2023-09-19 21:35:49
by Antonio Carioti
The philosopher of weak thought who challenged metaphysical constructions has died at 87
The philosopher Gianni Vattimo died on Tuesday evening in Rivoli hospital (Turin). He was 87 years old. The scholar has spent the last few days hospitalized in the nephrology department, after his health conditions had worsened. The news of his death was given by Simone Caminada, 38 years old, his assistant and companion for 14 years.
He considered himself a communist and a Christian at the same time (indeed, actually Catholic), but he was the anti-dogmatic thinker par excellence, the convinced opponent of the claim to describe the authentic order of reality through philosophical, or even scientific, means. Gianni Vattimo, who died on Tuesday 19 September at the age of 87, must be recognized for his consistency in criticizing every metaphysical construction, which was expressed in the position commonly known as weak thought, from the title of a famous collection of essays he edited with Pier Aldo Rovatti in 1983.
The Turin philosopher must also be given the credit for always trying to make his refined theoretical elaboration accessible to the averagely educated public. He had clear, albeit suggestive writing, of which a formidable example is the co-authored autobiography Nonessere Dio, written with Piergiorgio Paterlini (Aliberti, 2006). And he always showed himself available to dialogue and participate in the most diverse initiatives. Even in the political arena he had not hesitated to come forward: he had been a European parliamentarian for a long time, always within the left, but in gradually changing positions.
Born on January 4, 1936, Vattimo was the son of a Calabrian carabiniere stationed in Turin, who had died of pneumonia when little Gianni was just sixteen months old. Growing up in disadvantaged conditions, he had always claimed his proletarian origins: in addition to school, which he always attended with excellent results, the oratory environment, where he had quickly come to prominence, had contributed to his education. At the age of eighteen he had become the diocesan delegate of the students of Catholic Action, from which he had soon been expelled for his critical positions towards ecclesiastical authority. He always remembered with warm affection his teacher, Monsignor Pietro Caramello, a Catholic thinker with very conservative ideas, linked to the legacy of Thomas Aquinas.
In 1955 the future philosopher joined Rai together with his friends Furio Colombo and Umberto Eco, but left after a couple of years. His true path was university, under the guidance of another important teacher and friend, Luigi Pareyson. Vattimo graduated in 1959 with a thesis on Aristotle and in 1964, at just twenty-eight years of age, he began teaching as a professor of Aesthetics. The year before, his book Being, history and language in Heidegger (Marietti, 1963) had been published, which already indicated a line of research with original features.
Martin Heidegger himself and Friedrich Nietzsche, to whom he dedicated the fundamental essay The Subject and the Mask (Bompiani) in 1974, were already the basic points of reference for Vattimo’s thought. Authentic enlightenment for him was an image coined by the author of Cos spoke Zarathustra according to which modern man wanders in the garden of history as in a warehouse of theatrical masks, taking this and that. From Heidegger, whose most disturbing aspects he perhaps underestimated, he had borrowed the polemic against the theoretical tradition which he believes can grasp an ultimate foundation of reality in the form of an objective structure placed outside of time and history.
Here we can identify the basis of the approach that would have made Vattimo a point of reference also at an international level. The introduction to the collection of essays Il Pensione Weak (Feltrinelli), written with Rovatti, an acute criticism of the search for original, true Being, in which, in the opinion of the authors, a large part of Italian academia still lingered, as an alternative to which instead proposed a way to encounter Being again as a trace, a memory, a consumed and weakened being, for this reason alone worthy of attention.
It was an approach that did not lack strong repercussions on the field of public life, supported by the idea – Vattimo would write many years later – of using the easing of social relations, produced by technology, to achieve a form of liberation. It was the announcement of the postmodern era, an iconoclastic vision which replaced the aim of establishing knowledge, typical of Western philosophy, with the aim of depriving it of its authority, in the belief that Being can only be thought of in a plural and contingent form. Vattimo did not deny reality, as some accused him of doing, but believed that it was possible to grasp it only within certain paradigms, without any ambition of full and absolute rationality.
Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in Turin in the Seventies, signature of the Press, prominent public figure, Vattimo did not hide his homosexuality. His private life had reserved very painful experiences for him, which he spoke and wrote about openly. AIDS had taken away his partner Gianpiero Cavagli from him in 1992, and he was cared for lovingly until the end. And then another, Sergio Mamino, was struck by a tumor and died on a transoceanic flight from America to Europe in 2003, when he had already opted for euthanasia abroad. Lastly, a legal case arose regarding his relationship with his partner and assistant Simone Caminada, sentenced to two years in prison for circumvention of an incompetent person towards the philosopher.
In the 1990s Vattimo’s public commitment intensified, resulting in his election to the European Parliament for two legislatures, first with the left-wing Democrats in 1999 and then with Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori in 2009. Following his positions had become radicalized and some of his outbursts, for example against Israel or in favor of Hugo Chvez’s Venezuelan populism, had caused quite a stir.
He proclaimed himself a communist, but not in the old Marxist sense, even if he believed that there were various aspects of Karl Marx’s work to be recovered. More than anything else he intended to demonstrate his rejection of the existing order. However, he did not cultivate a catastrophist vision of late modernity: he was convinced that it contained an unbearable dose of barbarism, but also emancipatory potential of extraordinary importance. The future, he said, will be socialist or it won’t be. To fuel his cautious optimism, he referred to a verse by the German romantic poet Friedrich Hlderlin, often quoted by Heidegger, according to which where danger grows, what saves also grows.
And for Vattimo a source of salvation remained religious faith, to which he had long since reconnected, perhaps without ever really detaching himself from it. Reinterpreting Ren Girard’s scapegoat paradigm in his own way, he saw in Jesus the first great desacralizer of natural religions, the one who had denied the scheme of an authoritarian relationship between man and the transcendent, revealing that God calls us friends.
Therefore the profound secularization of the Western world appeared to him to be a great legacy of Christianity. Indeed he was convinced that the postmodern nihilism of weak thought was the only plausible Christian philosophy of our time. And in the pontificate of Pope Francesco Vattimo he had seen a consoling sign of hope.
September 19, 2023 (modified September 19, 2023 | 10.53pm)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#Gianni #Vattimo #died #philosopher #years #time.news