GIANNI VATTIMO BEING AND EVENT

As any practitioner of Philosophy will know , philosophers have great difficulty getting to the point or making themselves clear ,this can be sometimes misconstrued as the pursuit of philosophical constructs being a complex ; complicated and specialised discipline to be understood by the very few, yet alone practised.

The honest Prof. Vattimo has a special Hegelian exit strategy when backed into a corner when any person who tries to separate the ideas from the terminal terminological jargons , he shrugs his shoulders and states "dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-D-Dum" with a great knowing look.Students of Philosophy immediately understand exactly what he means and begin scribbling with great passionate frowns as if having a eureka moment.

For a lecture on philosophy Gianni fast tracked todays talk and caught us on the hop by getting to the point early , we were snapped out of our nap after only 51 minutes.But once he got to the point it was well worth getting up for as what he had to say about the place of Heidegger to todays student is worth recounting.

In the main the Heidegger point of divergence with Husserl was over the role of impartiality over Being.Husserl was of the view that external property was the stronger component whilst Heidegger argued Being was central and perception was the reality even more pronounced than reality.

Though Heidegger did not cover himself with glory when he took advantage of the Wagner laws in the early 30s which expelled Jews in public positions , including "Jews" who had converted , to allow his predecessor Husserl to be unseated from his University Chair , and then taking up the position himself.This double-cross was compounded with the ever alert to the judgement of History , Heidegger , joining the Nazi Party.

Vatimmos point was this bizarre chain of "mistake" should not cloud the judgement of students to some important points Heidegger took Phenomenology into the field of aesthetics , though understandably was somewhat chastened in making overt political points.

According to Vatimmo todays student should be "understanding" if not forgiving to the "bizarreness" of 1933 , in order to get full value from Heidegger doctrine which had a sound base in religion and contained many aspects which need not be rejected wholesale.

It is on this predication that the sidelining of Heidegger allowed Sartre to take over for a spell.Sartre give the philosophy to Phenomenology an overtly atheistic slant with which Heidegger staunchly disagreed , leading it into a Camusian dead end.The religious base was lost and Phenomenology as we knew it petered out , giving over to a crass and lurid chauvinist doctrinal parody diatribe which is a brass anglo-saxon Atheism as expressed by the weird and unwonderful Dawkins and Hitchens.

And so Vattimos lecture concluded with the "End of" reality.He left off this lecture series with the birth of Post-Modernism , the concept of leaving off the big questions of life and enjoying culture and superficial arts.The only problem with that conclusion is , according to Terry Eagleton , Post-Modernism was dead in its infancy if not still-born in the first place.And so it seems Faith , if not religion has to make a comeback in Human Life , though preferably not with a generation of religious grounded philosophers who see value and progress in National Socialism.