GIANNI VATTIMO

1936-2023

In Praise of a Towering European Intellect

By Claudio Gallo

When asked what philosophy's purpose is, Gianni Vattimo loved to say that it is crucial because it is useless, but you cannot live without it.

The joke meant to mark the difference with science that, in Heidegger's words, does not think precisely because it is useful. We have to resign ourselves to live in a world without Vattimo's brilliant irony that used to remind us how reason, which throughout history was conceived as a metaphysical imposition, may become a terrible dictator.

He died at 87 in a hospital just outside Turin, the former industrial capital of northern Italy, where he dwelled all his life. With him disappears one of the last few Italian philosophers known worldwide.

In 1999 and 2009, he was elected to the European Parliament. In his late age, he was out of the spotlight as a philosopher. The media circus didn't forgive him for some positions, such as the defense of protesters against the high-speed trains in Susa Valley (the ones that should connect Turin to Lyon) and his solidarity (sometimes expressed with too much eagerness) with the shamefully forgotten Palestinian cause.

Vattimo was one of the great thinkers who came to terms with the postwar crisis that led to our Age of Anxiety on steroids. The backbone of his approach was Nietzsche and Heidegger, who he transformed into the masters of postmodernism that unmasked what they perceived as the centennial lie of the metaphysic.

Western Thought betrayed Being, making a concept of it, posing the base of societies based on inherent violence and oppression in that way. But reality doesn't have a peculiar structure that is its meaning; there is nothing essential at the bottom of the real. In the end, Being is nothing else than language.

From Plato to NATO (quoting the title of a famous book), the meaning was imposed by the very frame of our traditional way of thinking, while the only decent way to look at reality is by re-interpreting it every time, with an almost Nietzschean image: dancing over its void.

Reading Heidegger through Nietzsche, Vattimo thinks there is not an unilinear path nor a goal in history but a "plurality of interpretations". This situation leads us to a kind of nihilism that is possible to call compassionate, not a gloomy closure but an attitude to live affirmatively.

The will to see the bottomless reality through the richness of the possible interpretations means reaching a land of plenty in human relationships. Inside this "conquest of abundance", to quote the late Feyerabend (obviously, his relativism had a pretty different horizon), is a way to try to defuse the violence and the tyrannical imposition of dominant metaphysical thought.

Vattimo saw this process as weakening the strong structure of Western cultural forms. His famous "weak thought" doesn't search for stable philosophical answers or eternal certainty but aims to the endless play of interpretation. This weakness is, in some respects, not weak at all.

As Santiago Zabala, Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, one of Vattimo's prominent disciples, points out: "As he often explained, it is by no means a weakness of thinking as such. It's actually the strongest philosophy around because contrary to other stances, it assumes its weakness to the fullest and can therefore practice a strong theory of weakness".

Philosophy becomes politics, lining up against the constitutive violence of Western history. In the second part of his life, Vattimo recovered the Communism of his youth, abandoned for its metaphysic flaw. He proposed a "Hermeneutic Communism" with Santiago Zabala, a weakened version of Marxism that tries to mend the errors of Soviet Communism and use a multipolar vision of society to defend the deprived masses from the Iron Heel of neoliberalism.

In a world of many possible truths, the truth of Politics is based on forms of consensus that communities deliver inside historical and cultural horizons. The political approach confirms the post-Heideggerian conclusions of Vattimo: in the end, the metaphysic can't be simply overcome, it should be twisted and "distorted" to cope with the reality of our history.

The philosopher's compassionate nihilism looks like a "convalescence", but it is the only practicable form of liberation.

Vattimo wrote many pages about the controversial role of the media. Crucial to the birth of the postmodern era, he says that the media do not make our society "more transparent" but more complex. Maybe with an excess optimism (nowadays, in the Western world in which the idea was born, we are observing pluralism reduced to a mere ideology), he even saw in this chaos possibly a source of emancipation because the multiplicity of information eliminates the possibility to believe in a single reality.

In the second half of his life, since the 1990s, Vattimo rediscovered the Catholicism that was, as Marxism, so important in his youth. "Thank God I am an atheist; thank also to Jesus Christ I no longer believe in the God of the Old Testament", he said.

From the philosophical point of view, his return to Christianism passed through the work of the French philosopher René Girard. Girard thinks natural religions were conceived upon the need to create victims to keep order in society, and the ritual sacrifice continues to live in our world's depths.

In this view, Jesus was crucified not because he was, or said to be, the son of God but because he unveiled that mechanism.

Vattimo took from this perspective the idea that Christianism is essentially emancipation from violence (as the weak thought is emancipation from metaphysical violence). The difference is that the Italian philosopher considered Jesus Christ not only the man who brought light on the secret structure of society but also the one who produced the desacralized weakening that opened the door to the modern world.

He accordingly said: "Postmodern nihilism is the revised form of Christianism".

In his private life, he humbly practiced his devotion, praying every night before bed. Recently, he received a warm phone call from Pope Francesco that made him happy. He was very bright and also, in his old age, conserved the beauty of features that characterized him as a young man, when at the university a lot of young girls attended his lessons only to take a look at him even though he made no mystery of his homosexuality (in times in which this was not an easy practice). He was always ready to tell new jokes (especially with his old friend Umberto Eco), radically disproving the cliché of the pompous philosopher lost in profound thoughts.