Pier Francesco Stagi, Gianni Vattimo (1936-2023). In memoriam, in Nuovo giornale di filosofia della religione, n. 2, 2022, Università di Urbino
Ricordando Gianni Vattimo, non si può fare a meno di mescolare filosofia e memoria,
pensiero e vita, perché Vattimo fece fin da giovane della sua vita la ragione della sua
ispirazione filosofica. Il primo ricordo che ho di Vattimo risale al 1992, quando entrando nel
suo studio a Palazzo Nuovo all'Università di Torino, si poteva notare dietro alla sua scrivania
un grande poster, Top of the World, dove erano rappresentate le 10 montagne più alte del
mondo; dietro alla passione tutta piemontese per la montagna e le scalate, c'era una indubbia
ironia, rivolta al fatto che proprio in quegli anni Vattimo era asceso a una fama internazionale,
tale da poter essere annoverato tra i più significativi filosofi internazionali. Fuori dalle beghe
di scuola italiane, era negli Stati Uniti e in Francia considerato un maître à penser a livello dei grandi maestri dell'epoca, Derrida, Ricoeur, Rorty, Putnam, così come lo sarà in seguito nell'America
Latina; meno in Germania, dove l'ermeneutica era legata alla
declinazione
fenomenologica,
che ne aveva dato Gadamer e che era lontana dall'ermeneutica
vattimiana, che si presentava come una forma di dissoluzione
postmetafisica della verità (Esistenza,
storia e linguaggio in Heidegger,1963; Schleiermacher,
filosofo dell'interpretazione,
1968; Introduzione
ad Heidegger,
1971). [...]
Il Vattimo noto ed apprezzato negli Stati Uniti e in Francia era una variante "debole", più
urbana, della decostruzione derridiana, una sua forma più classica e comprensibile, meno
presa dalle acrobazie verbali del filosofo francese (Il soggetto e la maschera, 1974; Le avventure della differenza, 1980; Il pensiero debole, 1983).
Postmodernism, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2015 (2005)
Hermeneutics, the science of textual interpretation, also plays a role in postmodern philosophy. Unlike deconstruction, which focuses upon the functional structures of a text, hermeneutics seeks to arrive at an agreement or consensus as to what the text means, or is about. Gianni Vattimo formulates a postmodern hermeneutics in The End of Modernity (1985, in English 1988 [1985]), where he distinguishes himself from his Parisian counterparts by posing the question of post-modernity as a matter for ontological hermeneutics. Instead of calling for experimentation with counter-strategies and functional structures, he sees the heterogeneity and diversity in our experience of the world as a hermeneutical problem to be solved by developing a sense continuity between the present and the past. This continuity is to be a unity of meaning rather than the repetition of a functional structure, and the meaning is ontological. In this respect, Vattimo's project is an extension of Heidegger's inquiries into the meaning of being. However, where Heidegger situates Nietzsche within the limits of metaphysics, Vattimo joins Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics with Nietzsche's attempt to think beyond nihilism and historicism with his concept of eternal return. The result, says Vattimo, is a certain distortion of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, allowing Heidegger and Nietzsche to be interpreted through one another (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 176). This is a significant point of difference between Vattimo and the French postmodernists, who read Nietzsche against Heidegger, and prefer Nietzsche's textual strategies over Heidegger's pursuit of the meaning of being.
On Vattimo's account, Nietzsche and Heidegger can be brought together under the common theme of overcoming. Where Nietzsche announces the overcoming of nihilism through the active nihilism of the eternal return, Heidegger proposes to overcome metaphysics through a non-metaphysical experience of being. In both cases, he argues, what is to be overcome is modernity, characterized by the image that philosophy and science are progressive developments in which thought and knowledge increasingly appropriate their own origins and foundations. Overcoming modernity, however, cannot mean progressing into a new historical phase. As Vattimo observes: “Both philosophers find themselves obliged, on the one hand, to take up a critical distance from Western thought insofar as it is foundational; on the other hand, however, they find themselves unable to criticize Western thought in the name of another, and truer, foundation” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 2). Overcoming modernity must therefore mean a Verwindung, in the sense of twisting or distorting modernity itself, rather than an Überwindung or progression beyond it.
While Vattimo takes post-modernity as a new turn in modernity, it entails the dissolution of the category of the new in the historical sense, which means the end of universal history. “While the notion of historicity has become ever more problematic for theory,” he says, “at the same time for historiography and its own methodological self-awareness the idea of history as a unitary process is rapidly dissolving” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 6). This does not mean historical change ceases to occur, but that its unitary development is no longer conceivable, so only local histories are possible. The de-historicization of experience has been accelerated by technology, especially television, says Vattimo, so that “everything tends to flatten out at the level of contemporaneity and simultaneity” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 10). As a result, we no longer experience a strong sense of teleology in worldly events, but, instead, we are confronted with a manifold of differences and partial teleologies that can only be judged aesthetically. The truth of postmodern experience is therefore best realized in art and rhetoric.
The Nietzschean sense of overcoming modernity is “to dissolve modernity through a radicalization of its own innate tendencies,” says Vattimo (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 166). These include the production of “the new” as a value and the drive for critical overcoming in the sense of appropriating foundations and origins. In this respect, however, Nietzsche shows that modernity results in nihilism: all values, including “truth” and “the new,” collapse under critical appropriation. The way out of this collapse is the moment of eternal recurrence, when we affirm the necessity of error in the absence of foundations. Vattimo also finds this new attitude toward modernity in Heidegger's sense of overcoming metaphysics, insofar as he suggests that overcoming the enframing lies with the possibility of a turn within the enframing itself. Such a turn would mean deepening and distorting the technological essence, not destroying it or leaving it behind. Furthermore, this would be the meaning of being, understood as the history of interpretation (as “weak” being) instead of a grounding truth, and the hermeneutics of being would be a distorted historicism. Unlike traditional hermeneutics, Vattimo argues that reconstructing the continuity of contemporary experience cannot be accomplished without unifying art and rhetoric with information from the sciences, and this requires philosophy “to propose a ‘rhetorically persuasive’, unified view of the world, which includes in itself traces, residues, or isolated elements of scientific knowledge” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 179). Vattimo's philosophy is therefore the project of a postmodern hermeneutics, in contrast to the Parisian thinkers who do not concern themselves with meaning or history as continuous unities.
