Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 187
beyond subjectivity and humanism. Nihilism should be regarded as an entrance gate to
a new post-human experience, which is now dawning upon us. This new post-human
condition cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of social history; rather Vattimo
sees it as a new event of Being. In this sense we can speak of a postmodern metaphysics
in the work of Gianni Vattimo.
Within postmodernism, Vattimo rejects the most common interpretations of Nietzsche
and Heidegger. For Vattimo, a theological reading of Heidegger fails to benefit
from the possibilities of a truly postmetaphysical philosophy. Such a postmetaphysical
philosophy entails a positive nihilism, which enables a general aesthetization of culture,
understood as the pluralization of lifestyles typical for our postmodern culture. In postmodern,
mediatized culture, the difference between art and reality progressively breaks
down. 65 The resulting pluralism is on the one hand a very open culture, which is ready
to accept every possible experience of being as an Ereignis, as an advent of Being. On
the other hand it is less so. Vattimo vehemently rejects everything that does not measure
with this pluralism. Every attempt to articulate a sense of a sphere ‘beyond’, or a
realm of authenticity, is seen by Vattimo as a denial of the weakening of Being. In terms
of secularity, this would mean that the secular for Vattimo is no longer accepted as a
multiplicity of spheres, rather as the possibility of endless difference within the only
possible sphere, the immanent sphere of pluralism. For Vattimo this nihilistic culture is
a continuation of Europe’s religious past, in the sense that there is a ‘return of religion’
in Vattimo’s philosophy. But this returned religion has to follow the protocols of the
weakening of Being. Vattimo works out the consequences of the weakening of being by
means of the concept of secularization. This will be the subject of the next section.
5.2 secularization
The end of metaphysics in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger forms the background
against which Vattimo makes his postmodern interpretation of secularization plausible.
66 Vattimo stands at the end of a tradition that can be characterized as dualistic. 67
He shares with Rorty a strong discontent with the subject-object divide as has been accomplished
by modern philosophy. For Rorty, the Christian religion, with its idea of a
transcendent God, was itself part of this tradition. For Vattimo, however, the overcoming
of philosophical dualisms enables a return to religion. Vattimo’s postmodernism is
in many respects close to Rorty’s version of it, especially with regard to the identification
of modern philosophy and foundationalism. Whereas Rorty sees religion as of a
piece with the meta-narrative of modernity and positivism, Vattimo takes religion as a
paradigm for a more open, narrative rationality proper to postmodern man. He defines
the postmodern condition as:
. . . the epoch in which reality can no longer be conceived of as a structure solidly tied
to a sole foundation that philosophy would have the task of knowing, or that religion
would have the task of adoring. The pluralistic world in which we live cannot be
65 Gianni Vattimo, ‘Het museum en de postmoderne ervaring van kunst’, in: Gianni Vattimo and Henk
Slager, editors, De transparante samenleving (Amsterdam: Boom, 1989), 96.
66 Vattimo, Belief, 32.
67 De Wit, ‘Return to Religion’, 392–394.