Background
Vattimo, Gianni was born in 1936 in Turin.
Hermeneutic ontologist: aesthetician
Vattimo, Gianni was born in 1936 in Turin.
Vattimo took his philosophy doctorate under Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin in the late 1950s. In the 1960s he undertook postdoctoral study at the University of Heidelberg with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Lowith. tnfts: Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Heidegger. Gadamer, E. Gombrich, Kuhn, Arnold Gehlen, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Lyotard.
Succeeded Pareyson as Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Turin. Since 1982, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Turin.
Vattimo is a philosopher in the post-Heideggerian vein who is much concerned with the problems of nihilism, hermeneutic ontology, aesthetics and postmodern thought. His work is characterized by an attempt to utilize and radicalize Nietzsche’s philosophy in order to articulate what ‘postmodern’ thinking might entail. The attempt to articulate the nature of what postmodern thought entails is dominated by the pivotal notions ‘accomplished nihilism' and ‘weak philosophizing’, both of which derive their sense from his effort to face up to and follow out rather than transcend the implications of Nietzsche’s radical nihilism and its exposure of systematic rationalist philosophy as a ‘strong’ instance of the will to power. Vattimo’s thinking found its individual tenor in the late 1960s when, under the influence of French post-structuralist readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, he began to question the hitherto dominant existentialist and neo-Marxist Gramscian strands of postwar Italian philosophy. Adopting Heidegger’s 1946 ‘Letter on humanism’ and Nietzsche’s philosophical critique of European nihilism. Vattimo contended that with the death of God philosophical humanism loses its principal raison d'etre, and that with the affirmation of endless becoming as actuality all fixed and progressivist truths are exposed as groundless fictions. In consequence, instead of a philosophy of identity with its unification of Being and history, Vattimo proceeded to affirm a style of thought which gave preeminence to difference and a hermeneutic ontology. His philosophy of difference argues that there is no world which is outside of interpretation. What constitutes our world is a plethora of subjective and intersubjective interpretations. The only world which can be known is that of difference, the world constituted by different interpretations. The infinite interpretability of reality as articulated by both Nietzsche and Derrida promotes what Vattimo describes as a hermeneutic ontology, a world in which an individual confronts neither fixed truths nor things but only yet more interpretive choices. Hermeneutic ontology ‘is nothing other than the interpretation of our condition or situation since Being is nothing apart from its event’. Vattimo suggests that postmodemity constitutes not so much a discernible historical epoch but a reflective awareness of the singular if not monological horizon of post-Cartesian European thought. Vattimo’s philosophy of difference refuses closure and effectively pluralizes history. Postmodern thought is grasped as nihilistic in the sense of denying substantive truths; but insofar as it demonstrates that previous universal claims to meaningfulness are but the particular claims of specific individuals, it allows individuals and individual groups to reappropriate universally proclaimed truths as their singular truths. European history can no longer be proclaimed world history and yet the exposure of its not being world history makes European history more discernibly European, that is, not African or Chinese history. IIpensiero dehole reflects Nietzsche’s notion of a ‘modest philosophy’ spuming the arrogance of universal answers. It is metaphysically but not existentially nihilistic, as it insists that questions of meaning and value can only be raised regionally, and never definitively. Postmodern thinking represents an accomplished nihilism in a threefold sense. First, it pensiero dehole involves embracing the transition from denouncing universalizing and totalizing philosophical perspectives to affirming them on a regional basis. Second, such a transition involves an ironic revaluation of philosophical tradition which recognizes that although its key terms and universalistic pursuits are defunct, it is the pursuit and critique of ‘truth’ which has uncovered the radical pluralism within hermeneutic ontology. Third, the substantive devaluation of rationalist and metaphysical philosophy does not render its language completely redundant. It retains what Vattimo terms a fictive value. The redundancy of the rationalist pursuit of meaning-in-itself does not leave empty the question of what is meaningful for us. Vattimo’s nihilism demonstrates that because rationalist or modernist pretensions to truth always were the perspectival projections of a singular group, we are free to experiment with, project and negotiate with a number of philosophical perspectives provided we remember, in a philosophically accomplished manner, their Ttctive’ or ‘modest’ status. Vattimo looks primarily to aesthetic experience for that reminder. Following Heidegger, Vattimo maintains that the primary value of aesthetic experience is that if offers experiential endorsement of a philosophy of difference. An appreciation of great art reveals an ‘ontology of decline’, a revelation of the ‘fallen’ and therefore different nature of past meanings and values. Yet the ‘trace’ of such meanings keeps the questions and problematics they addressed open, allowing the contemporary world not to be closed off from them but to venture its own perspective upon them. Of greatest importance for Vattimo, finally, is how aesthetic consciousness—understood as the radical disruption of ordinary expectancies—epitomizes the human experience of morality. Aesthetic experience reminds us not only of the fragility of reason’s attempt to render the world intelligible but also of how the world can suddenly and inexplicably present itself as different to the expected. Aesthetic consciousness therefore embraces an insight into both the Abgrund of mortality and the possibilities of creative otherness within a world of difference.