Gianni Vattimo

Gianteresio Vattimo (4 January 1936 – 19 September 2023) was an Italian philosopher and politician.

Gianteresio Vattimo was born in Turin, Piedmont.

He studied philosophy under the existentialist Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin, and graduated with a laurea in 1959.

In 1963 he moved to Heidelberg and studied with Karl Löwith, Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer with a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Then, Vattimo returned to Turin where he became assistant professor in 1964, and later full professor of Aesthetics in 1969.

While remaining at Turin, becoming Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in 1982, he had been a visiting professor at a number of American Universities.

For his works, he received honorary degrees from the universities of La Plata, Palermo, Madrid, Havana, and San Marcos of Lima.

Vattimo said he was exempted from military service.

After being active in the Radical Party, the short-lived Alleanza per Torino, and the Democrats of the Left, Vattimo joined the Party of Italian Communists.

History as a process of weakening (secularisation and disenchantment are other terms Vattimo uses) "assumes the form of a decision for non-violence" (1992:95).

An ethics of communication along the lines suggested by Jürgen Habermas suffers, according to Vattimo, from finding itself in a substantially ahistorical position, while oscillating between formalism and cultural relativism (1992:117).

For Vattimo it is only when hermeneutics accepts its nihilistic destiny that "it can find in 'negativity,' in dissolution as the 'destiny of Being' ... the orientating principle that enables it to realize its own original inclination for ethics whilst neither restoring metaphysics nor surrendering to the futility of a relativistic philosophy of culture" (1992:119).

Perhaps his greatest influence though is the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose "discovery of the 'lie', the discovery that alleged 'values' and metaphysical structures are just a play of forces" (1993:93), plays an important role in Vattimo's notion of "weak thought".

Vattimo rejected any notion of a transcendental structure of reason or reality that would be given once and for all.

This does not imply the loss of truth, but a Heideggerean reinterpretation of truth as the opening of horizons.

Such truth is deeper than propositions which are made possible by such openings.

Philosophies then are always responses to contingent questions, they are 'ontologies of actuality,' a thesis that can be confirmed by the historico-cultural links of particular philosophies.

For hermeneutics to be consistent with its own rejection of metaphysics, it must present itself, argues Vattimo "as the most persuasive philosophical interpretation of a situation or 'epoch'" (1997:10).

To do this, Vattimo proposed a reading of hermeneutics as having a "nihilistic" vocation.

To Vattimo, hermeneutics has become boring and vague, lacking any clear significance for philosophical problems.

His answer was to insist on the nihilistic consequences of hermeneutics.

The claim that "there are no facts only interpretations and this too is an interpretation" amounts to saying that hermeneutics cannot be seen as the most accurate/true description of the permanent structures of the reality of human existence.

Hermeneutics is not a metaphysical theory in this sense and so can only be "proved" by being presented as the response to a history of being, a history of the fabling of the world, of the weakening of structures, that is as the occurrence of nihilism.

This nihilistic reading of history involves a certain attitude towards modernity, whereby modernity is dissolved from within through a twisting, distorting radicalisation of its premises.

Vattimo uses Heidegger's term Verwindung to capture this post-modern recovery from modernity.

He was elected a member of the European Parliament first in 1999 and for a second mandate in 2009.

Vattimo was openly gay and a nihilist who embraced Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of God's death.

In 2004, after leaving the party of the Democrats of the Left, he endorsed Marxism, reassessing positively its projection principles and wishing for a "return" to the thought of the Trier philosopher and to a communism, rid of distorted Soviet developments, which have to be dialectically overcome.

Vattimo asserted the continuity of his new choices with the "weak thought," thus having changed "many of his ideas."

He namely referred to a "weakened Marx," as an ideological basis capable of showing the real nature of communism.

The new Marxist approach, therefore, emerged as a practical development of the "weak thought" into the frame of a political perspective.

The authors explain the book Hermeneutic Communism as follows: "Although the material published here had never been released before, there are two books that have determined the production of this text: Gianni's Ecce Comu: Come si diventa cio che si era (2007) and Santiago's The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (2009). In the former, Vattimo emphasized the political necessity of reevaluating communism; in the latter, Zabala insisted on the progressive nature of hermeneutics. Hermeneutic Communism can be considered a radical development of both."

Vattimo added his name to a petition released on 28 February 2009, calling on the European Union to remove Hamas from its list of terrorist organizations and grant it full recognition as a legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

His next political book, co-authored with Santiago Zabala, is Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (2011).

In March 2012 he was a speaker at the national congress of the Grand Orient of Italy in Rimini.

Vattimo died in Turin on 19 September 2023, at the age of 87.

Vattimo's philosophy can be characterized as postmodern with his emphasis on "pensiero debole" (weak thought).

This requires that the foundational certainties of modernity with its emphasis on objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts.

He draws on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger with his critique of foundations and the hermeneutic philosophy of his teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer.

On 22 July 2014, in response to the IDF military operation in Gaza against Hamas attacks on Israel, Vattimo said he would personally like to "shoot those bastard Zionists" and thinks Europeans should raise money "to buy Hamas some more rockets".