The Subject of Weak Thought: There Are Only Interpretations and This Too Is An Interpretation

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this development will not end precisely with the year 1930 a.d. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.

At the conclusion of “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger reiterates that “the essence of technology is nothing technological”.[1] For Heidegger, technology is not just a matter of machines but a way of ordering the world. Technology, in effect, interprets the earth, channels and transforms it into a world fit for human needs and wants. The extreme danger of a total enframing of existence which technology brings about also discloses the first glimmer of a possible redemption. The essence of technology is related to aesthetics and the appearance of truth, but also figures as a moment in the history of salvation. In the interview Heidegger granted to Der Spiegel in 1966 on condition that it be published only after his death, he states that this redemption will not be fulfilled by humans alone.[2] “Only a god can save us”, Heidegger declares.[3] All that humans can do is prepare for this possibility through a thinking which is no longer philosophy as it has traditionally been practised: “to the superior global power of the unthought essence of technology there corresponds the tentativeness and inconspicuousness of thought, which attempts to meditate this still unthought essence.”[4]

A student of Heidegger’s pupil Hans-George Gadamer, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has been an important contributor to debates not so much on technology itself as on the disposition of modern thought that has interpreted the advent of modern technology as an ominous threat. His work engages themes of the wider European tradition of philosophy, particularly recent German hermeneutics, and draws extensively on the theses of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. In The End of Modernity, Vattimo proposed that Nietzsche and Heidegger initiate a postmodern philosophy insofar as they seek to distance themselves from the philosophical tradition of modernity without proposing an alternative to it. This refusal places both philosophers on the margins of modernity, at its limit, though not properly outside or beyond it. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger radically question the heritage of modern European thought, “but at the same time refuse to propose a means for a critical ‘overcoming’ of it” because “any call for an ‘overcoming’ would involve remaining captive to the logic of development inscribed in the tradition of European thought”.[5] It is Vattimo’s contention in this work that “the scattered and often incoherent theories of post-modernity only acquire rigour and philosophical credibility when seen in relation to the Nietzschean problematic of the eternal return and the Heideggerian problematic of the overcoming of metaphysics”.[6]

It was in the late 1970s that Vattimo emerged as a leading thinker of postmodernity in Italy through his Heideggerian-inspired thematic of pensiero debole, a term usually translated as “weak thought”, where the weakness in question has connotations of depotentiation and depletion.[7] This figure of thinking carries forth something of the “tentativeness and inconspicuousness of thought” that the later Heidegger saw as corresponding to “the superior global power of the unthought essence of technology”. Vattimo’s twist is to shift the meditation away from technology per se as global enframing to its paradoxical dissolution as threat on account of the proliferation of technological perspectives accompanying its globalizing reach.

The refusal of “strong overcoming”, according to Vattimo, opens philosophy up to what he calls “weak thought”, the thought that is postmodern and hermeneutic, the thought that belongs to the world of...