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Abstract

1.INTRODUCTION: VATTIMO'S POLITICAL LIBERALISMLike most late modern mainland European thinkers, Gianni Vattimo is sceptical of putative neutrality and independence of Enlightenment model of reason. Yet, whereas this suspicion in many of his contemporaries engenders a nostalgic mourning of overcoming of modern rational tropes and a tendency for irresponsible play, for him it gives birth to possibility of emancipation. His original contribution to field of philosophy arises from his attempt to reconstruct a rationality out of recognition of interpretative, hermeneutic understanding of truth. The aims of following discussion are to offer a better understanding of Vattimo's thought, to resolve a theoretical problem in his own work and, consequently, to offer a way out of a philosophical impasse about nature and practicality of a more general philosophical idea. The general idea is main concern of modernity. As Kant spurs one to do, one must only obey those edicts which can be rationalized and hence be one's own. Only in such a way can oppression of others be resisted.1 However, whereas modernity was concerned with legitimacy and reason, late modernity, when one is made aware that universal reason of Enlightenment itself is an interested, historical construction, is concerned with relationship between legitimacy and power.To understand Vattimo's philosophy is, then, to think through problems of our tradition: the finitude that characterizes all of us and that rules out any complete conquest of opacity that every person bears.2 This finitude is initially understood as weakening of Enlightenment project. When one's state, one's family, one's managers or others in general command, ask or plead that agent do something, she appeals to her conscience to ask whether there are good reasons, whether reason itself can validate request. If so, then agent acts according to his or her own will and is self-determined. The aim of Enlightenment was to liberate one from arbitrary wills, superstitions and ideology; to be age of criticism.3 Freedom was conceived as subject's independence from power. And liberalism as a political creed is protection and maintenance of independent subject because a system of rights, political virtues of tolerance, equality and free thought and institutions of public education and democratic participation allow for free thinking and acting subject.Vattimo is not a liberal in this sense, as he recognizes cultural constructivism inherent in liberal reason: But what is called 'world' is an outcome not only of interpretation but also of history: it is result of interpretative processes of others. Just like subject is not something primordial or original, neither is world that is always given as outcome of other interpretations.4 As Vattimo has aged so his thought has become ever more overtly political and ethical. He perhaps always believed that hermeneutics and phenomenology were political engagements, but from turn of century his thought has drifted away from interpretation and non-grounding of hermeneutics as koine to which all other philosophies are mere reflected ideologies and towards application or practical consequences of (broadly conceived) hermeneutics' philosophical preeminence.5One enlightening way to understand Vattimo's political position is to imagine him-as he often does in his own writings-in conversation with his contemporaries, Gadamer, Derrida, Rorty, Habermas and Apel, in order to differentiate himself in a negative sense of identification. He is not a pragmatist and not a proceduralist; nor is he a conservative, nor a relativist, although he does-in a very Hegelian attitude-find commonalities in all these positions. Vattimo's ethics and political philosophy arise out of his return and rejection of these possible positions. …