his reading of Gadamer. 95 Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), xxxi. 96 Ibid., xxxii. 97 Gianni Vattimo and Carmelo Dotolo, Dio: la possibilità buona (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbetino, 2009), 17. 98 Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 79. 99 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25-26. 100 Ibid.

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Nowhere is this clearer than in The Future of Religion, in which he explicitly links a discussion of friendship, in which he reverses Aristotle’s dictum “amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas,” to a mention of Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons.” Vattimo declares that “no experience of truth can exist without some kind of participation in a community, and not necessarily the closed community…[but in] the ongoing construction of communities that coincide in a ‘fusion of horizons’.”101 Truth is fashioned through dialogue/conversation, resulting in the generation of new Being and a new horizon for the interlocutors, a conversation which is only possible through friendship, that is, the recognition of the provisional nature of their own traditions (existing horizons) and a willingness to listen to the other. There are philosophical reasons for keeping truth and friendship together in keeping with Vattimo’s broader programme: “keeping the two things [truth and friendship] separate would mean accepting two regimes, and accepting the idea that objective, adequative, scientific truth may well be immoral and savage.”102 One may disagree with Vattimo, that if there are “no facts, only interpretations,” is it the case then that it is not true that “2+2 = 4”? While mathematics of this kind is not disputed by Vattimo, it is not an issue for just about everybody except a handful of theoretical mathematicians. Drawing upon an anecdote of Brecht’s, Vattimo in The Responsibility of the Philosopher states that “If someone gets up in front of a crowd of strikers to inform them that two plus two makes four, he’ll get jeered. Plainly that’s not the kind of truth that’s needed.”103 Truth becomes an issue where it is most disputed, and this is why friendship and persuasion are of paramount importance for Vattimo. There is an element of pragmatism in Vattimo’s thought here, a sign of the influence of Richard Rorty. In a multicultural, multi-ethnic society in the late-modern West, truth cannot be found, but has to be agreed by consensus achieved through dialogue. This can only occur, though, if an attitude of friendship obtains before, during and after dialogue, for without friendship one or more partners in the dialogue (if it happens at all) might wish to impose their own interpreted tradition on the other. Therefore, Vattimo writes that, “In all fields, including science, truth itself is becoming an affair of

101

Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 51. 102 Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 98. 103 Ibid.

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consensus, listening, participation in a shared enterprise, rather than oneto-one correspondence with the pure hard objectivity of things.”104

6. The End of Modernity Perhaps surprisingly, there is no direct discussion of “nihilism” in “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought.” This is more than made up for in arguably Vattimo’s most important book, The End of Modernity, published two years after the essay. Why does Vattimo’s thought have to be nihilistic? Partly it is an inevitable consequence of him taking the death of God and end of metaphysics seriously, as they both entail that “Truth” (with a capital “T”) is no longer persuasive, that there are no more absolute values and that there are no facts, only interpretations. More importantly, a nihilist position safeguards against mysticism, hidden substrata and the possibility of any kind of “return” of metaphysics, especially when he makes the move that “the new” in any foundational sense would be to repeat the worn-out, weakened logic of the metaphysics of modernity. In this section, “The End of Modernity,” I will be exploring the themes of this important book, with reference in addition to other works of Vattimo’s, mainly from this period, especially The Transparent Society. These themes are nihilism and the relationship between hermeneutics, modernity and postmodernity. Already in the second section it was mentioned that Vattimo has said that we are living after the death of God, where the need for absolute truth seems superfluous. In The End of Modernity, Vattimo elaborates on what this means. The opening chapter in the work is “An Apology for Nihilism,” and he proceeds by elaborating on the meaning of nihilism for us—which is our “sole opportunity”105—and how his understanding of nihilism is a fusion between the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Vattimo’s Nietzsche is taken largely—but not entirely—from Heidegger’s reading of him, concentrating mainly on the unpublished works. In this chapter, Vattimo proceeds this way by quoting Nietzsche’s Will to Power, that nihilism is “the situation in which ‘man rolls from the centre toward X’.”106 That is, nihilism is a decentering process which is ongoing. Vattimo also says that Nietzsche’s nihilism is identical to “the kind of nihilism defined by Heidegger, namely the process in which….‘there is 104

Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 35. 105 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 19. 106 Ibid.

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nothing left’ of Being of such…the forgetting of Being by humanity.”107 Vattimo is quite clear that nihilism concerns Being first and foremost and is not a psychological thesis.108 “For Nietzsche,” writes Vattimo, “the entire process of nihilism can be summarized by the death of God, or by the ‘devaluation of the highest values’.”109 These two ideas of Nietzsche’s will be outlined in accordance with their interpretation by Vattimo, before looking more at how Vattimo reads Heidegger on the end of metaphysics. Finally, there will be some discussion on what Vattimo means when he says that, Nietzsche and Heidegger combined entails that “Nihilism is thus the reduction of Being to exchange-value.”110 To analyse the Vattimian reading of Nietzsche’s “death of God,” I will start by recounting what he has to say in The End of Modernity. For Vattimo’s Nietzsche, “God dies precisely because knowledge no longer needs to arrive at ultimate causes, humanity no longer needs to believe in an immortal soul etc. Even if God dies because he must be negated in the name of the same imperative demand for truth that was always considered one of his own laws, the meaning of an imperative demand for truth itself is lost together with him.”111 In this passage there are three points to pick out: i) Humanity no longer needs God ii) God died at the hand of his own command for truth iii) The force of the imperative for truth dies with God. These three points are interrelated and summarise Vattimo’s position on the death of God. The connection between “God” and “Truth” can be found in The Gay Science. Nietzsche writes in Book Five, “we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth.”112 In an essay entitled “Art and Identity: On the Relevance of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics” (1974) included in the collection of his writing on Nietzsche’s thought, Dialogue with Nietzsche, Vattimo writes: “excess is the movement that Nietzsche resumes in the proposition ‘God is dead’ and the concept of nihilism: God is dead as a result of the 107

Ibid. Ibid., 20. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 21. 111 Ibid., 24. 112 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201. 108

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extreme degree of refinement reached by religiosity, and the same holds good for all supreme values, like truth itself.”113 The more fervently Christians followed their God, the more they killed him, to the point where they did not seek God at all. Vattimo takes this from On the Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche writes “honest atheism” is “the outcome of a two-thousand-year training in truthfulness, which finally forbids itself the lie of belief in God.”114 In Vattimo’s words, God dies “on account of the religiosity of humans and their love of truth.”115 God commanded humans not to lie and Christianity has interpreted this as highlighting the value of truth. Ultimately this has led to the pursuit of scientific discovery in the name of truth, albeit—importantly, as shall become clear in the first part of this study—via the “turn to the subject” in the philosophy of history when Kant realised that the a priori forms of time, space and the categories of the mind constitute experience.116 As reality is ever more delimited by the scientific method, and technology as the fruit of scientific discovery is able to search space, sea and sky, one finds that God is nowhere and he is a “lie.” God, therefore, self-consumes. A variation on this “selfconsumption” notion is given in The End of Modernity where Vattimo links the death of God to the “chemical analysis” given by Nietzsche at the very beginning of Human, All Too Human.117 On this view there are no opposites (rational and irrational, for example), as the metaphysicians would have one believe, but that historical philosophy would discern that “the most glorious colours are derived from base.”118 This chemical analysis dissolves “higher” values such as “truth” to find their presublimated origins in human contingencies. The specific highest value of truth has its origin in insecurity, of the nearness of death leading ancient humans to look for something unchanging. In Beyond Interpretation, Vattimo links the death of God to the idea of the “true” (or “real”) world becoming a “fable,” a section in Nietzsche’s work Twilight of the Idols.119 In the section called “How the ‘Real World’ 113

Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 113. 114 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134. 115 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 113. 116 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 30. 117 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 166. 118 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 12. 119 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1997), 7.

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at last Became a Myth” (“fable” is Vattimo’s own, probably preferable, translation of the German “Fabel”), Nietzsche describes how the “real world” moves from an external, unchanging impersonal basis to that which is in the knowing subject, finally disappearing completely. Nietzsche starts with the eternal Platonic forms. With the rise of Christianity, the “real” world is promised to the virtuous, faithful believer (as the kingdom of heaven). In the Enlightenment era, the real world is no longer promised, but is seen as a “thing in itself,” or a Kantian noumenal realm necessary for guaranteeing experience which, ever since Descartes at the beginning of modernity, has retreated ever further into the subject. Empiricism comes to find no use for the noumenal world as “thinking becomes aware that what is actually real is, as the positivists assert, a ‘positive’ fact, a given established by science. Establishing, however, is precisely the act of the human subject.”120 As a result, science and technology produce the world. Not only have we done away with the real, but also the “apparent” (“empirical,” “phenomenal”) world, too.121 The fabulisation of the world is taken by Vattimo to mean the devaluation of the highest values. Here a link can be made between Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche and Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger. In the third of Heidegger’s lecture series on Nietzsche he discusses this passage of Nietzsche’s.122 Heidegger states that Nietzsche brings up terms such as “truth,” “value,” “real world,” “apparent world” and “twists” (reminiscent of Vattimo’s use of the term Verwindung) them from their context in the history of philosophy to accord with his own concerns regarded “life-enhancement.” Traditionally, “truth,” for instance, has been regarded as value-estimating in the sense of judging something to be correct, as with Aquinas’ notion of adequatio between eidos and res. By seeing even fabulisation as life-enhancing, Heidegger sees Nietzsche as valuing “Becoming” over “Being.” Whereas the latter is associated with permanence and stasis, Nietzsche saw the world in a state of flux, that the world is nothing but competing “perspectives” (which Vattimo reads as “interpretations”). Vattimo is fond of quoting one of Nietzsche’s fragments published posthumously in The Will to Power, that “there are no facts, only interpretations” and that this itself is “an interpretation” (if it were not, both

120

Vattimo, Belief, 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 50-51. 122 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. by David Ferrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1991), III, 33. 121

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Vattimo and Nietzsche would be contradicting themselves).123 This nihilistic conclusion to the fabling of the world goes against Heidegger’s own, for the forgetting of Being continues under Nietzsche in his notion of the will to power by reducing Being to value, of the secure conditions needed for the subject to enhance their life in a world of becoming. Heidegger thinks we do not have to reject the idea of the apparent world, but reinterpret it.124 Heidegger reads Nietzsche as rejecting Platonism, but does this mean having to reject the opposite of the “real” world, too? Why could the sensible world not be reinterpreted, instead of rejected outright? Rejecting both realms remains within the logic of Platonism, creating a duality and accepting or rejecting both over against the nothing.125 What, though, is meant by “life-enhancing” and what does this have to do with the end of metaphysics and nihilism in Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger? Whereas Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician due to his “doctrines” of the will to power and the eternal recurrence, Vattimo thinks differently. This is not to say that Vattimo reads Nietzsche apart from the western tradition of thought, quite the contrary. Indeed, Vattimo is wary of seeing Nietzsche as having relevance primarily for aesthetics or literary studies. For example, Vattimo sees Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche as representative of the “French” school of interpreting his work which is more “aesthetistic” than Vattimo’s own political concerns.126 By contrast, Vattimo develops the ontological reading of Nietzsche found in Heidegger’s work, albeit along more overtly political lines. This is not to say that Vattimo does not draw upon aesthetics in his reading of both Nietzsche and Heidegger, but that the political (particularly the notion of “emancipation,” which will be discussed in due course) is never far away from the ontological. Heidegger thought that while Nietzsche heralded the end of metaphysics by pointing towards this eventuation, his thought still remained within it. The two principal places in Heidegger’s work where he discusses this topic are in his lectures on Nietzsche and in his essay, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’.” In his fourth volume on Nietzsche, Heidegger thought that in modern metaphysics, the question “what is the being?” had been transformed into 123

Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 12, 105; quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 267. 124 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. by David Ferrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1991), I, 209. 125 Ibid. 126 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 197-199.

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one about fundamental truth, therefore exchanging certitude about salvation and revelation for certitude based on self.127 This can be traced back to Descartes’ Cogito. While “cogito ergo sum” is the most famous and well-known version of Descartes’ foundational formula for certain knowledge, in some passages he uses “percipere” (to take possession of/represent/that which he can master).128 To be human involves being able to permanently represent things in an open field in the certitude towards which one is brought. If a res cogitans represents and takes possession of something, the other side of this duality, res extensa, is mathematical in nature and is related back to (and is the consequence of) the first principle of the certainty of representation implicit in the Cogito. In the history of metaphysics, this gives rise to machine technology.129 In Descartes’ work, “subject” now becomes proper noun for man, and everything else object; Being for him is representedness in secure representation.130 “Security” comes from the metaphysical need for certitude, which manifests itself in rational calculation and planning in the world of techno-science which is the culmination of metaphysics. Before this, though, certainty comes to be a condition through Kant’s transcendental development of the Cartesian cogito. In Descartes one has the “point of view” as being related both to “mastery” and “certainty.” With Kant, this becomes a “condition” in the transcendental sense. Kant, though, still held onto a noumenal, of the “thing-in-itself” that was unknowable. By contrast, inverting Plato,131 the start of metaphysics, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche as holding that there was nothing but becoming. Nevertheless, Heidegger also thought that Nietzsche posited a subject who had to live in this becoming. As such, the subject needed to engage with the flux of becoming as follows: “To be able to be as life, life needs the constant fixity of a ‘belief,’ but this ‘belief’ calls for holding something to be constant and fixed, taking something as ‘in being.’ Since life posits values, yet is at the same time concerned about its own securing of permanence, a valuation must belong to life in which it takes something as constant and fixed; that is, as in being that is, as true.”132

127

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. by David Ferrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1991), IV, 97. 128 Ibid.; René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 50. 129 Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV 116-117. 130 Ibid., 120. 131 Heidegger, Nietzsche, I 154. 132 Heidegger, Nietzsche, III 62-63.

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A “point of view” in the Cartesian sense, combined with the Kantian “condition,” becomes a “condition of life” in the sense of representing as a value. All life is becoming, but the becoming of a subject is the will to power. If the will wills its will, it posits values that it holds fast with the certainty characteristic of the history of metaphysics. In Nietzsche’s philosophy this is expressed in the “doctrine” of the “eternal recurrence.” As Nietzsche held that becoming is all that there is, this is, for Heidegger, the mere reversal of Plato's eternal forms. The eternal recurrence is putting one’s “stamp” of Being onto becoming,133 in order to fix the values that enable one to life a life as the Ubermensch.134 The reduction of Being to a value is, for Heidegger, the ultimate forgetting of Being and the culmination of metaphysics, which contrasts with the “French” reading of the eternal recurrence in which is not metaphysical at all but is, “A principle that differentiates [fait la différence] between the ontological candidates for return. A principle that announces, therefore, contrary to what its name indicates, neither the return of the identical, nor the return of all things.”135 For instance, Deleuze writes: “If eternal return is a wheel, then it must be endowed with a violent centrifugal movement which expels…everything which cannot pass the test.”136 Vattimo has struggled to deal with the eternal recurrence in his interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought. It figured more prominently in his earlier work on Nietzsche but it has been dropped in favour of concentrating on the announcement of nihilism through the death of God. Most representative of Vattimo’s early work on Nietzsche is Il soggetto e la maschera (1974). In this work, the inner life of man is in tension with an outer life in which “Socratic” ratio (reason) has been manifesting itself through history in the form of metaphysics, themes Vattimo borrows from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Vattimo sees the Dionysiac will as being restrained by Socratic rationality. Art is a creative free space outside of the laws of metaphysics and, as such, as archetypal of the will to power. Vattimo also takes from Heidegger his view of metaphysics as calculating, rationalising, and aiming at appropriation. The term Vattimo gives to metaphysics is “violence,” for it silences questioning by reducing debate back to unwavering first 133

Heidegger, Nietzsche, I 19. Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV 82. 135 Catherine Malabou, “The Eternal Return and the Phantom of Difference,” Parrhesia, 10 (2010), 22. 136 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 55. 134

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principles—a “Grund” or “arche.” The search for certainty is, ultimately Vattimo believes, to stave off fear of the unknown, of death, and of change. Using a Nietzschean term that Robert Valgenti admits Nietzsche never uses overly much,137 Vattimo sees metaphysics also as a history of “masking” its origins in human insecurity, with even “unmasking” itself being a further masking. With interest in Nietzsche’s genealogical “middle period” (from the second Untimely Meditation to The Gay Science),138 Vattimo thought the Nietzschean figure of the Overman would expose the symbolism and logic of fear behind the mask. The Overman would then make a emancipating decision for the eternal recurrence to be free for the multiplicity of images and ways of life opened up by not fearing temporality, reconciling inner and outer: “La decisione eternizzante come decisione liberatrice è la sola capace di creare un essere nuova, che non soffra piú come noi, e che sappia vivere la grande avventura della scienza e della tecnica fuori dagli schemi del dominio, i quali bloccano scienza e tecnica.”139 Influenced by Marxism, Vattimo thought this individual would not only be free from metaphysical-religious violence, but also liberal-capitalist domination, too. As he reflected later in his work Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger, e l’ermeneutica, “Il libro su Nietzsche è stato scritto a ridosso del “68,”140 and the mood of student protest and engagement with Marxism is marked. However, in the period of his writing about weak thought, Vattimo has said little about the eternal recurrence. One essay— “‘Verwindung,’ Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy”—mentions that the end of modernity involves the eternal recurrence whereby it reveals modernity as the epoch in which the “new” was the highest value.141 Vattimo does not develop this idea much in the essay, but one can relate it to themes explored in The End of Modernity and The Transparent Society, such as the “routinisation of the new” in Arnold Gehlen’s idea of post-histoire. Gehlen puts forward the view that developments (or, “progress”) in technology is now required in order for 137

Robert Valgenti, “Vattimo’s Nietzsche,” in Ashley Woodward (ed.), Interpreting Nietzsche (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 153. 138 Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction, trans. by N. Martin (London: Athlone Press, 2002), 87. 139 Gianni Vattimo, Il soggetto e la maschera: Nietzsche e il problema della liberazione (Milan: Fabbri-Bompiani, 1974), 347. 140 Gianni Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger, e l’ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1990), 21. 141 Gianni Vattimo, “‘Verwindung,’ Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy,” SubStance, 16(2) (1987), 9.

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the consumer-capitalist West to stand still. Moreover, progress becomes devalued through imputing to the penultimate the value of being the “ultimate,” “best,” or “perfect” “driving machine,” for example.142 The “eternally new” devalues the value of novelty, revealing modernity and its values for what they are, expressions of the will to power which—in Vattimo’s Heideggerian eyes—are metaphysical. In his essay “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” Heidegger states that the death of God in Nietzsche’s philosophy is reducing God the highest values posited by the will to power.143 “Value” for Heidegger means “perspective,” or “enhancement/preservation” conditions for life.144 Heidegger says that a value values inasmuch as it counts, by which it posits insofar as it aims. However, gradually “aim” has changed from “eidos” (idea) to “perceptio” (perception), and this setting forth (or “representing”) has impetus (nisus) which is a springing-forth.145 Heidegger sees Nietzsche identifying “Becoming” (and Being) with the “will to power,” with the former shaping itself “into centers of the will to power particularized in time.”146 The “will to power is revealed as that which posts that point-of-view,”147 so values are only expressions of this internal principle aiming for the preservation-enhancement of life. How are we now in a state of nihilism and living after the death of God, and what does this have to do with the will to power? Heidegger writes: “The doing away with that which is in itself, i.e., the killing of God, is accomplished in the making secure of a constant reserve by means of which man makes secure for himself material, bodily, psychic, and spiritual resources, and this for the sake of his own security, which will dominion over whatever is—as the potentially objective—in order to correspond to the Being of whatever is, to the will to power.”148 The key moment in the history of metaphysics is when Descartes changed the Aristotelian hypokeimenon into a self-conscious subjectum, yet retaining the metaphysical yearning for the absolute in the form of certainty. This threw everything over against the subject as an object. As a result, “certainty” is taken away from the supra-sensory and laid flat on 142

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 101-104. Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 66, 103-105. 144 Ibid., 72. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 74. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 107. 143

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the plain of immanence. Gradually, the subject does not represent objects, which are mutable, but something certain, which are the values which spring from within—the will to power—and are capable of being taken under command: “because the will can will only from out of its disposal over something steadily constant, truth is a necessary value precisely out of the essence of the will to power, for that will.”149 Rather than being content explaining our current state as one of nihilism, Heidegger sees Nietzsche as having attempted to push on through the devaluation of the highest values with an attempt for “new valuepositing,”150 particularly with regards to art, which enables the will to move beyond itself but from itself and for itself through expressing its value in the form of a creative appropriation in a secure representation of its will.151 The danger Heidegger sees is that the danger of the will securing objects through its artistic representation is that everything (the “earth”) will be taken up in this way through technology, so that “The world changes into object,”152 so that there is no other way to think Being than as value (subject or object of).153 Through seeking to secure everything, Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power remains within metaphysics whilst still heralding the philosophy of nihilism. How do “art” and “technology” result in metaphysical objectification and—ultimately—nihilism? More clues can be found elsewhere among Heidegger’s essays. In the essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger says that “Value is the objectification of needs as goals, wrought by a representing self-establishing within the world as picture.”154 Representing replaces the substantial objectivity of an object, and is instead a will, a mastery, a “making stand-over against, an objectifying that goes forward and master.”155 Heidegger makes the link between this change in the subject-object relationship wrought by Descartes and reaching its apex in Nietzsche, and technology: “In the planetary imperialism of technologically organised man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organised uniformity and there firmly establish itself.”156 In an essay entitled “The Will to Power as Art,” one which Vattimo states as being 149

Ibid., 85. Ibid., 95. 151 Ibid., 85-86. 152 Ibid., 100. 153 Ibid., 104. 154 Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 142. 155 Ibid., 150. 156 Ibid., 152. 150

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key to his move towards his later thought,157 he writes the following: “In the end of metaphysics as technology, the nexus between metaphysics, domination and will, which had hitherto remained hidden, becomes explicit. The system of total concatenation of causes and effects, prefigured by metaphysics in its ‘vision’ of the world and actualized by technology, is the expression of a will to dominate. Hence the Nietzschean will to power is simply the most coherent culmination of the history of Western metaphysics.”158 Willing, valuing and representing: these activities of the subject culminate in the Ge-Stell, in the end of metaphysics in the modern world of technology. This is Vattimo’s understanding of Heidegger’s interpretation of the relationship between the will to power, technology and the culmination of metaphysics. It was for this reason chiefly that Heidegger regarded Nietzsche as a metaphysician and why he took a dim view of technology as “the unfolding of the will to power as technocracy.”159 In the essay, “Dialectics and Difference,” Vattimo writes that, “The technical world described as Ge-Stell is the world of planned production, served by knowledge as representation, and in which man is repeatedly interpellated in an ordering process imposing on him a continuous pursuit of things to serve as reserves of resources.”160 Before we look at what is meant by “representation” in Vattimo’s thought contrasted with Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s use of the word “representation,” and how this links to the will to power and Vattimo’s philosophy more broadly, it is important to look at the meaning of the term “Ge-Stell.” In his reading of Heidegger, Vattimo follows him in seeing metaphysics reaching its point of culmination in modern technology. Before looking at Vattimo’s specifically nihilistic reading of Heidegger on technology, it is necessary to outline Heidegger’s thoughts on the issue. In “The Question Concerning Technology” and Identity and Difference, Heidegger states that the essence of technology is not something technological: it is not merely instrumental, but also a way of revealing. The idea of “revealing” comes from Heidegger’s phenomenological rejection of Kant divorcing how things appear to us from how they really are; Heidegger thought they are connected, and the appearance of something in our consciousness is how it is revealed to us, how it is brought into unconcealment. Every unconcealment also conceals, however, as our knowledge of beings is always fragmentary; there is 157

Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 4. Ibid., 86. 159 Ibid., 87. 160 Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 169. 158

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always more to the essence of a thing than is revealed to us. Technology’s role in unconcealment for Heidegger is evident in the interest he pays to the ancient Greek etymology of techné, which emphasises technology’s role in “opening up” and “revealing.” Techné is the form of knowledge appropriate to poeisis, a Greek term for a form of (poetic) activity which is a bringing-forth from unconcealment, whether an artisan brings-forth a chalice which was previously a potential chalice, or whether blossom brings itself into bloom. Primitive technology allowed nature to reveal itself “poetically,” such as a farmer watching crops grow and harvesting them or a windmill converting the energy generated by the wind when it blew. Industrial technology, on the other hand, “challenges” nature by placing an unreasonable demand on it, forcing it to produce what is required of it by humans. For example, with man-made hydroelectricity dams the mode of revealing is a “challenging forth,” the way in which the river reveals itself is no longer the same. Rather than the Rhine appearing poetically as water flowing as a feature of a larger landscape, modern technology has made it become an energy resource. Equally, tourism cannot see the Rhine as an object of nature, but rather merely as a source of income. All nature is challenged in this way. Humans are also challenged, for they are reduced to the level of objects used for production. For example, human resources departments can be viewed as regarding humans as resources for production. A human waiting to go to work is, in this industrial society, like an aeroplane on a runway, having little value being brought-forth themselves, but only for something else; essentially both are “standing reserve,” valuable only when employed and at the mercy of a system which uses and manipulates them as and when required. The term for this type of revealing which is a challenging on a global scale is Ge-Stell (enframing). Ge-Stell is the culmination of metaphysics because it involves the total planning of everything in perfectly ordered relationships of cause and effect, all capable of unlimited manipulation. What is missing from this recounting of Heidegger’s position on the Ge-Stell is the notion of “representation.” This is due to the particular interpretation Vattimo has made of Heidegger’s thought by linking it to information and communications technology, which shall be discussed momentarily. Living after Heidegger, Vattimo interprets the Ge-Stell in information technological terms: “It is not in the world of machines and engines that humanity and being can shed the mantles of subject and object, but in the world of generalized communication. Here the entity dissolves in the

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images distributed by the information media.”161 In the play of images and messages attained through media such as television, radio and the internet, the difference between subject and object dissolves. For instance, one may doubt that someone’s online profile is “real.” Moreover, how could one ever verify its claim to representing reality? What is being hinted at in Vattimo’s talk of the “mantles of subject and object” being “shed” is what is referred to by both Vattimo and Heidegger as the “Ereignis,” or the “event of appropriation. The particular passage in Heidegger’s work that appeals to Vattimo is one from Identity and Difference: “The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them.”162 The “prelude” to the Ereignis is the Ge-Stell.163 In the Ereignis which results from Ge-Stell, metaphysical designations such as “subject” and “object” disappear as everything is challenged-forth. In the Enlightenment era, the rational Cartesian “thinking thing” is not only the subject, but also the foundation of knowledge. This anthropocentrism continued in different ways through the construction of unilinear narratives surrounding progress and science. The Ge-Stell challenges the distinction between humans and Being as they are all reduced to causal determined standing-reserve, with this universal manipulation revealed in the Ereignis, what Vattimo, following Heidegger in Identity and Difference,164 calls the “event of appropriation.” In the Ereignis, humanity and Being (traditionally considered as that which grounds the rule of reason) lose their metaphysical properties of subject and object. As a result, Being is shown not as a foundation or a thing, but as an “exchange value”: as “language and...the tradition constituted by the transmission and interpretation of messages.”165 What Vattimo seems to neglect at first sight, on this view, is that according to modern metaphysics a picture is a representation which is represented by a subject. However, if the Ereignis strips both subject and object of their metaphysical qualities, then how can there be “pictures” left? Indeed, in The Transparent Society, Vattimo states that this is why Heidegger thought that we are now living in the age of the world image 161

Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1992), 116-117. 162 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (London and New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 37. 163 Ibid., 36. 164 Ibid., 38. 165 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 26.

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created by science, not the world view of sovereign human beings.166 Here it is worth acknowledging that Vattimo uses the update he consciously made of Heidegger’s Ge-Stell to make a link between this notion and the essay “The Age of the World Picture.” Vattimo goes on to say: “The images of the world we receive from the media and the human sciences, albeit on different levels, are not simply different interpretations of a ‘reality’ that is ‘given’ regardless, but rather constitute the very objectivity of the world.”167 According to Heidegger in the essay “The Age of the World Picture,” the world picture “does not mean a ‘picture of the world’ but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man.”168 The links to Ge-Stell are clear, even if Heidegger’s notion of the world picture seems to place more emphasis on the agency of the human being as the “representing” and “setting” subject. The reduction of the world to a world picture gives rise to a shadow: “Everyday opinion sees in the shadow only the lack of light…In truth…the shadow is the manifest, though impenetrable, testimony to the concealed emitting of light. In keeping with this concept of shadow, we experience the incalculable as that which, withdrawn from representation, is nevertheless manifest in whatever is, pointing to Being, which remains concealed.”169 “The polemical thrust of Heidegger’s Weltbild essay,” says Karyn Ball in her essay on the metaphor of “shadow” in Heidegger’s essay, “is to emphasize the unthought that is simultaneously produced and obscured by the growing dominance of a mathematical orientation geared toward calculation.”170 Vogt thinks that Vattimo’s twist on the notion of the world picture is to hold that the shadow “has to be grasped as [the] immanent and nihilistic consequence in form of a proliferation of conflicting images of the world” given by communications technology, the apex of technology and therefore of metaphysics.171 The irreducible plurality of images and messages enabled through technology (especially the internet) in the society of mass communication 166

Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 15-16. Ibid., 24-25. 168 Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 129-130. 169 Ibid., 154. 170 Karyn Ball, “Paranoia in the Age of the World Picture,” Cultural Critique, 61 (2005), 121-122. 171 Erik M. Vogt, “Postmodernity as the Ontological Sense of Technology,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds), Between Nihilism and Politics (Albany: SUNY, 2010), 228. 167

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weakens the principle of reality—there is no longer a world picture and merely a shadow of the unthought, but “a Babel of conflicting images.”172 The result of the first flashing up of Ereignis in the Ge-Stell through the dissolution of reality in a play of images is the culmination of metaphysics. “Culmination” is to be understood both in the sense of the apex and dissolution of metaphysics. Information and communications technology, which challenges not only the world and humanity, but also mechanical machines themselves, allows for an unprecedented level of calculability and manipulation, thereby fulfilling the goal of metaphysics. Nevertheless, as Vattimo has shown in his understanding of the Heideggerian notion of Weltbild, reality dissolves in a play of images; from a Heideggerian view, this is the end of metaphysics and it is nihilism, the reduction of Being to value. “It is modern science,” writes Vattimo in Beyond Interpretation, “heir and completion of metaphysics, that turns the world into a place where there are no longer facts, only interpretations.”173 There are no “facts” left, only a play of interpretations for there is not a real world, nor an apparent one, but only images and traces of being as language inherited through tradition. That the world is a multiplicity of conflicting images is a postmodern and Nietzschean interpretation of Heidegger’s thought, one that reads his essay in a very particular way. It is far from obvious that Heidegger would have agreed with Vattimo’s interpretation. While this does not matter to Vattimo, especially with his notion of Verwindung, it is important to his readers, not least due to the implications of Vattimo’s radical immanentism for issues pertaining to religion and ethics.

7. Conclusion Having described and explained some of the fundamental aspects of weak thought, it is now time to move onto his return to religion. The first section outlines his return to religion and some of the principal issues which come out of it. Given Vattimo’s hermeneutical nihilism, it is surprising that he returned to religion, but it is just this nihilism and the end of modernity that allows for different interpretations to be released, including religious interpretations. After having looked at Vattimo’s return to religion, Section Two will look at the ethics he tries to derive from religion. Finally, in Section Three a broader range of issues will be analysed in relation to Vattimo’s understanding of the history of ideas. For 172 173

Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 26. Ibid., 26.

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the reader unfamiliar with the reasons behind Vattimo’s return to religion and/or the type of Christianity to which he returned, the first essay of Section One serves as an introduction to this development in Vattimo’s thought.

SECTION I: VATTIMO’S RETURN TO RELIGION

CHAPTER ONE GOD THE FATHER IN VATTIMO’S INTERPRETATION OF CHRISTIANITY1

Abstract Gianni Vattimo’s return to religion would appear to show at best ambivalence to the notion of God the Father, at worst a contradiction in his thought. Vattimo seems to care not whether God is father or mother, yet he talks of a ‘paternal’ feeling of dependence on God. Furthermore, Vattimo associates God the Father with the God of literalism, the Old Testament, and ‘natural religion,’ all of which in his eyes are associated with metaphysical violence. However, not only does Vattimo still draw upon Trinitarian formulae, but also some form of Trinity is needed in his thought. To prevent Vattimo’s Trinity from degenerating into a kind of supersessionism it is important to draw upon resources both from Vattimo’s own thought and a reading of Heidegger on Vattimian lines in seeing the Father as a theological transcription of the Heideggerian notion of the ‘Shepherd of Being,’ of the interpretative act of gathering ‘lost’ interpretations to create a situation in which there is even greater hermeneutical plurality.

1. A return “None of us in our western culture,” writes Vattimo, “begins from zero with the question of religious faith.”2 Vattimo’s own personal return, then, “is precisely the return of a thematic…that has engaged me in the past.”3 What this “thematic” is and means can be inferred from Vattimo’s own intellectual journey. “Vattimo’s intellectual journey traces a circle,” writes 1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “God the Father in Vattimo’s Interpretation of Christianity,” Heythrop Journal, 54(5) (2013), 891-903. 2 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by D. Webb and L. D’Isanto (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 21. 3 Ibid.

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Frederiek Depoortere, “starting from religion, the fervent Catholicism of his youth, he moved to politics and philosophy…[which] resulted in disillusion which was reflected upon philosophically.”4 This philosophical reflection “eventually resulted in his return to religion.”5 Religion entered into Vattimo’s life through education; two sisters who lived near the boy Vattimo suggested he went to the oratory.6 At first Vattimo went for friendship and games, but he got drawn into Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action), the community life, and Mass. Vattimo saw his religion as “interwoven with [his] philosophical and political commitment,” so that when he “lost contact with Italian politics, boom, it [his faith] was all over.”7 When Vattimo won the Humboldt Fellowship in his mid-twenties, he went to study in Germany, lost regular contact with Italian politics, and thus his faith dwindled, too. This implies how much his faith had in fact been attributable to cultural factors. Nevertheless, the thematic of this early faith led Vattimo to Nietzsche and Heidegger. “I am aware,” Vattimo writes, “that I have a preference for Nietzsche and Heidegger… [which] seems to be above all in harmony with a specifically Christian religious substratum that has remained a living part of me.”8 Therefore, Vattimo’s own “return” to religion is more of a recovery. What was it that triggered Vattimo’s recovery of religion, of his realisation that the thematic of religion, the trace of a faith in his life, had influenced him in the way that it had? Contingent factors within his own life, mostly to do with his advancing years, have played their part in his recovery of religion. Vattimo admits that his return “is related to the experience of death—of people dear to me.”9 Related to this point is that “the question of religion,” Vattimo writes, poses itself “at a certain time of life [and] has to do with the physiology of maturity and of getting old.”10 Additionally, Vattimo mentions both personal and social disillusionment where “projects…to which I had been deeply committed were shattered in a wholly contingent way.”11 Here Vattimo is alluding, for instance, to the 4

Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Gianni Vattimo and Piergiorgio Paterlini, Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, trans. by W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 42. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 Vattimo, Belief, 33. 9 Ibid., 22. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Ibid., 24.

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Chapter One

political causes he had been involved in; during his younger adult life he had been committed to varying forms of Communism. Vattimo also sees society as being more interested in religion due to political reasons. The political reasons “may be traced back to the decisive role played by Pope Wojtyla in the erosion and dissolution of the east European communist regimes.”12 The influence and relevance of the pope is also matched, Vattimo thinks, in the “increasing political importance of Islamic religious hierarchies.”13 A further reason, outlined in his book Belief, why Vattimo returned to religion is the end of modernity, which had been the topic of a significant book of his of the same name in the 1980s. With the end of modernity occurs the end of objective truth, unilinear history, and the need to find a sure foundation for epistemology. After the World Wars, the rise of the society of mass communication, and increased flow of people around the world, Vattimo thinks the notion of a “unilinear” history, such as of everincreasing “progress,” has been dissolved. Coinciding with the end of modernity is the event of nihilism, symbolised by Nietzsche’s death of God which Vattimo reads as the death of the highest values such as “truth” and “the new” constitutive of modernity.14 With the dissolution of the highest values, all that is left is a play of interpretations. This is why Vattimo sees hermeneutics as the only philosophy for late-modernity. Ironically, the death of God is the result of science, which is the search for truth, for the technological advancements which are the fruit of science made obsolete the need for sure foundations. It was the rationalising worldview associated with science that had pushed religion to the margins during modernity. This is why Vattimo states that the end of modernity constitutes “a radical disenchantment with the idea of disenchantment itself; or, in other words, that demythification has finally turned against itself.”15 With the death of God and of the highest values there is the demise of belief in, and need for, objective knowledge; there is a general recognition that, to use a Nietzschean expression, the world has been “fabled” and fully secularised. Secularisation leaves a space in which beliefs, values and traditions that were marginalised during the reign of scientific rationalism, such as religion, can re-emerge. These beliefs cannot impose themselves on the public space, but can be held privately 12

Ibid., 26; Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by L. D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 84. 13 Vattimo, Belief, 26. 14 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by J. Snyder (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1988). 15 Vattimo, Belief, 29.

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without feeling that they have been discredited by rationalism. In other words, the death of God and secularisation has cleared the path for a return to religion.

2. Secularisation, kenosis, and caritas The death of God and the end of modernity may have dissolved the strong reasons for atheism, but they do not leave religious claims untouched. The principal reason for this is that the very force which has resulted in the dissolution of the notion of truth is the Christian message: secularisation. This sounds paradoxical, for it is usual to hold that secularisation is a departure from Christianity, but this counter-intuitive position is an ingenious move of Vattimo’s. As the death of God is the self-consumption of the notion and value of truth, Vattimo can make this argument. Vattimo identifies Truth as being associated with the history of metaphysics and what Heidegger referred to as the forgetting of Being, the reduction of Being to presence (“beings”). Metaphysics is violent in that it appropriates to itself, closes down debate, and silences. Vattimo identifies the violence of metaphysics with the violence of René Girard’s “natural sacred.” Indeed, he saw Girard as “completing” Heidegger,16 the latter’s notion of metaphysics as a history of the weakening of Being elsewhere referred to by Vattimo as a “transcription” of Girard’s understanding of the incarnation of God.17 For Girard, violence is an anthropological fact due to mimesis—it is a fact about human nature that humans want what the other has, causing rivalries that develop over time which threaten to destroy society. Mimetic violence is directed towards a “scapegoat” in order to restore equilibrium to society. Over time this becomes ritualised and forms the basis and key function of “natural religions” with the natural sacred as that which underpins the violence directed towards the scapegoat, the “victim-based mechanism.” The Old and New Testaments are meant to reveal this victim-based mechanism, Jesus’ message of love performing this function, leading to a long and difficult education of mankind on this anthropological fact. Vattimo, while highly impressed with Girard’s premises, is not content with his conclusion that the most that can be drawn from who Jesus was and what he said is an anthropological fact, a piece of knowledge. Instead, 16

Gianni Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 78. 17 Vattimo, Belief, 36.

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Vattimo thinks that Girard’s understanding of the revealing role of Jesus Christ can be developed into a theory of secularisation. In effect, this historical process is a de-sacralisation. As Vattimo has made an identification in his mind between the violence of metaphysics along Heideggerian lines and the violence directed against the scapegoat in Girard’s anthropology, secularisation is removing aspects of the violent natural sacred in strong, metaphysical claims. This weakening of the sacral in history is the kenosis of God, a notion in which Vattimo puts a lot of store. Vattimo references Philippians 2:7 once, yet his understanding of kenosis is broad. Although for Vattimo kenosis is the incarnation, the latter concept refers to an “event” rather than a presence. “Event” for Vattimo is also a Heideggerian technical term. At the centre of Heidegger’s thought is the notion of ontological difference between Being and beings. Metaphysics is the history of Being and is one of forgetfulness. The forgetting of Being reduces it to a presence, a fixed foundation to which all things are reduced. As such, metaphysics is “violent,” appropriating everything to the foundation. This propensity to create foundations is manifested in different ways in the history of thought, from Platonic essences to the Kantian a priori. Heidegger’s notion of the human being as Dasein is as something essentially “in-theworld.” This is meant to undermine the Kantian view of the human, of a universal rationality, in favour of seeing the human as essentially an historical, interpreting being. In Heidegger’s later work, he becomes less interested in Dasein as the home of Being, instead seeing Being as not something owned by the subject. Rather, Being is a horizon in which things appear, “the aperture within which alone man and the world, subject and object, can enter into relationship.”18 For the later Heidegger, Being is a series of irruptions, or “events.” There is a Selbst (“same”) which “sends,” or “destines” (Geschick) these events, although it is wrong to think of the “Selbst” as a being, for this would be to repeat metaphysics. Showing the influence of both Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vattimo thinks that Being is nothing other than language known through events and traces. The way Being appears to us is through a series of announcements (events) which colour our interpretation of the traces of Being from previous epochs (sendings of Being). The traces of Being are transmitted through linguistic traditions into which we are, as Dasein, always already thrown. Being is, therefore, a linguistic event, a tradition. Increasingly, Vattimo is emphasising the importance of the Bible as a 18 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, trans. by W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 6.

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trace, as a tradition without which he would not be able to exist, so much have the themes of the Bible shaped his life. When it comes to postmetaphysical thinking, a Heideggerian phrase of relevance is “Denken ist Andenken,”19 that thinking is (pious) remembering. There are linguistic traditions which constitute the limits of thought, and whilst one cannot escape them, one can weaken them by “twisting” them. Verwindung is a convalescence which is also a resignation and an alteration (or “twisting”). Weak thought, Vattimo’s signature philosophical style, is a commitment to overcome the violence of metaphysics not by a dialectical overcoming, for this would be to repeat modernity and its desire for the new and for its foundationalism, but through twisting the traces of Being one has inherited by adding further contingency and provisionality. If Being is an event, and Being is linguistic, and the incarnation is an event, then kenosis is a linguistic event. The message both of what Jesus said “or (better) the interpretation which he himself is,”20 is one of “the friendliness of God towards his creatures.”21 The message of friendliness constitutes also the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, that of “you heard it was said…but I tell you…” (the “Antitheses” in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew) and “I no longer call you servants but friends” (John 15:15).22 “The guiding thread of Jesus’ interpretation of the Old Testament,” writes Vattimo, “is the new and more profound relation of charity established between God and humanity, and consequently between human beings themselves.”23 According to Girard’s thesis which Vattimo takes over and modifies, it is the Judaeo-Christian tradition that seeks to reveal the violence of the natural sacred through his message of God’s love for, and friendship with, the world. The secularising thrust of Christianity is thus a message, a message of weakening. What is the formal content of this kenotic message? For Vattimo, it is Jesus’ message of love, of caritas, that is, to love God and to love one’s neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22). Caritas is the limit of secularisation, the only aspect of the Christian message which cannot be secularised and the yardstick by which any interpretation should be measured.

19

Vattimo, After Christianity, 22. Vattimo, Belief, 64. 21 Ibid., 95. 22 See Vattimo, Belief, 49 for both of these quotations. 23 Ibid. 20

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3. Joachim of Fiore’s Trinitarian view of history and Scripture Secularisation as a weakening of strong structures (the transmission of the kenotic message) is carried on by the “Spirit,” schematised by Vattimo through the Trinitarian historicism of Joachim of Fiore. According to Vattimo’s reading of Joachim, the ages of the Father (Old Testament) and the Son (New Testament and rise of the Church) are surpassed by the age of the Spirit. In the latter, “the ‘spiritual’ sense of the scriptures is increasingly in evidence, with charity taking the place of discipline.”24 Vattimo does not follow Joachim’s ideas strictly, but uses his conception of history as a broad framework against which to position his own understanding of kenosis. Within this framework Vattimo also places Schleiermacher’s hope for everyone to be the author of their own Bible, and Novalis’ aesthetic and anti-disciplinarian conception of Christianity. Vattimo sees the link he has found between the religious tradition of the West and hermeneutics as beneficial for many reasons, such as encouraging thinking about the centrality of interpretation, liberating from myth of objectivity, and the “spiritual” reading of Scripture in this broadly Joachimist framework providing the opportunity for believers to overcome ecclesiastical discipline. The first corollary, then, for the notion of God the Father is that this way of referring to God is associated by Vattimo, like Joachim, with “literalism” as an approach to Scripture, and Vattimo associates “literalism” with being “disciplinarian” and therefore “violence.” If literalism is to be avoided, then the Father did not send a Son in terms of a literal Son. “In the end,” writes Vattimo: “what is Christianity? Is it the belief that God is one in three persons? Take the credo in the mass: If I stopped at each proposition from the confession, there is not even one article I could literally believe. For instance, Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the father. Why the right? Why the father and not the mother? There are so many literalisms that are passing away.”25 Not only does God the Father represent outmoded literalism, but also the fatherhood of God would appear at first sight to be just one more “literalism” to be secularised for Vattimo.

24

Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. by D. Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 49. 25 Gianni Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 99.

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4. Paternal dependence Given that the notion of God as “Father” is a literalism, as well as the fatherhood of God, Vattimo asks if he can still call God “Father,” and questions whether the Lord’s Prayer has any meaning for him. After careful consideration, he states that these things still have purchase for him, but only because of his “own biography,” that he was brought up with these traditions.26 Concerning the phrase “God the Father,” Vattimo’s argument is a little troubling here, for he alludes to Schleiermacher’s notion of a “feeling of dependence” justifying the term “Father.” Metaphysically, of course, Vattimo could not justify God as a Father insofar as the term refers to a being with a male gender; to insist upon it would be a contradiction in his thought for it would be to understand Being as a presence rather than as an event. Understanding Being in the latter sense, though, does lead to Vattimo acknowledging that he thinks of God in terms of paternal dependence. This is the “kernel” that, in Vattimo’s view, “cannot be an object of reduction or demythification.”27 What is beyond reduction: caritas, or dependence? Vattimo ties himself in knots here, trying to ground this feeling on his awareness that weak ontology is dependent on “an initiative that is not mine,” begun long ago.28 When it comes to dependence, one has no good reason to choose the language of “father” over “mother” when referring to God, but, one can see Vattimo as following Heidegger in distinguishing between “reason” and “thought.” Rationally, there are facts, not interpretations, reason being metaphysical in character, appropriating the other to itself. Clearly “reason” characterised in this way does not have a role in Vattimo’s philosophy. “Thought,” on the other hand, is the way in which tradition presents itself to us as the horizon for what is conceivable. “Paternal” for Vattimo constitutes not only an adjective of God within the tradition of Christianity, but also through its connotations his reliance upon the biblical tradition more generally. Although Vattimo “still believe[s] in the mystery of creation,”29 it is almost certain that Vattimo does not mean by this faith in a Prime Mover, or even a finite beginning to the world inaugurated from eternity by a biblical God. In later works Vattimo makes it clear that it is the biblical tradition upon which he is dependent, taking his work down a more clearly linguistic line he begins to explore in more

26

Vattimo, Belief, 77-78. Ibid., 78. 28 Ibid. 29 Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” 99. 27

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detail in After Christianity, even though he revisits “dependence” in particular in The Future of Religion.30

5. Trinitarian supersessionism In Chapter Four of After Christianity, Vattimo constructs another argument for the relationship between the incarnation, hermeneutics and the history of salvation by focusing on the relationship between the history of salvation and the history of interpretation. Although he is reluctant to identify these two histories completely, regarding one as merely another name for the other, he is aware that they are very closely linked. Starting with the incarnation, Vattimo reflects on the different ways in which “interpretation” and “salvation” are “joint” in the Christian tradition.31 At one level there is the “antithetical” nature of Jesus’ sayings: “You heard it was said…, but I say…” Although these are called “Antitheses” (Matthew Ch. 5), it is more to do with fulfilling the law through weakening, such as not loving only one’s neighbour, but also one’s enemy. Beyond the hermeneutical quality of Jesus’ sayings, that is, his self-conscious interpretation of the Old Testament which, historically, was not unusual at all (rabbinical interpretation was common at the time, such as Hillel and Shammai), Vattimo argues that “the event of salvation (Jesus’ coming) is itself, deep down, a hermeneutical occurrence.”32 However, Jesus can be claimed to be hermeneutical “only to a point.” Jesus, as the Logos, is not only the “living interpretation” of the Scriptures, but also its fulfilment. With this fulfilment goes a definitiveness, yet also there awaits a further fulfilment. Here Vattimo gets closer to a reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity, for he draws upon the notion of the Paraclete. Indeed, “The Trinity is a hermeneutical structure par excellence, for the Son is the Logos of the Father and the Spirit is their relation, the hypostatising of their love-understanding.”33 Reimagining traditional Christian doctrines in this way is interesting, but not without difficulties. For a start, the language of “hypostatising” gets uncomfortably close to metaphysics, for the Church Fathers often conceived of the persons of the Trinity in terms of hypostases. Secondly, Vattimo is keener on the Son and Spirit than the Father. In theological 30

Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 55-81, 77. 31 Vattimo, After Christianity, 59. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 60.

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terms, is Vattimo’s Trinity supersessionist in its economy? Is the Father to be identified with the “natural sacred” which is first broken down by the Son, that is, the weakening of sacral claims in the offer of friendship over servitude, to be spread by the Spirit as secularisation ever more clearly becoming a reality in modernity? There is some evidence in Vattimo’s writings that he is supersessionist. Reading Vattimo this way, one can point to his use of Joachim of Fiore. The Old Testament is the age of the “Father” in Joachim’s writings, and this is associated with “literalism” and all its attendant violence. Caputo situates Joachim of Fiore within a tradition that runs from him through Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach down to the death of God thinkers and—he thinks—perhaps Vattimo himself, of plotting “the transition from transcendence to immanence, from alienation and estrangement to homecoming, from God as a distant and severe Father to God first as Son and sibling and then as the spirit of love.”34 Although David Newheiser has shown how Vattimo misinterprets Joachim’s Trinitarian schema,35 it is a misinterpretation that does leave itself open for the accusation of supersessionism. Frederiek Depoortere puts it as follows: “Vattimo is magnifying the discontinuity between the Old and the New Testaments. The God of the Old Testament is then characterized by him as transcendent, wholly other, Father, severe, violent while the key terms of the New Testament are incarnation, kenosis, secularization, Spirit and love.”36 Depoortere brings up the possibility that Vattimo is anti-Semitic, although he doubts this is his intention, citing Vattimo denying as much. Similarly, John D. Caputo mentions that the “bad guy” in the aforementioned tradition of supersessionism “is inevitably Judaism.”37 Even though Vattimo is not anti-Semitic, there are problems insofar as he would seem to suggest that Judaism has been superseded by Christianity. In Vattimo’s defence, he readily admits that “I have great difficulty understanding” Joachim of Fiore’s teachings.38 Nevertheless, supersessionism goes back further than Joachim of Fiore, and some commentators, such as Anthony C. Sciglitano, see in Vattimo’s interpretation

34

John D. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God, 7980. 35 David Newheiser, “Conceiving Transformation without Triumphalism: Joachim of Fiore Against Gianni Vattimo,” Heythrop Journal, 52 (2011), 1-13. 36 Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 21. 37 Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” 80. 38 Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” 100.

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of Christianity “a form of Marcionism.”39 Marcion of Pontus was an early Christian leader in Rome, commanding a large following in the middle of the second century CE. Taking Scripture literally, Marcion thought the God of the Old Testament created the physical world, had a covenant with the descendants of Abraham, and pointed forward to a saviour figure, the Messiah. However, as Stuart G. Hall explains: “for Marcion such a God cannot be the God and Father of Jesus Christ, who is absolutely good. Jesus says that a good tree cannot produce evil fruit (Luke 6:43-44), and that people are not to judge, but to be merciful as their father is merciful (Luke 6:36).”40 According to Marcion, not the Creator of the Old Testament, but the Unknown God, sent Christ out of pity for a creation that was not his own in an extraordinary act of love. In Irenaeus’ summary of Marcion’s theology, the latter thought the Creator is “the author of evils, a lover of war, inconsistent in judgement, and contrary to himself.”41 The notion of the Creator being an “author of evils” is a subjective judgement and somewhat ambiguous. However, when it comes to the Creator proscribing murder in the Decalogue, then wiping out Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as the apparent lack of consistency over his commands to Abraham, then Marcion’s system has, Hall says, “strong pathetic appeal” to allow one to resolve “the undoubted moral, literary and historical difficulties of the Old Testament.”42 Vattimo might find Marcion’s exegesis flat-footed in its literal approach to Scripture, as, for Vattimo, “The language of God as father is so obviously an allegorical language.”43 Marcion’s literalism would not have the same appeal for Vattimo as Joachim’s spiritual interpretation of Scripture, regardless of how well or badly Vattimo understands his thought. Moreover, Marcion’s exegesis does not sit well with Vattimo’s program of emancipation through weakening of strong structures, as salvation for Marcion involved escaping our embodied existence through a quasi-Platonic notion of redemption through correct

39 Anthony C. Sciglitano, Jr., “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity,” Modern Theology, 23(4) (2007), 546. 40 Stuart G. Hall, Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church (London: SPCK, 1991), 37. 41 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.25.1, in J. Stevenson (ed.), A New Eusebius (London: SPCK, 1987), 92. 42 Stuart G. Hall, Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church, 38. 43 Gianni Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God, 42.

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knowledge of Marcion’s system.44 The whole idea of a literal God beyond God (and a world beyond a world) would not appeal to Vattimo given the frequent use he makes of Nietzsche’s story from Twilight of the Idols of “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth.”45 Therefore, any possible supersessionism in Vattimo’s thought would be nearer to a particular reading of Joachim of Fiore than to the theology of Marcion. Concerning supersessionism more generally, why, Vattimo may well ask, should his notion of Christianity be held up against dogmatic lists of what is or is not permissible in terms of interpreting doctrine? According to his own notion of weak thought, Vattimo would have a case here, for weak thought is anti-authoritarian and there is not a set of criteria by which Vattimo can be objectively judged. Nevertheless, one can at least pose the question whether Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity may one day be surpassed. If the Law as legalism can be superseded by caritas, may caritas one day be surpassed by another compelling formal inspiration? The latter term is important, for if we are entering the “Age of the Spirit” (or “Age of Interpretation”) may not the Spirit take over from the Son? If the Spirit takes over from the Son, then how can the kenotic action of the Son (the call to be friends, in particular) be used as a standard for the spiritualisation of Scripture? If the latter constitutes the opening-up to interpretations, Vattimo does not want a relativism in which “anything goes”; there are limits to interpretation, not least to prevent hermeneutics from becoming a meta-theory of interpretation (and therefore metaphysical insofar as hermeneutics would be seen as a theory of reality: there are no facts, only interpretations). Vattimo’s primary concern is showing how closely salvation is linked to the history of interpretation, all the while trying to secure the curiously, and typically, theological premise of the uniqueness and definitiveness of Jesus Christ: “It is true that the announcement of salvation is given once and for all—in Jesus and the prophets—but it is equally true that, having given itself, it needs interpretations that receive it, actualise it, and enrich it.”46 In other words, the Son is the message of its relationship between itself and the prophets, as fulfilment, as well as itself and humans—the message of kenotic caritas, that is, of friendship, of weakening—which requires further interpretations to realise itself through secularisation, and it is the Spirit that enables this to occur. The Spirit is that of Pentecost, of many voices carrying the message. Salvation is a hermeneutical interface between the 44

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.25.2, in J. Stevenson (ed.), A New Eusebius, 96. Vattimo, Belief, 29. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The AntiChrist, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 50-51. 46 Vattimo, After Christianity, 60. 45

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tradition which has as its kernel the kenotic message, and the creative interpretations of individuals of successive generations who heed its message of spiritualisation as secularisation, as “de-sacralisation.” Vattimo is keen to stress it is not merely the “biological fact” of new generations interpreting the kenotic message, but that this message sets off in a direction, and that is of secularisation: “Jesus’ incarnation (the kenosis, the self-lowering of God), as an event both salvific and hermeneutical, is already indeed an archetypical occurrence of secularisation.”47 For the spiritualisation of Scripture (for instance) to function in the way Vattimo wants, the Son and the Spirit need to work together, the former acting as a check on the latter. The kenosis of God in Jesus Christ (the Son) inaugurates secularisation which culminates in the secularisation characteristic of modernity, that is, in the Age of Interpretation which is also identified by Vattimo with Joachim’s Age of the Spirit. As has been mentioned, Vattimo even draws upon Trinitarian formulations.48 How the Son and Spirit work together is intelligible in Vattimo’s own philosophy as already described, but it is not clear how the Father enters the picture except as a horizon left behind as the spectre of literalism, and this is not really a Trinity at all. Vattimo needs to work harder to make sense of the linguistic heritage, the Wirkungsgeschichte (“effective history,” a phrase from Gadamer), to have careful respect for it yet all the while weakening its strength. Given this insight, it is necessary to re-evaluate how the notion of the Father can relate to the Son and the Spirit without regressing into a crude, metaphysical literalism while avoiding the vague and perhaps contradictory feeling of “paternal dependence” as the only way in which Vattimo understands the “Father.”

6. Dialectical Theology Dialectical Theology is a possible way to conceive of the links between the Father, Son and Spirit in Vattimo’s theology. On the surface of things, it has at least one thing in common with Vattimo’s approach, namely that it contains something approximating ontological difference in the refusal of theologians such as Karl Barth to identify God with a “being” in the straightforwardly metaphysical sense.49 However, dialectical theologians draw different conclusions from Vattimo. Secularisation for dialectical 47

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 60. 49 Timothy Stanley, Protestant Metaphysics After Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger (London: SCM Press, 2010), 155. 48

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theologians serves to highlight the transcendence of the God of Faith compared to humans; the human God is a temporally-bound construction that falls prey to the criticisms of thinkers such as Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Vattimo does not have much of a reply to Dialectical Theology. The most he does is to view this transcendent God as a continuation of “an absolute, threatening, bizarre, and ‘naturalistic’ image of the divine.”50 This response works if one takes transcendence, and the attributes that go with it, as caught up with metaphysics and that the latter is violent, a transcription of the Girardian notion of the “natural sacred.” Furthermore, Vattimo seems to put in the same bracket Dialectical Theology, Negative Theology, Death of God theology (Vattimo names Cox, Hamilton, Van Buren, and – curiously—Altizer, which has been shown to be inaccurate51), and philosophers who talk about the “wholly other” such as Levinas and Derrida. All of these thinkers, in Vattimo’s eyes, “go back to a theology of the first age, ignoring incarnation and consequently conceiving secularisation as the fall in which God’s transcendence as the wholly other can be revealed.”52 When Vattimo uses the term “first age,” he is drawing upon the idea of the age of the “Father” in Joachim’s theology of history. There is a link, in other words, between God as a “transcendent Other” and the “Father,” even if Vattimo interprets this latter term allegorically (not as a literal father). “Violence,” for Vattimo, is “an act of imposition on the other and her liberty.”53 This is not the physical violence shown in places in the Old Testament where God may be “violent” and “bizarre” as Vattimo contends, such as when he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), and punished the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:2-3). Moreover, Vattimo’s view of God in the Old Testament is very limited if it is reduced to being seen only as “violent.”

7. Shepherd of Being There may be one further strategy to rehabilitate the concept of the Father within Vattimo’s philosophy of religion which is not only consistent with the outline of his philosophy, but also with his methodology. Vattimo insists that a secularised Christianity is one in which a literal reading of 50

Vattimo, Belief, 48. Matthew E. Harris, “Gianni Vattimo and Thomas J. J. Altizer on the Incarnation and the Death of God: A Comparison,” Minerva, 15 (2011), 1-19. 52 Vattimo, After Christianity, 37. 53 Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, “Christianity and Modernity,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith, 45. 51

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Scripture should be replaced with one which is spiritual. What does Vattimo mean by a “spiritual” interpretation of Scripture? Vattimo is reticent when it comes to definitions, but reading between the lines one can infer that he means a “more flexible interpretation of the Bible,” with the only limit being caritas, that is, to promote “weak” interpretations over those that are strong.54 On the basis of this spiritual reading of Scripture, one can have a license to interpret a biblical story about God the Father in a spiritual manner in accordance with the principle of caritas. Even accepting that this is a “weak,” “charitable” reading of Scripture, one may argue that imputing Trinitarian categories onto New Testament terms such as “Father” runs the risk of anachronism given that the doctrine of the Trinity in anything like the form in which it is understood today was created much later through the councils and by theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa. Nevertheless, if Vattimo is drawing upon thinkers such as Joachim of Fiore, he is already reading the Trinity back into the Bible. Moreover, Vattimo uses the terms “kenosis” and “incarnation” interchangeably. Whereas the former term has some basis in Philippians 2:7 (although “ekenosen” is found instead of “kenosis,” they are the same word, for the “e” prefix- e-kenosen- indicates the aorist tense of the verb kenoo, anglicised as a noun, kenosis), the “incarnation” as a term is linked far more closely to later doctrinal developments among patristic thinkers and councils. Of course, the incarnation can be linked back to passages such as John 1:14 and to Philippians 2:7 itself, but linking the Trinity back to the New Testament is akin to doing the same with the incarnation. The New Testament story that might offer a strategy for Vattimo to think of God the Father in a more positive light is the parable of the Lost Sheep in Matthew 18: 12-14, and in Luke 15:3-7 as part of a trilogy on redemption along with the parable of the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32) and the Lost Coin (Luke 15:8-10). In the Lost Sheep, a man with one-hundred sheep leaves ninety-nine sheep to go and find the one who has strayed from the flock. The man with the sheep would be called a “shepherd” and commentators on the story often refer to the man in this way.55 Some New Testament commentators mention that Jesus could be interpreted as the “shepherd” of the story.56 However, from Matthew 18:14 one can argue 54

Vattimo, After Christianity, 48. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., Matthew: A Shorter Commentary (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 302. R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2007), 685. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2009), 451. 56 W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., Matthew: A Shorter Commentary, 302. 55

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that the man who is not willing to let any of the “little ones” perish represents the Father, for the text of Matthew draws an explicit parallel between the man and the “Father in heaven.” In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger uses the image of Dasein as a “shepherd of Being”: “Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth.”57 What does it mean to preserve Being’s truth, and how does this insight from Heidegger relate to Vattimo’s specific philosophical project? The key terms are those of “Andenken” and “sorge,” only briefly mentioned so far. The former term is usually rendered “remembrance,” while the latter is “care,” or “being careful.” Sometimes andenken itself is translated as “careful remembrance,” taking into account “sorge.” Given the context after the so-called “kehre” (“turn”) in Heidegger’s work, Dasein has to take care in remembering “Being.” Indeed, when giving a more detailed philosophical definition of andenken, Vattimo turns to the following passage from Heidegger’s Der Satz Vom Grund: “thinking from the point of view of the Geschick [the mission-destiny-gift of Being], and that is an entrusting of oneself—through recollection—to the liberating bond that positions us within the tradition of thought.”58 This passage introduces as many new terms as it defines, but it is imperative to deal with them in order to make clearer what Heidegger’s “shepherd” can bring to Vattimo’s “Father.” In particular, the next term to be defined is “tradition,” so again with Vattimo: “Tradition is the transmitting of linguistic messages that constitute the horizon within which Dasein is thrown as an historically determined project: and tradition derives its importance from the fact that Being, as a horizon of disclosure within which things appear, can arise only as a trace of past words or as an announcement that has been handed down to us.”59 “Weak thought” (pensiero debole) is withdrawing from certainty, not refusing metaphysical claims, for to refuse such claims would be to repeat the forgetting of Being by reducing it to presence. Withdrawing from metaphysics leaves room to explore other traditions. As James Martin in his summary of Vattimo’s thought puts it succinctly, “withdrawing from the quest for certainty permits us to explore the alternative truths that our 57 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 167. 58 Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 186; quoted in Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 119. 59 Ibid., 120.

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inherited traditions have excluded. Our cultural traditions are not unitary but diverse.”60 “Emancipation” is to come from “twisting” (Verwindung) the traces of Being (“truths,” not the “Truth”) inherited through the traditions that constitute the horizon for thought in which we live, interpreting them “weakly” in line with the Geschick (sending) of Being as hermeneutical nihilism, that is, the death of God and the dissolution of Being into the “exchange value” of the plurality of traditions at the end of metaphysics. In both Heidegger’s “shepherd of Being” and the man of Matthew 18, the shepherd takes care of something. The object of care in Jesus’ parable is often said to be a human who has wandered off the right path, with God the Father as a being who is trying to find them and bring them back to his flock through his Son. For Heidegger, and for Vattimo, accepting this interpretation of the parable at face value would betray a preoccupation with “beings” such as a “Father,” “Son” and a human. Rather than the Father being an entity (a greatest possible being) mercifully saving another entity (a human), that which is more fundamental to be a shepherd of Being itself; the ontological question has priority over the ontic. Therefore, through a spiritual reading of Scripture which acknowledges hermeneutical nihilism as the horizon in which we are living (at least according to Vattimo, and it is his thought specifically being developed), the “Father” in the parable of the lost sheep is Dasein carefully remembering “Being,” and this is a transcription of the Heideggerian image. In other words, if the Son represents kenosis, the move from God as authoritarian to friend, and the Spirit stands for the spiritual reading of Scripture in accordance with the caritas as the fruit of the friendship of the new covenant, the Father represents the tireless stewardship of Being, even to the “marginal, heterodox, and syncretistic” traces of Being.61 These traces of Being on the margins, properly shepherded back into the clearing of Being, will allow for the further generation and development of Being as a form of weakening, for the plurality of interpretation recovered through the act of shepherding retrieves interpretations previously lost. The greater the plurality of interpretations, the more the event of the death of God will be felt; weakening strong structures is more likely to occur, Vattimo thinks, when there is more awareness of the hermeneutical plurality unleashed through God’s death and the fabulisation of the world. If andenken pertains not only to the dominant, but also to the marginal traces, the

60

James Martin, “A Radical Freedom? Gianni Vattimo’s ‘Emancipatory Nihilism’,” Contemporary Political Theory, 9 (2010), 329. 61 Vattimo, After Christianity, 47-48.

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recovery of the latter will challenge the strong claims of the former by showing greater interpretative plurality. Vattimo himself acts as a “shepherd of Being” in his writings on Christianity, challenging what he regards (rightly or wrongly) as the authoritarianism of doctrinal orthodoxy. From the perspective of a spiritual reading of Scripture, he thinks that “we should examine the spread of marginal, heterodox, and syncretistic religions in various parts of the late Western world…they should be treated with more tolerance and more openness [than is shown by ecclesiastical officialdom].”62 Vattimo goes to the margins of Christianity to recover what Peter Carravetta calls the “heretical currents” in Christian thought,63 an example of which being Joachim of Fiore. Long since “normalised” by historians such as Marjorie Reeves,64 Vattimo’s shepherding of Joachim recovers something approaching the radical reading of him by Gerardo of Borgo San Donnino’s The Eternal Gospel.65 While Vattimo does not go so far as Gerardo in his understanding of Scripture, Vattimo does share his anti-authoritarian reading of Joachim. Retrieving the marginal currents of thought within Christianity has helped him to generate his own “return” to Christianity, as well as making one think about Joachim again. Although Vattimo himself does not go into this kind of detail, in Joachim’s writings the papacy in the third “status” (or “age,” of the Spirit) is referred to as moving from “Peter” to “John,” and it is clear even from Reeves that Peter stands for the papacy in Joachim’s writings.66 This typology is not one of replacement, but of transformation. Peter symbolises the active, John the contemplative, life: “Petro magis ascribitur vita active, Iohanni vero contemplative.”67 The act of interpreting in the light of the death of God allows one to look again with careful remembrance at traces of traditions shepherded back from the margins. By not conceiving of a centre of orthodoxy or a dominant tradition against which interpretations need to be measured (the 62

Ibid. Peter Carravetta, “Beyond Interpretation? On Some Perplexities Following upon Vattimo’s ‘Turn’ from Hermeneutics’,” in Brian Schroeder (ed.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 89. 64 Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (London: S.P.C.K., 1976). Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Indiana and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). 65 David Newheiser, “Conceiving Transformation without Triumphalism,” 7. 66 Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages, 131. 67 Gioacchino da Fiore, Tractatus super quatuor evangelia, E. Buonaiuti (ed.) (Rome, 1930), I, 121. 63

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“normalising” of Joachim through scholarship over the past half century), a twofold weakening occurs. Firstly, there is a weakening through the liberating of marginal, multiple traces in and of themselves, and there is the consequent weak reading of the dominant structures the liberation of the hermeneutical manifold encourages, such as interpreting the vocation of the pope as one which is primarily spiritual, not administrative or (in Vattimo’s eyes) authoritarian. One may object that it is not God the Father, but Dasein, who is the shepherd; the transcendent is reduced to the level of the creaturely. As has been stated, Vattimo, rightly or wrongly, does not have time for the notion of the transcendent. Regardless of Vattimo’s opinion, this objection concerning the “Father” is still stuck within metaphysical categories of corresponding names to things. As Heidegger makes clear, correspondence is a secondary question. What is primary is unconcealment of Being and the attunement of Dasein letting be. On this view, the “Father” is letting be, of letting Being speak to Dasein, and of Dasein recollecting Being. A further objection is that Vattimo is filling up old wineskins with an alien vintage to the point of rupture, a point made by Thomas Guarino about Vattimo’s approach to Christianity in general.68 There may be something to this objection that “the Father” understood in this Vattimian reconstruction has no resemblance to the meaning held by the mainstream of the Christian tradition. Such an objection, though, has more to do with the relationship between philosophy, theology and authority in Vattimo’s thought, something dealt with at length in Guarino’s book. In short, Vattimo may respond that in the light of the event of the death of God, all we are left with is tradition and effective history and that there is no objective measure for interpretation, with the only criterion for interpretation being the formal one of caritas, that is, “weakening.”

8. Conclusion Vattimo’s thoughts on the Trinity at first seem supersessionist, as being an inadequate reinterpretation of Trinitarian doctrine. At best, this kind of account would seem to be a misinterpretation of the historicising of the Trinity by Joachim of Fiore. At worst, through his reading of Joachim, Vattimo identifies God the Father with an Old Testament violent metaphysical being that is to be surpassed. Vattimo needs a Trinity, however, both in order to make sense of his own philosophical reinterpretation of 68 Thomas G. Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 152.

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Christianity and because his account of hermeneutical nihilism hinges upon the notion of tradition. It is through tradition that Vattimo has a feeling of dependence which he sees as paternal. Moreover, Vattimo needs to make sense of the “effective history” of a Christian tradition which has a non-supersessionist Trinity at its heart. Rejecting transcendence as being “metaphysical” (which may be a mistake), there are ways in which, on Vattimian grounds, it is possible to draw the outlines of a doctrine of the Trinity in which the Father has a part to play more than being reduced to a bizarre and threatening metaphysical figure or a vague feeling of dependence. Rather than seeing a bullying Father being succeeded by the friendly Son, in turn succeeded by the spiritualising weakening of strong structures in the Age of the Spirit, one can see the kenotic message being one of weakening authoritarian relations between the divine and the human which translates into hermeneutic terms as a flattening out of value. The movement of this message throughout history is kenosis, a secularising in which the spiritualising weakening of strong structures through caritas is the ethical corollary of this message. The notion of the Father, too, can be spiritualised through the realisation of this message. The Father now is not to be conceived as an authoritarian being, but as a way in which Dasein responding to the kenotic message acts as a shepherd of Being to gather in marginalised interpretations to further weaken strong structures through the greater plurivocity of interpretations that results from this gathering.

CHAPTER TWO GIANNI VATTIMO AND THOMAS JJ ALTIZER ON THE INCARNATION AND THE DEATH OF GOD: A COMPARISON1

Abstract Gianni Vattimo, the Italian Postmodern philosopher, has an understanding of the ‘Death of God’ that has drawn comparisons with the ‘death of God’ theological movement from the 1960s, particularly the work of Thomas J. J. Altizer on the subject. The influence of Nietzsche on both authors and their use of the Christian term ‘kenosis’ (the self-emptying of God in the incarnation) invites such a comparison. However, this article draws all the points of comparison between the two authors on this subject together before showing how and in what ways Vattimo differs from Altizer’s thoughts on the death of God. I will argue that Altizer’s reliance on Hegelian thought marks him out as different to Vattimo, particularly due to the latter’s Heideggerian influence. I will then show why it is wrong to think, as some commentators have done, that Vattimo is also a Hegelian.

1. Altizer and Vattimo Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) is a philosopher who exercises on the Continent, “in Italy in particular, the role that Jürgen Habermas fulfils in Germany as a public intellectual who also undertakes general cultural commentary.”2 For Vattimo’s education, he studied in Turin, under Pareyson, and Heidelberg, with Gadamer supervising. Although, as a result, Vattimo’s 1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, "Gianni Vattimo and Thomas JJ Altizer on the Incarnation and the Death of God: A Comparison," Minerva-An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 15 (2011), 1-19. 2 Thomas Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 1.

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philosophy very much reflects the existentialist and proto-postmodernist influences of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Kuhn, there is a more concrete side to Vattimo. Personally, Vattimo has been active in supporting gay rights and also has had experience in significant public office as an MEP. His ideas have had a wide-ranging influence across disciplines and causes such as Feminism,3 Theology,4 Sexuality,5 and Globalisation.6 Vattimo aimed at a Verwindung, a “twisting”/convalescence-alteration, of existing structures, whether they are religious, political, or cultural in some other respect, rather than their total destruction. Total destruction of such structures is unhelpful, as it would lead to a kind of nihilism which is inimical to life; one always needs to be rooted in some sort of cultural milieu. In this sense, Vattimo was influenced by Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (“being there”); one exists only in relation to other things, whether they are cultural artefacts, traditions, of things of another character. What Verwindung entailed in practice was not principally altering cultural content, but one’s attitude towards one’s own culture and those of others. The means by which cultural Verwindung takes place in an individual is through their coming to realise that, in Nietzschean terms, the world is a fable,7 confronting nihilism head-on. Vattimo was convinced that Nietzsche and Heidegger had shown beyond doubt that “there are no facts, but only interpretations.”8 Nietzsche had undermined the highest of all values in announcing the death of God,9 whereas Heidegger annihilated Being by transforming it into value,10 an “event” which discloses the parameters of thought in given historical era. In the era of the late-modern,

3

Marta Frascati-Lochhead, Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 1998). 4 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology. 5 R. Felski, “Fin de Siècle, Fin de Sexe: Transsexuality, Postmodernism, and the Death of History,” New Literary History, 27(2) (1996), 337-349. 6 Hugh Silverman, “Can the Globalised World Be in the World?” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (Montreal-Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 110-116. 7 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1992). 8 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1997), 2. 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119-120. 10 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in a PostModern Culture, trans. by J. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

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Being appears in the form of irreducible plurality, as exemplified in the infinite number of voices heard through the media.11 Recent commentators on Vattimo’s thought have remarked that Vattimo’s thought on Christianity bears a striking resemblance to that of the influential American death of God theologian, Thomas J. J. Altizer (b. 1927), particularly his magnum opus, The Gospel of Christian Atheism.12 Altizer has drawn heavily upon thinkers such as Nietzsche, Blake and Hegel for his nihilistic Christianity. Central to Altizer’s conception of Christianity is the emptying of God through history to make himself immanent; by eliminating the transcendent realm, believers would focus on the present, the here and now. In terms of comparing both Vattimo and Altizer, both thinkers have been influenced by Nietzsche, particularly his idea of the “death of God.” Vattimo, like Altizer, sees history as the weakening of God, Vattimo and Altizer drawing on the Pauline idea the “emptying”/“humiliation” of God in the incarnation (the technical term for which is the kenosis of Philippians 2:5-11), leading to the liberation of humans from the constricting violence of the transcendent. Vattimo admits that the death of God movement “is not something I’ve studied intensely.”13 This becomes apparent in his homogenising of its thought in After Christianity, for Vattimo suspects that the death of God theologians, including Altizer, have not “articulated an explicit theory of secularisation and of the death of God as the positive affirmation of divinity based on the idea of incarnation.”14 In view of this, Vattimo thinks Altizer, and the other death of God theologians, follow Bonhoeffer and Barth in affirming the “total ‘alterity’ of the biblical God.”15 As with his criticism of Derrida and Lévinas, he believes alterity leads back to “the same old God of metaphysics, conceived of as the ultimate inaccessible ground of religion.”16 Vattimo is wrong in his view of Altizer’s theology, for “there can be little doubt that Altizer did articulate an explicit theory of secularisation rooted in the ideas of kenosis, incarnation and divine 11

Vattimo, The Transparent Society. A. C. Sciglitano, “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity,” Modern Theology, 23(4) (2007), 525-559; Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek (London: T&T Clark 2008). 13 Gianni Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” in: J. W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 91. 14 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press), 2002, 37. 15 Ibid., 36-37. 16 Ibid., 38. 12

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death.”17 Indeed, Altizer opposed the idea of the “otherness” of God due to transcendence being a distraction for believers away from the present. Regarding Vattimo’s thought as nothing more than a restatement of Altizer’s theology ignores his philosophical contributions and, in my opinion, overlooks the subtleties in both his methods and conclusions. In the first part of this article I will deal with the main points of comparison between Altizer and Vattimo as put forward in Anthony C. Sciglitano’s article “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian Response to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity,” and Frederiek Depoortere’s book Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, Slavoj Žižek. My main argument will be that Altizer’s explicit Hegelianism adds a metaphysical element to the development of history which is absent in Vattimo’s attempt to create a history of Christianity which allows for the reduction/twisting of metaphysical, “strong” structures. Having dealt with these points, I will turn to the claim by Sciglitano that Vattimo’s thought is Hegelian, even if Vattimo does not fully realise the debt Sciglitano thinks he owes to Hegel. Before concluding I emphasise one other way, hinted at in the first part of the article, that Vattimo’s understanding of kenosis is important for him to explain the possibility of hermeneutics, a point which was not of interest to Altizer.

2. Points of similarity, aspects of difference Vattimo and Altizer “share the Barthian idea that there is a clear distinction between Christianity on the one side and natural religiosity on the other.”18 Vattimo follows Girard in regarding Christianity as unmasking the violence inherent to the natural sacred of the religious. In Girardian anthropology,19 very briefly summarised here, through mimetic desire each person covets what another has, ending up in an arms race. To protect the society, a “scapegoat” is formed as a mechanism to dispense with the violence, the sacral power imputed onto it making it powerful enough to restore the social order. By cloaking Christianity in the mythological language of the kind pertaining to the scapegoat mechanism

17

Sciglitano, “Contesting the World,” 535-536. Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 25. 19 Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, “Christianity and Modernity,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23-47. 18

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and the natural sacred, Christianity acts “like a Trojan horse,”20 for unlike other victims Christ was wholly innocent, a point which is made clear through his mythology as passed on through the New Testament and tradition. Vattimo links this insight from Girardian anthropology with Heidegger’s weakening of “Being.” Concerning Heidegger’s notion of the weakening of “Being,” Vattimo reads Heidegger’s philosophy as the conclusion of a conception of metaphysics which began with Plato’s forms. The latter, like the traditional Christian ideas concerning God and heaven, pertained to an ideal realm removed from immediate experience. When metaphysics, in more recent times, has been identified with science and technology, and pertains to humans, it makes being human unthinkable insofar as all spontaneity and openness is ruled out by the laws and objects of science.21 For Vattimo, this means a rejection of the identification of Being with presence. Instead, Being should be seen as “event,” such as the event of the late-modern, namely irreducible plurality and the end of metaphysics.22 Altizer’s main claim for the uniqueness of Christianity is to see other religions as promoting a “backward” movement away from history to Primordial Being, whereas the incarnation should be “conceived as a progressive movement of Spirit into flesh” which accepts and redeems the secular/profane world.23 Vattimo, too, is wary of the urge to return to Primordial Oneness, for any God which is too “Other” is “inaccessible” and “is the same old God of metaphysics,” which he also identifies with the gods of natural religions in reference to Girard.24 The starting point for Altizer is dynamism in history, of forwards versus backwards movements, of progressive immanence of the spirit compared to Primordial Oneness; this is all reminiscent of Hegel, a point not lost on the Vattimian commentator Sciglitano. Vattimo’s starting point, however, is his critique of metaphysics, whether it be in his quasi-anthropological appropriations from Girard, or in his incarnation-centred repudiation of conceptualising the divine as “the Other,” whether this be in accordance with Plato, Barth, the “death of God” theologians, Lévinas, Derrida, or natural religions.

20

Pierpaolo Antonello, “Introduction,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8. 21 Vattimo, After Christianity, 12-13. 22 Ibid. 23 Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (London: Collins, 1967), 46. 24 Vattimo, After Christianity, 37-39.

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For “both Vattimo and Altizer, the core of Christianity is the event of the incarnation. Both authors interpret the incarnation as the end of God’s transcendence, as the death of the ‘God of beyond.’ They both use the term ‘kenosis’ and consider the incarnation as the start of a process of desacralization and secularisation.”25 For Altizer there are two kenoses. One is a historical, actual death of God, as, for him, Theology must come to an understanding of the “inevitable correlation between God’s selfrevelation and his self-negation or kenosis…history becomes not simply the arena of revelation but the very incarnate Body of God.”26 Again, Altizer here owes a debt to Hegel for this understanding of the death of God. The second kenosis concerns the emptying of this event into common experience as atonement, an experience which is “a negative process of reversing every alien other…of every power confining life and energy.”27 After the epiphany of the cross, the event becomes ossified into “alien others” such as creedal formulas, what Altizer refers to as “Satan,” all of which eventually become emptied.28 The two are related due to the former effecting the latter by God relinquishing his transcendence in becoming immanent to complete himself. By contrast, for Vattimo, there is only one kenosis, and that is the long process of secularisation which is begun in the incarnation and is an on-going process which is never fully completed. Vattimo sees kenosis as the process of secularisation, a process which is indistinguishable from both interpretation and salvation. Given Vattimo’s stance concerning metaphysics, arguably the best way to read what Vattimo has to say concerning kenosis is to interpret the event of kenosis as a message which is communicated and reinterpreted throughout history from the time of the New Testament onwards. Indeed, Vattimo states that salvation “is the announcement that God saves us through a historical process of education,”29 and that “Christianity is a stimulus, a message that sets in motion a tradition of thought that will eventually realise its freedom from metaphysics.”30 It is also questionable about the extent to which Altizer, unlike Vattimo, can be said to be a theologian of secularisation, 25

Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 25. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 86. 27 Ibid., 114. 28 Ibid., 112-113. 29 Gianni Vattimo, “Introduction,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 86; emphasis added. 30 Gianni Vattimo, “Towards a Non-religious Christianity,” in J. W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 35; emphasis added. 26

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for while he talks about God emptying himself into history, he maintains an at least formal distinction between the sacred and the profane, both being transformed through the process of kenosis as Ogletree mentions in his summary of Altizer’s thought.31 According to both Vattimo and Altizer, “the true meaning of the incarnation has only recently been exposed.”32 Altizer refers to “modern historical consciousness,”33 by which he means “for the first time historical events appeared as radically particular, as confined in their meaning and value to the actual but singular process in which they occur.”34 Backwards-reference to Primordial Being had meant events and situations were defined in advance for humanity through the “givenness” of the present and norms in relation to this Absolute. “Jesus and…his death,” Altizer thinks, “liberated humanity from the oppressive presence of primordial Being.”35 However, this “modern historical consciousness” appears to be an effect, not a cause, of liberation. In Altizer’s eyes, though, in this instance cause and effect are the same thing, for, in Ogletree’s concise summary of Altizer, “The incarnate Word completes itself in a human community embodying in its own self-consciousness the same ‘consciousness’ which was first manifest in Jesus.”36 Through kenosis, the Word moves from the particular (Jesus) to the universal (“modern historical consciousness”) to reverse human dependence on backwardlooking (to Primordial Oneness) to interpret the particular (the present). Historically, this modern historical consciousness first became apparent, Altizer thinks, with nineteenth-century figures such as Nietzsche. The latter’s nihilism not only “foresaw” the “one clear portal to the twentieth century,”37 but also “disclosed God to be the very embodiment of an infinitude of man’s self-hatred and guilt.”38 Insofar as a connection is made between the kenosis of God realising itself in modern nihilism, Altizer is close to Vattimo. In Vattimo’s opinion, his Catholic upbringing drew him to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who made him reflect back on history to the point of realising that nihilism and the end of metaphysics was a product of the message of the kenosis of

31

T. W. Ogletree, The ‘Death of God’ Controversy (London: SCM, 1966), 83. Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 25. 33 Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 4. 34 Ibid., 74. 35 Ibid., 71. 36 Ogletree, The ‘Death of God’ Controversy, 71. 37 Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 22. 38 Ibid. 32

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God.39 That is, the possibility of hermeneutics is founded upon the message of kenosis. Differences between Altizer and Vattimo appear when one probes deeper to how the incarnation can take effect in the modern era. For Altizer it is part of the larger kenotic process, of Spirit becoming “incarnate in its opposite,”40 moving forward to its own self redemption, as “Spirit only becomes realised or historically actualised in selfconsciousness while Spirit is in a state of alienation and estrangement from itself.”41 The second kenosis, then, of the movement of the Word into the universal consciousness of humanity is caused by the kenotic process of God emptying himself fully into Jesus in the first kenosis. For Vattimo this would seem to rely too much upon the metaphysics of which he wishes to dispose when one recalls that for Vattimo it is the message of kenosis, the focus on interpretation, which is liberating and salvific. Vattimo does not want to prove his hermeneutics, for “proof” would constitute a return to metaphysics which he wants to avoid; Vattimo is more interested in “plausibility” and “persuasiveness.”42 Nevertheless, Vattimo wants to make his hermeneutics look the most plausible interpretation of the mind-set of the late-modern. In order to do so, he looks at how historical factors have mixed with the essence of the message of the Gospel in order to effect a gradual weakening of strong structures in the West down to the present day. The weakening essence of Christianity was hindered by the fall of the Roman Empire, Vattimo appealing to Wilhelm Dilthey’s view that figures such as Augustine were adopting Greco-Roman modes of thought and societal structures because they were solely responsible for the continuation of civilisation in any form.43 Nevertheless, over time these structures were weakened by the essence of the Christian message, the Reformation being a distinctive event. Vattimo draws on the work of Max Weber and Colin Campbell to show how modern consumer-capitalist culture was based on the Protestant work ethic (Weber) and a tendency for fantasy left by a faith which had been weakened through the Reformation which found its outlet in consumerism (Campbell).44 Vattimo argues it was the objective world-order made possible by Christian monotheism which leant itself to the scientifictechnological rationalism which made the gradual separation of faith and 39

Vattimo, Belief, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), passim. 40 Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 68. 41 Ibid., 66. 42 Vattimo, After Christianity, 50. 43 Ibid., 116. 44 Ibid., 76.

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reason possible from the early modern period onwards in which reformed principles took shape.45 In short, while Altizer and Vattimo see a prima facie circular relationship between modern historical consciousness of the death of God (and a feeling of its liberating effects) and the event of the incarnation, Altizer draws heavily on Hegelian metaphysics as an explanation of this apparent circularity, whereas Vattimo explains the relevance, and increasing presence, of the message of kenosis and the weakening of strong structures through a quasi-historical account of the journey of this message from the time of Jesus to the present day as the basis for the possibility of hermeneutics, a point to which we shall return much later. Transcendence cannot but be “violent and oppressive.”46 On this point there is indeed superficial similarity between Altizer and Vattimo. The former refers to the “bondage” of “a transcendent, a sovereign, and an impassive God.”47 Indeed, redemption for Altizer can be characterised as “man’s release from an alien and distant ‘Other’ who in sovereign freedom dispenses the fate of men.”48 The idea of the transcendent, “alien” other here conjured up by Altizer is of a being removed from the world but who nevertheless decrees for it, setting up rules and commands for humans to follow. There is also the Hegelian element of Altizer’s thought which holds that a being is unfulfilled insofar as it remains wholly transcendent. By contrast, Vattimo thinks transcendence is violent because it is the perfect example of metaphysics. Violence is caused by metaphysics because it is an expression of the will to power in order to appropriate the other totally through defining them by pre-existing measurements and categories.49 Vattimo is not worried about transcendence for the reason that it could involve humans being on the receiving end of the arbitrary fiat of a being that has not experienced the world directly, for he thinks that this conception of God is flat-footed. The death of God “is not a metaphor for a change in human experience, but part of the life of the Absolute itself.”50 Depoortere is right in his judgement of Altizer, but is wrong in hastily applying it to Vattimo. 45

Ibid., 75. Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 26. 47 Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 42. 48 Ogletree, The ‘Death of God’ Controversy, 73. 49 Vattimo, Belief, 30-32; Gianni Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard: Kénosis and the End of Metaphysics,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 81. 50 Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 26. 46

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It has already been shown that Vattimo did not want to construe God in terms of an “Absolute” which has been weakened in ontic terms, that is, in terms of his nature. Rather, Vattimo was concerned with the message, the story of kenosis and its working-out in history as the process of secularisation, of weakening strong structures. A possible reason why Depoortere makes this judgement is because he himself is deeply influenced by more “traditional” theology, as is evident from his book The Death of God in which he states “Should it indeed not be argued, in contrast to the often-repeated common opinion, that the metaphysical God and the God of Christian faith have much more in common than is often supposed?”51 Admittedly, sometimes Vattimo speaks as if he was referring to a change in the nature of God, such as “Secularisation is the way in which kenosis, having begun with the incarnation of Christ…continues to realise itself more and more clearly.”52 Taken out of context, Vattimo would appear to be making a positive assertion about a state of affairs which “happened” in the past. However, when one finishes the quotation one can understand what Vattimo is saying differently: “…by furthering the education of mankind concerning the overcoming of originary violence essential to the sacred and to social life itself.”53 Again, the term “education” implies that the importance of the incarnation concerns pedagogy, as a message which is passed on, taught, and reinterpreted in accordance with the signs of the times. It is wrong, then, to attribute to Vattimo, as it would not be with Altizer, a belief in the changing nature of God/the Absolute. How Depoortere can interpret Vattimo’s conception of history of the dissolution of Being on Heideggerian lines with “change…[in] the life of the Absolute itself” is difficult to imagine,54 for language of the “Absolute” pertains far more readily to Hegelian, not Heideggerian, thought, which is therefore more appropriate to the theology of Altizer than the philosophy of Vattimo given the latter’s distaste for metaphysics. Moreover, kenosis refers to more than a “metaphor” for Vattimo, for it is this message of weakening, of the revelation of the violence of the natural sacred. “Like Vattimo, Altizer is interested in neither Jesus nor in the Jesus of Church tradition, but in the incarnate Word as he will come to be known in the third epoch or Joachim’s Age of Spirit”55; “For Altizer, Hegel, and Vattimo, if God is to be love, then God can no longer be essentially 51

Frederiek Depoortere, The Death of God (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 4. Vattimo, Belief, 48. 53 Ibid., 48. 54 Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 26. 55 Sciglitano, “Contesting the World,” 536. 52

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different from the world itself.”56 These two points of comparison made by Sciglitano are to be dealt with together, for one follows on from another. At first sight, Sciglitano seems to have misjudged Altizer on the issue of his neglect of the person of Jesus. Altizer goes to great lengths to show the importance of Jesus: “God is Jesus.”57 However, when one looks at what Altizer means by Jesus it is clear that he is not interested in the man Jesus except insofar as he is representative of an opposite to Absolute Spirit, abstracted from the concrete: “God is Jesus, proclaims the radical Christian, and by this he means that the Incarnation is a total and allconsuming act: as Spirit becomes the Word that empties the Speaker of himself, the whole reality of Spirit becomes incarnate in its opposite.”58 Therefore, Sciglitano is right in saying that Altizer does not have an interest in Jesus, a fortiori the Jesus of the dogmas of the Church. To an extent Sciglitano is right in stating that Vattimo follows Altizer. Vattimo’s main interest in the message of the New Testament is its message of kenosis. Nevertheless, Vattimo’s interest in Jesus does extend slightly more than just to kenosis, but also to its ethical corollary, Jesus’ message of caritas, charity. By caritas, though, it is questionable about the extent to which Vattimo’s understanding of the concept has anything to do with the one held by Jesus (insofar as it is possible to know what he meant by the term), or the Church’s. Vattimo distinguished between pensiero forte (strong thought) and pensiero debole (weak thought). The former refers to holding one’s beliefs, values and traditions—and therefore, one’s culture—as objective and absolute, reducing others’ cultures to one’s own, causing exclusionary violence to the “other.” The latter is a way of holding one’s views in accordance with the virtue of caritas, that is, “Charity,” or “Love.”59 That which can be weakened through secularisation has no limit except caritas, the ethical corollary of kenosis. Caritas is a formal principle in his eyes, akin to Kant’s categorical imperative.60 Formally, one recognises the situatedness and provisional character of one’s own views and tolerates, and learns from, other cultures through one’s loving disposition. With nihilism, “The call is thus not for a society with no values but for a society without supreme and exclusive values. On this model, cultures are complex conversations among varying conceptions of the world. Such dialogue can, and must not, shift into a dogmatic clash

56

Ibid. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 68; Altizer’s emphasis. 58 Ibid. 59 Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 41. 60 Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 14. 57

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between conflicting truths.”61 Caritas, then, is “an active commitment to diminishing violence in all its forms,”62 on the recognition of one’s own provisionality. Vattimo’s understanding of Jesus’ message of caritas differs greatly from, for instance, the twentieth-century Lutheran’s thinker Anders Nygren’s view of caritas,63 which he sees as a later, Latinising distortion of agape, the latter meaning God’s love for humans dispensed through his grace, or from the modern Catholic view of the papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est (2006) which sees love coming from God and not only commanding, but uniting, humanity to love Him. Vattimo’s divine love is immanent, human in origin, and is devoted to weakening. Similarly, Altizer sees love as immanent, for “Christian love is an incarnate love, a self-giving to the fullness of the world, an immersion in the actuality of time and the flesh. Therefore, our Yes-saying must give us totally to the moment before us.”64 The immanent, incarnate love mentioned by Altizer is, though, the realisation in human consciousness and experience of the kenotic Word. Once again, there is metaphysics in the background of Altizer’s thought whereas there is none apparent in Vattimo’s. “Like Vattimo, Altizer eliminates from Paul’s narrative of kenosis the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of the Father, for such an exaltation would reinstate the ‘primordial Creator, an eternal and unchanging Lord’.”65 A criticism of Vattimo and Altizer is that they focus on verses five to eight of Philippians chapter two, leaving out the rest of the Pauline hymn, verses nine to eleven, which emphasise the glory of God’s resurrection and exaltation through his resurrection. It is true that they both neglect to deal with this aspect of hymn, preferring to concentrate on the humiliation and emptying of God in the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Altizer goes so far to state that “The radical Christian repudiates the Christian dogma of the resurrection of Christ and his ascension into a celestial and transcendent realm because radical faith revolves about a participation in the Christ who is fully and totally present to us.”66 Going further, Altizer even suggests reversing the resurrection 61

Gianni Vattimo and Zabala, Santiago “‘Weak Thought’ and the Reduction of Violence: A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo,” Common Knowledge 8(3) (2002), 454. 62 Vattimo, After Christianity, 51-52. 63 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, trans. by A. G. Herbert (London: SPCK, 1932). 64 Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 156. 65 Sciglitano, “Contesting the World,” 536. 66 Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 120.

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and ascension by using the “symbolic language of Christianity” to “transpose the traditional of the descent into Hell” of the crucifixion to express how Christ does not become resurrected after death, but “descends ever more fully into darkness and flesh.”67 In drawing upon the tradition of the “harrowing of hell” developed out of 1 Peter, Altizer twists the resources of the Christian tradition away from the hope of resurrection to his own “radical Christian” conception of the kenosis of God in history. Unlike Altizer, Vattimo has far less to say about the resurrection. In his introduction to Vattimo’s book Belief (1999), Luca D’Isanto states that “Vattimo follows René Girard’s hypothesis that Christ’s death and resurrection eliminates the violence of all sacrificial religion through its very unmasking.”68 This is not strictly accurate, for Vattimo follows Joachim of Fiore, who saw history as comprised of ages representative of the Trinity (Father: Old Testament times; Son: New Testament times; Spirit: some time during or after the thirteenth century), in making the most out of the “now-not yet” eschatological tension in the New Testament to the extent that he, like Joachim, does not believe in a closed canon: “although salvation is essentially ‘fulfilled’ in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, it awaits further fulfilment. Thus the Paraclete…has been assigned the task of assisting them in this further hermeneutical project.”69 Reading between the lines, “salvation” for Vattimo has little or nothing to do with traditional Christian beliefs in “grace” and “bodily resurrection.” Indeed, he follows Joachim in reading scripture “spiritually,” eliminating such literalisms.70 Sciglitano is therefore right in seeing a similarity between Altizer and Vattimo on this issue of the resurrection and ascension. Nevertheless, whereas Altizer explicitly writes against the resurrection and ascension, not fitting into his largely Hegelian scheme of kenosis, Vattimo is not interested in this issue, at most “twisting” resurrection into a longer scheme of salvation-ashermeneutics. Insofar as Sciglitano’s comparison of Altizer and Vattimo here is a criticism, it is wide of the mark. Altizer is a self-confessed “radical” Christian, while Vattimo is primarily a philosopher. Neither of these two thinkers are interested in returning to “traditional” doctrines and beliefs. Indeed, Vattimo thought that the “return to religion” in the West cannot be an uncritical flight back to tradition. “The strong pneumatological turn and the Trinitarian progressivism that springs from Joachim serves for Altizer and for Vattimo as a way to 67

Ibid. Vattimo, Belief, 10. 69 Vattimo, After Christianity, 59-60. 70 Ibid., 26. 68

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give theological movements a kind of contemporary authority over against the biblical canon, Church authorities, tradition, etc.”71 Concerning Joachim, Altizer states that “The radical Christian…inherits both the ancient prophetic belief that revelation continues in history and the eschatological belief of the tradition following Joachim of Floris,”72 that “we are now living in the third and final age of the Spirit.”73 Kenosis involves the Spirit moving into flesh, transfiguring both.74 Spirit exists for itself (für sich) when it exists as its own opposite or other.75 Only when Spirit knows itself in its own otherness will it fulfil its destiny as Spirit, achieving self-redemption.76 Altizer does think that the final age of the Spirit “effects a negation and transcendence of the dogma of the Church,”77 for the Spirit liberates us from the memory of transcendence and from the ossifying quality of creeds and formulas, again linking back to the dual sense of kenosis in his theology. Vattimo has a similar understanding of Joachim to Altizer. However, he uses Joachim’s ideas differently in his philosophy. Although, like Altizer, he sees Joachim’s “third age” prophecy, “emphasis[ing] the openness to the future implicit in the dogma of incarnation” and that salvation history is still in progress and Trinitarian in character,78 Vattimo’s main interest in Joachim is in his reading of scripture in light of this third age, that is, not literally or analogically, but spiritually. Vattimo is taken by Joachim’s idea of the “spiritual intelligence” of Scripture,79 of grasping events in the Bible as “figures” of other historical events. For Vattimo, Joachim’s exegetical method, in light of the age of the spirit, “stresses not the letter but the spirit of revelation; no longer servants but friends; no longer awe or faith but charity.”80 Joachim’s appeal is in the immanence of salvation allowing one to reinterpret Scripture in a spiritual way which sees salvation as an on-going process in progress. Vattimo is not interested in the literalistic aspects of Joachim’s prophecies,81 for events cannot be symbols of another discrete historical event. Vattimo and 71

Sciglitano, “Contesting the World,” 536. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 27. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 47. 75 Ibid., 64. 76 Ibid., 65. 77 Ibid., 64. 78 Vattimo, After Christianity, 28-32. 79 Ibid., 28. 80 Ibid., 31. 81 Ibid., 28-39. 72

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Altizer both make use of Joachim, particularly the idea of the lack of a closed canon, Altizer construes “Spirit” in more Hegelian terms, whereas Vattimo ties it in more closely to his hermeneutics.

3. Preliminary conclusion, and the charge of Hegelianism levelled at Vattimo There are superficial similarities between Altizer and Vattimo. Both thinkers draw upon Nietzsche, particularly his sentiment that we are living in a nihilistic age encapsulated by the phrase the “death of God.” Vattimo, like Altizer before him, also saw history as a gradual weakening of God, using the idea of kenosis to refer to this weakening in conceptual terms. Where the two thinkers differ fundamentally is how this weakening took place. In appealing explicitly to Hegel, Altizer draws upon his idea of spirit in such a way to suggest strongly that he posits that there has been a metaphysical weakening over time, that there was objectively some transcendent thing which has emptied itself into history which has led up to the nihilism of the present. By contrast, Vattimo sees the message of kenosis as being the cause of the weakening of strong structures in all forms since the time of Christ to the present day. Acknowledging hermeneutical plurality, this understanding of weakening is not even an objective, univocal construal of history, but an interpretation of a received, inescapable tradition from within the situatedness of being a citizen of the West in late-modernity. All that has been said to distinguish Vattimo from Altizer could falter if Vattimo himself is a Hegelian thinker. Indeed, this is what Sciglitano argues, and “if Hegel is his prime influence, then Vattimo’s position against metaphysical grounding or ontotheology becomes highly suspect, indeed impossible to maintain.”82 Sciglitano also mentions that Vattimo names Hegel as an influence.83 It is a truism to maintain that Hegelianism is not univocal in its meaning. Beyond traditional the traditional Right/Left Hegelian divides, more recent research would suggest ways in which Hegelianism could be a very positive renewing source for theology.84 Nevertheless, Sciglitano specifies seven points which mark Vattimo out as a Hegelian in his eyes:

82

Sciglitano, “Contesting the World,” 528. Ibid., 537. 84 Andrew Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit (London: T&T Clark, 2011). 83

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“(1) the Trinity is de-personalized; (2) the divine-world relation is given a modalistic and ultimately monistic reading; (3) Passibility is radical and history becomes constitutive, or stronger, determinative, of divine being; (4) Scriptural revelation is overcome by a ‘spiritual sense’ reading that envisions a reconciliation between divine being and the being of the world, thus asserting some form of identity; (5) Jesus’ historical existence becomes religiously insignificant; (6) Resurrection does not lead to exaltation and end kenosis, and does not apply to Jesus as an individual, but rather continues kenosis as a general diffusion of divine Being into the secular or as the secular; (7) Divine will, election, missions are excised from theological reflection.”85

Expanding on these points, concerning 1-3 the de-personalisation of the Trinity is Vattimo’s modalism due to the Joachimite dividing of history into ages.86 Concerning the third point, Vattimo’s conception of history is not of “divine being,” but of the message of kenosis. This history is not of “strengthening,” but of “weakening.” Vattimo is not interested in making objective statements about the nature of the divine, but is talking about the nature of belief in different eras. Sciglitano is broadly right on points 5 and 7. For 5, Vattimo is interested in the message of kenosis, not whether an actual person named Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead.87 As for 7, divine will is a non-issue for Vattimo as he is not interested in a being. Concerning 6, although Sciglitano is right in holding that Vattimo does not regard the resurrection as exalting the divine being, his analysis is hampered because he talks about “diffusion of divine Being,” for once again, Vattimo is interested in the message of weakening, not of positing what has or has not happened to beings. There are at least two more significant reasons to reject Sciglitano’s classification of Vattimo as a Hegelian. Firstly, many of his seven points are derived from categories of classical theology, a term he even uses himself.88 Vattimo is not in any shape or form a “classical theologian.” Indeed, Vattimo rejects what he sees as the dogmatism of classical theology. It is ironic and inappropriate to use these categories for assessing and categorising Vattimian thought, even if it is to compare him with another thinker. Superficial similarities of Vattimo’s thought to theological categories such as “modalism” disappear when one considers that Vattimo is not trying to create a univocal, objective theology or philosophy of history. One of Vattimo’s premises in his own hermeneutics is 85

Sciglitano, “Contesting the World,” 538. Ibid. 87 Ibid., 539. 88 Ibid., 538. 86

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interpretative plurality, extended even to history after events such as the two world wars and the end of colonialism shattered the West’s belief in a monolithic, univocal world history.89 Vattimo goes to great pains to show how personal his interpretation of both religion and history is to him.90 The last thing he would intend to do is to smash idols of theology only to erect new ones in their place. He is keen on citing Nietzsche’s aphorism that “new gods” will replace the old,91 but the term “god” is in the plural; we are living, Vattimo never tires of repeating, in a world of infinite plurality.92 Where Vattimo thinks his particular interpretation of the current state of the world has its force is twofold, one because he thinks it matches a common experience of the West—plurality, a lack of interpretative centre, and the collapse of old, absolute values, as well as, secondly, an anchor in the tradition of the West—Christian tradition— even if it is twisted almost to the point of breaking; unlike many postmodern philosophers, Vattimo insists on the importance of history.93 Vattimo’s emphasis on the “three ages” is not an example of a univocal philosophy of history a la Hegel. At most, and here is the second reason to reject Sciglitano’s classification of Vattimo, it is a “twisting” both of Hegel and Christianity, even, perhaps, of Heidegger. There is nothing tying Vattimo, in his eyes, to use past thinkers and traditions in a “faithful” way. Therefore, we see a twisted version of “kenosis,” talk which is reminiscent of Hegel in an idea gaining greater acceptance into the popular consciousness, and an ‘event’ of the late-modern which is akin to the “freedom” Hegel thought had taken place in Prussia. However, scratch the surface and one finds a lack of “monism” because there is no “objective,” “metaphysical” being (with a small “b”) which empties itself in Vattimo’s theology, unlike both Altizer and Hegel, and no univocal history, only an anchoring in tradition to make sense of how one interprets the present.

4. Kenosis and the possibility of hermeneutics Although he underestimates the similarity of his Altizer’s theology to his own thought, Vattimo’s conception of the importance of kenosis may differ from Altizer’s in at least one other significant respect, one which Vattimo does realise. Mentioning a number of theologians, including 89

Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 4. Vattimo, Belief. 91 Vattimo, After Christianity, 16. 92 Ibid., 15. 93 N. Pireddu, “Gianni Vattimo,” in H. Bertens and J. Natoli, (eds.), Postmodernism: The Key Figures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 302. 90

Vattimo and Altizer on the Incarnation and the Death of God

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Altizer, he goes on to say “they could never have done this work without Luther or Nietzsche.”94 More than this, Vattimo states that “my use of the death of God depends very much on the history of Being as connected to the problem of ontotheology…my notion of weak thought can actually help the death of God theologies better understand their origins in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophy.”95 In other words, it is Vattimo’s wedding of the idea of kenosis to postmodern hermeneutics and the death of metaphysics which constitutes his novelty. To what extent is Vattimo right in his estimation? Altizer has certainly acknowledged Nietzsche’s influence concerning the idea of the death of God in his early books, as a thinking whose nihilism has helped shape the modern historical consciousness, the explanation for which ultimately being the second kenosis to which Altizer referred. As for Heidegger’s influence on Altizer, Ward mentions in an introductory section to Altizer’s essay in a volume which he was editing, “Heidegger is mentioned briefly” by Altizer, but not dealt with at length.96 However, his essay entitled “The Self-Saving of God,” which appeared in the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology under the “Heideggerian” heading, constitutes arguably Altizer’s first concerted engagement with Heidegger’s thought. Nevertheless, while Altizer writes Vattimo-esque sentences such as “Heidegger can know that the realization that ‘God is dead’ is not atheism but rather ‘ontotheology,’ and an ontotheology in which both metaphysics and nihilism are fulfilled.”97 Altizer reads Heidegger through Hegel. The continuing influence of Hegel is clear when he talks about the “event” (to draw on Heidegger’s terminology) of the self-saving of God through the transcendence of God becoming completely actualised in its immanence.98 Altizer is not dealing with hermeneutics when considering the death of God, even after bringing Heidegger into the equation, whereas Vattimo is.

5. Conclusion Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy of Christianity does resemble Thomas J. J. Altizer’s theology at the surface level. The use of terms such as “kenosis” and “death of God,” the influence of thinkers such as Nietzsche and 94

Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” 92. Ibid. 96 G. Ward, “Introduction: The Self-Saving of God,” in G. Ward (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 428. 97 Thomas Altizer, “The Self-Saving of God,” in G. Ward (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 434. 98 Ibid., 441. 95

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Joachim of Fiore, and the idea of the historical unfolding of the weakening of God are all shared features of their thought. However, whereas Altizer is a radical theologian, one has to remember that Vattimo is a philosopher who is interested in hermeneutics. Unlike Altizer, Vattimo does not want to talk about a being called God, even if it is to say, like Altizer has done, that this being has been emptied into the world; to do so would be to betray his Nietzschean principle that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” While Altizer, too, is a self-proclaimed nihilist, his nihilism comes not from the plausibility of hermeneutics as being the only relevant philosophy in the infinite plurality of interpretations in a latemodern Western society, but from a conviction that the Absolute has emptied himself into the world effecting “the collapse of any meaning or reality lying beyond the newly discovered radical immanence of modern man.”99 More than this, for Vattimo to pronounce definitively on what has happened to God would be to reach back into the modern era and create another univocal interpretation of history, something he wants to avoid. Instead, he sees the hermeneutical plurality which has opened up in latemodernity as being the result, not of the metaphysical God’s being emptying into the world, but the message of the weakening of God gradually penetrating the consciousness of the West, announcing itself to the late-modern person in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger. All these aspects of Vattimo’s thought show that he is not a Hegelian, or at the very least not a Hegelian in the manner assumed by Sciglitano.

99

Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 22.

CHAPTER THREE VATTIMO, KENOSIS AND ST. PAUL1

Abstract The style of weak thought associated with Gianni Vattimo involves positing that we are living after the death of God in an age of nihilism that is our ‘sole opportunity.’ Nihilism, the lack of highest values, frees one from the ‘violence’ of metaphysics that silences one by reducing everything back to first principles. This article focuses on Vattimo’s return to Christianity, analysing in particular his use of terms found in the New Testament, kenosis and caritas. Vattimo sees the history of the West as the secularisation of Christianity, reaching its culmination in the nihilism of late-modernity through the liberation of a plurality of interpretations from metaphysics. By analysing Vattimo’s notion of Being and use of Joachim of Fiore’s historical schema in relation to Paul’s distinction between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter,’ it shall be argued that Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity does not involve the religion ‘superseding’ Judaism. However, this resolution comes at the cost of highlighting the lack of importance of Christianity for Vattimo if a broader understanding of Heidegger than Vattimo deploys is used to put Vattimo’s understanding of Being under scrutiny.

1. An introduction to Vattimo’s thought Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) is one of Italy’s foremost contemporary philosophers and public intellectuals, writing in the continental philosophical tradition. Vattimo grew up enthusiastic for the Christian faith. Nevertheless, only after having taken up a postgraduate Humboldt Fellowship in Germany under the tutelage of Hans-Georg Gadamer did Vattimo realise that he was a cultural Christian, and that he gave up his

1 Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “Vattimo, Kenosis and St. Paul,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 75(4) (2014), 288-305.

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faith as soon as he stopped reading the Italian newspapers.2 Even before he had left Italy, Vattimo had embarked on an intellectual adventure that would take him beyond the study of Aristotle and the scholastics with which he had spent his earliest student years, towards developing an idiosyncratic and syncretistic philosophical programme founded on the interplay between the themes of nihilism and postmodernity in the development of hermeneutics (the theorising of interpretation) as the koine of late-modernity. This article focuses on Vattimo’s return to Christianity, analysing in particular Vattimo’s use of terms found in the New Testament, kenosis and caritas. Drawing upon Vattimo’s understanding of Being and some texts of Paul’s that Vattimo does not use, it shall be argued that Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity does not involve the religion “superseding” Judaism, although at a cost of drawing attention to problems in Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger that make his appeal to Christianity redundant. Central to Vattimo’s philosophy is the “contamination” he has made between the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger.3 With respect to the former, he has drawn upon the insights of Heidegger to place Nietzsche’s thought within the history of philosophy, that is, within the history of Being, although unlike Heidegger, Vattimo does not regard Nietzsche as the last metaphysician. Nonetheless, Vattimo equates Nietzsche’s death of God with Heidegger’s notion of the end of metaphysics. Whereas Heidegger would not have regarded himself as a nihilist, Vattimo knowingly reads Heidegger “better” than he would have read, and understood, himself. To this end, Vattimo sees the death of God and the end of metaphysics as being essentially synonymous as marking the occurrence of nihilism. The latter term does not signify a state in which in there are no values at all, but in which the highest values have devalued themselves.4 It is the event in which those who pay heed to the “signs of the times,”5 that is, who are faithful to the event, realise that there are no objective values or absolute foundations. This insight is not itself merely a piece of knowledge in the fixed, certain, Cartesian sense of the term. Rather, it comes from a keen historical sense that one is historically 2

Gianni Vattimo and Piergiorgio Paterlini, Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 27. 3 Gianni Vattimo, Della realtà: Fini della filosofia (Milan: Garzanti, 2012), 134. 4 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by J. Snyder (Cambridge: The Polity Press 1988), 20-21. 5 Gianni Vattimo, “The Trace of the Trace,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Religion (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1998), 91.

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conditioned by openings. The one such historical opening that is the event in which nihilism becomes apparent is what Vattimo, after Heidegger, refers to as the Ereignis, the event of appropriation.6 The latter occurs in the “first flashing up” of the violence of metaphysics at its culmination in the Ge-Stell, of the universal “enframing” of humans and the “rest” of nature alike in the totally calculated, measured world of techno-science. Universal manipulation is the logical consequence of metaphysics historically played out in the world of generalised, mass communication (in Vattimo’s work; Heidegger did not live long enough to see beyond industrial mechanised manipulation, the reach of which is nowhere near as far). Metaphysics aimed at rational governance, measurement and manipulation, reducing the known and unknown alike back to fixed, universal first principles. Atemporal in Plato, historical yet still transcendent within Christianity, metaphysics becomes internalised in the secularised subjectivity of Descartes, with the transcendent receding from view in Kant to its radical immanence in Logical Positivism and science. The will to mastery grabs hold of humans, nature, and even the sense of reality in the whirling, de-centred proliferation of world pictures in the age of mass communication.7 Taking hold of and weakening metaphysical principles such as subject and object, reality and unreality, the apex of metaphysics yields our sole opportunity for liberation: through recognising the contingency of all beliefs and knowledge, as well as encouraging yet more plurality through admixing traces of metaphysics with the jarring, heterodox and marginal, one can “twist” away from the violence of metaphysics. Dialectically overcoming metaphysics is no longer either desirable or possible, for radical plurality and the collapse of the Soviet Union have led to the end of metanarratives and of modernity and the logic of the novum. This, then, is Vattimo’s “weak thought” (pensiero debole); we cannot leave behind traces of metaphysics, but we must “twist” away from their violence. Following Heidegger,8 Vattimo calls for a Verwindung of metaphysics,9 of bringing thinking in line with the “signs of the times.” Out of the conflict of traditions (or, as a hermeneutician, of “interpretations”), of traces of metaphysics based upon the situation into which we are thrown we must move towards dialogue, syncretism, ironic

6

Vattimo, “Towards an Ontology of Decline,” 72-73. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1992), 116-117. 8 Martin Heidegger, “On the Question of Being,” in William McNeill (ed.) Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 313. 9 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 171-176. 7

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distortion and the play of taking on and discarding masks from the costume box of the history of ideas.

2. Vattimo’s return to religion It is just this kind of ironic distortion Vattimo performs on Christianity, in a return to an altered form of the religion of his childhood in what Giovanni Giorgio refers to as Vattimo’s most recent phase of thought.10 Why choose Christianity, and how has Vattimo “twisted” it? Partly this choice was to do with his own personal heritage and the advancing years of his friends and he himself, too. Philosophically, Vattimo was eager to ground hermeneutics historically in order to prevent it from becoming a form of “anything goes” relativism. Due to his assumptions that all forms of metaphysics are violent, he did not want there to be any “rightist” interpretation of Heidegger (and by left and right, think along Hegelian lines) in which a “return of Being” was possible, a tendency he thinks he can find, somewhat unfairly, in the philosophies of alterity in the works of Derrida and Levinas.11 Finally, Vattimo wants his hermeneutical nihilism to yield an ethic.12 One of the principal advantages of the philosophies of Derrida and Levinas is that alterity, grounded in the transcendent “Other,” provides an ethic of concern for the “other” that trumps any individual or cultural standard. Through his “leftist” interpretation of Heidegger, Vattimo wants to ground an historical ethic (which is really a criterion for interpretation). Therefore, Vattimo has worked hard to steer clear from a “right” Heideggerian approach, whilst simultaneously trying to generate an ethical ideal which also historically grounds hermeneutics. Why, then, does Vattimo draw upon religious concepts? Vattimo gets from trying to ground hermeneutics historically to religious concepts via the notions of “emancipation” and “charity.” Concerning emancipation, Vattimo argues against relativism and reactive nihilism (retreating back into group identities) by stating that one should consider nihilism and the play of interpretations as an opportunity: “Instead of reacting to the dissolution of the principle of reality by attempting to recuperate a sense of identity and belonging that are at once reassuring and punitive, it is a

10

Giovanni Giorgio, Il pensiero di Gianni Vattimo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2006), 12. 11 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36-37. 12 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1997), 40.

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matter of grasping nihilism as a chance…of emancipation.”13 Hermeneutical nihilism can be an opportunity to free ourselves from authoritarianism and from adhering to strong structures and hardened identities. With this opportunity for emancipation, though, goes responsibility to negotiate one’s way through the play of interpretations by recognising that other people are doing so, too: “Thinking that no longer understands itself as the recognition and acceptance of an objective authoritarian foundation will develop a new sense of responsibility as ready and able, literally, to respond to others whom, insofar as it is not founded on the eternal structure of Being, it knows to be its ‘provenance’.’’14 Implicit within this quotation is a reference to what Vattimo has since developed more explicitly as his theory of truth, the notion of truth as friendship: “Amica veritas, sed magis amicus Plato, perhaps. Is it chance that some philosophers…speak today about a principle of charity?”15 This important passage brings together Vattimo’s thinking on nihilism, hermeneutics, truth and ethics. Immediately, Vattimo acknowledges that there will be objections to engaging with the principle of charity, not least because it could appear like a metaphysical principle. Vattimo situates charity within the Christian tradition of the West, even though other philosophers such as Donald Davidson had been developing the principle of charity in recent times already and broadly independently of this tradition. On the basis of the principle of charity, Vattimo sees it as necessary to engage with religion. Vattimo searches around for a way of looking at hermeneutics and charity in order to ground the liberation of interpretative plurality more positively. To this end, Vattimo compares and contrasts two western “archetypal” expressions pertaining to plurality: Aristotle’s to on léghetai pollachôs (“Being is said in many ways”), and St Paul’s “multifariam multisque modis olim loquens Deus patribus in prophetis” (Hebrews 1:1; “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets”; NRSV).16 The context of the phrase from Aristotle is his idea of substance, whereas the context for St Paul’s statement is the incarnation of the son of God, understood by Vattimo to be kenosis, a theological phrase that usually refers to God’s self-emptying in the incarnation and used in a highly unorthodox way here. While Vattimo had mentioned secularisation and Christianity before Beyond Interpretation, the introduction of the term kenosis was something new in his philosophy. In Beyond Interpretation, 13

Ibid. Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 46. 14

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Vattimo relates his version of kenosis to Aristotle’s phrase “Being is said in many ways.” Vattimo does this because the nihilistic ontology he is trying to “discern in hermeneutics is…a ‘contamination’ of Aristotelian pluralism by Pauline ‘historicism’.”17 For Vattimo, this “contamination” is the Verwindung of Aristotelian metaphysics performed by postmodern philosophers through locating it within a history of weakening. Vattimo thinks that Aristotle’s expression by itself, even without a reference to substance, is an “objectivistic-metaphysical thesis (the Being is said in many ways because, and only because, it is in many ways).”18 The contradiction Vattimo sees within Aristotle’s phrase, between metaphysical stability and proto-hermeneutical plurivocity, is resolved by placing the phrase within a history of weakening of strong structures, along the lines indicated by St Paul. The incarnation is referred to by Vattimo as a “key event” which confers meaning “on the many preceding and succeeding events.”19 The historicising effect of the Pauline notion of the incarnation on Aristotle’s understanding of the plurivocity of Being is to create a nihilistic ontology without hierarchy that is paradigmatic for, and historically grounding of, contemporary hermeneutics. Elsewhere, in the later work Belief, Vattimo again cites Hebrews 1:1, although, unlike in Beyond Interpretation, Vattimo adds “in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”20 Here he does not use the word “kenosis,” but links the passage to others with which he has established a kenotic theme. Kenosis usually refers to the so-called “Christ Hymn” of Philippians, chapter 2. Unlike Hebrews, Philippians is conventionally attributed to Paul. Oddly, Vattimo cites once, but never quotes, the text from Philippians.21 Nevertheless, he does refer to the Pauline theme of kenosis as “God’s abasement to the level of humanity.”22 Does Vattimo think kenosis refers to an action in the life of God? In a dialogue with Giovanni Giorgio and Carmelo Dotolo recorded in their book Dio: la possibilità buona, Vattimo warns against this interpretation of kenosis, for it could turn into a metaphysical theology very quickly.23 Indeed, it is

17

Ibid., 47. Ibid. 19 Ibid., 46. 20 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 79. 21 Ibid., 39. 22 Ibid. 23 Gianni Vattimo and Carmelo Dotolo, “Cristianesimo e storia: capire la secolarizzazione,” in Giovanni Giorgio (ed.), Dio: la possibilità buona: Un 18

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doubtful that Paul, even with all his learning, conceived of kenosis in a metaphysical sense, even if his texts were a gift to later theologians in the creeds, councils and controversies over the next few centuries after he wrote. Vattimo regards all metaphysics as violent, and he has expressed his belief that there has been a nexus of violence in what Heidegger originally called onto-theology. In the onto-theological God of the philosophers, metaphysical qualities such as “omnipotence, absoluteness, eternity and ‘transcendence’’’ were added to the biblical God.24 Already there was plenty of violence within religion through what Vattimo, drawing upon the theological anthropology of René Girard,25 calls the “victimary mechanism” of the “natural sacred” (or, the “naturally religious”). Human societies are characterised by what Girard calls mimetic desire, of wanting what the other has. Over time this escalates to the level in which it threatens to consume society. The victimary mechanism functions to deflect this violence onto a scapegoat. Gradually this has been ritualised, transcribing anthropological conditions into a religious structure. Equating metaphysics with the natural religious, Vattimo sees secularisation as a desacralisation of all transcendence, whereas Girard has viewed desacralisation very differently. As Erik Meganck puts it: for Girard “Desacralisation means that Christianity delivers transcendence from all violence. To Vattimo, it should mean delivering thought from all transcendence.”26 The difference between these two thinkers goes to the heart of their respective theoretical positions and further discussion goes beyond the scope of the present paper. Kenosis, God’s abasement, is the inauguration of secularisation by which Vattimo understands a de-sacralisation, the weakening of the nexus of violence bound up within onto-theology; whereas Girard was reluctant to develop a theory along these lines, Vattimo has no such concerns. In other words, secularisation is a process that undoes the violence not only of metaphysics, but also of religion. If kenosis is not a description of an event in the life of God in a (super)naturalistic or metaphysical sense, what is it? In one sense it is the idea that God has moved out of eternity and into time. This interpretation of kenosis in Vattimo’s thought has been put colloquio sulla soglia tra filosofia e teologia (Soveria Mannelli, Calabria: Rubbettino, 2009), 4. 24 Vattimo, Belief, 39. 25 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London and New York: The Athlone Press, 1987), passim. 26 Erik Meganck, “‘Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera …’ Secularisation and violence in Vattimo and Girard,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 74(5) (2013), 420.

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forward by Luca D’Isanto.27 There is some evidence in Vattimo’s work for this interpretation, particularly when Vattimo states that kenosis goes back as far as the covenant and even creation. Nevertheless, kenosis for Vattimo is framed in more than spatio-temporal terms, but should be appreciated as having a dispositional basis. Vattimo takes kenosis as a message of God’s abasement. Caring little for the formation of the canon, Vattimo takes the central kenotic message to be from the Gospel of John, of God’s abasement from the position of master of humanity to being its friend (John 15:15). In a bold move, Vattimo draws upon Wilhelm Dilthey to explain plausibly how God’s kenosis as weakening in terms of a message of friendship effected secularisation as a “stimulus” for freedom from metaphysics.28 Dilthey argued that Christianity inaugurated an important moment in the history of metaphysics by contributing to the formation of the subject. By virtue of a message of brotherly love through faith, Christians turned inwards, away from concern with Messianic-inspired political hopes (for Jews) or the Platonic forms (for gentile converts).29 The turn inwards, inspired by God’s message of unconditional love for all through friendship in the message of kenosis, became lost or downplayed due to the absorption of Christianity in the Roman Empire, with men such as Augustine doing all that was required to maintain civilisation in face of its collapse. Although Vattimo does not spell it out, there is the implication in his thought that the turn inward under Paul and Augustine feeds into the history of metaphysics as trace picked up on by Descartes, leading to the mastery of the world in the Ge-Stell and the first flashing up of Ereignis. There is deep ambiguity in Vattimo’s return to Christianity about whether he is looking for an explanation of our currently irreducibly plural world in a historical, causal sense, or whether he is merely reaching for a personal ground and limit for his own hermeneutical practise. Thomas Guarino has written that “At times Vattimo speaks as if the Incarnation of the Eternal Word is an objective, historical reality,”30 such as when Vattimo writes that the “Son” has become human “in the bosom of Mary.”31 Nevertheless, Guarino notes that Vattimo’s more considered 27

Luca D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 5. 28 Gianni Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 35. 29 Wihelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. Ramon J. Betzanos (Detroit and London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1979), 229. 30 Thomas Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 98. 31 Vattimo, After Christianity, 60.

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view is that kenosis is the “effective history” (to use Gadamer’s phrase) of the West, a metaphor or symbol “which exercises an enormous influence” on civilisation.32 While Vattimo ceaselessly emphasises that he appeals to Christianity rather than, say, Buddhism due to his thrownness,33 he also acknowledges his situatedness within the history and heritage of Europe, extending the influence of the Bible to all of the classics of European literature that, ultimately, constitute the limits of our horizons.34 Indeed, even Guarino sees that kenosis, for Vattimo, somehow “gives rise to weak thought.”35 Incapable of proof or disproof, Vattimo feels his interpretation of the contribution of the kenosis to secularisation as the history of Being (viz., Western thought) has plausibility from the event horizon of living after the death of God. Whatever Vattimo’s motives, it is clear that for him the archetype of kenosis yields a hermeneutical principle of caritas, of brotherly love with no conditions except that of listening to the other. Caritas is not an absolute principle for Vattimo, but more like a postmodern categorical imperative along Kantian lines; once one turns inward and recognises one’s own situatedness and tradition, one should realise the other like oneself and wish to enter into a friendly dialogue with them.36 In order to do this, one should also recognise the “signs of the times” in which we are living. Here Vattimo draws upon yet another unlikely resource in the writings of Joachim of Fiore. Joachim, a twelfth-century abbot from Calabria (a place of personal significance also to Vattimo, for he lived there for a while) divided history into three “stases” or epochs: that of the Father, the Son, and of the Spirit. The age of the Father, commensurable with the Old Testament, is one of the letter and authority, that of the Son (from the time of Jesus to the present day) is one of filial obedience with the rise of the Church, the final age to come is that of the Spirit and this is of increasing lightening and weakening of bonds in newfound spiritual maturity. Joachim identified the Spirit with a barefoot monastic order, which leant itself to being interpreted with the Franciscans in mind. Vattimo, and his pupil Santiago Zabala, have referred to the current age as the “Age of Interpretation,”37 in which literalism would leave one apart from taking up the possibility of an increasingly “spiritual” (or, weaker) 32

Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, 99. Vattimo et al., Interrogazioni sul cristianesimo, 52. 34 Vattimo, Della realtà, 125. 35 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, 176 n. 205. 36 Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42. 37 Santiago Zabala, “A Religion Without Theists or Atheists,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 43. 33

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interpretation of tradition to enable friendship with the other.38 Rather, a “spiritual” interpretation of traces of tradition is required in order to think in accordance with the opening of the Age of Interpretation, that is, nihilism.

3. Criticisms of Vattimo’s return to religion Vattimo’s return to religion has intrigued philosophers and theologians alike. However, whereas the former group have for the most part said relatively little about his return, Vattimo has attracted some strident criticism from theological quarters. Arguably the two most vocal critics have been Frederiek Depoortere, a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Unit of Systematic Theology and the Study of Religions at KU Leuven, and Anthony J. Sciglitano Jr., Associate Professor of Religion at Seton Hall University. Without being an apologist for Vattimo, it is necessary to engage with his critics in order to further the conversation concerning the place of Christianity after the death of God. Depoortere’s criticisms of Vattimo’s return to religion are more easily dealt with and will be critically assessed in relation to the way in which Vattimo uses Paul’s texts and ideas to begin with. By contrast, Sciglitano’s criticisms are fewer but more focussed and addressing them will be the principal focus for the remainder of the paper. Depoortere’s criticisms of Vattimo’s interpretation of Christianity are listed in the opening chapter of his book Christ in Postmodern Philosophy. “It is clear,” Depoortere writes, “that [Vattimo’s] version of Christianity is a very reduced one” for reasons such as his “limited” use of Scripture (Depoortere cites John 15:15 and Philippians 2:7), “read completely isolated from any context,” and that “Vattimo’s version of kenosis is a very poor one.”39 On the latter point, Depoortere writes that Vattimo “only reads half of the Christological hymn found in Philippians 2 and so simply skips the part in which the exaltation of Christ is mentioned,”40 echoing a similar point made by Marta Frascati-Lochhead a decade earlier.41 Similarly, another theologian Frans Vosman has criticised Vattimo for

38

Vattimo, After Christianity, 26. Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Theology: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 21. 40 Ibid. 41 Marta Frascati-Lochhead, Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 154-155. 39

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reading John 15:15 out of context, too.42 Depoortere also states that “the incarnation indeed plays a role in his philosophy, but without the cross and without the resurrection” and that Vattimo’s Christianity is “heterodox,”43 concluding that his Christianity is “philosophical” and that there is no “interchange” between philosophy and theology, a point also made by Thomas Guarino, who accuses Vattimo of filling up old wineskins with an “alien new vintage.”44 These criticisms can be countered by considering what Vattimo is trying to do. In a less accusatory tone, Thomas Guarino has also stated that “Vattimo has little interest…in ‘reconstructive’ hermeneutics, i.e., in the recovery of a stable textual meaning that endures over the course of time.”45 It would not matter to Vattimo to find parallel phrases in contemporary Greek texts for a phrase found in Philippians, for instance. Rather, as Guarino acknowledges, the relationship between the text and the reader is not for Vattimo one of passively receiving tradition, but creating a spiritually and socially liberating conversation between the traces of tradition and the hermeneutical situatedness of the reader. This in turn generates new Being by “twisting” the tradition to relieve it of its metaphysical strength in an indefinite process of interpretation and reinterpretation. With this understanding of Vattimo’s intentions, it becomes clearer what traditional Christian terms mean for him. Although Depoortere thinks Vattimo does not deal with the resurrection, in his dialogue with Pierangelo Sequeri and Giovanni Ruggeri entitled Interrogazioni sul Cristianesimo, Vattimo makes clear that he believes Christ is resurrected because what Jesus said was so attractive he cannot not believe in him.46 In some ways this is the opposite of Alain Badiou’s position. For Badiou, like with St. Paul on the road to Damascus, an event has meaning because it is personally transformative in a way that cannot be reduced to a message. Similarly to Badiou, the event is transformative and inescapable, but for Vattimo the event is grounded on the strength in weakness of Jesus’ message of charity and the message of God’s kenosis in Jesus. Concerning Badiou, Depoortere has indicated he believes that “anachronistic interpretations” of Scripture “can shed fresh light on these all-too-familiar texts” and that “it is a basic insight of hermeneutics that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the intention of its author or the 42

Frans Vosman, “God as Friend: Vattimo’s Challenge to Catholic Theology,” Bijdragen, 61 (2000), 418. 43 Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 21. 44 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, 152. 45 Ibid., 129. 46 Vattimo et al., Interrogazioni sul cristianesimo, 49.

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way it was understood by its first readers…the new context can produce new and unheard-of meanings.”47 Depoortere’s assessment of the value of Badiou’s approach to ancient texts has merit, although there are parallels between Badiou’s and Vattimo’s treatment of Scripture as both are trying to form a conversation with the past in order to release us from violence in the present. Nevertheless, it is debatable whether Vattimo succeeds in removing violence, especially as his approach to interpretation can be arbitrary. For example, Erik Meganck notes that while Vattimo is fond of quoting John 15:15 in which Jesus announces that he is no longer the master of human beings, but their friend, Vattimo omits reference to the preceding verse in which Jesus links friendship to doing what he commands.48 Meganck sees the arbitrariness in this approach the kind of metaphysics Vattimo is trying to avoid. Is arbitrariness metaphysical, and therefore violent?49 Or is arbitrariness a symptom of the “liberation of metaphor,” and perhaps therefore a recognition that more traditional forms of exegesis and interpretative standards no longer apply? Sciglitano, on the other hand, has more readily acknowledged Vattimo’s method, but claims that some of Vattimo’s conclusions may be harmful irrespective of the question of “validity.” He initially put forward his criticisms of Vattimo in an article for Modern Theology entitled “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity.” One of his points was that Vattimo’s interpretation of Christianity was “a form of Marcionism,”50 and here the links with St. Paul become more pronounced. Marcion of Pontus was a second century Christian writer based in Rome who thought the gods of the Old and New Testaments were not the same. Accepting only a much reduced canon compared to the one that that has been inherited, for Marcion only the Gospel of Luke and letters of Paul could be judged as the message of the Father, the “God of Love” of Jesus Christ. Other works considered for the canon bore the hallmarks of the “Judaisers” with whom the cruel God of the Old Testament (the Creator) was associated. It should be clear that being associated with Marcion’s ideas draws one close to attitudes that today would be regarded as anti-Semitic. Sciglitano’s 47

Frederiek Depoortere, “Badiou’s Paul,” in Peter Frick (ed.) Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 163. 48 Meganck, “‘Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera …’ Secularisation and violence in Vattimo and Girard,” 420. 49 Ibid., 430, n. 3. 50 Anthony C. Sciglitano, “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity,” Modern Theology, 2(4) (2007), 546.

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criticism of Vattimo as a Marcionite was a brief aside in his 2007 article, the main focus of which was showing how Vattimo was effectively a death of God theologian. However, this criticism is of central importance in his more recent chapter on Vattimo in a volume edited by Peter Frick, Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers. Sciglitano links Vattimo’s acceptance of Joachim’s historical schema with Marcionism. After Christianity is the principal text of Vattimo’s that Sciglitano identifies as having supersessionist undertones, in which through a “metanarrative formula” Vattimo moves “from an externalist metaphysical law-giving God to the revelation of God as Love in the form of a particular person…to the diffusion of Spirit in the community.”51 “In other words,” writes Sciglitano, “Vattimo’s reading of salvation history not only marginalizes the sacramental structures of Christian life and practice, but also juxtaposes the Pauline kenotic God to the Jewish transcendent God in ways that suggest anti-Judaism and Marcionism.”52 Having been rebuked by John D. Caputo in 2007 for adopting Joachimism in a way that Caputo regarded as supersessionist,53 Sciglitano believes Vattimo has consciously toned-down his use of Joachim.54 What Sciglitano does not consider is whether this downplaying is due to philosophical persuasion or prudence. Any kind of small, incidental point in which Vattimo seems to have a more positive appraisal of Judaism and/or the Old Testament Sciglitano has got covered. For instance, Vattimo mentions on more than one occasion that “kenosis” includes creation,55 an act primarily associated with the Old Testament. Nevertheless, Sciglitano has got an answer for this, that even the creative act is subsumed by a category (kenosis) that is bound to the New Testament dispensation, thus showing how redemption and kenosis have surpassed the Old Testament revelation.56 Where Vattimo has run together “Judaeo-Christian” (or anything of this kind), such as in After Christianity,57 Sciglitano also sees this continuity as 51

Anthony C. Sciglitano, “Gianni Vattimo and Saint Paul: Ontological Weakening, Kenosis, and Secularity,” in Peter Frick (ed.), Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 131. 52 Ibid., 133. 53 John D. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 79. 54 Sciglitano, “Gianni Vattimo and St. Paul,” 132. 55 Vattimo, Belief, 66; Gianni Vattimo, “After Onto-Theology: Philosophy Between Science and Religion,” in Mark Wrathall (ed.), Religion After Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 35. 56 Sciglitano, “Gianni Vattimo and St. Paul,” 137. 57 Vattimo, After Christianity, 7.

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implying supersession (“Christian” coming after “Jewish”58). Therefore, in order to show that Vattimo is not supersessionist in any kind of antiSemitic or metanarrative-based way (which would be repugnant or selfcontradictory, respectively), it is necessary to delve further into Vattimo’s theoretical framework, specifically his understanding of Heidegger’s notion of Being as event.

4. Being as event Sciglitano’s contention is that Vattimo juxtaposed not two gods, as Marcion did, but “stages of ‘revelation’.”59 This remained a “genuine temptation for Vattimo” up to and possibly including his 2009 book, A Farewell to Truth. Although Sciglitano does not explore the implications of Vattimo giving up his Marcionite interpretation of Joachim (if he did), it would raise questions about continuity (ontological or otherwise) and the uniqueness of the Christ-event. Nevertheless, as Luca Bagetto notes in his essay “Deciding to Bear Witness,” for Vattimo “The coming-before and the coming-after describe a procedure that is not peacefully continuous. They imply tension, a comparison of testimonies, the confrontation between an Old and a New Testament.”60 In Vattimo’s thought, this tension is expressed through the notion of Verwindung. The traces of a previous eventual disclosure are received, yet show themselves in a different way, in light of a new opening. By using Heidegger’s language of resignation-convalescence-alteration, Vattimo gives the impression that thought from a previous eventual disclosure is worse than the Being that is produced in the present. In truth, Vattimo admits he, like Heidegger, has an ambivalent relationship with traces from the past. For instance, it would be wrong, Vattimo states, to regard the history of metaphysics as if it was a series of foolish or pernicious errors, let alone “evil” in the apocalyptic sense in which Sciglitano would have him bracketed.61 Rather, whereas in the past metaphysics acted as a way to make sense of a world in which change and diversity were regarded as confusing and threatening, from the situation in which we have been thrown we not only need, but also have to weaken metaphysics insofar as foundational first principles are 58

Sciglitano, “Gianni Vattimo and St. Paul,” 135, n. 62. Ibid., 137. 60 Luca Bagetto, “Deciding to Bear Witness: Revolutionary Rupture and Liberal Continuity in Weak Thought,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 191. 61 Sciglitano, “Gianni Vattimo and St. Paul,” 140. 59

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extravagant, unnecessary, and restrictive upon the irreducible hermeneutical plurality of voices that constitute the ontology of actuality. To understand Vattimo’s notion of the event and its implications for the accusations of Marcionism levelled at his interpretation of Christianity, it is important to look at some of Vattimo’s more recent work. In his tiny pamphlet on Heidegger and in his Gifford Lectures,62 Vattimo has elaborated on how he understands the notion of event, which has been criticised as empty and formalistic by philosophers in conversation with Vattimo such as Van Harvey,63 in a way to make it more specific, in no small part by drawing on the work of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. While Sciglitano is correct in identifying that Vattimo, following Heidegger, prioritises truth as opening to truth as correspondence, there is good reason for believing that Vattimo does not subscribe to any form of supersessionism. This is because increasingly Vattimo has drawn his understanding of Being as eventuality (or “opening”) towards Kuhn’s paradigm concept. It is fair to say that Vattimo has had an interest in Kuhn’s work for a long time, citing his famous 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as an indication that hermeneutics has penetrated even the realms of science as far back as the mid-1980s.64 Nevertheless, Kuhn’s influence upon Vattimo has come to the fore in recent years. It is difficult to tell how far Vattimo is using Kuhn’s terminology to clarify certain aspects of the notion of the event for a more general audience less acquainted with Heidegger’s works, or whether the connections he has been making between the two authors is indicative of Vattimo’s “left Heideggerian” focus on history. Nevertheless, the rest of this paper will, with some caution, assume the latter to be the case and so will draw upon this interesting resource within his thought to solve this problem of supersessionism, although this identification will not escape scrutiny. In his short pamphlet on Heidegger, Vattimo likens the epochal nature of Being in its history to the paradigms of Kuhn: “Allora per Heidegger, se l’Essere non è Oggetività, ma ciò che si dà entro schemi storico-culturali, che lui chiama epoche (o paradigm, per dirla con Kuhn), la Storia di questi paradigm è ciò che lui chiama la Storia dell’Essere.”65 Three years earlier, in his Gifford Lectures given in Glasgow and included in his 2012 62

Gianni Vattimo, Heidegger (Milan: Booktime, 2013), 32-33, 42-43; Vattimo, Della realtà, 122-132 (the third lecture, “L’essere e l’evento”). 63 Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, “Hermeneutics, Authority, Tradition,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 73. 64 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 90-91. 65 Vattimo, Heidegger, 33.

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work Della realtà, Vattimo elaborated on how the Kuhnian paradigm concept can act as a model to understand not only the founding of a historical, contingent, epochal ground, but also the relationship between truth as opening and truth as correspondence. Vattimo writes: “Verità come alétheia è il darsi storico del paradigm, che, non essendo struttura eterna di un Essere metafisico e parmenideo, va pensato come evento. Ma verità è anche la proposizione verificata secondo i criteri propri del paradigm, dunque la scienza normale nel senso di Kuhn.”66 In other words, the opening is the revolution, the paradigm-shift, whereas the subsequent work completed within the historical opening is the normal science, the truth as correspondence that works itself out along routine lines in accordance with the norms and regulations founded by the horizons constituted by the truth as opening. From where does the historical opening as paradigm-shift come about? Given Vattimo’s aversion to “vertical” transcendence, it would be wrong to think of historical openings as some kind of mystical rupture, an intersection between history and eternity. Instead, Vattimo proposes what Giovanni Giorgio has called a “horizontal transcendence” in which an opening comes out from, and constitutes a new, horizon that transcends and encloses Dasein.67 Vattimo locates the origin of paradigms (or epochal openings, events) with era-defining texts. For Kuhn these were texts in the history of science such as Newton’s Principia,68 a “concrete scientific achievement” around which people would build a living tradition.69 It is doubtful that Kuhn would have been comfortable completely reducing paradigms to classic texts, as he thought that paradigms emerge out of anomalies in older theories accumulating to the point of the collapse of the old theory (previous paradigm).70 Nevertheless, Vattimo steers Kuhn closer to identifying the paradigm with the text. In the case of Vattimo, classic texts are milestones in culture that, surprisingly, Vattimo identifies along national lines (at least in the examples he provides). In his pamphlet on Heidegger, Vattimo writes “Shakespeare per gli inglesi, Dante per gli italiani, Cervantes per gli spagnoli. Queste persone hanno modificato la

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Vattimo, Della realtà, 125. Giovanni Giorgio, “Introduzione: Pensare l’incarnazione,” in Giovanni Giorgio (ed.), Dio: la possibilità buona: Un colloquio sulla soglia tra filosofia e teologia (Soveria Mannelli, Calabria: Rubbettino, 2009), xvi. 68 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10. 69 Ibid., 11. 70 Ibid., 89. 67

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lingua e hanno trasformato il nostro modo di vedere il mondo.”71 Nevertheless, he also writes “Personalmente, dopo aver letto Dostoevskij non sono più lo stesso. E questo è l’inizio di un’epoca: ciò accade anche per popoli e lingue.”72 Here Vattimo implies that although individual writers such as Shakespeare, Cervantes and Dante have made indelible, paradigmatic, era-defining impressions beyond the levels of the national character and culture, that is, ontologically, eventuality occurs at the level of the greatness of language from any situation, even nineteenth-century Russia, to effect a personal transformation. This account of the nature of event is reminiscent of Alain Badiou’s conception of this term in his work on St. Paul; in other words, the event can be a personal transformation. Badiou knows that there is more to the event than the personal, for St. Paul is, for him, the living embodiment of a paradox: a militant subject due to a personal event bearing witness to the impersonal event of the resurrection.73 From Badiou’s work on St. Paul alone it is unclear how the personal and impersonal relate to one another without recourse to something Badiou does not wish to entertain: the intervention of the miraculous (which he regards as a fable) giving either the resurrection an ontically real status and/or being the efficient cause of Paul’s “conversion” on the road to Damascus, filling him with a sense of vocation to testify to the event of the resurrection. Arguably, Vattimo explains the link between the impersonal and personal in the event more effectively by anchoring personal transformation in language. The latter, along broadly Gadamerian lines in which “Being, that can be understood, is language,”74 acts as the intersection between the personal (the transformative event within one’s life through encounter with the text) and the impersonal (the broader effect on language through inaugurating new metaphors, schemas, thematics, discourses) without recourse to vertical transcendence and with more explanatory purchase. The crucial benefit of drawing upon Kuhn’s paradigm concept when it comes to dealing with Sciglitano’s accusation of Marcionism is that paradigms are incommensurable and equal in value. Famously, Kuhn stated that “Copernicus’ theory was not more accurate than Ptolemy’s and 71

Vattimo, Heidegger, 43. Ibid. 73 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. by Ray Brassier (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19. 74 Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 57; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Verità e metodo, trans. by Gianni Vattimo (Milan: Bompiani, 1983), 542. 72

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did not lead directly to any improvement in the calendar.”75 On this view, if epochs are paradigmatic then one eventual disclosure is no better than another: they are merely different. Sciglitano himself regards the kenosis of God as one such “event” in the history of the withdrawal of Being for Vattimo.76 If kenosis is one event, and the Old Testament revelation is another, and if the “Age of Interpretation” is another such event (whether or not any of these events are textual, personal, or “macro” shall be discussed below), then on this Kuhnian reading of epochality they are neither better, nor worse than one another. Therefore, not only is Vattimo not Marcionite with respect to believing in two separate gods (as Sciglitano admits), but also he is not Marcionite in viewing revelation in a supersessionist way (as Sciglitano maintains in both his articles on Vattimo). Where Vattimo runs into difficulties is in reconciling his paradigmatic conception of the event, a conception of disclosure that emphasises rupture, and the Hegelian thematic of secularisation/weakening of which Jesus’ message is the inaugurating event. It is almost as though Vattimo requires there to be a master event that nudges every other in the direction of weakening. The mixture of Hegel, Heidegger and Kuhn is an uncomfortable one. Nevertheless, without some kind of master event or golden thread that runs through these epochal paradigms, there would only be left some kind of empty relativism in which “anything goes.” On the one hand absolutist claims leave us cold as strong thought is neither plausible, nor required. On the other hand, there is nothing preventing minority groups retreating into their own identities, shunning dialogue amid competing truth claims. Between these approaches to truth and Being in late-modernity, Vattimo realises he cannot have recourse to a vertically transcendent, “violent,” principle (although some critics of Vattimo, such as Jonkers, have questioned whether all transcendence has to be violent77). Equally redundant would be to impose some once-for-all “theory of communicative action” or other Habermasian system that is too rigid and unfounded in what Vattimo sees as a necessity to engage with history. Here Vattimo is ingenious in appealing to the Bible.

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Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 154. Sciglitano, “Gianni Vattimo and St. Paul,” 119. 77 Peter Jonkers, “In the World, but not of the World: The Prospects of Christianity in the Modern World,” Bijdragen, 61 (2000), 389. 76

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5. The Spirit and the Letter From the standpoint of European late-modernity, and with a cautiously pragmatic eye on the necessity of forging dialogue out of interpretative conflict, one can see the Bible as the ontological anchor in a weakened, historically-contingent way that constitutes the possibility of, and archetype for, hermeneutics. The difficulty of mixing Hegel (the “grand narrative” approach that Sciglitano identifies in Vattimo’s use of Joachim), Heidegger and Kuhn can be reconciled by trying to bring in more biblical resources from a hermeneutically nihilistic standpoint akin to Vattimo’s. In so doing, one can steer Vattimo back towards St. Paul in the process, drawing upon his distinction between the “spirit” and the “letter” in order to clarify how one can think being in light of the “signs of the times.” Vattimo does not deal with the spirit/letter distinction directly, although the terms do arise in his general treatment of Christianity. According to Paul in 2 Corinthians 3 there is a difference between the “spirit” and the “letter.” Whereas the letter kills, the spirit gives life and freedom. Paul uses this dichotomy to bring out the contrast between the old and new covenants. The letter of the law will “kill” as it is an external demand requiring obedience, whereas the Spirit gives life because it comes from within. The letter “killing” and the Spirit “giving life” is a theme taken up by Augustine.78 It is not necessary to dwell on Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s famous passage, not least because Vattimo does not either. Interestingly, Vattimo seems to find a companion more in the above-mentioned Joachim of Fiore than Augustine. Vattimo writes “Joachim’s text can still be our guide because of the general meaning of the age of spirit, which stresses not the letter, but the spirit of revelation; no longer servants but friends; no longer awe or faith but charity; and perhaps not action but contemplation.”79 This quotation from Vattimo’s After Christianity brings all the pieces together. The Age of the Spirit (or “Interpretation,” for Vattimo) is the current age, the epoch of nihilism in which his understanding of kenosis, as the revelation of the friendliness of God through Christ, has reached its secularising culmination. By “secularisation,” we recall, Vattimo means the stripping away of the “violent” naturally sacred features, such as authoritarianism in all its forms, with charity taking its place. The “spiritual interpretation” of Scripture involves, Vattimo thinks, an “overturning of superstition, and persecution of the clergy, and predicts that the ‘blind awe of the people 78

Augustine, “The Spirit and the Letter,” in John Burnaby (ed.), Augustine: Later Works (London: SCM Press, 1955), passim. 79 Vattimo, After Christianity, 31.

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toward the wise and its priests’ shall be no more.”80 With the decline of literalism, or the “letter” of the texts, “sacred texts will no longer be the exclusive heritage of priestly authority,”81 the kind of external authority that Paul associated with the “letter.” One can think of examples today such as Catholic dogma against the ordination of women and against same sex couples. If Christ’s death was to reveal the violence of the natural sacred and the naturally religious, his resurrection can be seen in the rising up of the spiritualisation of the world, which includes not only Scripture, but also any authoritarian, “strong” structures that are dependent upon literalism to maintain their power. On this reading of Vattimo, he has a lot in common with Rudolf Bultmann, who tried to “demythologise” the New Testament of the “bizarre” features it had retained as a result of its New Testament worldview of angels, demons and spirits. For Bultmann, the kerygma of the New Testament involved the “rising up” in faith of the disciples, rather than a literal body rising up out of the tomb. Bultmann, for all he was influenced by Heidegger, still believed in the programme of demythologisation. With his nihilistic style of weak thought, Vattimo, though, acknowledges the disenchantment even with the programme of disenchantment, and that even demythologisation is a myth.82 Nevertheless, like Bultmann he sees the danger in literalism and its tendency to give rise to authoritarianism. David Newheiser, in his article on Vattimo’s use of Joachim of Fiore, laments that Vattimo is “hostile” to literal readings of Scripture, stating that if Vattimo was more open to other viewpoints and ways of reading texts then this would enrich his own hermeneutics.83 Newheiser quotes Joachim himself remarking how “something happened” to him after reading a particular text. Ironically, Vattimo’s own accounts of the effect of reading Dostoyevsky are remarkably similar. The difference between the two thinkers, Joachim and Vattimo, takes the former’s value for the latter into account; Vattimo can have a personal transformation circumscribed within the bounds of the larger horizon of the ontology of actuality. Language has a transformative power based on the way in which individual classic texts have reconfigured the way in which we see ourselves. Nevertheless, there is the relationship between the one and the many to take into consideration today. With an irreducibly plural interpretative world before us in the West, literalism closes down dialogue 80

Ibid., 33. Ibid. 82 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 39. 83 David Newheiser, “Conceiving Transformation without Triumphalism: Joachim of Fiore Against Gianni Vattimo,” The Heythrop Journal, LII (2011), 10. 81

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and seals oneself off from the other when both for practical reasons and out of respect for fellow interpreters similar and yet different from ourselves, isolation is not an option. This view of Joachim has nothing to do with supersession, but of how best to view our heritage in the light of the signs of the times, that is, of having a lighter, more spiritual approach to interpretation based upon the lack of concrete foundation or centre by virtue of the contemporary experience of ever-increasing plurality. Vattimo, like Joachim before him, has read the signs of the times and the way in which texts transform us occurs within a larger horizon. Vattimo’s ingenious insight comes from the recognition that this apparently irreducible plurality can in fact be reduced to a common historical origin in the text of the Bible. Behind Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky and all other greats of European literature besides, of all epochs, is the Bible. One cannot understand these figures and their works without reference to the Bible.84 Today, from the situation into which we are thrown, we can see the Bible not as giving rise to the logic of the divine right of kings and the Inquisition, but to the turn to the subject and weakening based on charitable interpretation. Interpreting according to the spirit of the age means hermeneutical practise that accords with the Age of the Spirit (that is, for Vattimo, the “Age of Interpretation”), occupying the space between the event of personal transformation and the ontological landscape after the death of God.

6. Vattimo and Heidegger Why, though, should we see the Bible as so important? It has been argued that Vattimo sees all linguistic roads within European thought in the last two-thousand years as leading back to the Bible. While this may or may not be the case when put under scrutiny, there is a problem in Vattimo’s approach to ontology, namely that he too easily identifies “openings” with classic texts, such as the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays. By conflating “event” with “epoch,” as well as “paradigm,” Vattimo places Being too much into the hands of human artistry. It is as though Vattimo takes Heidegger’s “On the Origin of the Work of Art” too seriously. Vattimo has admitted downplaying the semantic field of “conflict” in Heidegger’s thought,85 and with that he has lost the tension between “earth” and “world,” and with it, also, the tension between the finitude of Dasein and what withdraws from thought. What withdraws, what is abyssal, is from 84 85

Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 36. Vattimo, Della realtà, 126.

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history, and can therefore leave us with a simplified view of history. From this simplification can emerge the kind of history that appears as supersessionism in Vattimo’s thought. Through jettisoning the tension between earth and world, Vattimo reduces the ontological to the ontic by prioritising the classic text. Here, too, one can see the influence of Gadamer in Vattimo’s “left Heideggerianism,” a phrase Vattimo uses about his own approach to Heidegger that refers to the long, inexorable decline of Being.86 While Vattimo wants to rule out the possibility of a “right Heideggerian” notion of a “return” of Being in a way that leaves the door open for vertical transcendence, his approach does appear to reduce Being to classic texts. Perhaps part of the problem is in Vattimo’s oversimplification of Heidegger that caricatures the “right” position as a form of onto-theology and positions the “left” as far away as possible in a form of philosophy that is closer to Kuhn, with much of what is interesting about Heidegger situated in the middle. This may be why Vattimo does not often draw from Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, which indicates that the Ereignis is “enowning,” and that it is not to be identified with an artefact, person, event or human creation. Take the following quotation from the Contributions: “Here not-granting and staying-away are enowned, as are onset and accident, reservedness and transfiguration, and freedom and compulsion. Such are enowned, i.e. Belong to the essential swaying of enowning itself. Every kind of arranging, cancelling, and mixing of 'categories' fails here, because categories speak from a being unto a being and never name or know be-ing itself.”87 The opening is of time and space, and it concerns aspects of our Being such as “transfiguration” and “compulsion.” It is the event whereby being and man co-belong, and as such cannot be historically localised, and it depends necessarily on the finitude of both man and being, hence the exposure of the abyss, nothingness, the inclusion of withdrawal and closure in the event of opening. As such, Heidegger did not think of Ereignis as being identifiable with a particular event in time or anything ontic, even if he seemed to move nearer this position in “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” It could be argued that Vattimo may be able to derive his desired position from the Contributions in order to avoid supersessionism, but at the cost of taking on more ontology than he would like. As Philip Tonner states, “No one epoch in this history of the sending of Being to thought can 86

Vattimo, “Hermeneutics, Authority, Tradition,” 77. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 197.

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be privileged.”88 Vattimo does distinguish between openings (aletheia) and Ereignis, even if he sometimes seems to use them interchangeably. When Vattimo does discuss the Ereignis, it is usually in the context of Identity and Difference, linking it with the Ge-Stell: “The experience of Ge-Stell leads us to grasp Ereignis, and therefore above all to uncover the eventual nature of Being.”89 Choosing the Identity and Difference understanding of Ereignis is important for Vattimo as it links technology both to liberation (through its pluralising effects) and violence (through its history in the development of metaphysics). This interpretation of Ereignis raises the question about the relationship between Ereignis and event (in the sense of an opening), for Vattimo still talks about the “eventuality of Being” in different “epochs.”90 Is the Ereignis merely the sending of Being (an event) that brings to consciousness the other events, or, as Richard Polt speculates when discussing the Ereignis in the context of the Contributions, is it something “deeper than any event”?91 While the Ereignis “throws light retrospectively on the eventual nature of every epoch,”92 do these epochs get reduced to classic texts in paradigmatic fashion, something against which the Contributions cautioned? If not, then the importance of texts such as the Bible become secondary to the sendings (and this does not preclude a “right Heideggerian” approach, something Vattimo would abjure). Whether they do or do not, why prioritise the Bible if it is the Ereignis, through the Ge-Stell, which brings about the change of consciousness, a narrative that can make sense without recourse to Christianity? Vattimo wants an ethic, a limit to hermeneutics to prevent an “anything goes” approach, and so looks to Christianity, with its “spiritualisation” of texts to this end. However, if events cannot be reduced to the ontic (such as texts), but instead the texts are the result of listening and interpreting to sendings, why pay so much attention to a “master event” such as kenosis as recorded in the Bible? Vattimo cannot appeal to the Bible without presuming its importance in a way that is inconsistent with his broader Heideggerian schema of weak thought. 88 Philip Tonner, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 120. 89 Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, trans. by Cyprian Blamires and Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 176. 90 Ibid. 91 Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 77. 92 Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 176.

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7. Conclusion How does the foregoing resolve the question of whether Vattimo sees Christianity as superseding Judaism? The key point to consider is that Vattimo sees the current age as one of the spiritualisation of Scripture. This is not due to a once-for-all objective event, such as the incarnation in some metaphysical sense, but to an inescapable linguistic tradition which has its roots in the Bible. The heritage that Vattimo thinks Europeans share which can be traced back to the Bible has to be interpreted in some way today, and it is better to interpret it spiritually in terms of friendship and weakening than in a reactively nihilistic way that bans the ordination of women or can still entertain the idea of hell for non-believers. Judaism, like the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, is not part of a “history of errors,” but of a concatenation of openings that can be seen like Kuhn’s paradigms: incommensurable, yet normative ways of being for different epochs. Admittedly, this reading of Heidegger by Vattimo in recent years is unorthodox, yet it stems from him striving to articulate a sense of the historicity of Being in an all-encompassing way that does not give rise to some Hegelian overcoming. Interpretation of laws and texts in accordance with the “letter,” for example, would have been indicative of the “normal science” (to apply Kuhn’s terms directly) in an earlier opening, such as of the “Father,” whereas the “signs of the times” after the death of God require spiritual, weaker interpretations of Scripture. While there is a weakened Hegelianism in the way he weaves Heidegger’s understanding of technology to Dilthey’s interpretation of the appeal of Christianity as having effected the “subjective turn,” this is more to provide some historical, non-metaphysical foundation for weak thought and the spiritualising hermeneutic of caritas in the reduction of violence than a “triumph” of the Spirit. However, if Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy is taken seriously, then one has to question whether the nature of the “event” can be reduced to classic texts. From how Heidegger describes the Ereignis, it is clear that it is more fundamental than anything ontic. Even if one distinguishes between Ereignis and other events, then the nature of the latter is still one of sendings that require interpretation before being encoded in classic texts. Therefore, even if the texts are paradigmatic, they are ontic responses to openings that in turn are recognised as such by virtue of Dasein’s response to the more fundamental event of appropriation. In virtue of all of this, the importance of the Bible recedes, as it cannot be that after the end of metaphysics the Bible has special purchase in terms of harbouring a message, of kenosis, that functions as a master event. If there is no compelling reason to regard

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kenosis as a master event that “nudges” all subsequent openings, then the problem of “supersession” should also recede.

SECTION II: VATTIMO’S RELIGIOUS ETHICS

CHAPTER FOUR METAPHYSICS, VIOLENCE AND THE ‘NATURAL SACRED’ IN GIANNI VATTIMO’S PHILOSOPHY1

Abstract Gianni Vattimo makes a deep connection between the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the anthropology of René Girard. Heidegger’s ontology of decline is, for Vattimo, a ‘transcription’ of Girard’s understanding of Christianity. At the heart of this identification is the parallel Vattimo sees between the ‘natural sacred’ in Girard’s thought and the violence of metaphysics. The incarnation in Vattimo’s utilisation of Girard’s ideas is connected with a broader understanding of the incarnation as kenosis. Vattimo sees Christianity as inaugurating a principle of ‘weakening’ which moves through history as a secularising message. Not much evidence is provided by Vattimo for this identification, but it is possible to go back through the history of Christianity and find examples which back up his claims, such as how Aquinas’ theology in the thirteenth century could be interpreted as a ‘twisting’ of Aristotle which weakened his philosophy. Nevertheless, by bringing the violence of metaphysics too close to the physical violence of the natural sacred, Vattimo runs the risk of trivialising the latter. Moreover, Vattimo’s hermeneutical nihilistic approach prevents him not only considering approaches to the origin of physical violence such as seeing it as a result of evolution, but also rules out a number of ways to cope with this violence such as institutions that are founded upon metaphysical principles.

1. Metaphysics and violence Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) follows Martin Heidegger in his view of metaphysics. The latter term takes on a specialist meaning for these two philosophers. Metaphysics is a rationalising, calculating sense of “Being.” 1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “Metaphysics, Violence, and the ‘Natural Sacred’ in Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy,” Humanicus, 8 (2013), 1-21.

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With its foundational first principles, absolute values, and claims to objectivity, metaphysics silences further questioning and reduces “Being” to “beings,” to mere presences. Starting with Plato, Vattimo's Heideggerian view of metaphysics sees it as aiming to calculate and measure Being by objectivising and stabilising it, the motivation for doing so being the nearness of death and suffering in an age without the comforts afforded by modern technology and medical science; metaphysics allows a rational ordering of the world in the face of chaos. Metaphysics is the history of Being and it carries on through philosophy to the “end of metaphysics” in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Heidegger. Metaphysics is “violent” for Vattimo because it silences further questioning as objectivity permits there to be only one right answer for any given question. Through the use of reason, metaphysics establishes foundations upon which truth is made objective and to which one “must give one’s assent or conform.”2 As Martin G. Weiss points out,3 violence is a speech act for Vattimo. It is not physical violence, even though Vattimo stresses that metaphysical violence can lead to physical violence, such as in the Inquisition where suspected deviation from metaphysically-guaranteed strict orthodoxy had physically painful consequences. Vattimo thinks metaphysics has come to an end through the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche's notions of the death of God and fabulisation of the world are adopted by Vattimo, albeit in his own way. The death of God is the death not of all, but of the highest, values, particularly of truth. The scientific-rationalistic worldview, built on the metaphysical value of the pursuit of truth and epitomised by God's command for truthfulness, discovers God is a lie both in the literal sense of not being empirically verifiable and also because the horrors of war all against all and the forces of nature have been tamed by technology. Vattimo, in his essay on “Zarathustra” (1979) included in his Dialogue with Nietzsche, puts it thus: “Like the idea of an objective, stable truth, God too served to reassure man in ages when science, technology, and social organisation provided little shelter against hostile nature and the menace of the war of all against all. Today, when a certain degree of security has been reached, thanks precisely to belief in truth, in God, in

2

Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 43. 3 Martin G. Weiss, “What’s Wrong with Biotechnology? Vattimo’s Interpretation of Science, Technology, and the Media,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY), 244.

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reason, these myths are no longer necessary.”4 God self-consumes due to the progress of science and technology which, ironically, were given impetus by the stable, rational worldview guaranteed under monotheism and the value of truth taken from onto-theology (Heidegger’s term for the metaphysical God, the God of the philosophers). Heidegger similarly sees the end of metaphysics in the culmination of technology.5 Metaphysics is the essence of technology for Heidegger. Technology, whether ancient or modern, is a mode of revealing. Modern technology appropriates everything completely for Heidegger, “challenging” it by forcing it to produce or to wait in “standing reserve” for future production, such as an aircraft on a runway. Rather than being allowed to reveal itself naturally, modern technology challenges natural features to reveal themselves only as resources for production. The Rhine cannot just be seen as a river now, since hydroelectric dams and the tourism industry reveal it as a source of power and economy. Even humans are challenged to produce and are treated as commodities, as seen in titles of company departments such as “Human Resources.” The total challenging posed by technology is Heidegger’s notion of “Ge-Stell” (“enframing”). Taking Heidegger's analysis and bringing it up-to-date, Vattimo sees information and communications technology as challenging even the machines themselves, as well as blurring the distinction between appearance and reality to the dissolution of both concepts. While Vattimo agrees with Heidegger’s estimation of technology, he sees liberating opportunities within it by taking into account the kinds of communications technology Heidegger did not get to see and consider in detail: “It is not in the world of machines and engines that humanity and being can shed the mantles of subject and object, but in the world of generalized communication. Here the entity dissolves in the images distributed by the information media, in the abstraction of scientific objects (whose correspondence with the real ‘things’ open to experience can no longer be seen) or technical products (that do not even make contact with the real world via their use value, since the demands they satisfy are increasingly artificial).”6 By drawing upon communications technology in relation to the Ge-Stell, Vattimo “twists” Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. The “world picture” created by technology has become a plurality of “pictures,” the unified 4

Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press), 172. 5 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in D. F. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 213-238. 6 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1992), 116-117.

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sense of reality generated by rationalistic metaphysics has dissolved into an irreducible plurality of interpretations. In this dissolution, metaphysical epithets such as subject and object disappear. The end of metaphysics gives way to hermeneutical nihilism, the fixed world of subject and object dissolves into a play of interpretations. The “death of God” coincides with the Heideggerian dissolution of metaphysical Being into “exchange-value.”7 What Vattimo means by this phrase is the opening of hermeneutical plurality once the idea of objectivity has lost its sense of truth with a capital “T.” Vattimo takes over Hans-Georg Gadamer's reading of Heidegger on this particular issue, that “Being that can be understood is language.”8 Late-modernity for Vattimo is the land of the sunset of Being where it lives on only as linguistic traces. These traces are remnants of metaphysics that have been exposed for what they are by the event of the death of God, yet the term “exchange-value” implies these traces function as “common currency,” like a “worn coin.”9 Another way of referring to these traces is as “tradition,” or “truths.” The importance of these traditions for Vattimo's philosophy becomes clear when he contends that they constitute the horizon of all thought.10 Thinking takes place within the parameters of the linguistic heritage of our provenance. Taking over Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, the human being is always in-the-world and is “thrown” into a series of contingencies. Our provenance as individuals includes where and when one lives and as such our linguistic heritage will vary between each individual depending on their thrownness. Vattimo uses the phrase “Denken is Andenken,”11 that thinking is remembering; thought is contained within the linguistic horizons of the traditions into which one is thrown. If thinking is remembering, this is not a passive act. New Being is generated by an interface between the reception of tradition and remembering as an interpretative act. Interpreting is not overcoming, but a twisting if it is carried out mindful of the “signs of the times,” by which Vattimo means the event of the death of God. Traces cannot be overcome in the dialectical sense, for to do so would be to repeat the logic of modernity and its 7

Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by J. Snyder (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1988), 27. 8 Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, F. D’Agostini (ed.), trans. by William. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 57. 9 Daniel Barbiero, “A Weakness for Heidegger: The German Root of Il Pensiero Debole,” New German Critique, 55 (1992), 166. 10 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 120. 11 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 22.

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metaphysical value of the “new.” Instead, Vattimo thinks we should aim for a release from metaphysics, and although he thinks we cannot do without an ontology for reasons similar to why a dialectical overcoming is impossible, any ontology for the late-modern should be one of decline. Rather than a dialectical overcoming, Vattimo thinks interpretation should be a Verwindung. This term, little-used by Heidegger, refers to a “convalescence-alteration,” a “distortion” which is also a “resignation.”12 Metaphors such as “worn coin” and “sunset of Being” show both resignation and nostalgia for tradition, that traces of Being constitute the horizon of thought which is inescapable. However, after the death of God one cannot believe in, for example, Plato's forms as if they were true, and so interpretation has the opportunity to weaken these metaphysical traces further by “distorting” them or “twisting” them by using these terms and concepts in new ways. By adding contingency into these traces, seeing them for what they are, one can be “healed” from the violence of metaphysics by the distortion of Verwindung.

2. Girard Vattimo sees Heidegger’s ontology of decline as a “transcription” of the anthropology of René Girard,13 even as ‘completing’ Heidegger.14 Before it can be seen why he thinks it is the case, something has to be said about Girard's ideas and their influence upon Vattimo. Girard's ideas have focussed in the main on the role of religion in diffusing the violence he has identified as essential to human society. Often referred by him as “mimesis,” Girard sees mimicking as a fundamental human trait: “There is nothing…in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation. If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish.”15 Envying what the other has or can do eventually culminates in a threat to consume the whole community in violence. A “scapegoat” is made a victim upon which to deflect the violence to prevent the community from being destroyed. At first ad hoc, over time the making of a scapegoat becomes ritualised and is overseen by religions, 12

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 172. Vattimo, Belief, 36. 14 Gianni Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard: Kénosis and the End of Metaphysics,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 78. 15 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London and New York: The Athlone Press 1987), 7. 13

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gaining a sacral quality. These “natural religions” thus have a notion of a violent “natural sacred” and a “victimary mechanism” in order to deflect the violence and restore the balance of the community. Vattimo says Girard “re-Christianised” him when he reviewed Girard's book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.16 Girard holds that the role of the Old and New Testaments is to reveal the violence of the natural sacred's victimary mechanism. Pierpaolo Antonello, in his Introduction to the collaboration between Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith, succinctly puts it that Christianity functions as a “Trojan Horse,”17 a non-religion posing as a religion in order to reveal the violence of the latter. In particular, it is Jesus' message, of the unmasking of the natural sacred and the revelation that God is love, which leads to his death according to Vattimo's understanding of Girard,18 and is the basis of the revelation of the natural sacred for what it is. Girard held that this death is not a sacrifice, as is the orthodox understanding of it, for this would be to repeat the victimary mechanism. Girard has gone back on this view and he now does think that Jesus' death is a sacrifice, in large part due to the writings of Raymund Schwager.19 Vattimo has only acknowledged reading Things Hidden and therefore has not kept up with this development in his writing. In actual fact this does not matter too much. What Girard's theory does for Vattimo is to provide for him a tool for articulating a fundamental intuition he has had for a while on the dependence of hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation, upon the Christian tradition, an intuition expressed at length in his book Belief.20 Vattimo's articulation of this dependence is in a theory of secularisation. Normally this concept is developed to express a “moving away” from Christianity. Vattimo, however, sees secularisation as the realisation of the essence of the Christian message. For a decade before Belief, his first book-length treatment of his return to Christianity, Vattimo had used the concept of secularisation. Sometimes this was with reference to Girard (although only through brief allusions), at other times mentioning Arnold 16 Gianni Vattimo and Piergiorgio Paterlini, Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, trans. by W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 150. 17 Pierpaolo Antonello, “Introduction,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8. 18 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1997), 50-51. 19 Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 93. 20 Vattimo, Belief, passim.

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Gehlen's notion of post-histoire. In either case, Vattimo's aim was to ground hermeneutics historically. In “Myth and the Fate of Secularisation,” Girard figures in Vattimo's first attempt to draw on the notion of secularisation by representing Christianity as the unmasker of the natural sacred: “Christ shows that the sacred is violence,”21 opening up the possibility of a new history. Around the same time, in The End of Modernity, secularisation refers to the making immanent of eschatological hopes which then become devalued in the routinisation of progress; faith in the progress of science and technology is the secularisation of the Christian hope for salvation in the progress of the kingdom of heaven.22 Girard did not develop his theory of Christianity into a history of secularisation, much to Vattimo's surprise. Part of Girard's reticence is attributable to his academic discipline. As an anthropologist, Girard sees mimetic violence as a fact about human nature. If Christianity has unmasked the mechanisms keeping it from consuming society, this could be dangerous; other mechanisms, less violent, should be put in place. Antonello mentions examples of this kind of “secularised forms of transcendence” such as democracy and mass media spectacle. Against this, Antonello says that “Vattimo…rejects any apocalyptic perspective, foreseeing a progressive liberation…from any need for limits of any sort.”23 By contrast, Vattimo thinks the mere knowledge of a “fact” does not grant salvation. For Vattimo, it is not enough to posit: “a scientific, nonvictimary knowledge of human nature. I know that this is not Girard’s intention, but as a matter of fact, even the redemptive power of Jesus seems to reside, for him, in a pure and simple theoretical unmasking of the violent essence of the natural notion of the sacred.”24 For Vattimo, knowledge of the natural sacred is not only impossible factually (Vattimo thinks there are no facts), but would also be irrelevant were it not wedded to a history of weakening, for the important matter for Vattimo is to be able to ground and commit to a practise of weakening in the present through orienting interpretation towards further weakening of strong structures in accordance with caritas as the sole hermeneutical criterion (a notion that shall be explained in due course). As Vattimo does not think that there are any facts, he does not believe in society being essentially violent. The disagreements here are perspectival, and Girard admits he is conservative in his thought, even going so far to challenge Vattimo's use of Nietzsche's phrase. For Girard, thoroughgoing 21

Gianni Vattimo, “Myth and the Fate of Secularisation,” Res, 9 (1985), 35. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 7-8, 100-103. 23 Antonello, “Introduction,” 14. 24 Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard,” 86. 22

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hermeneutics is self-defeating and “no facts, only interpretations,” should be seen as a piece of rhetoric, not a developed theory of interpretation. The Nietzschean phrase that there are “no facts, only interpretations” cannot provide a “functional theory of interpretation. To have nothing but interpretation is the same as having none.”25 Girard simply is not a nihilist, nor does he think that transcendence has to be violent in a metaphysical way. Notwithstanding Girard's misgivings, Vattimo has drawn upon his ideas in his more mature work on Christianity to develop an idiosyncratic theory of secularisation to show how modern hermeneutics relies upon its Christian inheritance. In his essay on “Religion” in his book Beyond Interpretation, Vattimo sees Christ's message of love as adding an ethical dimension to hermeneutics, that there is a limit of caritas (“charity”) to interpretation in the nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics. Some scholars have seen Vattimo's selection of caritas as arbitrary.26 However, it comes from the bigger picture of Vattimo's philosophy of religion. In Beyond Interpretation, Vattimo's two principal aims are to ground hermeneutics historically to prevent it becoming a meta-theory of interpretation and to devise a criterion for interpretation to rule out a situation in which “anything goes”; Vattimo wants only “weak” interpretations. While the Heidegger-Gadamer axis will provide resources for historical grounding, they do not readily yield an ethic. By turning to the incarnation, Vattimo feels he has both things he is looking for. Comparing “archetypal” Western formulas of plurivocity, he picks Aristotle’s to on léghetai pollachôs (“Being is said in many ways”), and St Paul’s “multifariam multisque modis olim loquens Deus patribus in prophetis” (Hebrews 1:1).27 The former is still rigidified by the metaphysical category of “substance” (Being is said in many ways). More particularly, Vattimo thinks Pauline historicism “contaminated” Aristotelian plurivocity through the adoption of metaphysical terms by the early Church.28 This “contamination” manifests itself later in the historicising of the rationalistic hermeneutics of Spinoza and Schleiermacher by Heidegger. It 25

René Girard, “Not Just Interpretations, There are Facts, Too,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 94. 26 Peter Carravetta, “Beyond Interpretation? On Some Perplexities Following upon Vattimo’s ‘Turn’ from Hermeneutics,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 2010), 89. 27 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 46. 28 Ibid., 47.

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is with the latter, along with Nietzsche, that the “Age of Interpretation” is born, roughly corresponding to the “Age of the Spirit” in Joachim of Fiore's Trinitiarian historical schema of which Vattimo is so fond. In this “third age” discipline will give way to charity,29 further addressing Vattimo's decision for caritas over any other biblical virtue. The incarnation is, for Vattimo at this point, kenosis, vaguely referred to by Vattimo as this “contamination” of Aristotelian plurivocity by its prophetic, historical plurivocity. The ethical dimension of kenosis is caritas, played out in the third age but foreshadowed by the love shown by Christ in Girard's understanding of the incarnation as a revelation of the violence of the natural sacred by the message of love. Christ's unmasking of violence reaches its culmination in the end of metaphysics in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and this is secularisation for Vattimo. Vattimo's argument is serpentine and magpie-like in its borrowing of ideas from unlikely sources. His understanding of Hebrews, Joachim, Girard, and caritas has come under criticism from Frascati-Lochhead, Newheiser, Depoortere, and Carravetta, respectively but not exclusively.30 In defence of Vattimo, he is only trying to put together what Marilyn Adams would call an “aporetic puzzle” by drawing upon resources with which he is familiar in order to offer another non-metaphysical way of showing how hermeneutics can be the koine of late-modern philosophy.31 Nevertheless, Vattimo's solution in Beyond Interpretation does not gel very satisfactorily. The link between Girard's understanding of Christ and Vattimo's notion of kenosis is unclear, let alone how they combine into a history of secularisation. Vattimo makes brief allusions to particular examples of secularisation such as Max Weber's thesis that capitalism is the secularised Protestant work ethic, but these are contingent and can be interpreted in different ways. What Vattimo did in his next major work, Belief, is to bring kenosis, caritas, his interpretation of Girard, and secularisation far closer together. In this work, Vattimo makes clear that secularisation is de-sacralisation; the revelation of God's love through the message and person of Christ dissolves strong structures by its movement 29

Ibid., 49. Marta Frascati-Lochhead, Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 1998); David Newheiser, “Conceiving Transformation without Triumphalism: Joachim of Fiore Against Gianni Vattimo,” Heythrop Journal, 52 (2011), 1-13; Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek (London: T&T Clark, 2008); Carravetta, “Beyond Interpretation.” 31 Marilyn-McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000). 30

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through history. Jesus’ message is one of “the friendliness of God towards his creatures.”32 The message of friendliness constitutes also the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, that of “you heard it was said…but I tell you…” (the “Antitheses” in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew) and “I no longer call you servants but friends.”33 “The guiding thread of Jesus’ interpretation of the Old Testament,” writes Vattimo, “is the new and more profound relation of charity established between God and humanity, and consequently between human beings themselves.”34 Here again the message of charity comes to the fore. Vattimo sums up the meaning of the incarnation in a way which emphasises both the message of Jesus and Jesus’ message: “The interpretation given by Jesus Christ of Old Testament prophecies, or (better) the interpretation which he himself is, reveals its true and only meaning: God’s love for his creatures.”35 According to Girard’s thesis which Vattimo takes over and modifies, it is the Judaeo-Christian tradition that seeks to reveal the violence of the natural sacred through his message of God’s love for, and friendship with, the world. Vattimo is against any literalism, including that of the incarnation. Therefore, it is the message of the incarnation that introduces the kind of “contamination” of the absolute through historicism to which he referred explicitly in Beyond Interpretation. More importantly, Vattimo's understanding of the kind of violence Christ came to abolish is equivalent to Heidegger's metaphysical violence. Vattimo makes an explicit connection between the violence of the victimary mechanism of the natural sacred and the violence of metaphysics. How he makes this connection is not obvious. As a “bridge” between these two understandings of violence, Vattimo refers to the “metaphysical” characteristics of God such as “omnipotence,” “absoluteness” and his “transcendence.”36 While Vattimo is right in the sense that these attributes featured in some understandings of God such as the kind of view of God referred to by Heidegger as “onto-theology,” there is very little to suggest that this kind of God has anything to do with primitive religion. In fact, there is little in the Bible to justify divine attributes of onto-theology. One could take an opposite reading of the situation, that Christianity did not abolish strong structures, but actually introduced the value of “truth” into

32

Vattimo, Belief, 95. John 15:15; see Vattimo, Belief, 49 for both of these quotations. 34 Ibid., 49. 35 Ibid., 64. 36 Ibid., 39. 33

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religion. This is the view of John Gray in his book Straw Dogs,37 as Savater mentions in his essay on Vattimo.38 What one can do is to combine the insights of Gray and Vattimo in order to add more justification to Vattimo's identification of Girard's and Heidegger's thought. Christianity looks like a religion. Nevertheless, its essentially hermeneutical “friendly” quality at first manifested itself in a missionary manner. Events such as Pentecost and Saul’s conversion, along with the socio-political-geographical provenance of Christianity led it to embrace Hellenistic categories of thought as a tool for conversion. As such, began both the dissolution not only of religious violence, but also of the violence of metaphysics. In other words, if one takes both Gray and Vattimo seriously, it is possible to see Christianity as functioning like a “Trojan Horse” not only for natural religions, but also for metaphysics, appearing both as a “religion” and as “philosophy.” Vattimo, in drawing attention to the connection between religion and metaphysics in his analysis of Girard brings to attention a further way of providing evidence for his understanding of secularisation as the weakening of strong structures.

3. The Christian message and weakening metaphysical strong structures Looking into the history of Christian thought, particularly in the early church fathers' writings and in the Middle Ages, there is evidence for Vattimo's secularisation thesis he does not entertain himself. There are numerous examples from creative appropriation of the doctrine of the Logos in the writings of early Apologists such as Justin Martyr, to the confusion of metaphysical categories of ousia, hypostases, and personae in the disputes on the Incarnation and Trinity from the third to fifth centuries. In these cases, although the metaphysical categories and value of “truth” in the metaphysical senses were introduced as a result of early missionary and apologetic efforts, philosophy was serving a more contingent historical truth, the scandal of the cross and the message of the resurrection. The notion of truth is given a dose of radical contingency, with metaphysical categories being employed to explain particular things such as God, the incarnation and salvation. 37

John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2002). 38 Fernando Savater, “Christianity as Religion and the Irreligion of the Future,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 299.

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Arguably the best evidence of the Christian message “weakening” strong metaphysical structures can be found in the Eucharistic controversies of the Middle Ages. By the time of the thirteenth century, it had been decided that the Eucharist was not a symbol. Rather, there was a “real presence” of Christ in the consecrated host. Moreover, the council Lateran IV included the term “transubstantiation” in its decrees in order to explain how Christ becomes present. Other options were available to explain the real presence, such as “consubstantiation.” The latter would have involved the accidents of Christ becoming co-present with those of the bread and wine. Consubstantiation was rejected by Aquinas on grounds of authority mainly, but also philosophically. With transubstantiation, the substances of the bread and wine are converted into those of the body and blood of Christ (respectively), but with the accidents of the bread and wine remaining: “it is clear that the body of Christ is in this sacrament ‘by way of substance’, and not by way of [the accident of] quantity” (Summa Theologica, III, q. 76, a.1). If an accident were “free floating” it would not be an accident, but a substance. Aquinas’ position has drawn significant criticism, most perspicaciously and strongly, by P. J. Fitzpatrick, who states, “For me, transubstantiation is a Eucharistic application of Aristotelian terms which abuses them to the point of nonsense,”39 for the terms are taken from his system but their application is outside of this system.40 Making nonsense out of Aristotelian thought in this way is weak thought par excellence, a Verwindung of traces of metaphysical thought left over from the Classical age of philosophy. Once recovered in the thirteenth century during the Crusades, the works of Aristotle added to the linguistic horizon of Being for the main scholars of the day. Part of their heritage, it enabled the likes of Albert Magnus and Aquinas to articulate their faith more precisely, but also to prevent Aristotle's philosophy from being seen as “true” independent of, or superior to, the Christian faith, a fear expressed in the Parisian condemnations of 1277 in which Aquinas’ legacy was nonetheless embroiled. In the thrownness of the all-embracing Christian faith of medieval Europe, Aristotle had to be interpreted through the contingencies of the Christian faith. Of course, Albert and Aquinas were living a long time before the “Age of Interpretation,” and the conclusions they drew were not at all nihilistic, for they were still able to believe in a radically historical truth with a capital “T.” Nevertheless, the examples of Aquinas' use of Aristotle in the Eucharistic controversy of the thirteenth century is evidence of how secularisation as a moving away 39

P. J. Fitzpatrick, In Breaking of Bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11. 40 Ibid., 24.

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from the logic of sacrifice thought he victimary mechanism by Christ's revelation of love an friendship could also effect a dissolution of metaphysics. To recap, Jesus' call to love and friendship added not only a dose of historicism in virtue of his kenosis, but also a missionary vocation to embrace all of humanity. To do so required speaking different languages and engaging with linguistic and cultural horizons of those to whom they were meeting in friendship. Through the provenance of Christianity in the Near East at the time of the Roman Empire, Christianity soon found the mission to the Gentiles as involving an engagement with Greek metaphysics, first mainly with Stoicism and Middle Platonism, later with Neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism. The radical contingency of the message of the Cross, with love and friendship at its centre, historicised the abstract nature of metaphysics and led to a lack of clarity between the value of truth given by metaphysics and its historical interpretation by Christianity. As a result, metaphysical categories came to be broken away from their system through the serving of a radically historical truth, a truth that would eventually consume even itself and realise its nihilistic vocation in the event of the fabulisation of the world through the death of God, when even the value of truth itself-- epitomised by God-- was found out to be a “lie.”

4. Different kinds of violence If evidence can be found by an abductive methodology to support Vattimo's identification of the dissolution of the natural sacred with metaphysics or a history of the weakening of Being through secularisation, there are problems for Vattimo's theory if the identification between the violence of the natural sacred and metaphysical violence is drawn too close. The first problem is the status of the subject in relation to the act of violence. With metaphysical violence, although Weiss characterises Vattimo's understanding of the violence of metaphysics in terms of an act of speech, the violence is effectively a “sending” (Geschicke) of Being itself, independent of human agency, which is manifested in language gauged in a certain way, namely in foundational first principles. Before the death of God and the end of metaphysics, first principles were constructed in various sendings of Being. Even if Christianity had added contingency to Aristotelian categories, modern foundationalism saw the human subject as the basis for knowledge in the Cartesian and Kantian senses. The modern attempt at foundationalism would, too, be undermined through thinkers such as Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. The point is, though, that

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metaphysics is a history of Being and for Vattimo, like Gadamer, Being that can be understood is nothing other than language. Metaphysical violence is primarily in language, secondarily in interpretation, and only thirdly in speech acts. After the death of God, strong though only survives through interpretations that do not read the “signs of the times,” that is, God's death and the fabulisation of the world. In contrast to metaphysical violence, the violence of the natural sacred is physical for it is the ritual sacrifice of a human being or animal. If the ritual was sublimated or made symbolic, then there would be no violence. What makes it violent, and also what enables it to be a functional tool in controlling the culmination of mimetic violence which would be all-toophysical is that physical violence occurs. A problem for Vattimo is that unlike metaphysical violence, physical violence unavoidably presumes a “subject” that carries out the violence. Vattimo follows Heidegger in identifying metaphysics with Humanism which he takes as placing Being in the hands of a subject in the Cartesian and Kantian senses. Subjectivity in this Humanistic sense is a metaphysical notion that fades away with the end of metaphysics.41 The “unavoidability” of a subject involved in physical violence could be challenged. Given the influence of Nietzsche upon Vattimo, it is very possible that Vattimo could draw upon Nietzsche’s notion of a deed without a “doer.” However, when one looks into Nietzsche’s work more closely, there is a “doer” behind an action, found both in his will to power (even if “choice” seems absent here), and the “eternal recurrence,”42 which presumes at least a “yes-saying” choice of attitude as a hypothetical test of whether one is an “overman” (how these contradictory elements play out in Nietzsche’s philosophy is another matter that cannot be dealt with here). A further response in Vattimo's defence would be to argue that perhaps the event of the end of metaphysics exposes the subjectivity behind physical violence insofar as it reveals the violence of metaphysics. As such, there would be a threefold revelation. Firstly, there is the violence of the natural sacred, inaugurated by the revelation of love and friendship of God for which Jesus was put to death. Secondly, the violence of metaphysics is exposed, through the search for truth, ever historical and made immanent, consuming itself. Thirdly, with this unmasking of metaphysics goes subjectivity. However, Vattimo does not mention the exposure of subjectivity with the natural sacred, even though he does identify the death of Humanism with the end of metaphysics. 41

See Vattimo, The End of Modernity, Ch. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29. 42

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In drawing physical violence so close to metaphysical violence, Vattimo is, perhaps unintentionally, in danger of making light of the former by reducing it to the latter, as well as removing resources with which to deal with it. Firstly, Vattimo seems to be implying that physical violence will disappear proportionally to the weakening of strong metaphysical structures. Vattimo may respond that he is talking specifically about the physical violence of the natural sacred. If he is not talking specifically about the natural sacred, he is reducing all physical violence to metaphysical violence. However, if he is talking specifically about the violence of the natural sacred, then how does Vattimo aim to reduce, or even conceptualise, physical violence that does not arise from the natural sacred? Vattimo may respond by making the move that all physical violence is a result of metaphysical violence. Certainly Vattimo makes the connection between the two, providing examples such as burning heretics in the Inquisition based on metaphysical principles.43 However, Vattimo refrains from a total identification of these two types of violence in this specific causal relationship, for to do so would be too lawlike, moving close to a metaphysical judgement of sorts. Moreover, as a move it would be patently absurd, raising problems for Vattimo's philosophy he would be uncomfortable dealing with. The absurdity of the reduction of causality of physical violence to metaphysical violence is clear when one raises the issue of Being and humankind. If Being is nothing apart from language, did violence not occur before language? There was a time in which early humans did not possess language, yet violence must have occurred among humans and between humans and the rest of nature. Before humans, there would have been violence among all kinds of creatures. Should one not class these kinds of phenomena as violent, then one begins to use terms in ways very contrary to how they are normally understood. Indeed, to do so would be to minimise physical violence even today. Wolfgang Welsch, in his contribution to the Santiago Zabala edited volume of essays on Vattimo, Weakening Philosophy, argues that prehistory, including evolution, is of greater importance than history or ontology for why and how humans are the way they are today: Vattimo’s hermeneutics “swears allegiance to origins but equates theses origins only with ‘history’ (and even with a history understood to consist exclusively of linguistic messages, of texts) and thus overlooks and ignores the by far greater part of our origin: prehistory and the entire evolutionary trajectory 43 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “‘Weak Thought’ and the Reduction of Violence,” Common Knowledge, 8(3) (2002), 455.

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of humankind.”44 Evolution may be a more likely cause than metaphysics for the kind of violence described by anthropologists such as Girard in shaping our drive for mimesis and capacity for violence all against all if left unchecked or without sublimation. Organisms that show traits such as aggression are more likely to survive and pass on their characteristics than those that do not show some aggression, even if individuals who display excessive violence are taking too much of a risk.45 There is also mimesis as a type of behaviour to account for. Girard shows how mimesis plays a fundamental role in human behaviour at the later stage of evolution. There is no evidence that Homo Erectus had mastered language. Therefore, although mimesis leads to violence, it is not attributable to Being, as there was no language in which it could be understood. There is evidence for mimesis having a pre-linguistic role in symbolic gestures for purposes such as mastering skills46; mimesis thus has an origin in natural selection. Evolution is, for some, a “theory.” For many people, though, it is a fact, or at least the fossil record can be classified as such. Anthropologists such as Girard also regard their findings as facts. Evolution and anthropology cannot be taken as facts for Vattimo as he does not accept there are facts. As a result, there is a danger of him reducing violence ultimately to metaphysics, neglecting to consider other causes for violence such as genetic heredity. Vattimo's failure to consider prehistory and evolution has implications for how he can possibly deal with violence. Even if metaphysics is violent in the way Vattimo characterises it (and that is another issue entirely) is it worse than letting physical violence go unchecked? Put differently, is not the Nietzschean “slave revolt in morals,” the postulating of a “world behind a world,” the Kantian summum bonum of a marriage of virtue with reward, better than allowing humans navigate through a “play of interpretations” without discipline or authority, especially if some or all humans are predisposed to at least some aggression and violence? If natural selection has entailed only the most well adapted humans have survived, and toughness and aggression have played a part in being well adapted, is there not something to be said for metaphysically-derived 44

Wolfgang Welsch, “The Human—Over and Over Again,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007), 101. 45 C. J. Ferguson and K. M. Beaver “Natural Born Killers: The Genetic Origins of Extreme Violence,” Aggression and Violent Behaviour, 14 (2009), 286-294. 46 E. Webb, “Mimesis, Evolution, and Differentiation of Consciousness,” Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 4(2) (1995), 151-165.

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ethics having a place in order to temper natural violent streaks which do not find a ready outlet in hunting in a late-modern consumer society? Not every human is a placid, well-educated Italian with a penchant for caritas; very few are. Is it not for the greater good that metaphysics be tolerated, or even encouraged, in order to impose a framework for morals? Vattimo would object that metaphysics has lost its purchase after the death of God to the extent that it can no longer be regarded as true, only weakened indefinitely. Vattimo may well be doing philosophy as a form of autobiography, extrapolating from his own personal experience to the West at large. Metaphysics may not be as unbelievable or as indefinitely declining as he thinks as not only is it alive and well in some quarters, but also there is the possibility of the return of Being. Concerning the former, Frankenberry mentions the well-known fact that belief in God is flourishing in America,47 a highly developed western country. As for the question of the “return” of Being, Vattimo is aware that he adopts a “left” Heideggerian approach (in the sense of right and left Hegelian), one which is immanentist and historical as opposed to the “right” interpretation which reads Heidegger as leaving room for a return of Being. This choice may well, again, be biographical, for he has always been interested in political issues,48 a long-standing concern that also drew him to various forms of Marxism. There is evidence in Heidegger's work that a “right” reading of his work could be justified. At the end of “Nietzsche's Word: God is Dead,” Heidegger argued that the human who stops reasoning can make room for thinking and find faith.49 While this moves away from metaphysical rationalism, Heidegger kept the door open for a transcendent dimension to interface with and provide a check for the human. In his criticism of dialectical theology, negative theology, and the notion of the “wholly other” in the philosophies if Derrida and Levinas, Vattimo identifies transcendence with metaphysics: “transcendence is a highly metaphysical notion.”50 47

Nancy K. Frankenberry, “Weakening Religious Belief: Vattimo, Rorty, and the Holism of the Mental,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 271-296. 48 Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, passim. 49 Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. by J. Young and K Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 50 Vattimo and Girard, “Christianity and Modernity,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 76; see also Vattimo, After Christianity, 37.

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Vattimo, in castigating institutions and principles that either are metaphysically-based or entertain at least the possibility of transcendence, may rob himself of much-needed resources to deal with both the causes and effects of a physical violence rooted not only in metaphysics, but also in human nature (evolution) and society (Girardian anthropology). A variety of examples could be given of metaphysically-derived ways in which physical violence could be curbed. It is not the place to go into any one or more strategies in any detail. However, a few could be briefly mentioned. The philosophy of alterity, for instance, is implicitly ethical and can be developed into concern for the other.51 The Neo-Kantian position is another one in which, on Thomas Nagel’s ethics, concern for the “other” is based on the natural facts of pain, presuming both a subject capable of empathy and the non-solipsistic position of acknowledging other subjects who feel pain; knowledge of one’s own pain should be reason enough to prevent pain in other.52 Iris Murdoch is another philosopher of recent times to deem metaphysics as important to morality.53 These ethical positions are not open to Vattimo because of his disdain for “facts,” metaphysical “subjects,” ethical naturalism, transcendence, and absolute values. However, each of these strategies are metaphysically-sanctioned ways for human subjects to deal with the violence that occurs from decision-making and impulses, to a significant extent shaped by evolution.

5. Conclusion Vattimo draws upon the ideas of René Girard in order to ground hermeneutical nihilism historically and to develop an ethic of caritas to function as a limit of interpretation, of what can or cannot be secularised. This emphasis on historical grounding comes from Vattimo's “left” Heideggerianism and his fundamental intuition that hermeneutics is dependent upon its Christian inheritance in the West. Secularisation is, for Vattimo from Belief onwards, a de-sacralisation. To tie this in his Nietzschean-Heideggerian philosophy, Vattimo sees the violence of the natural sacred as identifiable with metaphysical violence. Late-modernity, in which the culmination of secularisation occurs, Vattimo thinks, reveals 51

M. Lim, “The Ethics of Alterity and the Teaching of Otherness,” Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3) (2007), 251-263. 52 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 53 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London and New York: Penguin, 1992).

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both for what they are. While it is possible to provide evidence for Vattimo’s claims by drawing upon episodes in the history of thought of Christianity weakening metaphysics through the encounter of one with the other, such as Aquinas’ Verwindung of Aristotle’s thought, there are problems in bringing metaphysical violence and physical violence so close together. The identification of metaphysical violence and the natural sacred raises the question about the origins of physical violence. Vattimo's particularly nihilistic hermeneutics cuts him off from being able to conceptualise the origins of physical violence in the way evolutionary biology and anthropology can. This leads Vattimo to place undue weight on metaphysics as an explanation for physical violence. In so doing, Vattimo would never consider metaphysics, or at least transcendence (which he cannot but see as a form of metaphysics), as the lesser of two evils in checking the worst excesses of human nature. This is a pity, for metaphysically-derived ethics, or a moral value sanctioned by reference to a transcendent source, may still be able to function as a check on the worst excesses of human behaviour left over from the development of humankind by the process of natural selection.

CHAPTER FIVE VATTIMO AND OTHERNESS: HERMENEUTICS, CHARITY AND CONVERSATION1

Abstract Gianni Vattimo’s philosophical approach of weak thought views metaphysics as being ‘violent’ as it reduces dialogue back to first principles and therefore silences questioning. Rightly or wrongly, Vattimo regards any notion of transcendence as metaphysical and therefore violent. As such, Vattimo rejects the idea of the ‘Other’ (with a capital ‘O,’ sometimes also referred to as the ‘Wholly Other’) as metaphysical because this ‘Other’ is transcendent. While Vattimo’s historical approach to hermeneutics as a process of nihilism does not entertain the possibility of what he calls ‘vertical transcendence’ regarding the ‘Other,’ his theory of interpretation adapted from both Heidegger and Gadamer involves the ‘horizontal transcendence’ of the linguistically-constituted epochs into which we are thrown. The irreducible plurality of interpretations generated from various traditions that we have received as traces of metaphysics need to be interpreted, and the vocation of the philosopher today is to seek out ‘the other’ (with a lower case ‘o’) in order to further weaken these traces. Anchoring both the historicity and other-regarding limit of hermeneutics in Christianity, Vattimo grounds this ethic of alterity vaguely through his interpretation of the Christian notion of charity. The latter is viewed by Vattimo as the divine call for friendship located in the incarnation of God in the person and message of Christ. This historical approach to the other avoids potentially metaphysically defining otherness, but at the risk of ambiguity, for Vattimo’s call to be charitable to others ‘like us’ is fraught with danger; who counts as others ‘like us’—only 1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “Vattimo and Otherness: Hermeneutics, Charity and Conversation,” Otherness: Essays and Studies, 4 (2013), 1-21.

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‘weak thinkers’? It shall be shown that there is a way to reconstruct friendship for the other on Vattimian grounds, namely emphasising ‘listening’ to the other and establishing friendship based on care for the other as a person, whether or not they are ‘weak’ thinkers.

1. Hermeneutical nihilism and the ontology of actuality Gianni Vattimo’s thoughts on otherness, on both the Other (with a capital “O”) and the other (with a lower-case “o”), depend on his philosophical style of “weak thought.” The latter can be understood as the way in which he thinks we should relate to metaphysics today in what Vattimo calls the late-modern, a time in which it is no longer possible to believe in modern values such as progress but which nevertheless does not constitute a complete break from the modern (a complete break would repeat the foundationalism of modernity, thus perpetuating metaphysics). Following Heidegger, Vattimo regards metaphysics as the rationalising way of thinking of “Being” as presence, of what is calculable and capable of manipulation in predictable relationships. With its origins in the philosophy of Plato, metaphysics has gradually been weakened through the history of Western thought (Christianity, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Positivism, and finally modern science). The security given by metaphysics has given rise to the fruit of modern science, the technology that has banished the terrors of primitive existence: the will to truth engendered by metaphysics has revealed it to be a superfluous “lie”2; this is Vattimo’s reading of Nietzsche’s “death of God.” While metaphysics provided stability, it was in its essence violent not only because it was appropriating (aiming to order the world, a goal realised in its culmination in modern techno-science), but also because it reduces reality back to first principles, silencing questioning. Therefore, “All the categories of metaphysics are violent categories.”3 As such, the end of metaphysics in modern techno-science is an opportunity for emancipation. From the vantage point of late-modernity, Vattimo states that Being has a tendency for weakening, and that emancipation occurs through this nihilistic process.4

2

Gianni Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 90. 3 Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy After Heidegger, trans. by Cyprian Blamires (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1993), 5. 4 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 18.

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By nihilism Vattimo means the devaluing of the highest values, not that there are no values left at all. If nihilism meant no values altogether, or some unthinkable “nothing,” then one would not have overcome metaphysics.5 Similarly, metaphysics cannot be overcome through dialectical overcoming; a “new beginning” would be equally metaphysical as it would be repeating the metaphysical tendency to create foundations.6 Rather, Vattimo thinks that the values we have are traces of metaphysics that have lost their plausibility after the death of God and end of metaphysics, but we cannot throw them off like a worn-out garment. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s phrase that we cannot get rid of God until we have got rid of grammar.7 Following Heidegger and Gadamer, Vattimo thinks that the traditions into which we are thrown are linguistic in nature. As such, they constitute the horizon of thought, of what it is possible to conceive and understand.8 Without the linguistic heritage of the Bible, for example, Vattimo states it would be impossible for him to understand Dante and Shakespeare.9 Along with biblical and Christian thought, other traces of the linguistic heritage of the West include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, among others. Instead of overcoming these traces of metaphysics, Vattimo thinks we should “twist” them. This notion of “twisting” comes from the Heideggerian concept Verwindung, which has the connotations of resignation, convalescence, acceptance, and distortion.10 We cannot overcome metaphysics dialectically and start again, for we are saddled with the metaphysical heritage of over two thousand years. Nevertheless, we can no longer believe metaphysics, either, if we have read Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, among others; it is impossible for any of us today, Vattimo thinks, to really believe in Plato’s forms (although plenty of people in the West still believe in God in the metaphysical sense, something about which Vattimo is largely silent). 5

Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1999), 63. 6 Gianni Vattimo, “Metaphysics, Violence, Secularisation,” in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Recording Metaphysics, trans. by Giovanna Borradori (Evanston, Il. Northwestern University, 1988), 45-61. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 43. 8 Gianni Vattimo, "Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,” in Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds.), Weak Thought, trans. by Peter Carravetta (Albany, New York: SUNY, 2012), 39-52. 9 Gianni Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 36. 10 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 172-173.

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Therefore, we have to “ironically distort” our heritage hermeneutically through listening to Being carefully when recollecting its traces. Some post-Heideggerian philosophers, such as Derrida, would reject talk of “Being” altogether as it is metaphysical. Vattimo, on the other hand, argues that out of modesty one needs ontology.11 After the end of metaphysics one cannot conceive of Being as presence, but as event (a linguistic event, of interpretation). In describing the being of how things are, Vattimo views the world as being the play of an irreducible plurality of interpretations, and, following Nietzsche, there are no facts, only interpretations. This is Vattimo’s hermeneutical nihilism; philosophy today concerns itself with interpretations after the death of God when the notion of there being “facts” in the strong, metaphysical sense is no longer plausible. As such, Vattimo’s style of weak thought is an ontology of actuality,12 trying to make sense of the irreducible plurality of the latemodern world in which metanarratives of progress and Eurocentrism have been broken down in the light of the infinite number of interpretations of history and current events that have been disseminated through information and communications technology.

2. Vattimo and “the Other” As Vattimo makes clear that the death of God is the death of the metaphysical notion of truth and its corollaries such as the ontotheological notion of God, why should Vattimo only think we are resigned to ironically distorting the traces of metaphysics? Inspired by Nietzsche’s unpublished “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Vattimo regards language as essentially metaphorical. The death of God liberates metaphor, since language is no longer dominated by a single metaphysical semantic field, liberating a plurality of myths.13 Could the death of God liberate not only language, but also the possibility for an encounter with a God-beyond-God, of the “Wholly Other” (“Other” with a capital “O”)? If metaphysics has been constraining our idea of God into logical, human, all-too-human categories, then could the end of metaphysics not ironically clear the way for a return to religion conceived as the recovery of the transcendence of God? The language of transcendence has been banished to the margins in the last phases of the history of metaphysics, Positivism 11

Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 87. Gianni Vattimo, “Philosophy and New Monumentality,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 28 (1995), 41. 13 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1997), 54. 12

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and modern science. If our linguistic heritage limits thought, and if we are no longer able to believe this heritage, then Positivism and thorough-going empiricism should no longer prevent us from opening our minds to the infinite, even if the “Wholly Other” could not possibly be circumscribed in thought. This Other could then ground a non-metaphysical way of overcoming metaphysics, healing ourselves from its violence along broadly Levinasian lines. Vattimo unqualifiedly rejects any notion of the “Wholly Other.” He says that God as “the wholly other of which much of contemporary religious philosophy speaks is not the incarnate Christian God. It is the same old God of metaphysics.”14 He thinks the Other and transcendence go hand-inhand, and that transcendence is a metaphysical category.15 To this end, Vattimo categorises philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas with Protestant theologians such as Barth and Bonhoeffer, as well as 1960s “Death of God” theologians such as Altizer, Van Buren, Cox, and Hamilton.16 While Vattimo certainly thinks that the liberation of metaphor enables a return to religion (arguably this has been the defining theme of his later work), the return to religion must be a purely historical affair; it is a response to the event of the death of God and the perceived liberation of metaphor associated with the rise of society of mass communication. For Vattimo, metaphysics must be thought of as the history of Being with a guiding thread (its vocation for weakening, according to Vattimo’s interpretation of this phenomenon), for if it were conceived as a discrete series of conceptual schemes and/or of the possibility of the “Wholly Other,” “it would still leave an ontos on outside itself,” Vattimo thinks, “a thing in itself thought in metaphysical terms.”17 Therefore, Vattimo takes what he calls a “Left Heideggerian” approach. “Left” corresponds to a “historicist” reading of Heidegger on the one hand, and ‘right’ to one in which a “return” of Being is possible, the latter implied at the end of “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’.”18 Ever since he developed his philosophical style of “weak thought” in the late 1970s, Vattimo has developed the theme in his work of the nihilistic vocation of Being, its tendency for weakening. Vattimo frequently makes 14

Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 38. 15 Vattimo, Belief, 49, 55. 16 Vattimo, After Christianity, 36-37. 17 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 108. 18 Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. by William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 112.

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use of the long aphorism in one of Nietzsche’s later works, Twilight of the Idols: “How the Real World Finally Became a Fable.”19 Reading the aphorism through Heideggerian lines taken from the German’s lectures on Nietzsche, Vattimo sees the devaluing of the world through metaphysical rationalism occurring first in Plato’s realm of the forms. This becomes eschatological and historicised in Christianity’s notion of the Kingdom of God. Drawing on Wilhelm Dilthey’s work, Vattimo sees Christianity as creating the “principle of interiority” that notably manifested itself in Augustine’s writings,20 later finding expression in Descartes’ and Kant’s turn to the subject. The possibility of knowledge located within the subject is later made empirical through Positivism and modern science. Various factors dissolve the possibility of factual knowledge altogether, from the discovery of the historicity of science through Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, through to the breakdown of the notion of the human subject in the “GeStell” outlined by Heidegger and developed by Vattimo: the transpropriation of subject and object through the universal challenging of everything by modern techno-science (Vattimo updates it to refer to the images of the world created through information and communications technology).21 Nevertheless, the end of metaphysics (and therefore of the domination of scientific positivism) dissolves the reasons to be an atheist,22 paving the way for the return of religion in the arena of public debate. Vattimo realised that the guiding thread of weakening was nothing other than secularisation. In other words, the nihilistic process in which metaphysics consumed itself was inaugurated in the Christian message. This is why, for Vattimo, the death of God is not the death of the biblical God,23 for the latter is archetypical of hermeneutical nihilism. Vattimo identifies the moment that inaugurates secularisation as the kenosis of God. This term means “self-emptying” and it usually refers to the “Christ Hymn” of St. Paul in Philippians chapter two. The hymn refers to the incarnation of God as the humiliation of God taking the form of a slave in order to serve humankind. Vattimo has been questioned on whether this is a literal occurrence, of whether this humiliation refers to a world historic event. As Vattimo’s whole programme is to move away from metaphysical literalism,24 this is unlikely, and Vattimo has mentioned that he does not 19

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 50-51. Vattimo, After Christianity, 106. 21 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1992), 116-117. 22 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 44-45. 23 Vattimo, After Christianity, 6. 24 Ibid., 29. 20

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conceive of God in terms of a presence, whether transcendent, immanent, or utterly transcendent (“Wholly Other”). Instead, kenosis is a message of the humiliation of God in the incarnation, along with that of friendship for the other.25 The two go hand in hand. Some nuanced commentaries on Vattimo’s philosophical theology state that kenosis has importance in his work in terms of Being emptying itself into becoming.26 While this is a fruitful theme, this has been pursued elsewhere, such as in the death of God theologies of thinkers like Altizer, although with more overtly Hegelian enthusiasm. Indeed, this is not a theme Vattimo himself develops. The lowering of God through kenosis is to make him not a master of humans anymore, but their friend (John 15:15).27 In part, this is the message of the ethically corollary of kenosis that Vattimo develops as the driving force of secularisation, and that is the notion of caritas: the friendship of one for the other.

3. Caritas and regard for the other Caritas is the impetus for secularisation, of de-sacralisation.28 Drawing upon the work of the anthropologist René Girard, Vattimo identifies the sacred and the metaphysical, drawing a parallel between the violence found in religious thought and philosophy.29 Girard thought humans naturally grow jealous of what the other has and can do. This is mimesis. Over time the undercurrent of resentment generated from mimesis threatens to erupt in violence, destroying society. The balance of society was kept by directing this violence onto a “scapegoat.” Gradually this became more ritualised and made sacral to have more efficacy, explaining the generation and development of religions and the “natural sacred” (of this “victimary mechanism”). Vattimo makes the link between the natural sacred and the violence of metaphysics by describing the metaphysical attributes of the ontotheological God such as omnipotence and omniscience as being naturally religious.30 Secularisation is therefore desacralisation of both the natural sacred (the violent aspects of religion) and the metaphysical tradition of philosophy. 25

Vattimo, Belief, 95. Luca D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 15. 27 Vattimo, Belief, 78, 95. 28 Ibid., 64. 29 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London and New York: The Athlone Press, 1987). 30 Vattimo, Belief, 49-50. 26

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Vattimo needs secularisation to be a continuous thread of weakening based on the de-sacralisation of religion and stripping away of the power of metaphysics. How does this relate to the hermeneutical occurrence of Christ both as person and his message? Vattimo follows Girard in regarding that Jesus Christ was put to death for revealing the victimary mechanism pertaining to the scapegoat. Whereas Girard thinks it recurs in the mass, and that Jesus was not a sacrifice himself (he has since changed his mind on this latter point), Vattimo does not think that the true message of Christianity is to institutionalise some natural sacred substitute. Rather, the message of Christ became underplayed and hidden in the institutional nature of Christianity in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in which the clergy, such as the bishop Augustine of Hippo,31 had to continue civilisation at the expense of the Christian kerygma. Nevertheless, Girard’s theory does not lend itself to a theory of weakening, for he was interested in anthropological facts, unlike Vattimo who does not believe in facts. The question remains: how can the message of caritas function as a continuous thread of weakening, as a nihilistic process that culminates in the death of God and end of metaphysics? The answer for Vattimo comes in the principle of interiority that Wilhelm Dilthey thought was the constitutive message of Christianity. With Christianity, compared with Greek thought, Dilthey stated that “the will is no longer satisfied with producing an objective state of affairs…On the contrary, the will goes beyond all this…and back into itself.”32 This inner life, on Dilthey’s view of the Christian message, was based on the idea of fraternity among all people due to faith over against outward factors such as class, nationality, and education.33 The principle of interiority turned the soul of the late antique human inwards, having grown accustomed under the Hellenistic worldview to looking outside (Aristotle) or beyond oneself (Plato). Dilthey thought that the conflict between the interior life of the soul and the demands and value of the exterior world has been a constant theme in the West since the beginning of Christianity, especially in figures such as Augustine.34 Alongside the obligation to maintain and preserve civilisation amidst the destruction of the Roman world, Augustine developed a protoCogito. Other Christians retreated into their souls, such as the Desert Fathers such as St. Pachomius and St. Anthony. Much later the principle of interiority resurfaced under philosophers such as Descartes and Kant. 31

Vattimo, After Christianity, 116. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. and intro. by Roman J. Betanzos (Detroit and London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1979), 228. 33 Ibid., 229. 34 Vattimo, After Christianity, 106-107. 32

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Vattimo does not spell out explicitly how the principle of interiority culminated in the death of God, but he probably presumes his readers are aware of, among other things, Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power as the culmination of the metaphysical forgetting of Being by hubristically transforming Being to values posited by the subject.35 Not only is Vattimo unclear about how the principle of interiority instigated by Christianity culminates in the death of God, but also there is the question about how this principle is related to the de-sacralising message of God’s friendship in the “new covenant.” On this point, however, matters become interesting with respect to the question of the “other” (with a lower-case “o”). Vattimo has been heavily criticised for bringing into his philosophy the principle of charity. Some commentators see it as making an exception for an absolute in his philosophical style where there is no place for one.36 However, these commentators have not paid attention to Vattimo’s description of how he understands caritas. For Vattimo, caritas is a kind of postmodern categorical imperative.37 Vattimo, in his essay “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity” states that “Augustine’s turn inwards is already a step forward with respect to the notion of objective truth, because once you turn inward you must also try to listen to others like you.”38

4. Otherness and the weak subject What does Vattimo mean by “others like you”? Vattimo’s philosophy is one that is other-regarding, but who is the other? On this matter, Vattimo is unclear and it is up to the reader to look for clues. Does Vattimo mean respect for other human subjects, with the term understood in its philosophical sense? As a Nietzschean, writing after the death of God and end of metaphysics, could Vattimo still believe in subjects? Nietzsche did 35

Robert Pippin, “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Metaphysics of Modernity,” in Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Modern German Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 36 Peter Carravetta, “Beyond Interpretation?” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 2010); Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008); Peter Jonkers, “In the World, but not of the World: The Prospects of Christianity in the Modern World,” Bijdragen, 61(4) (2000), 370-389. 37 Vattimo, Belief, 66. 38 Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42.

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not believe there was a doer behind the deed; it is a mistaken belief to think there is a subject behind the action.39 Moreover, Heidegger thought the end of metaphysics was the end of Humanism, with its notion of the strong subject as locus of value. Following Heidegger, in Vattimo’s book The End of Modernity, he calls for the need for a “crash diet” for the subject,40 but he does not fill in many of the details concerning what this kind of subjectivity would be like beyond prioritising listening to Being over subjectivity in the western metaphysical tradition (such as the Cartesian self). This is not particularly helpful when trying to establish what others “like you” might mean. Vattimo mentions that the turn inward inaugurated by the Christian message is a “step forward with respect to the notion of objective truth,” for it implies that one is turning away from external world, from observation to inward agreement with others. However, to look for inward agreement, one would need to have relinquished the notion of objective truth.41 It is likely that Vattimo considers those “like you” only as those people interested in listening to the sending of Being as “weakening,” that “like you” means only those people who realise both they and their beliefs are contingent and historically situated; in other words, that one should only listen to other people who have put friendship before objective truth. Put yet another way, one should listen to those who are not prepared to fuse horizons and agree. Taking the case of Vattimo’s views on Islam, he tacitly agrees with Richard Rorty when the latter stated that “dialogue with Islam is pointless.”42 In this exchange with Rorty, recorded in the book The Future of Religion, Vattimo notes that the West is “refused” by “some parts of the Islamic world.”43 Elsewhere, Vattimo’s reasoning behind such an opinion is clarified, for in an article for La Stampa (17 February 1989) called “Our Savage Brother,” Vattimo noted that Islam has “strong values.”44 Later, in lectures published as After Christianity, Vattimo stated practices based on a “strong identity” (indicating Vattimo identifying approaches to knowledge with personhood), such as women wearing the 39 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29. 40 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 47. 41 Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42-43. 42 Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, and Santiago Zabala, “Dialogue: What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 72. 43 Ibid. 44 Quoted in Dario Antiseri, The Weak Thought and its Strength (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 69.

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chador, should be outlawed.45 “Strong values” and “strong identity” are examples of “strong thought.” “Strong thought” (pensiero forte) is not a term outlined and elaborated on much by Vattimo, but it is the logical antonym of weak thought (pensiero debole). In Vattimo’s landmark essay, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” he describes strong thought as “deductive cogency, which fears letting the initial move escape, the move after which everything falls into place.”46 The “initial move” mentioned in this quotation is the “first principle,” religious (“God”) or philosophical (“substance”), against which everything is measured and to which everything is reduced. With the example of the chador, there is the suspicion that in Vattimo’s society, “strong thinkers” are not to be considered others “like you” but others “unlike you” who need to be banished to the margins. There is a paradox in Vattimo’s thought in the sense that for all Vattimo is interested in going to the margins to bring the other back in from exclusion,47 these others would have embraced weak thought as a way of combating the meta-narratives and strong values of metaphysics and the natural sacred, such as homosexuals who have been marginalised by Natural Moral Law. Vattimo himself is an example of somebody who sought-out Nietzsche and Heidegger and turned his back on the Thomism with which he was brought up because it made him an other “not like” other heterosexual Catholics.48 Neo-Thomists, however, will be banished to the margins should a form of weak thought become normative as they are “strong” thinkers with ethical naturalism as their cognitivist metaethical standpoint. Ironically, Vattimo’s thought is a repeat, and inversion, of the Enlightenment in which religion was banished from public respectability and debate. A similar observation has been made by Thomas Guarino. “The contrast between the crucifix and the chador is revelatory,” writes Guarino, “because it indicates that, for Vattimo, no one with strong beliefs can truly participate in the public sphere.”49 Guarino worries that the cognitive content of religious belief will be emptied if it were to participate in a public sphere organised along Vattimian lines. Another worry not mentioned by Guarino is what about 45

Vattimo, After Christianity, 101. Vattimo, "Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 39. 47 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 50-51. 48 Gianni Vattimo and Piergiorgio Paterlini, Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 13. 49 Thomas Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 71. 46

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those who neither know, nor care, about weak thought; will there simply be no effort to go to the ‘margins’ to engage with “strong” thinkers? Will “charity” be extended to these people? When considering “friendship” (another way of Vattimo’s for referring to charity, normally used by him when not discussing religion) below, this theme will be taken up once more.

5. Secularisation reconstructed There may be a way of reconstructing Vattimo’s notion of secularisation to help keep hermeneutics grounded in history, as well as yielding an ethic of charity as friendship which is more inclusive. To begin with, a number of Vattimo’s premises can be assumed, such as the identification of metaphysics with the natural sacred, the notion of kenosis, and the message of God’s friendship in, through and as Christ. Rather than then develop these themes into a history of secularisation explained through the principle of interiority that leads to an undefined notion of otherness (does one take into account other Daseins, or just people who realise they are Daseins?), there is another way of showing how Christianity effected the weakening of strong structures throughout history. The key idea here is Pierpaolo Antonello’s reading of Vattimo’s interpretation of Christianity. Antonello sees Vattimo as putting forward the notion that Christianity was a “Trojan Horse,”50 posing as a religion when in fact not really being one at all. Christianity destroyed itself by being a lie; it was not really about sacrifice at all, and we are realising now through the work of Girard that this is the case. God commanded humans not to lie, but the religion has been discovered to have been based on a lie. When it comes to how philosophy weakened religion, the “death of God” reading of Nietzsche by Vattimo also applies. The value of truth in religion culminated in the modern, secular world of techno-science in which God was a superfluous lie. Therefore, one can understand why now we are living in the light of the death of God. It could be argued that this idea of Christianity as a Trojan Horse could be taken further and in a slightly different direction not only by including Christianity as a Trojan Horse for religion, but also for philosophy, a view that shall be developed below in relation to the issue of how “truth” entered Christianity to begin with. 50

Pierpaolo Antonello, “Introduction,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8.

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From where did Christianity gain this idea of the absolute value of truth in the first place? It certainly was not from its Jewish roots, for the Old Testament emphasises the relationship of the covenant rather than philosophical ideals, even if philosophical ideas were beginning to enter Judaism in the Wisdom literature and in Egypt through the writings of Philo of Alexandria. If it was not from Christianity’s Jewish heritage, the earliest Christians must have sought out other cultures that happened to include philosophical ideas; this is the line of thought that shall be pursued below. Fernando Savater contrasts Vattimo with his British contemporary, the philosopher John Gray.51 In Gray’s understanding of secularisation, Christianity actually made thought stronger rather than weakening it by bringing into religion the value of truth: “Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for truth.”52 Through a dialectical reading of Vattimo and Gray it is possible to synthesise their ideas for it could be argued that Christianity brought the value of truth from philosophy into religion, posing as, and weakening, both. There are plenty of examples of Christianity weakening philosophy. One can think of the use of philosophy made by the Church Fathers in Late-Antiquity during disputes concerning the Trinity and Incarnation. An example is that the term “ousia” was used as “essence” rather than as “substance” by theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa. The term “ousia” functioned reasonably well within the Aristotelian system, but when it was applied to such an exceptional case as the Trinity then the internal logic of the concept failed as the doctrine required that one essence was shared between three persons (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). In fact, the use of the word ousia even confused the Church Fathers, and there was very little agreement on philosophical terminology in general among them.53 Arguably the paradigmatic example of how theology weakened philosophy is the case of Thomas Aquinas. In disputes on the Eucharist, Aquinas, in the words of P. J. Fitzpatrick, abused Aristotelian terms “to the point of nonsense” by positing that there were free-floating accidents

51

Fernando Savater, “Christianity as Religion and the Irreligion of the Future,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 299. 52 John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2002), 127. 53 Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in the Divine Life (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 195, n. 19-21.

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of the bread when Christ was substantially, and sacramentally, present.54 In short, religion and theology ruined philosophy by holding the universal and metaphysical ransom to the scandalously particular and historical. Why did Christianity adopt the values of philosophy? Jesus himself went to the margins of society to seek out prostitutes, “sinners,” tax collectors, and people with leprosy. He taught that one should love one’s enemies and seek out and help even those who are definitely “other,” such as in the parable of the Good Samaritan. More importantly for hermeneutics and the philosophical question of encountering the other in dialogue, the risen Christ’s last words to his disciples were to spread the good news to “all the nations” (Matthew 28:18-20). This is the “Great Commission,” and it forms the evangelical, universalising, and missionary basis of Christianity. Vattimo himself “twists” this basis by reading it through his late-modern lens, interpreting it anew through his reading of Derrida on the concept of “hospitality.” The latter term means placing “oneself in the hands of one’s guest, that is, an entrustment of oneself to him.”55 In dialogue, “this signifies acknowledging that the other might be right,” and that in the spirit of charity the Christian “must limit [himself] almost entirely to listening.”56 On these grounds, one can reach out even to those “strong” interpreters, for the primary action of this “twisted” missionary activity is listening, not trying to convince the other. This view of secularisation and friendship is more inclusive than Vattimo’s own because it clearly involves seeking out the other no-matter who they are; whether or not they are fellow “weak thinkers,” or staunch “strong thinkers.”

6. Encountering the other: possibilities and pitfalls Charity in terms of friendship is seeking out the other, primarily to listen to them in order to weaken one’s own position by being genuinely changed through the encounter. The earliest Christians, Jews seeking out Gentiles (especially philosophers), are an example of seeking out those who are not “like us.” How can we understand this reconstruction of secularisation in relation to encountering the other as working in terms of Vattimo’s own philosophy? Here one can draw upon the influence of Gadamer’s interpretation of Heidegger on Vattimo’s philosophy. Dialogue 54

P. J. Fitzpatrick, In Breaking of Bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11. 55 Vattimo, After Christianity, 101. 56 Ibid., 101.

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is possible as the traditions of the interlocutors are linguistic, and each particular language inheres within language, within Being. Vattimo, translating Gadamer, wrote “Being, that can be understood, is language,”57 so every experience of Being is linguistic. The primacy of language “has a kind of metaphysical preeminence,”58 and we are each thrown into a horizon that is a linguistic tradition; we can understand other people because they use language, too. Language, shaped through the tradition which is the heritage into which we are thrown, is Gadamer’s way of resolving the Heideggerian problem of the way in which we can conceive of our pre-understanding as Dasein without resorting to a Kantian a priori. As such, language is required not only for experience, but also as the possibility of thought. When interlocutors engage in dialogue, an “event” of interpretation occurs, generating new Being. The continuity of one’s own horizon is broken by the novelty of the other. More than a simple exchange of ideas occurs, but a “fusion of horizons,” “in which the two interlocutors recognize each other not as they were before but as discovered anew, enriched and deepened in their being.”59 Although Vattimo rejects “vertical” transcendence, of the “Wholly Other,” he accepts the necessity of this kind of “horizontal transcendence,”60 of the salvific possibility of the event coming from without historically in order to bring people beyond their own horizon by fusing them closer together. The fusion re-establishes the continuity of the horizon, which is similar and yet different after the dialogue. Influenced by his pupil Santiago Zabala,61 more recently Vattimo has chosen to use “conversation” than “dialogue.” The latter term in philosophy is reminiscent of the Socratic dialogues in which truth is presupposed from the outset.62 Moreover, dialogue may not be possible with some people because they only want to talk, not listen: apparent dialogue would be a monologue. By contrast, Vattimo and Zabala argue that conversation

57

Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 57. 58 Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 148. 59 Ibid., 133; emphasis Vattimo’s. 60 Gianni Vattimo and Carmelo Dotolo, Dio: la possibilità buona: Un colloquio sulla soglia tra filosofia e teologia, Giovanni Giorgio (ed.) (Soveria Mannelli, Calabria: Rubbettino 2009), 17. 61 Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 79. 62 Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism, 25-26.

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occurs when truth is not presupposed from the beginning.63 However, this term is not helpful when encountering “strong” thinkers as many people have a sense of certainty even when one takes into account the infinite plurality of interpretations in the late-modern. Even after having read Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Wittgenstein, some people are unwilling and/or unable to relinquish their strong beliefs; they simply do not feel the need. Whereas Vattimo reads plurality as meaning that it is impossible to find a centre or foundation and that certainty is presumptuous and violent, another way to view plurality is that one may feel one is right and everyone else is wrong. Vattimo sees the latter as implausible, giving the example that is it really possible for the pope to dine with the Dalai Lama and still think the latter is damned to hell?64 How could the pope believe this at all, especially in the late-modern world of techno-science in which mass communication presents us with a de-centred, disorienting world of hermeneutical plurality? The answer is that many people, especially in America (a technologically developed country Vattimo seldom mentions, as commentators on his work such as Nancy Frankenberry note),65 take a leap of faith beyond the pluralistic world Vattimo so ably describes. This might be a leap towards the kind of “Wholly Other” God or “force” that Vattimo decries, or even to a biblical God very different to the one presented by Vattimo, that is, one who is transcendent (although not in the sense of ontotheology), a judge, and one who is glorious, not humiliated. This move is not open to Vattimo as he thinks that all transcendence is metaphysical, and all metaphysics is violent. The first assumption is questionable; the God of the Old Testament is transcendent in the sense that he is beyond his creation, but this “beyond” is not worked out through metaphysical categories. Even if one argues successfully for the view that any “beyond” is metaphysical, and that any metaphysics is violent, some believers may accept the trade-off between the comfort of their faith and not engaging with other non-believers. It is, moreover, quite an assumption that “friendship” can only occur between weak thinkers. Are all “strong thinkers” averse to being friends with those who do not share their convictions? Some people can be good friends and care for one another perfectly well without engaging on the 63

Ibid. Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, “Christianity and Modernity,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 40. 65 Nancy K. Frankenberry, “Weakening Religious Belief,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 282. 64

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level at which convictions lie (in Britain it is often said that one should never discuss religion or politics if one wishes to remain friends). Even if one thinks in terms of fusing horizons to reduce marginalisation or barriers between people, rather than establishing friendship through conversation, it may be possible to create friendship through listening without judging or trying to share ideas. Sometimes people who are very sure of their beliefs become more open-minded when given a platform, especially where people seem to be taking on board at least some of their ideas. This may create a friendship in the sense of caring for and respecting the other which may lead to a conversation in which a genuine exchange may take place. Vattimo follows Gadamer in arguing that through a fusion of horizons one can be changed.66 Nevertheless, one wonders whether the psychological attitude of another towards you (such as caring for the other), even of someone very much unlike you, can affect one even when a worldview is still held strongly, enabling, potentially at least, a future fusion of horizons through a genuine exchange. In other words, there may be too little interplay between the psychological and philosophical in Vattimo’s hermeneutics. Indeed, there seems to be more than a little determinism in the pairing of “weak thought” and “openness” and “strong thought” and “closedness,” as if openness to the other in terms of friendliness of disposition (caring for the other) and openness to ideas (that is, not presupposing truth at the outset of an encounter) were synonymous. If anything, Vattimo, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces the idea that we should be friends with those people who are willing to be open to other interpretations, and that those who are closed-minded are not worthy of friendship. It is highly doubtful this is Vattimo’s intention, but it does follow from what he says.

7. Conclusion Rightly or wrongly, Vattimo’s hermeneutical nihilism precludes any “vertical transcendence” that might pave the way for a “return of Being” or any kind of “Otherness” with a capital “O.” Nevertheless, concern for the other (with a lower-case “o”) is at the heart of Vattimo’s philosophy in recent years, although the identity of the other is largely undefined. This causes a problem for Vattimo, for even though he derives an ethic of charity, or friendship, from historically grounding hermeneutics in the weakening of Being as the nihilistic process of secularisation, he is ambivalent about with whom one should be friends. When considering 66

Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, 133.

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caritas, Vattimo thinks one should consider others “like you.” What “like you” means is unclear, and it could be that one should be charitable only to those engaged in weak thought. When Vattimo discusses the example of the chador, this is what is implied. On this view, those who are not weak thinkers are banished to the margins, much like religion was in the Enlightenment. Even when Vattimo is not discussing charity, but the more secular correlate “friendship,” the implication is not only the same, but even more clear. “Friendship” implies that one does not presume the truth at the outset of the encounter, allowing oneself to be changed in the event of interpretation constituted by the fusion of horizons. On this view, those who hold one’s views “strongly” are not included in “friendship.” One’s disposition towards the other is reduced to the extent to which one is willing to be open-minded, neglecting the fact that it is perfectly consistent to have strong views on a subject, or even the world in general, and care for and enjoy the company of somebody who thinks differently to you, that is, being their friend. In fact, the latter could effect the former, whereby if someone cares for and enjoys the company of another, an exchange of ideas is more likely to be brought about in the future (although not necessarily from strong thought to weak thought). Vattimo frequently mentions preferring friendship to truth, and approvingly cites Dostoyevsky’s claim that he would choose Christ over truth,67 but Vattimo is really choosing and approving weak thought over strong thought. Remodelling charity and secularisation by “twisting” the missionary, universalising vocation of Christianity, in which the imperative is to seek out and listen to others no-matter who they are, will inculcate the type of friendship that is more inclusive and capable of abandoning the centre/margins distinction that Vattimo has ironically retained.

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Vattimo, After Christianity, 103-104.

CHAPTER SIX VATTIMO AND CARITAS: A POSTMODERN CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE?1

Abstract After the death of God, the hermeneutical nihilist Gianni Vattimo thinks we are living in an age where it is no longer possible to believe in ‘violent’ metaphysical notions such as ‘objectivity’ and ‘universality.’ However, we still cannot shake off the traces of the past that have been passed down through linguistic traditions. Kantian ethics is a case in point, situated in the midst of what Vattimo, following Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, regards as the history of Being as a weakening without a termination point. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is a secularised form of Christian caritas mixed with its evangelical universalising mission. In turn, Kant’s emphasis on reason built on the key Christian insight of binding people together by turning inwards through faith. For Vattimo, if one turns inwards then one should listen to others like you, i.e., those who are fellow weak thinkers who want to engage in dialogue. By introducing this condition implicitly, Vattimo weakens the categorical imperative by revealing it in weakened form to be a hypothetical imperative at the cost not only of excluding ‘strong’ thinkers, but also revealing a stronger conception of the subject in his philosophy that borders on the metaphysical.

1. Kant’s Categorical Imperative in the light of Vattimo’s hermeneutical nihilism Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is arguably the height of Enlightenment thought on ethics. At its heart is the subject conceived as a rational and autonomous individual, the lawgiver whose value derives 1 Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “Vattimo and Caritas: A Postmodern Categorical Imperative?” Kritike, 8(2) (2014), 47-65.

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from self-legislating and having self-respect, with respect for others as such logically following. The rational, law-giving member of the kingdom of ends “must always regard himself as making laws in a kingdom of ends which is possible through freedom of the will,” writes Kant in the Groundwork,2 and this ability and realisation “must be found in every rational being.”3 By respecting oneself through obeying one’s own laws, one realises every other being is similarly a self-legislator, and therefore one attributes worth to all rational beings as ends in themselves. In turn, this informs what one is able to rationally universalise when selflegislating, at least on the interpretation of Kant offered by philosophers such as Onora O’Neill and Allen Wood.4 Although this brief summary of Kant’s position is schematic and perhaps over-simplified for the purposes of brevity, it contains the key assumptions that the postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo regards as being devalued and made implausible in his interpretation of the European-wide event of the “death of God.” These assumptions include the sovereignty of the subject, the transparency of reason, and the need to universalise in ethics. Born in Turin in 1936, Vattimo studied under HansGeorg Gadamer in Heidelberg and Luigi Pareyson in Turin. Along with the significant and distinct philosophies of his mentors, his two defining influences have been Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Vattimo often reads Heidegger through Nietzsche and vice-versa. In the case of the death of God, the Nietzschean image central to Vattimo’s weak thought, his controversial philosophical programme since the late 1970s, Vattimo draws heavily on Heidegger’s volumes on Nietzsche and his essay “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’.” Vattimo follows Heidegger in drawing overly much on Nietzsche’s unpublished work. Thus, Vattimo in key works such as The End of Modernity, like Heidegger in “The Word of Nietzsche…,” identifies the “death of God”’ not only with nihilism,5 but also with the important quotation from an aphorism of The Will to Power,

2

H. J. Paton, The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1972), 95. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 Onora O’Neill, The Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by J. Snyder (Cambridge: The Polity Press 1988), 20; Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is dead’,” in David Farrell Krell (ed.), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York and London: Garland 1977), 57.

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that nihilism is “the highest values are devaluing themselves.”6 Both of these identifications are contestable, not least due to the fact that Nietzsche was ambivalent towards nihilism. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche regards nihilism as the fate of European civilisation to lose faith in that which makes life endurable, particularly its embedded Christian values.7 Yet in The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche sees nihilism as bound-up with vigour sufficiently destructive to obliterate these inherited values.8 Rather than sharing Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards nihilism, Vattimo sees it as our “sole opportunity.”9 Why is nihilism liberating? For Vattimo, nihilism, the “death of God,” is the end of philosophy, by which, again following Heidegger, he means metaphysics and the “highest values” from the time of Plato to their dissolution in the late-modern world of techno-science. “Metaphysics” is, for Vattimo, a pejorative term. It is seen as negative because it is “violent” as it silences, closing down debate by presuming there is always a correct answer to any question that is asked. From the idea of Plato’s philosopher kings to Logical Positivism, metaphysics has been linked to restriction and repression. If nihilism is liberating, how did it come about? Here Vattimo adduces a number of arguments. This is his method: instead of demonstrating, he cajoles one into seeing a way of interpreting the way in which the world is now that is most plausible. In his work A Farewell to Truth, Vattimo writes: “Someone might ask, ‘but why are you so convinced that you should be preaching [this message of liberation] to us if you are not a metaphysician?’ To which I would reply, ‘but haven’t you read a, b, c, and d?’ In short, the only arguments I can adduce are not ones of the traditional type but ones of transmission, language, the classics we have in common.”10 By these classics, Vattimo is referring to the wide range of authors that are part of the western tradition to which Vattimo refers and draws upon when outlining his position concerning the death of God. In Beyond Interpretation, Vattimo states that if one has read Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein, one can no longer entertain certain

6

Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche…,” 66. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by Josephine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University 2001), 204. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin 1990a), 132. 9 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 19. 10 Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 70-71. 7

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beliefs about the world,11 including the idea that a human is a rational, autonomous self-legislator. These thinkers themselves are part of a longer tradition, that of what Vattimo calls the “nihilistic vocation of Being”: the death of God is metaphysics culminating in its own self-destruction. Vattimo has various, interrelated ways of articulating this phenomenon. Along Nietzschean lines, he refers to the death of God, such as the image Nietzsche used of God cancelling out his own commandment not to tell lies by being discovered to be a superfluous lie. Vattimo also employs the Heideggerian notion of metaphysical descriptions of “subject” and “object” being dissolved in the Ge-Stell (enframing) enacted by technology, with technology challenging humans and vice-versa to the point of everything losing its qualities, to which we become aware in the Ereignis, the event of transpropriation in which we realise we are released from being defined by a metaphysical essence. Through being released from metaphysically-defined qualities and roles, there has been what Vattimo calls in his book The Transparent Society a “liberation of differences, of local elements,”12 such as minority groups using communications technology to come to the microphones and, in more recent times, begin blogging and setting up alternative media outlets. This postmodern phenomenon illustrates that there is no longer any centre, that there are “no facts, only interpretations,”13 a phrase of Nietzsche’s Vattimo often mentions. Vattimo has continuously stressed the need to engage with the history of metaphysics, the forgetting of ontological difference by identifying Being with beings. Being is more originary than beings, for without the clearing of Being in which humans (or “Dasein,” to use Heidegger’s terminology adopted by Vattimo) dwell, one would not be able to identify and refer to beings at all. The “opening” provided by the clearing of Being into unconcealment permits any expression at all. The opening is not given once for all, but is “historical” and “eventual”; how we understand the nature of things depends on changes in language over time. While Heidegger in his later works places critical emphasis on language, Vattimo’s own philosophical style finds its most succinct expression in the identification he makes between Being and language through his own translation into Italian of Gadamer’s phrase from Warheit und method 11

Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 106. 12 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 8. 13 Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 81.

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(Truth and Method) “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.”14 Vattimo’s translation was “L’essere che può venire compreso è linguaggio.”15 Rendered from the Italian into English, the translation reads “Being that can be understood is language.” Vattimo wished to keep the commas from the German, even though a strict translation into Italian and English would not necessitate them. The commas are present in the German due to the conventions of grammar. Against removing the commas, Vattimo writes in his book The Responsibility of the Philosopher that he wanted to emphasise that Being is language, to ward not only against relativism, but also against “the supposition…that somewhere beyond all linguistic comprehension there might subsist a Being ‘in itself”.”16 As Vattimo implies when talking about the “classics,” the horizons of our thought are established through the linguistic traces we inherit. This is his interpretation of the “thrownness” in Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. We inherit the tradition of western metaphysics, as well as a canon of literary classics, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Within this tradition we find themes such as the uniqueness, and importance, of the human being, variously understood in terms of his being made in the image of God, secularised into the autonomous rationality of the Cartesian and Kantian human being. Other dominant themes include universality and objectivity, first understood as Platonic forms, historicised through Christianity, being secularised in Kant’s thought, and quantified through science and positivism. Vattimo frequently recounts Nietzsche’s narrative of “How the ‘Real World’ finally became a Fable” from his Twilight of the Idols in which this story is outlined.17 In the nihilism of the story’s end, which Vattimo understands as the death of God, both “rationality” and “rationality” need to be “reconstructed,” as Vattimo puts it in his book Nihilism and emancipation.18 These linguistic metaphysical traces—from Plato, Christianity, Descartes, Kant, and many more besides—cannot be discarded in a sort of dialectical overcoming, for to do so would be just to start again on another foundationalism, to repeat, not weaken, metaphysics. This is why Vattimo’s philosophical programme is one of 14

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und methode: grundzuge einer philosophischen Hermeneutic (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972), 450. 15 Gianni Vattimo, Verità e metodo (Milan: Bompiani, 1983), 542. 16 Vattimo, The Responsibility, 57. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 50-51. 18 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xxvi.

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pensiero debole (“weak thought”), in which he talks of “weakening” not “destroying” metaphysics, for the traces of the latter are ineradicable, not least because they constitute the horizons of thought within the traditions found within our shared western culture. As Vattimo writes in The End of Modernity, “Tradition is the transmitting of linguistic messages that constitute the horizon within which Dasein is thrown as an historically determined project.”19 Rather than an overcoming, in a term borrowed from Heidegger, Vattimo proposes thought undertakes a Verwindung (an ironic distortion, or “twisting,” of, and convalescence from) metaphysics.20

2. Vattimo’s Verwindung and Christianity It is just this kind of ironic distortion Vattimo performs on Christianity, in what Giovanni Giorgio refers to as Vattimo’s most recent phase of thought.21 Why choose Christianity, and how has Vattimo twisted it? Vattimo appeals to Christianity for personal, philosophical, and ethical reasons. Growing up in Italy during the 1940s and 1950s, religion was ever-present, and he was sent to Catholic school and participated in Catholic youth groups. While he lost his faith during his university studies, particularly when he lost the links with the Italian Catholic culture when he moved to take up the Humboldt fellowship in Germany, his mind returned to existential questions concerning his own health and mortality, and that of others, in his advancing years.22 Philosophically, Vattimo was eager to ground hermeneutics historically. Due to his assumptions that all forms of metaphysics are violent, he did not want there to be any “rightist” interpretation of Heidegger (and by left and right, think along Hegelian lines) in which a “return of Being” was possible, a tendency he sees what he regards, somewhat unfairly, as the metaphysical philosophies of alterity in the thought of Derrida and Levinas.23 Finally, Vattimo wants his hermeneutical nihilism to yield an ethic.24 One of the principal advantages of the philosophies of Derrida and Levinas is that alterity, grounded in the transcendent “Other,” provides an ethic of concern for the “other” that 19

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 120. Ibid., 172-179. 21 Giovanni Giorgio, Il pensiero di Gianni Vattimo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2006), 12. 22 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 23 Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36-37. 24 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation. 20

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trumps any individual or cultural standard. A purely “leftist,” historical and immanent hermeneutical nihilism does not seem to provide anything more than subjectivism or relativism, insufficient for establishing any kind of ethical normativity. From the early 1990s onwards, Vattimo’s “Verwindung” of Christianity has aimed to address these concerns through the hermeneutical figure of Jesus Christ. As he puts it in his book Belief, “The interpretation given by Jesus Christ of Old Testament prophecies, or (better) the interpretation which he himself is, reveals its true and only meaning: God’s love for his creatures.”25 There are two sides to the same coin of bringing Jesus Christ into his philosophical programme: the historical and the ethical. The historical refers to Vattimo’s appropriation of a term used to refer to one of St. Paul’s Christological themes: “kenosis.” Usually, the context of kenosis is the Christ Hymn of Paul’s letter to the Philippians (chapter two, verses five to eleven), in which Christ is said to empty his power to come from heaven to earth, incarnating himself in the “form of a slave.” Vattimo does not quote Philippians 2:5-11, although he cites the text once in Belief.26 Instead of focusing on this one particular text, by kenosis Vattimo means a message of indefinite weakening inaugurated through the message of Jesus and Jesus’ message. Due to Vattimo’s anti-metaphysical stance, he does not think the message of Jesus corresponds to an incarnation in the literal sense of the term. As such, Vattimo has been accused by theologians such as Thomas Guarino of filling up old wineskins with new wine—“a new and alien vintage”—without regard for what Christians actually believe.27 However, this is precisely the point of a Verwindung; Vattimo cannot shed the linguistic tradition, even though he can weaken it through interpreting it anew. Nevertheless, what exactly Vattimo means by “the interpretation which he himself is” remains unclear. Luca D’Isanto speculates that for Vattimo it refers to the message of the divine abandoning transcendence entering into history, thus weakening himself.28 This reading cannot be derived explicitly from Belief, although it can be seen in a later, lesser known essay of Vattimo’s

25

Vattimo, Belief, 64. Ibid., 39. 27 Thomas Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 152. 28 Luca, D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Gianni Vattimo, Belief (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 11. 26

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called “After Onto-Theology.”29 The message of the Christ entering into history parallels the “indefinite process of consummation and dissolution” of the structures of Being, “which does not culminate in ‘fully realized nothingness’,”30 for the latter itself would be metaphysical. Vattimo calls this process “secularisation.” It is this process that culminates in the nihilism of the late-modern world and it is through this imagery that Vattimo argues that the tradition of the West favours this “left Heideggerian” interpretation. The plurality found in the secularised latemodern world has its archetype in the way in which God has spoken to his people in different ways at different points in history, which is another interpretation Vattimo gives to kenosis in Beyond Interpretation.31 If secularisation is not to be understood in some quasi-Hegelian metaphysical emptying of transcendence into immanence in the manner in which 1960s death of God theologian Thomas Altizer conceived of it, the force by which it moves must be provided by something else. While the kenotic power of Christ derives from the message of God entering into history, Christ’s kenotic power stems from his message which then feeds into ethics. Rather than dwelling on Philippians 2:5-11, Vattimo places more emphasis on John 15:15: “I no longer call you servants but friends.”32 The message of kenosis, then, is one of levelling, of devaluing the highest values; God takes the form of a slave and he is no longer calling others servants. Seeing the message of Jesus, and Jesus’ message as recorded in the New Testament, as paradigmatic for devaluing the highest values, “If one thinks of nihilism as an infinite history in terms of the religious ‘text’ that is its basis and inspiration, it will speak of kenosis as guided, limited and endowed with meaning, by God’s love.”33 For God’s love, Vattimo often uses the term caritas (“charity,” or “love”). For Vattimo, secularisation has no limit except for charity. This principle of charity is the point of convergence between philosophical nihilism and the religious tradition of the West.34 Vattimo further reinforces the link between the discourses of kenosis and the history of Being by drawing upon the thought of the French anthropologist René Girard, particularly

29

Gianni Vattimo, “After Onto-Theology: Philosophy between Science and Religion,” in M. Wrathall (ed.), Religion After Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 35. 30 Vattimo, Belief, 63. 31 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 48. 32 Vattimo, Belief, 78. 33 Ibid., 64. 34 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 51.

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his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.35 Girard argues that Jesus was killed for exposing the “victimary mechanism” underlying all natural religions. The latter were established to contain the overflow of mimetic violence through scapegoating an individual upon which society can vent in order to preserve itself. Ritualised over time and developed into that which is sacred underscoring the religious is overseen by priests, Jesus appeared the perfect victim, yet his message of love revealed the natural sacred for what it is. Girard did not develop his insights into a theory of secularisation, but Vattimo draws parallels between the “onto-theological” qualities of God (such as his omniscience and transcendence) and the violence of metaphysics,36 to the point where in his essay “Heidegger and Girard” he thinks the latter has helped him “complete” Heidegger.37

3. Vattimo and caritas: ethics without transcendence Girard’s work “completes” Heidegger by yielding a hermeneutical ethic that cannot be found in either the work of the latter or in the thought of Nietzsche. Girard bridges the gap between the New Testament and Heidegger’s thought by linking Jesus’ message of love to the revelation of religious violence that is at the same time metaphysical, thus fusing the discourses between secularisation and the nihilistic vocation of Being as a weakening of strong structures in history. Vattimo has been heavily criticised for his understanding of caritas, with some theologians, such as Frederiek Depoortere, seeing it as “something absolute, something transcendent.”38 Anticipating such criticism, Vattimo writes in Belief that “Perhaps the reason why nihilism is an infinite, never-ending process lies in the fact that love, as the ‘ultimate’ meaning of revelation, is not truly ultimate.”39 Caritas, then, is not a moral absolute or transcendent principle, but it is the only limit of secularisation. Secularisation is the nihilistic process of weakening strong structures. It would appear that caritas is the self-limiting of secularisation, with its tendency for 35

René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London and New York: The Athlone Press, 1987). 36 Vattimo, Belief, 39. 37 Gianni Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.) Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 78. 38 Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Theology: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 20. 39 Vattimo, Belief, 65.

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weakening as its limiting factor. If caritas is to be treated as a kind of ethic, what would it be and how would it be related to nihilism as a process? Cryptically, Vattimo writes in Belief that “love…is a ‘formal’ commandment, not unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, which does not command something specific once and for all, but rather applications that must be ‘invented’ in dialogue.”40 Elsewhere, in an essay called “Ethics without Transcendence,” Vattimo elaborates a little more on how he sees caritas functioning both historically and formally: “It should not be forgotten that the categorical imperative of Kant in its most memorable formulations does little more than express in secular terms that Christian imperative of caritas.”41 Through traces of both Kant and the Christian principle of love, Vattimo aims to derive a limit of secularisation that is both ethical and hermeneutical. If Vattimo can successfully create a postKantian ethic which takes into account not only the death of God as an ontological event, but also retain the sense of duty and ethical structure from Kant’s work, then he would have made an important contribution to post-Kantian thought. This is especially so as Kantian thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition such as David Wiggins have expressed scepticism concerning the possibility of post-Kantian universalism in ethics, only seeing some sort of preference utilitarianism with an “impartial spectator” as a live possibility.42 While Vattimo did not want to retain the strong notion of an objective, universal moral law, he did want to “twist” this Kantian structural feature to retain a universally available (in the normative sense) criterion for adjudicating between interpretations based on a respect for others, the latter feature being picked out by Kant scholars such as Jerome Schneewind as an integral feature of Kant’s work.43 It was with later works, such as After Christianity (2002), The Future of Religion (2004), and After the Death of God (2007) that Vattimo developed his historicised understanding of the Categorical Imperative further. Vattimo’s method is to trace the Kantian concerns with interiority and universality that underlie the Categorical Imperative not only back to the Christian revelation, but also forward to the collapse of compelling reasons for their “rationalist” interpretation. For the former part of his 40

Ibid., 66. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “Ethics without Transcendence?” Common Knowledge, 9 (2003), 403. 42 David Wiggins, Needs, Values and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 43 J. B. Schneewind, “Autonomy, Obligation and Virtue: An Overview of Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 309-341. 41

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method Vattimo appeals to the German hermeneutic philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (d. 1911), who thought the most significant consequence of the Christian revelation was that it involved people turning inwards to discover the truth. In his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey argued that Jesus Christ unified people through faith, an inner truth.44 This focus on the inner life, which Vattimo refers to as the “principle of interiority,” constitutes a universality in the sense that the Christian faith is for all people, regardless of race, nationality, class, or gender. Corresponding approximately to Nietzsche’s story of how the world became a fable, it is with Christianity that the absolute became interiorised, historicised, and universalised in terms of faith. Vattimo notes in After Christianity, the book of his that most discussed Dilthey’s ideas that “the new principle of subjectivity introduced by Christianity did not immediately succeed.”45 Nevertheless, Vattimo points to thinkers such as Augustine in whom the tension between “the novelty of Christian interiority and the hegemony of Greek aesthetic or ‘visual’ objectivism” was embodied.46 “A struggle between Christianity’s offering of a new possibility to thought and metaphysics’ endurance,” writes Vattimo in After Christianity, “goes on up to Kant, who draws the anti-metaphysical implications of the inaugural move of the Christian message.”47 On the one hand, the Greek aestheticist idealist objectivism stipulated that absolute truth was located exterior to the intellect in the forms. On the other hand, Christianity emphasised “inwardness, will, certitude of the cogito” that had been recollected by Descartes,48 and from whose thought Kant was drawing further conclusions. The turn inward, begun with Christ, moving slowly through Augustine, Descartes and Kant, weakened the dominant PlatonicAristotelian notion of truth as correspondence, that is, of objectivity. If truth is found within one, then one need not match statements to external things outside. Of course, as Vattimo realises, with Descartes and Kant’s thought there occurred merely a relocation of metaphysics; the metaphysical needs did not disappear, but simply moved to the subject, such as Descartes’ requirement for “clear and distinct” ideas and his foundationalism. Kant, similarly, thought that a universal, absolute moral law could be established on the subject’s rational will. The death of God undermined faith in this rational will, however, through the various 44

Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. by Ramon J Betanzos (Detroit and London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. 1979), 229. 45 Vattimo, After Christianity, 107. 46 Ibid., 107. 47 Ibid., 108. 48 Ibid.

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insights of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, among others. Unfortunately, Vattimo does not explicitly state how and why subjectivity as secularisation culminates in the death of God and the liberating need for a Verwindung of metaphysics. This omission may well be because it would require him to accept Heidegger’s estimations both of Nietzsche as a metaphysician, albeit one who simultaneously heralded the end of metaphysics, and of nihilism. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power was the ultimately nihilistic theory (in a negative sense) for it reduced the suprasensory, such as God and the forms, to “highest values,” reducing Being to value. That which valued was the will to power, the will that wills itself in order to survive.49 It was said above that Vattimo’s method also involved moving forward to the way in which we can “piously remember” the linguistic traces of tradition, in this case of the Categorical Imperative. The latter already had the character of a secularised, weakened Christian universalism, which in turn is a historicised Platonism, “for the people,” as Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil.50 Nevertheless, since Kant there has been the world-historical event of the death of God, liberating all traditions from being placed in a metaphysically ordered hierarchy. With the culmination of metaphysics goes a need to reconfigure notions such as rationality, universality, and objectivity. Vattimo’s starting point in twisting these traces of Enlightenment rationality is the present situation in which objectivity is not possible or plausible due to the decentred hermeneutical plurality that is the defining feature of late-modernity (or “postmodernity”), and that this nihilism is the result of recognising our finitude through secularisation inaugurated by Christianity’s principle of interiority. Vattimo states in The Future of Religion that with caritas he is developing “a metarule that obliges and pushes us to accept the different language games” that have been liberated by the event of the death of God.51 In A Farewell to Truth, Vattimo responds to Augustine’s precept, “look within yourself,” which Vattimo regards as “an advance on the truth of the object,” with the question, “if you turn toward your inner self, oughtn’t you also try to heed ‘the other as yourself’?”52

49

Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche…” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 32. 51 Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, and Santiago Zabala, “Dialogue: What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” in: Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 59. 52 Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, 76. 50

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Vattimo’s logic here is reminiscent of Kant’s. For Kant, if one recognises that one is a rational self-legislator and is willing to obey one’s own laws, then one should be able to see this capacity for self-legislation in others, giving them the same moral value to which one would impute onto oneself. Vattimo’s appropriation of Augustine’s “look within yourself,” in turn based upon a universal brotherhood of faith according to Dilthey’s understanding of Christianity’s appeal, is far less defined. Augustine’s turn inward had value on the assumption that it was possible for the human being to have an inner connection with God. As Vattimo has no need for, or belief in, an objectively existing metaphysical God, then this justification for turning inward has no purpose. All we are left with, in fact, is an inward-gazing, with no adequately reason for it; our subjectivism is nihilistic and empty. Nevertheless, we still do in fact turn inwards. If we do turn inwards, surely we should look to others who just so happen to do the same to find a way to establish ethical norms. Indeed, in finding no objective truths within or without, all we can do is to turn to one-another to fuse one’s limited horizons in dialogue. To whom should one turn in caritas, and how should one conduct oneself in this turning? Moreover, what would be the result of this action? The answers to these questions will reveal Vattimo’s postmodern Categorical Imperative. In After the Death of God, Vattimo writes “once you turn inward you must also try to listen to others like you.”53 What does Vattimo mean by others “like you”? Clearly he cannot mean anything like a Platonic universal of humanity or a Kantian rational subject. In Vattimo’s book The End of Modernity, he calls for the need for a “crash diet” for the subject,54 of a reduced subjectivity, even if he does not flesh out the details. It would appear that Vattimo would prefer to follow Heidegger in conceiving of the individual more in terms of Dasein’s relation to Being than as an autonomous subject who moves out of herself to have relationships with other people and relations to other things. Vattimo believes people should interpret late-modernity accordingly as the nihilistic epoch of Being. Writing in Nihilism and Emancipation, this becomes clear as Vattimo states: “The situation to which we really belong before all else, and toward which we are responsible in our ethical choices, is that of the dissolution of principles, of nihilism. If we choose instead to find our ultimate points

53

Gianni Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” in J. W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 42. 54 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 47.

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of reference in the most specific kinds of attachment (to race, ethnic group, family, or class), then we limit our perspective right at the outset.”55 With a “dissolution of principles,” there is no centre, no objectivity and no absolute against which anything can be measured in terms of its truth value. This situation has liberated a plurality of interpretations, which is why Vattimo believes his hermeneutical nihilism is the koiné of latemodernity. Accordingly, ethics should take the form of “discoursedialogue between defenders of finite positions who recognize that this is what they are and who shun the temptation to impose their position on others.”56 This form of ethics “will certainly retain…some aspects of Kantism (especially the formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of respect for the other…stripped of any dogmatic residue).”57 Vattimo’s crash-diet subject is, then, one who has piously recollected Being in its current nihilistic sending; recognising her own finitude by turning inward and finding no divine spark or foundational rationality there, she will turn to others like her. What will these postmodern, weakened subjects do? Vattimo has implied that they will engage in dialogue, but for what end? Vattimo writes in A Farewell to Truth that “we don’t reach agreement when we have discovered the truth, we say we have discovered the truth when we reach agreement. In other words, charity takes the place of truth.”58 Elsewhere, in Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith, Vattimo puts his position more clearly by stating that “It is still possible to speak of truth…but only because we have realized caritas through agreement. Caritas with respect to opinion, with respect to choices about values, will become the truth when it is shared.”59 The “universal,” writes Vattimo in Nihilism and Emancipation, is only regarded “by passing through dialogue, through consent, if you like through caritas…truth is born in consent and from consent.”60 In fact, Vattimo priorities “listening” over talking, for Christian charity, in its secularised universal mission, involves acknowledging that others might be right so that “universality” should give rise to charitable hospitality, as Vattimo writes in After Christianity.61 Listening to others will further weaken one’s own position, as well as gathering in multiple interpretations in order to fuse horizons to create 55

Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 41. Ibid., 46. 57 Ibid. 58 Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, 77. 59 Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard,” 51. 60 Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, xxvi. 61 Vattimo, After Christianity, 101-102. 56

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more syncretistic, less logically coherent positions. This is how caritas is the stimulus to weakening, the nihilistic force behind secularisation. Vattimo’s postmodern Categorical Imperative, then, is forming truth as dialogue. This dialogue is the coming together of “weak” subjects fusing their horizons as a result of recognising their finitude as a consequence of turning inward and reading the “signs of the times,”62 that we are living in the epoch of the consummation of the nihilistic vocation of Being.

4. The conditional and the postmodern subject: problems for Vattimo’s ethics Vattimo’s notion of caritas rescues some core strengths from Kant’s ethics for the late-modern philosopher. It retains the benefits of the second and third formulations of the Categorical Imperative by grounding concern for, and the ethical significance of, others through recognising the importance of oneself. Arguably, though, there are problems with respect to Vattimo’s Categorical Imperative. The first is that Vattimo’s Categorical Imperative actually seems more like a hypothetical imperative: “if one is prepared to listen to one-another, then engage in dialogue.” The second problem is that the decision whether or not to engage in dialogue seems to presume some kind of autonomy of decision-making, or at the very least a stronger notion of subjectivity than Vattimo is prepared to admit. Vattimo seems to introduce the conditional into the Categorical Imperative: if others are like you, then listen to them. Can you have an unconditional Categorical Imperative? Unsurprisingly, the answer is “No,” for it would be a contradiction in terms. A conditional imperative is a hypothetical imperative, such as “If you want to go to the cinema, then you have to buy a ticket.” This is instrumental reasoning, based on an individual or a community deciding a goal and then deducing what would be the rational course of action required in order to achieve this goal. In the case of Vattimo, this goal-setting and instrumental rationality occurs at a different point in the ethical decision-making process than in Kant’s ethics. For Vattimo, the goal-setting occurs through the dialogue, but the decision to enter into dialogue is based on whether the other party is willing to engage. “Strong” thinkers would not be dialogue partners, for they presume the “correctness” of their views at the outset, precluding dialogue and, therefore, truth. In recent years, in collaboration with his pupil Santiago Zabala in the work Hermeneutic Communism, Vattimo has 62 Gianni Vattimo, “The Trace of the Trace,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Religion (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1998), 91-92.

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preferred to use the term “conversation” rather than dialogue, for the latter term is reminiscent of Platonic dialogues in which truth is presupposed at the outset.63 Truth for Vattimo and Zabala is identical with “friendship,” and the latter is forged in the fusion of horizons that constitutes weakening of Being in accordance with the secularising power of caritas, that is, its nihilistic vocation as a process in history. It has been written elsewhere that the separation of people into “strong” and “weak” thinkers is regrettable not only because it retains a metaphysical dualism, but also because the semantic field of “friendship,” “truth,” and “charity” indicates that those who are not prepared to engage in dialogue can be ignored and not listened to.64 Moreover, the value judgement behind Vattimo’s assessment of “strong” thinkers reveals the inconsistencies in Vattimo’s philosophy. “The unconditional is violent” is ironically an unconditional assessment. One can liken this inconsistency to Bernard Williams’ criticisms of subjectivism in his book Morality: if a subjectivist says someone “has no right” to criticise another’s opinion, then this idea of “no right” takes one beyond a merely subjectivist ethic; it is some sort of metaethic or transcendental, pre-content schema in which ethical opinions are separated out and managed.65 If Vattimo criticises strong thought on the basis of it being “violent,” and if Vattimo backs out of a genuinely Categorical Imperative of universal respect for others based on an “inner turn” primarily on the basis that some people are strong thinkers, then he is just like Williams’ subjectivist holding that people have “no right” to condemn someone else’s beliefs. In other words, Vattimo’s view that “violence is wrong” is his implicit moral absolute, just in the same way the subjectivist still conceives of a “right” and “wrong” when it comes to judging peoples’ opinions. Of course, Vattimo would not even consider himself a relativist, let alone a subjectivist. Vattimo would argue that he is appealing to history to ground a criterion for interpretation that takes him beyond relativism and subjectivism. Vattimo’s problem is in trying to create a criterion for interpretation out of hermeneutical nihilism. “For this problem,” writes Wolfgang Welsch in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo, “[that is] of the multiplicity of competing interpretations and the absence of a

63

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: from Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25-26, 79. 64 Matthew E. Harris, “Vattimo and Otherness: Hermeneutics, Charity and Conversation,” Otherness: Essays and Studies, 4 (2013), 1-21. 65 Bernard Williams, Morality (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 41.

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noninterpretative metacriterion—Vattimo has no solution.”66 Welsch does not think that a “noninterpretative metacriterion” is possible after the death of God. Vattimo may argue that we should try to recollect traces of Being to weaken them to reduce violence. However, if Being just happens, then why should one listen to it? Being has weakened itself despite “strong” thinkers from the time of Late-Antiquity up to the present; indeed, as Vattimo pointed out, the “principle of interiority” took its time to develop between Augustine and Descartes, but it did. Therefore, if we are “thrown” into the world as Dasein, and if Being is inescapably linguistic, surely it is impossible to fail to recollect it in some way, and it takes further, strong reasons to argue for weak thinking and the reduction of violence? If one argues that we should all be weak thinkers (and therefore conversation partners), that we should interpret the traces of Being charitably, then sooner or later one runs into an ethical absolute. Indeed, if one argues that one can choose to be either a strong or weak thinker, and that one should be excluded or included as a result of this choice (or at least identity), then this implies that Vattimo believes that individuals are subjects capable of ethical responsibility, even if it is in the postmodern ontological-ethical sense of the way one which comports oneself to Being. It has been argued by Gavin Hyman in a review of Nihilism and Emancipation that Vattimo does not “distort” metaphysics sufficiently in his notion of the subject that underlies his ethics. First of all, Hyman distinguishes between the “nominative” and “accusative” ethics of the subject, whereby the former is autonomous and discrete, whereas the latter is called by something that is constituted by that which is prior to contemplation.67 Hyman questions whether Vattimo has been able to move to an “accusative” ethics of the subject. Although Vattimo argues that we should read the “signs of the times” and that we are thrown into the infinitely plural world of the late-modern, Hyman points out that Vattimo’s subject still seems to need ethical guidance.68 “For Vattimo” writes Hyman, “ethics…is something we develop or invent by means of our own “choices” and ‘decisions.’”69 Vattimo does mention the need for decisions and choices such as “between what holds good and what does 66

Wolfgang Welsch, “The Human—Over and Over Again,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 100. 67 Gavin Hyman, “Must a Post-Metaphysical Political Theology Repudiate Transcendence? The Case of Gianni Vattimo,” The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 8 (2007), 129. 68 Ibid., 130. 69 Ibid.

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not in the cultural heritage from which we come.”70 Hyman finds it puzzling that Vattimo should conceive of such a strong, founding subject when he rejects other “metaphysical” notions such as the Levinasian “Other,” for the latter is equally “metaphysical” and is a more promising way of grounding a postmodern ethic.71 Presumably, on this nominative sense of the subject one can choose to adhere to one’s heritage and become a “strong” thinker. While Vattimo would argue that this is not reading the “signs of the times,” but this assumption presumes that one can only create one ontology of actuality. Surely, though, in the spirit of plurality one is able to interpret late-modernity in different ways? One could interpret plurality as the dissolution of first principles and foundationalism, or one could see everyone else as wrong and only you and your “cultural heritage” as being right. With no neutral point from which to adjudicate interpretations, even caritas needs to be grounded on something else, something which his lacking. Vattimo’s postmodern Categorical Imperative therefore lacks both a foundation that does not beg the question or consistency with his intention to weaken metaphysics.

70

Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 46. Hyman, “Must a Post-Metaphysical Political Theology Repudiate Transcendence?”, 130.

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SECTION III: VATTIMO AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

CHAPTER SEVEN GIANNI VATTIMO ON CULTURE, COMMUNICATION AND THE MOVE FROM MODERNITY TO POSTMODERNITY1

Abstract Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher and politician, has argued that the end of colonialism and imperialism and the rise of the society of mass communication have contributed to the emergence of the postmodern. Modernity’s unilinear conception of history is no longer possible in the face of multiple cultures and subcultures coming to the microphone across countries in the West. This article considers this view in the light of problematizing comments by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the nature of culture that it is something people do not take seriously and therefore people do not regard science as a culture. If science is apart from culture, then modernity can continue as the grand narrative of the increasing rationalisation of humankind as shown by the emancipating effects of science expressed through technology. Resources from Vattimo’s broader philosophical programme are drawn upon to argue that not taking culture seriously is a postmodern condition and that science is cultural.

1. Introduction Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) is an Italian philosopher and politician who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Turin. Working in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, he is a philosopher of hermeneutics (the philosophy of interpretation), but one who situates it historically in the late-modern rather than as a meta-theory of interpretation. In the opening chapter to his 1992 book The Transparent Society (originally published as La società trasparente, 1989), Vattimo has the following to say about 1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, "Gianni Vattimo on Culture, Communication, and the Move from Modernity to Postmodernity," Journal for Communication and Culture, 2(1) (2012), 31-48.

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culture, communication, and the movement from modernity to postmodernity: “[The] giddy proliferation of communication as more and more subcultures ‘have their say’ is the most obvious effect of the mass media. Together with the end, or at least radical transformation, of European imperialism, it is also the key to our society’s shift towards postmodernity.”2 The aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, it is expository to the degree that it draws attention to Vattimo’s views on the society of mass communication, largely neglected in secondary literature in favour of concentrating on his larger projects of “weak thought” and “hermeneutical nihilism.” The second principal aim of this article is to hold Vattimo’s above claim to critical scrutiny. More particularly, a short extract from the work The Puppet and the Dwarf by Slavoj Žižek will be drawn upon to question both to what extent “science” can be seen as a “culture,” and whether the proliferation of communication in the media (principally through television, radio and internet) from cultures and subcultures, linked inextricably with the transformation of imperialism, is central to the move towards postmodernity as Vattimo claims. Before this critique can occur, however, it is necessary to understand what is meant by “postmodernity” and also by extension, “modernity,” at least in Vattimo’s eyes, for these are highly contested terms.

2. The modern and the postmodern Vattimo juxtaposes the modern and the postmodern by contrasting the values and assumptions associated with both of these terms. The modern, which began at “the end of the fifteenth century”3 is associated with Enlightenment rationalism, and therefore with foundationalism. Descartes, the archetypal modern philosopher, sought to establish a certain base of knowledge on the thinking subject: cogito ergo sum is the most indubitable statement for an individual human subject, and it is upon this certainty that all other knowledge is founded. If one rational being can do this, then it must be universal for all rational persons. This is the logic of modernity. Modern thinkers, such as Descartes and Hume, were interested in a range of philosophical problems, including the interaction between mind and body, and induction (respectively). Nevertheless, Vattimo sees foundationalism and trust in rationality as characteristic of the modern. Foundationalism in matters pertaining to knowledge and reality also 2

Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press: 1992), 6. 3 Ibid.

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affects the modern’s understanding of history and human life. The universal in ethics is epitomised by the work of Kant, particularly his idea of the categorical imperative. Universalism also affects history by making history monolithic and linear, as in the dialectic view of history in Hegel’s thought, frequently commented on by Vattimo.4 Nevertheless, a general feature of modern thinkers is the assumption that history is teleological, that is, goal focussed and drawn to an end, a secularised interpretation of the Judeo-Christian eschatological legacy, particularly in Marx. A value which affects history and life more generally is the value of the modish; what is “new” supersedes what has gone before in virtue of its novelty: “modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself,”5 a time in which the artist “came to be thought of as a creative genius.”6 That which has created the most novelty in the modern age is science, with the numerous technological advances it has brought, from washing machines to computers, microsurgery to powered flight. Vattimo does not equate science with technology, but he does relate them very closely together, such as in the index to The Transparent Society, where “technology” is cross-referenced from “science,” and some page numbers in the index under “science” pertain only to “technology.”7 Although Vattimo refers to a “techno-scientific complex,”8 Vattimo does not completely reduce science to technology, seeing science in more abstract terms as well, as an ideal of rationality that has permeated the modern and has been integral to intellectual programs such as demythologisation.9 Technology is the product of practical science, which has a significant number of its roots in theoretical science. The foundationalist tendencies of modernity leant themselves to the development of theoretical science. Vattimo sees monotheism as “the condition in which nature can be conceived of from the unitary perspective of a physical science.”10 Another factor in the growth of science is its mathematical character. The latter factor relates to the characteristic of science to look for “certainty,” which is another feature of modernity (think of Descartes’ search for the “indubitable” which led him to the Cogito). In accordance with the 4

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 1. 6 Ibid., 2. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 29-30. 10 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 75. 5

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foundationalist tendencies of modernity, theoretical science has universalised the scope and applicability of its empirical methods, through Positivism, to reduce all meaning to atomic facts and logical connectors. The most aggressive form this took was the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle in the first half of the twentieth century. “If the ‘modern’ placed a pronounced stress on the homogeneity of thought, culture and practice,” writes Guarino in his overture to Vattimo’s thought, “the postmodern response has been to celebrate discontinuity and pluralism.”11 Whereas the modern sees the human in terms of foundationalism, whether Cartesian and Kantian rational subjects, or in terms of the biological definition of the human, postmodernity accounts for “essential dimensions of actual historical life such as our embeddedness in determinate societies, cultures and practices, our traditioned and situated reason, our contextualised knowledge.”12 As a result, “postmodernity exhumes from Enlightenment obsequies notions such as alterity and difference, rupture and breach.”13

3. History as multivalent, and the breakdown of the idea of progress According to Vattimo, “modernity ends when—for a number of reasons— it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear,”14 and this is arguably the most important cultural factor to which Vattimo draws attention to support his interpretation of the late modern as a time in which strong structures are weakened. History loses its unilinear character in three principal ways: theoretically, demographically, and through the rise of the society of generalised communication. These points will be explained in turn, drawing in particular on his clear exposition of these ideas in the opening chapter of his work The Transparent Society. For the first point, concerning the loss of a theoretical unilinear notion of history, Vattimo turns to the philosophy of history of Walter Benjamin, especially his 1938 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Vattimo interprets Benjamin as maintaining that this unilinear history “is a representation of the past constructed by dominant groups and social classes.”15 The powerful—kings, emperors, nobles—make history, whereas 11

Thomas Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (New York: Continuum, 2009), 6. Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 2. 15 Ibid., 3. 12

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the poor, the defeated, the disenfranchised do not get a chance to do so. “In every era,” writes Benjamin in his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, “the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it,” for history too easily becomes “a tool of the ruling classes.”16 Vattimo acknowledges here that Benjamin was speaking in a then nascent tradition, “along a path cleared…by Marx and Nietzsche,”17 of seeing history as constructed, that it was not impartial but interested, and this included unilinear history, too. As unilinear history is selective and power-laden, it is “illusory to think that there exists a supreme or comprehensive viewpoint capable of unifying all others.”18 Such a realisation has profound implications for the idea of progress, for “if human events do not make up a unilinear continuum, then one cannot regard them as proceeding towards an end.”19 This implication applies to sacred eschatology, as much as to its secularised cousin, such as Marxist hopes of world revolution and the realisation of the classless society. Other teleological, unilinear philosophies of history also fall prey to this criticism, not least Hegel’s, explicitly named by Vattimo.20 What is being rejected by Vattimo here is Hegel’s dialectical notion of history, of the concept of Aufhebung. History, on this view, is an escalating, dialectical process of conservation and destruction, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Conceived religiously, although there is destruction and weakening of an absolute through its engagement with history, the absolute’s “eventual coincidence with the subject makes it possible to speak of a definitive attainment of the truth,” for Hegel.21 In conceiving of history as plural, Vattimo is against anything “definitive,” of there being a single truth to grasp either of, or in, history. If there is no single end, there is also no single centre, or fulcrum, to history, including the coming of Christ.22

16

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. by H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 247. 17 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 3. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), 53. 22 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 3.

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4. The roles of culture and communication in the advent of the postmodern Of “greater magnitude” for changing attitudes towards the unilinear conception of history, writes Vattimo, than the merely theoretical, is demographical change.23 In the West, in modern Europe where this notion of history has flourished, “the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples colonised by Europeans…have rebelled, making a unilinear and centralised history de facto problematic.”24 Vattimo does not expand much on this point, but it is a significant one. Demographic changes due to mass immigration have led to greater realisation of other histories, other ways of thinking. The rebellion of previously ruled peoples is a common theme in history. What prevents the rebellion of people following the death of Alexander, or the fall of Rome, or in the Reformation, or after the defeat of Napoleon from being postmodern is that they were not rebelling in the age of mass communication, a point which shall be elaborated on below. Of course, a hallmark of the Reformation is the importance of the printed word. Nevertheless, it still did not give anywhere as much capability to express, and preserve, an alternative viewpoint to as many people as exists today with radio, television and—mostly significantly—the internet. In the United Kingdom there is “Black History Month,” for instance, and internationally there is “Gay Pride Week.” Public recognition of the link between history and identity in this fashion could be seen as evidence for the weakening of belief in a unilinear conception of history. The other “decisive factor in both the dissolution of the idea of history and the end of modernity is the advent of the society of communication.”25 Vattimo has very clear ideas about what this entails, for what he is proposing is: “(a) that the mass media play a decisive role in the birth of a postmodern society; (b) that they do not make this postmodern more ‘transparent,’ but more complex, even chaotic; and finally (c) that it is in precisely this relative ‘chaos’ that our hopes for emancipation lie.”26 Point “c” will not be explored here. The first and second points, however, require some immediate explanation. By “mass communication,” Vattimo meant “newspapers, radio, television, what is now called telematics.”27 The Transparent Society was written just before the introduction of the internet for consumers, but what Vattimo has to say about mass 23

Ibid., 4. Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 5. 24

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communication applies even more strongly now in light of the effects of widespread internet use in the West. If alternative television and radio stations gave voice to more groups, such as “The God Channel” for Christians and the “Sy-Fy” channel for those whose worldview includes the possibility of extra-terrestrials, and different news stations for different countries with their own ideals, such as CNN in America, Al-Jazeera for Arabian countries (although accessible elsewhere, too), Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums go beyond groups to give any individual a way to express their worldview. “Recent decades in the United States,” Vattimo writes, “have seen minorities of every kind take to the microphone.” As a result, this “apparently irresistible pluralisation renders any unilinear view of the world and history impossible.”28 Here the points about the end of imperialism (or at least its transformation), the end of colonialism (Vattimo often mentions this together with the end, or transformation, of imperialism, seemingly using the terms interchangeably despite their generally accepted terminological differences29), and the rise of the society of mass communication come together. Since the end of the Second World War, people from colonies and former colonies have moved to countries such as Britain, to fill labour shortages immediately after the war, to find a better way of life, to be with relatives and – in more recent decades—to seek asylum.30 Concurrently, communications technology developed significantly. With the rise of multiple radio stations, television channels and, a generation later, the advent of the internet, previously marginalised cultures and subcultures have begun to have a voice. Vattimo does overstate his case, and there have been studies to show that in places such as Canada, ethnic minorities have been invisible, stereotyped, and tokenised in the media.31 It is interesting that Vattimo himself provides no concrete examples of the liberating effect of communications for minorities. 28

Ibid., 5-6. For Vattimo using “imperialism” and “colonialism” together, see Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 4-5, 31-32. For the terms having different meanings, even if they are often used interchangeably, see Carolyn Gallaher, Carl Dahlman, Mary Gilmartin, Alison Mountz, Peter Shirlow, Key Concepts in Political Geography (London: Sage, 2009), 115-116. 30 BBC website: Short History of Immigration, accessed 05/04/12: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk/2002/race/short_history_of_im migration.stm 31 Augie Fleras, ““Please Adjust Your Set”: Media and Minorities in a Multicultural Society,” in Communications in Canadian Society, 4th Edition, 1995, accessed 31/12/11. http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/articles /diversity/media_minorities.cfm 29

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Moreover, he talks about the end of imperialism, but praises the effect of communications in America. Nevertheless, communications technology such as radio have been used by minority ethnic groups and political movements, such as feminists, in places such as Norway throughout the 1980s to some effect, although it is another question about the extent to which the use of technology by such groups had an impact on the cultural consciousness of society at large. Although it is easy to overstate the “democratisation” of the media through the internet, social media, blogging, web-site design, trending and focus groups based on internet data have enabled minorities with access to communications (which is a larger, separate, but related issue of importance beyond the scope of this article) to express their beliefs and values. Radio stations and music video channels have also given a voice to the marginalised, through protest singers such as Phil Ochs in the 1960s, to revealing to a far wider audience than would have been possible without communications technology subcultures angry at the status quo, such as the early rap group Public Enemy in the 1980s. Unlike, say, the use of radio by minority groups in the 1980s in Norway,32 these artists and bands did garner a much larger public audience and therefore may exemplify better the kind of point Vattimo has been trying to make.

5. A critique of Vattimo on culture and communication It is worth placing Vattimo’s understanding of the relationship between culture, communication, the end of colonialism and imperialism, and the nature of reality under scrutiny. To recap, Vattimo sees the end of colonialism and imperialism and the rise of the society of mass communication as allowing “cultures and subcultures of all sorts” to step “into the limelight of public opinion.”33 The “apparently irresistible pluralisation” of “cultural universes” in the “information ‘market’ in the West ‘renders any unilinear view of the world and history impossible.”34 This view of the effect of the culture of mass communication is in contrast, as Vattimo realises,35 with the views of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Orwell on the subject, for these three thinkers predicted that homogenisation of society would be the result. One may argue whether the difference 32

S. Ananthakrishnan, “Freedom in the Air: Community Radio and Minorities in Norway,” Economic and Political Weekly, 22(36/37) (September 5-12 1987), 1547-1552. 33 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 5. 34 Ibid., 6. 35 Ibid., 5.

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between these three thinkers and Vattimo on the subject need be put in this “either/or” fashion, for are not the plurality of voices on the internet curiously homogenous? Perhaps formally, stylistically this may be the case, for there is the common internet language of terms such as “lol” (laugh out loud), “imo” (in my opinion). However, the content of views certainly does vary significantly. On the “mainstream” BBC website, coverage of Prince Philip’s return from hospital over Christmas 2011 involved reports of the length of his stay, the state of his health, and his demeanour when leaving hospital.36 By contrast, the David Icke Forum took the mainstream news headline of the prince’s health and analysed it, trying to decode secret messages concerning conspiracy theories and hidden history.37 What is assumed by Vattimo, though, is that this plurality of messages coming from an infinitely plural number of cultures (although, arguably with the internet, subjectivities), has a “dissolving” power in the sense of dissolving the “unilinear view of the world and history” of modernity. If anything, Vattimo is reducing “world” and “history” to culture, and then drowning it in its own media-conveyed plurality. The work of Slavoj Žižek may provide a useful opposing view in order to further the discussion on how far plurality has a dissolving power. Consider the following quotation from Žižek’s 2003 book The Puppet and the Dwarf: “What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December? Perhaps, then, the ‘nonfundamentalist’ notion of ‘culture’ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without ‘taking them seriously’. Is this not also why science is not part of this notion of culture—it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as ‘barbarians,’ as anticultural, as a threat to culture—they dare to take their beliefs seriously?”38 There are two issues from this quotation which may have consequences for Vattimo’s argument. The first concerns the extent to which we take “cultures” seriously in the first place. The second issue is whether science is considered a culture. Each of these issues will be dealt with in turn. If, 36 “BBC News article”, accessed 27/12/11, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world16337357 37 “David Icke Forum,” accessed 27/12/11, http://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?p=1060468790&highlight=prince+phi lip#post1060468790 38 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2003), 7.

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as Žižek argues, cultures are not taken seriously, then to what extent will media-enabled saturation of them dissolve weaken the sense of any unilinear view of history as Vattimo assumes? Žižek does not really argue for his position, but the possibility that some people think in this way is enough to warrant questioning Vattimo’s equally sweeping assumption. Although it is clear that the society of mass communication gives a voice to an infinite number of conflicting viewpoints, it is another question of whether anybody is listening to this plurality of opinions and more importantly how they are interpreting this variety; could not some people block out or see as irrelevant, or even reject the plurality around them, due to the conviction they have in the truth of their own beliefs? The example Žižek provides is “fundamentalism,” but could this not be broadened out to anybody who believes in the truth of their worldview? Many religious people believe in the truth of their faith but are not “fundamentalists” in the pejorative sense of the term. For all Vattimo is interested in hermeneutics, he is not so much concerned with the depth of interpretation, of the attitude towards the plurality of interpretations, but with the age-old problem of the “one and the many”: unilinear history of modernity and the many histories communicated through technology in the late-modern time period. In his book Beyond Interpretation, at one point he is looking for archetypal expressions of the hermeneutic position in the history of Western thought, and he cites Aristotle’s to on léghetai pollachôs (Being is said in many ways).39 Aristotle’s phrase is insufficient for Vattimo because of Being’s relation to substance, as well as its metaphysical character: the many inhere in the one, or the many ways are once-for-all time (respectively).40 Hermeneutics, by contrast, involves reality being constituted by many interpretations without one substratum and/or common core, as well as being contingent and historical. The issue, then, for Vattimo is not reception, but the relationship between unilinear history and the many stories of late-modernity, between the once-for-all nature of metaphysics and fact on the one hand and the contingency of “becoming” of interpretation on the other. The search for contingency and historicity is why Vattimo prefers the doctrine of kenosis to the thought of Aristotle when looking back into the history of Western thought for an archetype of hermeneutics. Kenosis is a theological concept appropriated by Vattimo for philosophical purposes. Normally, it refers to a passage in Philippians chapter 2 in which God empties his power to be incarnated in the person of Jesus, to live and to 39 40

Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 46. Ibid., 47.

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die, then be resurrected in glory. Vattimo sees kenosis as a message communicated from the time of Jesus to the present day of God speaking to his prophets in various ways (“multifariam multisque modis olim loquens Deus patribus in prophetis”), foreshadowing the plurality of the late-modern,41 and of God announcing that humans will not be servants, but friends.42 The effect of this message passed down, re-interpreted and applied through history is a message of weakening, of secularisation which Vattimo sees as both the nature and fulfilment of Christianity. Secularisation expresses itself through the reduction of strong structures; if one is God’s friend, not servant, ecclesiastical institutions that demand complete obedience are, in Vattimo’s view, out of sync with the charitable message of the gospel. Vattimo does not see kenosis and charity’s relevance as limited to the ecclesiastical domain due to the Nietzschean notion of the death of God. The death of God means a lot of different things for Vattimo and he conflates these different interpretations. In an interview in the collection of essays called After the Death of God, Vattimo links the term to the death of Christ (and is therefore linked to kenosis), but also to the “chemical” analysis of truth in Nietzsche’s book Human all too Human.43 When the value of truth is radicalised, it dissolves itself, as shown in the death of God—God, representative of truth, is discovered to be a lie. This is an example of finding a way out of modernity, for truth and foundations, important concepts in modernity, are not overcome—for this would be to repeat modernity—but dissolved.44 “If God is dead,” Vattimo writes, “there are no meanings or values that transcend the process,”45 leaving no hierarchy of values—everything is reduced to “exchange-value.”46 Nihilism occurs because “even the idea of a true basis is a lie that is ripped away by the unmasking.”47 As Vattimo sees Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God” as symbolic of the death of all strong truth claims, then the message of kenosis—of the humbling of God until death, of his call for friendship and of communicating to people in many ways—applies to all 41

Ibid., 46. Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 55. 43 Gianni Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” in After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 89-90. 44 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by John Snyder (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 167. 45 Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 156. 46 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 21. 47 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 156. 42

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pensiero forte (strong thought). Returning to Žižek’s quotation, Vattimo has, then, a way to counter his objection, for although one may (in terms of logical possibility) distinguish between culture and something one “takes seriously,” Vattimo believes one should not take any belief system seriously if by “seriously” one means in a strong, exclusionary sense. Ironically, Vattimo is similar to Žižek in the sense that he would be against those fundamentalists who hold their views strongly and take them seriously, although Vattimo grounds his opinion in the history of the message of weakening he sees in the gospel, encapsulated in the idea of kenosis. Moving on to the second issue which is taken from Žižek’s quotation, what if science is generally regarded, at least in the West, as set apart from “culture”? Ironically, then the enabling factor of the dissemination of cultures—the technological advances which have propelled the rise of the society of mass communication—are exempt from their dissolving power. Paradoxically, then, Vattimo’s argument contributes to what Lyotard calls a “grand narrative,” in this case of the progress of science. At root, Vattimo’s argument seems like a ringing endorsement of the increasing power of science to set people free, in this case liberating voices to be heard by the masses. This link between rationality (as expressed in the designing, making and propagating of tools of mass communication such as the radio, television and the internet) and emancipation has a strongly “modern” ring about it, having shades of philosophers as varied as Hegel, Simmel48 and the Enlightenment tradition’s current re-constructor, Habermas. However, Vattimo tries to show how the constant progress in technology undermines such a grand narrative of progress by invoking the ideas of Arnold Gehlen. For Gehlen, progress empties-itself out by becoming “routine.” For example, if a car company calls each one if its new cars the best driving machine money can buy, it devalues the notion of “best” when the next car comes out. Moreover, progress becomes expected, and to make money to sustain liberal capitalism, frequent and necessary.49 Against this view, given how popular even small technological advancements are (different generations of mobile phones, for instance) and how the general attitude of people in the West towards them is of progress (“My new phone is better than my old one”) the grand narrative of the progress of science and technology seems alive and well. Vattimo would not agree with interpreting him as inadvertently supporting the grand narrative of the progress of science and technology 48

Frédéric Vandenberghe, A Philosophical History of German Sociology, trans. by Carolyn Shread (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2009), 83. 49 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 102-103.

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on both Nietzschean and Heideggerian grounds. On Vattimo’s reading of the death of God, science would be another “truth” which has been “dissolved” insofar as it is another expression of absolute truth, and “even the idea of a true basis is a lie that is ripped away by the unmasking.”50 Vattimo is keen on mentioning the Nietzschean phrase “there are no facts, only interpretations,”51 and scientific “facts” are not exempt from being seen as interpretations. The Heideggerian argument for the “cultural” interpretation of science is more complex, but it is necessary to state it here. More precisely, the argument to present is a Vattimian interpretation of Heidegger on technology. Most of the following exposition is taken from “The Question Concerning Technology,”52 although Vattimo also draws upon Heidegger’s Identity and Difference.53 For Heidegger, the essence of technology is not something technological. It is more than just a means, but a way of revealing. The essence of something is not something static, for it comes from “wesen,” to “endure,” to “come into presence.” Moreover, the ancient Greek etymology of techné, with its conjunction with “episteme,” emphasises its role in knowing, revealing. More than just a means, an instrument, it will be shown why technology, modern technology in particular, is a revealing. Heidegger contrasts the ways of revealing in ancient and modern technology. Ancient technology’s way of revealing is in accordance with physis, the nature’s way of revealing. For example, a flower would reveal its scent and colour through the changing of the seasons. By contrast, modern technology reveals in a way which is a herausforden, a “challenging.” The latter is a demanding, a bringing out of nature. An example makes this clearer. A windmill is ancient technology, and, left to the wind, would produce energy. Modern coal mining, though, extracts the coal from the ground in a way which it would not do so if the coal was left to its own devices. This challenging is not an end in itself, but is an expediting, turning the yield to something else. The coal would power homes and factories, for instance. If the coal is not yet needed, it is stored, as what Heidegger calls “standing reserve”; it is ready for use and can no longer be seen as an object. Modern technology turns all of nature into standing reserve. Standing in reserve is a change of essence of an object. As everything in the age of modern technology is standing in reserve, it can no longer be seen as it was. An airplane cannot be seen as a 50

Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 156. Ibid., 81. 52 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2011). 53 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 51

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mere object on a runway when one has seen it in flight; it is always standing in reserve for flying. Similarly, the Rhine is no longer a river, but an energy source for hydroelectricity. Even with tourism, one cannot see it as merely an object of nature, but a source of income from tourism. The “trend” of the interlocking things on standing reserve is called by Heidegger, Ge-Stell (“enframing”). This is the process of modern technology in its determination, ordering and challenging, the direction in which it is heading. Ge-Stell is a type of revealing which challenges, orders and determines things into standing reserve. It would be wrong to think of human beings themselves as being the ultimate cause of Ge-Stell. Rather, humans are challenged to challenge in turn. If the logger in the wood does not use the same technology as his grandfather, it is because he has been challenged by factors such as needing to earn a living wage, or the demand for paper, to use modern technology that challenges. Man himself, then, is standing reserve. Enframing is revealing destiny, Heidegger believes. Freedom for man lies in openness to its unconcealment, if “he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens, though not one who simply obeys.”54 Insofar as enframing is part of destiny, as Heidegger would have it, man is not in danger. However, enframing, although a mode of revealing, ironically restricts other modes of revealing, of poiesis. By challenging, modern technology eliminates physis, for instance. In blocking other ways of sending/destining, enframing restricts man’s freedom. Ge-Stell, along with the death of God, for Vattimo constitutes the culminating point of the history of metaphysics. This is not the place to get side-tracked into a lengthy exposition of Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger (a good exposition can be found in Barbiero’s essay on Vattimo55), but something should be said by way of explanation of how, contrary to the usual reading of Heidegger, Vattimo interprets him nihilistically. From the time of the Greeks onwards, Heidegger thought, Being has been unconcealed through historical openings, events, which act as horizons into which things are given; for a time, Heidegger thought this was effected through art.56 This contrasts with the universal, permanent nature of the Kantian transcendental structures, for these horizons are historical and irruptive. Returning to Ge-Stell, it is “the place where metaphysics reaches its climactic moment and its highest and most 54

Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 230. Daniel Barbiero, “A Weakness for Heidegger: The German Root of Il Pensiero Debole,” New German Critique, 55 (1992), 159-172. 56 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrell Krell (ed.) Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2011), 130-131. 55

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complete unfolding.”57 In this enframing, man and Being “lose their metaphysical qualities,”58 for everything is challenged and therefore reduced to exchange-value as standing reserve. This is “not merely the demonic import of technology,” but it, “is, instead, precisely in its ambiguity, the flash of Er-eignis, of the event of Being as the opening of a realm of oscillation in which the giving of itself of ‘something as something,’ the ‘self-propriating’ of entities each in its own definiteness, happens only at the price of a permanent transpropriation.”59 A hierarchy of values disappears when everything is equally challenged, and Being begins to show itself as eventual and contingent, not permanent and universal. Therefore, there are no foundations to be built upon, whether these be explicitly metaphysical (such as the Aristotelian division of nature), religious (God as behind everything), or scientific (dividing nature again, but this time “physically,” although such a division is “metaphysical” in Vattimo’s eyes insofar as it divides for all time). What is imperative to mention is that Vattimo brings Heidegger upto-date by stating that Ge-Stell occurs through communications technology. This statement should not be taken in a literal sense that GeStell occurs through the sum total of communications technology, but through the play of images that they present. When Vattimo wrote The Transparent Society in the late nineteen-eighties he was thinking about satellite television and the radio, but his argument applies even more in the age of the internet. In a world of the irreducible plurality of images and voices made possible through communications technology, images “constructed and verified by science”60 (which again underscores how, against thinkers such as Heidegger and Andrew Feenberg, Vattimo would appear to regard technology as applied science) breaks down any unilinear view of history or hierarchy of values. Ultimately, from these conclusions drawn by Vattimo, “we must straightforwardly thrust hermeneutics toward its proper fulfilment in nihilism.”61 In other words, thinking takes place in a tradition and cannot be grounded in any universal, underlying foundation.62 Science, like 57

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 172. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 116. 59 Gianni Vattimo, “Towards an Ontology of Decline,” in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Recoding Metaphysics, trans. by Barbara Spackman (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 72. 60 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 16. 61 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, 29. 62 Ibid., 29-30. 58

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religion and any other ‘strong’ claim, is reduced to “exchange-value”; it, too, should not be taken “seriously” insofar as “seriously” means “strongly.” If “science” is taken in its theoretical sense, it is “cultural” and is just another interpretation alongside all the others conveyed in the society of mass communication. It is an irony that science as a set of beliefs, truths or laws is consumed by its own practical application in technology, mirroring the “death of God” in Nietzsche’s thought, in which God (a term which represents “truth” in its strong sense) is consumed by the religious duty to be truthful. If science is taken seriously, it is through not having read the signs of the times in seeing it as one interpretation of the world alongside others. Although Žižek poses the question of whether science is apart from culture, ultimately, drawing upon resources within Vattimo’s own broader philosophy (it is another matter, beyond the scope of this paper, whether these are valid), it is cultural.

6. Conclusion Modernity, Vattimo thinks, is characterised primarily by a unilinear history, with its attendant foundationalism and universalising tendencies. The end of history, and the beginning of the postmodern experience, occurs, according to Vattimo, when in the late-modern time of the twentieth century the combination of the end of colonialism and rise of the society of mass communication in the West has dissolved the notions of a unilinear history and a single truth. Communications technology (in the sense of radio, television, and internet) have allowed an array of cultures and subcultures to come to the microphones, forums and cable television channels to give their opinion on issues, often opposing that given in the mainstream media. As has been shown, Vattimo’s argument as it is presented in this form is very vulnerable, especially to a contrarian in the history of ideas such as Žižek. As soon as one starts to problematize the notion of culture, then Vattimo’s argument requires greater depth to support it. Žižek, in questioning whether cultures are valued or not, draws attention to a relative weakness in Vattimo’s philosophy of hermeneutics: in describing the move from the modern to the postmodern, Vattimo is not so much interested in how people interpret plurality, but whether there is plurality vis-à-vis singularity. Moreover, if science is not a “culture,” a possibility Žižek raises, then Vattimo’s argument reads for an unexpected, and convincing, extension of the “modern” grand-narrative of the continuing progress of reason through the emancipatory effects of science as seen in

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the power of modern communications technology to offer a platform for hitherto marginalised voices. There are, however, resources in Vattimo’s writings to get around these problems. Firstly, Vattimo follows Gadamer and Heidegger in situating hermeneutics historically as he is explicitly against hermeneutics as a meta-theory of interpretation. In situating hermeneutics historically, his work from the last twenty years has involved him reinterpreting the faith of his youth, which he thought he had abandoned, in terms of a message of the kenosis of God, of weakening, which leads to the dissolution of strong structures. This is, Vattimo is at pains to say, a transcription of the Heideggerian notion of the weakening of Being, which in turn is nothing but the same message as the Nietzschean “death of God.” All three are ways of expressing the koine of hermeneutics in the late-modern, as the basis for pensiero debole (weak thought). Tradition cannot be overcome, for this would be to repeat modernity, but twisted in order to weaken in. Culture, then, should not be taken “seriously” if by this is meant “strongly,” for to take culture seriously would be to act as if the death of God had not occurred, as if one had not heard the message of kenosis. Taking culture lightly, not seriously, then, is a feature of the postmodern experience. For those who have read the “signs of the times,” the effect of receiving the plurality of messages from cultures and subcultures in the media would be a weakening of the modern, unilinear view of history and reality. Crucially for Vattimo, science is included as a culture, for it is merely a culmination of metaphysics as shown in the enframing of the world through its product, the domination of technology. Science is another expression of the metaphysical tendency towards foundationalism. While Vattimo can deploy these resources to overcome problems concerning the reception of culture in the late-modern and the status of science in relation to culture, a question remains how Vattimo’s societal-cultural argument on the basis of communications technology and post-colonialism relates to his deeper, more philosophical reflections on Nietzsche and Heidegger; can somebody read the signs of the times in a postmodern sense due to the plurality of messages, or only as a result?

CHAPTER EIGHT VATTIMO, NIHILISM AND SECULARISATION: THE ‘TROJAN HORSE’ EFFECT OF CHRISTIANITY1

1. Hermeneutics, History, and the Nihilistic Process of Weakening Hermeneutics as the philosophy of interpretation, rather than as a branch of another discipline such as biblical study, has become the koine of latemodern philosophy, according to the philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The moment in history when hermeneutics has arisen is after the death of God, the “event” in which it is no longer possible, if one has read the signs of the times, or a lot of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein,2 to believe in epistemic foundations or certainty; this is nihilism, the self-devaluing of the highest values, an understanding of the term that permeates Vattimo’s philosophy and which he borrows from the start of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. The death of God, for Vattimo, is an announcement of the consummation of this nihilistic process, even if this process is construed as indefinite in order to avoid positing a metaphysical nothing (Vattimo, following Heidegger, characterises metaphysics as violent due to it silencing debate by drawing back to fixed first principles). The religious proscription of lying turned out to be a lie, and the stability afforded by monotheism to society gave rise to science and technology, rendering God superfluous.3 The security of monotheism may not be needed, but science and technology have challenged the privileged status of humankind. Like

1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “Vattimo, Nihilism, and Secularisation: The ‘Trojan Horse’ Effect of Christianity,” Parrhesia, 19 (2014), 51-64. 2 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 106. 3 Ibid., 7.

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the Copernican revolution, man is rolling from the centre towards X,4 to use one of Vattimo’s favourite Nietzschean terms for the late-modern experience. This feeling of a lack of epistemic stability reflects the Heideggerian analogue of the death of God, the end of metaphysics. Vattimo realises that Heidegger would not have classified himself as a nihilist, for the latter in Heidegger’s eyes was the flattening of Being onto value that is the result of the forgetting of Being. Nevertheless, Vattimo reads Heidegger in a nihilistic sense, that Heidegger’s understanding of Being as an historical opening (“event”) is a rejection of the notion of absolute truth and violent metaphysical first principles (“violent,” Vattimo thinks, because they silence questioning). The history of nihilism can be summed up by a lengthy aphorism from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols frequently cited by Vattimo: “How the Real World Finally Became a Fable.”5 Vattimo follows Heidegger’s reading of the text in which Plato’s eternal, transcendent world of forms became historicised by Christianity in the promise of heaven to come, but this promise became interiorised by Descartes and Kant when the idea of knowledge was interrogated in a quest for certainty, before the positivistic approach to scientific inquiry, the last bastion of objective truth, became devalued when it became clear that such inquiry is not disinterested. With the ending of the real world also ended the apparent world and therefore this history concludes in nihilism. If there is no real world, apparent world, absolute truth or value, or certainty, surely everything is just will to power, letting the strongest interpretation win? Less aggressively (or more optimistically), will nihilism lead only to cultural relativism? Against these interpretations of the philosophical situation of the late-modern, Vattimo has written that “hermeneutics is not just antifoundationalism plus interpretations in conflict. It also entails a philosophy of history…that views hermeneutics as the result of a ‘nihilistic’ process, in which metaphysical Being, meaning violence, consumes itself.”6 For the past twenty years, Vattimo has referred to this process as “secularisation,” and that “We are headed for secularization, another name for which is nihilism, the idea that

4

Gianni Vattimo, “Toward an Ontology of Decline,” in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Recoding Metaphysics, trans. by Barbara Spackman (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 66. 5 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 7. 6 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 94.

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objective Being has gradually consumed itself.”7 Normally secularisation means the abandonment of the sacred, and more colloquially the reduction in importance of the religious in the public arena. Indeed, Vattimo realises that religion had been banished in this sense due to the dominance of the semantic field of positivism before the event of the death of God; Vattimo follows Nietzsche in his unpublished essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense” in holding that there is no reality, so language has to be metaphorical.8 Before the end of metaphysics, one semantic field of metaphors dominated at any one time. After the death of God, the liberation of metaphors made it possible for Vattimo to return to religion. Despite Vattimo thinking he has returned to Christianity, a religion he abandoned some thirty years earlier in the 1960s, it is not really religion to which Vattimo has returned, for he distinguishes “religion” – and all the institutional accoutrements about which he for the most part has nothing good to say – from “faith.”9 Nevertheless, Vattimo regards this faith he has recovered as the missing piece of a philosophical puzzle that is “too good to be true.”10 What is this puzzle, and why does Vattimo think that his excellent solution is “secularisation”? Although hermeneutics is, for Vattimo, the appropriate and logical koine for a philosophy in the light of the event of the death of God, it was mentioned above that he did not think it should entail that “anything goes.” Hermeneutics should neither be an overly aggressive domination of one interpretation over others, nor a passive, laissez-faire acceptance of interpretative plurality. The latter would leave philosophy politically and ethically toothless. As for the former, “strong” interpretations could well be due to reactive nihilism, a Nietzschean term for how some individuals and groups react to the event of the death of God. If other “metaphors” are liberated by the event of the death of God, then all sorts of discourses may be released; some people may use this freedom as an opportunity to reassert their own identity now the univocal standard of rationality has been dissolved. Strong religious, ethnic, and political identities may assert themselves in an exclusionary sense now that they no longer need to measure up to a single rational standard. Vattimo sought a normative criterion for adjudicating between interpretative 7

Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 73. 8 Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction, trans. by Nicholas Martin (London: The Athlone Press, 2002), 27. 9 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1999), 38. 10 Ibid., 41.

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claims. Moreover, he also needed a rational basis for making a persuasive case against reactive nihilism, particularly when strong claims drew upon transcendent principles. Vattimo’s tactic has been to ground hermeneutics in an historical foundation by seeing it as the end of a process. This process is one of weakening, hence Vattimo’s philosophical “style” of “weak thought.” Weakening cannot be a dialectical overcoming, both because the traces of metaphysics are inescapably bound up with the language and tradition that constitute the horizon for experience and interaction (Nietzsche’s dictum that we cannot get rid of God until we get rid of grammar) and because a new beginning itself would be metaphysical insofar as it would either assert a new foundation in the Cartesian sense or would be an assertion of nothing. The latter point is why Vattimo insists that weakening has to be an indefinite process. Rather than overcome metaphysics, one can only “twist” it. Verwindung is a Heideggerian term employed extensively by Vattimo to refer the inescapability of the traces of metaphysics to which we must be resigned by virtue of the linguistic traditions into which we are thrown, while nevertheless realising the need to heal ourselves from the violence of metaphysics by distorting and altering these traces. Vattimo performs a Verwindung on secularisation, as well as on the Christian tradition as a whole when he is searching for a normative criterion for hermeneutics beyond the “style” of weakening in the history of the West. Indeed, while Vattimo already has ways to ground hermeneutics historically (Heidegger’s notions of Ge-Stell/Ereignis, Nietzsche’s death of God and fabulation of the world), it is through the Christian concept of charity (caritas) that Vattimo thinks he has his hermeneutic criterion. Caritas is the basis that guides, limits, and endows secularisation as a nihilistic process of weakening which eventuates in the death of God and the philosophy of hermeneutics as its corollary in the late-modern.11 This paper first argues negatively that Vattimo’s account of the secularisation process, for which he realises he owes a significant debt to Wilhelm Dilthey, does not yield the kind of ethical principle he desires. Secondly, it offers a positive argument for how Vattimo could ground an historical ethic of weakening out of a process of secularisation by emphasising what Pierpaolo Antonello has called the “Trojan Horse” effect of Christianity: Christianity poses as a religion and a philosophy and weakens both by mixing the characteristics of each.

11

Ibid., 64.

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2. The Place of Secularisation in the Historical Grounding of Hermeneutics How does Vattimo relate secularisation to the essence of Christianity, and why does caritas emerge as the normative criterion for hermeneutics? Vattimo sees caritas as the flip side to the Christology coin of kenosis. The latter term normally refers to the account of God divesting himself of his power to become Jesus Christ in St Paul’s “Christ Hymn” of Philippians 2:5-11. Vattimo cites Philippians 2:7 once,12 but he is more interested in the general idea of kenosis indicating that God has a tendency for weakening,13 in which he sees a “family resemblance” to the history of Being as weakening: having recognized its family resemblance with the biblical message of the history of salvation and with God’s incarnation, Vattimo thinks “philosophy can call the weakening that it discovers as the characteristic feature of the history of Being secularization in the broadest sense.”14 The term “secularisation” tends to be used a lot by Vattimo to refer to this process of weakening and to the examples of it he gives, such as Max Weber’s recognition that capitalism is the secularisation of the Protestant work ethic.15 In order to understand how this process of secularization has its origin and impetus in Christianity, the message of Jesus seems less important for Vattimo than Jesus’ message, such as his message of calling humans to be God’s friends, not servants.16 The message of Jesus as the incarnation alone, even conceived as kenosis, would be insufficient grounding for hermeneutical nihilism historically. Luca D’Isanto, in his “Introduction” to Belief, interprets Vattimo’s use of the kenotic Christological model as indicating that Being enters into becoming in order to be endlessly reinterpretable, grounding hermeneutics historically in this way.17 This interpretation is elegant and in keeping with Vattimo’s philosophical schema. However, D’Isanto, like Vattimo, overlooks the difficulties this interpretation encounters when faced with the Wirkungsgeschichte (Gadamer’s notion of “effective history,” the traces of traditions that reach us today) of Christianity that include traces of doctrines such as the “Trinity” in particular, not to mention the related 12

Ibid., 39; although he does not quote the text. Ibid. 14 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 24. 15 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 51; Vattimo, Belief, 41. 16 John 15:15; Vattimo, Belief, 55. 17 Luca D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1999), 15. 13

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problem of the actual text of Philippians 2. The latter refers not only to the glory of the risen Christ (of which Vattimo is silent), but also his obedience to the Father, a point noted by other scholars commenting on Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity, such as Kevin Hart.18 Indeed, the figure of the Father presents a difficulty for Vattimo in the sense that taken together, the doctrine of the Trinity read back into Philippians 2 indicates that Being has not emptied itself wholly into becoming, as the Father remains simultaneously separate to and apart from the Son. No-matter whether there comes a point in time in which, as is the case in the latemodern, hermeneutics has become the koine of philosophy, there always remains that which transcends becoming: God the Father. It is no coincidence that Vattimo has implied that God the Father, the Old Testament God that has been surpassed by the Son and Spirit, is a metaphysical idea.19 Moreover, although Vattimo’s language at times hints to the contrary, he would not entertain the notion of a literal kenosis, for Vattimo states “Resisto all'idea che io possa fare una teo-logia solo se penso che la teologia sia un discorso descrittivo rigoroso” (“I resist the idea that I can create a theology only as a rigorously descriptive discourse”).20 Reducing Vattimo’s theology to a description of entities that come to presence, of describing a thing that is “actually” there in the measurable, metaphysical sense, would go down the route of Death of God theology, of God dying by emptying himself ever more into history in a vaguely Hegelian manner.21

18

Kevin Hart, review of Gianni Vattimo and René Girard “Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (December 8th 2010). Available from http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24546-christianity-truth--andweakening-faith-a-dialogue. Accessed 27/6/12. 19 Vattimo, After Christianity, 38. 20 Gianni Vattimo and Carmelo Dotolo, Dio: la possibilità buona: Un colloquio sulla soglia tra filosofia e teologia. A cura di Giovanni Giorgio (Soveria Mannelli, Calabria: Rubbettino, 2009), 5. 21 Some commentators on Vattimo’s work, such as Frederiek Depoortere and Antony C. Sciglitano have argued that Vattimo is repeating this kind of “Death of God” theology. See Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), and Antony C. Sciglitano, “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity,” Modern Theology, 23(4) (2007), 525-559. Against Depoortere and Sciglitano’s views on this matter, see my article, Matthew Edward Harris, “Gianni Vattimo and Thomas J. J. Altizer on the Incarnation and the Death of God: A Comparison,” Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 15 (2011), 1-19.

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However, Vattimo conceives of kenosis, its significance for him is that it is a process that removes the sacral character of religion. Here Vattimo draws upon the thought of René Girard, the anthropologist who inadvertently “re-Christianised” Vattimo when the latter reviewed Girard’s book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,22 and was impressed with his notion of the “natural sacred.” Natural religions are founded upon the need to make victims to keep order in society. The mimetic drive in humans to desire what the other has escalates until violence threatens to consume society. A sacrificial scapegoat is killed to prevent the society’s destruction. Over time this becomes ever more ritualised and “assumes a sacral and divine character.”23 Girard sees the Old and New Testaments as intended to reveal what Girard calls the “victimary mechanism”; the person of Jesus was put to death because of his message of love which revealed this mechanism. Following Feuerbach and Marx, Vattimo thinks that when divinities are created, they often carry within them the psychological burden of a thirst for revenge. Vattimo expands Girard’s concept of the “natural sacred” to include this kind of vengeful deity. The latter has all the traditional attributes of the ontotheological, metaphysical God, such as omnipotence, absoluteness, eternity and transcendence. This move allows Vattimo to make a link between “secularization—the progressive dissolution of the natural sacred”24 and Heidegger’s notion of metaphysics as the history of the weakening of Being. Vattimo has even gone so far as to say that his reading of Girard has helped him “complete” Heidegger.25 Even if this is going too far, in Vattimo’s mind there is a clear parallel between the two thinkers, as is clear from his statement that “[f]or both Girard and Heidegger, the emancipatory meaning of history—the salvation that takes place in it—is related to a self-consumption of the violence that characterises natural religion or, in Heidegger—the metaphysical oblivion of Being.”26 Vattimo has shown surprise and disappointment that Girard has not developed his ideas into a theory of secularisation. Girard has avoided 22

René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London and New York: The Athlone Press, 1987). 23 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 50. 24 Vattimo, Belief, 50. 25 Gianni Vattimo, “Heidegger and Girard: Kénosis and the End of Metaphysics,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 78. 26 Ibid., 85.

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doing so not only in view of his profession as an anthropologist and his own Christian faith, but also because he has changed his ideas a lot over the years.27 As a result, Vattimo has taken the liberty to do so himself. Secularisation is emancipation through the weakening of strong structures, whether they be “naturally religious” or metaphysical; both have “violence” at their core. The Christian message acts as a blueprint for hermeneutical nihilism, a stimulus that grounds late-modern hermeneutics and functions aetiologically in terms of allowing “continuity” in a history of weakening,28 as well as preventing the event of the death of God being understood as some sort of rupture born out of transcendence acting in history. What does “continuity” mean in this context? From Vattimo’s writing it is unclear whether he sees secularisation as running parallel to, inspiring, causing, or being part of the same thread as the history of Being as a history of weakening. Following his reading of Heidegger, Vattimo reads the history of Being as having a nihilistic vocation beginning with Plato, before Christ, seemingly ruling out the two histories of weakening as running parallel, although cryptically Vattimo reads kenosis as extending back to the story of creation.29 In terms of “inspiring” the history of Being as weakening, Vattimo has referred to the Christian message as a “stimulus” for the end of metaphysics.30 As for a “causal” relationship, Nancy Frankenberry can write that “Vattimo’s narrative is distinctive for asserting a causal relationship between the Christian message of kenosis…and philosophical antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, and the collapse of capital-T Truth.”31 Vattimo has also written that secularisation is the process in which the “Lord of the Bible” is both the author and effect.32 Frankenberry further notes that the Christian message of charity is the “point of convergence between philosophy’s downward path and the

27 René Girard, “Not Just Interpretations, There are Facts, Too,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 28 Gianni Vattimo, “Metaphysics, Violence, Secularisation,” in Giovanna Borradora (ed.), Recording Metaphysics, trans. by Barbara Spackman (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 60. 29 Vattimo, Belief, 66. 30 Gianni Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 35. 31 Nancy K. Frankenberry, “Weakening Religious Belief: Vattimo, Rorty, and the Holism of the Mental,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 274. 32 Vattimo, “Metaphysics, Violence, Secularisation,” 60.

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historical transmission of Christianity,”33 which implies that hermeneutical nihilism and Christianity are part of the same history, and Vattimo has talked of the history of the weakening of Being as a “transcription” of kenosis.34 Unhelpfully, all of these interpretations of “continuity” have some basis in Vattimo’s philosophy of secularisation. In short, Vattimo has an intuition about how the postmodern condition of hermeneutical nihilism has its origin and guiding thread in Christianity, and he has located these interpretations of “continuity” primarily in the way the message of the incarnation in Girard’s work relates to the history of weakening. However, in terms of developing this intuition through a persuasive explanation of how this relationship should be understood, Girard’s ideas do not lend themselves to a detailed theory of secularisation as Vattimo thinks they do. All they indicate is that the core of the Christian message is the unmasking of the natural sacred, not how this message has come to light today. Indeed, a cursory glance at the history of Christianity would indicate that the victimary mechanism was alive and well for the majority of the centuries since Christ’s death. Vattimo tries to explain this away by drawing upon Wilhelm Dilthey’s thoughts on Augustine; influential Christian figures at the end of Roman Empire had to make compromises in order to preserve any kind of law, learning and culture at all.35 If Jesus’s revelation of the victimary mechanism became buried, it was due to political factors such as these. The potential of Dilthey’s thought is arguably greater than Girard’s when it comes to how Vattimo turns his anti-violent interpretation of Christianity as a theory of secularisation in some of his later works into his return to religion. Remaining with Augustine, in After Christianity Vattimo draws upon his interpretation of Wilhelm Dilthey’s view, in Introduction to the Human Sciences, on Christianity’s role in the history of ideas, namely that Christianity’s distinctive contribution was the principle of interiority. Whereas the ancients, according to Vattimo’s reading of Dilthey, were interested in the natural world and therefore founded a principle of objectivity based on this focus, the event of Christianity “shifts the attention of thought inward, putting at the center the will rather than the intellect.”36 This is due to the inner unity of faith among Christians.37 Dilthey was particularly interested in Augustine, in whom 33

Frankenberry, “Weakening Religious Belief,” 274. Vattimo, Belief, 64. 35 Vattimo, After Christianity, 108. 36 Ibid., 106. 37 Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. and intro by R. J. Betanzos (Detroit and London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1979), 229. 34

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there existed a conflict between the “interiorising” principle of Christianity (which he expressed through the relation of his soul with God) and the Greek concern with the natural world or, in the case of Augustine, ideas external to oneself (the Platonic influence on Augustine). Vattimo believes that this conflict between the interior and exterior occurs throughout the history of Christianity.38 Taking Dilthey’s insight and running with it, Vattimo places this conflict centre stage in the history of European thought and relates it to “Heidegger’s vision of metaphysics’ survival and dissolution”39 and Nietzsche’s phrase that “there are no facts, only interpretations.”40 What Vattimo fails to spell out sufficiently is how Heidegger’s “hermeneutic ontology” and Nietzsche’s nihilism “draw the extreme consequences from this principle” of interiority,41 although Vattimo may presume familiarity among his readers with Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s notion of the will. Through this principle of interiority, objectivity may lose its “weight,” as Vattimo points out,42 but then Descartes and Kant illustrated how subjectivity could be just as metaphysical, the nihilistic vocation of metaphysics culminating in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power’s value-positing.43 Perhaps Vattimo expects his readers to be able to join the dots among his influences. Certainly the exterior/interior dichotomy has a family resemblance to Vattimo’s favourite story of how the world became a fable, from Plato down to positivism via Christianity and the Cartesian ego. The final stage, positivism, dissolves when it is realised that the objective world is dependent upon the human as measurer, but that the measurer is historically situated, interested, and manipulated by technology to want things that are not natural.44 What one cannot find in Nietzsche or Heidegger, though, is Vattimo’s view that this principle of interiority is a call for friendship,45 linking back not only to Jesus’s message (John 15:15), but also to who Jesus is. God is no longer the authoritarian parent demanding servitude and sacrifice, but is 38

Vattimo, After Christianity, 108. Ibid., 108. 40 Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 47. 41 Ibid., 47. 42 Vattimo, The Future of Religion, 47. 43 Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro by William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 95, 104. 44 Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, 73-74. 45 Vattimo, After Christianity, 109. 39

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instead the friend of humans who reveals violence for what it is: the naturalistic is violent, so turn inwards. Vattimo, in his interview “A Prayer for Silence,” states that “Augustine’s turn inwards is already a step forward with respect to the notion of objective truth, because once you turn inward you must also try to listen to others like you.”46 This is Vattimo’s much-maligned interpretation of the Christian virtue of caritas. For Vattimo, “in the place of truth we have put charity,”47 and this is why Dostoyevsky would choose Christ over truth48 and is also why we would say today that Plato is a better friend than truth. Charity is, for Vattimo, the limit of secularisation. That is, charity is what cannot be secularised, and is therefore also the principle of weakening expressed as a normative criterion for adjudicating between interpretations. Prima facie, it would appear as though Vattimo has created an absolute, something that would be at odds with his theory in which an absence of absolutes is precisely the point. This has led critics of Vattimo, such as Carravetta,49 Depoortere,50 and Jonkers,51 to accuse Vattimo of hypocrisy at worst, or inconsistency at best. These critics are being uncharitable to Vattimo because they are overlooking the fact that he has admitted that there are “gaps” in his argument.52 Instead, one should look harder to see what he is trying to do. On one level, caritas is the nihilistic process of weakening that Vattimo refers to as secularisation; reading the “signs of the times,” interpretation is in accordance with this process in virtue of being situated in the latemodern. Insofar as Vattimo, following Heidegger, holds to the human condition as one of “thrownness,” of having a pre-understanding based on a horizon that, in this case, is the irreducible plurality of interpretations as the nihilistic outcome of a history of weakening, then this reading of caritas is justified. However, as shall be discussed below, Vattimo seems to imply that “interpretation” not only indicates a historically-situated preunderstanding, but also involves an interpretative act, implying some kind of positive ethic that needs to be derived. This reading of Vattimo indicates that he is seeking an ethic, not just a way of describing a 46

Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42. Ibid., 43. 48 Vattimo, After Christianity, 103. 49 Peter Carravetta, “Beyond Interpretation?” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 2010), 79-97. 50 Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy. 51 Peter Jonkers, “In the World, but not of the World: The Prospects of Christianity in the Modern World,” Bijdragen, 61(4) (1999), 370-389. 52 Vattimo, Belief, 45. 47

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historical process. Moreover, in the above quotation from “A Prayer for Silence,” it has just been shown that in at least some parts of Vattimo’s thought (the times when he is most intent on showing how secularisation has taken place), charity is based on the principle of interiority culminating in the death of God/end of metaphysics. If one realises the provisionality and contingency of oneself based on one’s own subjectivity, then one should recognise that one cannot hold one’s own opinions with certainty and that, as a consequence, there must be other people, or Daseins, like oneself—historical, contingent subjects—to whom it is worth listening. This is why Vattimo, when defending his notion of caritas, refers to it as a form of “categorical imperative,”53 and it is no coincidence for Vattimo that the categorical imperative was an Enlightenment version of Jesus’s love commandment. Therefore, Vattimo’s caritas is not a substantial, cognitive ethic, but a formal commandment that is the ethical corollary of the principle of interiority that has led to secularisation as the realisation of the essence of the Christian message.

3. Vattimo’s Notion of Secularisation as a Repeat of Enlightenment Anthropocentrism To recap, in the 1990s Vattimo felt a post-religious return to faith which he somewhat misleadingly referred to as his “return to religion.” He was led back to religion by Heidegger and Nietzsche, for he realised he was interested in these thinkers because of his Christian upbringing. Religious concepts, like overtly metaphysical notions and terminology, are unavoidable and cannot be overcome, but only “twisted.” To confront his heritage Vattimo needed not only to effect a Verwindung of religion, but also to establish an historico-ethical basis for hermeneutics to prevent both an “anything goes” approach to interpretation or a reactive nihilism based on a ghettoising approach to identity. To this end, Vattimo utilises Girard to bring together the violence of metaphysics and the violent, “naturalistic” and ontotheological aspects of religion he finds distasteful. Girard’s theory does not readily yield a theory of secularisation, so Vattimo turns to Dilthey’s reading of the history of Christianity as the turn inwards. Although vaguely worked-out, Vattimo brings together the notion of Jesus revealing in his person and words the violence of the natural sacred through his call to turn inwards through faith, loving your neighbour like you would love yourself. This message of interiority has slowly dissolved not only the natural sacred, but also its explicitly 53

Ibid., 66.

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metaphysical correlate through the philosophy of the history of the weakening of Being, reaching its culmination in Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power and the dissolution of Being into value. This indefinite nihilistic process of secularisation has as its impetus and limit the formal principle of caritas. Where Vattimo may be going wrong is his emphasis on the turn inwards as the historical ground for caritas. Although Vattimo writes, “once you turn inward you must also try to listen to others like you,”54 he has argued extensively against the idea of a strong subject, and “turning inward” presumes a subject. Following Heidegger, Vattimo thinks that the end of metaphysics is also the end of humanism. One can no longer believe in the certainty of a subject in the Cartesian or Kantian senses. If friendship has taken the place of truth, why ground this in the principle of interiority? The whole interior/exterior distinction, even if it had purchase in Christianity’s origins, should not convince today if Vattimo is right about the event of the death of God/end of metaphysics. On a number of occasions Vattimo refers to the “transpropriation” of subject and object in the Heideggerian notion of Ge-Stell,55 noting that these metaphysical appellations have become imputed one to another in the world of modern technology, leading to the dissolution of the subject. Continuing to speak along the lines of “subject” and “object,” “interior” and “exterior” betrays an enduring metaphysical tendency at odds with the end of metaphysics. In fairness to Vattimo, this is partially his point, that one cannot overcome metaphysics dialectically because we still have grammar and tradition. This is why Vattimo continues to speak of what Erik M. Vogt has called a “weakened subject,”56 one that has been on a “crash diet,”57 a subjectivity which is not to be conceived as an immutable essence present within history as a “soul” but a historically grounded Dasein involved in a network of communications. This subject is Vattimo’s Übermensch, a figure who, developing an unpublished fragment of Nietzsche’s, is “most moderate,”58 like the figure mentioned in Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation, rummaging through the theatrical costume box of history, 54

Vattimo, “Towards a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42. Vattimo, “Towards an Ontology of Decline,” 73. 56 Erik M. Vogt, “Postmodernity as the Ontological Sense of Technology,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 2010), 229. 57 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 47. 58 Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 131. 55

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putting on and taking off myriad masks. Through this casual attitude one would ironically distort, “weaken,” or “twist” the strong structures associated with these historical traces of metaphysical subjectivity. Apart from acting “ironically” through mask-wearing moderation, what is the normative difference between humanism in its “strong” form (upon which categorical imperatives have been built insofar as the human being has been regarded as the apex of rationality, aside from angels and God in some of humanism’s more theological guises) and Vattimo’s Übermensch in relation to his charitable categorical imperative? If one is meant to consider other Übermenschen “like you,” listening to them and bearing them in mind when one makes one’s own hermeneutical choices, what about others “not like you,” such as the natural world or people not engaged in “weak thought”? Charity is then limited to things capable of language, of interrogating their own being, at best, or only to fellow weakthinking crash-diet subjects at worst. For instance, Vattimo would ban the wearing of the chador in public because it is a symbol of strong thought;59 should people be excluded if they fail to “read the signs of the times” by continuing to hold their traditions strongly? That Vattimo implies people can choose whether or not to read the “signs of the times” (that is, recognise that we are now living after the death of God), indicates, as Gavin Hyman points out, that Vattimo’s crash-diet subject is stronger and more metaphysical than he would care to admit; it is an agent, not a play of forces, a subject in the “nominative” rather than the “accusative” sense, to use Hyman’s terms.60 Vattimo even talks about the weak subject being an “autonomous interpreter.”61 Returning to the example of the chador, even though there is a “liberation of metaphors” after the death of God, it would seem Vattimo thinks some “strong” semantic fields and practices based on them should be returned to the margins. In banning a form of life from the public space, Vattimo has thus created a weak humanism and has repeated the Enlightenment in “low-carb” form, a charge that has been levelled against him by Thomas Guarino about other aspects of his return to religion.62

59

Vattimo, After Christianity, 101. Gavin Hyman, “Must a Post-Metaphysical Political Theology Repudiate Transcendence? The Case of Gianni Vattimo,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 8(3) (2007), 130. 61 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 130. 62 Thomas Guarino, Vattimo and Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 71. 60

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4. The Christian Message as a Trojan Horse: Reconfiguring Secularisation Thankfully there are other resources within Vattimo’s account of religion to reconstruct a theory of secularisation that will do what Vattimo wants it to do without the dubious anthropocentrism (and, perhaps, Eurocentrism). It has been shown already that he uses Girard’s work to bring together different forms of violence (religious and metaphysical) in a “family resemblance.” The end of metaphysics is a “transcription” of the message of the incarnation. Christ has value for Vattimo both in terms of who he was said to be (the kenosis of God) and his message of friendship. Girard’s theory works on the basis that his sacrifice on the cross was not really a sacrifice, but an exposure of the victimary mechanism. Vattimo does not have much time for the cross, but telescopes Jesus’s person and prophecy together as his message of friendship exposes the violence of God the Father (which, through his Joachimism, he identifies with the authoritarian God of the Old Testament63). Whether one takes Girard’s view of “unmasking” or Vattimo’s, they both amount to the same thing: Christianity acted as a “Trojan Horse” for religion, to use Pierpaolo Antonello’s phrase,64 that it was not really a “religion,” but posed as one to expose the violence of the natural sacred. So far in this reconstruction there has been little or no divergence from Vattimo’s own account of secularisation. At this point, though, Vattimo would wish to draw upon the principle of interiority to explain how the message of friendship/caritas became an exemplar for, and stimulus of, the end of metaphysics. However, in order for this to occur one has to accept Dilthey’s principle of interiority which is only one particular, debatable account of the import and history of Christianity, which also limits one to human beings (and possibly only those engaged in weakening strong structures) insofar as weakening can only work itself out through normative inter-subjectivity. Is there another way in which the Christian message acted as an exemplar and/or stimulus for weakening metaphysical claims? Arguably, one can see how Christianity’s missionary vocation enabled it to function as a “Trojan Horse” for philosophy as well as for religion. In other words, Christianity posed as religion and posed as philosophy, bringing them together and weakening both. This is an 63

See Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 48-49. Pierpaolo Antonello, “Introduction,” in Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8. 64

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account of secularisation in Vattimo’s thought that has been developed in part by Carmelo Dotolo65 and by me elsewhere,66 and is being extended further in this present study. Dotolo argues that the Christian message brought about a de-Hellenising in philosophy and a reduction of ontotheology in the content of philosophy. For philosophy, Dotolo interprets Vattimo as stating that philosophy was weakened based on its encounter with the Hebrew-Judaic temporally linear eschatological horizon, replacing the eternal view of time found in Greek philosophy. Ontotheological religious claims were then weakened later, in Dotolo’s eyes, by being recovered in the late-modern environment in which transcendence no longer has any purchase.67 I interpret the workings of secularisation slightly differently, such that the evangelical message of friendliness brought together both philosophy and religion, weakening both as Christianity was in essence neither, even if this has taken a long time to show. My own position will be developed here more explicitly in the missionary context of Christianity in which friendliness has entailed spreading the “good news” to all nations, thus explaining why Christianity took philosophy into itself in order to weaken it. The risen Christ told his disciples before he ascended to heaven to make disciples of “all the nations” (Matthew 28:18-20), the “Great Commission” as it is known. Greek philosophy was part of the cultural milieu of the Near East of the first century, and once St Paul began his mission to the Gentiles he quickly encountered the philosophers of Athens. Most were unimpressed with his scandal of the cross; it was “foolishness” to the Gentiles. Nevertheless, a handful were receptive, notably Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17:34). By the second century, however, Christianity had found an impressively educated, albeit small, Gentile audience, including the philosophers Athenagoras, Theophilus, and most notably Justin Martyr. The theme in ecclesiastical history that Christianity became “Hellenised” is an old and contentious one, famously put forward by Adolf von Harnack.68 More interesting is the claim by the contemporary British philosopher John Gray that Christianity did not abolish strong structures, but actually introduced the value of “truth” into religion through its

65 Carmelo Dotolo, La teologia fondamentale davanti alle sfide del ‘pensiero debole’ di G. Vattimo (Rome: LAS, 1999). 66 Matthew Edward Harris, “Metaphysics, Violence and the 'Natural Sacred' in Gianni Vattimo's Philosophy,” Humanicus, 8 (2013), 1-21. 67 Ibid., 406. 68 Adolf Von Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 1, trans. by Neil Buchanan (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1902).

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appropriation of philosophy.69 Fernando Savater places Gray’s reading in opposition to Vattimo’s,70 but one could actually use it to extend Antonello’s analysis of the function of Christianity as a “Trojan Horse.” Christianity has posed variously as a religion and a philosophically justified faith, taking in the concepts of both philosophy and religion to weaken them in an indefinite process. It is possible to indicate how Christianity has functioned as a “Trojan Horse” in the weakening of metaphysics. Karl Löwith has said that philosophies of history are ideological and are not interested in “what actually happens.”71 Nevertheless, if secularisation is to be a plausible philosophy of history, rather than the kind of teleological unilinear history about which Löwith was writing, it should at least be persuasive. To this end, examples can be found of Christianity weakening metaphysics in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the controversies concerning the Trinity and Incarnation in Late Antiquity there were frequent arguments over how metaphysical terms should be used. There was confusion, for instance, over whether the Greek “hypostases” should translate into Latin; was “personae” good enough? If so, it made the Trinity three separate beings, but according to Gregory of Nyssa they were not, for they shared a common “ousia” (essence), just as Peter, Andrew, John and James shared the common essence of humanity as four different hypostases of the ousia. Insistence on the use of these terms did no good for metaphysics, for it was making the normal conform to the exceptional, the immanent and human conform to the transcendent and divine, all due to the scandal of the particular: the incarnation of Christ. For although through the notion of ousia Peter, Andrew, John and James share a common human nature it would have been normal to regard them as separate human beings, Gregory of Nyssa would have had one think otherwise. Moreover, the use of ousia as “essence” rather than “substance” confused matters further, with the differences between ousia and hypostasis unclear even among the Church Fathers.72 69

John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2002). 70 Fernando Savater, “Christianity as Religion and the Irreligion of the Future,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 299. 71 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 3-4. 72 Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in the Divine Life (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 195 n. 19-21.

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The recovery of Aristotle in the West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only made things worse for metaphysics. St. Thomas Aquinas “twisted” Aristotle in various ways, forcing his eternal view of the universe into a Hebrew-Christian linear temporality, thus making his Prime Mover a first mover of creation, rather than acting as something akin to an eternal magnet as final cause for everything else in the universe. Therefore, Aquinas made problems for issues such as mutability, potentiality, actuality, and causation by using Aristotelian terms outside of their context. Even more problematically, Aquinas used Aristotelian terms such as “substance” and “accidents” for his explanation of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist through transubstantiation, but, in the words of P. J. Fitzpatrick, “abuses them to the point of nonsense.”73 This is because Aquinas thought “free floating” accidents of the bread and wine remained once the host had been consecrated: “it is clear that the body of Christ is in this sacrament ‘by way of substance’, and not by way of [the accident of] quantity.”74 Aristotle did not think it was possible for there to be free-floating accidents not qualifying a substance. Therefore, the absolute importance of a contingent event, the Incarnation of Christ, meant a philosophical system had to bend to the point of breaking in order to explain articles of faith. That this philosophy had to be brought to bear at all comes down firstly to the Great Commission, the evangelical imperative of the risen Christ’s, and to the insistence on truth which came from the philosophy the evangelists brought into Christianity. This latter is explicit in the work of the second century Apologists and is traceable even to early second century canonical works such as the Gospel of John, which betrays strong Stoic influences particularly in the opening “Logos Hymn” (John 1). If Christianity supplied a fatal dose of contingency to philosophy, how did philosophy weaken religion through its Christian guise? As has been mentioned, Savater reads Gray’s theory of secularisation as holding that Christianity introduced “Truth” with a capital “T” into religion: “Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for truth.”75 Here one can depart from Savater and Gray and take a far more familiarly NietzscheanVattimian line. The Hebrew-Judaic God was part of a linear view of salvation history based on a covenant, not on God being representative of the Absolute Truth. Nevertheless, monotheism leant itself to being read through the lens of philosophical first principles. Therefore, once the 73

P. J. Fitzpatrick, In Breaking of Bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11. 74 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, q. 76, a.1. 75 Gray, Straw Dogs, 127.

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missionary element of Christianity necessitated that Gentile Apologists place a Hellenistic gloss over the Christian kerygma, the identification of God with the Truth was destined. However, a religion based on “Truth” and “truthfulness” will collapse when it is discovered to be a “lie.”76 Of course, neither Nietzsche nor Vattimo have held that this discovery revealed God as a lie in a flat-footed literal sense. Rather, this “lie” has been interpreted variously, including such that God as the guarantor of the security of society is no longer required given the advances in science and technology that were permitted by monotheism (and here one can relate this history to the Heideggerian Ge-Stell and Ereignis), or that the value of truth and its concomitant, knowledge, led to the subjective turn inward and therefore down the road to the fabling of the world as narrated by Nietzsche (through Descartes, Kant, positivism, and its unmasking as a play of forces and situatedness). One could even interpret the “lie” as pertaining to the “Trojan Horse” effect in particular, such that it has been found out, through Girard’s work, that the value of Christ was not as a sacrificial victim, but as an unmasker of the natural sacred.

5. The Trojan Horse and the Ethic of Charity A significant motivation for Vattimo in recovering Christianity was to find an ethic to adjudicate the irreducible hermeneutic plurality of latemodernity. Vattimo thought he found it in “caritas.” His own account of caritas was flawed, but how will Christianity as a Trojan Horse yield an ethic of charity? Here an answer can again be found along Vattimian lines. If using philosophy as a handmaiden for theology occurred on the grounds of serving the servant, the kenotic Word, then essentially weakening took place in the name of friendship. Aristotle’s metaphysics was weakened in the name of fellowship (communion) and due to a history of salvation based on a contingent event, the incarnation. Now, if the incarnation functioned as an unmasking of the natural sacred due to a message of friendship (God lowering himself and announcing he was no longer master, but friend), then this message itself is the historical and historic announcement that is the guiding, normative thread for weakening interpretations that persists to the present day and is not capable of being secularised. Therefore, Vattimo has a principle of friendship based on the hermeneutical occurrence of the Incarnation and Jesus Christ’s own interpretative action, of lightening the burden, of lessening enmity in his

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Antitheses (“love your enemy”), and his calling of everyone to friendship: “all the nations” and a renewal of all creation (Matthew 19:28). Textual justification for this reading of Vattimo on friendship comes in the form of what he has written about “truth.” In a relatively recent book entitled The Responsibility of the Philosopher, Vattimo writes that “I can no longer keep the notion of truth and evangelical charity apart.”77 Charity in this context, for Vattimo, is “a life of heeding others and responding to others in dialogue”78; in short, “friendship.”79 It is interesting that Vattimo should qualify “charity” with “evangelical.” This term has two main meanings in the context of Christianity. On the one hand, it is a synonym for “good news,” and thus simply the Gospel message, and this may well be the way in which Vattimo wishes to use the term. Nevertheless, “evangelical” can also mean spreading this good news, and this is where the nihilistic missionary vocation of Christianity comes in. Truth is made, for Vattimo, in consensus in which the primary value is the dialogue itself, only secondly the consensus that is made out of “interpreting our common situation along certain lines and from shared assumptions.”80 Traditionally, evangelism in the missionary sense meant conversion through reduction. However, dialogue itself would presume weakening, for absolute positions preclude genuine dialogue. Indeed, to reach out to others in the first place means there is a desire to listen to others. In this Verwindung of the evangelical, the good news is that of weakening, abasement, and, above all, charity, friendship. In an ironic distortion of the Great Commission, the good news is that of spreading the good news, of seeking the other through dialogue.81 For this reason, Vattimo refers to the missionary vocation of Christianity after the end of metaphysics as moving “from universality to hospitality,”82 deliberately invoking Derrida’s work on hospitality. The latter term means placing “oneself in the hands of one’s

77

Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 97. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 98. 80 Ibid. 69. 81 In recent works, such as his collaboration with Santiago Zabala, Vattimo has preferred the term “conversation” to “dialogue,” for the latter have an association with the Socratic form of reasoning in which truth is presupposed before the exchange. Nevertheless, the context in which Vattimo and Zabala are writing is political philosophy. See Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25-26. 82 Vattimo, After Christianity, 100.

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guest, that is, an entrustment of oneself to him.”83 In dialogue, “this signifies acknowledging that the other might be right,” and that in the spirit of charity the Christian “must limit [himself] almost entirely to listening.”84 On these grounds, one can reach out even to those “strong” interpreters, for the primary action of this “twisted” missionary activity is listening, not trying to convince the other. Even for this reason alone this form of “friendship” is preferable to that given on Vattimo’s “principle of interiority” account. Relating all this back to the reconstruction of Vattimo’s secularisation thesis without the “crash diet” Enlightenment undertones, it is possible to see charity and hospitality in the history of Christianity. The very weakening that occurred in the setting-up of Christianity as the Trojan Horse for both religion and philosophy can be regarded as the archetype for such a relationship to the other. The Christian gospel of weakness spread out and quickly found a Hellenistic Gentile culture to which it listened, adopting principles from its philosophy, Stoicism in particular. Later it listened to, and adopted, from other cultures, such as Roman governance after the conversion of Constantine, all the way up to listening to Marxism and the struggle of people in countries that developed liberation theologies. As such, one can see why Vattimo thinks that in caritas (the driving force of secularisation due, on this reading, to its ‘weak evangelism’ based on friendship and hospitality) he finds “the original ‘text’ of which weak ontology is the transcription.”85 Caritas and weak ontology weaken strong structures by finding the other based on the announcement that God—representative of absolutist strong thought—has been weakened (kenosis). Indeed, as Vattimo realises, it is due to this secularisation that the death of God occurred and the philosophy of “weak ontology” is possible at all.

6. Conclusion In seeking to ground hermeneutics historically in such a fashion that the process of weakening yields a normative criterion for interpretation, Vattimo “twists” the history of Christianity by interpreting the realisation of its essence as secularisation. Drawing together the authoritarian elements of religion and metaphysics under the label of “violence,” Vattimo is able to see one, then the other unmasked through a process of 83

Ibid., 101. Ibid. 85 Vattimo, Belief, 70. 84

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weakening inaugurated by the announcement of Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ’s announcement of friendship. Christ as the Incarnation of God is the hermeneutic event par excellence, but his real value was in the kenotic Word’s message of God’s friendship. Vattimo’s own attempts to account for the weakening power of his message through appropriating Dilthey’s notion of the subjective turn inaugurated by the Christian message lead down an alley that only ends with a “crash diet” Enlightenment anthropocentrism that is normatively a restricted and contradictory form of categorical imperative. A more historically situated, less Enlightenment-based friendliness can be found by placing more emphasis on the missionary focus of the Christian announcement which led to the spread of Christianity to the Gentile world. Whereas Christianity was a Trojan Horse for religion in the sense that Girard describes, this became the exemplar for the notion of Truth in philosophy; in both cases, Christianity successfully posed as something it was not in order to weaken it to the point of breaking. Jesus’s calling to friendship and his death on the cross unmasked the “natural sacred,” but the power of this memory as a trace, a tradition, made philosophies such as Stoicism, Platonism in its various forms, and Aristotelianism all break under the weight of having to accommodate the exceptional and contingently historical. This re-reading of Vattimo’s theory of secularisation can still yield the results he wants, that is, to ground hermeneutics historically and yield an ethic of weakening, in other words, one of secularisation. The ethic in question remains one of caritas, but disparate elements of Vattimo’s return to Christianity have been brought together to show that there are a lot of resources within his work with which to construct a philosophy of dialogue based on charity understood in terms of friendship and hospitality. These two notions involve seeking out the other and listening to them, which was commanded by the risen Christ’s “Great Commission.” This found its archetypal form very quickly in the mission to the Gentiles which yielded the Trojan Horse effect of the message of the weakening of God (kenosis) meeting philosophy. Therefore, Vattimo was right to say that kenosis, caritas, and secularisation are important for hermeneutics, but in this analysis they are shorn of the Enlightenment presupposition of the “strong” subject left over in Vattimo’s work. In agreement with Vattimo, it has been argued that kenosis is the message given in Christ of the weakening of God from master to friend. However, differently from Vattimo, it has been suggested that rather than seeking to ground caritas as a hermeneutical principle through Dilthey’s principle of interiority, one should pay more attention to

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the missionary tendency within Christianity, of organising the hermeneutical principle around seeking the other in terms of seeking them out and listening to them no-matter who they are (caritas). When in the early fruit of a charitable exchange of ideas the covenant-based historical religious “Jesus Movement” met Gentiles, a fusion of fundamentally incompatible horizons took place. This fusion has played itself out in history in the form of secularisation, reinterpreted here as making the religious worldlier through its gradual unmasking at the hand of the ideal of truth incorporated from philosophy. Furthermore, the importance of the contingent was taken into philosophy through religion and has proved fatal to metaphysical philosophy. A process of weakening strong religious and metaphysics structures (secularisation) has thus taken place as a result of the weakening of God through kenosis and its hermeneutical principle of caritas.

CHAPTER NINE GIANNI VATTIMO ON SECULARISATION AND ISLAM1

Abstract To clarify Vattimo’s position on secularism and Islam, I first discuss his view that secularisation as kenosis and caritas entails the nihilistic vocation of Being, as expressed in our postmodern world where there are no facts, only interpretations. I then survey some of Vattimo’s negative judgements of Islam, which appear to be out of keeping with his own disavowal of ‘modern’ ideals such as ‘progress’ and ‘grand narratives.’ After analysing Islam’s turbulent history of secularism, I suggest the need for Islamic secularism for its own religious and political reasons. Vattimo’s theory of secularisation helps to identify not only what Islam should avoid in pursuing its own secularisation (an Enlightenment notion of subjectivity), but also what it can emphasise within its own tradition as a stimulus towards secularisation: The Golden Rule. This rule, if presented by influential imams as spiritually and as ethically open to the other as possible, may lead through action-based dialogue to a form of reciprocal listening that is the core of Vattimo’s notion of secularism, but is based, at the same time, on the religious awareness of the gulf between the transcendence of Allah and the finitude and fallibility of human politicoreligious institutions.

1. Gianni Vattimo Numerous thinkers have explored the relationship between secularisation and democracy, largely from a Western, post-Christian perspective. In doing so, much has been made of the link between a de-sacralised, non1

Originally published as Matthew E. Harris, “Gianni Vattimo on Secularisation, and Islam,” The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms, 20(3) (2015), 239254.

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hierarchical, “free” and “open” West and its fruit, democracy. One thinker who has written extensively on the subject is Gianni Vattimo, who regards the current time as the Age of Interpretation in which an infinite plurality of interpretations has been set free by the democratising effects of information technology. This, in turn, is the result of a process of secularisation, inaugurated by the message of Christ’s incarnation, that is, the kenosis (self-emptying) of God as his new covenant of friendship. The force and limit of this self-emptying and levelling of power and hierarchies is caritas, God’s love for humanity and the new relationship of friendliness, not mastery, with his creation.2 Secularisation is thus not the drifting away from, but the fulfilment of, the kernel of the Christian message. Gianni Vattimo is widely regarded as one of the most significant postmodern thinkers living and writing today in Europe. Indeed, in a 1999 article in Diogenes, Alfonso Berardinelli and Juliet Vale place him alongside Umberto Eco in this regard.3 Moving away from, and returning to, Christianity, Vattimo has also reconfigured his relationship with Marxism over the course of half a lifetime. Not only does Vattimo live and work in the hermeneutical plurality of late-modern Europe but also he has a clearly defined attitude of openness towards it. While Vattimo sees this openness as a consequence of the weakening of Being in the process of secularisation and while he maintains that one should look for truth only in the “friendship” found in “fusing horizons,” he seems to disregard Islam despite its presence in the current European cultural milieu. In this article I attempt to uncover Vattimo’s implicit assumptions about Islam and to suggest what Islam can gain from his notions of “weak thought” and secularisation as a “process.” one of the purposes of the article is to explore Vattimo's apparent negativity towards Islam, looking at the reasons why. In the process of doing this, it transpires that, ironically, Vattimo's own approach to secularisation serves as a model for Islamic secularisation, whilst simultaneously highlighting the limits of what Islamic secularisation could be. Brought up as a Catholic in Italy, Vattimo sees his “Christian inheritance” as having drawn him towards thinkers such as Nietzsche and

2

Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala, “Dialogue: What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 65. 3 Alfonso Berardinelli and Juliet Vale, “From Postmodernism to Mutation: How the Twentieth Century Draws to a Close,” Diogenes, 47 (1999), 94.

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Heidegger.4 After drifting away from his faith during his time spent in Germany on a postdoctoral fellowship, Vattimo returned to Christianity in the 1990s after having engaged with Marxism and atheism in the intervening years. Vattimo sees Christianity as the final piece in a hermeneutical puzzle that is “too good to be true.”5 According to his philosophical style of “weak thought,” developed a decade earlier, our current age of late modernity is in a state of hermeneutical nihilism. After the death of God and end of metaphysics, it is impossible to believe in a fixed reality with strong epistemological foundations. The death of God is the event that shattered the ideal of Truth with a capital “T.” It is less a single event than a name for a loose aggregation of phenomena and happenings, including the works of writers such as Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche himself, as well as the culmination of the metaphysical impulse of ordering and calculating engendered by modern information and communications technology (metaphysics is always “violent” for Vattimo in the sense that it silences questioning by presuming there is only one correct answer to each question). Today events are communicated simultaneously with their occurrence,6 blurring the lines between appearance and reality, shedding the metaphysical epithets associated with both notions. As Vattimo has argued, especially in The Transparent Society,7 communications technology has also enabled myriad individuals and groups, liberated from the yoke of colonialism after the two world wars, to state their interpretations of the world. Thus the sense of a centre of reality has been lost in the infinite plurality of interpretations. The death of God is a stage in the history of Being, the epoch of the sunset of Being, a history that began with Plato and Aristotle. In this sense, Vattimo follows Heidegger, although against Heidegger this stage is regarded by Vattimo as one of hermeneutical nihilism, the “Age of Interpretation,” in which there are no facts, but only interpretations, in Nietzsche’s phrase, and one of Vattimo’s favourites.8

4 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 33. 5 Ibid., 41. 6 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in PostModern Culture, trans. and intro. by Jon Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 10. 7 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), Ch. 1. 8 Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion, 43–54.

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Yet rather than seeing nihilism as negative, Vattimo sees it as our sole opportunity.9 For Vattimo, nihilism means the absence not of values, but of absolute values, of the world reduced to a fable. Metaphysics, forgoing Being by focusing on classifying, manipulating, and ordering beings, is violent in so far as it aims at certainty, for where there are absolutes, questioning is not permitted. The death of God raises the possibility of a route out of metaphysics, not through dialectical overcoming, for to start again would be to repeat the foundationalism of metaphysics, but through a Verwindung,10 a convalescence-alteration of metaphysical terms. As Nietzsche said, we cannot get rid of God until we have got rid of grammar: we can only “be” if we use language.11 (“Being, that can be understood, is language,” is Vattimo’s translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s dictum, although against Gadamer’s will, he wished to keep the commas to emphasise that there was no other Being outside language.12) This means that we cannot but use metaphysically loaded terms such as “subject” and “object.” What we can do, Vattimo thinks, is to reinterpret these terms according to the signs of the times, the state of hermeneutical nihilism in which we exist, and to qualify our understanding of the terms with a dose of contingency and irony. This can be done by fusing discourses together through dialogue to weaken the residual traces of metaphysics until they become spectral. This is, Vattimo thinks, the nihilistic vocation of Being, to fade in a never-ending process of weakening that was inaugurated by the paradigmatic event of weakening of the absolute in history: the kenosis of Christ by which God revealed that he was now not master of humanity, but its friend.13 Vattimo uses Christianity to explain and enrich the notion of hermeneutics as the koine of modernity. Hermeneutics should not be reduced to a generic philosophy of interpretation or a relativistic “anything goes” mode but is a historical response to the sending of Being, the historically-conditioned “aperture within which alone man and the world, subject and object, can enter into relationship.”14 Vattimo has many different histories of Being to which he could refer, such as those of 9

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 19. Ibid., 171–76. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 48. 12 Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 57. 13 Vattimo, Belief, 55, 95. 14 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 6. 10

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Heidegger and Nietzsche, to show how and why hermeneutics is the philosophical koine of late modernity. Indeed, Vattimo has drawn on these thinkers extensively in his development of the philosophical style of weak thought. However, what neither of these histories yield is an ethical approach, especially one that would allow us to navigate peacefully the world of late-modern pluralism. Vattimo could not appeal to a transcendent source for this ethic because he regards, rightly or wrongly, all transcendence as “violent.” He therefore had to ground hermeneutics historically. As he believes that it is impossible to get outside of history, either to a series of discrete conceptual schemas or to a transcendent arche, hermeneutics must ground itself historically and immanently.15 The central notion in Vattimo’s Christianity-inspired history of weakening, first outlined at length in Belief, is that of kenosis, of the weakening of God in the incarnation. This image is taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 2. Vattimo uses it in an unusual way, taking it to be a term that refers to the whole process of secularisation, of the sacred emptying itself into history. This is not to be understood in a Hegelian way, for Vattimo is opposed to the metaphysical focus on beings. Rather, the emptying is the emptying of power and authority, for it institutes a message of friendship. Secularisation is thus a nihilistic process in which Being weakens itself indefinitely. Vattimo appeals to the Gospel of John where Jesus announces that God now calls humanity not to be his servants, but his friends. As Marta Frascati-Lochhead has noted, among others, Vattimo’s interpretation of Scripture is selective. While he reads the image of kenosis as weakening, it could be regarded as triumphant, with God exalting Christ to the “highest place” (Philippians 2:9), or even as inspiring “strong” thought and action for Christ was obedient “to death” (Philippians 2:8). Nevertheless, as Frascati-Lochhead points out, Vattimo is not interested in proof-texting, but in emphasising through passages such as John 15:15 (and elsewhere, in Beyond Interpretation,16 Hebrews 1:2–4) that God at different times has spoken in different ways, which suggests that “kenosis means for Vattimo that hermeneutics is born on Christian soil.”17 Luca D’Isanto speculates that for Vattimo kenosis refers to the message of the divine abandoning transcendence and entering into history, thus weakening himself.18 This reading cannot be derived 15

Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 108–9. 16 Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 46–47. 17 Marta Frascati-Lochhead, Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 155. 18 Luca D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Vattimo, Belief, 11.

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explicitly from Belief, although it can be seen in Vattimo’s later, less known essay “After Onto-Theology.”19 The message of Christ entering history parallels the “indefinite process of consummation and dissolution” of the structures of Being, “which does not culminate in ‘fully realized nothingness’,”20 for the latter itself would be metaphysical. Vattimo calls this process “secularisation.” Kenosis has its ethical correlate in caritas, usually translated as “charity” or “love,” which has led some commentators to accuse Vattimo of inconsistency, of instituting another absolute—charity—in place of other absolutes.21 Vattimo does not regard caritas as an absolute standard, but as a formal principle much in the same way as some people understand Kant’s categorical imperative.22 Following Wilhelm Dilthey, Vattimo sees the uniqueness of Christianity as involving a turn inward, away from a preoccupation with external presences.23 The appeal of Christianity thus lies in its inward unity of brotherhood, of faith, rather than in any external signifiers of group membership such as nationality, class, or race. Drawing on the work of anthropologist René Girard, Vattimo sees Jesus as being put to death precisely for delivering this message. While his death appeared to be a sacrifice to appease a community torn by mimetic rivalry (Girard believes natural religion was a way to defuse the violence arising from the fundamental human tendency to desire and mimic what the other has and does), it unmasked the function of natural religion through his message of love. While Girard does not develop his insights into a theory of secularisation, Vattimo does so by finding ways in which natural religion and metaphysics overlap, as, for example in the ontotheological understanding of God developed through the fusion of metaphysical

19

Gianni Vattimo, “After Onto-Theology: Philosophy between Science and Religion,” in Mark Wrathall (ed.), Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 35. 20 Vattimo, Belief, 63. 21 Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 20. 22 Vattimo, Belief, 66. See also Gianni Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” in Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.), After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 42. 23 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 106–7. See also Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. and intro. by R. J. Betanzos (Detroit, MI: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1979), 229.

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categories and religio-theological terms.24 Vattimo thus combines the insights of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Girard in an exceptionally subtle and creative theory of secularisation in which all authoritarian, transcendent, and metaphysical claims are gradually dissolved in the history of Being, the nihilistic vocation of which occurs as weakening. In this form of secularisation humanity interiorises the absolute until subject and object become transpropriated in the world of communications technology where there is no longer centre, reality, or foundation. On this view, secularisation weakens any institution, principle, or value that is absolute in any shape or form. Vattimo regards the current age as one in which democracy makes the best sense of an “ontology of actuality,” of how things are, in which, thanks to caritas, we should listen to others and hold our own views with a sense of ironic contingency. Democracy is thus one of the many fruits of secularisation, as Vattimo states in Nihilism and Emancipation: “In all of modern historicism, the emancipation and perfecting of mankind entail a move away from the sacral horizon of the beginnings. This is not necessarily the extirpation of religion; indeed, it is often perceived as a revelation of the most authentic truth of the divine—most authentic because profoundly related to the human (Christ is God incarnate). If we recall the role Christianity has played… in the modern invention of democracy, equality, and social and political rights, we can form an idea of how the idea of secularization might be generalized, along the lines laid down by Max Weber for economic structures.”25 Vattimo uses secularisation in its various forms to refer both to the nihilistic vocation of Being as weakening and to specific examples of weakening. Following Max Weber, he sees liberal capitalism as a secularisation of the Protestant work ethic. Similarly, he also draws on the work of Colin Campbell in identifying the basis and efficacy of modern consumerism and advertising as the secularisation of the Christian imagination of other worlds or alternate realities.26 The interrelation between the levels of the general process of the nihilistic vocation of Being as weakening and these specific examples can be expressed as the latter having in common “the humanization of social relations… [and] the dissolution of the divine right of all forms of authority.”27 In other words, the nihilistic vocation of Being 24

See, in particular, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, Pierpaolo Antonello (ed.), trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 25 Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 31. 26 Vattimo, After Christianity, 78. 27 Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 32.

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entails a weakening of strong structures that tends to create a humanisation and less authoritarian conceptions of interpersonal relations. Historically, this tendency is grounded in the inner subjective faith in the brotherhood of all human beings, which, as emphasised by Christianity was disclosed in the message and person of Christ, the kenosis of God. Clearly, today in the secular West there is no such unity of faith, but rather a unity of heritage, a linguistic dependency on what was once a shared faith. Through the efficacy of this message in the course of history, this “brotherhood” has been secularised into human rights, into the ideas that each and every person has an intrinsic dignity and worth that enables them to partake in the socio-political world irrespective of individual differences. For Vattimo secularisation does not end the process but continues to weaken the authoritative traces of tradition. Listening to the other, who like oneself, also has a shared linguistic heritage, will lead to this form of weakening through the interlocutors’ recognition of plurality and a fusing of horizons,28 of putting together elements of their respective traditions to form a blended tradition, regardless of the internal logic of the prior traditions. In view of these processes, the significance of Vattimo’s philosophy seems to lie in his reading the “signs of the times” so very well. His philosophy is an “ontology of actuality,” of taking into account how things are, yet also, through his concept of caritas, of how things should be. If it is a truism that the world is increasingly interconnected and societies irreducibly plural, then is it not important to have as your guiding principle a historically grounded sense that you should listen to other people? Already in his 1989 book The Transparent Society, Vattimo emphasised the decentred, plural nature of our technologically-mediated world, the features of which have become even more pronounced since the advent of the internet in the intervening years. Like his friend Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, as evinced in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,”29 Vattimo’s thought cannot be proved, demonstrated, or supported by strong reasons, but is nevertheless marked by an intuitive plausibility and reasonableness.

28

Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, ed. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (Cambridge, 1988), 257–82. 29

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2. Islam and Secularity Despite his tolerance and respect for cultural diversity, in his published works Vattimo has been critical of Islam. In After Christianity, for example, he takes up the issue of wearing the chador in Europe, which has philosophical significance, given the ban of certain forms of Islamic dress in some countries (e.g., France).30 Although the word “hijab” would be more appropriate, Vattimo’s text has been translated as “chador,” so this term will be used for consistency’s sake. Wearing the chador, unlike the cross, which has faded into the background of public life in the West, according to Vattimo, should be banned in public as it is a symbol of what he calls “pensiero forte” (strong thought), and thus a symbol of intolerance of presumably Western values. Despite his application of the Heideggerian notion of “thrownness” to hermeneutics and thus his admission that one cannot but interpret the world from a position into which one is thrown, Vattimo is doing the interpreting for Islam; Vattimo, and not a Muslim woman, is stating that the chador is an example of strong thought, and yet the chador is part of the situation into which some Muslim women, and not Vattimo, is thrown. He is more interested in the “ontology of actuality,” where the plurality of interpretations is oriented towards weakening of strong thought (that is, of absolutism in all its forms), than in how these interpretations are formed and by whom. Thus a Muslim woman may interpret the chador differently. Lila Abu-Lughod offers the example of Dr. Suheila Siddiqi, a lieutenant general in the Afghan medical corps, whose surgical expertise led the Taliban to ask her to return after she had been dismissed in the mid-1990s. One of her conditions for returning was the permission not to wear the burqa. However, she did wear the chador. Abu-Lughod emphasises that different forms of veiling and covering have communal, moral and spiritual meanings for women, and that “veiling itself must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency.”31 Abu-Lughod also cites Saba Mahmood’s 2001 ethnological study of Islamic dress in the mosque movement in Egypt, for whom, she finds, it expresses the devout woman’s spiritual connection with Allah.32

30

Vattimo, After Christianity, 95. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist, 104(3) (2002), 786. 32 Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” 786. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology, 16(2) (2001), 202–35. 31

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Vattimo’s comments on Islam extend well beyond the question of Islamic dress codes. In his dialogue with Santiago Zabala and Richard Rorty, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” on 16 December 2002, Rorty asked: “What can we do with people who apparently do not share civic responsibility either inside our society or outside?” “Outside” means outside the West, for, as Rorty exclaimed, “It was, after all, Europe that invented democracy and civic responsibility.”33 One could forthwith accuse Vattimo and Rorty of Eurocentrism. Indeed, Vattimo admits “the narrowness of the horizons that bound my own reflections,”34 and Rorty too acknowledges the “ethnocentricity” of his tradition.35 It is to the history of the West that all three of these thinkers appeal: Vattimo and Zabala to the Christian inheritance of hermeneutics, Rorty to the French Revolution. Islam does not acknowledge kenosis, and it has not undergone an “Enlightenment,” thinks Rorty, so that for him “the idea of a dialogue with Islam is pointless,” comparing the chances of having a successful dialogue between the two sides with those conducted by philosophers and the Vatican in the eighteenth century.36 Vattimo tacitly agrees with Rorty, having described Islam as “medieval” in his La Stampa response in 1989 to Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.37 As Ashley Woodward puts it, “In the case of the clash of cultures, Vattimo seems to reject cultural relativism, and upholds the nihilism of the West as the very basis by which we may make judgements about other cultures.”38 One should therefore distinguish between Vattimo’s theory of secularisation and how he applies it to other cultures, particularly Islam. The former, shorn of the latter, may have some important implications for Islam’s own self-understanding in the twenty-first century. Vattimo’s comments on Islam are symptomatic of what Nader Hashemi regards as the growing suspicion of Islam in recent decades, in large part due to political events directly concerning Islam such as the Iranian Revolution, the Rushdie affair, and 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and 33

Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” 72. Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, 115. 35 Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 266–67. 36 Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” 72–73. 37 Gianni Vattimo, “Our Savage Brother,” La Stampa, 18 February 1989. Quoted in Dario Antiseri, The Weak Thought and its Strength (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996), 69. 38 Ashley Woodward, “The Verwindung of Capital: On the Philosophy and Politics of Gianni Vattimo,” Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 13(1) (2009), 97. 34

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indirectly through geopolitical changes such as the end of the Cold War which turned public attention to other potential “threats” to Western civilisation. Although there has been a lot of paranoia and prejudice on the part of western thinkers, politicians, and journalists, the expression of antisecular attitudes by some Muslim individuals and groups has clearly not helped the public image of Islam. Hashemi maintains that many Muslims today, particularly in countries such as Iran, express an anti-western sentiment as part of their identity. According to Hashemi, Khomeini’s speeches in the 1970s have been influential in cementing the mind-set that politics and religion should not be separated, for the prophet Muhammad did not keep them apart. However, alongside the anti-secular attitude of Islamists, influenced by Khomeini among others, over the past few decades there has been a growing realisation among Muslim scholars that secularity may actually benefit Islam and the citizens of Muslim countries. In other words, secularity could have pragmatic importance for co-existence between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Moreover, secularity may not only be important to guarantee liberal democracy (and therefore rights and limitation of abuses by the state), as Hashemi argues,39 but may also be important for making religion less of an obligation and more of a pious intention (niyah), as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im believes.40 On the latter’s view, if religious observance is not required by state law, it will become a matter of individual choice, which is more likely to be heartfelt, internalised and merit-worthy. Furthermore, secularity may be necessary for the coexistence with other nations in so far as “strong thought” may preclude the changes in human rights and foreign policy issues required for establishing positive relations between countries. Thus replacing compulsory Sharia law by voluntary submission to the law would make cooperation between nations more likely. Admittedly, considering secularisation as a benefit to Islam along these lines may appear overtly pragmatic, and may even be criticized for furthering Eurocentric hegemony. But, as noted earlier, according to Vattimo secularity leaves room for private religiosity while enabling cooperation at the international level. What are the obstacles to secularisation in the Muslim world? Alongside the lack of a proper translation of the word “secular,” which too 39 Nader Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4, 143, 144, 20. 40 Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4.

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often is rendered “atheist” or “irreligious,” the main problem, according to Hashemi, appears to have been the negative association of secularity with the poorly-implemented, western-influenced secular regimes driving modernisation in predominantly Muslim countries. In some of these countries, he writes, “the political manifestation of secularism was imposed from the outside via Western hegemony in the form of colonialism and imperialism and kept alive by local elites who lived their lives alienated from the religious sentiment of the masses.” One significant example he provides is Iran, a “semi-colony” under Russian and British rule in the first quarter of the twentieth century, until in 1921 some independence was wrested back in 1925 the Pahlavi dynasty assumed power. Modernisation included initiatives such as the building of the Trans-Iranian Railroad and establishing Tehran University. Under the Shah’s autocratic rule, the increased access to education and travel reduced the clergy’s power. His autocratic rule was even more pronounced after the coup d’état that removed Mohammad Mossaddegh as Prime Minister in 1953 and crushed all political parties. The result, as Hashemi explains, was that Iran became “an autocratic modernizing state, often with critical external support, [which] suffocated secular civil society, thus forcing oppositional activity into the mosque, inadvertently contributing to the rise of political Islam.” The autocracy and external intervention of Western powers in the political wrangling that went on in Iran hindered secularism and contributed to the opposition that resulted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Thus, as Hashemi concludes, “State-led modernization from above has not been matched by a concomitant transformation of Muslim political culture from below.”41

3. Secularity and Secularisation With the case study of Iran mentioned in the previous section in particular, a major cause of the failure of secularism to take hold in Muslim countries thus appears to be that it was imposed top-down rather than an expression of the will of the people. The Indonesian scholar Nurcholish Madjid, among others, distinguished in the 1970s between the secular (the irreligious) and secularisation (the sociological process). Going beyond Madjid, the secular could be taken to refer to a political state of affairs, whereby the religious is kept out of politics. Arguably, however, to be effective secularity may require secularisation. In other words, religious reform should occur before the political if it is going to take hold and have 41

Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, 135–36, 137, 139, 134.

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any lasting effect, otherwise religious absolutism would cast a shadow on the political sphere. What is therefore required is secularisation as a process of removing any authoritarian barriers to separating the state from religion. Madjid attempted this in Indonesia, combating the prevalent view that it was sinful not to vote for Islamic parties. Putting concepts such as democracy, tolerance and pluralism at the forefront of his attempt to reform Islamic thought, Madjid could be regarded as promoting a form of secularisation. Like Vattimo, Madjid saw secularisation as a liberating process, offering what Hashemi describes as a “temporalising” of values, culminating in the realisation that only God is transcendent and divine. Madjid should be seen as a realist, dealing with a plurality of views and with the socio-economic and political necessity of cooperating with people who may not share the same beliefs in an increasingly globalised world. Although Madjid’s secularisation has been highly influential and effective in Indonesia, Hashemi notes that there has been a growing tendency towards Islamism in the country, in large part due to the failure of civil reforms.42 In other words, secularisation in Indonesia appeared to be going hand in hand with civil and material progress, but when the latter slowed down, the former reversed. This does not tally with the irreversible process of weakening that Vattimo sees in the West (a dubious notion, given the rise of twentieth-century fascism in Western Europe). Is there then something else in Islamic thought that prevents it from embracing secularity and arrests the process of secularisation? It has been suggested that Islam cannot fully embrace the secular because it has not had its own Enlightenment, that is, it can embrace modernisation but without modernity. This view has sometimes been expressed in an Orientalist way. Hashemi cites Ernest Gellner’s 1983 Muslim Society where he expressed his belief that Islam has used the fruits of modernity (e.g., transport and education) to propagate pre-modern views that had previously been the preserve of the educated minority.43 Even some Muslims have taken it as a given that Islam has no systematic critique of modernity and therefore does not embrace secularity or conceptualise its consequences, such as human rights and democracy. As Sajjad Idris affirms, “there has never been a truly satisfactory critique of modernity from the Muslim point of view.”44 The view that Islam cannot engage with the secular is strongly implied in Vattimo’s writings, as seen in his response to the Rushdie affair. 42

Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, 161–62, 164. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 44 Sajjad Idris, “Reflections on MawdnjdƯ and Human Rights,” The Muslim World, 93(3–4) (2003), 549. 43

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Furthermore, in his dialogue with Rorty and Zabala, he dwells on the Age of Interpretation (following the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason) as if the West has already gone beyond modernity whereas Islam had not yet even encountered it.45 Rorty explicitly states that Islam has not gone through the Enlightenment.46 Logically, on Vattimo’s view, the Enlightenment is no better than pre-modernity, for there is no “progress” in history: the metanarrative of progress was unmasked as a myth by the two World Wars.47 Thus Vattimo discusses “destiny” in the technical, Heideggerian sense of the epoch of Being into which we are “thrown,” rather than as a historical process that applies to all cultures. While Vattimo and Rorty seem to have been unable to refrain from making value judgements on Islam that are inconsistent with their own philosophical programmes, they may well have a point if one strips away some of their emotive language. They appear to be saying that Islam (being frustratingly unspecific with regard to Muslim countries or the Muslim world) is trying to modernise itself without being modern, without having gone through an Enlightenment. Both of the terms “Enlightenment” and “modern” can refer to periods of time and to a period of thought. In Vattimo’s eyes, the two terms are approximately equivalent. In The Transparent Society, Vattimo writes that “in the Enlightenment, human history is seen as an ongoing process of emancipation, as if it were the perfection of the human ideal,” and that “If history is progressive in this sense, greater value will clearly be attached to that which is more ‘advanced’.” Enlightenment thinkers held a unilinear history, with either Christ or the Holy Roman Empire at the centre. Progress on this view is the advancement of western European man.48 Vattimo also develops Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s view of Enlightenment as a “disenchantment” of the world, that is, of dropping the supernatural and metaphysical. Whereas Adorno and Horkheimer see the Enlightenment as a way of elites gaining further control and power by concretising and mastering the “other” as a representation of the fear of the unknown,49 Vattimo says that it “moved principally by an ethical requirement to emerge from violence and oppression.”50 In The End of Modernity, Vattimo defines modernity as “that era in which being modern… becomes 45

Vattimo, “Our Savage Brother.” Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” 73. 47 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, Ch. 1. 48 Ibid., 2, 3–4. 49 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by Joan Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), Ch. 1. 50 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 96. 46

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the fundamental value to which all other values refer.” He links the value of the new with secularisation, “the abandonment of the sacred vision of existence and the affirmation of the realm of profane value instead.”51 These notions of Enlightenment and modernity work together, for they are processes that “disenchant” the world, stripping tradition to the point of scepticism and immanentism. “Disenchantment is the recognition,” writes Vattimo in The Transparent Society, “that there are no objective structures, values or laws and that everything is posited, created by man (at least in the realm of meaning).”52 Thus following Heidegger, Vattimo sees Descartes as following a thread of internalisation (which Vattimo traces back to Christianity), of doubting the external world in an effort to emancipate thought from ecclesiastical dogma. While this “turn to the subject” bears the promise of democracy and human rights, it also culminates in the Nietzschean doctrine of the will to power, the taking of subjectivity to its logical conclusion in reducing Being to values posited by the will. As a development in the history of ideas, subjectivity helped augur religious reform as the precursor of secularisation by underscoring the importance of reading and interpreting the Bible for oneself: the printing press alone would not have undermined religious authority without the new emphasis on the values of progress and subjectivity. One can thus see how secularisation originated within Christianity through Vattimo’s description of the process, and also why it differs significantly from the notions of religious belief and practice within Islam. In other words, although Islam may need secularity (and therefore a process of secularisation) in order to flourish in a modern, globalised world, secularity cannot be transposed wholesale from Christianity. Vattimo’s emphasis on kenosis and on the turn to the subject do not find ready correlates in Islam, which emphasises the transcendence of Allah who cannot be depicted and is beyond human comprehension. Islam, unlike Christianity, is based on revealed law, which further emphasises transcendence and a sense of timelessness, for while the law requires consensus and historical interpretation, it affirms the mastery of God and not his gradual friendliness with his creation. Moreover, as Abdolkarim Soroush notes, this revealed law stresses duties more than rights.53 The difficulty of finding ways by which one could replicate the Enlightenment 51

Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 99, 101. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 97. 53 Abdolkarim Soroush, “The Sense and Essence of Secularism,” in Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (eds.), Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54–68. 52

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as a process of secularisation within Islam has led fringe figures such as Fouad Zakariyya to call for a de-emphasising of the divine in the political and ethical thought in Muslim countries, with the yardsticks of “rationality” and “progress” being put in its place. Although, as Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘ notes, Zakariyya realises that an Arab Enlightenment cannot be a carbon copy of the European Enlightenment, Zakariyya explains that “the modern ‘Arab self’ cannot be nurtured by historical Islamic tradition, since this tradition has disengaged itself from the ‘modern self,’ which had been developing in the West since the Enlightenment.”54 Furthermore, the question arises whether repeating the secularising process of the Enlightenment in an Islamic context would even be desirable. With the benefit of hindsight, one can attribute many ills of the world to placing the locus of value and meaning on the human subject. Abu-Rabi‘ agrees, stating that “one of the main consequences of the modern definition of the ‘self’ has been the colossal destruction seen in World Wars One and Two.”55 If the “will to power” and the reductionist approaches of positivism and scientism have resulted in the modern self, it may be best to avoid it altogether. Equally, though, it would be implausible to adhere to Zakariyya’s ideal of using “progress” as a standard for development. Moreover, merely appealing to Islamic virtues such as “generosity, patience, compassion, and kindness” would be insufficient to effect the kind of religious reform that would result in the divorce of religion from politics and perhaps even ethics.

4. The Golden Rule, Reform, and Dialogue-Informed Secularisation If then secularisation is to take hold among Muslims it can only be as a result of an authentically religious Islamic reform, which need not necessarily be analogous to the developments in Christianity that took place in the Enlightenment. To achieve this, religious reform should stress duties rather than rights. Yet this religious reform should effect the kind of de-sacralisation inspired by Madjid’s insight that the sacred is human and temporal. There are parallels between this view and Vattimo’s Christian secularisation, in which he follows Girard in identifying the sacred with violence. Where Islamic secularisation needs to depart from Vattimo is in retaining the concept of transcendence; religious reform in Islam cannot 54

Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘, “Introduction,” in Fouad Zakariyya, Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement (London: Pluto Press, 2005), xvi. 55 Abu-Rabi‘, “Introduction,” xvi.

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begin or end in nihilism or be based on it. This is because Islam, unlike Christianity, keeps complete transcendence and mastery of God; in Islam there can be no devaluing the highest values, only that there might be a possibility of distinguishing between these highest values and the culturalreligious, human institutions based on them. The question then is what principle(s) could develop into a process of secularisation that is open and yet has a link to transcendence. An-Na‘im’s book on secularity may provide an answer by proposing the Islamic version of the Golden Rule, which he regards as the cross-cultural basis of human rights.56 This, we recall, is what Vattimo identified as the Christian principle that Kant secularised in the Categorical Imperative, and which Vattimo recasts as “caritas.” Selecting this principle as a stimulus towards secularisation has been timely, as attested by the open letter, “A Common Word Between Us and You,” written in 2007 by 136 Muslim leaders and addressed to Christian leaders. This principle, if harnessed by Muslim leaders to inspire Islamic populations, can form the basis of the kind of weakening through dialogue that Vattimo puts forward as caritas, the ethical principle at the heart of his theory of secularisation. Various versions of the Golden Rule can be found within Islamic tradition. One example is the Thirteenth of Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”57 The principal benefits of putting this ethical principle at the forefront of religious reform are that it is traditional, practical, and outward looking, and also draws on a wider network of Islamic beliefs such as the creation of humankind. Of course, how one recognises the other and upon what one predicates one’s own value remain important points of contention. At one level, the Golden Rule could be taken as a formalistic principle of reciprocity (Mu’awada). According to Mahmoud Mohammad Taha in his book Liberal Islam, Mu’awada refers traditionally to the mastery of Allah: if one refuses to become a slave of Allah out of ignorance, one undergoes training in humility and obedience at the hands of another slave of Allah: “if a free person refuses to become the slave of God, he may be subjugated and made the slave of a slave of God.”58 According to another interpretation of the Golden Rule, which is mentioned by An-Na‘im, Muslims who wish to enforce Sharia on others would not wish rules of 56

An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 24. Al-Arba’un al-Nawawiyya, An-Nawawi’s Forty Hadith, trans. by Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies (Damascus: The Holy Koran Publishing House, 1976), 56. 58 Mahmoud Mohammad Taha, “The Second Message of Islam,” in Charles Kuzman (ed.), Liberal Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 277. 57

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other religions to be imposed on them. Yet another interpretation sees it as a rule that is concerned with the well-being of all humans by recognising their value on the basis of the value one sees in oneself. The Thirteenth Hadith, as interpreted by An-Na‘im, stresses the need to care for all of humanity and implies that the individual who upholds it would attain a high level of spiritual development through introspection (muhasabah) and selflessness. Nevertheless, it is important to note that “brother” is sometimes interpreted exclusively as a blood relative or as a “spiritual brother” (i.e., another Muslim, in the sense of the ummah). Oddbjørn Leirvik points out that Islam, like Christianity, contains a tension between care for the Muslim community and concern for all of humanity.59 What has the Golden Rule to do with religious reform and secularisation? The answer clearly depends on how the rule is interpreted and applied. At the level of formalistic reciprocity, it could involve perpetuating an exclusivism that further emphasises the sacred: one should obey another person just as one obeys Allah in order to teach humility. On another level, the rule entails the enlightened self-interest of not imposing one’s customs and beliefs on others so that they in turn do not impose theirs on you, which, by implying the separation between public and private religiosity, leads to secularisation. A further, deeper level of secularisation would come about if Islamic cultures put the “spiritual” interpretation of the Golden Rule at the forefront, even if imams present it to the general public as the need for cooperation in an increasingly plural, globalised world. As Idris notes, there is a “need… for the development of a discourse of co-existence rather than domination.”60 How though can the Golden Rule deepen secularisation beyond mere reciprocity? Both Christianity and Islam, among other faiths, emphasise the virtue of selfless care for all human beings based on their intrinsic worth. Vattimo bases his theory of secularisation on a nihilistic weakening of Being that has at its core the notion of listening to others, the result of which is a weakening of one’s own position in a fusion of horizons. The exchange of viewpoints can only take place if one is not only concerned for the other but sees as much value in them as one does in oneself. Yet the perception of this value will differ as much between Vattimo and a “traditional” Catholic as it would between a Catholic and a Muslim, despite the fact that all see it as the necessary condition for any form of exchange to occur. Vattimo believes that by being open to a person from a 59

Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Aw qƗla: ‘Li-jƗrihi’: Some Observations on Brotherhood and Neighbourly Love in Islamic Tradition,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 21(4) (2010), 357–72. 60 Idris, “Reflections on MawdnjdƯ and Human Rights,” 550.

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different culture will likely result in a weakening of positions and that an awareness of a plurality of interpretations will call into question the reasons one has for holding certain opinions. In the West, secularisation has led to hermeneutical nihilism, according to which there are no facts, only interpretations: the only thing that cannot be secularised is that which drives the process itself: caritas. Yet for a Muslim, secularisation may lead to a greater appreciation of the dichotomies between transcendence and immanence, the finite and the infinite; all that is cultural and historical is immanent, finite and human, whereas Allah alone is transcendent and the ultimate source of value. For Vattimo this value judgement would still be metaphysical and “violent,” whereas other Western thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas would see the faith in Allah as the ultimate “Other” as a strong reminder one of the finite, temporal and fallible nature of human values, traditions and institutions. In turn, questions would be raised about the role of religion in the modern state, the issue of human rights and the nature of democracy. How one separates the human from the divine would need to be negotiated and would be fraught with danger, for, as An-Naim points out, in the Islamic world consensus is important for interpretation.61 This hermeneutic of suspicion, however, would induce a movement towards secularism from the ground up, and would lead to a popular reconsideration of practices such as Islamic dress codes and laws that have hitherto remained obstacles in encounters with other cultures. Another issue is how one articulates the “weakening” of the Golden Rule. Is it best understood as dialogue or conversation? Vattimo and Zabala favour conversation because “dialogue” sounds as if Socrates were guiding his interlocutor towards a pre-established conclusion.62 However, “mere conversation” may not get the two parties anywhere, particularly if it only takes place among the intellectual elite. Yet between metaphysical discourse and banal informality lies performance, or “dialogue in action.” Through necessity or simply through caring about other people on the basis of having internalised the Golden Rule as part of one’s heritage, one may learn from others, or realise concretely the value of people outside of one’s own culture by helping them. “Dialogue in action” includes sharing of facilities, such as the parking area of a mosque and synagogue in Toronto leading to friendship,63 or a mosque in York inviting the antiimmigration English Defence League (EDL) in for tea and football in May 61

An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 12. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25–26, 79. 63 Liyakatali Takim, “From Conversion to Conversation: Interfaith Dialogue in Post 9–11 America,” The Muslim World, 94(3) (2004), 352. 62

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2013 in the wake anti-Islamic protests after the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby by Islamic extremists.64 Dialogue here means the everyday human level of concerns and feelings, rather than the level of discourse. Thus concretising the abstract principle of the Golden Rule may lead people to listen to the other, which in turn would lead what Vattimo calls a weakening of Being through a fusion of horizons. Effectively, it would lead to Madjid’s “temporalisation” of values, though being a popular (rather than elite) movement of secularisation, it would be more secure and irreversible. Vattimo may argue that this action-based dialogue ignores ontological questions, such as the possibility of recognising shared concerns in the first place, that the realisation that tea may be an olive branch requires some historically-situated pre-understanding to enable genuine dialogue in a fusion of horizons. There is, however, a problem in thinking that the ontological understanding of dialogue is more “true” (even in a “weak” sense), “authentic,” “originary,” or whatever word one would chose to describe its priority over action. The reason is that the ontological understanding of dialogue seems too quietist and fatalistic; it is the mirror image of Heidegger’s strategy for dealing with negative occurrences. Heidegger infamously compared the Holocaust to modern agricultural techniques, extending the blame first to mechanisation, then to the history of Being. As Richard Polt put it, “Heidegger typically leaps from the question of personal responsibility to an analysis of the technological understanding of Being that is supposedly taking over the planet.”65 Vattimo, so strongly influenced by Heidegger, follows suit, in apparently attributing all positive developments (i.e., of becoming more humane and anti-authoritarian) in Western societies to secularisation, or in his formulation, to the nihilistic vocation of Being with its tendency to weakening.66 While Polt’s concern with Heideggerian fatalism pertains to eschewing responsibility for negative actions, it could easily be applied to the responsibility for omissions or lack of action. “Listening to Being” could also be used as an apology for the status quo. In so far as Vattimo has tended to refer to his hermeneutical nihilism as an “ontology of actuality,” he has been perceived as moving away from his revolutionary “Overman” interpretation of Nietzsche in the 1970s to coming close to

64 “York Mosque praised for offering EDL protestors tea,” last modified 28 May, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-22689552 65 Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 157. 66 Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 31–32.

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becoming an apologist for the liberal capitalist status quo,67 although given that Vattimo and Santiago Zabala have written Hermeneutic Communism (2011), this interpretation of Vattimo’s more recent writings may be unfair. Necessity may throw people from different cultures together in a situation in which they must get along for their own mutual interest. In a globalised world, issues such as the economy and the environment make this a near certainty. Keeping members of one culture from exploiting or reducing members of another culture would therefore depend on the emphasis laid by influential members of both cultures on the Golden Rule. Reciprocal, practical action-based dialogue would concretise this internalised abstract concern for the other, inculcating personal respect and care between the parties. Vattimo once found himself speculating whether the pope could really believe the Dalai Lama was going to hell after having had dinner with him.68 Personal concern for the other should lead to respect and a willingness to listen to the other. Listening to another already implies respect for his or her opinion, and this plurality should induce both sides to inquire into the underlying reasons for their opinions. Scepticism based on hermeneutical plurality if pursued further through the genealogical method should lead to the realisation of the temporality and constructed nature of these interpretations. As Vattimo has emphasised, one is necessarily situated in the world, and therefore the limits of secularisation will differ depending on one’s culture. Vattimo, situated in the tradition shaped by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx and the long history of Christianity, sees the only limit as the reciprocal listening and weakening itself, the nihilistic vocation of Being in the interminable process of secularisation. For a Muslim living in Iran, Indonesia or Turkey, the only limit may be the realisation that the transcendence of Allah casts a question-mark over any and every human belief, value and tradition, thus leading to the separation of personal piety from state affairs in a secular order, in which a self-consciously pragmatic system may better ensure justice and prosperity for all.

67 Gavin Hyman, “Must a Post-Metaphysical Political Theology Repudiate Transcendence? The case of Gianni Vattimo,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 8(3) (2007), 124–34. 68 Vattimo and Girard, “Christianity and Modernity,” in Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, 40.

CONCLUSION

1. Art, paradigms and monuments In the process of writing these articles, among other work of mine on Vattimo over the past five years, I have come to see that the primary objection to Vattimo’s views on religion, the one which is potentially the most troubling and difficult to refute, is that of supersessionism. This problem of supersessionism was implicit in my earliest article on Vattimo’s thought—for Minerva in 2011—and was present in my work on Vattimo and God the Father (for The Heythrop Journal) and later for my work on Vattimo in relation to St. Paul. In the latter article (here in Chapter Three) I showed how Vattimo has increasingly turned to the work of Kuhn to get around supersessionism with his use of the latter’s paradigm concept. It has been shown in Chapter Three that Vattimo’s more recent turn to Kuhn to elucidate Heidegger’s notion of the event could get around the problem of supersessionism, focusing on the importance of the Bible. In prioritising “classic texts,” Vattimo opens himself up to a number of objections. Is he too focused on the classic text as something ontic, reducing the ontological to “things”? It shall be shown in this conclusion that there is precedent within Heidegger’s thought for the importance of classic texts, particularly in his treatment of Hölderlin’s work. Having looked at the latter, I will show how Vattimo understands the founding and influence of a classic text as event, particularly in relation to the fourfold. “The fourfold,” writes Andrew J. Mitchell, “is a thinking of things. The fourfold names the “gathering” of earth, sky, mortals and divinities that comes to constitute the thing for Heidegger.”1 More than in Being and Time, the fourfold in the post-war work of Heidegger is a “phenomenologically more robust” working-out of the thing.2 Michael Wheeler also points out that along with Heidegger developing his understanding of the thing, the fourfold was also a way to reimagine the “world” by thinking of it as something culturally structured by including some reference to nature 1

Andrew J Mitchell, “The Fourfold,” in Bret W. Davis (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 208. 2 Ibid.

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(such as “earth”).3 The fourfold, however, along with his attempt to understand the history of the West in terms of weakening founded by the Bible as the paradigmatic European text, are read by Vattimo through his understanding of the event of appropriation (Ereignis) based on a combination of Heidegger’s texts Identity and Difference and “The Age of the World Picture”; Contributions to Philosophy appeared in German in 1989 and so could not influence Vattimo’s earlier work, but he has had twenty-five years to incorporate it into his “return to religion,” which he has not done. Drawing upon the work of Modesto Berciano and Reiner Schürmann I proceed to show the limitations of Vattimo’s understanding of Heidegger and the fatal implications of these for his return to religion. Arguably, Vattimo too easily identifies “openings” with classic texts, such as the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays. By conflating “event” with “epoch,” as well as “paradigm,” Vattimo places Being too much into the hands of human artistry. It is as though Vattimo takes Heidegger’s “On the Origin of the Work of Art” too seriously. Vattimo has admitted downplaying the semantic field of “conflict” in Heidegger’s thought,4 and with that he has lost the tension between “earth” and “world,” and with it, also, the tension between the finitude of Dasein and what withdraws from thought. What withdraws, what is abyssal, is from history, and can therefore leave us with a simplified view of history. By “abyssal” here I am referring to Heidegger’s distinction between beings, which have a ground, and that which withdraws—Being—which has no ground. As Heidegger writes in the Contributions, “The abyssal ground is the primessential clearing concealment, the essential occurrence of truth.”5 This quote draws attention to the ground as something which is simultaneously an eventual occurrence which clears and founds a world, as well as remaining concealed and not reducible to the ontic. However, through jettisoning the tension between earth and world, Vattimo reduces the ontological to the ontic by prioritising the classic text. Here, too, one can see the influence of Gadamer in Vattimo’s “left Heideggerianism.”6

3

Michael Wheeler, "Martin Heidegger," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.) (2015) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/heidegger/Accessed 21.12.15. 4 Gianni Vattimo. Della realtà: Fini della filosfia (Milan: Garzanti, 2012), 126. 5 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event, trans. by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 300. 6 Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 77.

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Perhaps part of the problem is in Vattimo’s oversimplification of Heidegger that caricatures the “right” position as a form of onto-theology and positions the “left” as far away as possible in a form of philosophy that is closer to Kuhn, with much of what is interesting about Heidegger situated in the middle. This may be why Vattimo does not often draw from Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, which indicates that the Ereignis is “enowning,” and that it is not to be identified with an artefact, person, event or human creation. Take the following quotation from the Contributions: “Eventuating here and refusal and remaining absent, incursion and accident, restraint and transfiguration, freedom and compulsion. Such things eventuate, i.e., belong to the essential occurrence of the event itself. Every way of ordering, rearranging, and intermixing ‘categories’ fails here, because the categories are said on the basis of beings and apply to beings and never name or know beyng itself.”7 The opening is of time and space, and it concerns aspects of our Being such as “transfiguration” and “compulsion.” It is the event whereby being and man co-belong, and as such cannot be historically localised, and it depends necessarily on the finitude of both man and being, hence the exposure of the abyss, nothingness, the inclusion of withdrawal and closure in the event of opening. As such, Heidegger did not think of Ereignis as being identifiable with a particular event in time or anything ontic, even if he seemed to move nearer this position in “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” The event gives the formal structure of the event of disclosure, which opens history, and in and through which human existence and understanding are related to Being. So event as intended here is, in effect, the ontological dimension to ontic events, which make up history as ordinarily understood. It could be argued that Vattimo may be able to derive his desired position from the Contributions in order to avoid supersessionism, but at the cost of taking on more ontology than he would like. As Philip Tonner states, “No one epoch in this history of the sending of Being to thought can be privileged.”8 Vattimo does distinguish between openings (aletheia) and Ereignis, even if he sometimes seems to use them interchangeably. When Vattimo does discuss the Ereignis, it is usually in the context of Identity and Difference,9 linking it with the Ge-Stell: “The experience of Ge-Stell leads us to grasp Ereignis, and therefore above all to uncover the 7

Heidegger, Contributions, 220. Philip Tonner, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 120. 9 Modesto Berciano, “Heidegger, Vattimo y la Deconstrucción,” Anuario Filosófico, 26 (1993), 18. 8

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eventual nature of Being.”10 Choosing the Identity and Difference understanding of Ereignis is important for Vattimo as it links technology both to liberation (through its pluralising effects) and violence (through its history in the development of metaphysics). This interpretation of Ereignis raises the question about the relationship between Ereignis and event (in the sense of an opening), for Vattimo still talks about the “eventuality of Being” in different “epochs.”11 Is the Ereignis merely the sending of Being (an event) that brings to consciousness the other events, or, as Richard Polt speculates when discussing the Ereignis in the context of the Contributions, is it something “deeper than any event”?12 While the Ereignis “throws light retrospectively on the eventual nature of every epoch,”13 do these epochs get reduced to classic texts in paradigmatic fashion, something against which the Contributions cautioned? If not, then the importance of texts such as the Bible become secondary to the sendings (and this does not preclude a “right Heideggerian” approach, something Vattimo would abjure). Whether they do or do not, why prioritise the Bible if it is the Ereignis, through the Ge-Stell, which brings about the change of consciousness, a narrative that can make sense without recourse to Christianity? Vattimo wants an ethic, a limit to hermeneutics to prevent an “anything goes” approach, and so looks to Christianity, with its “spiritualisation” of texts to this end. However, if events cannot be reduced to the ontic (such as texts), but instead the texts are the result of listening and interpreting to sendings, why pay so much attention to a “master event” such as kenosis as recorded in the Bible? Can Vattimo appeal to the Bible without presuming its importance in a way that is inconsistent with his broader Heideggerian schema of weak thought? There are resources within Heidegger’s own work to justify Vattimo’s prioritising of classic texts, and these can be found above all in his lectures on Hölderlin. A crucial distinction needs to be made between reducing the opening to the work as a thing which is an object of authorial intention (that is, something ontic, a representation of will to power), and a work which allows Beyng to come through. By the latter, Heidegger meant that recollective thought (Andenken). A work which is itself, or gives rise to, recollective thought allows Being to come through a thing “so that it is in

10

Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, trans. by Cyprian Blamires and Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 176. 11 Ibid. 12 Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 77. 13 Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 176.

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the thing and as the thing that Being makes its appeal to us.”14 A work which allows Beyng to come through is Heidegger’s position in the Hölderlin lectures. In his lectures on “Germania,” Heidegger says that the poet harnesses the power of the gods and opens himself up to Beyng, which appropriates him through language: “It is not we who have language, rather language has us.”15 The work of the poet is an event which is placed as a founding for his people, those who speak the same language, for the poet’s words “harnesses the lightning flashes of the god, compelling them into the word, and places this lightning-charged word into the language of his people.”16 “Gods,” here does not refer to deities in the straightforwardly religious sense, but more a looking forward to future possibilities, of a kind of thinking not ruled by the metaphysics of technoscience in which the receptivity of disclosure is dulled. The poet’s works, then, are places in which Dasein historically dwells, linguistically. By drawing upon Vattimo’s book Art’s Claim to Truth, I can show how he has developed an understanding of how a work founds a world which is similar to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin in some ways, albeit different in others. In this book, Vattimo writes “To dwell in the world founded by the work is to live in the light of it. The history of an epoch is, in the end, solely an exegesis of one or more artworks, wherein a certain ‘epoch’ of being was instituted and opened.”17 Heavily influenced by “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” Vattimo interprets the founding of a world (the event of the opening of a clearing, or “lichtung,” which gives the light of disclosure to Dasein) as instituted by a work which draws from the earth, the permanent reserve of meaning which is not identifiable with nature;18 the “gods” (or divinities) do not have a large part to play in “On the Origin…” Earth, world, divinities and mortals are part of Heidegger’s concept of the “Geviert” (“fourfold”) which frame the event in terms of what it means for Dasein. It was Heidegger’s opinion that man is appropriated by Beyng as the site of the event which works itself out as a conflict between world and earth, humans and gods. Admittedly, sometimes the fourfold (Geviert) is worked out in greater harmony, as earth, sky, mortals and divinities, such as in “Building, Dwelling, 14

William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 574. 15 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Susanne Ziegler (ed.), Gesamtausgabe 39 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980), 23. 16 Ibid., 30. 17 Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 159. 18 Ibid., 157.

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Thinking.”19 For Heidegger, the fourfold work to explain the thrownness of interpretation in a way that links with nature (earth and sky) which nonetheless emphasises the centrality of human dwelling with others (mortals). Figures from the past illuminate the present and guide the future (divinities, similar to the “heroes” from Being and Time). One is thrown into a linguistic tradition, and Being appropriates by happening through Dasein dwelling among the fourfold. However, in “On the Origin of the Work of Art” there is conflict between the earth and world, as one also finds in the Contributions, such as talk of “strife” between earth and world.20 For Vattimo in Art’s Claim to Truth, “The earth…represents the permanent ontological reserve of meanings, which makes is [sic] so that the work cannot be exhausted by interpretation.”21 The work opens worlds through an infinite plurality of interpretations which come from it, but there is a “permanent reserve of new interpretations” in the work “and for this reason Heidegger sees in it the presence of the earth, which is always given as that which withdraws and holds itself in reserve.”22 The importance of the work is because it “has a privileged link to Being in that it connects the world to the earth as permanent reserve of meanings, and thus to Being itself in its originating force.”23 With regard to hermeneutics, “Interpretation…is always a linguistic event, which is made possible by the community of language shared between speaker and listener, presupposed as the basis of any conventional institution of meaning.”24 Here is the influence of Gadamer in Vattimo’s argument: Being is through and through linguistic, and so interpretations are linguistic events. Now it can be seen how the work relates to linguistic conventions in Vattimo’s mind through the Kuhnian language of the paradigm shift (revolutionary science) being developed through normal science, the day-to-day linguistic exchanges. For instance, Vattimo writes that “A historical world…is always born through the institution of language…the establishment of linguistic conventions always comes after the birth of language.”25 As with Heidegger’s work on Hölderlin, the work is the site of an opening of Being in language which acts as the founding of the world for a community 19

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 246. 20 Heidegger, Contributions, 25. 21 Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, 157. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 148. 25 Ibid., 121.

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which dwells in the truth of the work, which nonetheless conceals as it reveals. The main difference in Vattimo’s analysis is that he downplays the role of the gods. Vattimo relates this ontological analysis of the role of the work to the Bible, and here one gets a hint at what he means by “community.” Valgenti has stated that “Vattimo does not provide an explicit analysis of community,”26 and he is right. Nevertheless, one can infer what Vattimo means by the term when he talks about “belonging” through inheriting a linguistic tradition based on a work, and above all the foundational work in the West: The Bible. “The Word of God does not signify a preconstituted world; rather, it creates it.”27 The Bible as a work “embodies a real prophetic character, instead of being a purely historical document of a past event…the unsaid that lies in its background is not something provisionally concealed but constitutive.”28 By the “unsaid,” Vattimo means “earth,” the permanent possibility of new meaning from the text. As for the scope of new meaning, the importance of the Bible is primary for Vattimo when he says that, “In the case of the Bible, we stand before an entire civilization that constitutes and develops itself as the exegesis of a book. The history of the West is in its essential development the history of the interpretation of the Bible.”29 “To belong to this civilization,” writes Vattimo, “signifies belonging to that specific text, and in this sense we should conceive of the belonging of the reader/interpreter to the work in its fullest form.”30 What one finds in his most recent philosophical work, Della realtà, is a link between the work considered ontologically as an opening, the conflict between “world” and “earth,” and the notion of “belonging” to a community conceived in terms of the normal science from Kuhn’s paradigm concept, all wedded to a hermeneutical nihilistic philosophical schema styled based on the key Nietzsche-Heidegger axis. “Ciò a cui Heidegger sembra pensare è che,” Vattimo writes, “siccome la verità di una proposizione qualunque si prova solo all’interno di un paradigma storico, il quale non è semplicemente l’articolarsi di una struttura eternale…ma accade, nasce, ha un’origine…. la sede di questo accadere va cercata nell’opera d’arte.”31 Vattimo proceeds to give 26

Robert Valgenti, “Nothing in Common: Esposito and Vattimo on Community,” in Antonio Calcagno (ed.) Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2015), 30. 27 Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, 121. 28 Ibid., 119. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Vattimo, Della realtà, 224.

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examples of paradigms: The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s works, Homer’s poems, and “anzitutto,” the Bible.32 These paradigms are horizons which create openings in which there is conflict between world and earth: “Quel che costituisce la base della forza inaugurale dell’opera d’arte, e questo mi sembra oggi più importante di quanto non mi apparisse in passato, è il fatto che essa mantiene aperto il conflitto tra mondo e terra.”33 The work (or “paradigm”) opens the world and lets us dwell there in its language: “il mondo, come l’orizzonte articolato, il paradigma, che l’opera inaugura e dentro cui ci fa abitare.”34 The earth is the inexhaustible reserve of meaning from the paradigm: “la terra, come quella riserva di sempre ulteriori significata che, lo dice il termine stesso,”35 which changes with each generation of interpreters, to the point where a revolution occurs which is never from dialogue, consensus or rationality.36 Instead, changes are often due to imposed power, politically, by people such as George Bush.37 Despite referring to it, Vattimo, in Della realtà, consciously admits to having downplayed the language of conflict in Heidegger’s work.38 Where there is harmony, there is greater similarity to Vattimo’s interpretation of the fourfold, but what about strife? What is it that causes this “strife,” and how does Vattimo deal with it? Vattimo reinterprets “earth” in the context of “setting into work of truth” in the following way in The End of Modernity: “In the monument that is art as the occurrence of truth in the conflict between world and earth, there is no emergence and recognition of a deep and essential truth. In this sense, as well, essence is Wesen in its verbal aspect.”39 Linking the priority of the poetic found in “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” with the fourfold, as well as with the importance Gadamer placed on architecture as the foundation of art, Vattimo sees the poetic in the monumental as the setting-into-work of truth in providing openings for Dasein. Therefore, what is the monumental for Vattimo? Monument is a metaphor for Vattimo, and it is clear from his chapter “Postmodern Criticism: Postmodern Critique” in the David Wood edited

32

Ibid. Ibid., 225. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 226. 38 Ibid., 126. 39 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by Jon Snyder (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1988), 87. 33

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book, Writing the Future, that texts can be monuments, too.40 Enduring and capable of endless interpretation by each generation (and here is an uncharacteristically literal reference to “mortals”), monuments bring together both earth and world. There can sometimes be conflict in the way in which different generations, or even individual Dasein of the same generation from different thrown projects, interpret the same monument. The monument may fade into the background of experience, but it is still there. Here we can make sense of Vattimo’s metaphor of dwelling in a “library of Babel” in Beyond Interpretation,41 clearly not only echoing, but also developing Heidegger’s dictum that “language is the house of Being” from his “Letter on Humanism.”42 Even as far back as his early book on Heidegger, Introduzione a Heidegger (1971), Vattimo makes it clear that the place of dwelling is not time and space (seemingly at odds with Heidegger’s views in Contributions to Philosophy), but poetic language: “la cosa é davvero cosa solo in quanto fa dimorare presso di se terra e cielo, mortali e divini; ma ciò essa fa non in quanto presenza spaziotemporale, ma nella parola poetica.”43 We can also make a link between the final chapter of Della realtà and The End of Modernity: the classic texts such as the works of Shakespeare, Dante, as well as scientists including Newton and prophets such as the Bible, are monuments, which are also paradigms and poetic openings where Being eventuates. The works of Shakespeare, Dante and—possibly—Newton as well would also have been considered “monuments” by Nietzsche, who used the term “monumental history” to refer to one of the types of history outlined in his second Untimely Meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” With “the monumentalistic conception of the past,” writes Nietzsche, one “learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again.”44 Like the “earth” in Heidegger’s work, monuments are a reserve of meaning for Nietzsche, but they are more ontic and subjective in the sense that the monuments are meant to be inspirational rather than era-defining, and what could be inspirational for one person may not have any influence 40

Gianni Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger, e l’ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1990), 64. 41 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. by David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1997), 90. 42 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 161. 43 Gianni Vattimo, Introduzione a Heidegger (Roma-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1971), 128. 44 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Daniel Breazeale (ed.), trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69.

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over another. Therefore, the twin language of Gadamerian “monuments” and Kuhnian “paradigms” allows Vattimo to bring out the ontology of the “same” (monument, that which endures) and difference (the paradigm shifts), which both have their root in the paradigmatic nature of the work itself providing an opening and a linguistic community based around the work. Nietzsche’s understanding of monuments is similar, but betrays a more individualistic approach. Before I move on to problematize Vattimo’s interpretation of “earth,” it is worth dealing with a couple of standard objections to Vattimo’s understanding of the Bible. Firstly, it may be objected that he is wrong in prioritising the Bible, that behind all the other classic textual openings (Dante, Shakespeare and so on) there is the Bible. In reply I could imagine that Vattimo would be on very safe ground in saying that the language, themes and idioms used in these works are incomprehensible without at least a pre-understanding of the Bible. Dante’s Inferno, for instance, cannot be understood without the biblical themes of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” in hell. Another criticism made against Vattimo by D’Arcais is that people understand the Bible differently: Do we inherit the meek, loving Jesus or the Christ of the Crusades.45 Therefore, how could it be a “monument” or a “paradigm,” for the former implies sameness and the latter homogeneity? Two things could be said here. Monuments can be interpreted differently. For example, the Taj Mahal is sometimes interpreted as the epitome of beauty, whereas other people see it as the epitome of cruelty concerning how the building was constructed using slaves who were killed during its construction. Moreover, in the second edition of Kuhn’s text he put forward the notion of a paradigm as a “disciplinary matrix,”46 where there are fundamentals upon which interpreters agree (and in Christianity this may be something like a linear conception of time, God as creator, Jesus’ teaching, death and resurrection), and then these fundamentals can be interpreted in opposing ways (fundamentalist see Jesus’ resurrection as literally bodily, Bultmann saw it was the rising up of the church to faith). Vattimo would have no problem with different interpretations of the Bible; in fact, he would encourage it. These would be successive generations “Andenken,” of their thought commemorating the monument of the Bible, or the “normal science” of working within current paradigms understanding the older one. Vattimo does the exact same 45 Paolo Flores D’Arcais, “Gianni Vattimo, or rather, Hermeneutics as the Primacy of Politics,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy (Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 259. 46 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 184.

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thing. For Vattimo is working out the paradigm of the Ge-Stell/Ereignis, trying then to gather up the traces of paradigms prior—such as the Bible— by historicising them, reading them in the signs of the times. The hermeneutic circle into which Vattimo is thrown means he then has to understand this paradigm, this destining of the end of metaphysics and death of God historically in order to prevent the thinking proper to it— hermeneutics—from appearing as relativism. Here he returns to the Bible to historicise hermeneutical nihilism, to see it as the consequence of a chain of messages from a monument of the Word which have been interpreted and reinterpreted by successive generations, where the key message has been the nihilistic drift of kenosis (of God coming to earth to announce his friendship) and caritas (which is friendship itself). The former’s message of friendship, of internal brotherhood, wound up as the will to power and the age of the world pictures, whereas the latter is the way to orient ourselves today with regards to adjudicating between interpretations, that is, taking the other into account by recognising that they—like I—are Dasein, a historically-thrown being who shares a linguistic tradition that has its origin in weakening.

2. Vattimo and the Contributions to Philosophy: appropriation versus transpropriation The term “earth” appears most notably in “On the Origin of the Work of Art” and in the Contributions to Philosophy. While Vattimo quotes extensively from the former, as Modesto Berciano points out, in his article “Heidegger, Vattimo y la Deconstrucción,” he says Vattimo does not tend to refer to the Contributions. Instead, he draws heavily upon Identity and Difference for his interpretation of the all-important notion of the event in Heidegger’s philosophy.47 This is significant because the understanding of Being is explained differently in Contributions than in Identity and Difference, particularly the notions of the direction of “appropriation” and the conflict between “world” and “earth.” This will become important when I look at whether Vattimo understands the Bible in a way which a priori rules out other forms of coming to presence, which not only conflicts with the general message of tolerance coming from his style of thought, but also would not “persuade” other European thinkers who, too, have been brought up with the Bible within their linguistic tradition. Berciano argues it is a shame that Vattimo uses limited sources on the Ereignis (and the link between Ge-Stell and Ereignis), privileging Identity 47

Berciano, “Heidegger, Vattimo y la Deconstrucción,” 26-27.

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and Difference for Vattimo seems to understand this link only from the perspective of the relationship between man and the technical.48 Berciano reminds Vattimo that Heidegger thought there are other ways to the Ereignis as well, not just through technology.49 This is slightly unfair on Vattimo as we have seen that he believes there are openings beyond the technical, albeit Vattimo draws on classic texts as forms of “art” in which truth is disclosed; indeed, it seems to be the other way around, with the technical being the exception in Vattimo’s thought to the notion of classic texts constituting openings. Before I mention what Berciano has to say about the Contributions, it is worth trying to unpack what Vattimo really believes about the relationship between Geschick and event. Concerning these notions, he writes “The eventuality of Being is not separable from its aspect as Geschick,”50 and that concerning Being, “we can do nothing except re-think—from the point of view of the Ge-Schick—the same history of metaphysical errancy that constitutes us and that ‘constitutes’ Being as Überlieferung.”51 These traditions (Überlieferung) come from openings, which Vattimo variously refers to as “event,” “aletheia,” “aperture” and “paradigm.” In Nihilism and Emancipation, Vattimo writes that “Since the aperture does not confer stability on the object…Being should be thought of as ‘event’.”52 In A Farewell to Truth, Vattimo writes that for Heidegger “truth [is] aletheia as the opening of a horizon (or paradigm).”53 Vattimo brings all of these disparate terms together in a passage from Della realtà which exemplifies the link he makes between “the event,” “paradigm” and “opening” being the following: “Verità come alétheia è il darsi storico del paradigma, che, non essendo struttura eterna di un essere metafisico e parmenideo, va pensato come evento. Ma verità è anche la proposizione verificata secondo i criteri propri del paradigma, dunque la scienza normale nel senso di Kuhn.”54 It is ambiguous, however, where destining fits in. In Dialogue with Nietzsche, Vattimo says that “the historico-destinate apertures in which things come to Being are

48

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 27-28. 50 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 155. 51 Ibid., 175. 52 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, trans. by William McCuaig (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2004), 6. 53 Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, trans. by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), xxx. 54 Vattimo, Della realtà, 125. 49

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epochal,”55 so here again there is a link between “apertures” and “destining.” From Art’s Claim to Truth, we can get closer to identifying these classic texts, such as the Bible, with destining. If Being is eventual, and events are paradigmatic apertures based on classic works, and if these apertures are “epochal” and “destining,” Vattimo always refers to the “‘epochal’ character of the artwork,” acting as a “model” (in his later works, paradigm) for a “determinate historical epoch,” “founding” it.56 It should be clear that “destining” and “founding” are inextricably linked for Vattimo, which explains his aforementioned comment that “The eventuality of Being is not separable from its aspect as Geschick.”57 This leaves us with a quandary. For while Vattimo expresses his surprise at Heidegger restricting himself to “the aperture that takes place in poetry,”58 this is essentially what Vattimo himself does. He makes an exception for the reading of the Ge-Stell, of an opening coming to us through technology, pouncing on Heidegger’s account of the relationship between the Ge-Stell and Ereignis in Identity and Difference, relating it closely to another of his essays “The Age of the World Picture.”59 By going to “The Age of the World Picture,” the term bild (“picture”) means “structured image,” but as a copy or imitation of the world but setting it in place (“stellen”) as Dasein getting in the picture, or becoming acquainted with it as an object of representation.60 Here there are clear links with the Ge-Stell. This would enable Vattimo to make the move he wishes to make in interpreting the Ereignis as the outcome of the Ge-Stell as the culmination of the history of Being, the end of metaphysics. However, there are other ways of reading “image” that do not automatically bring it back primarily to “representation.” Take what Heidegger says about “images” elsewhere. In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger states how the meaning of “image” changes with different epochs in the history of Being. While earlier in medieval thought, image meant referential correspondence in the order of creation and in modern times it means “representational object,”61 originally, in the works of the Greeks, it meant 55 Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. by William McCuaig (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2006), 189. 56 Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, 119. 57 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 155. 58 Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 13. 59 Ibid., 15-16. 60 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 129. 61 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III, trans. by David Ferrell Krell (ed.) (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 29-30.

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physis (coming to presence); this will be discussed more below in the context of the work of Reiner Schürmann. Vattimo has posited GeStell/Ereignis as the destining of the later-modern epoch, one of nihilism as the end of metaphysics. Whilst Heidegger would admit that “getting in the picture” is a setting-into-place representationally of the world by a modern subiectum which is linguistic in nature, the opening does not come from a classic text; could openings come from elsewhere, reducing the importance of the Bible as the “master event” (particularly its messages of kenosis and caritas). We shall reconsider this possibility shortly. Vattimo might well reply that it is the Ge-Stell/Ereignis which then, in accordance with the destining of nihilism into which he was thrown, has enabled him to go back and see the history of Being as one of the transmission of messages which began with the Greek, with a crucial intervention from the Bible. However, why prioritise the reading of the Ereignis from Identity and Difference? Here we return to Berciano, who mentions the very different reading of the conflict between “earth” and “world” found in Heidegger’s Contributions. Concerning Beyng and the conflict between “earth” and “world,” a passage from the Contributions reads: “Beyng is the conflictual appropriation which originarily gathers that which is appropriated in it (the Da-sein of the human being) and that which is refused in it (god) into the abyss of its ‘between.’ In the clearing of the ‘between’ world and earth contest the belonging of their essence to the field of time-space wherein what is true comes to be preserved. What is true, as a ‘being,’ finds itself brought in such preservation to the simplicity of its essence in beyng (in the event).”62 Whereas Vattimo emphasises the transpropriation and humans and Being in the Ge-Stell in accordance with Heidegger’s position in Identity and Difference, Berciano draws attention to the view of “event” put forward by Heidegger in the Contributions, that “Beyng un-settles by appropriating Da-sein.”63 The opening is of time and space, and it concerns aspects of our Being such as “transfiguration” and “compulsion.” It is the event whereby being and man co-belong, and as such cannot be historically localised, and it depends necessarily on the finitude of both man and being, hence the exposure of the abyss, nothingness, the inclusion of withdrawal and closure in the event of opening. The opening takes place through and in Dasein, and it changes the way in which Dasein interacts with the world. Therefore, there is not a single event of appropriation as transpropriation which highlights the case that Being is eventual, as in the case of Vattimo’s reading from 62 63

Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 382. Ibid., 380.

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Identity and Difference. By limiting his interpretation of Heidegger on Ereignis largely to Identity and Difference, Vattimo sees it as the culmination of a history of metaphysics that looks almost unilinear, starting from the Greeks and the Bible, and working up to the Ge-Stell via Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche. By rejecting the unilinear notion of Ereignis Vattimo acquired by concentrating on Identity and Difference, Berciano reads the notion of Geschick in the Contributions as indicating that there is more than one sending in modernity,64 even though Vattimo seems to have followed Heidegger in Identity and Difference in holding that the Ereignis was unique.65 If Berciano’s criticism of Vattimo is right, then it has important implications for Vattimo’s view of nihilism, which in turn have significant consequences for his understanding of Christianity. Berciano points out that in Identity and Difference, the event of appropriation, this unique event, is portrayed by Heidegger as being prior to the constellation man-Being, something one does not find in the Contributions.66 Indeed, in Identity and Difference, Heidegger writes: “The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them.”67 Thinking can apply itself to this realm insofar as it gives itself over to language. Nevertheless, that the realm appears to be prior to man and Being seems more likely when Heidegger writes: “The appropriation appropriates man and Being to their essential togetherness,”68 similar to how Heidegger later, with Time and Being (1968), referred to Being as “it gives.” It is ironic that Vattimo draws upon Identity and Difference as much as he does, for the text seems to support the notion that although Being “is not,” but “happens,” there are happenings beyond language which raise the possibility for a “return” of Being or some other parallel or new history of Being which could occur outside the tradition of transmissions from metaphysics as a history of Being. This is a possibility which finds expression in the Contributions where the Ereignis is where Being appropriates humans; it is an appropriation, not a transpropriation (especially one in which the Ereignis is somehow prior to the Beinghuman constellation). In the Contributions, the Ereignis is considered as 64

Berciano, “Heidegger, Vattimo y la Deconstrucción,” 28. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1969), 36. 66 Berciano. “Heidegger, Vattimo y la Deconstrucción,” 28. 67 Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 37. 68 Ibid., 38. 65

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opening (Da), is regarded by Heidegger here as the foundation of everything. About this, Daniela Vallega-Neu writes: “Letting be and building (or taking care and creating) are the two fundamental modes of what Heidegger calls the ‘sheltering’ of truth in beings, which means that things are necessary to provide in their being a historical site for the truth of be-ing. Beings (words, works of art, deeds, things) are necessary in order to let be-ing occur in its original abysmality.”69 Being finds a site in all manner of beings to open up as world and yet also simultaneously conceal itself as earth; Being happens in the strife between world and earth. Linking back to “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” Vallega-Neu alludes to the Greek Temple, the form of which opened up onto and into the culture of the time, yet not only the stone, but also the plants and animals conceal that which the self-secluding earth lets appear.70 The work is a site which shelters Being as it brings it out of unconcealment into the clearing. Nevertheless, in the Contributions, Being appropriates humans differently at different times, enabling them to conceive of things anew, such as the case of the term “image” being understood in contrasting ways between the Greeks, medieval thinkers and moderns. Here it is not difficult to see how and why Vattimo conceived of “openings” as paradigm shifts. Nevertheless, the issue is whether Being appears as language or through language. Vattimo, with his Gadamerian influence, reduces the latter to the former. However, works such as a Greek Temple can reveal beings whilst also concealing; what other “sites” can there be for beings to come to presence? If the Ge-Stell is not the primary way of destining in the late-modern epoch, then not only will there be other destinings in the late modern which are not necessarily nihilistic (and therefore do not require an ontology of weakening), but also are capable of revealing other things. Here we are back to the problem of “earth” and “world” which deserves one more mention before moving on. Key to the Ereignis in the Contributions is the fourfold developed there. It is tempting to regard the “earth” as something natural, but arguably it simply represents how whenever Being appropriates Dasein in one linguistic disclosure of meaning (through tradition), in doing so it leaves out other ways of understanding the world linguistically. The former is the “world,” the latter is the “earth,” and the “conflict” between them is unconcealing (world) and concealing (earth). This means interpreting the fourfold poetically. Vattimo sees the conflict of “earth” with “world” as the former disappearing over time into concealment due to 69

Daniela Vallega-Neu, “Thinking in Decision,” Research in Phenomenology, 33 (2003), 256. 70 Ibid., 257-258.

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the passing of generations. However, on the model of the Contributions, earth is a conflict worked out synchronically, at any given time with the “mystery” surrounding concealing/earth being due to our thrownness where other linguistic traditions are concealed. Vattimo would then argue in reply that these concatenations of openings and different interpretations based upon varying inheritances all point to an ontology of weakening, to the “specialisation of languages.” However, Vattimo’s reply is based on his reading of the Ereignis as the result of the Ge-Stell, in which both man and Being have lost their metaphysical epithets. Instead, we are simply left with people interpreting differently based on thrownness and the way in which Being appropriates through works which one will interpret based on their inherited linguistic tradition. What about destining, especially when in “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger writes that the GeStell “drives out every other possibility of revealing”?71 However, also in the same text he states that destiny is not a “fate that compels,”72 as where there is danger there also grows what saves; only the gods can save us now. By gods he seems to have meant a cultural template, linguisticcultural models with significance to a group of people, or something like a disclosure of Being based on a heroic figure for a group of people.73 Relating this to Christianity, Jesus may well have functioned in this way, and his messages concerning the resurrection, Parousia and judgement all constitute the linguistic parameters of the horizon for this group of people. They would not recognise Vattimo’s interpretation of Christianity, and they would not regard themselves as being “destined” by technology. In short, if Identity and Difference is put to the forefront, then Vattimo has a case to support his weak thought, where one responds to the destining of an era at the end of metaphysics. However, if the Contributions is prioritised, then his weak thought is not persuasive as it stands. As for “destining” for the Contributions, this seems much more about strife in relation to Dasein, of how the latter relates to the coming to presence of Beyng in unconcealment which is also concealment: “What propels human around is their thrownness into beings, a thrownness that destines humans to be projectors of being (of the truth of beyng).”74 In short, if the Ge-Stell is not the destiny of (late) modernity, then there is no ontology of actuality in the sense of weakening as the defining way of thinking in our age as Vattimo wishes. If so, hermeneutics is not necessarily the koine of late 71

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 27. Ibid., 25. 73 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98. 74 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 37. 72

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modernity and it neither needs a historical grounding to escape relativism, nor does it need an ethic to adjudicate between interpretations. For these reasons, Vattimo’s Christianity is left theoretically redundant if one does not accept his reading of Heidegger’s key concept of the Ereignis. Making a different, but related, point to Berciano is Reiner Schürmann who distinguished between three stages in Heidegger’s development. The first, approximately of Being and Time, involves Heidegger being concerned with the meaning of Being, rather than the truth of Being, in which ecstatic temporality comes across as being almost neo-Kantian.75 After this stage, Schürmann sees Heidegger as developing the notion of the epoch, adding a greater sense of history to the way in which things open for Dasein beyond ecstatic temporality. The final stage Schürmann sees in Heidegger’s development is that of event understood in terms of physis (coming to presence of nature): “Heidegger’s understanding of ‘event’ as presencing is topological inasmuch as the topoi where presencing occurs are many: not only diachronically but also synchronically. Ereignis designates the originary phenomenon, which is the condition for historical, as well as ecstatic, time.”76 “Physis,” Schürmann writes, “as an event-like measure is irreducible to dialectics, since it implies no reappropriation of past historical effects.”77 In other words, Schürmann points out that this concept of physis implies that there is another understanding of the notion of the event in Heidegger’s writing that Vattimo ignores. Significantly, this understanding of the event is one in which history and tradition do not have roles to play. Rather than appropriating traces of past linguistic events, emphasis is instead placed on nature emerging into presence. In the essay “Science and Reflection,” Heidegger writes that nature is only one way in which what presences has been named physis.78 It is not as though Being is identified with the natural order, as this would be too simplistic. Rather, nature coming to presence constitutes an opening for Dasein. Whilst Dasein standing within this opening will interpret nature, doubtless through linguistic categories, the coming to presence is not an ontological trace of a past opening in linguistic terms, but “the simple appearance of a phenomenon, any phenomenon, here and now.”79 To an extent Schürmann is right here in that we do distinguish nature from 75

Reiner Schürmann, “Deconstruction is not Enough: On Gianni Vattimo’s Call for “Weak Thinking”,” in Santiago Zabala (ed.), Weakening Philosophy (London and Ithaca, New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 125. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 174. 79 Schürmann, “Deconstruction is not Enough,” 125.

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history, as Heidegger did, too. Nevertheless, Heidegger realised that both “nature” and “history” have the same root in the sense that they both are.80 What we need to distinguish, Heidegger thought in his lecture “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1” is between, as the title indicates, the essence and concept of physis. This distinction is explained by Günter Figal in the following way: “only the ‘concept’ of physis ties us to a particular realm of beings, that is, natural beings, whereas the original ‘essence’ or physis is supposedly emergence and selfshowing without restriction.”81 Figal recounts how Heidegger struggled to show how physis could be grasped “on its own,” as Figal puts it, “without restriction,” for focus on beings is not only the “sole realization” of physis, as Figal notes, but also historically conditioned. This is why, Figal points out, Heidegger returned “to his early guiding concept of aletheia.”82 Nevertheless, with physis in principle Heidegger has identified a way of coming to presence which, as Schurmann put forward, “implies no reappropriation of past historical effects.”83 Schürmann’s point, taken seriously, undermines Vattimo’s Gadamerian reading of Heidegger as now there is more to Being than language which, combined with the idea of “earth” as a concealing of meaning from someone which is open to another Dasein, leaves the door open for a different understanding of religion.

3. The question of transcendence The possibility of transcendence It is now expedient to summarise the previous section and relate it more directly to the issue of Vattimo’s return to religion. So far in this conclusion we have looked at the problem of Vattimo reducing the ontological to the ontic in his appeal to the Bible as a paradigmatic text/opening which has central to the West, which is recognised as such after the Ge-Stell/Ereignis have allowed those who read the “signs of the times” to understand that Being is not, but happens and that remembrance (Andenken) is commemorative recollection of the linguistic traditions into 80

Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (ed.), Gesamtausgabe 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 241. 81 Günter Figal, “Phenomenology: Heidegger after Husserl and the Greeks,” in Bret W. Davis (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 38-39. 82 Ibid., 39. 83 Schürmann, “Deconstruction is not Enough,” 125.

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which we are thrown as Dasein. I appealed to the importance Heidegger himself gave to classic texts in his reading of Hölderlin to support Vattimo. Nevertheless, in Vattimo’s own development of Heidegger’s position on this the question of the fourfold comes about in the “birth” of a language through the conflict between earth and world. The “conflict” is taken by Vattimo as being the leaving behind of interpretations by generations, and the Bible has influenced successive generations in the West and has been the constant reserve of meaning behind other openings, such as the works of Dante, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. Here, though, there is conflict between the importance Vattimo places on texts and the technical in the Ge-Stell. Vattimo reduces the latter to the increased specialisation of languages revealed in the society of generalised communication, with talk of a proliferation of “world images” being related to the will to power in Nietzsche’s sense of representation/valuethinking. Nevertheless, why prioritise the Ge-Stell at all? I drew upon Berciano’s thinking to highlight the lack of attention Vattimo has paid to other readings of the Ge-Stell in Heidegger’s thought, especially in the Contributions. Here terms such as “earth,” “world” and “Ereignis” mean different things, leaving open the possibility that there is more than one “sending” in modernity. The Ereignis is not a transpropriation in which “Being” and “man” lose their metaphysical epithets, but an appropriation of man by Being in which man is transformed and Being finds not only a clearing, but also a sheltering, which can occur in any being. Whilst Being is understand as language, it is not necessarily disclosed through language, leaving open more sites of Being than Vattimo would wish to limit in the import he gives to classical texts, downplaying the role of the Bible. Even if one argued that Heidegger would still regard the importance of the GeStell as heralding the Ereignis, the latter could be understood as the event of appropriation rather than transpropriation, whereby the former epithet refers to ways in which Being takes hold of Dasein and allows it to rethink earlier, perhaps lost, traces of Being, including sites which are not primarily linguistic; it is here, thinking of Schürmann, that Heidegger might imagine thought returning to physis, or even a way of reclaiming poesis from the technical. The net result is that Vattimo’s interpretation of the Ereignis resulting from the Ge-Stell is reduced, which opens the possibility of a plurality of destinings in modernity as well as the plurality of sites of Being indicating that there are other ways of reading classic texts and language games in which ideas such as “faith” and “transcendence” could be interpreted differently. Most importantly, if Vattimo’s interpretation of the Ge-Stell is not seen as “destining” modernity in the unilinear sense of a transpropriation which leads to

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hermeneutical nihilism, then there is less reason a) to think we are in an age of nihilism, b) to see nihilism as our sole opportunity and c) to understand our sending as resulting in nothing more than a play of interpretations. Without this “ontology of actuality” (viz. weakening), there is less need to seek out historical foundations for hermeneutics and to derive from this history an ethic of charity. Moreover, if one takes what Schürmann says seriously of the idea that, through physis, things could come to presence simple in appearance in an extra-linguistic way (even if it then dwells in language), there opens the possibility of transcendence, of being able to consider “faith” and “religion” in a way which is not reduced to a “left”-Heideggerian reading. It is this latter possibility and its implications or Vattimo’s thought which shall be explored in the following section. Vattimo has been criticised for leaving out the possibility of transcendence with regard to his return to religion, with numerous commentators on Vattimo’s work reacting negatively to this blind-spot in his thinking.84 Antiseri was prominent among the early commentators on Vattimo’s return to religion in criticising Vattimo on the lack of vertical transcendence in his thought. Antiseri was right for the wrong reasons, for he is correct in his assertion that Vattimo is too quick to dismiss transcendence, but Antiseri argues for transcendence along existentialist lines, particularly those of Kierkegaard and Pareyson. Antiseri thinks that that “The choice between the existence and non-existence of God is an existential act of acceptance and repudiation.”85 Vattimo, who sticks closely to his interpretation of Heidegger, thinks that the latter repudiated the existentialist notion of choice after the kehre (“turn”) in his thought, downplaying the notion of authenticity and instead holding that “choice” is

84 Dario Antiseri, The Weak Thought and its Strength (Aldershot: Averbury, 1996); Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, Slavoj Žižek (New York and London: T&T Clark, 2008); Alberto F. Roldán, “La kénosis de Dios en la interpretación de Gianni Vattimo: hermenéutica después de la Cristiandad.” Teleogia y cultura, 4(7) (2007), 83-95; Anthony C. Sciglitano Jr, “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar’s Trinitarian “Response” to Gianni Vattimo’s Secular Christianity,” Modern Theology, 23(4) (2007), 525-559; Laurens Ten Kate, “Econokenosis: Three Meanings of Kenosis in “Post-modern” Thought On Derrida, with References to Vattimo and Barth,” in Onno Zijlstra (ed.), Letting Go: Rethinking Kenosis (New York and London: Peter Lang, 2002), 285-310; Jens Zimmerman, “Weak Thought or Weak Theology? A Theological Critique of Vattimo’s Incarnational Theology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 40(3) (2009), 311-329. 85 Antiseri, The Weak Thought and its Strength, 121.

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circumscribed within a historical destining.86 Moreover, Vattimo, again following Heidegger, sees existentialism as a form of metaphysics in which the human being is central in a continuation of the anthropocentric Enlightenment project. As regards Kierkegaard, in broad brush-strokes Vattimo sees his theology as an example of “apocalyptic faith,” of a nostalgia for Being and ignoring the nihilism that has come from the event of the death of God,87 or as “tragic” Christianity, which adds up to the same thing:88 “submission” to something “beyond” is nostalgia for certain foundations which have disappeared after the death of God and the end of metaphysics. In putting kenosis at the forefront of his return, Vattimo sets out his stall with respect to transcendence in that the latter could not be vertical, but fully divested into history in the form of messages. It is not as though Vattimo thought that kenosis is a weakening of the second person of the Trinity which could then be reversed, for kenosis does not necessarily entail a weakening of God, but weakening in God itself for his Trinity is economic, with the age of the Father giving way to that of the Son.89 With kenosis Vattimo’s God is emptied wholly not into history, but into transmission. Indeed, it is wrong to think that there is a being—God— who is emptied. Rather, kenosis is the giving-way of the idea of transcendence in favour of emphasising immanence, friendship. This approach is made more clear in Vattimo’s more recent writings on religion where he emphasises Matthew 18 (where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, that is where he will be) and the Logos in the Bible and the latter as the paradigmatic text of the West. Mancini has stated that Vattimo is wrong to identify the sacred with transcendence,90 and it is this identification of transcendence with metaphysics in philosophy and the sacred in religion (and therefore, through the “family resemblance” he sees between Girard and Heidegger, also metaphysics as it is onto-theological) that makes Vattimo rule-out a priori any form of transcendence as

86

Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 50. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 139-141. 88 Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 94-95. 89 Gianni Vattimo, “How to Become an Anti-Zionist,” in Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder (eds.), Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 20-21. 90 Quoted in Carmen Repolschi, “The Christian Message in the Weak Thinking Discourse,” Auvt, 22(10) (2010), 42. 87

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“violent.” This, ironically, leads to “violence” being done against religion through Vattimo’s own thought, an opinion shared by Klun.91 With respect to the possibility of transcendence, the problem with Vattimo’s Heideggerianism is that he does not take “physis” seriously. Schürmann said that Vattimo remains “stuck” in the second development of Heidegger’s thinking, in which the “historical-cultural epoch… determines every possible occurrence…It transcends [Dasein], but more like a system of transcendental conditions than like a transcendent model.”92 Whereas Heidegger “move[d] beyond what Vattimo describes as his historicism,” with “physis,” Vattimo has not, and instead—due to his reliance on Gadamer—reduced the transcendental to aletheia, historico-cultural openings (or “paradigms”). In short, Vattimo is against any form of transcendent except horizontal transcendence,93 which is a transcendental based not on the a priori synthetic, but a historical aperture which recognises ontological difference between Being which comes to presence within an opening, and Dasein for whom the opening founds a world. This is in large part due to biographical reasons. It could be argued that although Heidegger thought physis could happen in a way not restricted by concepts, it can only by understood through concepts which are historically embedded and, therefore, linguistic.94 However, just because Being can only be understood as language, who is to say that all Being has to be understood? Vattimo’s particular reading of Gadamer brings together “Being” and “understood” in the sense that there can be no Being which is not understood, and no understanding which is not linguistic. However, there remains the possibility with physis that Vattimo is wrong on this point, and this can leave room open for Being which is not understood in terms of nature and (as, and/or in addition) the divine, which links back to the tradition in many religions in which the divine is a mystery. In The Responsibility of the Philosopher, Vattimo cites his “proletarian roots,”95 for the interest he has taken in “emancipation.” His father was a policeman who died before his time, leaving his mother widowed and 91

Branko Klun, “Dialogue, Weak Thought, and Christianity: Some Questions for Gianni Vattimo,” in Maximilian Lakitsch (ed.), Political Power Reconsidered (Vienna: Lit. Verlag GmBH, 2014), 52. 92 Schürmann, “Deconstruction is not Enough,” 124. 93 Giovanni Giorgio, “Introduzione: Pensare l’incarnazione,” in Giovanni Giorgio (ed.), Dio: la possibilità buona: Un colloquio sulla soglia tra filosofia e teologia (Soveria Mannelli, Calabria: Rubbettino, 2009), xvi. 94 Figal, “Phenomenology: Heidegger after Husserl and the Greeks,” 39. 95 Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, 105.

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needing to move across Italy. As a result, Vattimo felt like an outsider in the North, having lived in the South of Italy. This experience, along with having lived through the social upheaval of the 1960s and the student revolutions of 1968, may have drawn him to Marx and Mao. In conjunction with his Catholic upbringing, it is easy to see how emancipation dovetailed with theology, but in a context very different from Latin America. In a profession surrounded by middle class university lecturers and politicians, the oppressor was not holding a machine gun, but a copy of Aristotle’s Metaphysics or the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Shortly after, on the following page of The Responsibility of the Philosopher, Vattimo says “In a sense I was born philosophically within that outlook—which from the religious point of view had its defects, like being moralistic rather than mystical, for example.”96 By “that outlook” Vattimo means seeing himself based on his proletarian roots, being “involved in an undertaking of historical and emancipatory scope.”97 His proletarian and Marxist roots influenced him to be suspicious of vertical transcendence. Vattimo’s interest in comradeship in a Marxist-Maoist sense leads him to posit a universal brotherhood of all people as friends, even with God who has lowered himself to this level. The manifestation of the idea of caritas in history is the growing idea of historical embeddedness, much like the growing emancipation of a communist struggle; even with the apparent defeat of caritas under Augustine and the Middle Ages afterwards, this is like the cunning of reason, again displaying Vattimo’s interest in history even in a Hegelian sense. As D’Isanto puts it, Vattimo has an awareness of belonging to a chain of messages,98 but Vattimo sees this chain as all there is, and that he is adding to this chain by entering into conversation with these messages. As Borradori realises, Vattimo’s interest in Christianity is neither as an object to be studied or appropriated by him, nor as a whim, but both as a Geschich and an opening based on his interests in the Heideggerian and Gadamerian senses of these terms (respectively).99 Vattimo is not interested in apologetics, but Christianity “belongs to his life story and his

96

Ibid., 106. Ibid., 106. 98 Luca D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Gianni Vattimo, Belief (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1999), 8. 99 Giovanna Borradori, “Postmodern Salvation: Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder (eds.), Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY, 2010), 144. 97

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heritage.”100 “Vattimo’s writing personalises itself,” writes Repolschi, as “to talk about faith is possible in your own name.”101 This autobiographical attitude extends to how he reads the Bible. Due to being born into an Italian post-war Catholic family, he finds that when he reads the Bible the history of the Jews “has nothing to do with me.”102 More than this, Vattimo has said that he suspects “the God of Israel who was believed to be the father of Jesus Christ is instead only and properly the God of the hosts of nomadic people.”103 Here, in the text “How to Become an Anti-Zionist,” Vattimo explains that this attitude is autobiographical and is based upon his growing realisation that Israel has been acting unlawfully in its treatment of Palestine.104 This is not the place to expand upon Vattimo’s anti-Zionism or to analyse the significant controversy it has created, although it is worth noting that he has made pronouncements sufficiently inflammatory to be referred to as an “inveterate anti-Semite” in the online magazine, The European.105 What is important to recognise is that anti-Zionism seems to have affected his perception of transcendence of even a personal god. Vattimo sees all transcendence as being violent because he sees how claims over land vouchsafed by a transcendent being have been a source of exclusionary, and physical, violence, citing Zionist beliefs about a chosen people and a promised land based on the covenant. That Vattimo identifies this God of the covenant with God the Father is interesting, and it is more explicit in this very recent text than in previous works, otherwise it would have informed my article on the subject.106 In light of this, kenosis is the emptying of transcendence and the authoritarian “father” characteristics of the Old Testament God. This is perhaps why Vattimo points out the “Old Testament” is the “Hebrew Bible.”107 Of course, this position of Vattimo’s is supersessionist and modalist, but I have already shown that there are resources within his thought to help circumvent this problem, albeit raising other issues. Like Vattimo’s views on the Ge-Stell, if one does not 100

Ibid. Repolschi, “The Christian Message in the Weak Thinking Discourse,” 47. 102 Vattimo, “How to Become an Anti-Zionist,” 20. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 19. 105 Severyn Ashkenazy, “A New Exodus?” The European Magazine 4.10.2014 http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/severyn-ashkenazy/9073-resurgence-ofanti-semitism-in-europe Accessed 23.8.15. 106 Matthew E. Harris, “Vattimo and Otherness: Hermeneutics, Charity and Conversation,” Otherness: Essays and Studies, 4 (2013), 1-21. 107 Vattimo, “How to Become an Anti-Zionist,” 21. 101

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interpret the covenant as exclusive (which was the whole point of the work of St. Paul), one will not regard it as violent. As a result, transcendence would not have to be considered as violent and the whole Bible could be read together. The point I am trying to make is that Vattimo has styled not only a philosophy, but also a religion based on his own preferences and as a result they have little direct relevance to others beside himself. What are the implications of Vattimo’s views on transcendence for religion? Vattimo has been heavily criticised by numerous commentators on his work for neglecting the dimension of transcendence (or “vertical” transcendence to distinguish it from aletheia as a horizontal aperture). There are two main reasons why this is a problem for Vattimo: i) neglecting the religious experience of people who are “full” believers (compared to his own status as a self-confessed, “half believer”108); ii) internal inconsistencies with Vattimo’s own arguments, both ethically and hermeneutically. Klun points out the lack of vertical transcendence in Vattimo’s Christianity, that “transforming” religion into a story does violence to a believer’s religious experience, and that in his emphasis on spiritualisation Vattimo removes the lasting role of incarnation in terms of the flesh, particularly the importance of the resurrection.109 Again, whilst one may agree with Vattimo in his view that Being can be understood as language, it does not have to come to presence through language, in classic textual works alone. Focusing on Klun’s objection, it is important to note the significance he placed on the “flesh” of Jesus. While Klun accented the resurrection, Jesus” flesh is at the heart of Christianity and is inseparable from the messages of kenosis and caritas. In turn, this flesh is inextricably linked to transcendence. Kenosis is linked to an emptying which then returns to fullness through the resurrection (the parabola from transcendence, and back), while caritas is linked to obedience to a transcendent source of authority. Arguably, Jesus’ flesh was a site in which Being came to presence in terms of physis, dwelling in the language of kenosis, caritas, Eucharist and so on, whilst also hiding much of who he was, how he related to the historical world of Judaism and the world at large, and—importantly— being capable of infinite interpretability. In his dialogue with Vattimo, Dotolo notes that Christianity is critical of transcendence without a name, and so transcendence becomes historical.110 Although transcendence becomes historical in Dotolo’s understanding of Christianity, it does not 108

Vattimo, Belief, 77. Klun, “Dialogue, Weak Thought and Christianity,” 52. 110 Carmelo Dotolo and Gianni Vattimo, Dio: la possibilità buona, Giovanni Giorgio (ed.) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2009), 30. 109

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dissolve into a play of horizons—it cannot be exhausted in immanence.111 Rather, the incarnation for Dotolo acts as a question-mark towards authoritarian, scientistic understandings of what it means to be human. The Chalcedonian definition—Jesus as God and human unmixed and combined—brings together transcendence and immanence in a way in which the truth of Christianity is a meeting with Jesus, who is inexhaustible insofar as he is divine.112 The meeting is an opening, one which is a dialogue between the interpreter and Jesus.113 While this could be understood in a Gadamerian sense of transcendence as an event which harbours the potential for an infinity of meanings, I would prefer to see it in terms of the conflict of the fourfold. The body of Christ was an event which came to presence and dwelt in language (the Logos: The Word made flesh, John 1:14). The inexhaustible nature of the divinity placed in relation to humanity, as Dotolo puts it, opens up a world but closes it off as it is a notion which is incapable of ever being fully understood. Nevertheless, for mortals Jesus was a god (in the Heideggerian sense) in that he provided a cultural model normative for future thinking. Crucially, though, the “divinity” requires the possibility of vertical transcendence, not only of there being a “divine” that emptied himself into history (kenosis), but also one which has a relation to its Father. This does not entail the flat-footed move of identifying God with Being; far from it. Instead, if, as I have shown, there are sufficient resources in Heidegger’s thought to think of ontological difference without understanding the Ereignis as being nihilistic by reducing it to a Nietzschean-Gadamerian interpretation of an event of transpropriation arising from the Ge-Stell, one does not have to eliminate the possibility of transcendence coming to presence in experience, subsequently articulated in language through religious ideas. This is not Being irrupting from the “outside” such as in the work of Mendieta, but of a connection with a beyond which takes place in a work which is simultaneously articulated in language. It is also worth mentioning that vertical transcendence does not equate to metaphysics or violence. Baird questions this assumption, as does Jonkers.114 Baird’s work on the subject is particularly interesting as he compares Vattimo’s views on kenosis with those of Levinas. The latter’s distinction between the absolutely transcendent Yahweh and the less remote (but still vertically transcendent) Elohim is important, for kenosis 111

Roldán, “La kénosis de Dios en la interpretación de Gianni Vattimo,” 92. Dotolo and Vattimo, Dio: la possibilità buona, 56-57. 113 Ibid., 56. 114 Peter Jonkers, “In the World, but not of the World: The Prospects of Christianity in the Modern World,” Bijdragen, 61 (2000), 389. 112

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pertains to the latter in its humility and inability to interact with the world it has created without ethical input from humans.115 Along similar lines, ironically, other commentators have noticed exclusionary violence in Vattimo’s own account of religion, particularly in his obliteration of the vertically transcendent dimension of religion in his reduction of the religious into a story, at odds with the experience of some religious believers, not allowing religious believers to conceive of their belief as anything more than the reception of a message, or even as a story.116

4. Conclusion The resources Vattimo could bring to bear in avoiding the charge of supersessionism—the topic (directly or indirectly) of the first three chapters of this book—highlight the wider problems with his philosophy, namely the conflict in his thought between Heidegger, Hegel and Kuhn. Whilst Vattimo tries, in some syncretistic fashion, to bring them together under the aegis of weak thought, of the ironic Verwindung of these traces of metaphysics after the death of God, it does not work. The reason for this is that in bringing these philosophers’ works together presuming we are living in the age of hermeneutical nihilism, he ignores other important motifs in Heidegger’s philosophy, ones which lead one to question whether the highest values have devaluated themselves and if transcendence means more than only living always within a linguistic tradition.

115

Marie L. Baird, “Whose Kenosis? An Analysis of Levinas, Derrida, and Vattimo on God’s Self-Emptying and the Secularization of the West,” Heythrop Journal, XLVIII (2007), 424. 116 Klun, “Dialogue, Weak Thought and Christianity,” 52.

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