From veritas to caritas , or how nihilism yields to democracy

September 29, 2017 | Autor: Silvia Benso | Categoria: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Human Studies
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Hum Stud (2006) 29:503–508 DOI 10.1007/s10746-007-9044-y BOOK REVIEW

From veritas to caritas, or how nihilism yields to democracy Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, & Law. Ed. Santiago Zabala. Trans. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 197 pp + xxiii Silvia Benso

Published online: 7 February 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

‘‘Veritatem facientes in caritate, a Pauline expression that echoes, and perhaps not so very distantly, the aletheuein [truthing, disclosing] of the Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics, means, in terms of today’s philosophy, that the truth is born in consent and from consent, and not, vice versa, that agreement is reached when we have all discovered the same objective truth’’ (xxvi). These few lines condense the principal thesis supporting Nihilism and Emancipation by Gianni Vattimo, the Turin philosopher renowned worldwide especially for his daring proposal of a pensiero debole, or weak thought. Vattimo describes weak thought as ‘‘a weak ontology, or better, an ontology of the weakening of Being’’ (19), capable of recognizing ‘‘the vocation of the west for decline and the weakening of strong identities’’ and helping ‘‘us to conceive the inevitable westernization of the world in terms that we may venture to call light, mellow, and soft’’ (34). Vattimo, who studied with Heidegger and Gadamer and whose majors philosophical works include The Adventure of Difference, The End of Modernity, and Beyond Interpretation, is also a prominent social democratic politician, a public intellectual regularly writing in leading Italian and European newspapers and magazines, and a former member of the European Parliament. As Richard Rorty remarks in his foreword to the volume that places Vattimo into a philosophical context more familiar to the English speaking readership, in this work Vattimo exhibits himself as ‘‘an imaginative philosopher who is also a vigorous campaigner for social change’’ (xx). In Rorty’s view, Vattimo joins leftist thinkers such as John Dewey, but also Ronald Dworkin, Ju¨rgen Habermas, and the tradition of analytic philosophy. In this sense, Vattimo reveals himself as an excellent representative of the position for which philosophy ‘‘ceases to be ancillary either to theology or to natural science. Instead, it takes the form of historical narrative and utopian S. Benso (&) Department of Philosophy, Siena College, Loudonville, NY 12211, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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speculation...it becomes ancillary to sociopolitical initiatives aimed at making the future better than the past’’ (xiii). All but three of the 14 highly accessible essays contained in the volume have already been presented publicly by Vattimo in various formats—conference papers, editorials, journal articles—and occasions during the past decade. Thus, despite the carefully organized itinerary suggested in the table of contents, the essays can be read separately and in arbitrary order without losing the effectiveness of the individual discussions. Nevertheless, the essays do not appear at all to be ‘‘excessively heterogeneous’’ (xxx). A common thread of unity lies in the Nietzschean-Heideggerian background constituting Vattimo’s lens of interpretation. Such a background is masterfully complicated by a constant conversation with major thinkers such as Adorno, Arendt, Apel, Habermas, Benjamin, Derrida, Dilthey, and Rorty, among others. More relevantly, however, the book’s internal coherence is successfully given by the unified attempt at reading nihilism, in its hermeneutic variation, as a constructive project loaded with political implications capable of giving a democratic orientation to the realms of ethics, politics, and rights (or the law, as in the English subtitle). As Rorty remarks, Vattimo’s provocative proposal, as paradoxical as this may seem to some, is that ‘‘Heideggerianism is just what social democracy needs’’ (xv). Although not in its overtly political implications, this challenging line of argumentation, which reads nihilism in the perspective of freedom and liberation, has been proposed by Vattimo for over 20 years. What is new to the current volume, arguably the most political Vattimo has written, is the direct application of such a ‘‘hermeneutics of the nihilistic or ‘weak’ variety’’ (152) to the concrete realms of ethics and, even more so, political and legal issues and agendas. These are in fact the three sections in which the individual essays have been gathered, and which constitute the three parts of the volume (‘‘Ethics,’’ ‘‘Politics,’’ and ‘‘Law’’). In Vattimo’s own words, this book is ‘‘a first attempt’’ on his side ‘‘to develop the discourse of hermeneutics in [a] constructive direction’’ (xxix). Although some more conservative readers may disagree with Vattimo’s political conclusions, this self-pronounced first attempt is certainly laudable, provocative, and highly engaging because of the pressing issues it raises and the original perspectives it takes. Having understood emancipation as ‘‘a process in which constraints are shed and we gain greater freedom, autonomy, and opportunity to choose’’ (xxv), the question Vattimo asks in the Introduction is how it is ‘‘possible to discuss [emancipation] using concepts like nihilism and hermeneutics’’ (xxv). Much has to do with one’s understanding of nihilism and hermeneutics. Vattimo’s now consolidated idea is that ‘‘the terms ‘nihilism’ and ‘hermeneutics’ are ... synonyms’’ (xxv), insofar as ‘‘hermeneutics is the thought of accomplished nihilism’’ (xxvi). This coincidence of terms becomes clearer if, following Nietzsche, one distinguishes between positive (or active) and negative (or reactive) nihilism. Whereas negative nihilism expresses the nostalgic ‘‘desperation of those who continue to cultivate a sense of mourning because ‘religion is no more’’’ (xxvi), active nihilism, which Vattimo also qualifies as

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‘‘constructive’’ (xxviii), means ‘‘the dissolution of any ultimate foundation, the understanding that in the history of philosophy, and of western culture in general, ‘God is dead,’ and ‘the real world has become a fable’’’ (xxv). Such a dissolution of any ground or foundation, which in itself ‘‘brings freedom’’ (xxvi) insofar as it also dissolves any authoritarian archaic principle, runs the risk of hardening itself into a new form of foundationalism, into a new metaphysics. It is at this point that hermeneutics, based on ‘‘the principle of the plurality of interpretations, in other words respect for the freedom of everyone to choose’’ (xxviii) and offering ‘‘a concept of the world as conflict of interpretations’’ (90), can constitute a powerful corrective against the foundationalist aberrations of nihilism. It is not a matter of accepting nihilism as the new truth, Vattimo argues, but of developing an ‘‘ontology of actuality’’ (3 ff.), that is, ‘‘a discourse that attempts to clarify what Being signifies in the present situation’’ (3–4) when we observe ‘‘the dissolution of the principle of reality into the manifold of interpretations’’ (20). According to Vattimo, hermeneutics is not simply one philosophical position among many, but rather, following Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung, which Vattimo interprets in the sense of a ‘‘twisting, resignation, ironic acceptance ... of precisely the heritage of metaphysics’’ (28), it is ‘‘the philosophy of modernity and modernization tout court’’ (90). That is, hermeneutics contains within itself a nonmetaphysical philosophy of history ‘‘that views hermeneutics as the result of a ‘nihilistic’ process, in which metaphysical Being, meaning violence, consumes itself’’ (94). This process, which can also be thought of as a phenomenon of ‘‘secularization’’ (32) and as the ‘‘destiny’’ or ‘‘destination’’ of the west (33), requires the ‘‘reconstruction of an idea of universal rationality that, if [one has] to distinguish it from rationalism and metaphysics, [one] can do no better than describe as weak and secularized’’ (30). It is precisely the weakening of strong structures attested in contemporary philosophical thought, which also implies a ‘‘reduction of claims’’ (35), that will bring about human emancipation and liberation, since the truth will no longer be given by an objective standard established a priori, or as a oneto-one correspondence, but rather as the outcome of ‘‘an affair of consensus, listening, participation in a shared enterprise’’ (35). A nihilistic hermeneutics is a ‘‘thought that knows it can only regard the universal by passing through dialogue, through consent, if you like through caritas’’ (xxvi). In this sense, a nihilistic hermeneutics is the philosophical parallel of the political notion of democracy (90 ff), with its idea that truth is a matter of consensus rather than the imposition of an authoritarian principle. The task becomes particularly arduous, however, when we want to move from the realm of theoretical considerations, where Vattimo’s proposal seems very sound and viable (at least to this reader), to the realm of practical applications. How can a nihilistic hermeneutics walk the fine line between the dissolution of foundationalism, its own self-image and proposal as an interpretation among many, and the perspective of human emancipation? How can one speak of ethics, politics, and the law, without a regulative or foundational principle capable of directing the discourse? Why should one embrace a

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nihilistic hermeneutics face to face with the concrete, practical situations of our world? It is here that Vattimo’s brilliant considerations on technology, information and communication technology, the (super)market economy, globalization, citizenship, punishment, Christian and foundationalist morality, and a host of other current issues of debate reveal their utopian and inspirational power. Vattimo is convinced that a nihilistic hermeneutics, ‘‘a weak ontology, or better, an ontology of the weakening of Being supplies philosophical reasons for preferring a liberal, tolerant, and democratic society’’(19) that takes into account the current emergence of all sorts of pluralistic identities. His general premise accepts ‘‘the condition of nonfoundedness in which we find ourselves thrown today’’ (40) as an ‘‘explicit point of departure (and not as its foundation)’’ (40) for ethics (but also for political and legal discussions). As he makes explicit in the first part of the book devoted to ethics, one’s own historical, existential, and social condition—one’s ‘‘provenance’’ (41)—becomes the reference for ethics, in the awareness that ‘‘one’s own provenance is ‘located,’ in a way always and insuperable finite’’ (44). If this is the case, ethics can only be constructed around human finitude, it can only be an ‘‘ethics of finitude’’ whose overall significance is ‘‘the exclusion of violence that thinks itself legitimate and the exclusion of the violent refusal to be questioned, the authoritarian silencing of the other in the name of first principles’’ (46). What ensues from such historicity is a ‘‘postmetaphysical ethics’’ (64), an ethics without metaphysics, an ‘‘ethical discourse free of transcendence’’ (64), ‘‘a passage from the ethics of the Other (with a capital O) to an ethics of the other, or the others (with a lowercase o)’’ (64). Such an ethics with no reference to a transcendental principle functioning as a foundation takes the form of ‘‘an ethics of negotiation and consensus rather than an ethics of immutable principles or categorical imperatives speaking through the reason of everyone’’ (67). Old metaphysical ethical principles may retain their validity, but their cogency is now given by their recognition as cultural legacies, not as natural or essential entities. Their rationality comes from their being approved through shared discourse, and hence their violence is limited, if not eliminated. In this sense, ethics emancipates the human condition because, among other things, it is anti-authoritarian. The ethics of negotiation finds its counterpart in the political concept of institutional democracy because, as Vattimo argues in part two (Politics), democracy is the triumph of neither equality nor communitarianism, but rather of a truth that establishes itself as a consequence of negotiations and consensus. Even the truth of equality, which Vattimo reinterprets as ‘‘free projectuality,’’ is not a natural fact but needs to be ensured as truth; it becomes true only as the outcome of a replacement of the law of nature with the law of reason, as the result of institutional procedures democratically established. Democracy does not espouse any a priori truth; rather, it lets itself be led by the interplay of majority and minority rules and discourses. In this sense, democracy corresponds to the nihilistic history of modernity, which, as hermeneutics reveals, has led to the dissolution of all strong structures. What

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Vattimo delineates in a declaredly nonsystematic articulation is the sketch of a ‘‘‘nihilistic’ left’’ (97) founded on the principle of the ‘‘reduction of violence’’ (98 ff.). By ‘‘violence’’ Vattimo means ‘‘the peremptory assertion of an ultimacy that, like the ultimate metaphysical foundation (or the God of philosophers) breaks off dialogue and silences the interlocutor by refusing to even acknowledge the question ‘why?’’’ (98). Such a reduction of violence does not function for the democratic left as another metaphysical foundation because it is the historical consequence of the ‘‘nihilistic history’’ of which we are part. It is here that socialism, understood as ‘‘a program for setting politics free of the laws of economics’’ (129), reveals once again its timeliness as a current political option capable of reducing the violence of the laws of globalized economy. Without such an autonomy for politics, globalized politics ‘‘immediately become imperial politics’’ (129), Vattimo argues, whereas socialism proposes itself as ‘‘the conception of the state as guarantor of the multiplicity of the communities that compose it, communities in which individuals confer recognition on one another because they are not all homogenized into an indistinct mass of citizen-subjects’’ (129). Thus, socialism, here analogous to hermeneutics, presents itself as the historical destiny of the west. Vattimo’s nihilistic hermeneutics finds another area of application in the philosophy of rights or law discussed in the third and final part of Nihilism and Emancipation. Here, too, the task is that of assuming the nihilistic implications of hermeneutics and using them to detach ourselves from any metaphysical residues in the fields of rights and law, such as the notions of justice or the legitimation of the law. Vattimo argues that the only regulative principle is that of interpretation, time after time, of the law and its application to each individual case. ‘‘Interpretation is neither the apocalyptic-messianic unveiling of the violence (injustice) implicit in any position of law, nor the consolatory masking of this violence by means of ad hoc fabulations, but a cumulative process of dissolution of the violence arising from the initial unfoundedness of the law’’ (146). As an application that weakens the violence of the origin, interpretation ‘‘‘does the law justice’’’ (148). What gives a legal system its stability is thus not the original violence of the law, which is progressively reduced by the interpretations, but rather ‘‘the network of interpretations that have incarnated it over the course of time in history’’ (150). In this sense, ‘‘every juridical, political, or other system is ‘only’ procedure, or, in other words ... truth is ‘only’ interpretation’’ (158). The emancipation that nihilism brings, as announced in the title, is that of the one who resists, in the field of laws as well as in ethics and politics, ‘‘the (true and genuine) temptation to identify (one’s own) justice with justice tout court’’ (172). In this passage from objective truth to social labor binding humans to one another, in this passage ‘‘from veritas to caritas’’ (35) is the true meaning of emancipation according to the modern interpretation—‘‘a move away from the sacral horizon of the beginnings’’ (31), a move that also constitutes the core of a secularized and weakened concept of the divine. This is a sense of the divine, as Vattimo argues elsewhere, wherein the violence of the sacred and its fanaticisms has been reduced. The emancipation invoked in the title is thus the emancipation

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from any strong structure of violent imposition. As Nietzsche’s nihilism teaches, emancipation is brought about by the realization that ‘‘God is dead, and now we wish for many gods to live’’ (xxvi). Thus, as the title announces, we need nihilism (of a constructive, that is hermeneutic kind) to emancipate ourselves.

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