Secularization as Kenosis

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the nineteenth century. In the historicist system of, for example, G.W.F. Hegel, metaphysics
no longer means the knowledge of a static and unchangeable Being; but Being
itself is thought of in historical terms. 21 Vattimo criticizes historicism for thinking about
history ‘in terms of recognizable and necessary rhythms, which maintain a certain stability.’
22 The postmodern condition means for Vattimo that we cannot think of Being as
such a necessary process. This does not imply for Vattimo that Being is just a chaotic
confusion. Being is an event and its stages are more than random. Modernity can be
understood as a step beyond the cyclical thought of antiquity. But this ‘beyond’ cannot
be thought of as linear progress, or an overcoming. The postmodern condition is
rather an awareness that history itself is coming to an end. Vattimo thus sees himself
standing, with Heidegger and Nietzsche, in a tradition of non- or post-historicism. 23
The end of metaphysics is not only a negative observation regarding the impossibility
of foundational knowledge and the cognitive representation of reality’s structures.
The way we are going from there is not entirely open to negotiation. For Vattimo it
is essential to see that Being has a history. We cannot return to a pre-metaphysical
mode of thought, nor can we simply forget about the metaphysical past. In the wake of
the end of metaphysics, philosophical thought can no longer rely on the rigidity of the
metaphysical tradition. 24 Vattimo describes the postmodern condition as a post-historic
condition in which ‘historicity has become problematic for theory’. 25 In modernity, history
is methodically relevant, often to articulate a caesura with the past and to think
of the future in terms of a project that needs to be realized. 26 For Vattimo the postmodern
consciousness of our culture is characterized by an awareness that history has
come to an end. This is not meant in a catastrophic sense, as if there was an awareness
that the end of history is near, but in the sense of Arnold Gehlen’s post-histoire. Gehlen
speaks of an experience of history that is no longer progressive or teleologic. In modern
society, progress has become routine. Vattimo translates this routine to an experience
in postmodernity in which man no longer anticipates decisive, salvific events, but has
made progress a part of everyday routine. 27 Progress has turned into an experience
of simultaneity that produces a de-historization of experience.’ 28 Vattimo explains this
development in terms of secularization, when he writes:
For Christianity, history appears as the history of salvation; it then becomes the search
for a worldly condition of perfection, before turning, little by little, into the history of
progress.. . . By depriving progress of a final destination, secularization dissolves the
very notion of progress itself, as happens in nineteenth and twentieth century cul-
21 Dupré mentions Hegel as ‘the first to abandon the static idea of philosophy.’ Louis Dupré, Metaphysics
and Culture, The Aquinas lecture 1994 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 26.
22 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 3.
23 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 6.
24 Vattimo, After Christianity, 13.
25 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 6.
26 This modern use of history has been scrutinized by Koselleck in Die Vergangene Zukunft. See Machiel
Karskens, ‘Tijdsplitsingen. Hemelrijk en aardrijk als model van historische tijd’, in: Maria Grever and Harry
Jansen, editors, De ongrijpbare tijd. Temporaliteit en de constructie van het verleden (Hilversum: Verloren,
2001), 66.
27 Vattimo writes: “In a consumer society continual renewal(of clothes, tools, buildings) is already
required physiologically for the system simply to survive. What is new is not in the least ‘revolutionary’ or
subversive; it is what allows us to stay the same.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 7.
28 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 10.