Secularization as Kenosis

176 | postmodern condition and secularity
particular. As a young man Vattimo had a close bond with institutional religion. He
describes himself as a militant Catholic. In his student years Vattimo turned his back
on the Church, its ethics and metaphysics. Under the influence of his promotor, the
Italian philosopher Pareyson, he started to read the great anti-modern philosophers Nietzsche
and Heidegger. Nietzsche and Heidegger would remain the two most important
philosophers for Vattimo. Only Gadamer, whose assistant he was for some time, approaches
them in importance. Like many of his generation he felt attracted to socialism
and the activism of the left. In his books of that time, however, he distanced himself
from a purely economic revolution in a Maoist and Marxist sense. He suggested that
the Maoist revolution should form an alliance with the bourgeois avant-garde: so that
the revolution would not end up in a proletarian regime. He emphasized the need for
liberation from the values of a Christian-bourgeois society in terms of a psycho-analytic
theory. 5 The suggestion of a broadening of the revolution made him suspect in radical,
left circles. His attitude to the socialist agenda became more critical and Vattimo began
to see more and more that the ideology of the left is potentially violent. 6 Moving away
from the violence of leftist ideology, he became devoted to studying the intrinsic connection
between violence and ideology. Vattimo became increasingly disappointed with
mainstream left parties and he realized that they did not have a real alternative to the
expansion of the neo-liberal economic system. This made him rediscover the meaning
of communism. As a member of the communist party, he worked as a member of the
European Parliament for four years. 7 After that, he returned to the University of Turin,
where he teaches as a professor of philosophy.
In order to make clearer the relation Vattimo has to the preceding discussions, I will
give a general impression of Vattimo’s relationship to the philosophy of Richard Rorty.
So far, we have demonstrated, through a reading of Rorty, that there is an intrinsic link
between postmodern philosophy and the concept of secularity. Rorty establishes this
link by speaking of secularization as temporalization. By giving this broader definition
of the concept he can use it to refer both to the transition from a metaphysical-Christian
to a modern-scientific culture and to the transition from a modern-scientific culture
to a postmodern-literary culture. Our reading of Rorty also made clear that this is
not the end for religion. In order to get rid of positivism’s obsession with ‘truth as
correspondence’ – for Rorty nothing but a secularization of monotheism – he argues
that a polytheistic philosophy of religion fits the postmodern condition best. So there is
a postmodern turn to religion in the philosophy of Rorty, but this is not a return to the
metaphysics of premodern religion, but rather an overcoming of metaphysics, through
polytheistic religion.
A significant overlapping concern is given here with Vattimo’s research program.
As Nancy Frankenberry remarks, ‘it is the secularization thesis that undergirds both
their narratives.’ 8 For Vattimo, however, the insistence on secularization is not a means
to overcome Christianity, but rather a legitimate continuation of Christianity in the
5 Erik Meganck, Nihilistische caritas?: secularisatie bij Gianni Vattimo (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 5.
6 Meganck, 4.
7 Vattimo was a member of the Party of Italian Communists. Between 1999 and 2004 he was a member
of the European Parliament, for the Party of European Socialists. For an overview of his op-eds see his website
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8 Nancy Frankenberry, ‘Weakening Religious Belief: Vattimo, Rorty, and the Holism of the Mental’, in:
Santiago Zabala, editor, Weakening Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2007), 282.