"Weak Thought" and the Reduction of Violence: A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo

Santiago Zabala: In your book The Vocation and Responsibility of the Philosopher, you say that "philosophy is more an edifying discourse than a demonstrative one, more oriented toward the edification of humanity than toward the development of knowledge and progress." You say also that "the duty of the philosopher no longer corresponds to the Platonic agenda: the philosopher is no longer humanity's guide to understanding the Eternal; rather, he redirects humanity toward history." Are these the meaning and direction of what you have termed—in books, in articles, in public debates—"weak thought"?

Gianni Vattimo: I would say that "weak thought," pensiero debole, can now be defined in more precise terms. It is as you describe it, of course; but not only as you describe it. Its content is an ontology of weakness. "Weak thought" is by no means a weakness of thinking as such. It is just that, because thinking is no longer demonstrative but rather edifying, it has become in that restricted sense weaker.

Zabala: In which case, "strong" is a negative description. In The End of Modernity, published nearly twenty years ago, you say, in the context of discussing "weak thought," that we now require "a fictionalized experience of reality"—and that this experience "is also our only possibility of freedom." You have said too that, during the waning of modernity, our experience of unlimited interpretability has led to "the weakening of the cogent force of reality." In other words, what used to be considered facts are now taken as interpretations. Of course, many people, including many intellectuals, many philosophers, find this an alarming development. But it is a development of which you approve, and you have encouraged the development, to match it, of a style of thinking that is, in that same sense, "weak." But can we conceive of a strong "weak thought"? Do we not need one now?

Vattimo: I believe that we may. In a strong theory of weakness, the philosopher's role would not derive from the world "as it is," but from the world viewed as the product of a history of interpretation throughout the history of human cultures. This philosophical effort would focus on interpretation as a process of weakening, a process in which the weight of objective structures is reduced. Philosophy can consider itself neither as knowledge of the external, universal structures of being, nor as knowledge of the external, universal structures of episteme, for both of these are undone by the philosophical process of weakening. That is, after the critique of ideology, after the Nietzschean critique of the notion of "things as they are" . . .

Zabala: After Freud?

Vattimo: After Freud, we can no longer believe that "being," as a type of incontrovertible evidence, can be apprehended by us. With Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we are led to doubt all that appears to us the most obvious. If institutions like the papacy, an empire, newspapers, the media, define objective truths, philosophy must do precisely the opposite. It must show that truth is conversational. It is within conversational frameworks that preferences (as opposed to objective truths) can be delineated. It is in conversation that preferred interpretations can be proposed—and interpretations are always remarks about history . . .

Zabala: Does that kind of deconstruction—or, as you have called it, "destructuration"—apply also to the rhetoric of the deconstructors? Should we not regard "God is dead!"—Nietzsche's claim—as a description of things as they are?

Vattimo: "God is dead!" is an announcement, not a claim. It means, not that God does not exist, but that our experience has been transformed such that we no longer conceive ultimate objective truths, and now respond only to appeals, announcements. When Nietzsche calls for a multitude of gods, we can understand him as calling for a polytheism of values. The call is thus...