Between Nihilism and Politics

The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo

Silvia Benso, Brian Schroeder

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438432861
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This is the first collection of essays in English that deals directly with the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo from a purely critical perspective, further establishing his rightful place in contemporary European philosophy. Vattimo, who first came to prominence as the translator of Gadamer's Truth and Method into Italian, is now considered to be more than a philosopher and prolific author. As a former member of the European Parliament (1999–2004), he is also a public intellectual. This book takes up his call to advance the crucial active and affirmative engagement with thinking and society. More than just interpretations of Vattimo's thinking, these essays are expressions of the new impetus given to hermeneutic philosophy by "weak thought, " the term he coined for how we think now in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The development of Vattimo's thinking is reflected in the organization of the volume, divided into three main parts: Hermeneutics and Nihilism, Metaphysics and Religion, and Politics and Technology.

Part One

Hermeneutics and Nihilism

1

The Experiment of Nihilism

Interpretation and Experience of Truth in Gianni Vattimo

GAETANO CHIURAZZI

Hermeneutics and Nihilism

In an essay contained in The End of Modernity, Vattimo offers what can be considered as the cornerstone in his philosophical proposal: the nexus between hermeneutics and nihilism.¹ This nexus is theorized in relation to the way in which, in the fundamental text of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics—specifically, in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method—the problem of the truth is posed from out of the experience of art. For Vattimo, this experience has a peculiar nihilistic undertone because it is the experience of an “ungrounding” (sfondamento) in which one experiences the loss of cogency and continuity of one's own world. That is, one experiences that dimension of historicity that for Gadamer joins artistic and historical experiences, but that for Vattimo is still thought in excessively cumulative and even substantialist (in Hegel's sense) terms. In truth, such a nihilistic dimension is not absent from Gadamer's analysis either; inspired by Hegel's concept of Erfahrung, he emphasizes the negative moment that destabilizes the certainties of the subject and induces it to a readjustment of its worldview.

Taking into account such an ungrounding, destructive effect, one can say that every experience of truth requires an interpretation, and therefore that truth is interpretation. In its ungrounding feature, the experience of truth is the experience of an interruption of meaning (senso). The subsequent need for integration is not, however, mere assimilation or mirroring; nor can it be, because it translates itself into the modification of the world of the one who has such an experience. The conception of truth as conformity of the proposition to the thing is thus overcome in favor of a “more comprehensive notion founded on the concept of Erfahrung, that is, on experience as a modification that the subject undergoes when it encounters something that truly has relevance for it” (EM 123).

Ten years after, the relation between nihilism and hermeneutics is resumed by Vattimo in Beyond Interpretation² in the attempt at defining positively the hermeneutic meaning of the concept of truth. The general framework of the book is expressed in the first chapter, titled “The Nihilistic Vocation of Hermeneutics” (BI 1–14). Here Vattimo manifests his discomfort toward the ecumenical physiognomy that hermeneutics has taken up in the contemporary philosophical scenario, which on the one hand has turned hermeneutics into a sort of koine of Western culture (this fact had been positively considered in a 1980s essay),³ and on the other hand risks excessively diluting its meaning and neutralizing its philosophical import. Such import lies in its “nihilistic vocation,” as Vattimo reasserts. The nihilistic vocation is not entirely explicit, though, in the definition that in these pages Vattimo offers of hermeneutics as “the philosophical theory of the interpretative character of every experience of truth” (BI 7). Contrary to what one might be led to believe by a merely aestheticist conception of interpretation in the sense of its complete liberation from any bond, that is, as complete identification of interpretation and transformation (as one finds for example in Deleuze or Derrida), the interpretative character is here tightly anchored to an experience of truth. What transforms is truth, and interpretation is not the creative act hovering over the nothingness of nonsense, but rather the transformative rearticulation of meaning (senso). The cited definition in fact presupposes that 1) there is truth, 2) one has experience of truth, 3) such experience is of an interpretative kind, and 4) hermeneutics is a theory not of truth but of the experience of truth. If one wants to speak of nihilism, this does not consist so much in some metaphysical thesis perhaps expressed in the claim that “truth does not exist,” but rather in the experience one has thereof.⁴ Nihilistic is the way in which such an experience presents itself to “hermeneutic consciousness.” The sense of the encounter between nihilism and hermeneutics should be grasped, I argue, on this ground of the experience of truth—perhaps the only way in which one can speak of truth. Without the mediation of experience, such a nexus is doomed to being the statement of the mere idealistic consummation of the world, which subtracts its very effectiveness, that is, its sense, from interpretation. In the following pages I attempt an explanation of such a definition of hermeneutics as “the philosophical theory of the interpretative character of every experience of truth” through some central guiding concepts in Vattimo's thought—concepts that implicitly affect the definition and can therefore help to cast some light on it.

The Experience of Truth: Transformation and Event

Hermeneutics is a theory not of truth but of the experience of truth. All concepts of truth that it can offer can be understood only if one keeps in mind such a specification. The truth of which hermeneutics speaks is not the object of knowledge but rather the form of an experience. It is not the telos of a specific and methodical activity but rather that in which we are constantly immerged and that escapes our ability to mastery. The first connotation of truth understood in this way, that is, from out of the experience one has thereof, is that it transforms.

The vindication of the truth of the humanities (scienze umane) is based on such transformative character. That there is a truth of the humanities is attested by the fact that they produce effects, they have their own Wirkung, and therefore their own reality (Wirklichkeit). The interpretative dimension of the experience of truth consists in this possibility of letting oneself be transformed in the encounter with it, that is, of truly having an experience. An experience that is truly such is the one that is true experience, that is, the one “that effectively modifies the one who has it.”⁵

As already remarked, Vattimo finds this idea of the transformative character of the experience of truth in Gadamer, who in Truth and Method proposes a theory of hermeneutic experience that is at the same time a theory of the hermeneutic character of experience. The dialogical relation enacted in the encounter with a text becomes the model of experience in general. Experience is dialogue, alternation of questions and answers. Questions arise as consequence of an interruption of sense, exactly as when in a text something does not give itself to clear understanding and demands interpretation. This experience is the experience of a shock [urto]: “In fact we have experiences when we are shocked by things that do not accord with our expectations…. A question presses itself on us; we can no longer avoid it and persist in our accustomed opinion.”⁶ In this impossibility to avoid the self-imposition of truth from out of the question that it asks, Gadamer sees the objective dimension of the humanities, that is, their escaping the subjectivism in which the unilateral methodical conception belonging to natural sciences would like to exile them. Methodical is the moment of verification, and not the moment in which truth announces itself. The latter is “extra-methodical” precisely because it escapes all subjective mastery and domination. It is not we who guide the unfolding of the game of experience; it is experience that leads us; our task is that of corresponding to such continuous opening of truth, to its character of event. The extra-methodical dimension of the truth that Gadamer defends is for Vattimo expressed precisely by such Heideggerian concept.⁷ Vattimo emphasizes the expropriating character thereof, which indicates a happening that is not in the subject's mastery. Truth “transforms us” precisely because it takes us away from “our accustomed opinion,” from certainty and obviousness. It is opening because it consists in a continuous questioning of our horizons and prejudices.

What emerges powerfully from such hermeneutic conception (of the experience) of truth is its nonconforming character—truth does not conform, it changes. The method by which one ascertains a new formulation of truth, that is, by which one ascertains the truth-character of a statement, has the function of “making one find the right way,”⁸ of reconstructing a sense after the fact that truth has forced us to deviate—that is, after it has produced a “disjuncture” in our convictions. If hermeneutics raises its protests against the traditional conception of truth as adaequatio (conformity) (a conception that is not denied but rather considered as secondary and derivative, as Vattimo remarks following Heidegger), this is because such an idea of truth, although legitimate, represents the conformist moment thereof, and is prone to exposure to ideologization when not even dogmatism. The motivations for this nonconforming but rather disruptive and uncanny conception of the experience of truth are not only ethical. Ultimately there are also strictly gnoseological reasons: truth gives itself first of all as the experience of an interruption.⁹ This is true for artistic as well as for scientific experience because it is true for experience in general.¹⁰ Truth can only manifest itself in negative form. Even in scientific experience, the moment when truth shows itself is not the moment of the alleged confirmation of a theory, which after all is always a nonfalsification (a nonnegation); rather, it is the moment of falsification, when the truth is other than what one thought. In some passages Vattimo explicitly relates this experience to the ontological difference, that is, to the idea that Being (truth) never completely coincides with any of its historical realizations.¹¹ Truth (like reality for Heidegger) is the realm of the possible, of the “not yet.”

Against Hegel's beautiful ethicity, against the risk of classicism, which he thinks can be detected in Gadamer's aesthetic proposal, Vattimo thinks the experience of truth as a shock similar to the one produced by the encounter with avant-garde art.¹² As we have already remarked, the need for historical continuity ends up prevailing in Gadamer over the experience of interruption that is registered in the encounter with the work of art. Such experience is perhaps better perceived precisely by that which Gadamer criticizes, namely, the punctuality of the aesthetic consciousness. “What takes place in the work of art is a particular instance of the ungrounding of historicity, which is announced as a suspension of the hermeneutic continuity of the subject with itself and with history. Aesthetic consciousness, as an abstract series of discrete instants in time, is the mode by which the subject lives the leap into the Ab-grund of its own mortality” (EM 125).

The Being of Truth: Opening as Dwelling

The experience of truth is true experience because it modifies and changes the one who has it. It modifies and changes such an individual in view not of greater conformity but rather of further liberation. It is therefore not possible to describe it in the fundamentally Apollinian terms in which the metaphysical tradition has always described it, that is, as an experience of luminosity, incontrovertible evidence, as harmony, integration, and fulfillment (see BI 107 ff). It is not the case of the bright morning in which, according to Nietzsche's image, the pandemonium of all free spirits rises¹³ (the Hegelian intonation of the image cannot be missed; the true, according to Hegel, is the feast of thought, “the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk”).¹⁴ It is rather the crepuscular experience of finitude, limit, and mortality. This does not mean closure; on the contrary, the way in which the hermeneutic notion of truth is usually thought of is “opening” precisely because it is first and foremost an experience that discloses rather than concludes a possibility.

“Opening” means the condition of possibility of all being-true (esservero)—one can sum up in this way Heidegger's reply to Husserl's exigency to find the conditions of truth of logical formations within a prepredicative terrain. These conditions are made by Heidegger to coincide with Dasein's very existence, which is opening because through its own self-giving it opens a world, that is, it renders beings accessible in the form of pre-apophantic meanings orienting Dasein's behaviors, that is, giving sense to Dasein's acting. Truth as opening is being-in-the-world, the Da of Dasein, what Heidegger also expresses as “dwelling.” There is truth because of the simple fact that Dasein is.

For Vattimo, this way of dwelling in the truth (essere nella verità) is similar to the competence of a librarian who knows how to move in his own library. “Whereas the idea of truth as correspondence conceives of knowledge of the true as the possession of an ‘object’ by way of an adequate representation, the truth of dwelling is by contrast the competence of the librarian who does not possess entirely, in a single act of transparent comprehension, all of the contents of all the books amongst which he lives, nor even the first principles upon which the contents depend. One cannot compare such knowledge-possession through the command of first principles to the competence of librarianship, which knows where to look because it knows how the volumes are classified and is also acquainted with the ‘subject catalogue’” (BI 82–83). The “truth” of the librarian is the truth of the one who “knows” the library in such a way as to be able to orient oneself within it, to know how to find a book even when one does not know exactly what the book is about. The librarian knows what to do; he does not possess the whole field of knowledge, but knows the context within which to move so as eventually to gain knowledge. His behavior is guided by that pre-understanding that in Being and Time, section 31 Heidegger defines as “können,” that is, to know how to do, be capable of facing something, be able to. To the extent that this competence is true, it enables one to do things, and it constitutes a “power/ability” (potere). In the end, it is the competence of phronesis, a pragmatic competence guiding action when a defined method is not available. That spiritual sciences (scienze dello spirito) have been dragged into the wave of natural sciences, to the method of which they should conform, constitutes a deep misrecognition of the fact that it is rather the latter that have drawn the sense of their own methodological effectiveness from a realm that is non-naturalistic and not focused on mere observation. Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of modern experimental science, expressed the sense of the scientific method in this manner: “The rule of religion, that a man should show his faith by his works, holds good in natural philosophy too. Science also must be known by works. It is by the witness of works, rather than by logic or even observation, that truth is revealed and established.”¹⁵

The hermeneutic concept of truth is inspired by such a pragmatic effectiveness, which coincides with its transformative power. With good reason can such concept be considered “more originary” than the merely theoretical concept of adaequatio. This is something that Vattimo claims even in front of Gadamer's apparent shyness on this point—moving within truth, dwelling in the truth means possessing this kind of orientating knowledge, which could be defined as a “know how” rather than a “know what.”

The transcendental character of such a positive definition of the truth as opening gives account also of its negative, as it were “nihilist,” definition, that is, of the opening as interruption of a given sense, as rupture of a horizon. Truth opens new possibilities showing that the ones that have already been consolidated and realized can be modified. What one means by “opening” is not a horizon that hovers over and circumscribes experience in a structural and atemporal manner; rather, it is the being open of experience. The transcendental meaning of the notion of truth as opening can be defended only if one considers it, in a Kantian manner, as the form of experience and nothing else. Truth is truth of experience, in the subjective and objective sense of the genitive “of”—it is that which opens experience by rendering its sclerotizations fluid, and it is experience itself insofar as open. The more one experiences truth, the more is one's own experience open, not secured in its own dogmatisms, available to the encounter with the other. As Gadamer writes, “The hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma.”¹⁶ Experienced human beings are those who, from out of experience and the suffering that experience brings with itself—Aeschylus' pathei mathos [learning through suffering]—become aware of their own finitude, and understand the limits within which they can project and a future is open to them; that is, they understand that all of their expectations and projects are limited.¹⁷ This sense of the limit does not translate at all into a closure; it leads to a greater opening toward experience. The experience of truth produces an opening toward new experience. The experienced individual is a human being free for experience—free for truth.¹⁸

The Interpretative Character of Experience: Verwindung as Emancipation

The encounter with truth has the feature of an interruption, the resolution of which implies a transformation. This moment of resolution is the properly interpretative one; the ungrounding effect of truth implies the interruption and becoming opaque of a previously constituted, given, and taken-for-granted sense. The experience of truth is not the moment of the disclosedness or transparent luminosity of sense; rather, it is the moment of its darkening, the moment when the legibilit...

Table of contents

• Series Page
• Part One. Hermeneutics and Nihilism
• Part Two. Metaphysics and Religion
• Part Three. Politics and Technology
• Contributors