Vattimo: post-modernity and crisis in the technical society

Abstract

The text examines Vattimo's critique of modernity and its sources in Nietzsche and Heidegger concerning nihilism and the crisis of technical civilisation. It follows the Italian philosopher's writings of the 1980s and 1990s — The End of Modernity, The Transparent Society, The Ethics of Interpretation and Beyond Interpretation — placing nihilism as the abandonment of the supreme values in Nietzsche and as the withdrawal of Being in Heidegger, and linking the critique of humanism to the critique of metaphysics, of which technology is the expression. It addresses the unveiling of the essence of technology as the culminating moment of the crisis of humanism and of metaphysics, the founding role of the work of art, the relation between nihilism and the post-modern, hermeneutics as a response to scientism and to the total organisation of the world according to technology, and art as secularised religion. The text characterises the philosophy of post-modernity proposed by Vattimo as weak thought, an ontology of decline, nihilism in a positive sense, meditation on the pluralisation of world images, an ethics directed to freedom and an aesthetics recovering the ludic, noting that this reading impoverishes the Heideggerian treatment of art and technology.