C. van de Veerdonk Dr. J. de Bloois
Master Thesis Comparative Literature 15 June 2020
A Weak Definition of Truth
One thing that has frustrated me since I was young is that whenever I was, and still when I am, at social gatherings, or get together with friends or even with family, for example over dinner, there always seemed to me to be a lack of mutual understanding amongst people and every get-together always felt like a coming together of separate egos, instead of how I would ultimately wish it to be: a coming together of a multiplicity of egos within a shared one. This vague discrepancy I felt is especially strong whenever there is a disagreement based on misaligned opinions, where ultimately at the core of the problem it is shown that there is a difference in world-views or truths that collide through the impossible act of unexchangable facts, because these facts are so very often personal and based on interpretation. I always, through some hard toil, attributed this to differences in understandings of the world, and thus rather a discrepancy between all the individual understandings of the world that are confined within gatherings to engage with one another. The results felt of these conflicting
understandings have without exception harmed cooperation and useful discussion, because they tend to end in stalemates. Notice however how I say a multiplicity of egos within a shared one. Because to take this multiplicity of egos away would entail the very real danger of being left with just the shared ego, which anticipates ideologies, or other hive-mind-esque collectivities, like those of the twentieth century that committed all the horrors and atrocities effectuated by such totalitarian and fascist regimes such as Nationalism, Nazism, Stalinism and others associated with such political doctrines. But in current time it feels more and more like the shared ego is taken away completely, and this too feels to me like an avoidable loss of
possible human experience. My aim with this paper is to engage in an examination of the fine line that walks between these two conceptual categories of ego in which the possibility exists of doing exactly that, of hypothesizing a space where a multiplicity of egos can exist within a shared one simultaneously and most favorably without conflict.
When I first read Gianni Vattimo's description of contemporaneity in his book Belief, originally published in 1996 as Credere di credere, in which he is described in the
introduction by Luca D'Isanto as saying that modern time is signified by a “dispersion of the present” (8) and that “[c]ontamporary culture identifies the postmodern subject with the hubris and conflict of interpretation” (14), these qualifications struck a chord with me, because a couple of things said there ring true to me when it comes to describing
postmodernity – the age we are said to live in and I base this description of the postmodern age on the opening segment from Lyotard's introduction to The Postmodern Condition (1979):
The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies. I have decided to use the word postmodern to describe that condition. The word is in current use on the American continent among
sociologists and critics; it designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts. The present study will place these transformations in the context of the crisis of narratives (xxiii)
Both 'dispersion' and 'conflict of interpretation' seem to me to be the great problems of my life that I felt myself dealing with on a regular basis. The causes and irritations that accompany these concerns of postmodernity, which Vattimo calls “contemporary culture” and in which the “postmodern subject” is identified “with the hubris and conflict of interpretation” and that I see myself sharing with Vattimo, will be the grand theme of this paper; as well as the
solutions. More precisely, I see in the philosophical work of Vattimo the possibility for a new ontology that is able to change in a fundamental way the manner in which postmodern society is currently existing. That is to say, I do not see myself changing, nor wish to change or criticize postmodernity defined in such a manner in any ruthless or fundamental way, because I also owe to it so much, fear the consequences of large disruptions in a life which I describe as relatively stable and understand why postmodernism exists as it does. My only wish is to shine some light on certain areas of postmodernity and the problems that I perceive in them and hopefully to start a discussion that will engage them fruitfully. Again my aim is to explore this fine and complex line between different coexisting forms of ego, which has to do with the abasement of metaphysics and with what Vattimo interpreted as Nietzsche's vision of the
Uebermensch as a “man capable of living the unity of existing and meaning, of doing and
knowing” (Vattimo 1993, 33).
Now what comes first is to describe postmodernity and consequently also that which, at least etymologically, seems to precede it, namely: modernity. To define postmodernity is however a difficult task, because its range in concepts in literature, theories, discussions and by varying authors is enormous. Gary Aylesworth probably says it best in the opening statement of his article on the website of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about postmodernism:
That post-modernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning. (1)
Even if it summarizes more or less the entire extent of the postmodernist response to modernity, a lot of it might still seem vague and highly theoretical at first hand. The question I
found myself asking therefore when I first started working on this paper is how I was supposed to position myself in the modernist and postmodernist debate in which the
discussions take place that surround these topics, summarized by Vattimo as concerning “the hubris and conflict of interpretation”, and as a debate itself that is marked by its equivocality and seeming incongruency as implied by Aylesworth? Furthermore I wanted to know how to make these concepts relatable to myself as well as to others around me.
In a sense, I would argue, we are all children of modernity and/or postmodernity, whether knowingly or not. We are all in some way affected or influenced by those occurrences that announced modernity, like the Enlightenment or the technological and medical
discoveries and developments of the 18th century and onwards. Furthermore almost all of the world's population in contemporary times is connected to the internet, radio and television and the mass of information that entails it, and I think it is fair to say that also almost on a global scale people have been affected by or informed on those horrors that were at the center of the two first great wars of global proportions. As a result I think it is fair to say that at least in the very minimum almost every living person on the planet in contemporaneity is in some way a child of modernity and consequently postmodernity. But still this description might seem vague and unsatisfying in some sense and a understandable question that might follow could be, who are we? Can we even speak of a we? Or, what does it mean to be living it, or to be affected and thus to be considered a child of modernity or postmodernity? And many other questions just like these. The first aim of this paper is to show precisely that the consequences of postmodernism as defined by Lyotard are relevant for all of you reading this paper because of the realization that everything is narrative or functions on the basis of a metanarrative has made it that the postmodern world, and consequently also history, must be understood not as a clash between truths, but rather as a clash between cultures, that is, between different
pensiero debole (weak thought) is able to provide the formative and conceptual definitive
theory that acknowledges this realization of the fabled structure of reality and that even meaning itself has become (or rather always was) political.
It is thus in Gianni Vattimo, an Italian philosopher hailing from Turin, that I found a voice that could be able to guide me through some of these difficult waters. His philosophical discoveries which I extracted from, in what to me is their rawest form, two of his books, The
Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger first published in Italian
in 1980 and Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy first published in 1994 also in Italian, gave me the possibility for a new look on contemporary society, the perceived problems therein (mainly philosophical in their nature) and possible solutions to these (mostly philosophical) problems. In my view Vattimo is first and foremost a philosopher, however in his later years Vattimo made a return to Christianity and
consequently attempted to reconcile much of his philosophical work with theological and Christian themes. But to me it is his work in philosophy that is most noteworthy, or at least, interesting for what I will examine in this paper. It is therefore that Vattimo's philosophical discoveries will stand at the center of my approach into this reassessment of the philosophical backbone of modern and postmodern society and those cultural, political, religious and critical institutions and theories that define these societies to their very core.
Other prominent contemporary philosophers that will play a large role in this paper are Jean-François Lyotard, who can be considered the first to really define postmodernism as a philosophical concept and Richard Rorty, Vattimo's closest confidant in the philosophical sense, but who came to similar philosophical discoveries in a different, and North-American context. Lastly comes Roberto Esposito, another Italian philosopher who concerns himself mostly with the branch of philosophy called biopolitics, which Vattimo is in a lesser sense concerned with, but which I will investigate in this paper nonetheless because I perceive
biopolitics as relevant to the concept of not only modernity and postmodernity, but also to the work of Vattimo, the extension of weak thought, Rorty and his neopragmatism, Lyotard, because of his search for a new metanarrative and other modern and postmodern thinkers that will be brought up in their respective sections, because again, to my knowledge, all these concepts have to do with the abasement of metaphysics and with the creation of the man (and woman) “capable of living the unity of existing and meaning, of doing and knowing”.
The Origins of Postmodernity
In The Origins of Postmodernity Perry Anderson explains how the idea of postmodernism first surfaced in the “Hispanic inter-world of the 1930's (3-4). He tells us how it was coined by Federico de Onís, who used it to describe a reflux within modernism, as he referred to a particular branch in modern Spanish-language poetry. Later adopted by Arnold Toynbee, a critic of industrialism, nationalism and Western imperialism, it was named the “post-modern age” as a description for a world which Toynbee saw steadily globalizing through the
spreading influence of Western authoritarianism and imperialism, but at the same time a world at risk of ruining itself, unless it would be able to create a new universal religion, arguing that “[only] a syncretistic faith – could secure the future of the planet” (6). Passing through various other domains of society and hands, most notably those of Ihab Hassan, the idea of postmodernism gained the most philosophical traction when it was used by the French
philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in the 1979 piece The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Lyotard responded to a request by the conceil des universités du Quebec by
writing the book as a report on the current state of knowledge in its relation to the
developments in science and computer science in the modern Western world. In his report Lyotard tried to formulate a definition for the state of postmodernism as a philosophical and conceptual movement that reacted to scientific, linguistic and philosophical developments of
modernity and late modernity. Although he later reviewed this book as the worst he had ever written and claimed not to have had the right amount of background and research to support much of the claims made therein (Anderson 1998, 26), it nevertheless became one of the most influential and critically acclaimed text regarding postmodernism and still holds interesting ideas that are necessary to consider when discussing postmodernity. For this same reason and for the reason of its influence in the academic world I will use his book as the first point of entry into our discussion surrounding postmodernity.
In his book Lyotard defines postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), to which he however immediately adds that this description is an extreme
simplification. In order to understand his text completely however it is necessary to understand what Lyotard meant when he talks about narratives and metanarratives. In The
Postmodern Condition Lyotard understands culture and knowledge intrinsically linked with
each other in a Wittgensteinian language game-esque manner. As a matter of fact, he uses Wittgenstein's conception of language games as fundamental to the understanding of knowledge throughout the book (See Aylesworth 2015, sec. 2). Thusly he distinguishes knowledge that is narrative in its nature from scientific knowledge. Notwithstanding the possible arbitrariness of this distinction – although Lyotard argues this distinction, it can be considered nonsensical, which I will return to at a later stage – the underlying claims that are the consequence of Lyotard's semantic distinction are valid and worth consideration (in my mind the scientific explanation of the world can also be seen as a narrative – but this is not that important at this point in the discussion). Lyotard says: “Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative” (26). Lyotard's worry is namely that science (with science, Lyotard refers to positive science, science that is defined by proof, verification and falsification (24)) does not offer a coherent explanation of its own knowledge gathering, of its own ontology or
epistemics, and he is right about this, as he rightly denotes the ontological deficiency of positive science when he says about its methodology: “what proof is there that my proof is true?” (24). As such, science is not able to provide an overarching – or grand – narrative that explains its own foundations. It rather endorses the existence of co-existing small narratives in the form of language games that are inherently correct, but do not necessarily correspond with one another, and are therefore also not necessarily commensurable. This contributes to the plurality of voices and 'truths' that dominate contemporary thought and postmodern society. Therefore what is noticed by Lyotard is that scientific knowledge lacks a certain quality that he ascribes to narrative knowledge, because the very essence of scientific knowledge endorses splintering of knowledge and growth of heterogeneous language games, rather than creating a coherent narrative with the power of unifying a society. Hence Lyotard asks: “Do not we ourselves, at this moment, feel obliged to mount a narrative of scientific knowledge in the West in order to clarify its status?” (28). And he is more specific about this in his introduction: “Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?” (xxv).
When it comes to offering a paradox and mounting a narrative of scientific knowledge in the West in order to clarify its status to my mind one voice is more clear and convincing than any other and this is the voice of Vattimo, who offers exactly such a kind of paradox requested by Lyotard in his philosophy with his weak thought. His structuring of the
postmodern debate in its relation to the history of modernism, the abasement of metaphysics, the development of philosophy, science, ethics, religion, art and hermeneutics are exemplary for me when it comes to offering a proper candidate for the objective of formulating a
narrative that can unite narrative and scientific knowledge in the manner described by Lyotard as well as providing the basis for this new metanarrative.
his book Weak Thought originally published in 1983, Vattimo explains in his essay called “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought” his conception of it:
[I]t is to be defined primarily in terms of the Heideggerian notion of Verwindung, a term whose sense also must be understood within the horizon of a 'weak' notion of what it means to think […] Weak thought has not entirely left dialectics and difference behind; rather, they constitute for it a past in the Heideggerian sense of
Gewesenes, which has to do with the idea of sending (invio) and destiny. (39)
Vattimo speculates about the end of metaphysics in a Heideggerian sense of Being becoming weaker, that is, of metaphysics becoming less prominent and maybe even disappearing from philosophy altogether. He says:
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. (45)
Consequently Vattimo speaks when talking about weak thought in terms of a possibility of a future time denounced as "postmetaphysics" (47). Weak thought must therefore be understood in this sense, as the abasement of strong thought, that is, as the abasement of metaphysical thinking that leads to claims of absolute quality over the nature of human existence, the human condition and the world humans inhabit. About the Heideggerian concepts in relation to weak thought Vattimo says conclusively: "Weak thought aims at articulating such repercussions and thereby preparing a new ontology" (45). Vattimo therefore makes no mistake of formulating that what he wishes to achieve with weak thought, which accumulates in the end into saying something about the nature of human existence and the human condition in a definitive way, that is, it is an attempt at creating a new ontology and consequently a new possibility for epistemics. A more articulated conception of weak thought,
in which these more difficult Heideggerian concepts will be explained, will be central to this thesis, but for now this understanding of weak thought, as the weakening of metaphysical thought and the creation of a new ontology shall suffice.
Comparative Literature
The aim of this paper is therefore lastly to argue the possibility for the philosophy of Vattimo to respond to the problems of postmodernity as described by Lyotard in The Postmodern
Condition and the predecessors of this postmodern movement, together with a reassessment of
the way in which cultural objects, including art, literature, religious objects, music, etc. are interpreted and investigated at this moment in the school of critical theory of comparative literature, which is inextricably linked to this project. Several authors of the post-critical school of comparative studies, who I will let be voiced by Bruno Latour and Rita Felski, have asked for a different mode of thinking in the analysis of cultural objects and literary texts. My understanding is that Vattimo offers a solution to this problem perceived by them with his answer to the call of the nihilistic vocation as it is conceptualized by him through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Critical theory in comparative studies is a theory functioning within a nihilistic epoch, and shows certain flaws that are similar to the same uneasiness I experience in the assessment of postmodernity by Vattimo. Among these problems is the problem of epistemic truth and certainty of knowledgeable facts, that stems from nihilistic uncertainty and the absence of metaphysical grounding, and in Lyotard's conception, the lack of metanarrative. Because Vattimo's theory responds to the problem of epistemic certainty in his response to nihilism, his philosophy can also be argued as giving a response to the problems of critical theory. Furthermore Vattimo's conception of the nihilistic epoch that is defined by its loss of meaning through its loss in the belief of metaphysical foundations, is in description philosophically parallel to Lyotard's conception of
postmodernity in terms of the loss of meaning through the incredulity toward metanarratives. This parallelization of definitions enables the possibility to interpret Vattimo's response to the nihilistic vocation as a equally valid response to Lyotard's call for a paradoxical narrative that can rightfully explain the pragmatic value of scientific knowledge as visualized by him. The evaluation of Vattimo's philosophy as a response to this perceived problem in comparative literature will function as an example or exemplum of the way in which Vattimo's philosophy can contribute to postmodern problems in different fields of science.
The example of comparative literature in relation to weak thought entails a venture into the realm of politics and shows how Vattimo thinking, in my opinion, leads to thinking in terms of politics; which I perceive as inextricably linked to the conclusions drawn from Vattimo's thought, namely that also meaning, i.e., the interpretation of the world, has become political. This consequence of Vattimo's thought is partly explained by himself in his book
Hermeneutic Communism published in 2011, but carries political implications that I will
further investigate through the work of Roberto Esposito. The pragmatic outcome of Vattimo's philosophy that is connected with that of Richard Rorty and applied to certain scientific fields has consequences for political acts of the human and social body, that is, the individual and the community who together constitute society. Therefore I will relate in the final part of this paper Vattimo's claims concerning the political landscape of the modern and postmodern world with Esposito's investigations in the philosophical field of biopolitics, supporting this connection with claims made in the works of Rorty, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, who have written extensively on the subject of communism, capitalism, liberalism and in the end many of modern politics forms and systems. Vattimo's weak thought as a new ontology will enable us to revisit these political concepts as postmodern entities in a new comprehensive manner, where pragmatism, semi-metaphysicalness and the fabled structure of reality will form the basis of this reinterpretation.
In summarization, this paper will be about Vattimo's response to problems in modernity and postmodernity as he discerns them in his theoretical works The Adventure of
Difference and Beyond Interpretation. It will also be an articulation of his ideas against the
background of the problems of modernism as a whole. For that reason it will try to review Vattimo's work as a whole, situated in the discussion of post-modernism and thereby asses its possible value, merit and contribution to philosophy, religion, art, science and society, by taking multiple directions in engaging with Vattimo's thought. It is noteworthy to add that Vattimo's religious views are part of his later work, and can be seen as an outcome of his thinking and discoveries in his philosophical work. I will discuss both his philosophical work and his later attached religious views, but my focus will lie primarily with his philosophical discoveries which accumulated in weak thought.
I will start in chapter one by situating Vattimo in the postmodernist debate and the philosophical tradition of Western thought; and furthermore by explaining the way he sees himself answering the problems of knowledge he and Lyotard declare as part of modernism and Western culture from the beginning of ancient recorded history. He borrows the word
Verwindung from Martin Heidegger, which means as much as to twist, therefore he states that
he sets out to twist, or enhance modernism, rather than to change it. Vattimo's ultimate goal is to introduce the philosophy of weak thought. It is the outcome of his thinking.
In the second chapter I will explain how Vattimo developed his philosophical ideas and how his conception of weak thought is a response to the problems of modernism as he sees them explained by other philosophers, specifically building on the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Belonging to the content of these ideas is Vattimo's conception of hermeneutics. Hence I will address the role he envisions for hermeneutics in his philosophy and his theory at large as a continuation of a Western philosophical tradition.
In this same chapter I will discuss how Vattimo's conception of hermeneutics is relevant for literary analysis and comparison, by investigating with greater depth how I imagine him answering some of the problems raised by thinkers in the post-critical school of literary analysis. I will answer questions raised by Bruno Latour in “Why has Critique Run out of Steam” and Rita Felski in “Context Stinks!”, in which they both ask for a different attitude when reading and interpreting texts. I will argue how Vattimo's philosophical conception of weak thought and religious concept of charity are possible answers for this vocation and the relevance this has for cultural analysis and comparative studies.
In the third and last chapter I will assess the political consequences that weak thought's relation to cultural and literary analysis entails by diverting my attention to the practical biopolitical realm sketched by Esposito and the concept of immunity theorized by him. I will relate Esposito's concept of immunity and its connection with community and the protection of life with Vattimo's notion of charity, hermeneutic communism and weak thought. Although Vattimo says in “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought” that
[E]ven the discovery of the superfluousness of metaphysics (in Marcuse's words, of additional repression) risks resolving itself into a new metaphysics –
humanistic, naturalistic, or vitalistic – going no further than substituting 'true' being in place of the one that has been shown to be false (44)
and thus that there is the risk of replacing metaphysics with an vitalistic approach of creating a metaphysical explanation of human existence, I think there is the possibility and necessity to address this field of philosophy called biopolitics that is addressed in the work of Esposito in order to unify and possibly intensify the reading of Vattimo.
In conclusion, this paper will be an examination for the possibility of a form of philosophical thought that is related to a pragmatical approach of human life and the political realm that governs this life. It is an examination of the human condition, its history, its
philosophical discoveries and the lessons that could have possibly been learnt in this process. Furthermore it is an examination into the world of biopolitics that entails the philosophical direction of postmodern thought as it is described by Gianni Vattimo. In its conclusion it will try to draw critical lessons and discoveries from this venture for the near possible future and attempt to look for a possible unification of weak thought with a biopolitical approach to human existence, culture and society in order to examine this aforementioned fine and complex line that balances between the coexistence of a shared ego and the multiplicity of egos, as well as at the same time examining the possibilities and intricacies of creating man that is “capable of living the unity of existing and meaning, of doing and knowing”, which is the final goal of this paper and in my understanding the ultimate applicability and thus usefulness of weak thought. All this will be done under the light of an investigation and from an inherently honest interest into the intricacies of human life and how it develops and has developed. I do not wish to make claims of any intrusive or profuse kind that are of actual value about the truth of the actualities of the world and it should therefore at all times be understood solely as a personal investigation from beginning to end.
Chapter 1 – The Postmodern Condition
The grand narratives or metanarratives as described in The Postmodern Condition are the most important notion defined by Lyotard in this text. Examining the nature and status of knowledge in postmodern thought Lyotard evaluates knowledge as existing and being valid within narratives understood in a late Wittgenteinian manner. How knowledge is defined in modernity he splits up however in two different forms: either through narrative or scientific knowledge. According to Lyotard postmodernity is defined by its incredulity toward
metanarratives. This coincides with Vattimo's perceived loss of metaphysical truth and this parallel is not superficial or coincidental. Metanarratives as explained by Lyotard function as a foundational explanation of the world; they are the narratives that tie together all human activity by explaining a goal or ontological truth about the nature of human existence; this explanation is thus metaphysical in its functional sense that it serves as a mechanism of giving meaning to everyday experience by transcending it, that is, by providing a story that puts everyday experience in a larger perspective, which is other than the nihilistic materialistic view supported by science that claims that no such transcendence of the material, that is, no such contextualization, is possible. That is why Lyotard says: "Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26). With the loss of foundation for a belief in metaphysics a loss of belief in the functioning of metanarratives followed. Positive science, with its tendency to disregard metaphysics and grand narratives functions therefore as a different kind of narrative; it is a nihilistic narrative. It lacks consequently the quality of social bonding that narrative knowledge has, because science is a narrative – in my view – that denies the possibility of the existence of metanarratives. It is therefore that Lyotard asks for a paradox, because he foresaw that in order to retain the pragmatic value of scientific knowledge, a metanarrative would have to be construed that could provide both the social bonding quality of the metanarratives of
premodernity and combine this with the anti-metanarrative quality of science, thus retaining and combining the positive qualities of both science and narrative knowledge. Hence his question: "Do not we ourselves, at this moment [in postmodernity], feel obliged to mount a narrative of scientific knowledge in the West in order to clarify its status?" (28). What Lyotard asks for is a metanarrative that can paradoxically explain the narrative of science with a metanarrative, while at the same time actively and paradoxically denying the possibility of metanarratives. Vattimo's weak thought does exactly this, it denies the possibility of metanarratives, while at the same time conceding that in order for a society to function properly a metanarrative must be in place. This is the paradoxical yet powerful essence of weak thought.
The basis of this weak thought is formed on the doubts about the possibility of epistemic knowledge. This problem traces back to the inquiries of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and even the beginning of Western philosophy in ancient Greece. In ancient Greece the main school of thought was the idealism of Plato. Kant, over two millennia later, however argued that a priori knowledge could only be obtained through the cognitive configuration of the human understanding and sensibility; later this was interpreted by Nietzsche as the end of metaphysics, resulting in his ultimate claim that God was death, ushering in the epoch of nihilism with its mantra: there are no facts, only interpretations (Vattimo 1997, 6).
This mantra of nihilism results in the paradoxical metaphysical claim that
hermeneutics has become a generic philosophy of culture that is "a finally true description of the (permanent) 'interpretive structure' of human existence" (6). This claim, although
paradoxical in its logic, is in essence the ultimate foundation for Vattimo's claim to the merit and validity of hermeneutics, which holds the basis of his philosophy and weak thought. The essence of the hermeneutical principle is paradoxical because it is founded on the claim that there is no metaphysical truth, but claims to be a truthful utterance itself. This discrepancy is
noted by Vattimo and dealt with accordingly through the ontological work done by Heidegger. It is this paradoxical quality of Vattimo's hermeneutical principle – which is called “weak thought” – that makes it the perfect contender for Lyotard's vocation to function as a metanarrative that denies its own foundations. Weak thought in its essence can therefore be best described as this: the recognition that metaphysical inquiries are non-sensical results in the suspension of absolute articulations of truth. All epistemic claims of knowledge, that is, all claims of absolute or objective truth must at all times be disregarded, rather only 'weak' claims regarding truth can ever be made, meaning that other 'weaker' motivations of truth must constitute its value (See Vattimo 2012, 39).
What contributed to this conception of weak thought is that the epoch of nihilism – which was heralded by Nietzsche in his response to Kantian suggestions – has justified the possibility to interpret the world as being fabled (8). What this encompasses is that in modernity scientific and philosophical discoveries led to the assumptions that culture and language are formative for how human cognition experiences the world and all its related objects and concepts. Primarily in the philosophy of Heidegger world and Being – the multi-interpretable concept signifying general human existence, experience and consciousness in relation to the physical world – were becoming more and more synonymous and thus, Vattimo argues, also Being, that is, the human condition of worldly experience, can be, and according to him must be, interpreted as being fabled (Ibid.). It is only when we regard nihilism as an occurrence in the history of Being interpreted through the theory of Heidegger, that we can prove the truth of hermeneutics as a response to this very same nihilism and thus act on it as a true method of interpretation and philosophy (8). Much of this will be repeated in the chapters to come which will provide more extensive clarification about this.
This method of thinking revealed the ambiguous relation inherent in the theory of
hermeneutics – a practice originally formed in literary analysis and Biblical exegesis where the explanation and interpretation of written forms of text were questioned, debated and analyzed. Vattimo says about hermeneutics:
In this framework, to accept hermeneutics as an interpretation and not as a metaphysical description would, strictly speaking, amount to no more than a matter of taste; indeed not even that, for it would be a case not of choosing but simply of registering a state of mind that remained as wholly inexplicable to oneself as to others (8)
Precisely this is the paradoxical nature of hermeneutics as propagated by Vattimo, but it is at the same time its strength, Vattimo argues, because it affirms its own ambiguous relation to objective truth and the fableness of the world "and thus [the] historicity and contingency of primary truth; the claim that the subject is not the bearer of the Kantian a priori, but the heir to a finite-historical language that makes possible and conditions the access of the subject to itself and to the world" (8).
Human perception of the world is therefore, Vattimo argues in the vein of Nietzsche and Heidegger, not a result of a priori knowledge and cognition, but rather the result of and conditioned by a lineage of 'finite-historical' language, which should be understood as a lineage of Wittgensteinian language games that have developed by succeeding each other and influencing each other in a phenomenological sense of horizons interacting. Vattimo argues: "[H]ermeneutics must make explicit its own ontological background, that is, the Heideggerian idea of a destiny of Being that is articulated as the concatenation of openings, of the systems of metaphors that make possible and qualify our experience of the world" (108).
The new meaning that Vattimo instills into hermeneutics opens up a whole range of possibilities for philosophy, its methodology, and the conception of human experience in
relation to itself, its own culture and the world that is inhabited by the human and the culture he or she is part of. Hermeneutics is, according to Vattimo (and much of this interpretation is attributable to the work of Hans Georg Gadamer), the new appointed epistemic foundation for all further research and thought about human nature. Vattimo explains this by addressing the consequences this epistemic claim has for the relation between different fields of human culture, including science, ethics, religion and art. It is by this formulation of the human condition that Vattimo is also able to connect these fields in a holistic interpretation of human culture, history and existence.
Vattimo's aim to ground epistemic certainty in the development of human culture and the hermeneutical activity that he sees as a logical consequence of the cultural development of Western European society resulting in nihilism as a result of metaphysical foundationalism, offers a renewed means to interpret human existence and the way human interpretation could be interpreted. Vattimo's theory must also be understood as a response to the scientism and rationalism of modernity, without objecting against it or assimilating itself with irrationalism or aestheticism (Vattimo, 1997, 97). It rather affirms the contingency of all these different -ism's, and argues the historical value of the hermeneutical perception of these -ism's. Vattimo's hermeneutical conception of weak thought – which are at times very equatable in terms of use in terminology – functions ultimately as a semi-metaphysical grounding on which basis functional interpretation of historical human culture can be validated, because it denies the metaphysical foundations on which it is built and from which it is derived. It ultimately serves therefore as a sort of stand-in for metaphysics, while retaining an ironic relation to its self made and this discovered position, because it undermines its own absolute claim of having a metaphysical meaning, but understands that a metaphysical position is necessary for the creation of meaning. It is for this reason that I call this weak thought semi-metaphysical.
Ultimately Vattimo claims in his later work that it is possible to discern within the hermeneutical development of human culture a guiding thread that provides the basis for this perceived development of Being, i.e., the development of humanity. For Vattimo this thread is related to religion and belief. Luca D'Isanto explains Vattimo's theological vision – which he owes much to the influence of the work of the French historian and anthropologist René Girard – as following in the introduction to Vattimo's book Belief:
Vattimo argues that one may find a – provisional – sense by placing oneself (that is, by interpretative listening) within these messages (texts, cultures, myths), thus rescuing them from the dispersion of the present and taking responsibility for it. (8)
Taking responsibility means for Vattimo as much as answering to the problem of the dispersion of interpretations that signifies for him, contemporary ((post-)modern) culture. It is because of this that Vattimo is able to equate the epoch of nihilism with the Christian
understanding of kenosis, a term he borrows from Christian tradition. Kenosis has to do with an emptying of life, soul or thought. In the same way, Vattimo argues according to D'isanto, that nihilism can be considered as a philosophical parallel to this act of emptying, paving the way, according to Christian traditional understanding of the act of kenosis, for a renewed interpretation of God or the spiritual, even so far as to allow God to take over (Ibid). D'Isanto says about this: “Contemporary culture identifies the postmodern subject with the hubris and conflict of interpretation. For Vattimo, then, conflicting interpretations trigger a charitable recognition of belonging to a common history” (14). This re-interpretation of messages belonging to Christianity must be understood as an attempt by Vattimo to instill a notion of semi-metaphysical meaning in the post-nihilistic epoch. It is therefore an extension of his own philosophical work on weak thought. It is his attempt of visualizing a post-nihilistic world where meaning is centered around charity (pietas). In the next chapter I will explore and
explain the concept and origins of weak thought to a greater extent, its relation to literary and cultural analysis and the political and religious consequences this entails, as well as the reason for Vattimo to create this philosophical concept and why I think this works towards the ontological possibility and foundation of creating this fine and complex space and way of living that keeps the balance between a multiplicity of egos that exist within a shared ego; in which every man is in a Nietzschean sense "capable of living the unity of existing and meaning, of doing and knowing”. After that I will investigate weak thought's consequences for literary and cultural analysis and lastly in the final chapter I will explore weak thought's implications for politics.
Chapter 2 – Weak Thought
Vattimo is an Italian philosopher whose first and foremost interest lies with the discipline of hermeneutics, nihilism and their relation with the secularization of the Western world, according to Roberto Esposito, who compares him with other contemporary Italian thinkers on this subject in Living Thought, a thorough written overview of Italian thought and philosophy originally published in 2010 (Esposito 2012, 248). Esposito mentions how the current state of Italian thought is defined in its latest anthology as a philosophical exploration along two major axes: nihilism and biopolitics (3)1. Hence, when Vattimo is responding to other philosophers, it is mainly that he replies to them and interprets them through the discipline of interpretation in relation to nihilism, and he should be understood in such a tradition2.
Hermeneutics is for Vattimo the essence of all human interaction and cognition, in a post-Heideggerian sense; it is because when we as humans perceive things, we automatically interpret them (2)3. According to Vattimo this line of thought is the result of the development of philosophy in Western culture, which started with Plato who initiated largely the
importance of the metaphysical within philosophy, and the cultural worldview of Western thought at large. On the basis of Nietzsche's passage in The Twilight of the Idols (1889) called "How the 'True World' Ultimately Became a Fable – The History of an Error" Vattimo recalls how Plato philosophized about a conceptual world of ideal objects in which all perfects forms and essences of worldly objects remained and how thus a philosophical theory was created in which a metaphysical realm existed that transcends worldly objects. Claims of objectivity and truth were linked to this ideal or 'real' world and thus the idea of perfection as well. Since then Western culture has been obsessed with the metaphysical, Nietzsche argued. It was during the 1 Esposito refers to the anthology The Italian Difference Between Nihilism and Biopolitics by Lorenzo Chiesa
and Alberto Toscano, published in 2009.
2 Much of Italian philosophy and hence also the work of Vattimo is according to Roberto Esposito greatly indebted to the work of Giambattista Vico, a renowned Italian philosopher who lived during the
Enlightenment and early modernity. 3 Also see Vattimo (1993) p. 18-19.
Enlightenment that Immanuel Kant disbanded the realm of the metaphysical to the non-sensical. He still believed in metaphysical entities, but he displayed that it was impossible to engage in logical discussions about the nature of the metaphysical and that thus all claims about metaphysical entities had to be considered non-sensical. However, to retain the ability to obtain objectivity or the 'real' and thus to make truthful statements about the world, Kant transposed the location of truth and objectivity to the place of the cognition and its
predetermined configuration. Hence his conception of the a priori categories and the
transcendental nature of the human understanding4. This is in short how Vattimo follows the Nietzchean genealogy of metaphysics within European philosophy, from ancient Greece to German idealism and further to an anticipated form of philosophy. It is Vattimo's wish to create a philosophical concept that is able to bring this wandering of the metaphysical through Europe to its definitive conclusion by formulating a concept that gives both an ontological as well as epistemic grounding of human existence and reasoning, without trapping itself in the metaphysical cage of absolutism. It is in this sense a continuation of Nietzsche's work, because Vattimo's weak thought – the philosophical concept that is meant to decisively bring this metaphysical journey to an end – is construed in such a way that it makes possible for every man and woman to, in a Nietzschean sense, be “capable of living the unity of existing and meaning, of doing and knowing”, in the same intended meaning as Nietzsche surmised when he said in his Untimely Meditations in the foreword to chapter two, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”: “The unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture (63)”. Vattimo's weak thought enables this dual functioning of doing and knowing, by being paradoxical in its own very essence. But more of this will be explained at a later stage.
The following paragraphs about Vattimo's response to the works of Nietzsche and
4 This genealogy of the metaphysical is a rough paraphrasing of Nietzsche's original passage in The Twilight of
Heidegger are largely distilled from two of his books The Adventure of Difference (1993) and
Beyond Interpretation (1997) and are focused on the origin of Vattimo's realization of a
possibility for such a paradoxical concept as weak thought as a placeholder for an ontological explanation of human existence and consequently of providing a possibility for epistemics, that is, true knowledge, but than in this paradoxical sense; through which I visualize Vattimo as being able to construe the paradoxical metanarrative which is not metaphysical and thus allows the meaning of grand-narratives that enables social bonding to coexist with the positivism of natural sciences in the fashion asked for by Lyotard in The Postmodern
Condition.
Nihilism, Epistemics and The Will to Power
Nietzsche, one of two philosophers Vattimo spent most of his philosophical career responding to – the other being Martin Heidegger – is one of the first and best known philosophers who exclaimed that even Kant's conception of a priori cognition and transcendental understanding is in fact relative to changing factors and argued that also human cognition is rather
dependable on circumstance and contingency, and thus not transcendental or objectively true. These findings accumulated in his nihilistic claim that there are no facts, but rather only interpretations and that God is dead. It is these two claims that Vattimo responds to the most and that he poses as central and most critical in Nietzsche's thinking about the world, humans and the societal relations they engage in. It are these two claims that define nihilism and consequently form the basis of the coming into existence of weak thought. The claim that there are no facts, only interpretations is for Nietzsche, and also for Vattimo, the central concept of nihilism as it first appears in response to humanities metaphysical history. The claim is taken from the book The Will to Power by Nietzsche that was originally published in full posthumously in 1906 by his sister Elisabeth-Förster Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast,
and was considered by them to be Nietzsche's intended magnus opus. The passage goes: Against positivism, which halts at phenomena-"There are only facts"-I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact "in itself": perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.
"Everything is subjective," you say; but even this is interpretation. The "subject" is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.- Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.
In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.- "Perspectivism."
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. (267)
The nihilism Vattimo and Nietzsche – in other sections – refer to is in short the final recognition in human cultural history, that there is no possibility, philosophically speaking, for objective truth. The idea is that even Kant's transcendental a priori is not a universally given objective truth. This realization is the result largely of studies and research in anthropology, biology and sociology, which conclusions accumulated in the work of Nietzsche. In these areas of science it was noticed and theorized that culture, upbringing, genes and evolution have either a large or complete influence on the way in which humans, that is homo sapiens, sentient beings, animals, etc. see and are related to the world they inhabit. It is also theorized that the resulting difference of worldviews, consequence of the dispersion in evolutionary branches, is one of the reasons behind the conflicts between cultures and different societies5.
5 Contributors to such modes of thinking are the great sociologists like Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx.
The resulting realization that what is truthful for one society or culture, is not necessarily truthful for the other and the consequences of these discoveries was that the interest in the research of interpretation was sparked, an ancient, but before rather minor branch of
linguistics and philosophy, called hermeneutics, mainly reserved and appreciated within the field of interpretation of religious texts6. During and after Nietzsche's proclamation however that there are no facts, only interpretations, a renewed interest started to grow in this
somewhat more obscure field, along with a new interest in the role of language in philosophy (linguistic turn). To summarize Nietzsche's meaning behind this statement, it involved the assumption that all human cognition of the world could be regarded as interpretation; and therefore the very act of being human meant to be constantly interpreting the world and that this interpretation was in great lengths connected with language, culture and conceptual thinking, all of which are considered structures either heavily or completely susceptible to change, alteration, contingency, difference and arbitrariness, which resulted in and contributed to the discovery of the contingency of the concept of truth. For Nietzsche what followed was the assimilation of the "lust to rule", that is, all intent of interpretation was to convince other interpreters to subject themselves to the perspective of their own to extent this rule; to gain power. It is from these fundamental mechanisms that exist in Nietzsche's thinking that Vattimo conceptualizes his weak thought, and consequently the will to power articulated in Nietzsche's work is also why the implications of weak thought are that even meaning has become political, because every interpreter, that is every human, wishes to impose his
perspective unto others in – what Nietzsche calls – a lust to rule. That is why Nietzsche says: "It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm". This political aspect of weak thought is why biopolitics is so
6 Two of the most important figures in this revivement of hermeneutics were Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
interesting to me in its relation to it. But we will return to this at a later stage. First it must be made clear how the genealogy of metaphysics is conceived in the European philosophical tradition and at a later stage how the ontology of weak thought is established through the work of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Along with this realization of the arbitrariness of human cognition and existence and the concept of truth came Nietzsche's exclamation about the death of God, which must be understood as: metaphysics is dead (Vattimo 1997, 77) uttered in The Gay Science (1882) for the first time and repeated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885). Vattimo's interpretation is that what Nietzsche meant with this utterance, was that as a result of the realization that human cognition and thus knowledge is contingent, arbitrary and hermeneutic, absolutism, that is, the belief in all notions of supernaturalness and the metaphysical, also had to die.
Metaphysical claims as we have discussed already, were proclaimed to be non-sensical by Immanuel Kant. Kant claimed in his Critique of Pure Reason, published between 1781 and 1789, that when we want to talk about the world in a sensical manner we should only discuss the phenomena and not the noumena, for nothing sensical can be said about the noumena (Kant 1999, B306; B312). Nietzsche concluded however that the phenomenal world is wholly open to interpretation and that every form of human cognition is, contrary to what Kant believed, not universal, but rather an individual or socially determined interpretation based on cultural and linguistic concepts that have arisen as far as we now know historically, biologically and arbitrarily. This results ultimately therefore in Nietzsche's characterizing of the nihilistic epoch that is defined by the philosophical loss of universality and objectivism in the form of the loss of the metaphysical realm. It is in this sense that the nihilism that Vattimo responds to in his philosophical work and that resulted to his conceptions of weak thought, must be understood.
approach of Western cultural history, thought and philosophy is Martin Heidegger. For Vattimo, Nietzsche and Heidegger can be read as complimenting each other. Vattimo's understanding of Heidegger's conception of hermeneutics and the interpretation of Being is used as the foundation for his own claim of epistemic certainty and theorizing. If Vattimo is to claim that his own theory of weak thought is truthful and worth appreciation and
consideration he has to answer to this problem of the loss of metaphysical certainty and objectivity, which can also be called the loss of truth as described by Nietzsche. What distinguishes Vattimo's theory from others is that with his conception of the hermeneutical approach one can ascertain a metaphysical, i.e. truthful, or absolute position that however undermines its own absolutism and truthfulness. This is the hermeneutical principle, or weak thought; it proclaims that the only fundamental position that should ever be held, is the position that acknowledges that everything is ultimately always just an interpretation of human – fallible – cognition and that therefore objective and epistemic certainty is
philosophically never completely possible, but rather that this struggle for knowledge is a struggle for power and thus inherently political (including its own).
An Ontology of Being
Vattimo explains in "Hermeneutical Reason/Dialectical Reason" – the first essay in The
Adventure of Difference – how Heidegger is connected to Nietzsche, and more specifically
Nietzsche's concept of the historical malady, which is a critique of the influence of the
positivist methodology of the natural sciences on the Geisteswissenshaft that is the practice of researching history. Building on Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (1871-1876), Vattimo approaches Heidegger's interpretation of this text and the concept of the historical malady through the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Nietzsche's critique is that a too scientific
the objective methodology of the natural sciences is wrongly applied to historiographical knowledge, while Nietzsche claims that it is impossible to reconcile objectivity with historiography, in the same vein that argues that it is impossible to obtain objective
knowledge, because all human knowledge is of hermeneutical nature. What is at stake is thus this positivist assumption that human beings can make epistemic claims about the objects they experience in everyday life. Heidegger's ontology namely does not allow for such a
epistemics to exist, because he claims, human beings, that is Dasein, do not have the qualities to make such fundamental claims about the nature of worldly objects. Vattimo explains how it is in this trend that Gadamer begins in Truth and Method (1960) with the analysis of the hermeneutical consequences of these claims, by relating Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and the hermeneutical ontology that is developed in it as a response to this problem of
historical knowledge identified by Nietzsche (Vattimo 1993, 20). The hermeneutical ontology developed in Gadamer's reading of Heidegger, consists of the idea that there is no ontological distinction between object and subject in the world – the distinction on which the positivist model of knowledge is based. This is argued by Heidegger in section 44 of Being and Time in which he claims that truth is treated in the positivist sciences as an object of which an subject can gain knowledge. However as human beings that are thrown into the world as a part of Being, that is, as a Dasein, this being-in-the-world makes the distinction between subject and object impossible, because human beings are in their act of corresponding with the world inextricably linked to the objects therein. In other words, they are one and the same. It is therefore that we as humans can never uncover truth in this objective sense, or even ever ascertain that it exists, because we are these objects themselves and thus saying something about the ontological nature of the objects outside of us, would be similar to saying something about our own ontological nature, and this Heidegger would argue, is impossible (Heidegger 1962, 261)7.
This ontological approach of human being as part of Being resulted later in Gadamer's claim that Being is language, that means, the way the world is interpreted by human beings, or consciousness, is always through the framework of language (Gadamer 2004, 390). Vattimo says in his essay that "[h]ermeneutical ontology is quite right to view history as the history of language, the pure transmission of messages, or to use terms closer to those of Nietzsche, as the freedom of the world of symbols" (34). Conclusively this means for Vattimo that all human cognition and epistemics, i.e. knowledge, is founded by the linguistic character of Being at that given historical time (29). Alongside reading the interpretation of Gadamer Vattimo attests that in accumulation of Heidegger's and Gadamer's understanding of Being8, Being must be understood as the linguistic and historical framework that all humans live in at their respective point in history and that thus all forms of knowledge are articulated through and by this state of Being at that given point in time, which is similar in its concept to theories like Thomas Kuhn's paradigm and Michel Foucault's épistémè, but not singly confined to the realm of science (Vattimo 1997, 5), but rather to all human interpretation at a given historical period, and is therefore most closely related to Wittgenstein's idea of language games and the limits of knowledge attested therein (Vattimo 1993, 110-111). It is therefore also possible for Vattimo to provide through the work of Gadamer and Heidegger, an ontological explanation for the Wittgensteinian language games described by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. Thus all we are still doing is explaining the philosophical intricacies of weak thought and how it historically came into existence, in order to explain why it is such a good contender as the new metanarrative requested by Lyotard and why it is therefore possibly a solution to the problems posed by postmodernity.
Being in this Heideggerian and Gadamerian sense distinguishes itself in several ways
"[A]void the self-deception of thinking that we [man] posses a deep, hidden, metaphysically significant nature which makes us 'irreducibly' different from inkwells or atoms" (373).
8 Vattimo bases this part of his readings mainly on Heidegger's Being and Time and Gadamer's Truth and
to make this ontology possible. First of all it includes history and language both as
determining the contemporary human conception of the world. Secondly it allows different periods in time of Being to influence one another in both determinable and indeterminable ways. It is through what is called openings in the horizons of distinct epochs that Being holds influence over itself and its progression (Vattimo 1997, 93), accounting for the fact that different epochs and periods are not completely unrelated to or uninfluenced by each other, like separate functioning, demarcated structures, but rather affect a certain hold and sway over one another throughout the passing of time and history (ibid.). This influencing occurs when humans are experiencing history through literature, art, human interaction, etc.. However, every action in this act of experiencing the past is defined and intermediated by interpretation (Ibid., 1997, 6/7/8). Thus the interpretation and experience of the world is formed by pre-existing modes of Being, but is also therefore subject to change, alteration and contingency, because it is continually renewing the way in which it interprets itself (Vattimo 1997, 6).
However Vattimo notices how this concept of hermeneutical ontology fails to meet certain aspects that are expected of it. He says: "Hermeneutical ontology [in the Gadamerian sense] evades the problem of the unification of doing and knowing [...] it remains committed to the separation of theory from practice" (1993, 30). Because it assumes the infinite
possibilities of interpretation, coupled with the finite existence of men, which gives human existence the "feel of wandering or exile" (31). Summarizing Vattimo attests: "the problem that hermeneutical ontology leaves undiscussed is this one: if there is an infinity of
interpretation, and if we conceive this, as hermeneutical ontology does, in a way that is substantially inseparable from the finitude of existence, does this not also necessarily imply a permanent split between existence and meaning, between doing and knowing?" (Ibid.). Nietzsche's wish in the second part of the Untimely Meditations to overcome the historical malady – that is by the creation of "man capable of living the unity of existence and meaning,
of doing and knowing, historically (and therefore still in time, in becoming, not in the
motionless self-transparency of the Hegelian absolute spirit)9 (33) – is thereby not completely solved by the concept of hermeneutical ontology.
To push further the point to find an answer to this problem first raised by Nietzsche about the malady of history, to which Heidegger and Gadamer responded, and which is in fact a critique of positivism, Vattimo quotes Jean-Paul Sartre from The Problem of Method, in which he says: "Our historical task, at the heart of this polyvalent world, is to bring closer the moment when history will have only one meaning, when it will tend to be dissolved in the concrete men who will make it in common" (34). Reminiscent of one of the original goals of postmodernism posited by Arnold Toynbee who argued that “[only] a syncretistic faith – could secure the future of the planet”, it seems that postmodernism interpreted in this vein argues for wishes of a similar outcome in the development of humanity. The difficulty of this is however to be careful not to attribute a metaphysical notion to this development, or for that matter to even view it as a development. Which is something Vattimo seemingly makes himself guilty of (See Esposito 2012, 247)10 but I will return to this critique at a later stage. In conclusion of his essay Vattimo asks himself:
Is it possible for there to be a historical action bearing along with it from the beginning its own meaning, and not liable to fall back into the inertia of
counterfinality? Is there a possible interpretation that means a way of living out symbols, an interpretation that is dance and play as with Zarathustra, and not a persistent re-emergence of the transcendence of meaning, a wandering, an
exercise in finitude? Can there be a production of symbols that is not based on the repression/sublimation structure? Can there in this sense be an overcoming of
9 The "motionless self-transparency of Hegelian absolute spirit" must be understood as the inertia that
overtakes the disciple of Heraclitus "who cannot move even a finger, so conscious is he of the vanity of every initiative that claims to establish anything in history, which he sees as pure passing" (Vattimo 1993, 11). 10 See note 11 below on these critical remarks by Esposito on Vattimo's thought.
metaphysics? (35)
What Vattimo asks for here is very similar to the question asked by Lyotard in The
Postmodern Condition when he asks for a paradoxical narrative, that will be able to combine
science (positivism) with meaning (narrative). Similarly Vattimo asks in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer for an explanation, "a production of symbols", a metanarrative of sorts, that will be able to combine existence and meaning, doing and knowing and therefore give a solution to the malady of history posited by Nietzsche. It is likely that Vattimo gave an answer to this problem himself in his philosophy with the
conception of his weak thought, which I call semi-metaphysical, because it holds the ability to function as a paradoxical metanarrative that provides both the meaningful interpretation of the world and is able to couple this with the pragmatic usefulness of positive sciences. It is thus in this sense both metaphysical and not metaphysical at the same time, because it takes a
position within the messages send to us by history, but at the same time it denies the possibility of holding such a position, reinforcing the thought that such a position is taken only for pragmatic reasons, that is, for reasons that are "good for us [...] for a group, for a society, tendentially for all of humanity" (Vattimo 2009, 157); this is the true meaning of weak thought being semi-metaphysical.
The Defence of Weak Thought's Ontology
In Vattimo's philosophy there are two things that emerge as a response to this nihilistic epoch as formulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. One is what he calls the nihilistic vocation and the other is the comparison he makes to the Christian notion of kenosis11. The latter he developed later in his academic career and has much to do with secularization. The nihilistic vocation and kenosis are distinct in philosophical terms, but boil down to the same idea. The vocation of nihilism, or the nihilistic vocation is that nihilism, in the eyes of Vattimo, asks for
something new, in the same vein as mentioned above. For Vattimo it is this nihilism in Western society that is related to kenosis – which means in Christian tradition to empty oneself – because it functions like an emptying. Nihilism can best be described as an empty epoch, because it is devoid of meaning and objective truth through the erasure of metaphysics; and therefore Vattimo saw later in his career similarities between kenosis and nihilism. It is also in this theological sense that Esposito positions Vattimo in the tradition of Italian thought and for him a way to evaluate his work, saying about it that "we see glimpses of the
minimizing, compliant, and, in some ways, yielding character of Vattimo's thought. Always careful to adhere to all the folds of interpreted reality, it is as if he were incapable of friction, and resistance in its regard" (247) and in the same way he raises questions about the more frequent mentioning of Joachim of Fiora by Vattimo (245), who prophesied about the coming of the age of the Spirit, thus enforcing this tendency to understand the whole of human existence in the Christian narrative of salvation and becoming (Ibid.).
While complicating the philosophical power of his own thought by adhering his thought to a perceived development of Christianity, I do not necessarily see this as a bad thing. I do think however that Vattimo's return to Christianity can raise some complicated aversions or misconceptions, because the name of Christianity carries so much history. I think it is imperative to keep a critical view of this direction of his thought, but I do belief it to be ultimately justifiable in a nuanced sense. Therefore I will briefly address it now and will return to it at a later stage more convincingly to explain my understanding of it.
Vattimo explains in Belief how in Christian tradition kenosis is understood as an act of Jesus in which he emptied his will to allow the will of God to take over. In the same way Vattimo argues that nihilism can be perceived as an emptying of meaning in Western culture in order to obtain new meaning; a new way to gain an understanding of the world, and thus a new way of Being. In his Christian work, Vattimo seems to make himself guilty of
