Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 191
to a worldview that replaces the idiom of Christianity with the idiom of science and
progress on the other hand. Postmodernity no longer remains with this unilinear account
of secularization and its confidence about immanent closure. Therefore, Vattimo
proposes seeing the postmodern as a very specific hermeneutics of modernity that can
be explained as secularization. In postmodernity, there is a secularization of scientific
culture itself, exemplified by the emergence of modern technology and mass media. Art
and the centrality of genius prefigure within modernity the tendency to progressively
untie nature and culture. A secularized version of a scientific culture is increasingly
modeled after art. For, as Vattimo has it, ‘. . . art has found itself in the same ungrounded
condition that science and technology only today explicitly recognize themselves to
be in.’ 79 The secularization of modern rationality and its unmasking as perspectivistic
is thus at the same time a continuation and a rejection of modernity. Postmodernity
pushes secularization to its extreme. It entails a more radical sense of historicity and
recognizes an infinite number of possible perspectives. Postmodernism, in the form of
art’s occupation with the new, was present in modernity from its very beginning. 80
To what extent can Vattimo do justice to secularization, with its deep roots in
Christianity and modernity, and to his postmodern concerns with the end of the great
narratives? The key to understanding the fragile balance between secularization and
postmodernity lies in Vattimo’s historicist ontology. In a discussion of the term ‘posthistoire’
in Arnold Gehlen, Vattimo argues that, whereas modernity thought of history
as teleologic, as leading us to some point in the future in which all true knowledge
would converge, postmodernity is skeptical about that alleged ultimate, fixed goal and
finds greater worth in the new as such.
The condition that Gehlen calls post-historical does not only reflect . . . an extreme
phase of the development of technology, one at which we have not yet arrived but at
which it seems reasonable to expect to arrive; progress also becomes routine because,
in theoretical terms, the development of technology has been prepared and accompanied
by the ‘secularization’ of the very notion of progress: the history of ideas thus
leads – through a process which could also be described as the logical development
of a line of reasoning – to its voiding. For Christianity, history appears as the history
of salvation; it then becomes the search for a worldly condition of perfection, before
turning, little by little, into the history of progress. But the ideal of progress is finally
revealed to be a hollow one, since its ultimate value is to create conditions in which
further progress is possible in a guise that is always new. By depriving progress of a
destination, secularization dissolves the very notion of progress itself, as happens in
nineteenth and twentieth-century culture. 81
So, for Vattimo, we can only speak of a postmodern secularization as a non-teleological
account of history. This post-historicist awareness not only discovers the roots of secularization
in Christianity, but also sees that Christianity asks for a more radical secularization
that exposes the idea of progress as a metaphysical prejudice. Vattimo does not
understand postmodern secularity as progress in the meaning that 19th century historicism
ascribed to it. Nor is the postmodern a return to a premodern, or religious mode of
thinking; rather the postmodern notion of progress is one which is continuously aware
79 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 101.
80 “Art functions as an anticipation or emblem.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 101.
81 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 7–8 Gehlen’s essay is published as Arnold Gehlen, ‘Säkularisierung des
Fortschritts’, in: Arnold Gehlen, editor, Einblicke (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978).