After the Death of God

John Caputo, Gianni Vattimo, Jeffrey Robbins

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231512534
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

It has long been assumed that the more modern we become, the less religious we will be. Yet a recent resurrection in faith has challenged the certainty of this belief. In these original essays and interviews, leading hermeneutical philosophers and postmodern theorists John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo engage with each other's past and present work on the subject and reflect on our transition from secularism to postsecularism.

As two of the figures who have contributed the most to the theoretical reflections on the contemporary philosophical turn to religion, Caputo and Vattimo explore the changes, distortions, and reforms that are a part of our postmodern faith and the forces shaping the religious imagination today. Incisively and imaginatively connecting their argument to issues ranging from terrorism to fanaticism and from politics to media and culture, these thinkers continue to reinvent the field of hermeneutic philosophy with wit, grace, and passion.

I

Toward a Nonreligious Christianity

GIANNI VATTIMO

Knowledge and Interpretation

Let us start from an observation that may help us to understand what the meaning of interpretation is and the role it has to play in what we call knowledge. From a hermeneutical perspective, we must say that knowledge requires a perspective, that in knowing anything I must choose a perspective. But some may object, what about the case of scientific knowledge? Is scientific knowledge also perspectival? My answer is that because scientists have chosen not to have anything to do with their own private interest, and describe only what concerns their science, their knowledge as such is deliberately limited. They never know everything.

Those familiar with the hermeneutical tradition know that this is the point where Heidegger’s objection to metaphysics begins—namely, in the decision to be objective, we cannot help but assume a definite position, de-fined, in other words, a point of view that limits, but also helps in a decisive way, our encounter with the world. While Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics begins here in the critique of the metaphysical definition of truth as an objective datum, his critique also moves beyond this point in its eventual focus on the ethical-political nature of metaphysics, the “rationalization” of modern society against which the vanguards during the first part of the twentieth century were fighting. Heidegger also realized that the scientific claim of objectivity (which is also what Lukacs says under a Marxist’s profile) is inspired from a determined interest: for example, to describe a natural phenomenon in a way that others could also speak of it in the same way and develop this self-same knowledge. In other words, scientists are not moved by the impulse of truth. The relation between the world and the knowledge of the world does not function as a mirror. Instead, there is the world and someone who is “in the world,” which means someone who orients himself in and to the world, someone who uses his own capacities of knowledge, hence someone who chooses, reorganizes, replaces, represents, etc.

The concept of interpretation is all here: there is no experience of truth that is not interpretative. I do not know anything that does not interest me. If it does interest me, it is evident that I do not look at it in a noninterested way.

For Heidegger, this concept of interpretation also makes its way into his reflection on the historical sciences, as one can see reading not only the first parts of Being and Time but also so many other essays of that period. For Heidegger, then, it comes down to the following: I am an interpreter as long as I am not someone who looks at the world from the outside. I see the external world because I am inside it. As a being-in-the-world, my interests are very complicated. I cannot say precisely how things are, but only how they are from this point of view, how they seem to me and how I think they are. If an experiment moved by one of my ideas works, it does not mean that I have exhausted the objective knowledge on that aspect of reality. Rather, as even the philosophy of science has later realized, I have made the experiment function under certain expectations and premises. When I conduct an experiment, after all, I already have a whole set of criteria and instruments thanks to which I may determine—always with another someone who comes to the experiment with other interests and thus, by definition, does not think exactly as I do—whether my experiment works or not. From the beginning, the criteria and the instruments are left out of the discussion. No scientist studies all physics from scratch. Nearly all of them trust handbooks, and, with the help of the inherited knowledge contained therein, they develop still others.

This point made by Heidegger almost a century ago is an accepted fact by now—scientists do not objectively describe the world. On the contrary, their description of the world depends on their specific usage of precise instruments and a rigorous methodology, all of which is culturally determined and historically qualified. Of course, I realize that not all scientists would accept these words. But even the very conditions of possibility for verifying a scientific proposition (or falsifying, as Popper would have it) depend on the fact that we speak the same language, we use the same instruments, we take the same measures, etc. If any of this were different, not only would we not understand each other, but we would not even have the possibility of understanding each other. And, further, these criteria and this paradigm have not been invented from scratch. On the contrary, we have inherited them.

Again, this is interpretation: being inside a situation, facing it not as someone who comes from Mars but as someone who has a history, as someone who belongs to a community.

There are some people who believe that to study physics is not to study the truth of physics, but to learn the secret skills and practices and to endure the various rites of initiation, like an athlete getting in shape or an initiate becoming a member of a secret society. It makes sense when one considers the difficulty in getting someone to understand a scientific demonstration. In order to understand the truth of the theory, one must first teach the rudiments of the discipline. These rudiments are presumed to be “natural.” But, when we take a closer look, isn’t it the case that the knowledge belonging to a particular science could also be different? In all this we must consider something further—namely, the emergence of structuralism as a movement within anthropological study of culture. Heidegger was not yet acquainted with the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, but what is the difference between Kant and Heidegger? Put simply, there is the nineteenth century wherein we have the scientific and/or anthropological “discovery” of other cultures.

This nineteenth-century discovery dramatically alters our understanding of how knowledge is constructed. According to Kant, in order to know the world, one needs some a priori structures that cannot be recuperated from experience and through which experience itself is organized. But what does this mean? Space, time, and the categories of understanding, these are things that constitute myself as the universal structures of reason. In other words, for Kant and many neo-Kantian philosophers, reason was thought to be always the same. Cultural anthropology, on the other hand, reveals differences by showing the various ways that societies, cultures, and diverse individuals face the world. We could say, then, that the philosophy of the twentieth century, as reflected in Heidegger’s existentialism, is the result of a Kantian philosophical sensibility passing through the crucible of anthropological culture. If I am a finite human being, I will be born and die at a certain point in history. Is it possible then that I am the carrier of this absolute that I may unconditionally affirm without any doubts? Are these categories and is this structure of the mind no different than the truth that two plus two equals four? After all, there are cultures that eat their own, not to mention the many differences that exist even within European culture and thought.

The first wave of cultural anthropology acknowledged the existence of other cultures but, at the same time, emphasized their “primitive” status—that is, they were examples of an earlier or previous form of human relations. Basically, it was thought that the “primitives” did not know about mathematics; once we get there we teach them sciences and install our governments. But, today, where are these “primitives”? To whom can we teach all these things?

The matter of interpretation is now configured in this way: interpretation is the idea that knowledge is not the pure, uninterested reflection of the real, but the interested approach to the world, which is itself historically mutable and culturally conditioned.

The Advent of Christianity and the Birth of the Subject

But what does any of this have to do with Christianity, let alone the nonreligious interpretation of Christianity I am proposing here? And what right do I as a philosopher have to declare such things?

According to other philosophers with whom Heidegger was quite similar—most notably, Wilhelm Dilthey—Christianity accomplished the first attack against metaphysics construed exclusively as objectivity. Accordingly, Kant only taught us centuries later what Christianity had already affirmed, hence the idea of Saint Augustine that in interiore homine habitat veritas (“truth lives in the inner human”). Christianity announces the end to the Platonic ideal of objectivity. It cannot be the eternal word of forms outside ourselves that saves us, but only the eye directed toward the interior and the searching of the deep truth inside us all. According to Dilthey’s schema of history (which, even though Heidegger never said this explicitly, is the schema of history that Heidegger follows), the thing that is most decisive in the event of Christianity is precisely this attention toward subjectivity, which, incidentally, also brings with it the concern for the poor, weak, and outcasts.

In other words, as Erich Auerbach demonstrates in a beautiful book, each of us is just like the other.¹ To be fair, the philosophies of the late antiquity are also like this: Epicureanism and stoicism are both philosophies much more oriented toward the subject. But none more so than Christianity, which consistently questions the fixation on the object in favor of its own attention on the subject. And in this way, at least according to Dilthey’s schema, we arrive at Kant and at the truth, which is not in things, not outside ourselves, and which, therefore, comes forward always in an accidental way. Instead, truth is found in the reason of man, which, once it turns back on itself, once it becomes truly reflexive, shows how the mind itself actually contributes to the knowledge of truth.

The philosophers of science of today also talk about the fact that single phenomena (a kettle of water that boils at 100 degrees) are not somehow better known whenever science is able to generalize them in formulas. By generating formulas, science in some way transcends the single phenomenon and places it inside a complete artificial system. The thermometer is not useful because it allows me to better know the boiling of the water; it serves me only to generalize this discourse in a wider sphere. In other words, abstraction is not intended to penetrate into the phenomenon and find its true essence. The essence we reach is only the general structure of a certain world of phenomena that become truth in some way having nothing to do with individuality.² We are not always looking at the kettle, but we measure it, we link it to some system. In a certain way this is again a Kantian way of thinking. Regarding the immediacy of what I see, I construct a system made of connections, a calculus, through which knowledge is mediated. This is Kant in a nutshell.

Returning to the crucible of cultural anthropology, and with the increased appreciation for the finitude of existence, perhaps now even mathematics is revealed as only a mathematics. This is seen in the beginning of the twentieth century with the development of alternative mathematics, non-Euclidean geometries. I must confess that I do not know why people invent these things, but it is always about systems, about logical mathematical connections that really do work and through which it is possible to demonstrate certain truths. When it is discovered that perhaps they can be applied more adequately to some natural phenomenon than others—for instance, some suggest that certain non-Euclidean geometries apply better to cosmic space—one begins to understand that there might be different languages that deal with phenomena in different ways.

Wittgenstein, who was not a great friend of Heidegger (in fact, I do not think that Heidegger ever read him), says, for example, that if someone puts forward a mathematical formula that gives different results from mine, I may always ask myself if he is getting the calculus wrong or if he is applying a different mathematical language. This is already a way to understand the idea of interpretation. That does not imply that if we accept the idea of interpretation, then “everything goes” and anyone can say whatever he wants. Regardless, there are rules, but the rules themselves are relative to language. This is the importance of the later Wittgenstein’s insight into language games, wherein every language functions like a game with its own rules. Obviously, you cannot apply to a game of basketball the rules of baseball. Otherwise, the norms of basketball would be violated. This does not mean the baseball rules are wrong, but it means that each language has its own norms.

So Christianity contributes to a philosophy of interpretation for many reasons.³ One of these is that Christianity turns the mind inward and thus, say the historians of thought, makes possible the Kantian subject and anticipates modern philosophies of subjectivity. Indeed, even the very possibility of theorizing this is due to the fact that we live in a Christian civilization (even if we do no longer live in the era of Christendom in the global sense). All the discourse concerning the biblical view of creation, which is put forward in mythological form, stands at odds with the compact metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, etc. Not to mention the more extravagant, or mind-bending, episodes from the New Testament, such as the story of the virgin birth or the Holy Spirit descending onto the apostles at Pentecost. What does all this mean? How are we to understand it? Jesus gives us some clue when he foretells the day of Pentecost when the apostles would be baptized by the Holy Spirit. Here Jesus sends to the apostles what his father had promised so that they might finally understand all that he had taught them. As Jesus anticipated the age of the spirit, he recognized and justified the later transformation of the Christian truths. The message of Christ is true even as he introduced himself as someone with the authority to interpret the inherited tradition and the sacred writings of the past (which Christians now refer to as the Old Testament). In this way Christ is seen as the agent of interpretation. As such, he is not unlike Moses, who, to be realistic, did not simply transcribe the literal words of God. Rather, the commandments brought down by Moses were also the product of interpretation.

My Jewish colleagues remind me that hermeneutics does not, and did not, begin with the New Testament. For the writings contained within the Hebrew Scriptures are nothing if they are not an example of this continual act of interpretation and reinterpretation. They are correct, of course. For example, we see in Water Benjamin, who was a great intellectual of the philosophy of the twentieth century, that he thought about everything in Talmudic terms. That is to say, his thinking was a form of commentary reflecting on that which has been already handed down.

The history of the origin of the idea of interpretation is inescapable.⁴ Consider the New Testament gospels, none of which were written before 60 ce. In other words, as is well chronicled, the stories of Jesus as the Christ were written sufficiently after the time of Jesus such that it is reasonable to conclude that none are eyewitness accounts and that none preserve for us a journalistic record of the actual happenings. One of the reasons why Heidegger chose to comment on Saint Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians, in his “The Phenomenology of Religious Life” course of 1919–1920,⁵ is because they are the oldest writings from the New Testament and thus represent the earliest layer of Christian history we can now access. All of which is to say that even when we are referring to the canonical gospels—those texts that the church has long since established as authoritative and trustworthy—they are at best written reports based on an oral tradition.

I recognize that these are all scattered observations and premises drawn from the history of interpretation and its battle against objectivity. But what is its significance? The answer is that Christianity is a stimulus, a message that sets in motion a tradition of thought that will eventually realize its freedom from metaphysics. Does this mean that metaphysics should have never existed, that Aristotle was somehow wrong or misguided? No, because to say that would be to fall into the trap of metaphysics. It would be an example of typical metaphysical reasoning—namely, affirming that it is an eternal truth that metaphysics is a mistake. I cannot and would not say this, but, in order to say something, or anything, I must draw on particular words, and, in order for those words to make sense, they must be drawn from some particular tradition. If you were to ask me why I feel so confident as to preach this message of freedom from metaphysics without falling into the trap of metaphysics, I would offer you a litany: “Did you read this or that?” In other words, the only arguments I can offer are not those that are traditionally recognized as such by those who police the rules of logic. My argument is not traditional, but one of transmission, of language, and of the culture in which we live together.

For instance, when I say that I am certain that God created me, I recognize that if I were to strip myself of the biblical world of meaning and reference, I would strip myself of meaning altogether. So to take away the Bible is to take away meaning. It would be like taking Dante away from the history of Italian literature. Dante, like Shakespeare, is written in such a way that, if you did not read the Bible, you would not understand anything. But you can read the Bible without reading Dante or Shakespeare. This means that to profess faith in Christianity is first of all to profess faith in the inevitability of a certain textual tradition that has been passed down to me. Take away the Bible and I would not be what I am. Perhaps I would be something or someone else, but it would be useless for me to think that I could just as easily be a native of the Amazon. It is true that I could be, but how does that help me to understand who I actually am? If I reflect on my existence, I must realize that without the text of the Bible I would be bereft of the very instruments I have in order to think and to talk.

The twentieth-century Italian philosopher and political figure Benedetto Croce once said, “We cannot but call ourselves Christians.”⁶ I have referred to this statement many times, pulling it in different directions, even taking it to an extreme position that Croce probably would not share. For instance, when he says that “we cannot but call ourselves Christians,” I say more extremely that we cannot even speak but from a Christian point of view. That is because we are fundamentally incapable of formulating ourselves, fundamentally incapable of articulating a discourse, except by accepting certain culturally conditioned premises.

Think here of Voltaire: For many, Voltaire is considered an enemy of religio...