From veritas to caritas, or how nihilism yields to democracy

Excerpt

“Veritatem facientes in caritate, a Pauline expression that echoes, and perhaps not so very distantly, the aletheuein [truthing, disclosing] of the Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics, means, in terms of today’s philosophy, that the truth is born in consent and from consent, and not, vice versa, that agreement is reached when we have all discovered the same objective truth” (xxvi). These few lines condense the principal thesis supporting Nihilism and Emancipation by Gianni Vattimo, the Turin philosopher renowned worldwide especially for his daring proposal of a pensiero debole, or weak thought. Vattimo describes weak thought as “a weak ontology, or better, an ontology of the weakening of Being” (19), capable of recognizing “the vocation of the west for decline and the weakening of strong identities” and helping “us to conceive the inevitable westernization of the world in terms that we may venture to call light, mellow, and soft” (34). Vattimo, who studied with Heidegger and Gadamer and whose majors philosophical works include The Adventure of Difference, The End of Modernity, and Beyond Interpretation, is also a prominent social democratic politician, a public intellectual regularly writing in leading Italian and European newspapers and magazines, and a former member of the European Parliament. As Richard Rorty remarks in his foreword to the volume that places Vattimo into a philosophical context more familiar to the English speaking readership, in this work Vattimo exhibits himself as “an imaginative philosopher who is also a vigorous campaigner for social change” (xx). In Rorty’s view, Vattimo joins leftist thinkers such as John Dewey, but also Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas, and the tradition of analytic philosophy. In this sense, Vattimo reveals himself as an excellent representative of the position for which philosophy “ceases to be ancillary either to theology or to natural science. Instead, it takes the form of historical narrative and utopian speculation...it becomes ancillary to sociopolitical initiatives aimed at making the future better than the past” (xiii). …