Gianni Vattimo: From Weak Thought to Hermeneutics as a “Second Realism” and a Philosophy of Praxis

Gianni Vattimo from Weak Thinking to Hermeneutics as “Second Realism” and Philosophy of Praxis In 1974 Vattimo suggested in his book The subject and its mask a revolutionary lecture of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was seen as an anarchist and libertarian prophet, who intended to pull down the totalitarian ratio of platonic metaphysics but first of all that hierarchical social order that, coming from the Socratic turn in the conception of trugh, has finally found its stability in the capitalistic state. Vattimo tried to combine Nietzsche with Marx, in order to promote a junction between the avant-gardist bourgeois intellectuals (radicalized students and professors) and a new movement of workers finally post-hegelian and free from the ethics of work and (the “mass-worker”, in Toni Negri’s language). The snake’s bite on the haed in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was in that book the act of foundation of a new dionisyan world. It was the liberation of the human creativity and the regaining of our ability to reinsert the Novum in the history, a history that seemed to be “finished” now in the capitalistic steel-cage. The destruction of metaphysics should facilitate “a new way of existence” but also “a radical change in the conditions of work, in the discipline of production, in the structure of the social control”. It should facilitate therefore a real revolution. During the Eighties, on the contrary, the grounding of Vattimo’s “weak thought” was the acknowledgment of the absurdity of his previous revolutionary and dialectical lecture of Nietzsche. But first of all this elaboration testified Vattimo’s relief to the exhaustion of any reconstructive effort, of any hypothesis about new political and social order: the season of marxist terrorism in Europe bared the indissoluble link between dialectics and violence. So, after the crisis of the myth of Development in Real Socialism, “The possibility to join Nietzsche’ idea of liberation… to dialectical perspectives, appears today very problematic”, explains Vattimo. This possibility was only “a dream”, the idea of “beyond-humanity as possible condition of reconcilement between existence and meaning”. At the end of the First Republic begins in Italy and the berlusconian age and Vattimo rediscovers the joy of political commitment. In these years appears the book Ecce Comu, with its appeal to “become what we were” (we need to pursue “a project of human emancipation”, a project that can be founded “only on the search for equality and on a political culture that correct the “natural” disequalities”). And in these years appear also Della realtà and Hermeneutic Communism. These two book are theoretically focused in rejecting the realistic philosophies, seen as cultural supports of the existing neoconservative order. But they are addressed at the same time to “build a philosophy not merely descriptive but ‘projectual’”. With an unexpected and suddenly jumping-back to the Seventies, this is a philosophy that wants to change again the world and the reality. A reality that other scholars - as Maurizio Ferraris, whose polemic about Hermeneutics and New Realism I reconstruct in my article – want simply to contemplate as a pure fact. In this conclusive perspective, even Heidegger’s “Andenken” or “poetic thinking” becomes now “the source of any legitimacy for the transformative action”, until at least in Vattimo’s view “hermeneutics” becomes synonymous of “philosophy of praxis”.