Secularization as Kenosis

178 | postmodern condition and secularity
background can the postmodern identification of philosophy with sociology be meaningful.
15
5.1.2 Weakening Philosophy
Vattimo’s philosophy is an effort to get beyond metaphysical philosophy. For him, metaphysics
is inherently violent. He writes:
All the categories of metaphysics are violent categories: being and its attributes, the
‘first’ cause, man as ‘responsible’, and even the will to power. These categories must
be ‘weakened’ or relieved of their excess of power. 16
Weakening cannot be achieved by simply falsifying metaphysics. Any falsification of
metaphysical philosophy in the name of a truer, non-metaphysical or atheist philosophy
can easily lead to an ideology which is merely another ‘strong’ metaphysical system.
Vattimo experienced this in 1968 when violence became apparent in the left revolutionaries.
17 The violence of the left was not accidental, but was implied in the metaphysical
views that underpinned it. It is not primarily physical, visible violence that is the subject
of Vattimo’s inquiries, but the way violence resides in ideology and philosophical
claims to truth. 18 Vattimo refers to his program of non-violent thinking as pensiero debole:
weak thinking. As he opposes both metaphysical philosophy and its rejection in
the name of a greater truth, the aim of weak thinking is to resist metaphysics through
weakening. What does Vattimo mean when he says that metaphysics is violent and in
what way can metaphysics be overcome? For Vattimo, metaphysics is essentially violent.
It is a sign of human hybris, to comprehend the ultimate ground of reality, the
arche. This leads to concrete violence as it makes man master of his own existence
and can justify violence done to others. 19 In modernity, human hybris – and thereby
violence – reaches its summit, as man is now, through technology, the master of his
world. Vattimo sees a human desire for mastery not only in modern philosophy, but
also in Christianity which adopted the metaphysical attitude as it began to understand
theology as knowledge of first principles in the sense of Platonic philosophy. 20 Putting
of a par Being and the particular God of the Christian tradition lead Heidegger to the
thesis that Christianity is a form of onto-theology.
Heidegger and Nietzsche are the two philosophers for Vattimo, that have most
radically called into question this metaphysical tradition. In line with them, Vattimo
defines the postmodern condition as breaking with traditional philosophy in a very
specific sense. Their critique did not only concern the traditional metaphysics of a Hinterwelt.
In a way the historicism of the nineteenth century had said the same thing.
The metaphysical philosophy Vattimo sees as his primary target is the historicism of
15 Giacomo Marramao, ‘Which Ontology after Metaphysics? Conversations with Gianni Vattimo and
Richard Rorty’, in: Santiago Zabala, editor, Weakening Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 78. See also the essay Hermeneutics and Anthropology in Vattimo,
End of Modernity.
16 Gianni Vattimo, The adventure of difference (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1980), 5–6.
17 Meganck, 3–6.
18 Meganck, 7.
19 Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 120.
20 Vattimo, After Christianity, 124.