Secularization as Kenosis

186 | postmodern condition and secularity
centering around such notions as ‘freedom, choice, and unpredictability of behaviour’. 60
The emergence of nihilism, and the historizing of difference, lead to a culture in
which the human subject is no longer in the center. Vattimo thus agrees with Heidegger’s
critique of humanism. For Heidegger, humanism lies at the root of the reification,
technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world. 61 Instead of
trying to save the core of humanism, Vattimo suggest seeing the crisis of humanism
as a part of the crisis of metaphysics. The centrality of the subject is at the root of
both metaphysics and its ‘most advanced development’: technology. We can neither
reappropriate humanism, nor leave it behind. Instead we relate to it in the mode of
Verwindung. For Heidegger, Verwindung means healing. We have to recover from humanism
and metaphysics. What we cannot do is simply ‘amputate’ it. Vattimo sees the
emergence of a mass culture, made possible by technology, as the postmodern mode
of humanism. 62 Thus secularization, in the meaning Vattimo ascribes to it, not only
concerns the relation of Church and state, but is also characterized by a post-human
perspective. The human self is now considered as composed of ‘many mortal souls’. 63
In Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger, there is one more element that is significant for
Vattimo’s understanding of secularity. In the wake of Heidegger, there is also a philosophical
reflection on the idea of Lebenswelt. Vattimo describes this as a philosophy
centering around the idea of a world that ‘stands prior to any possible fixing of categories.’
A turn to the world would, for Vattimo, imply staying within the scheme of
subjectivity and objectivity. His rejection of Gadamer’s interpretation of the notion of
Erde in the work of Heidegger is instrcutive here. For Gadamer, the idea of Erde functions
as a critique of the centrality of subjective consciousness. For Vattimo, however,
Heidegger is after a perspective that leaves the duality of subject and object behind. As
Vattimo sees it, the ‘recovery’ of the irdisch or earthly character of Dasein, cannot be
understood in terms of a reappropriation. 64 Being, for Vattimo, is an immanent experience
of Ereignis, but this immanent experience may not be understood in a material
sense. The immanentism Vattimo has in mind is characterized by a differential logic,
according to which Being shows itself in the experience of the continuously changing.
Vattimo’s position in contemporary philosophy can thus be located more precisely.
As a postmodern thinker, he confronts the reappropriative intention. Instead of saving
from nihilism a core of human subjectivity and humanism, Vattimo’s effort is to get
1.
60 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 34.
61 Gail Soffer, ‘Heidegger, humanism, and the destruction of history’, The Review of Metaphysics 1 (1996),
62 “Technology does not represent the crisis of humanism because the triumph of rationalization subverts
rationalistic values, as superficial analyses have led us to believe; rather, it does so because – in representing
the fulfillment of metaphysics – it calls humanism to an act of overcoming or Verwindung.” He
sketches the perspective of an overcoming of metaphysics, which is also an overcoming of humanism, as follows:
“. . . humanity can take leave of its own subjectivity, which is defined in terms of the immortality of the
soul, and can instead recognize that the self is a bundle of ‘many mortal souls’, precisely because existence
in a technologically advanced society is no longer characterized by continual danger and consequent acts of
violence. Vattimo, End of Modernity, 41.
63 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 41.
64 “The intensity with which Heidegger explores in his late works the notion of Ereignis and the related
concepts of Vereignen, Ent-eignen, and Über-eignen, can be explained as more than just a concern for
the nature of Being as an event which is not simply present; rather, it is an effort to free his original concept
of Eigentlichkeit, or authenticity, from any suggestion of potential reappropriation which would still be
metaphysical and humanistic.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 44.