# Gianni Vattimo

Gianteresio Vattimo (4 January 1936 – 19 September 2023) was an Italian philosopher and politician.

## Quotes

* I am a marxist, a leninist and I don't even consider disagreeable Stalin, who saved us from Hitler, more than the United States.
** "I do not vote for Bresso even under torture", February 21, 2010.
* I grew up as a Catholic militant; when I was a boy I used to read authors like Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and novelists like Bernanos. But Catholic inspiration led me also to read authors that were heretical to the modern tradition. I didn’t like rationalistic historicism that came from Enlightenment, peaking in Hegel and Marx.
** Gianni Vattimo Interview by Claudio Gallo, publicseminar.org, July 11, 2016.
* Someone said that it is important — you cannot live without it — exactly because it is useless. As Heidegger put it in a famous sentence: "Science doesn't think" — precisely because it is useful, it works toward goals that it doesn’t choose. In Kantian terms, science deals with phenomena, factual data that it receives according to reason’s frames, organizes them in time and space, expresses them mathematically, connects and measures them in various ways. But Kant says that there is the noumenon beyond the phenomenon: what you can think but is phenomenologically unknown. It is part of what Kant calls the "Kingdom of Ends". In this kingdom you encounter freedom; that is something impossible to know phenomenologically. The same goes for the existence of God. In philosophy, there are higher questions that usually don’t have an answer because they do not concern phenomenal data, the way science does. This is the source of a peculiar feeling of uselessness and void-ness about philosophy. But we cannot live without it if we don’t want to become machines or robots.
** On the role of philosophy, Gianni Vattimo Interview by Claudio Gallo, publicseminar.org, July 11, 2016.

### "Only Weak Communism Can Save Us" (2013)

    "Only Weak Communism Can Save Us", by Ian Angus, MR Online, January, 5, 2013
* Stalin imposed the development of heavy industry against agriculture and thence the displacement of people, the sacrifices, the deaths... A crazy dream! But... without the Stalinist industrial force, the Nazis would have won!
* Soviet communism and Western capitalism share the same crazy ideology: forced industrialization of society.
* I am Christian, therefore I am communist. The first Christian communities were very communist... except that they were expecting the immediate end of the world.
* I propose hermeneutic communism: non-dogmatic communism, weak communism. Only this can save us. [Is is] without essences, without absolutes to be realized at all costs. It is only an ideal of equitable society, a society that progressively weakens violence like dialectics.
* “the worrying gap that seems to persist between the spontaneity of reason and the passivity of sensibility can be overcome if one no longer thinks of nature exclusively in the deterministic terms of modern scientism;”
* “I am not proposing any return to reality—to foundations, to the solidity of an ontology that has its feet on the ground—against the risks of rampant irrationalism, as it seems to me is happening today in certain returns to phenomenology, now combined with the attention of the cognitive sciences,”
* “the dissolution of reality in interpretation is also an (act of) interpretation, which puts the historicity of the interpreter into play, and is not a discovery or a shedding of light onto a past error that would be uncovered on the basis of an objective awareness of the facts.”
* Thanks to God, I'm an atheist.”
* “What distinguishes Nietzsche’s from McDowell’s is solely a more explicit awareness of the always social, and thus authoritarian, character of Bildung and of tradition.”