Hermeneutics by John D. Caputo

Author:John D. Caputo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241308417
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

Weak Thought

Vattimo gives another twist to the history of nihilism, one that is closer to Heidegger than to Nietzsche, and closer still to Gadamer. The history of nihilism is hailed as our emancipation from the violence of metaphysics.4 This Vattimo takes from Heidegger’s critique of the history of metaphysics as the history of the manhandling of Being, of subjecting Being to the wilful constructions of human thinking. This leads Vattimo to describe metaphysics as strong thinking, whose concepts grasp (from the Latin con + capere) the ultimate nature of reality and lay claim to objective truth. That poses a mortal threat to anyone who disagrees. Absolute Truth tends to discourage debate. Once you conclude that the ideas that you have inside your head come from God or Nature or Pure Reason, once you think you are hard-wired to Absolute Truth so that your views do not simply represent your perspective, then the rest of us are in trouble. Vattimo’s signature concept, his way to describe nihilism, is to call it the history of the weakening of these structures, of their becoming-nothing, their becoming unbelievable, which, for him, is an emancipatory development.

The name of this weakening is hermeneutics, that is, the displacement of objective-absolutizing thinking by interpretation.5 For Vattimo, the postmodern age is the ‘age of interpretation’,6 and hermeneutics is the post-metaphysical, post-modern philosophy par excellence. Vattimo does not try to prove his position directly for two reasons. First, because, as Lyotard says, in the postmodern era metaphysics has become unbelievable and we have become ‘incredulous’ towards its ‘big stories’. Vattimo does not have to defeat the opposition; the opposition is just making itself unbelievable, which leaves hermeneutics as the last man standing. Second, as Nietzsche said, this assertion about the ubiquity of interpretation does not claim to be the objective truth, and does not pass itself off as another entry in the competition for the Big Story. It, too, is an interpretation. But Vattimo thinks it is the best interpretation – not because of its biological vitality (Nietzsche) or attunement to early Greek poetic thinking (Heidegger), but because it is the most democratic and ultimately the most non-violent, the most Christian, the most loving thing one can say. In hermeneutics, we do not out-argue, we out-narrate; we tell a better story.

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