Gianni Vattimo

Works

• 1983Weak Thought

  A collection edited with Pier Aldo Rovatti that gave its name to a programme: philosophy after the end of metaphysics without claims to ultimate foundations.

• 1985The End of Modernity

  Reads Nietzsche’s nihilism and Heidegger’s “Verwindung” of metaphysics as the key to a postmodern culture without a single history or foundation.

Position

Vattimo combined the hermeneutics of Pareyson and Gadamer with Nietzsche and Heidegger. If, as Nietzsche wrote, there are no facts, only interpretations, and if metaphysics, as Heidegger argued, cannot simply be overcome but only accepted, twisted and got over (Verwindung), then philosophy has to give up the claim to ultimate foundations. Vattimo called this “weak thought”: not a lack of rigour, but a thinking that accepts the weakening of strong structures – Being, truth, authority – as the course of modern history and sees in it a chance for pluralism and for less violence. He read hermeneutics as the philosophy of this nihilism and, from the 1990s, interpreted secularisation as the fulfilment of the Christian message of kenosis, God’s self-emptying in the incarnation, with charity as the only limit of interpretation. Richard Rorty found in him an ally for a post-metaphysical, liberal culture, and with Jacques Derrida he discussed the return of religion. Critics objected that weak thought slides into relativism and cannot justify the emancipation it promises; Catholic theologians questioned his reading of Christianity; and his former student Maurizio Ferraris turned against the primacy of interpretation with the “new realism” (2012). Vattimo held that hermeneutics is itself an interpretation, not a description of reality as it is (“Della realtà”, 2012). In July 2014, during the Gaza war, Vattimo said in an interview with Radio 24, as reported in the press, that he would like to shoot “those bastard Zionists” and that Europeans should club together to buy Hamas better weapons. Renzo Gattegna, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, called the remarks unacceptable; Ralf Fücks of the Heinrich Böll Foundation saw in them antisemitism in the guise of a militant anti-Zionism and proposed considering whether the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, which Vattimo had received in 2002, should be withdrawn.

Life & context

Gianni Vattimo was born on 4 January 1936 in Turin. He studied philosophy at the University of Turin with Luigi Pareyson and graduated in 1959 with a thesis on Aristotle; from 1963 he studied in Heidelberg with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith, and in 1972 he published the Italian translation of Gadamer’s “Truth and Method”. He taught at Turin from 1964, as professor of aesthetics from 1969 and of theoretical philosophy from 1982, and was a visiting professor at several American universities. His early books dealt with Heidegger (1963) and Nietzsche (“The Subject and the Mask”, 1974). The volume “Weak Thought” (1983), edited with Pier Aldo Rovatti, and “The End of Modernity” (1985) made him widely known as a theorist of philosophical postmodernism. From the 1990s he wrote about his return to Christianity (“Belief”, 1996), edited a volume on religion with Jacques Derrida after a seminar on Capri in 1994, and published “The Future of Religion” with Richard Rorty (2005). He was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004 and from 2009 to 2014 and later described his political position as a “hermeneutic communism” (2011, with Santiago Zabala). He died on 19 September 2023.

Further main works

• Being, History and Language in Heidegger (Essere, storia e linguaggio in Heidegger, 1963)
• The Subject and the Mask (Il soggetto e la maschera, 1974)
• Belief (Credere di credere, 1996)
• Hermeneutic Communism (with Santiago Zabala, 2011)