O cristianismo não religioso de Gianni Vattimo

Abstract

This thesis assumes that the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo has an important significance in the backdrop of postmodern thinking in a particular way in his defense of nihilistic hermeneutics. Starting with Nietzsche, with his maxim about the death of God, and Heidegger, with the proposal of a weakening of metaphysics, the Italian philosopher inaugurates the weak thought as a proposal for the time of nihilism, the end of the absolute essentials. By stating that the West is the land of being as an event, Vattimo is conviced of following the Christian tradition of kenosis (κένωσις), the self-emptying of God made flesh from which he draws a secularizing element of history as a place of salvation. Thus, returning to Christianity in postmodernity is not specifically an accidental movement: it is to go back to the very root of a culture constituted by caritas. The non-religious Christianity would be, indeed, the experience of a loving praxis that stands against all forms of violence starting with those emanated from religious metaphysical conceptions, which preach the divide between the sacred and the profane, heaven and earth, reason and faith. Thus, the encounter between Vattimo´s philosophy and the Christian tradition promotes not an abstract truth to which humans must abide by, but an existential project that aims at the experience of a love incarnate in history. The aesthetic consequences of such thinking point to creativity as a response to the quest of being, which summons the Dasein to give concrete answers in its relational surrender. Even more, the ethical engagement reveals that, what is truly ethical in hermeneutics, is to take possession of the finitude as a place of hospitality, embodied in the construction of the fraternal community.