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Relazione di Gianni Vattimo all'Academía de la LatinidadeIstituto
Spagnolo di Cultura, New York, | |
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Allow me to start with an observation which is also a
self apology, an apology for philosophy which seems to engage in questions
too general for its capacity of analysis and solution - especially in a
country where philosophy has been mainly practised as the discussion and
also, elimination, of specific and too abstract problems. In our time -
usually indicated as the post 9/11 world - the specialised nature of
philosophy is de facto lost, as many "normal" distinctions which used to
belong to an "order" of life which is just a matter of the past. So you
will not be surprised if I start by re-discussing one of the most
traditional notions of philosophy from its very beginning, the notion, and
value, of the ONE.
I don't know whether the central role of the ONE in our
tradition depends on monotheism, or if monotheism is already a consequence
of this preference. If this latter were the case - but note that this is
just an hypothesis, and that one cannot cut the question so roughly - one
could imagine that unity is at the very end a way of assuring a more
efficient manipulation of external reality, more or less in the sense Max
Weber considered western judeo-christian monotheism as the necessary
condition for a general unified science of nature: the laws of the
physical world could not hold if nature were the reign of different
divinities often in open rivalry each against the other. No matter whether
Weber was completely right or not, my impression is that twentieth century
philosophy - or at least a "good" part of it - has progressively agreed
that the preference for unity in the conceptual tradition of the west is,
by and large, a matter of power, i.e. something which goes far beyond the
pure logic of (individual) rational thought. I want to recall briefly the
case of one of the greatest philosophers of the last century, Martin
Heidegger; who in his capital work, Being and Time, 1927, had
defined human existence as "being in the world" - in der Welt sein;
but in later works such as the essay On the origin of a work of art
(1936) ceased to speak of THE world and started to use the expression in
the plural form: A world etc. The reason of this transition is to be found
in the increasing awakening of Heidegger that human existence could not be
considered as having the same characters independently from the concrete
historical predicament in which everybody lives.
This awareness, as you can imagine, was a sort of
revolution in Heidegger's philosophy; and in philosophy as such, as far as
it has assimilated the result of Heidegger's work: universality, validity
of the reason, every form of essentialism were left without their
traditional basis, the assumed "unity" of human nature and of THE world.
What Heidegger in those same years called the end of metaphysics - an
event which, although on different basis, is largely recognised by many
other philosophers - was a consequence of the factual dissolution of the
"modern" unity of the world. This unity had started to dissolve already
before several centuries, with the protestant revolution and the great
religion and dynastic wars in Europe; but it came to an end only with the
progressive dissolution of colonialism and eurocentrism, which also marks
the origin of post-modernity. Note that the end of metaphysics, in these
terms, had been anticipated by Marx and Nietzsche in the previous century.
Especially Nietzsche, even more than Marx (who still believed in a human
reason capable of THE truth, once it would have been freed from the
alienation of the social division of work), had warned against the
mistakes of a language construed on the basis of domination relationships:
until we use the same grammar, he said, we shall not get rid of God...
Both Heidegger and Nietzsche and Marx had not
"discovered" that metaphysics and it belief in the unity of being, world,
reason was false. They had rather listened to the "signs of the time", so
to speak; and this was already a way of overcoming metaphysics towards
what Marx would call the critique of ideology and Heidegger existential
ontology. Note that, almost in the same years of Heidegger, Karl Popper
had presented a strong critique of Plato's political philosophy, which
reproached him for having inaugurated totalitarianism by relating
politics, and policies, to philosophical truth. Also in this critique of
Plato's doctrine of the state one can read, although not explicitly, a
refusal of the leading notion of unity.
I realize that a complete critical revision of the
central notion of unity in philosophical tradition cannot be outlined
here. So, let me go back to the situation in which philosophy more or less
radically became, and is becoming, aware of the dissolution of metaphysics
and unity. The situation of Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger was that of the
explosion of conflicts which could no longer be mediated by a "universal"
rationality supported by a strong philosophical and/or religious belief in
the value of unity. Not only to Marx, but also to the much more
"bourgeois" Nietzsche, the world of XIX century appeared as the place of
conflicts which had become totally explicit - Nietzsche spoke of an
"Indian sauvagerie" typical of the new capitalist economy, which he saw
especially represented by America. In many senses, our situation is deeply
analogous to theirs. Not only in relation to the leading role of America,
of course.
I propose again to skip a more detailed analysis, which
is probably familiar to all of you, and simply agree on the following
thesis: to day we are not simply strongly mistrusting any idea of unity -
of reason, of the world, even of "humanity" (while human rights are cited
as a reason for imposing "democracy" on peoples...) - but we increasingly
discover that unity is a dangerous myth, which instead of preparing peace
and improvement of life, contributes powerfully to damage them. This seems
to me a real philosophical point, of the kind of those which "provoked"
the progressive dissolution of metaphysics in the past two centuries; i.e.
the discovery of class struggle by Marx, the "discovery" of the domination
structure of language by Nietzsche, the global critique of
objectification-reification of human existence through metaphysics by
Heidegger; and the related "facts": first of all, the revolt of the
so-called third world against the central power of the West... These,
among others, are the causes of the transition from modernity to the
post-modern condition. Not merely "theoretical" discoveries, but social
and political changes.
Today, a basic fact of the same kind (fact plus cultural
consciousness, of course) is the more and more undeniable negative value
of unity.
Just consider the energy problem: can we really imagine
that economic "progress" will go on by a universalization of the western,
or American style of life and consumption? As you know, recently even the
Pentagon, which used - at least officially - to share the optimism of the
American presidents, has started to worry publicly about the imminence
(twenty years or so) of a war for energy, clean water, unpolluted air!
This is not at all unrealistic; at this stage of the "development", we
don't have many alternative hypotheses. That is why, no matter how great
and sincere the western world love for peace and solidarity (remember the
enormous popular manifestations against the war last year), we seem to be
taken into an "objective" mechanism which sooner or later will make o all
of us (I mean, of our countries and of ourselves) disciplined soldiers in
the infinite war against terrorism initiated by the attack to Iraq.
The fact is that, if put before the necessity of limiting
our models of consumption, it is very likely that all of us decide that at
the very end we have to defend our "lives" - cars, heating, air
conditioning, elevators, etc - and no electorate will support a policy of
radical transformation of all that. I may be a little too pessimistic. The
only less disastrous alternative seems to be an effort to recover, if it
not too late, the differences of cultures. There is not a single model of
good human life. It's true that if Chinese peasants or Amazonian Indians
want to buy a refrigerator or a car, we cannot simply summon them to
remain within their original culture. At this level, the problem seems
absolutely unsolvable.
We can nevertheless imagine that from now on, having
recognized the disastrous consequences of the "unique progress of
mankind", we change our mind and our policies. Not only our mind, of
course. As to the policies, they depend on so many objective (in fact,
rather subjective: the corporations and so on) factors, that it is very
difficult to imagine a change in the close future. Maybe that's why we,
here, are an Academy and not an IMF or so. For an Academy as ours,
nevertheless, it is important to start to promote a change of mentality.
Remember Adorno's sentence by which he wanted to reverse Hegel's doctrine
of totality. Not: the all is the truth; but: totality is the false. We can
substitute the one for the totality.
Not only as citizens-consumers of the "affluent" world;
also as simple workers of this same world we are more or less caught
within the mechanism of unity. If Chinese peasants or Amazonian Indians
cease to desire a car or a refrigerator, we loose our jobs. Why then
should we favour a restoration of different cultures and life styles?
Fortunately or unfortunately, we are loosing our jobs also, and above all,
because of the unification of the world under the sign of the market.
Under the powerful imperative of the reduction of the costs, a large part
of the production of the west is being dislocated to the countries of the
East and generally there where the human work costs less.
We could go on listing all the negative implications of
the current globalization. By the way, sociologists and economists have
calculated that in the last ten-fifteen years - i.e. when the process of
globalization started to be general - poor have become poorer and rich
richer; not only on the international level, but also inside the rich
industrial world. Optimists object that this is "just" a matter of
relative distances: also the poor, in other words, have improved their
condition, but they just feel poorer because of the greater difference
with the rich-richer. Well, and so what? Is there really an objective
natural standard of poorness?
But the perverse effects of unity - as an ideal, as a
policy - are not only economic and environmental (in perspectives like the
ones of the Pentagon cited report). They are visible above all, and in the
most dramatic way, in the concrete question of peace and war. Today more
than ever, war is justified by citing "his umanitarian" motives. For all
our antipathy against Carl Schmitt, we have to confess that his doctrine
of the dichotomy between friend and enemy is much more acceptable and
human than the current idea of the defence of human rights wherever they
may be violated, even adopting pre-emptive action.
If considered critically, the idea of making war in name
of the human rights etc. is a variation of the perverse notion of unity.
There is just one human reason, and as we imagine that it is ours (Gott
mit uns) we have the right of intervention everywhere we judge it is
violated. Remark how many terms have come to be used at the singular in
recent political and media rhetoric: the terrorism, first of all, which
unifies every kind of reluctance, although not violent, is listed under
this name. A recent variation of the term is the word "nihilism", largely
used by André Glucksmann in a delirious pamphlet on L'occident contre
l'Occident (the title in the Italian translation).
At the very end, philosophers like Rorty or myself, which
sympathize with the philosophical idea that metaphysical foundationalism
has to be abandoned in favour of a more liberal and non-authoritarian
notion of being and truth might be the object of some pre-emptive attack:
censorship, i.e., or even worse. Fascism has never been nihilist, of
course! But this, by now, the most remote worry. Look at what is happening
to the civil liberties not only in the US, but in the whole western world,
where the war against terrorism is becoming a justification for increased
control in all fields of private and public life.
Even more than that, there is the fact that the efforts
to secure peace and safety through the use of military force are failing.
One could think that this is just because the superpower does not want to
use all its weapons. But this is also because it cannot. Not only an
atomic strike would initiate a general destruction; but also, the
extremization of the use of the force would make more and more difficult
to control the world of the consumers, voters, TV-watchers that is the
sole thing which the superpowers want really to control. So the myth of
the unity - one single world under a generally recognised power - remains
a myth, in the sense that it cannot be realized completely; like many
myths, it functions as an ideological justification of war and of various
kinds of reduction of freedom inside our societies.
Terrorism, you will say, is nevertheless a rough reality,
which cannot be fought by changing our idea of unity as a supreme value.
Sure. But as it certainly not beaten by war, as we see these days, we
should agree that politics has to take a different path. Seinlassen was
another favourite word in the philosophy of Heidegger I named before. Of
course, I don't want to defend his unhappy, unacceptable pro-nazi choice
of the Thirties. But the idea that our task is not so much that of
producing, making, creating actively something, and much more that of
letting things, and human beings, human cultures (worlds) be, seems to me
especially appropriate for our current condition. I am not sure in which
measure this can be applied to the Iraqi situation, for instance in order
to call for a general abandonment of the region by occupying troops. At
any rate, it seems very difficult to imagine a greater disorder and
unsafety for everybody than the one we have under our eyes.
Some twenty (or more) years ago, a young Franco-American
philosopher, Reiner Schurman, died prematurely in the nineties, published
a very important and suggestive book on Heidegger under the title Le
principe d'anarchie (ed. du Seuil). The term of anarchy was there used
almost exclusively in the etymological sense - getting rid of the archai,
principles, authorities, etc. Among the new facts that Reiner has not been
allowed to see, there is probably also an increasing identification, in
philosophy too, between the etymological and the "current" meaning of the
word. Emancipation, liberation from unauthenticity, reaching of a
possibility of "good life", depends more and more on the negation of the
authority of the one. If Marxist intellectuals of the past century took
part with the liberations wars of the third world because they believed
that proletarians have the right view of history (no interest to defend,
no ideological screen...), the (democratic) intellectuals of to day have
no longer this ingenuous faith in the truth of the proletarian
Gattungswesen; they simply sympathize with any, or almost any, kind of
revolt against the unique order, because they are persuaded that unity is
always a mask of the power, and liberty, if it possible, depend on
multiplicity. Multiplicity is also, more and more clearly, the sole
possibility of survival for the (multiform) human-kind.
Even if we agree with St. Augustine that "pax est
tranquillitas ordinis" we should never forget that order implies a
multiplicity which keeps its internal differences, sometimes also its
conflicts, and tries only to establish a set of rules in order to avoid
violence. This is not exactly the imperial situation in which we have been
thrown recently, and from which it becomes more and more difficult to
exit.
Gianni
Vattimo | |