THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PHILOSOPHER
GIANNI VATTIMO
THE RESPONSIBILITY
OF THE PHILOSOPHER
Edited with an Introduction by FRANCA DAGOSTINI
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 responsabilit 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 responsabilit del filosofo. English]
The responsibility of the philosopher / Gianni Vattimo ; edited with an introduction by Franca DAgostini ; 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, Modern20th century. 2. Philosophy, Italian20th century. I. DAgostini, Franca, 1952II. Title.
B3654.V383V6313 2010
190dc22 2010003075
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CONTENTS
THE STRONG
REASONS FOR WEAK THOUGHT
There exist thinkersKierkegaard and Hannah Arendt come especially to mindwhose propensity for singularity and antitheory is grounded in precise and rigorously theoretical reasons. This to a certain extent is Gianni Vattimos case too, and the primary aim of what follows is to bring out the strong reasons for Vattimos commitment to weak thought (pensiero debole), and to an attenuation or lightening of the structures of traditional philosophical discourse.
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? Vattimos 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 philosophys 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 Vattimos 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 allor any iciness either. The two attitudes may be reciprocally corrective, or either may be promoted at the expense of the other. So while Vattimos theoretical stance may be vulnerable to a charge of elasticity, 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?
By weak Vattimo seems to mean essentially two things: pluralistic and incomplete. 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 isnt some sort of amalgamated, all-purpose relativism; its 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.
Actually, what makes philosophical discourse specifically weak in Vattimos 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.)
