Auke Hunneman

I have started Vattimo’s After Christianity, and I have been struck by his argument that we can understand Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God as Heidegger’s announcement of the death of metaphysics. This may sound very abstract and irrelevant to a lot of people. However, the claim is that the Platonic worldview that underwrites our traditional spirituality dissolved into the mathematic framework of modern physics and that framework leads to “the theoretical impossibility of thinking about human existence with the concepts inherited from tradition.” The worldview given by the standard interpretation of science (and I would argue not by science itself) is a worldview that claims to explain everything objectively except the reality of science itself as a practice done by communities of human beings that care deeply about meaning and truth. This is the blind spot that Frank, Gleisser and Thompson talk about in their recent excellent book The Blind Spot. Vattimo claims that we should note the paradigm shift that is emerging as we struggle to get free from the performative contradiction of a world picture in which we as loving participants of such pictures have no important role. Vattimo argues that this shift makes possible a new relationship with a sacredness that is no longer a static supernatural substantial perfection but instead an inherently participatory inexhaustibility of evolving-living meaning that is one with the on-going disclosure of inexhaustible depths, heights, and ways forward for us.