Secularization as Kenosis

204 | postmodern condition and secularity
secularization is used to affirm the world and to save it from transcendental abstractions,
nihilism is usually defined as a denial of the inherent worth of reality and the impossibility
of knowing that world. 141 The postmodern habit to refuse to speak of ‘the world’
and instead to speak in a fragmented mode of multiple worlds, makes the question urgent
whether the idea of the world has any meaning left. 142 In this section I will set out
to demonstrate that Vattimo’s position in the end denies the world. In this perspective
his reflections on art and the artificial nature of postmodern society are very instructive.
In Vattimo’s philosophy of language there is no reference between words and the
world, as the only conceivable meaning is in intertextual allusions. The world itself has
no meaning.
Whilst single things belong to the world insofar as they are inserted in a referential
totality of significance . . . the world as such and as a whole does not refer and thus has
no significance. Anxiety is a mark of this insignificance, the utter gratuitousness of
the fact that the world is 143
In the primacy of fear and the loss of “sense of reality”, 144 Vattimo echoes the concerns
of existentialists like Sartre. Despite his effort to distance himself from the humanism
of the existentialists, both observe an Entwirklichung of the world and man. 145 When
Vattimo uses the word secularization to express the way man is in the world; he does not
mean a restored relation with the world, but a definite loss of the world. The very notion
of reality becomes problematic. He sees the idea of a single, objective reality springing
from a desire to escape a world of contingency. Giving up of reality is the radical
consequence of modernity, as the metaphysical notions of ground and a systematic
account of reality reach a culmination in technology. In technology, an objectifying
stance is applied to man and the inner self. In this sense metaphysics becomes fully
apparent in its collapse. Everything dissolves in communication. In the postmodern
world, every account of the world turns out to be but another local construction, a
dialect as it were. When all accounts of reality are exposed as just as many contingent
narratives, there is no need to mourn the loss of the single world; instead this can be
experienced as liberation and emancipation.
5.3.1 World Dissolution as a Mark of Postmodern Culture
At several places, Vattimo refers for his account of the relation man has to the world,
to the three stages of Verfall in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In his Götzendämmerung Nietzsche
distinguishes between three stages of a Verfall. First he discerns the stage of
the Platonic Hinterwelt. According to Plato the truth of the world was to be thought of
141 I refer here particularly to Nietzsche’s reduction of the world to ‘will to power’ Richard Schacht,
‘Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm’, in: Robert Audi, editor, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 615.
142 Silverman voices this question explicitly in Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Can the Globalized World Be in-the-
World?’, in: Weakening Philosophy. Essays in honour of Gianni Vattimo (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 2007), 111.
143 Vattimo, Transparent Society, 150.
144 Vattimo, Transparent Society, 24.
145 The term Entwirklichung in relation to Sartre is from Gerrit Cornelis van Niftrik, De boodschap van
Sartre (Callenbach, 1953), 201. He also uses the term Entweltlichung with regard to Sartre.