Con Gianni Vattimo

Ontologia ermeneutica e nichilismo alla fine della modernità

Abstract

In this text I remember Gianni Vattimo’s The End of the Modernity (1985), in which he puts the Ontological Event (Ereignis) and Truth (Alétheia) in the middle of the discussion between Modernity and Postmodernity. The central question is to study the philosophical effects and changes that these concepts produce in the hermeneutical and historical ontology and the scope and the limits that the question of Nihilism requires; not only in the critical (methodological) sense, but also in an alternative one. We analyze then the keywords of Heidegger’s The Origin of the Artwork (1936): World and Earth. We show that the Earth can never be assimilated to Nothing, or to Death, but rather to the Potential Possibility of the Future; we can this way understand also the léthe (occulted, silenced, blinded and covered) as the tensional Alterity of non–given (Ungedachte, Umgesachte). Summarizing, we suggest that léthe must be interpreted as the Earth, that is, as the living limit of Being. All this constellation of sense (mystery, occulted, silence, non–given, reserve. . . ) name the living soil and the roots of the Ontological Difference, and provide the possibility of all historical becoming. In conclusion: Nihilism has to be limited to his critical and methodological uses.