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5.0 out of 5 stars
Believing that one believes, July 23, 2003
This review is from: Belief (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Paperback)
The original Italian title of this book is "Credere di credere" (Believing that one believes).
"Belief" - which is the English translated title - is perhaps more succinct, but it's also one sided, and misses the philosophical and theological double intention of the Italian.
"Believing that one believes" is paradoxical because it means both to have faith, conviction and certainty in something, but to also think uncertainly about something.
In a chapter entitled "The substance of faith", near the end of this book, Gianni Vattimo - a professor of hermeneutic philosophy at the University of Turin (Italy), member of the European Parliament, and a framer of the European constitution - writes of how he came upon his book's title.
Vattimo describes how one hot afternoon he made a telephone call, from an ice cream shop near a bus stop in Milan, to Gustavo Bontadini, "a distinguished representative of 'neoclassical' Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy." The phone call regarded the competitive examination for a university chair. Since both Vattimo and Bontadini were members of the examining commission, they had some confidential academic business to discuss.
It was an enjoyable conversation. The two philosophers had not seen each other for awhile so they played catch-up. At one point during the conversation Bontadini asked Vattimo whether he still believed in God. Vattimo, aware of the paradoxical moment in which the question arose, noticed next to the telephone a table of women eating ice cream and drinking orange juice in the midday heat.
Vattimo responded "I believe that I believe."
Stylistically, Vattimo's book is written in an engaging, personal and informal (although not "chatty") fashion -- similar to the a mood and spirit of the reader sitting at a cafe table in an ancient dusty, sunwashed Roman piazza and drinking Cinzano in front of the Colosseum, or St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, or the Spanish Steps, and perhaps throwing some coins for good luck into Trevi Fountain, all the while listening to one of Italy's best and brightest philosophers candidly talk about his philosophy and rekindled faith.
Intellectually, for Vattimo, an Italian Catholic, raised in the post Second World War milieu, it surely must have been a circuitous route with many spiritual meanderings, before settling into some serious philosophy study in the university. It was there, in the halls of academia, where Vattimo was swayed away from his christian faith by the nihilism of Nietzsche, Heidegger and others who were antimodern and anti-Christian, before cozily settling into hermeneutics.
Now comes Vattimo's "rediscovery" of Christianity. Through studying Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo is paradoxically led back to Christianity.
Vattimo asserts that once again there is room for faith, now that the "end of modernity" has been ushered in. Those philosophies such as scientific positivism, Hegelian and Marxist historicim, which claim to be able to prove the non-existence of God, and have done away with religion, today are no longer strong reasons to be an atheist. For Vattimo, we are free again to hear the words of the Scripture. Christianity is under reconsideration. A postmodern-faith (belief) arises - an authentic christian philosophy for post-modernity.
What sort of belief is possible in these times? For Vattimo, it is "weak belief."
Drawing on his own interpretation of contemporary hermeneutical ontology, Vattimo acknowledges a positive tie with nihilism - meant as the weakening of metaphysical categories - in which God is dead (as Nietzsche states).
"Weak ontology" finds a connection to Christianity specifically through the lowering of God to the level of humanity, which is called "kenosis" in the New Testament.
In Philippians 2:7 one may read that Christ "emptied himself." Most kenoticists believe that by becoming incarnate, Christ gave up his sovereign dominion. Some Protestants view the Incarnation as a Divine self-emptying, and a self-limitation of the God's omniscience and omnipresence.
Kenosis is an idea that never flourished under classical metaphysics - but in our new, post-metaphysical age, Vattimo has conceived a secularized interpretation of Christianity thanks to kenosis.
Vattimo spends much of his book fashioning a secularized outline for contemporary belief out of Heidegger's "weak ontology" - the undoing or "weakening" of Being in the classical metaphysical sense. For Vattimo, Heidegger's concept of "weakening" parallels the essence of the christian message. Through charity - via kenosis- christian belief and its spiritual structures are secularized Kenosis itself is viewed as the act of charitable self-exhaustion.
Christianity and its very grounds of belief are weakening. Since the idea of a universal truth is abandoned, spirituality is now seen as a personal sense of being, as opposed to the grandiosity of revelation. What matters is a personal sense of satisfaction rather than the belief of a universal truth. Man is urged to find security and connection through charity. This notion of charity is very hermeneutical - meaning that it is provisional, never absolute or ultimate, and interpretive of fragmentation in its search for wholeness and unity between disparate entities or bodies of knowledge or the sacred and secular, etcetera.
For Vattimo the essence of belief is the continual secularization of spiritual structures. Belief is the "weak belief" in the possibility of belief.
Considering that Vattimo is presently a functional member of the European Parliament, it should be interesting to see whether any of his hermeneutical studies of Nietzsche, Heidegger or Gadamer should trickle their way somehow into European law and edict.
Perhaps in the future this author will also write books on government, genealogy and power.
Meanwhile, we readers should keep throwing our philosophical coins into Trevi Fountain - legend has it that it's good luck and may help guarantee safe passage to whatever world or worlds are out there beyond the stars after this one.
Bon Voyage! Ciao!
-- Alex Sydorenko
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