Abstract
Gianni Vattimo refers his weak interpretation of metaphysics to its Christian provenance. He argues that his nihilist secularization theory divulges the full and ultimate meaning of Christianity. This model understands Christianity as God who ‘returns,’ not as an eternal (pre-modern) substance but as one who in his return reveals himself as becoming the current nihilist hermeneutic flux that is reality. Vattimo takes kenosis as the model of the destiny of ontology. God takes a distance from the eternal origin and lets go of his transcendent divinity. From this, Vattimo learns that truth becomes a purely ‘wordly’ matter without any external, c.q. metaphysical or sacred reference. The Good message is: there are only messages, no facts. God’s return has to be understood epistmo-theologically. Revelation is now completely accomplished in a nihilist, endless way: Christianity means keeping thought away from petrifying into truth, fact, and reality. This is pure Christian caritas in that it does away with the violence of metaphysics and the sacred and thereby discourages all human attempts toward violence. Redeeming though this may sound, perhaps Vattimo is too naïve (as Girard claims) and too theologically shallow.
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Notes
Heidegger’s thinking path reveals many names that hint at a thought ‘beyond’ metaphysics. He proposes andenkende Denken as different from rechnende Denken or Gelassenheit instead of Be-stellen and so on. The word An-denken refers to a poem by Hölderlin and means something like ‘memorial.’ It hints at a peculiar sort of remembering, re-minding that does not aim at an evaluation of received ideas but rather becomes conscious of what remained ‘unthought’ for long, such as the ‘forgetting of Being.’ This unthought must not be re-casted as object of thought—which is the ‘errancy’ that Heidegger calls ‘metaphysics.’ Late-modern philosophy should not re-introduce Being as the highest entity or concept, but rather re-mind Being-as-forgotten.
Pietas refers to the modest posture of a thought that relates in a friendly, non-competitive vein to other thoughts. This posture is inspired by Nietzsche’s consideration that our predecessors in thought deserve all the more respect for the fact that these thoughts were their own achievement rather than the mere registration of eternal truth.
The exegetic meaning of kenosis is to be found in Paul’s Fil 2:6–11 as the ‘self-emptying’ of God. Vattimo’s rather restricted reading of kenosis does little justice to the theological wealth of meaning in this word. First, it is not God who ‘massively’ immerses into the world, it is in the person of the Son that God becomes man. This is relevant as it explains Fil 2:9 where the Son is elevated, a passage that Vattimo arbitrarily but indeed conveniently ignores. Second, kenosis consists of a double movement, namely the movement of service (incarnation) and the movement of obedience (crucifixion). Third, resurrection, which within the hermeneutics of Trinity is intrinsically related to incarnation and the notion of the Paraclete, implies that Christianity is not merely a religion of the Book but also the religion of the Living Christ. Biblical caritas is not just ‘written down,’ it is the word that became ‘flesh.’ This is also why Christian charity can never be reduced to a ‘law’ or ethical system or any kind of hermeneutics. Vattimo only ‘weakens’ the word caritas into a philosophically accessible term. But this way, truth can never remain or become—in Heidegger’s words—a god to whom we pray or before whom we dance and sing and bend our knees. Something essential to Christianity seems to be lost here.
Many scholars express their doubts as to the theological accuracy of Vattimo’s interpretation of kenosis. I quote two examples here. There is an “unguardedness” (Caputo J. e.a., After the death of God, 2007, New York, 78) in his theological elaborations. Frits de Lange points at his “lack of theological craftsmanship” and the “rather bold and unguarded way in which Vattimo interprets biblical tradition and the theological language of caritas, God and the incarnation” (de Lange F., ‘Kenotic ethics: Gianni Vattimo, reading the <signs of the time>’ in Zijlstra O. (red.), Letting go: Rethinking kenosis, 2002, Bern, 27).
Vattimo often refers to Joachim of Fiore to support his model. Certainly, this can be no more than an illustration, not a strong argument. I think Vattimo means that Joachim saw in a preliminary way, obscured by metaphysical-theological medieval ‘unweak’ thought, the weakening that Vattimo himself in the ‘end’ fully recognizes.
The term ‘positive’ has nothing to do with positivism here. It refers, first, to the recognition of the return, not as a fact but as an event that offers itself to cultural experience; second, to the moral advantage of the return as a nihilist religious experience; third, to the historical irreversibility of the return, defying a nostalgic ‘rewinding’ of secularization.
And indeed, Vattimo considers a (moral) example not someone to look up to and in whose footsteps we should walk, but rather ‘one of a kind,’ someone who belongs to a certain (moral) conviction he shares with others in a hermeneutic way.
It is important not to lose the following methodological premises out of sight. I consider neither weakening nor scapegoat mechanism as absolute theories or hardcore scientific facts that are supposed to obey the principle of falsification or other demarcation criteria of science, but rather as hermeneutic grounds, i.e., as cultural experiences and perspectives with a strong philosophical purport and an unmistakable hermeneutic capacity without aiming at total explanation. A hermeneutic ground does not offer the description of a causal chain. Weakening and the scapegoat mechanism are considered as drama, as a subcutaneous pattern that does not just copy a supra-historical original structure—the sacrifice of the scapegoat, c.q. of Christ—over and over again but rather tells of a scene that is expressed in myth, art, religion, politics, economy, justice … This way, I do not think it meaningful to label Girard’s somewhat hard criticism of psychoanalysis as a scientific attack, but rather as an interesting perspective on desire that allows its object a lesser importance than Freud c.s.
Of course, not all philosophical discourse on charity needs to be ‘Biblical.’ I only feel justified in asking this question because Vattimo himself refers to the Bible as the hermeneutic source of charity.
The thermodynamic concept of entropy hinges on the irreversibility of the ‘time arrow,’ which obviously resembles the imperative of the historical orientation of secularization and weakening.
John Caputo explicitly shares this concern.
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Meganck, E. God Returns as Nihilist Caritas . SOPHIA 54, 363–379 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0479-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0479-8