After the Death of God by Gianni Vattimo

Author:Gianni Vattimo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI022000, Philosophy/Religious, PHI036000, Philosophy/Hermeneutics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2007-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Power of the Powerless

Dialogue with John D. Caputo

Let’s begin with a biographical question. Tracing a genealogy of your thought through your published writings, one could say that you have come full circle as a philosopher of religion—from your early interest in the mystical element in Heidegger’s thought, to a radical hermeneutics of demythologization, to Derrida and your present interest in religion without religion. Could you please explain how you understand the evolution (or is it a revolution?) of your thought, and reflect on what, if any, common thread runs throughout these developing interests of yours?

The consistency is that I have always been interested in the space between philosophy and religion. In one way or another, I have always been reflecting on philosophical questions by exposing them to theological and religious resources. At the same time, and perhaps this is at bottom the same thing, I have always been interested in the question of the limits of philosophy. My first serious philosophical project, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, was a study of Heidegger’s delimitation of philosophical rationality—or metaphysical reason, or ontotheology—by way of establishing the relationships between mysticism, which mainly meant Meister Eckhart, metaphysics, and what Heidegger calls thinking.

My interest in mysticism was stimulated by my Catholic starting point. While the mystical tradition pervades the Christian Middle Ages, it acquires a certain ascendency at the end, in the twilight of the great scholastic systems when philosophical rationality was beginning to decline. A certain skepticism emerges about metaphysics accompanied by a turn to the mystical. My interest in the mystical is rooted in the fact that it positions itself at the limits of metaphysical reason. One of the books that I cherished as an undergraduate was Jacques Maritain’s The Degrees of Knowledge, which described a sort of ladder of ascent of the soul to God—from metaphysical reason, through faith, to mysticism. Maritain places mysticism at the peak, while faith itself remains still in the dark.

So I have always been addressing the question of the limits of philosophy by way of its exposure to religious discourse. In a certain way it has always been the same question, but in the first half of my work I tended to see the mystical, and also what Heidegger called thinking, as a kind of crowning perfection that superseded rationality. With Heidegger, the notion of the experience of thought is deeper than metaphysical reason, even as mystical union crowns what metaphysical theology seeks. But with my turn to Derrida—my real confrontation with Derrida began in the early 1980s—I began to see not so much a crowning but the delimitation of reason. At the same time, my sense of the religious became a lot less mystical and a lot more prophetic or ethicopolitical, and I became a little skeptical about the very idea of something “deeper.” In deconstruction the delimitation of rationality is not made in the name of something deeper, but in the name of something other or new or novel, of an event rather than an abyss of Being.

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