Towards a Philosophy of Least Violence
type: CreativeWork
description: Gianni Vattimo is often regarded as a purely negative, eliminativist thinker, defined by the weak thought that he articulated over the course of his storied career. Our temptation to read him in this way is encouraged, not only by an extensive and growing body of secondary literature in the Anglophone world, but by Vattimo’s own consistent focus on weakening as represent an alternative to the strong and violent metaphysical systems that have defined much of the philosophical legacy of the Christian West. What often go unacknowledged, therefore, are the positive elements in Vattimo’s work. Indeed, weakening is, from the start, a politically motivated project, tied up in an effort to reduce (not to say eliminate) violence. This political motivation, in turn, is not merely about reduction but is instead tied to an ethico-aesthetic-religious complex, a vision of the world in which the barriers to community are broken down, in which the previously silenced might call for justice and organize against injustice, and in which we are no longer chained to the necessities of a harsh and repressive metaphysical order but are instead free to pursue voluntary associations in the spirit of love and charity. At stake in this alternative reading of Vattimo is, naturally enough, his utility as a social, political, and religious thinker and his resistance to the concern that his thought leads to a counterproductive quietism, at best, and to a destructive relativism, at worst. Once we have engaged with both the temptation to read Vattimo in a purely negative way and with the reasons to resist this temptation in favor of a more positive reading, it is important to reckon with the never-unproblematic character of the latter effort. Indeed, we cannot simply integrate the positive and negative moves we identify into a coherent and solid whole without reinstantiating the sort of totalizing and violent metaphysics that Vattimo critiques. Rather than succumbing to the temptation to seek such …
abstract: Gianni Vattimo is often regarded as a purely negative, eliminativist thinker, defined by the weak thought that he articulated over the course of his storied career. Our temptation to read him in this way is encouraged, not only by an extensive and growing body of secondary literature in the Anglophone world, but by Vattimo’s own consistent focus on weakening as represent an alternative to the strong and violent metaphysical systems that have defined much of the philosophical legacy of the Christian West. What often go unacknowledged, therefore, are the positive elements in Vattimo’s work. Indeed, weakening is, from the start, a politically motivated project, tied up in an effort to reduce (not to say eliminate) violence. This political motivation, in turn, is not merely about reduction but is instead tied to an ethico-aesthetic-religious complex, a vision of the world in which the barriers to community are broken down, in which the previously silenced might call for justice and organize against injustice, and in which we are no longer chained to the necessities of a harsh and repressive metaphysical order but are instead free to pursue voluntary associations in the spirit of love and charity. At stake in this alternative reading of Vattimo is, naturally enough, his utility as a social, political, and religious thinker and his resistance to the concern that his thought leads to a counterproductive quietism, at best, and to a destructive relativism, at worst. Once we have engaged with both the temptation to read Vattimo in a purely negative way and with the reasons to resist this temptation in favor of a more positive reading, it is important to reckon with the never-unproblematic character of the latter effort. Indeed, we cannot simply integrate the positive and negative moves we identify into a coherent and solid whole without reinstantiating the sort of totalizing and violent metaphysics that Vattimo critiques. Rather than succumbing to the temptation to seek such …
author: Ambord, Daniel Whitcomb
keywords: Gianni Vattimo, Luigi Pareyson, Metaphysics, Postmodernity, Violence, Weak Thought, Religion
date published: 2022-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:40:15Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University