Gianteresio Vattimo, also known as
Gianni Vattimo (born January 4, 1936) is an internationally recognized Italian
authorAn author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, philosopher, and
politicianA politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...
. Many of his works have been translated into English.
Biography
Vattimo was born in
TurinTurin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
,
PiedmontPiedmont is one of the 20 regions of Italy. It has an area of 25,402 square kilometres and a population of about 4.4 million. The capital of Piedmont is Turin. The main local language is Piedmontese. Occitan is also spoken by a minority in the Occitan Valleys situated in the Provinces of...
. He studied
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
under the
existentialistExistentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
Luigi PareysonLuigi Pareysón was an Italian philosopher.-Biography:Luigi Pareyson was born on 4 February 1918, in Piasco, in the province of Cuneo...
at the
University of TurinThe University of Turin is a university in the city of Turin in the Piedmont region of north-western Italy...
, and graduated in 1959. After studying with
Karl LöwithKarl Löwith , was a German philosopher, a student of Heidegger.Löwith was born in Munich. Though he was himself Protestant, his family was of Jewish descent and he therefore had to emigrate Germany in 1934 because of the National Socialist regime. He went to Italy and in 1936 he went to Japan...
and
Hans-Georg GadamerHans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
in
Heidelberg-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...
he returned to Turin where he became assistant professor in 1964, and later full professor of
AestheticsAesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
in 1969. While remaining at Turin, becoming Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in 1982, he has been a visiting professor at a number of American Universities.
After being active in the
Partito RadicaleThe Radical Party was a political party in Italy. For decades it was a bastion of liberalism and radicalism in Italy and proposed itself as the strongest opposition to the Italian political establishment, which was seen as corrupt and conservative...
, the short-lived
Alleanza per Torino, and the
Democrats of the LeftThe Democrats of the Left was a social-democratic Italian political party and part of the Olive Tree electoral coalition, which merged with a number of centrist and leftist groups to form the Democratic Party on 14 October 2007...
, Vattimo joined the
Party of Italian CommunistsThe Party of Italian Communists is a communist political party in Italy. Its long-time leader is Oliviero Diliberto.-Foundation and early years:...
. Between 1999 and 2004 he was a
member of the European Parliament- A :*Generoso Andria *Roberta Angelilli - B :*Paolo Bartolozzi *Sergio Berlato...
.
He is openly
gayGay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
and an avowed Catholic "who welcomes God's death."
Vattimo added his name to a petition released on February 28, 2009 calling on the European Union to unconditionally remove
HamasHamas is the Palestinian Sunni Islamic or Islamist political party that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas also has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades...
from its list of terrorist organizations and grant it full recognition as a legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.
Vattimo's philosophy
His philosophy can be characterized as postmodern with his emphasis on "pensiero debole" (weak thought). This requires that the foundational certainties of
modernityModernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
with its emphasis on objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts.
He draws on the philosophy of
Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
with his critique of foundations and the hermeneutic philosophy of his teacher
Hans-Georg GadamerHans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
. Perhaps his greatest influence though is the thought of
Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, whose "
discovery of the 'lie', the discovery that alleged 'values' and metaphysical structures are just a play of forces" (1993:93) plays an important role in Vattimo's notion of "
weak thought."
Being as event
Vattimo rejects any notion of a
transcendentalIn philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages...
structure of
reasonReason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
or reality that would be given once and for all. This does not imply the loss of truth, but a Heideggerean reinterpretation of truth as the opening of horizons. Such truth is deeper than
propositionIn logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
s which are made possible by such openings. Philosophies then are always responses to contingent questions, they are ‘ontologies of actuality,’ a thesis that can be confirmed by the historico-cultural links of particular philosophies. For hermeneutics to be consistent with its own rejection of metaphysics, it must present itself, argues Vattimo "
as the most persuasive philosophical interpretation of a situation or ‘epoch’" (1997:10). To do this, Vattimo proposes a reading of hermeneutics as having a "
nihilistic" vocation.
Nihilism as the truth of history
To Vattimo, hermeneutics has become boring and vague - lacking any clear significance for philosophical problems. His answer is to insist on the nihilistic consequences of hermeneutics. The claim that "
there are no facts only interpretations and this too is an interpretation" amounts to saying that hermeneutics cannot be seen as the most accurate/true description of the permanent structures of reality of human existence. Hermeneutics is not a metaphysical theory in this sense and so can only be "proved" by being presented as the response to a history of being, a history of the fabling of the world, of the weakening of structures, that is as the occurrence of nihilism.
This nihilistic reading of history involves a certain attitude towards
modernityModernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
, whereby modernity is dissolved from within through a twisting, distorting radicalisation of its premises. Vattimo uses Heidegger's term
Verwindung to capture this post-modern recovery from modernity.
Weak thought and ethics
History as a process of weakening (secularisation and disenchantment are other terms Vattimo uses) "assumes the form of a decision for non-violence" (1992:95). An
ethicsEthics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
of communication along the lines suggested by
Jürgen HabermasJürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
suffers, according to Vattimo, from finding itself in a substantially ahistorical position, while oscillating between
formalismThe term formalism describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy. A practitioner of formalism is called a formalist. A formalist, with respect to some discipline, holds that there is no transcendent meaning to that discipline other than the literal...
and cultural
relativismRelativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
(1992:117). For Vattimo it is only when hermeneutics accepts its nihilistic destiny that "
it can find in ‘negativity,’ in dissolution as the ‘destiny of Being’ … the orientating principle that enables it to realize its own original inclination for ethics whilst neither restoring metaphysics nor surrendering to the futility of a relativistic philosophy of culture" (1992:119).
The revival of Marxism
In 2004, after leaving the party of the Democrats of the Left, he endorsed
MarxismMarxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, reassessing positively its projectual principles and wishing for a "return" to the thought of the
TrierTrier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....
philosopher and to a
communismCommunism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, rid of distorted soviet developments, which have to be
dialecticDialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
ally overcome. Vattimo asserts the continuity of his new choices with the "weak thought," thus having changed "many of his ideas." He namely refers to a "weakened Marx," as ideological basis capable of showing the real nature of communism. The new Marxist approach, therefore, emerges as a practical development of the "weak thought" into the frame of a political perspective. His next political book, co-authored with Santiago Zabala, is
Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (2011).
Quotes
Works
Selected works:
- (1991) The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, Translated by John R. Snyder, Polity Press, 1991 Translation of La fine della modernità, Garzanti, Milan, 1985
- (1992) The Transparent Society Translated by David Webb, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 Translation of La società trasparente, Garzanti, Milan, 1989
- (1993) The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger Translated by Thomas Harrison and Cyprian P. Blamires, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 Translation of Le avventure della differenza, Garzanti, Milan, 1980
- (1997) Beyond Interpretation:The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, Translated by David Webb, Stanford University Press, 1997 Translation of Oltre l'interpretazione, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1994
- (1998) Religion by Jacques Derrida, Edited by Gianni Vattimo, Translated by David Webb Stanford University Press, 1998
- (1999) Belief by Gianni Vattimo, et al., Polity Press, 1999 Translation of Credere di credere, Garzanti, Milan, 1996
- (2002a) Nietzsche: Philosophy as Cultural Criticism Translated by Nicholas Martin Stanford University Press, 2002 Translation of Introduzione a Nietzsche, Laterza, Rome-Bari,1985
- (2002b) After Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
- (2004) Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law, Edited by Santiago Zabala, Columbia University Press, 2004
- (2005) The Future of Religion, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, Edited by Santiago Zabala, Columbia University Press, 2005
- (2006) After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, Edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins, Columbia University Press.
- (2008) Dialogue with Nietzsche, Gianni Vattimo, Columbia University Press.
- (2008) Art’s Claim to Truth, Gianni Vattimo, Edited by Santiago Zabala, Columbia University Press.
- (2009) Christianity, Truth, and Weak Faith, Gianni Vattimo and Rene Girard, Edited by P. Antonello, Columbia University Press.
- (2010) The Responsibility of the Philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, Edited by Franca D'Agostini, Columbia University Press.
- (2011) Hermeneutic Communism, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Columbia University Press.
External links