Gianni Vattimo, a philosopher trained by Lowith, Habermas & Gadamer, was twice a Communist Member of the European Parliament. He was also Gay and fanatically pro-Hamas. Sadly, he died before the Caliphate could take power in Italy and kill him and his partner by collapsing a wall upon them.
Sid Simpson, a rising young academic, has published the following review of Vattimo & Zabala's 'Hermeneutic Communism' in 'Thesis 11'.
A Farewell to Truth and Hermeneutic Communism begin from the same insight: that belief in objective metaphysical truths is no longer tenable after Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the poststructuralist work done in the 60’s and 70’s.
What is tenable is the view that Nietzsche was mad, Heidegger was bad and post-structuralism was a wank. However, this is beside the point. Beliefs aren't beliefs because they are tenable. They subsist for psychological or strategic reasons. Hypotheses or theories may be abandoned when it seems impossible to defend them by reasoned argument or by appeals to Scriptural or Oracular or empirical evidence. But beliefs are not hypotheses.
The two books diverge, however, in the context in which they discuss the ramifications. Presenting an interpretive model of ethics which takes as its starting place the finitude of our lives,
this entails admitting the virtually infinitesimal salience of the ethical. It is only if souls endure for eternity that ethics can have any substantial or enduring significance.
A Farewell to Truth seeks to re-envision both religion and ethics after the death of objective truth.
Buck stopped, protocol bound juristic systems provide truths which are objective enough. What is objectively true may, however, change over time as new evidence become available and particular judgments are overturned.
That which is objective is merely the Schelling focal solution to a particular type of coordination game. Hermeneutics is game theoretic in that sense.
Hermeneutic Communism, on the other hand, articulates the effect of the loss of objective truth on modern neoliberal states and their markets,
No such loss has occurred. The law is protocol bound and the commodity price vector is objectively known- i.e. all financial analysts and stakeholders agree that it has a unique graph.
and goes on to offer a way to incorporate, twist and weaken these institutions in the form of a ‘spectral’ communism.
I suppose 'lawfare' could weaken the Justice system but Courts may bar vexatious litigation or punish those who bring frivolous or fraudulent law suits. The other problem is that public interest litigation is a double edged sword. You may use it to try to undermine neoliberalism and promote your crazy ideology. But the other side may use it to chase you out of your safe spaces on campus.
A Farewell to Truth begins by referencing Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies
which was silly but appealed to adolescents. The enemies of a Society aren't shitty pedagogues. They are guys who have money and guns and who are prepared to kill to gain control of the Society's territory.
to point out that Plato, Hegel, and Marx (i.e. the ‘enemies’) rely on an objective conception of truth: be it the truth of the Forms, of history, or of the revolution.
They don't. They claim superior knowledge by reason of some esoteric and wholly bogus type of reasoning. This is mere charlatanism.
Because what makes each of these thinkers hostile to the open society is their reliance on an eternal truth, Vattimo argues that truth itself is the ‘enemy of the open society, and specifically of any democratic politics’ .
Very true. Consider what happened when a legislature in the USA sought to pass a law defining pi as 3.2. Sadly, some clever clogs pointed out that it was an objective truth of Mathematics that pi could be no such thing. Immediately, the 'open society' of Indiana collapsed. It turned into a theocratic monarchy. Similarly, Germany was a very nice and sweet open society when it believed that Newton's laws were synthetic apriori truths. Evil Jew, Einstein, pointed out that, objectively speaking, this was not the case. Anybody anywhere making the same experiment would find that the Newtonian system is wrong at certain scales. The result was that Germany turned into a closed society ruled by Hitler.
Did you know that Israel has lots of scientists? Those evil fuckers are finding more and more objective truths! That is why it must be the case that Israel is a completely closed society. It does not have free elections or a free press. Only Hamas ruled Gaza is an open society. This is because they aren't Muslims. They don't say 'Allah hu Akbar'- God is Great!. They say 'Allah is a stinking corpse. Let us have gay sex to celebrate the death of that elderly nuisance.'
The ramifications of Popper’s work, however, have yet to be fully realized;
by the time his readers got to Collidge, they discovered he wasn't real smart and was wrong about everything. Still, admitting to have read Popper when you were 15 was better than saying you had read Ayn Rand. This is because nobody gets raped in Popper whereas in 'Fountainhead' Roark rapes Dominique. Thus if you said you were a Randian 'Objectivist', everybody laughed heartily and said you were a randy bugger who wanted a reach-around from Gary Cooper. Indeed, that is how Alan Greenspan got his start- or so I fondly believe.
Vattimo cites the American invasion of Iraq in the name of
fucking up Saddam coz he tried to kill Dubya's pappy
democracy as a contradiction for a state that has supposedly adopted the principles of the ‘open society’
America adopted the principles of the Founding Fathers. The first one was the only good Injun is a dead Injun. The second was Africans make great slaves. Why the fuck would Americans, who had a superior philosopher in C.S Pierce have given Popper the time of day? Tarski was first rate and so the Americans took him. Popper wasn't and so he had to settle in England after a brief exile in New fucking Zealand.
yet feels the urge to recreate the world in its own image.
Fuck off! The Americans didn't want Iraq to turn into an economic and military super-power. They just wanted its oil reserves to pay for the war on terror.
Vattimo proposes that we complete the break with metaphysical objectivity and reformulate the relationship between politics and truth.
i.e. tell stupid lies. But all politicians were doing that already. Still, we now understand why Italy sent him to the European Parliament. England sent Nigel Farage. Sadly they didn't bugger each other senseless. This led to Brexit.
This, in his eyes, creates ‘the basis for a radical new vision of democracy itself’.
Farage probably told him about 'Black Rod'. Westminster had one. Brussels didn't. This led Vattimo to have really radical visions of what a really big Black Rod could do for his anus. Then it occurred to him that evil Israeli professors of Political Science might establish, as an 'objective truth', that Black Rod isn't actually a dildo. Currently, Black Rod is an elderly lady named Sarah Clarke.
Vattimo points to the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger,
i.e. shite he read as a student because he was too stupid to go in for a STEM subject
rather than the Platonic tradition, as fertile conceptual ground for theorizing about the end of truth. Nietzsche’s observation that after the death of God ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’,
That isn't a fact. It is merely an interpretation. Sadly, it is one given by an ignorant lunatic.
as well as Heidegger’s articulation of our inseparability from the horizon of meaning in which we find ourselves,
We are separable from any horizon we can distinguish. Indeed, we are separable from this planet.
compounded by the collapse of real socialism
State Socialism. Nobody has seen 'real socialism' because it comes into existence only when scarcity has disappeared. Perhaps Soviet style 'really existing socialism' is meant. But the thing was a joke.
in the 20th century, sets the stage for Vattimo’s own ‘ontology of actuality’.
which, actually, was shit.
It holds a ‘twofold significance’: namely, ‘making oneself aware of the paradigm into which one has been thrown yet suspending its claim to definitive validity and heeding Being as that which remains unsaid’ .
Italians are a cultured and polite people. They may say 'Ciao Professore!' while leaving 'you stupid shithead' unsaid.
Preempting the critique that such an ontology results in a slippery slope into relativism (and worse, domination), Vattimo explains that democracy is indeed only possible once belief in objective truth is jettisoned. A political system which continues to entertain the existence of objective truth
is like a restaurant which prints a menu of the dishes which it can provide for its customers. The menu is objective. The tastes of the customers are subjective. Reading the menu, some pick one dish, others choose another. Some may leave the menu when they find nothing they like on the menu.
‘paves the way to the republic of the philosophers,
Technocracy? In some fields, that is fine. In others, it isn't.
the experts, the technicians, and – at the limit – the ethical state, which claims to be able to decide what the true good of the citizens is even in defiance of their own opinions and preferences’ .
The democratic state can certainly decide what is or isn't ethical. If you don't like it you can leave or else register a conscientious objection in some approved manner.
An ontology of actuality, by contrast, makes possible a politics based on the ‘construction of consensus and civic friendship’.
This already exists but it isn't an ontology precisely because under its rubric Meinongian objects which don't belong in being and ontologically dysphoric goods and services feature. The problem with cunts who use the word ontology is that they don't understand what the word actually means.
In this way, bidding truth ‘farewell’ is not an event to be feared but instead presents the possibility of politics in a world in which metaphysical foundations can no longer be relied upon.
Politics is about solving collective action problems. It is economic, not metaphysical. Marxism is an economic theory.
While A Farewell to Truth mentions the relationship between political domination
which causes other peeps to believe I've got a real tiny dick. Fuck you political domination! Fuck you very much!
and objective truth only in passing, Hermeneutic Communism elaborates precisely on this relationship in terms of the modern neoliberal West. Vattimo and Zabala begin by illuminating the connections between power and a ‘politics of description’, a metaphysically framed system which intends to direct society according to ‘the truth’.
It's quite true that there is a politics of description. But it shrivels up and dies when a matter becomes sufficiently important as to develop an economics of description. Essentially, political coalitions which have a shitty econ of description lose control of resources to those who have better economic descriptions. Consider the USSR which was trading oil for Cuban sugar. But oil was often much more valuable. The Soviets did have an economic description based on 'shadow prices'. Sadly, it was shit. A better vector of descriptors gave rise to spot market prices which in turn raised allocative efficiency which increased incentive compatibility and thus reduced frictions within and between mechanisms.
This ‘truth’, however, is simply an interpretation, or Kuhnian ‘existing paradigm’, marshalled by the ‘strong against the weak’.
No. The truth is that which saves us money so we get a bigger return on effort. That's why smart peeps spend money to find out the truth about certain things. Consider what happens when we find a friend of ours with his knife in his back. As a Society, we could simply torture suspects and kill them after they confess, unless they did while being tortured. But that is wasteful. It is better to spend some money on detectives who are smart enough to prove a particular dude is guilty.
Paradigms of proof change as technology changes. Once DNA evidence became available, some wrongly convicted people were released whereas some guilty people were caught. As for the strong, if they do stupid shit, they may become weak relative to those who don't do stupid shit.
Because of this, Vattimo and Zabala draw a clear connection between truth and violence,
which is the same as the connection between ruth and silence or cats and catachresis.
and even go so far as to call violence the political meaning of truth.
The political meaning of truth is 'I did not have sex with that woman'. Also 'I didn't inhale'. In Viattimo's case, I suppose political truth means fucking Netanyahu to death even if you have to pretend to lurve Hamas to have an excuse to do it.
For this reason, the authors reverse the usual relationship between metaphysics and dominion, saying instead that ‘Metaphysics is an aspect and a consequence of dominion, not its cause’ .
The dominated are welcome to go in for metaphysics as can those who are weak and stupid and utterly useless. As for Dominion, it can have any shit it likes however it swallows that shit it will get sick and maybe even die.
Those under the dominion of a politics of description,
i.e. nutters who keep seeing Nazis under the bed
made possible by a parallel return to conservative philosophical realism, exist in what Derrida called the ‘margins of philosophy’ or, as Benjamin would put it, within ‘the tradition of the oppressed’ (HC, p. 16).
or, as Agamben would put it, up me arse for a fiver, mate.
For Vattimo and Zabala, ‘the end of truth is the beginning of democracy’,
i.e. 'post-Truth' Trumpistas have inaugurated Democracy. Sadly Vattimo didn't live to see the Donald return to the White House.
or in other words, release from dominion is coextensive with release from the objectivity of metaphysical truth.
in other words, the thing is a logical impossibility- unless you are crazy stoopid. But being crazy stoopid isn't difficult. Just do a PhD in useless shite and you are half way there.
In order to demonstrate their point, the authors underscore the status-quo maintaining, and thereby emergency-undermining, nature of American politics.
Trump is using emergency powers to deport people. Maybe it really is true that only the Right was paying attention to Leftist somniloquy.
Using the 2003 Iraq invasion as an example, Vattimo and Zabala remind the reader that the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction was ultimately immaterial;
D'uh!
the moment the weapons were shown not to exist, the US
was already balls deep in that oil rich state.
noble visions of democracy were sufficient reasons for the invasion.
Actually, the plan was to move on to Iran after Iraq. The question was whether regime change could turn a profit.
The example demonstrates not only American foreign policy’s conservative self-regulation,
Nonsense! The neo-cons weren't 'conservative'. Some were crazy ex-Trotskyites. All were Straussians- i.e. devotees of the 'noble lie'. That's one up on 'post-truth'. It is important to remember that Trump is actually way saner than mathsy guys like Wolfowitz.
but also the unsubstantiated urge to impose liberal institutions and political systems on other states which results in the ‘exclusion of the invaded state’s cultural and political systems’ (HC, p. 57).
Saddam's cultural and political systems got displaced. Boo-fucking-hoo!
Thus, the US’s self-certainty is enough to turn the prior inhabitants of those states into the ‘weak’, or the oppressed at the margins of history.
If this were the case, the US would have been defeated in war much more often. The fact is death or incarceration or abject powerlessness soon overtakes a self whose 'self-certainty' deviates too much from reality in any important respect.
Vattimo and Zabala extend their analysis to US financial policy,
Strangely, the US didn't want its financial system to collapse.
looking closely at the 2008 financial crisis as well as the IMF’s imposition of structural adjustment criteria on developing countries.
Bizarrely, lenders want borrowers to pay back loans rather than buy lots of drugs and party with hookers.
Citing Paul Krugman, the authors point to the metaphysical seduction of capitalism, which takes the form of the boon which would follow from a ‘perfect, frictionless market’.
This same seduction arises from any frictionless economic model- Marxist, Traditional, Islamic, Gandhian, etc. It must be said, it isn't a very powerful seduction. Few leave their spouses for any such thing.
Unfortunately, there are both particularistic and broader reasons that US bankers turned a blind eye to the self-undermining illusion of the free market:
Sensible people turn blind eyes to illusions.
the prospect of a powerful job within framed democracy, and the ‘submission of their discipline to the “secure path of science”, where alternatives, changes, or shocks are impossible, given that “modern financial economics [has] everything under control”’ (HC, p. 60).
It isn't about control, it is about hedging. But volatility must exist to drive liquidity. The the thing isn't rocket science because if you are aiming at the Moon your calculations might send you up Uranus.
Vattimo and Zabala, then, are in agreement with economist Joseph Stiglitz when he claims that ‘the recession is not a crisis of the housing bubble but rather of our whole economic and political system’ (HC, p. 61).
One which the US bounced back by ignoring Stiglitz.
Having detailed the ‘myth’ of objective truth and how it animates America’s expansionism
or contractionism. It has run away from Afghanistan and might get out of the MENA entirely.
and foreign policy, A Farewell to Truth and Hermeneutic Communism offer ways forward.
For Trump, maybe.
For Vattimo and Zabala, embracing the end of objective truth opens the door to emancipatory re-imaginings of religion, ethics, and politics.
Trumpism. I look forward to his meeting with the Pope. He'll be like 'I have a fantastic relationship with the Pope but I told him that if he doesn't do a deal with Satan I will cancel the tax-free status of the Catholic Church. Seriously, them Pope dudes just use their Churches on Sunday right? How about leasing the place out to Satan for the rest of the week? Also you can rebrand Vatican as Holy Trump City. A roulette table in the Sistine chapel would add a touch of class. I hear all they got there now is fucking slot machines.'
A Farewell to Truth presents a radical reinterpretation of Christianity in the light of Vattimo’s ‘ontology of actuality’.
i.e. priests fucking choir boys while saying 'sodomy is wrong'.
Flowing neatly from his rejection of objective dogmatism in the face of a perspectival modernity, Vattimo points to the (Christian) Church’s persisting impulse to be a ground of eternal truth.
Rather than a passing fad.
The ‘biblical anthropology’ held by the Church is the reason they ‘fight so hard against divorce, abortion, and homosexual unions and why genetic engineering, even for therapeutic ends, horrifies them so much’ (FT, p. 50).
No. The Church is welcome to consider Scripture as wholly imperative. Anthropology is alethic.
This rigid insistence on the literal truth of the Bible,
does not occur in the Catholic or Episcopalian or Orthodox Church.
however, puts the Church squarely in tension with a modernity that rejects foundational thinking on a large scale.
But that modernity shat the bed long ago.
In another homage to Heidegger, Vattimo explains that only a relativistic God can save us now.
from ISIS? A relativistic God could only save you relatively speaking- i.e. not very much at all.
This ‘weak’ God accepts
that she isn't god so much as she's a goat- not one of those brainy, glamorous, goats who get invited to all the best goat parties but like a really shitty goat whom nobody has heard off because she doesn't actually exist.
‘that the age of the Bible as a deposit of knowledge, the truth of which is guaranteed by divine authority, is over and gone’ and that this process is a ‘part of salvation history’ (FT, p. 53). For the same reasons that Vattimo believes objective truth leads to domination in the political arena, he urges the Church to vacate objective claims on the grounds that such a stance would be an ‘authoritarian abuse’ which ‘scandalizes the faithful’ (FT, p. 62).
Sadly Vattimo did not give similar advise to Imam Khomeini.
Why, then, should we turn to a religion rid of metaphysics rather than jettison religion completely?
Choir-boys?
Beyond the fact that Christian theology thoroughly permeates the Western tradition, Vattimo contends that Christianity contains ‘the latent powers to liberate’ through an ethic of caritas, or charity, which entails ‘the progressive elimination of walls – the Berlin Wall, the wall of natural laws that they preach against the freedom of individuals, the wall of the laws of the market’ (FT, p. 79).
Oh. The dude was just phoning it in. I suppose all the rich food the serve Parliamentarians in Brussels caused Vattimo's brain to turn to shit.
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