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Vattimo, Kenosis and the Philosophy of the Event Matthew Edward Harris

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Vattimo, Kenosis and the Philosophy of the Event Matthew Edward Harris View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by STORE - Staffordshire Online Repository Vattimo, Kenosis and the Philosophy of the Event Matthew Edward Harris A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Philosophy, Staffordshire University Submitted March 2016 Contents Abstract 4 Note__________________________________________________ 5 Acknowledgements______________________________________5 1.An Introduction to Vattimo’s Thought 6 a) A brief summary of Vattimo’s weak thought and return to religion 6 b) The reception and importance of Vattimo’s return to religion 9 c) The purpose of this thesis 14 d) The direction of this thesis 16 2. ‘Dialectics, Difference, Weak thought’ 18 a) Il pensiero debole 18 b) Historicist metaphysics and difference 19 c) Being and ontological difference 20 d) Thinking Being weakly 28 e) Truth 32 3. The End of Modernity 36 a) European Nihilism 36 b) Art, openings and the event 58 4. Beyond Interpretation 59 a) Hermeneutics as a sending and the ‘ontology of actuality’ 59 b) Charity 68 5. ‘Left’ Heideggerianism, sendings and metaphysics as the history of Being 69 a) Left and Right Heideggerianism 69 b) Left Heideggerianism, the end of metaphysics and the end of Humanism 72 Part One: Vattimo’s Return to Religion and Thoughts on Christianity 76 Chapter One: Vattimo’s Return to Religion 76 a) Introduction 76 b) Personal 76 c) Societal 77 1 d) Theoretical 79 e) Two returns, cultural and philosophical 79 f) Relevant texts 80 Chapter Two: Beyond Interpretation 81 a) The project of Beyond Interpretation 81 b) Emancipation and charity 82 c) Secularisation and kenosis 84 d) Caritas 88 e) Vattimo’s argument: summarising and drawing the implications 89 Chapter Three: Belief 90 a) The project of Belief 90 b) Secularisation and incarnation 91 c) Salvation 99 d) Caritas and Secularisation 100 e) The kind of Christianity recovered 102 f) Belief? 104 Chapter Four: After Christianity 106 a) The project of After Christianity 106 b) The centrality of Nietzsche and ‘the death of God’ 106 i) Belief and After Christianity 106 ii) Chapter One of After Christianity 108 iii) Chapter Eight of After Christianity: The death of God on the cross and the subjective turn 112 c) The status of kenosis 117 d) The importance of Joachim of Fiore for Vattimo’s notion of Christianity 119 e) History of Salvation, History of Interpretation 120 f) The West or Christianity: Andenken and radical historicity 124 g) Christianity and violence 126 Chapter Five: Vattimo, Gauchet and the Löwith-Blumenberg 129 debate a) Vattimo and the Löwith-Blumenberg debate 129 b) Vattimo and Löwith: A Meditation on Modernity 133 c) The equivalence of Christianity with the West 134 2 d) The Value of Vattimo’s Contribution: Getting Beyond the Metaphysics of Opposites 136 e) Verwindung: Secularisation, Interiority and Distortion 138 Chapter Six: Vattimo and the Death of God Theologians 141 a) Introduction 141 b) Vattimo and Altizer 141 i. Comparisons made 141 ii. Christianity and religiosity 145 iii. Transcendence and incarnation 146 iv. Jesus 152 v. The Holy Spirit 155 Chapter Seven: Vattimo and Hegel 157 a) Vattimo, Altizer and Hegel 157 b) A weakened Hegelianism and the spectre of unilinear history 160 c) Which Christian tradition? 163 Chapter Eight: Vattimo and Judaism—the danger of supersessionism 164 a) Supersessionism 164 b) Vattimo on the past in relation to the present 167 Part Two: Eventuality and Ethics 174 Chapter Nine: After the Death of God and other later works 174 a) A summary of these later works 174 b) Classic texts 174 c) Vattimo’s intention 180 Chapter Ten: Paradigms, concealment and reductionism 185 a) Art, paradigms and monuments 185 b) Vattimo and the Contributions to Philosophy: appropriation versus transpropriation 194 c) The question of transcendence 203 i. The possibility of transcendence 203 ii. Transcendence and caritas 211 iii. A postmodern Categorical Imperative? 214 iv. Conclusion 221 Conclusion: A weakened Vattimo? 224 Bibliography 238 3 Abstract Having presented as a Marxist atheist for the previous thirty years, in the 1990s the postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo returned to religion. This dissertation analyses and evaluates the kind of religion to which Vattimo has returned, looking in particular at how it relates to his wider philosophical style of ‘weak thought,’ the interpretation of our current situation as one of hermeneutical nihilism in which there are no longer any ‘strong foundations’ such as metaphysics, value-free facts and metanarratives. In particular I look at whether Vattimo has constructed a ‘supersessionist’ religious history in which Christianity is ‘better’ than Judaism, a claim which—if true—would not only be politically incorrect, but also inconsistent with weak thought in that it puts forward a metanarrative of progress away from ‘strong’ biblical literalism associated with Judaism towards the ‘spiritual’ interpretation of Scripture found in postmodernity today, via the ‘liberating’ messages of kenosis and caritas found in Christianity. I argue Vattimo has constructed a ‘weak Hegelian’ narrative and one which, due to his increasing reliance on the work of Thomas Kuhn, can be tempered by an appeal to the ‘incommensurablity’ of paradigms, whereby difference in content is acknowledged although one paradigm (such as Judaism) cannot be regarded as better than another (such as Christianity). To support this interpretation of Vattimo’s ‘return’ to religion I appeal to changes in his view of Christianity since the Millennium in which the ‘unilinear’ history is downplayed in favour of a Gadamerian focus on the importance of the Bible as the source of textual tradition. Nevertheless, I go on to show that while there are resources within his return to religion to counter its critics, the kind of ontology he takes on board with his appeal to Kuhn highlights the larger problem within his philosophy of an increasingly selective reading of his main influence, Heidegger. The selectivity in his reading of Heidegger pertains in the main to his central concept of Being as event, and I show how this has implications for his return to religion in relation to the ideas of transcendence and caritas. Having done this, I construct my own reimagining of Vattimo’s return to religion to keep the spirit of what he has done without the conceptual problems generated from his reading of Heidegger, using Vattimo’s idea of the defining message of the New 4 Testament as God’s newfound announcement of universal ‘friendship’ for all peoples to construct the idea that Philosophy and Theology have inexorably weakened one another through the missionary aspect of ‘friendship’ leading the Apostles to seek out Greeks (philosophers) as well as fellow Jews. Note Section 116 of the Revised Regulations for the Award of the University’s Degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy by Supervised Research states: ‘The candidate will be free to publish material in advance of the thesis submission but reference will be made in the thesis to any such work. Copies of published material should either be bound in with the thesis submitted for examination, or placed in an adequately secured pocket at the end of the thesis.’ Therefore, I have included a CD at the back of the dissertation with copies of all the works I have published during the course of my research at Staffordshire University. Not all of these works were incorporated into my dissertation but I have included them in light of section 116 of the revised regulations. Furthermore, where I have drawn upon one or more of the articles at length in my dissertation I have supplied a footnote referencing the article of origin for the material concerned. Acknowledgements Many thanks are due to my supervisor, Professor David Webb, for his patience and many helpful suggestions over the last five years. Thanks also to Professor Douglas Burnham for his idea that I should write the IEP entry on Vattimo as this forced me to crystallise my thoughts on Vattimo in the earlier stages of my writing. I would like to thank Professor Santiago Zabala for encouraging me to write more about Vattimo, as well as Professor Erik Meganck and Professor Thomas Guarino for their constructive criticism of my work. Furthermore, I would like to thank Warminster School for funding my final year of study. 5 An Introduction to Vattimo’s Thought 1. An outline of the research question, purpose and direction of this thesis a) A brief summary of Vattimo’s weak thought and return to religion Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936), an Italian philosopher and cultural commentator, was born and studied in Turin, Italy, with Pareyson, then in Heidelberg under Hans-Georg Gadamer. While Vattimo's philosophy very much reflects the proto-postmodernist influences of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, as well as drawing inspiration from the philosopher of science, Kuhn, there is also a more ‘concrete’ or politically engaged side to Vattimo which has made him visible outside of philosophical circles, including supporting gay rights and being a Member of the European Parliament. Since the early 1980s, Vattimo has become well known for his philosophical style of ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), a term and style deriving from a volume of this name edited by Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti and containing the work of a number of other philosophers (Vattimo and Rovatti 1983). 'Weak thought' is an attempt to understand and re- configure traces from the history of thought in ways that accord with the lack of centre and foundations characteristic of the postmodern in order to create an ethic of ‘weakness.’ Core features of Vattimo’s style of weak thought are hermeneutics, nihilism and a negative assessment of metaphysics. The latter is regarded by Vattimo, following Heidegger, as ‘violent’ in the sense that it reduces thought back to irreducible, fixed first principles.
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