Secularization as Kenosis

216 | postmodern condition and secularity
to say that the hermeneutics Vattimo has in mind is a sort of transcendental science,
but he does assert that the nature of hermeneutics is more than a coincidence and that
it is not without liability for the cultures and religions it encounters. He speaks of
hermeneutics as a specific Geschick, which cannot be explained exhaustively in terms of
positive science. Anthropology cannot dissolve metaphysics, rather it becomes, itself,
part of the metaphysical tradition. 204 In hermeneutics, there can be no radical alterity,
but rather a reciprocal relation of alterity and sameness. Vattimo asserts that both
sameness and alterity have always been present in the history of hermeneutics. As a
discipline, hermeneutics had its origin in the collapse of European unity. As a philosophical
theory, it attained dominance in the time of a “fully unfolded metaphysical and
scientific-technological unification.” 205 Hermeneutics emerged in the context of unity
breaking down and attained dominance in a context of Western ‘homologation.’ For
Vattimo it is therefore likely that the “eventuality of Being” is inseparable from the “homologation
of the Western world”. 206 The political significance of hermeneutics is then
that the course of Western culture is not a mere pluriformity of contingent forms of
life. Rather, hermeneutics is an ontological and normative undertaking. The discourse
of “radical alterity” turns out to be “an internal aspect of the general process of Westernization.”
207 For Vattimo, thus, the context of a hermeneutic culture is neither one of
total (Western, imperialistic) organization, nor one of authentic alterity, but a gigantic
construction site, in which the founding texts of Western tradition have lost their authority
and are interpreted in dialogue with countless other texts. In Vattimo’s eyes,
the idea of a merely descriptive anthropology, which claims superiority over theological
and metaphysical ‘imperialistic’ ways of engaging other cultures, is highly suspect.
In the post-imperialistic situation of cultural reapprochment, Vattimo sees not a valuefree
encounter. In our time we see alterity disappear as a consequence of the ubiquity
of contamination. Therefore the role of hermeneutics in our day is to express an ontology.
208
If there is one philosophical school, which Vattimo criticizes for seeing the modern
secular West as a corrupted society, in which authentic human existence is thwarted, it
is the Frankfurt school of Adorno and Marcuse. Their criticism of culture was in fact an
ascetic ideal, which resisted ‘cultural industry’. One could only withdraw from its influence
by means of avantgarde Art, like Beckett’s prose and Schönberg’s atonal music:
“Die Disharmonie evoziert die Schönheit nur als ihr utopisches Gegenteil – alles andere
ist Täuschung und Lüge.” 209 Vattimo refuses to see mass society as a threat to human
204 Vattimo writes: “It is only through the use of these profoundly Western categories that anthropology
becomes a science, or . . . a part of the metaphysical enterprise of reducing the world to measurable objectness.
. . . this in turn raises questions about the possibility of thinking about anthropology as a discourse on
cultures that are other.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 135.
205 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 154.
206 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 155.
207 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 156. or, as Vattimo puts it even more paradoxically: “Hermeneutics starts
out by trying to see anthropology as an ideal site for verifying its own notion of Being as eventuality and
alterity, but ends up by returning to reflect upon the significance of sameness, and on the relation between
the latter and the metaphysical homologation of the world.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 156–7.
208 “Hermeneutics first emerges as a technical discipline in Europe in the age of the collapse of traditional
Christian unity, but it is perhaps in this condition of contamination that hermeneutics instead develops
into an ontology.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 159.
209 In Vattimo’s social theory, the idea of such an aesthetic sphere of ‘authentic’ human existence
is highly suspect. It isolates authentic experience from the social. Instead, Vattimo proposes seeing the