Secularization as Kenosis

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an end of metaphysics after which we can no longer rely on abstract principles. According
to Vattimo, difference can easily be used as, again, a principle. Difference as
the principle of an endless deferral of meaning opposes the interpretation of the end of
metaphysics. Therefore, Vattimo criticizes the principle of difference in Derrida’s philosophy.
Vattimo thinks a truly postmodern and post-metaphysical philosophy should
be historicist, and combine ethics, hermeneutics and nihilism. In Derrida’s différance
Vattimo suspects a principle that is not itself historic, but transcendent. He proposes
thinking of difference, not in the quasi-transcendental sense of the French postmodernists
and phenomenologists such as Henry and Marion. The religious experience that
lies beyond metaphysics is understood by Vattimo as an experience that takes place in
the world. The experience of difference is not an experience of difference with a Being
beyond being, in an ungraspable realm of alterity, rather it is the experience of events
in history. In a genuinely non-transcendental account of human agency, man is always
already in the world he is trying to interpret. 57 Thus, for Vattimo, an ontology that
is proper to the postmodern condition does not return to a duality of immanence and
transcendence, but respects the postmodern condition as thoroughly immanent. He sets
out to develop a position that avoids the ‘nostalgic’ interpretation of Heidegger, which
centers around the notion of difference. In the interpretation of Derrida and others the
essential promise of Heidegger’s philosophy is lost. Heidegger effectively criticized the
modern schema of subject and object and tried to think of man as part of the world. He
criticized a conception of man as an external spectator in favor of a conception of man
as being part of the world. 58 The centrality of the ontological difference between the
world, man and Being, frustrates the possibility of a truly historical philosophy.
A Nihilistic Culture
Vattimo’s contribution to contemporary philosophy consists in a historicist interpretation
of difference. Rejecting the conservative interpretations of Heidegger that often
insist on the loss of authenticity in modern culture and the threat of technology, as an
alienating force, Vattimo reads him in a Nietzschean way, as a phase in the advent of nihilism.
Being, in the Nietzschean reading of Heidegger, is not the quasi-mystical Being
beyond being, rather it is what shows itself in historical events. The accomplishment
of nihilism will open a new horizon that will be a truly new experience, that no longer
feels the loss of transcendence as a tragic fate. Technology is not so much an alienating
force, rather in essence it is the entrance gate to this new mode of experience. 59
Far from a defensive attitude towards the emergence of a technological and nihilistic
culture, Vattimo refuses to define a realm of authentic human existence and rejects the
dualism of science and humanities, according to which there is a genuine human realm
57 Vattimo is after a hermeneutic ontology as ‘. . . that peculiar link . . . between thought focused on
existence in its concreteness and historicity on the one hand – and the renewed attempt to tackle the problems
of Truth and Being on the other hand.’ Vattimo, Nietzsche, 6–7.
58 Ger Groot, ‘Gianni Vattimo en het geloof in de filosofie’, Thomas More lezing 2000, in: Gianni
Vattimo and Ger Groot, editors, Een zwak geloof. Christendom voorbij de metafysica (Kampen: Agora, 2000),
10.
59 He asserts that for Heidegger, the essence of technology is not something technological, but belongs
to the Überlieferung, that started with Parmenides and that it is the accomplishment of metaphysics. Vattimo,
End of Modernity, 29.