WEAK THOUGHT (“IL PENSIERO DEBOLE”) AND “WEAK THEOLOGY” AS SYMPTOMS OF POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING

Abstract

The growing political influence of religious communities and beliefs, the growing presence of religious discourse in public sphere require a rethinking of the role of religion in modern society. A number of mutual accusations in a metaphysical way of thinking leads to the fact that the whole philosophy of the XX century turns out to be a philosophy thinking in a “post” situation. Formation of the “post“ states is entirely explained in the field of social philosophy, which tries to “keep pace with time”, but the intrigue lies in the fact that in the first place these transformations touched the most fundamental and “eternal” field of philosophy – ontology. After Heidegger's thesis on the ontoteological structure of metaphysics, the discourse at the end of metaphysics and post-metaphysical philosophical thinking not only inevitably affect the problem of theology, but connect the problems of updating philosophy and theology in the XX-XXI centuries as well.

Along with the decline of metaphysics as a system philosophy that is able to propose a coherent, unified, well-grounded picture of immutable structures of existence, the very possibility of philosophical refutation of the existence of God is exhausted. It defends the possibility of religious experience. The pluralism of the post-metaphysical era eliminates the possibility of any theoretical distinction between metaphorical and non-metaphorical languages. On the other hand, the famous statement by F. Nietzsche about the death of God, which is inscribed in the context of the critique of metaphysics, symbolically means the final decay of the religious way of thinking and the flowering of secularization, which means the rejection of appeals to other levels of being, except in the focus of today and everyday life.

The specificity of hermeneutics, which is practiced by Caputo and Vattimo, is directly related to the key moment in the constructs of both thinkers – the concept of weakening thinking. For Vattimo, a weak thought (pensiero debole) refers to the gradual weakening of being, which turned the modern philosophy from its "obsession" with the metaphysics of truth to the local rationality and awareness of the hermeneutic nature of any truth. There are two aspects of weakening opinion. The first process – the weakening of being – from the objective metaphysical structure to the interpretation (“events” in the Heideggerian sense). It is described in the Nietzschean language of nihilism, which means the historical process, within which objectivistic claims of metaphysics, absolute grounds have become false (or reduced to “nothing”), weakened, and replaced by “prospects” or interpretative schemes.

The second process is the weakening of God in the world, described in the language of the apostle Paul in terms of subtlety – kenosis, which is a paradigmatic expression of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, birth and death of Jesus. Kenosis is not a one-time event that took place in the life and death of Jesus, but the continuing history or tradition initiated by this event. This process is called “secularization” by Vattimo, which doesn’t mean a rejection of God, but a kind of “transcription” of God in time and history (saeculum). Thus, nihilism and kenosis are parallel processes. Nihilism is the devastation of being in an interpretative structure; kenosis is the ascension to nothing of God as transcendental deity. Kenosis is understood as transcription, translation or transfer of God into the world, a means to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. This idea, the political correlation of which is non-authoritarian democracy, and the epistemological correlate, is a Gadamer's understanding of dialogue.

On the positive side Vattimo’s “weak thinking” and the ontology, seek to be hermeneutical and nihilistic in the spirit of the Heideggerian ontology. Vattimo's philosophy seeks to save ontological discourse without making it metaphysical in the traditional sense. To speak more specifically, this philosophy recognizes the world of symbolic forms, the world of action, recognizes different practices, perceiving them as different languages of the mind.

Describing postmodernity as a “more enlightened Enlightenment”, where there is no longer a dream about pure objectivity, Caputo emphasizes that the modern rebirth of religion returns its original meaning – faith, not less form of knowledge. Therefore, religious truth is characterized as truth without knowledge, and modern religiousness as “religion without religion”.

By reducing the ontological and theological thought there is a convergence of theology and philosophy, which now do not contradict each other, but are found in some new space, which we call post-secular philosophy.