Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 207
this text fully aware of the problematic coincidence of nihilism and an experience of
the world. Vattimo’s objective in this text is to show the coherence of nihilism and
hermeneutics, against the constructivist hermeneutics of Gadamer, Apel and others,
which risks retrieving a neo-Kantian idea of the subject. Against this approach, Vattimo
emphasizes the ‘nihilistic aspects’ of Heidegger’s work. 157 For Vattimo there are two
aspects of Heidegger’s work that enable a nihilistic interpretation. First, the analysis
of Dasein (existence) as a hermeneutic totality and, second, in the later works, the idea
of Andenken as a relationship to a tradition. The idea of Dasein as a hermeneutic preunderstanding
of the world, brings Vattimo to the following reflection:
Being-in-the-world does not mean being effectively in contact with all the different
things that constitute the world, but rather being always already familiar with a totality
of meanings, that is, with a context of references. In Heidegger’s analysis of the
world-character of the world, things give themselves to Dasein only within a project,
or, as Heidegger says, as tools. Dasein exists in the form of a project in which things are
only insofar as they belong to this project, or, in other words, only insofar as they have
a specific meaning in this context. This preliminary familiarity with the world, which
is identified with the very existence of Dasein, is what Heidegger calls ‘understanding’
or ‘pre-understanding’. Every act of knowledge is nothing other than an articulation
or an interpretation of this preliminary familiarity with the world. 158
Vattimo explicitly denies the idea of being ‘in contact’ with the world as entailed in
Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. The way man is in the world is a ‘thrown-ness’, that can
hardly be said to entail knowing or participating in this world. Vattimo gives a central
role to the ‘being towards death’, in the way man is related to the world. In doing so,
being in the world can be explained only in negative terms. Vattimo writes:
Dasein establishes itself as a hermeneutic totality only insofar as it continually lives
the possibility of no-longer-being-there. This condition may be described by saying
that the foundation of Dasein coincides with its groundlessness: the hermeneutic totality
of Dasein exists only in relation to the constitutive possibility of no longer being
(there). 159
Vattimo writes that Heidegger’s idea of Andenken is not simply an embeddedness in a
tradition, but more a continuing ‘mirror play’ in which nothing has a fixed meaning.
The thing is not simply given, but is given only in an Ereignis. For a thing to appear in a
context, means at the same time its dissolution in a network of references. 160 Andenken
is not establishing a connection with tradition in order to construct a positive ontology,
rather, against the forgetting of Being in the metaphyisical tradition, Heidegger proposes
entrusting oneself to tradition. To entrust oneself to tradition, however is like a
‘leap in the abyss of mortality’. Tradition is thus never a safe heaven, rather the context
in which words constantly receive new meanings. 161 For Vattimo, the awareness of this
157 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 114.
158 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 115–6.
159 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 116.
160 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 117.
161 “Tradition is the transmitting of linguistic messages that constitute the horizon within which Dasein
is thrown as an historically determined project: and tradition derives its importance from the fact that Being,
as a horizon of disclosure in which things appear, can arise only as a trace of past words or an announcement
that has been handed down to us. . . . tradition does not supply us with a fixed point of support, but rather
pushes us on in a sort of return in infinitum to the past, a return through which the historical horizons that
we inhabit become more fluid.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 120–21.