2023-09-19 21:37:38
by MAURIZIO FERRARIS
Maurizio Ferraris remembers the philosopher of “weak thought” who challenged metaphysical constructions and the cult of science. His reflections influenced d’s thinking
The philosopher Gianni Vattimo has died. Here is the memory of his friend and colleague Maurizio Ferraris.
Gianni Vattimo was a friend, a teacher, an antagonist for me for fifty years. I have to resist the temptation of memories to give the reader the memory of what is destined to survive about him, beyond his physical passing, which occurred at 87 years of age.
What Vattimo proposed to us is, first of all, a philosophy of history, which goes in the opposite direction to that of Augustine. For the latter the city of man, which was collapsing and aging, prepared the advent of the city of God. For Vattimo it is the opposite. It is the city of God, the world of otherworldly certainties and indisputable foundations, which is declining, not under the weight of the times and barbarian invasions, but of the modern world, with its light and its science.
“God is dead”, here is the fundamental word of modernity. Faced with this sentence, the most common response is: at this point, we are in the realm of the human surrendered to himself, we are on a level in which there are only humans, as the secular philosophers of the generation preceding Vattimo maintained, as Jean-Paul Sartre. Or we need to fully understand the tragedy of this death, restore the presence of God no longer in his triumph, but in his fall, and this was the path followed by twentieth-century Christian philosophers, such as Vattimo’s master, Luigi Pareyson .
The singularity, the uniqueness of Vattimo’s choice, from which his radical philosophical originality and his inimitable human mix, made of tenderness, irony and melancholy derives, consisted in taking a third way. God is dead, nothing will resurrect him, but the human is not the only player on the field. All around, to give the climate of the time and the sense of thought, there is a memory, a process and a progress.
Memory is the fact that, in dying, God remained on the horizon of our world. Globalization is not God’s race through time and nations, as imagined by philosophers writing in the times of Eurocentrism. It is the memory of something that has been and no longer is, but whose absence is cumbersome like a specter, which can take many forms, but first of all that of the sense of guilt of a piece of humanity that in the name of God has claimed to dominate the world.
The process is secularization, the term which originally designated the use of sacred buildings and goods for civil uses, and which little by little came to mean taking leave of transcendence. The world of Christ the King was a world in which everything was sacred, solid, untouchable. That of the dead God is a long farewell to the past in which humanity emancipates itself from the sacred and the violence it entails, and recognizes that there are no longer any absolutes. We did not kill God to replace him with the Human, but to understand that everything in the world is fragile, historical, interpretable. There is nothing that is truly untouchable because, in agreement with Friedrich Nietzsche (the philosopher who, together with Martin Heidegger, counted most for Vattimo) there are no facts, only interpretations.
Progress is the goal that humanity engaged in this crossing of the desert must set itself. Because obviously recognizing the death of God is anything but a euphoric condition in itself; the “great bacchanal of free spirits” of which Nietzsche spoke may well take place, but it is the joy that accompanies a shipwreck, since it is not at all easy to live without foundations. It’s like being in quicksand, which can swallow up humanity at any moment and discover that it rests on nothing, that it is just one of the infinite possibilities of a story that has no rhyme or reason.
How can we give meaning back to a humanity without absolutes? Certainly not by creating new and alternative ones, and this is why Vattimo has always been against the cult of science, which in his eyes was the worldly substitute for lost transcendence. We need a different movement, which does not replace the old idol with a new one. Instead, we must recognize the positive dimension of freedom, in judgments, behaviors and choices, which derives from the collapse of a wall much older and sturdier than that of Berlin. And so, once the only God has disappeared, a polytheism of values is the destiny of secularized humanity, and this destiny is not necessarily catastrophic. This is the reason why, unlike Nietzsche and most, Vattimo wanted to give a positive value to nihilism, which is not only humanity’s race towards nothingness but is also the emancipation from a being, from a God or from a foundation that is too bulky.
Obviously, saying goodbye is not enough to build a new world, and it is here that Vattimo’s thought, like that of many other philosophers of his time (I am thinking, in particular, of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) encountered the greatest difficulty. A deconstruction must always constitute the prelude to a reconstruction, and if Foucault, for example, after having decreed the death of the human and the reduction of truth to power, laboriously committed himself, in the last years of his research, to the re-foundation of a ethics and a truth by going to school with the ancients, Vattimo took the path of recovering Catholicism and relaunching communism at the very moment in which it seemed to have disappeared from the political horizon.
It may seem like a paradox, but it isn’t. What certainly attracted him to Catholicism was the dimension of a ritual without myth, of an accommodating religion devoid of absolutes, that is, paradoxically but not too much, of the best ally of secularization, because, in Vattimo’s interpretation, Catholicism was first of all a tradition and a way of life, much more than a system of positive dogmas and absolute beliefs. It was, in short, the historical religion par excellence, the one best suited to orient humanity after the trauma of the death of God.
In communism, however, Vattimo sought a doctrine of redemption and brotherhood for the disinherited, for the last. As he once wrote, he saw in it the necessary outcome of weak thinking, which had to be converted into the thinking of the weak. However, it is important to observe that Vattimo’s adherence to this ideal communism took place only after the conclusion of the historical parable of real communism, and this was essentially for the same reason that pushed him to return to Catholicism.
In the two cases, in fact, it was not a question, in Vattimo’s eyes, of winning doctrines, but of cults that appeared to him destined for a long sunset, in whose ever-longer shadows humanity could have found a possible but not obligatory path, the indication of a path to follow after the sunset of the absolutes. Just like the deconstruction, which was carried out under the sign of weakness, that is, of interpretation and relativization instead of iconoclasm and head-on confrontation, the reconstruction also took the form, mild and non-mythical, of the recovery of two completely different religions. nothing but triumphant.
This endless escape from absolutes and violence, the essential feature of Vattimo’s thought and teaching, was not simply a theory, but the reflection of a life. Which was not, mind you, a quiet and peaceful life but, on the contrary, an existence full of tragedies, mourning, contradictions experienced firsthand and with great suffering. Instead of becoming the bearer and witness of these lacerations, like, for example, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vattimo wanted, so to speak, to spare them for his peers, and he built an entire edifice of thought to exorcise them by indicating the ways of a peaceful coexistence of ‘human with himself and with other humans.
It is the spirit that shines through in an anecdote with which I would like to close this memory. I was just over twenty years old, Vattimo just over forty, and another student and friend who was with us said «we should advise against reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies, for the pain they release». It was obviously a paradox, but I – recently graduated from a Catholic school and eager to show a strong-spirited attitude – replied that it seemed like censorship, like putting it on the blacklist. And Vattimo limited himself to saying: «Sometimes things are done not for censorship, but to protect from pain».
The lightness of weak thought was precisely this attempt to “secure”, as we would say today in reference to natural disasters, humanity from the crash of God’s death.
September 19, 2023 (modified September 19, 2023 | 9.39pm)
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