The Responsibility of the Philosopher

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PHILOSOPHER

GIANNI VATTIMO

THE RESPONSIBILITY

OF THE PHILOSOPHER

Edited with an Introduction by FRANCA D’AGOSTINI

Translated by WILLIAM MCCUAIG

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York  Chichester, West Sussex

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Originally published in Italian as Vocazione e responsabilità del filosofo

Copyright © 2000 Gianni Vattimo

Translation copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52712-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vattimo, Gianni, 1936–

    [Vocazione e responsabilità del filosofo. English]

    The responsibility of the philosopher / Gianni Vattimo ; edited with an introduction by Franca D’Agostini ; translated by William McCuaig.

        p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-231-15242-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52712-5 (ebook)

    1. Philosophy, Modern—20th century. 2. Philosophy, Italian—20th century. I. D’Agostini, Franca, 1952–II. Title.

    B3654.V383V6313  2010

    190—dc22                                                        2010003075

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION:

THE STRONG REASONS FOR WEAK THOUGHT

Franca D’Agostini

Weakness

French Nihilism and Italian Nihilism

Nihilism and Difference

Difference and Dialectic

Nihilism, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernity

Verwindung

Argumentation and Provenance

This Book

Postscript (2009)

1.   PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

After Kant, After Hegel

The Flash of the Ereignis

The Story of a Comma

Science and Being–not beings

The Edification of Humanity

Cumulative Knowledges

2.   PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY, LITERATURE

Truth, Rhetoric, History

Are History and Ontology Compatible?

Mythization of the World

Fugues

Sciences of Nature and Sciences of the Spirit?

3.   LOGIC IN PHILOSOPHY

Logic and the Logics

Logic and the History of Being

Philosophy of Logic and Logic of Philosophy

Logic and Ontology

4.   TO SPEAK THE TRUTH

Redemisti nos Domine Deus veritatis

The Endless Banquet

Do Vampires Exist?

5.   THE VOCATION TO PHILOSOPHY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY

Writing for the Newspapers

Writing in the First Person

The Dive Into Politics

Politics Philosopher-style

Losing your Soul

Filling In the Blanks

The Construction of Universality is Political

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION: THE STRONG

REASONS FOR WEAK THOUGHT

Franca D’Agostini

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

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

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

WEAKNESS

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

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

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

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

V0 = everything is interpretation

followed immediately by:

V1 = V0 is also an interpretation

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

V2 = we must inevitably think this self-refuting game

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

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

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

FRENCH NIHILISM AND ITALIAN NIHILISM

Vattimo is one of the philosophers best placed to address the question of the role of philosophy at the start of the third millennium,⁹ not just because the self-understanding of philosophy has always been one of his favorite themes, but also because his thinking about the topic has been singularly generative and positive.

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

Because weak is such an equivocal term, and for other contingent reasons, Vattimo’s philosophical project has often run the risk of being misunderstood precisely where its best qualities lie. In fact, if the outcome of his work were only a generic attenuation of theoretical discourse, then a lot of effort was expended for a meager result. But since 1983, the date when the