The Responsibility of the Philosopher

Gianni Vattimo, Franca D'Agostini, William McCuaig

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780231527125
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Over the course of his career, Gianni Vattimo has assumed a number of public and private identities and has pursued multiple intellectual paths. He seems to embody several contradictions, at once defending and questioning religion and critiquing and serving the state. Yet the diversity of his life and thought form the very essence of, as he sees it, the vocation and responsibility of the philosopher. In a world that desires quantifiable results and ideological expediency, the philosopher becomes the vital interpreter of the endlessly complex.

As he outlines his ideas about the philosopher's role, Vattimo builds an important companion to his life's work. He confronts questions of science, religion, logic, literature, and truth, and passionately defends the power of hermeneutics to engage with life's conundrums. Vattimo conjures a clear vision of philosophy as something separate from the sciences and the humanities but also intimately connected to their processes, and he explicates a conception of truth that emphasizes fidelity and participation through dialogue.

1	PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

AFTER KANT, AFTER HEGEL

There are a few things I wish to make clear at the outset. The first is that I do not regard philosophy as a handmaiden to science; indeed, I do not believe there is a privileged rapport between philosophy and any part of the scientific spectrum—not the exact sciences, not the natural sciences, not the “sciences of the spirit” (the Geisteswissenschaften—the humanities and social sciences). Indeed, I do not believe that philosophy is a science at all if we are using the word strictly in accord with its prevalent modern connotation. If by science is meant any form of knowledge,¹ then it is obvious that you have to know a few things to do philosophy, but if science is used to mean a form of knowledge equipped with fixed methods, cumulative results, and repeatable experiments, and above all with set guidelines and an institutional framework, then I very much doubt that philosophy is anything like science. You might be able to call the history of philosophy a science, because like the history of anything else it contains more or less objective points of reference: if someone publishes a book on the thought of Kant, you can check to see whether or not he has done his homework, if he knows the texts for example, and has mastered the secondary literature. But by the time Kant came to write the Critique of Pure Reason, it was already difficult to determine if this was “science” or not, and in any case it seems to me that, as far as Kant was concerned, the scientific imperative meant that it was imperative to have a criterion, a definition that would demarcate that which was “scientific” from that which was not.

Many would likely assent to the view that philosophy is not a science; it is the status of philosophy as a university discipline that causes problems. Naturally it suits us, because otherwise who would pay our salaries, but at bottom there always remains some uncertainty, a gray area. Philosophy may be a university discipline, but it can’t be treated as if it were a cumulative, experimental, objective form of knowledge. The question therefore arises: if it is not a science, or even a cumulative and progressive form of knowledge with objective data that can be checked, what is it?

Let’s go back to square one: why is it not a science? Aristotle held that it was; metaphysics was knowledge of Being as such and topped the hierarchy of the sciences, followed by knowledge of Being as quantity and Being as motility: philosophy, mathematics, and physics. What has happened since? Why is this Aristotelian outlook no longer defensible? Here there is a problem of content, inasmuch as physics is no longer definable as the science of movement, or mathematics as the science of quantity. But from the formal point of view as well, the history of philosophy shows that many facets of what was once regarded holistically as knowledge have been positivized and split off as specific knowledges about various sectors of reality. As for knowledge of Being in and of itself, it has become increasingly refractory to classification as a science, especially since Kant.

After Kant, science was formalized very strictly in modern terms, as a system of propositions that presuppose sensory verifiability: if you cannot bind concepts to sensory data, you do not have real science. And that is how philosophy sank to relatively ancillary status with respect to science. Many still speak of Kantian philosophy as a theory of knowledge that studies the conditions of possibility of the sciences, as what we can call a second-order science. But if that is true, I would stipulate nevertheless that it is still a science critiquing science, an exploration of its conditions of possibility and its limits. As for what Kant calls metaphysics, it is no accident that the attempt to endow metaphysics with a scientific dimension coincides with a profound crisis of metaphysics: from the late-nineteenth-century neo-Kantians on, it becomes evident that transcendental philosophy is a critique and an overcoming of metaphysics. All that remains of metaphysics is the description of the a priori structures of reason, and this is the perspective, as I see it, that passes over with a few variations into the regional ontologies of Husserl.

In any case, with Kant it is no longer possible for philosophy to be the science of Being in and of itself. And that holds good for all that follows from Kant, apart from idealism. German idealism could be defined as the last great effort to link the Aristotelian signification to the Kantian one: Hegel would not say that either Kant or Aristotle was wrong, he would say that the theory of the a priori forms is also the theory of Being. After Hegel, though, the question starts to become murky. I have the impression that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, Kantism rather than Hegelism was the main target of criticism. The very thinkers who criticized Hegel from a Kantian perspective, from Cohen and Windelband to Dilthey and others, actually wound up rehearsing Hegelian solutions. The claim to ground the various knowledges in a more or less subjective form of phenomenalism (the most obscure and controverted point of the transcendental philosophies) is not in the least a Hegelian claim, it’s only in Kant, or more properly in the use of Kant to ground a theory of science, for metascientific and encyclopedic ends—Kant as deployed by neo-Kantians. Indeed, in Hegel we already have an attempt to modify this claim, with the theory of the Spirit as suprapersonal historical instance, and the whole of knowledge as an effective historical subject.

To be schematic, what no longer functions after Kant (what is failing to function in the unfolding of neo-Kantism) is the idea that there exists a stable and universal reason. Kantism is battered by cultural anthropology, by the plurality of cultures, and even, I would hazard, by the objections Nietzsche raises to Kant, and by what emerges with positivism. Hegel is not the main target. What batters Hegel is Kierkegaard, existentialism, and the Kierkegaard renaissance of the twentieth century; but even Kierkegaard’s objections are always tip-toeing delicately along a crest, always on the point of “toppling” back into the history of Spirit (as a moment, at least, of the dialectic of absolute knowledge).

All this merely confirms that philosophy can no longer be a science even of the “critical” kind. But if it is not the science of Being as such, of first principles; if it is not the critique of pure reason, meaning the structures of reason, or a transcendental epistemology; then it seems to me that there is very little left to refute in the thought of Hegel: maybe only his broadly “Kantian” claim to shut reason up in a stable image. If Hegel were not claiming an entirely determined and rational destiny for reason (and it isn’t clear how far he pushed this claim), there would be nothing objectionable in the Hegelian vision of philosophy. It’s a vision in which the only thing left to philosophy is a way of apprehending the historicity per se of all that comes to pass in human reality. Including science.

THE FLASH OF THE EREIGNIS

What I have said so far does not imply that philosophy ought to be cut off completely from science. Rather, it interests me greatly to learn what the impact is of certain scientific achievements, what has changed in the history of our existence, our culture, our human community in consequence. For me, the philosophy of science is basically, whether it likes it or not, a species of sociology or philosophy of culture. Philosophical reflection on science cannot just be the logic of science; Feyerabend was right to ask what business it was of philosophy to tell science how to think. Philosophical reflection on science should be historical reflection on the aftermath of the transformation of our existence by this strain of cultural activity. Naturally, this stance is part of my overall attempt to think in terms of the ontology of actuality, to answer the question: what of Being in a world in which the empirical, experimental, mathematical sciences have developed along certain lines and yielded certain technological results?

In this respect, I disagree squarely with the traditional image of the philosophy/science relationship, especially as Gadamer portrays it in Truth and Method, and Heidegger too, though Heidegger is more astute; his essay on “The Age of the World Picture” reveals a more receptive attitude to science.² Gadamer tries various ways of mending the rent between method (science, that is) and truth, but nevertheless the discourse in Truth and Method always comes round to a defense of his basic claim, to wit, that truth does not rest with science alone (and you can even bracket the word “alone”), there is truth in history, in aesthetic experience, in historical experience: truth lies in the experience of common, non-specialized language, which governs scientific language as well. This is the overriding aspect for Gadamer. Fundamentally, his stance is always a defense of humanism, though it may perhaps wish it weren’t, and perhaps isn’t at bottom.

If I turn to his short book Reason in the Age of Science,³ though, our positions are a lot closer. Gadamer says something there to which I could subscribe, when he proposes to set limits of an ethical kind to science. The problem is not the truth or falsity of scientific propositions, or truth or falsity in the way science regards existing things; the problem is that science has social, historical effects, and on those an ethical framework demands to be imposed (not counterposed). Gadamer rightly maintains that this ethical dimension has to do with the continuity of the spirit, with the fact that we are in this together.

The closed work place of the earth ultimately is the destiny of everyone…. We are still a far cry from a common awareness that this is a matter of the destiny of everyone on this earth, and that the chances of anyone’s survival are small … if humanity … does not learn to rediscover out of need a new solidarity.⁴

But the crucial point is that Gadamer doesn’t really take onboard the meaning of Heidegger’s discourse on metaphysics; for him, Heidegger’s objurgations against metaphysics apply principally to scientism, or rather scientistic objectivism. There is not, in Gadamer, a true history of Being.

Even when he does concur with Heidegger in the analysis of where philosophy is now, Gadamer in reality limits his discourse to the fact that modern philosophy, since the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, let’s say, or if one prefers, since Kant, reduces the ambit of truth to the ambit of the experimental ascertainability of science. All the rest is outside the ambit of truth. This fundamentally goes for Heidegger too, but the idea never even occurs to Gadamer that this might have come about for some reason. In this sense, Gadamer remains moored to a static vision of the relation of mind to world; he isn’t much of a “Hegelian.” How does it happen that at a certain point we start thinking that the sole truth is that of the positive, experimental, mathematical sciences? Gadamer would say it is simply an error, and maybe it is, but it is certainly an error of gigantic proportions, with stunning consequences, which remain unaccounted for.

That falls a bit short, it seems to me. So when it comes to thinking about science, I feel much closer to Heidegger than to Gadamer, though even Heidegger probably could have done more in this area than he did. Science is an essential aspect of the destiny of Being in the contemporary world. But not just the destiny of oblivion, the destiny of a possible return, too. That is why I lay so much emphasis on that unique place in Identity and Difference where Heidegger says that the Ge-Stell⁵ might be regarded as a first flash of the event of Being:

Das Ereignis vereignet Mensch und Sein in ihr wesenhaftes Zusammen. Ein erstes, bedrängendes Aufblitzen des Ereignisses erblicken wir im Ge-Stell. Dieses macht das Wesen der modernen technischen Welt aus.⁶

The appropriation appropriates man and Being to their essential togetherness. In the frame, we glimpse a first, oppressing flash of the appropriation. The frame constitutes the active nature of the modern world of technology.⁷

I inquired of Gadamer whether he thought Heidegger meant those words to be taken with full seriousness, and he told me that he had been present when Heidegger delivered the text as a lecture, and that Heidegger was clearly aware that he was advancing a singular notion. I suppose Gadamer might have given that answer to gratify me, or perhaps had not quite understood what I was asking him. But I take it at face value, because it’s hard to imagine Heidegger just blandly coming out with the statement that the Ge-Stell might be regarded as a first flash of the event. For one thing, he says it that one time and never develops the thought. Yet it shouldn’t be seen as an offhand remark. Something deeper is undoubtedly going on.

I hold to the view that Heidegger’s words should be read in relation to his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” which really means “pictures” in the plural. The natural conflict among branches of knowledge in organized society renders the world picture impracticable, it essentially becomes an image producing multiple images. All that talk about das Riesenhafte and das Riesige (enormousness or hugeness; that which is outsized or gigantic) in the final pages of the essay⁸ is substantially saying that it is no longer possible to grasp the idea of the world picture—that we have produced the world picture, but this picture has then spontaneously, naturally, pluralized itself…. Hence there is no longer a world, there are multiple pictures of the world, and that generates the conflict of interpretations. Now all this is a question concerning Being, but Gadamer never comes out and states as much, and I wonder if he even could have. He remains closely tied to Plato, closely tied to Greek metaphysics, which also, of course, validates the idea that there are various apertures of truth. In a book on Gadamer, Jean Grondin says (without, as far as I know, any protest from Gadamer), that the idea of the plurality of the apertures of truth serves essentially to ground tolerance, to ground dialogue, in the sense that people grow disposed to accept that truth may inhere in more than one point of view. It’s practically straightforward relativism; there is nothing historical, no history of Being, nothing about destiny. Gadamer never delved too deeply into this aspect of Heidegger, never took it all that seriously. It’s odd, because on the other hand Gadamer declares himself a Hegelian: but his is a use of Hegel that minimizes this aspect of the problem considerably.

In 1985, in the first Annuario di filosofia, we published a translation of a 1965 essay by Gadamer on the philosophical foundations of the twentieth century.⁹ Gadamer clearly does not adopt Hegel’s open historicity, tending instead to reduce the stages (“moments”) of the spirit to the objective spirit. It is not that doubt is cast on the triad of moments: subjective spirit, objective spirit, absolute spirit; it is rather that the absolute spirit is blanked out. For Gadamer the absolute spirit forms part of the objective spirit. You could read that in terms of Marxist historicism, that is, in terms of increasing concreteness: we are always part of epochs, and so we work in this “inside” that is history. But if the objective spirit develops no further, it too winds up as Aristotelian Being, a capacious (static) dwelling within which there are many mansions, to on leghetai pollakos. Naturally, this is how I portray Gadamer, an image I have formed for myself, against which I measure myself, with respect to which I define myself. It’s not meant to be incontrovertible.

THE STORY OF A COMMA

Not long ago I wrote a brief essay entitled “Story of a Comma” for a special issue of Révue Internationale de Philosophie celebrating Gadamer’s 100th birthday.¹⁰ It is called that because when I was translating Wahrheit und Methode into Italian I was faced with the problem of rendering the sentence “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.”¹¹ Should the commas be included in the translation or not? I have always maintained that they should, even if their presence in the original German is dictated by grammatical conventions that do not apply in Italian (or English), where strictly speaking they should be omitted.¹² So I raised the matter with Gadamer, and he disagreed with me: there was a risk of being misunderstood. Some readers, for example, might wrongly infer that there was a Being that was incomprehensible and that was different from language.

If you think about it, though, the only way for Gadamer to escape from relativism might actually be to interpret the sentence along these lines: Being, in its most general sense, has the character of being comprehensible, inasmuch as it is language. Not: only that Being that can be understood is language. For in the latter case, we would still be stuck with the distinction between the sciences of the spirit and the natural sciences; and more than that, the supposition would be entailed that somewhere beyond all linguistic comprehension there might subsist a Being “in itself.” But saying that would mean returning to the “realist” metaphysics that Heidegger criticized, and that Gadamer cannot accept either.

My proposal to keep the commas amounted, in any case, to an attempt to read Gadamer...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction: The Strong Reasons for Weak Thought
• 1. Philosophy and Science
• 2. Philosophy, History, Literature
• 3. Logic in Philosophy
• 4. To Speak the Truth
• 5. The Vocation to Philosophy and the Responsibility of Philosophy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index