Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 223
duality and reconciliation of religion and politics. The dissolution of the boundary between
state and society is not only a chance to liberation, as Marx intended, but can
also be the most extreme form of slavery, as man is now part, only and completely, of
one reality. 234
The idea of weak thought has been to free philosophy of the grip of metaphysical
presuppositions. Secularization expresses this transition from a metaphysical and often
transcendental mode of thought to an account of human knowledge as more worldly
and embodied. As we have seen above, for Vattimo it is explicitly the world that has
become utterly problematic. To use the Nietzschean phrase, Vattimo often cites; ‘the
true world has become a fable’. But how can one be secular, if one believes at the same
time that there is no true world? Vattimo’s usage of secularization is almost the opposite
of world affirmation. It radicalizes the intention of world affirmation to an extent that
it becomes its opposite: it becomes nihilistic. The idea of secularity as an affirmation of
the world cannot at the same time mean a nihilism, meaning a dissolution of the world.
At the end of modernity we do not, as Vattimo claims, finally experience the world,
rather the world dissolves. The meaning of the weakening of Being is that the world
and history no longer have any inherent meaning, they put no constraints on what
can be a legitimate interpretation. I think it is fair to say, with René Girard, that this
nihilistic bent of Vattimo’s philosophy entirely neglects anthropology and history as
the contexts in which truth can be tested. 235 The emancipatory value of postmodernism
is therfore highly questionable. When, in the name of nihilism, history and humanism
are left behind, there is no reason left to hope. Marramao writes:
In Abschweifen davon, in der Bewegung der Differenzierungen, der Entfaltungen, des
Strebens (im Nomadentum Lyotards, der Dromologie Virilios) tritt die Existenz über
die Grenzen, läuft sie in nicht wiederzugewinnender Weise davon. Sie befindet sich
nicht mehr im Sonnenlicht des zentralen Wesens. Sie gewinnt ihren Rhythmus dann
nur noch im “Übergriff” auf die Nacht. Man muss sagen, dass diejenigen, die diese
Seite des Nihilismus radikal gedacht haben, nichts zeitlich Erlösendes, nichts historisch
Befreiendes finden konnten (Heidegger, Bataille) 236
234 Aron, Essai, 28–29,38.
235 Girard and Vattimo, ‘Geloof en relativisme’, 61.
236 Giacomo Marramao, ‘Hypermodernität und Verzeitlichung der Geschichte. Notizen zur Frage der
Säkularisation’, in: Peter Koslowski, Robert Spaemann and Reinhard Löw, editors, Moderne oder Postmoderne.
Zur Signatur des gegenwartigen Zeitalters (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1986), 100.