Gianni Vattimo

Gianni Vattimo (1999)

Gianteresio Vattimo (4 January 1936 – 19 September 2023) was an Italian philosopher and politician.

Quotes

• Thank to God I am uncertain, or even an atheist – not an idolater, not truth-dependent... And then, an existence full of certainty, how boring. A bit like the traditional Paradise: tota simul ac perfecta possessio. But please. Instead, what? Open historicity, which is the true meaning of creationism. We are not manifestations of a geometrically demonstrated structure; the rationality we encounter in the world is only a “fact”, a contingent, historical product, which, as such – with our experience of choices, alternatives projects with successes and failures – of ex-sistence, that is – attests to the contingent, free nature of my origin. I call God the act of original freedom from which my freedom comes, and which I certainly cannot prove with the five Thomistic ways or with any other deductive method. Even Descartes does not prove it. And Immanuel Kant can only imagine eternal life as a continuation of the struggle for good, that is, as history.
  • Grazie a Dio sono incerto, o anche ateo – non idolatra, non verità-dipendente… E poi, una esistenza tutta certezza, che barba. Un po’ come il paradiso della tradizione: tota simul ac perfecta possessio. Ma per favore. Invece, però, che cosa? La storicità aperta, che è il vero senso del creazionismo. Non siamo manifestazioni di una struttura geometricamente demonstrata, la razionalità che incontriamo nel mondo è solo un “fatto”, un prodotto contingente, storico, che per esser tale – con la nostra esperienza di scelte, di alternative, di progetti con riuscite e fallimenti – di ex-sistenza, cioè – attesta il carattere eventuale, libero, della mia provenienza. Chiamo Dio l’atto di libertà originaria da cui proviene la mia libertà, e che certo non posso dimostrare con le cinque vie tomiste né con qualche altro metodo deduttivo. Persino Cartesio non lo dimostra. E Kant riesce a immaginare solo la vita eterna come una continuazione della lotta per il bene, cioè come storia.
    • Gianni Vattimo: grazie a Dio, non dipendo da nessuna verità, October 18, 2011

• I am a marxist, a leninist and I don't even consider disagreeable Stalin, who saved us from Hitler, more than the United States.
  • "I do not vote for Bresso even under torture", February 21, 2010.

• Cecchi Paone is a kind of right-wing aunt. I don't dislike him. I don't like him, but not because he's right-wing. If Robert Redford were right-wing, I'd still like him. Cecchi Paone, honestly... I don't even like Rizzo . But when Rizzo's name comes up in gay clubs, everyone.
  • Cecchi Paone è una specie di zia di destra. Non mi è antipatico. Non mi piace ma non perché è di destra. Se Robert Redford fosse di destra mi piacerebbe lo stesso. Cecchi Paone, sinceramente... Rizzo nemmeno mi piace. Ma quando nei locali gay si nomina Rizzo si eccitano tutti... quella testa pelata...
    • From an interview of Claudio Sabelli Fioretti, sabellifioretti.it, 23 January 2007

• Well, if I hadn't been gay, I would never have embarked on this profound reflection on the non-normativity of natural essences, which constitutes the soul of weak thought. So, even if it's not a particularly gay philosophy, I believe there are important connections.
  • Ecco, se non fossi stato gay, non avrei mai intrapreso questa profonda riflessione sulla non normatività delle essenze naturali, che costituisce l'anima del pensiero debole. Quindi, anche se non è una filosofia particolarmente gaya, credo che ci siano connessioni importanti.
    • P. Quaranta, Gianni Vattimo è morto, addio al filosofo del pensiero debole, lastampa.it, 19 September 2023

• My mother was a widow and I am gay, but I know many other children of widowed mothers who, despite the absence of their fathers, did not become gay. After all, I am convinced that almost anything is better for a child than an orphanage. Nor can one pursue the perfect family balance. It is enough that the adoptive parents are normal, civilized people, not sadists who cut up children, and that they have an income to support them, without necessarily having to be part of the Agnelli family.
  • «Adozioni gay, non voto più ds», Corriere della sera, 17 December 2006, p. 20

• Opposing homosexual families is only possible in the name of a philosophical belief about the natural essence of the family itself. This cannot be professed by a lay state.
  • Lasciate che si sposino, L'Espresso, 21 January 1996

• I grew up as a Catholic militant; when I was a boy I used to read authors like Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and novelists like Bernanos. But Catholic inspiration led me also to read authors that were heretical to the modern tradition. I didn’t like rationalistic historicism that came from Enlightenment, peaking in Hegel and Marx.
  • Gianni Vattimo Interview by Claudio Gallo, publicseminar.org, July 11, 2016.

• Those who rail against relativism are not addressing us as individuals, who are not and can never be relativists—since perhaps only God can truly be so, looking down from above on the plurality of cultures and interpretations. Relativism can only be a feature of society, since it is within society that multiple worldviews coexist and often clash. Would eliminating the vice of relativism not simply mean doing away with liberal society?
  • "Chi attacca il relativismo ce l'ha con la società liberale", La Stampa, 1 March 2006

• Just as Western literature would be unthinkable without the Homeric poems, without Shakespeare, without Dante, so our culture as a whole would be meaningless if we were to cut Christianity out of it.
  • Il futuro della religione, with Richard Rorty and Santiago Zabala (editor), Garzanti
• Someone said that it is important — you cannot live without it — exactly because it is useless. As Heidegger put it in a famous sentence: "Science doesn't think" — precisely because it is useful, it works toward goals that it doesn’t choose. In Kantian terms, science deals with phenomena, factual data that it receives according to reason’s frames, organizes them in time and space, expresses them mathematically, connects and measures them in various ways. But Kant says that there is the noumenon beyond the phenomenon: what you can think but is phenomenologically unknown. It is part of what Kant calls the "Kingdom of Ends". In this kingdom you encounter freedom; that is something impossible to know phenomenologically. The same goes for the existence of God. In philosophy, there are higher questions that usually don’t have an answer because they do not concern phenomenal data, the way science does. This is the source of a peculiar feeling of uselessness and void-ness about philosophy. But we cannot live without it if we don’t want to become machines or robots.
  • On the role of philosophy, Gianni Vattimo Interview by Claudio Gallo, publicseminar.org, July 11, 2016.

• The paradoxical fact is that it is precisely the passion for truth, conscience, in its search for the truth, that has come to undermine itself: it has discovered, in fact, that it is just a passion like any other.
  • Le avventure della differenza, Garzanti, Milano, 1988

• The tradition of the Catholic Church is based on keeping the faithful under terrorist threats. The story of Eluana Englaro shows that the Catholic Church as an institution cannot be reformed; it deserves only to be destroyed. We are witnessing the final madness

of the Church. I have never been so aware of the diabolical essence of the Catholic Church as I am now.

• • "La pazzia finale della Chiesa", micromega, 4 February 2009

• Even if we have to think that the Higgs boson has nothing to do with God, it is nevertheless true that discoveries such as today's have a powerful impact on our lives, on our worldview, and therefore also on our religiosity. It is a kind of effect that we can only call “neutralizing” with respect to our lived history. How can we compare the few millennia of human history with the endless horizons of geological eras, the formation of the physical cosmos, and, indeed, the minutes following the Big Bang?
  • Ma non è nella natura che si scopre il divino, lastampa.it, 5 July 2012

• Eco is one of the few people I recognize as being more intelligent than me. They don't give him the Nobel Prize only because they already gave it to Dario Fo. But he's sly, he identifies too readily with his social persona as a sacred monster, a national monument. And I get pissed off with him when I see him hanging out with the people from “Libertà e Giustizia” (Freedom and Justice), which is a kind of Red Cross committee. These are balanced gentlemen who are unlikely to be seen in their smocks in Piazza San Giovanni shouting at Berlusconi.
  • Claudio Sabelli Fioretti, Corsera Magazine , 2 September 2004

"Only Weak Communism Can Save Us" (2013)

"Only Weak Communism Can Save Us", by Ian Angus, MR Online, January, 5, 2013

• Stalin imposed the development of heavy industry against agriculture and thence the displacement of people, the sacrifices, the deaths... A crazy dream! But... without the Stalinist industrial force, the Nazis would have won!
• Soviet communism and Western capitalism share the same crazy ideology: forced industrialization of society.
• I am Christian, therefore I am communist. The first Christian communities were very communist... except that they were expecting the immediate end of the world.
• I propose hermeneutic communism: non-dogmatic communism, weak communism. Only this can save us. [Is is] without essences, without absolutes to be realized at all costs. It is only an ideal of equitable society, a society that progressively weakens violence like dialectics.