Gianni Vattimo

Last week the University of Glasgow held its annual (I think) Gifford Lectures and Italian Communist, MEP and professor of philosophy Gianni Vattimo came to talk about "The End of Reality". I could only make it to one of the series, but a thing in it caught my attention. I'll try to follow it through, and it'll probably be more what I think he said than what he actually said, but I don't think that matters.

So, we have seen, especially since postmodernity, a gradual dissolution of reality, with the idea of being as event (did he mention Badiou at all?), an event "in which we participate actively as interpreters" (that was one of the introducers speaking) rather than as an objective given. If it is an event, then, it is ongoing, continual, and in that sense it is a dialogue, between at least two and probably between far more than two. Being is not reducible to an individual. It is therefore collective, and Vattimo talked about "solidarity instead of objectivity". This either led to or was itself an "increased spirituality to everyday life" because of the idea of God as the Holy Trinity is a dialogue too - God in this image is not an individual being but a (manifestation of a) dialogue. THIS is the End of Reality - it is the increased spirituality of everyday life. If reality ends - reality here being that objective event - then that end is an increase in spirituality because reality ending creates a dialogue, which is Godlike.

If this is true, then human life is always incomplete, never-ending. This is why, said Vattimo, a devout Catholic who believes not in God but in the "death of God", "I don't think we can find salvation on planet earth".

I liked him immensely. He was very well turned out in blue suit and pink tie, chuckled a lot, got lost, skipped bits of his paper, ran off tangentially into little anecdotes and jokes that were sort of half-lost in translation, given his thick Italian accent. It's pretty amazing Glasgow can get people like that to come over and speak - he was here for a week, he gave a seminar on Saturday and then a series of lectures from Monday to Thursday. David Jasper, from the Theology department, gave an emotional little speech afterwards about how these lectures remind us what the university is for - sharing ideas, talking, meeting - and how we said goodbye to Gianni as friends.