The Future of Religion: Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo

by Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, Santiago Zabala (Editor)

Though coming from different and distinct intellectual traditions, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are united in their criticism of the metaphysical tradition. The challenges they put forward extend beyond philosophy and entail a reconsideration of the foundations of belief in God and the religious life. They urge that the rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of religion; instead it opens new ways of imagining what it is to be religious—ways that emphasize charity, solidarity, and irony. This unique collaboration, which includes a dialogue between the two philosophers, is notable not only for its fusion of pragmatism (Rorty) and hermeneutics (Vattimo) but also for its recognition of the limits of both traditional religious belief and modern secularism.

In "Anticlericalism and Atheism" Rorty discusses Vattimo's work Belief and argues that the end of metaphysics paves the way for an anti-essentialist religion. Rorty's conception of religion, determined by private motives, is designed to produce the gospel's promise that henceforth God will not consider humanity as a servant but as a friend. In "The Age of Interpretation," Vattimo, who is both a devout Catholic and a frequent critic of the church, explores the surprising congruence between Christianity and hermeneutics in light of the dissolution of metaphysical truth. As in hermeneutics, interpretation is central to Christianity, which introduced the world to the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into "listening to and interpreting messages."

The lively dialogue that concludes this volume, moderated and edited by Santiago Zabala, analyzes the future of religion together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our contemporary postmodern, postmetaphysical, and post-Christian world.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Sociology, Cultural, Theology, Ebooks

106 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Julian Worker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure if I understood anything in this book. I'm not sure how you know whether you've understood what terms such as antiessentialist and postmetaphysical mean? It's a pity there's no explanation for these terms provided in the book for the context they're used in.

Richard Rorty was a pragmatist and Gianni Vattimo teaches hermeneutic philosophy which reduces everything to interpretation. They discuss the future of religion and that love is the only law.

Page 30 contains the text - The antipositivist tenor of post-Kuhnian philosophy of science has combined with the work of post-Heideggerian theologians to make intellectuals more sympathetic to William James's claim that natural science and religion need not compete with one another.

How is any ordinary person supposed to understand this? Or perhaps we're not supposed to read the book at all? Sometimes I think 'intellectuals' enjoy excluding readers or perhaps it's because they can't explain concepts any more clearly using language that most people understand?

Anyway, thanks to this Richard Rorty book I'm now reading The Endangered American Dream by Edward Luttwak which is excellent.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very short read about religion in a post-metaphysics world. The premise is that Vattimo, who identifies as a post-metaphysics Christian, and Rorty, who refuses the question of religion altogether, are not actually all that different from one another. I got turned on to this book from Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, which I highly recommend for any Rorty-heads.

The key insight is that we should abandon as pointless any debate about the existence of God.

We are not told that God does not exist, only that it is not clear what it actually means to affirm or deny his existence.

This move is therapeutic by itself, but also has the paradoxical advantage of making religion possible once again in a post-Age of Reason world. This is because it removes the conflict between religion and science. We can put to action "William James’s claim that natural science and religion need not compete with one another".

One way of understanding this harmonization between religion and science is to realize religion doesn't have to be about "belief". "Religiosity is not happily characterized by the term 'belief'", because of "our conviction that if a belief is true, everybody ought to share it".

He follows William James in disassociating the question “Have I a right to be religious?” from the question “Should everybody believe in the existence of God?”

. Instead, religion could be private.

An assertion has such content insofar as it is caught up in what the contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom calls “the game of giving and asking for reasons.” But to say that religion should be privatized is to say that religious people are entitled, for certain purposes, to opt out of this game.

When you opt out of this game, you forgo the pretense of being able to make essentialist claims involving our shared world. But this opting out opens a space for commitments that cannot conflict with science. It leaves open that religion can be a cherished form of self-description, a "sense of dependence... recognizing that we are part of a larger whole", and a "historical message of salvation". An analogy I found particularly useful is religion as music. Someone identifying as atheist would do better to identify themselves with "Max Weber’s 'religiously unmusical'" in the sense that "one can be tone-deaf when it comes to religion just as one can be oblivious to the charms of music". But since "this is not a matter of conflicting beliefs about what really exists and what does not", this doesn't mean that the religiously unmusical is something so qualitatively different from the religiously musical.

This all might sound like science is taking a victory lap by deflating the claims of religion. But science, too, must give up its claims on capital-T Truth for the same reasons (it need not give up its claims on instrumental, lowercase-t truth). Science is its own language game. We would do better to accept "the Baconian turn from science as contemplation of eternal truth to science as instrument of social progress". Put in this context, the viewpoint of a scientist is one of many human viewpoints that ought to be embraced for improved human flourishing. We lose nothing by making such an identification. What we gain is a recognition of the continuity of science with (post-metaphysics) religion.

Vattimo has an interesting perspective on all this.

His strategy is to treat the Incarnation as God’s sacrifice of all his power and authority, as well as all his otherness. The Incarnation was an act of kenosis, the act in which God turned everything over to human beings. This enables Vattimo to make his most startling and most important claim: that “secularization . . . is the constitutive trait of authentic religious experience”

Vattimo's post-metaphysics Christianity envisions salvation as the internalization of all the perspectives presented above. When we stop grasping after a final understanding of "what truly exists" and instead learn to appreciate the merits of private, plural religion, we "attempt to think of love as the only law". We better learn to live in harmony with each other and we engage in an incrementalist meliorism. In my opinion, this is a "salvation" worthy of the name. In fact, this is what "salvation" would have to sound like in order to convince me it is worthy of the name!

This idea, that the death of metaphysics makes religion possible once again, is a brilliant one. It opens up a way of being human that I hadn't thought of before, a way that is friendly, open, inspiring, and skeptical all at once.

My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate. I have no idea how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book. For me it was a challenging read. For me this kind of analysis helps a person of faith in the postmodern world.

[Andrea Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was a short, but incredibly dense read. I read this as part of my capstone project for my bachelor's degree in philosophy. A background in epistemology would help in understanding the two main theories discussed: hermeneutics and neopragmatism.

The book is a discussion between Rorty and Vattimo regarding—as is titled—"The Future of Religion." What is the task of religion after the death of God? Both authors are essentially in search of a new truth in this Age of Interpretation. They align on many fronts, but most essential of their agreements: the meeting ground for the cultural junction between religion, science, and truth - is dialogue.

Rorty's neopragmatism says "the quest for truth and knowledge is no more and no less than the quest for intersubjective agreement," while Vattimo believes "the Christian revelation has cogency insofar as we recognize that without it our historical existence would not make sense.

Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are geniuses in their own right. At the end of reading their dialogue in Paris, I felt a sense of awe for both philosophers for the way in which they were able to seamlessly blend philosophical topics into current issues and explain philosophy's relevance to modern-day problem solving.

Reading this book was an incredible journey, and a satisfying read that scratched my brain just right. I left knowing that I gained valuable new insight to and perspective on the world.

[David Breeden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to pragmatism and post-metaphysic theology.

[Veronica Visoţchi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Am avut alte așteptări.
E prea universitar.

[H]

a necessary supplement to Vattimo's "Belief." Rorty's analysis elucidates much of Vattimo's take on hermeneutics.

from my understanding, Vattimo's basic idea is that 1) secularization since the very beginning of the church has not only been necessary but in line with spiritual ideals given the nature of interpretation and privatization while also considering that the church with all its flaws will remain necessary; and 2) since religion and science (or theism and atheism) are not truly antithetical because they are both faiths that rest on no empirical foundation, ergo religion has no basis either in power or in truth, the real core then is love. Vattimo takes this, I assume, from the Greek "agape" to the Latin "caritas" and his translator takes it from Italian to the English "charity."

"The essence of the [Christian:] revelation is reduced to charity, while all the rest is left to the non-finality of diverse historical experiences." he, and apparently many others, lay claims to the infinitude of 1 Corinthians 13.

super postmodern stuff, and though he addresses it I'm not sure how these interpretations differ from Nietzsche's "I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar." Vattimo's distinction, though, that Nietzsche's "God is dead" does NOT at all mean "God does not exist," is very helpful.

all in all baffling with no real answers. this doesn't taste very much like truth, and though a lot of points made are important, Vattimo seems to make some presumptive stretches toward absurdity which discomfort me in the same way as those east-west hodgepodge spiritualists do.

--

'There is a third possibility between, on one hand, the metaphysical demonstration of the truth of Christianity ([. . .:] the historical veracity of the resurrection) and, on the other, its falseness with respect to scientific reason (entailing the quasi-naturalistic acceptance of the differences among individuals, cultures, and societies): Christianity as a historical message of salvation. Those who followed Christ when he appeared to them in Palestine did not do so because they had seen him perform miracles, and even less had all those who followed him subsequently done so. [. . .:] that is, "they took him at his word"; they had "fides ex auditu," faith from hearing. The commitment to Christ's teaching derives from the cogency of the message itself; he who believes has understood, felt, intuited that his word is a "word of eternal life."

'At a time when, thanks to the Christianity that has permeated the history of our institutions as well as the history of our culture more generally, we have come to realize that the experience of truth is above all that of hearing and interpreting messages (even in the "hard sciences" there are paradigms, preunderstandings that we receive as messages), the Christian revelation has cogency insofar as we recognize that without it our historical existence would not make sense. The example of the "classics" of a literature, a language, a culture is illuminating here. Just as western literature would not be thinkable without its Homeric poems, without Shakespeare and Dante, our culture in its broadest sense would not make sense if we were to remove Christianity from it.

'The authority of an [sic:] such an argument seems insufficient only because we have not yet fully developed the antimetaphysical consequences of Christianity itself; because we are not yet nihilistic enough, in other words Christian enough, we still oppose the historical-cultural cogency of the biblical tradition to a "natural reality" that supposedly exists independently of it and with respect to which the biblical truth is obliged to "prove itself." But must we really believe in Jesus Christ only if we are able to demonstrate that God created the world in seven days or that Jesus himself actually rose on Easter morning and by extension that man is by nature one thing or another or that the family is by nature monogamous and heterosexual, that matrimony is by nature indissoluble, that woman is capable by nature of entering the priestly office, and so on? It is far more reasonable to believe that our existence depends on God because here, today, we are unable to speak our language and to live out our historicity without responding to the message transmitted to us by the Bible. One might object that this is still a specific belonging, which forgets humanity in general and closes itself off from other religions and cultures. Yet these consequences follow even more certainly if we take the Christian revelation to be tied to a natural metaphysics, which, in the wake of the marxist critique of ideology and cultural anthropology, appears as anything but "natural." '

[Abdullah Başaran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the main idea of both philosophers' texts is clear enough, it has not satisfied me to think the future of religion. First, after the age of God and of Reason, do we have a guarantee that the age of interpretation turns itself into a sort of metaphysics or power-laden foundation? And second, by arguing that we have not yet been nihilistic enough, does not Vattimo herald a "better" future for religion and society? These two questions still remain to be answered especially by Vattimo.

[Popebrak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super-quick read - not much depth, but it's a great introduction to the affinities between these two schools of modern political philosophy.

[Luís Branco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enjoyed the reading, specially the description of the philosopher's role in a postmodern time.