In the latest issue of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, our friend Father Thomas Guarino describes the “postmodern Christianity” of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, said by Guarino to be a major voice in Europe now being increasingly read and discussed here thanks to the translations of his works by Columbia University Press. “Despite its patent opposition to anything resembling historic Christian orthodoxy, Vattimo’s interpretation of Christianity constitutes an influential achievement that has proven, either explicitly or implicitly, to be attractive to large segments of contemporary society.”
Vattimo is most famous for his idea of “weak thought,” writes Guarino in The Return of Religion in Europe?:
It is perhaps best to understand Vattimo’s weak thought as an attempt to reconstruct rationality in a postmodern way. By this I mean that the Torinese intends to move contemporary construals of rationality away from modern notions of reason, with their aggressive assertions about the “certainly true,” the “really real” and “absolute objectivity,” and with their insinuations that evidence and warrants are unproblematic concepts, readily available to settle questions of interpretative adequacy. Weak thought, on the contrary, holds that the world is not simply given to us as pure, uninterpreted, unmediated reality.
If contemporary philosophy has taught us anything, it is that the world is known by men and women who are already deeply enmeshed in history and tradition, who are themselves entirely theory-laden. Vattimo is convinced, then, that the world is “given” to the postmodern christianity of gianni vattimo 19us as an always-already interpreted reality. And precisely because of this, we must avoid “strong thought” with its blinkered claims to truth, finality, and objectivity and with its concomitant avoidance of historical contingency. No ultimate, normative foundations exist that are available to us outside of interpretation.
There exists no “evidence” that is not already deeply implicated in determinate sociocultural forms of life and in already elaborated interpretative structures. Consequently, we have no clearly available archai or Gründe, undisputed first principles or warrants, that could settle matters finally, that could offer definitive notions of truth that would escape perpetual provisionality.
April 13th, 2011 | 4:21 pm
from CS Lewis:
It is your duty to to fix the lines (of doctrine) clearly in your minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession. This is your duty not specially as Christians or as priests but as honest men. There is a danger here of the clergy developing a special professional conscience which obscures the very plain moral issue. Men who have passed beyond these boundary lines in either direction are apt to protest that they have come by their unorthodox opinions honestly. In defense of those opinions they are prepared to suffer obloquy and to forfeit professional advancement. They thus come to feel like martyrs. But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing in your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of the other.
— Christian Apologetics, C. S. Lewis, Easter 1945
http://www.jknirp.com/lewis.htm
April 13th, 2011 | 4:52 pm
Just from the excerpt here, I can’t tell what distinguishes Vattimo’s thought from the cultural contingency relativism of so many other postmodern thinkers. It’s not like I’ve never before heard anyone say that there can be no reliable truth claims unencumbered by cultural baggage, and that we therefore have to refrain from making confident judgments. That’s pretty much just the standard post-modern epistemological line, as far as I know.
Can anybody tell me what makes Vattimo particularly interesting?
April 13th, 2011 | 6:15 pm
Ethan, I’m really not sure either, although I haven’t read him. I suppose it has something to do with his being Christian, although he doesn’t seem to be saying anything not already said by Kierkegaard 150 years ago.
Also, he seems merely to replace the Gründe of reason with the Gründe of the observation of the situated contingency of perception, and is likely just as inflexible in doing so. I guess the trick with respecting the limits of perception is about cultivating personal humility rather than constructing more theories to explain the inadequacy of the previous theories. Sort of like a Zen thing, or something…
April 13th, 2011 | 10:55 pm
Kevin Hart has a very critical assessment of Vattimo here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22029
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