Gianni Vattimo is an Italian social democratic politician, a newspaper columnist, a philosopher, a strong advocate of an integrated Europe … and a proud nihilist. Richard Rorty, who supplies the laudatory foreword to Nihilism and Emancipation, characterizes Vattimo as espousing an intellectual outlook that goes by the (oxymoronic) descriptor of “commonsense Heideggerianism” (p. ix). This is a nonfoundational grasp of the world as postmetaphysical, with Nietzsche celebrated as a watershed event in our historical (self-) understanding. Commonsense Heideggerians take their cues from the master's writings after Being and Time, while tuning down (or tuning out) the echoes of metaphysics that remain in Heidegger after his turn (Kehre) away from fundamental ontology.

Like Rorty, Vattimo argues that the social and political “Left” is better served by jettisoning all vestiges of transcendental thought. Instead of groping for essences and universals, it is encouraged to adopt a hermeneutic approach and historical self-consciousness. The narratives that we craft to give meaning to our lives in this postmodern world, Vattimo acknowledges, will always flirt with foundations. We cannot do without “weak” ontologies. Metaphysics, in this sense and as Heidegger understood it, is never truly overcome, only gotten over. This getting over (Verwindung) promotes a “conflict of interpretations” in the absence of “strong structures” (pp. 90, 97). Postmetaphysical life is a democratic practice, not a philosophical accomplishment.

Such an “extrapolation” of Heidegger, Vattimo argues, portends a (re)assertion of politics over economics through principles that safeguard the survival of individuals and communities beyond the financially fittest (pp. 18, 87). Just as Christians gave the coup de grace to a declining Roman empire, so the destitute multitudes losing the game of economic globalism today will bring the American empire to its ruin (p. 123). In the wake of its collapse, Vattimo foresees an opportunity for a federated, neosocialist, ecologically aware, democratic world marked by free, informed debate and the binding voice of citizenries—with a place reserved for conscientious objection. Vattimo also endorses the right to basic public services, such as free education, health care, and job provision. None of these institutions or rights is guaranteed by natural law—or even well argued for by Vattimo. Rather, they are the expected product of an informed and interactive, postmetaphysical public.

Vattimo's new Left is not all inclusion and apple pie. Tax evaders are to be punished. And the use of force, including warfare, is legitimate if its rationale and boundaries are articulated within democratic institutions. Whenever force and violence are employed, however, they are to be acknowledged as a nonvengeful “treatment” for social delinquents. Notions of guilt grounded in metaphysical beliefs are to be abandoned. In the same vein, social democracy should dispense with (transcendental) notions of equality. Its guiding light can be only the reduction of violence and pain.

By violence, Vattimo means not only lawn-and-garden varieties of physical harm and duress but also any assertion of foundational authority that silences hermeneutically engaged interlocutors. The postmetaphysical world allows a strengthening of democracy and non-violence because it puts an end to the authoritarian possibilities that manifest themselves with the alliance of philosophers and princes (the latter seeking counsel—or simply cover—for their deeds). With this in mind, Vattimo makes an “apology for proceduralism.” Justice (in law and policy) is served when legitimate procedures—duly crafted and promulgated within the auspices of democratic institutions—are followed. Of course, the values that contribute to our crafting of procedures cannot be derived from philosophic facts. With this also in mind, Vattimo calls for all procedurally minded thinkers, including Jürgen Habermas, fully to embrace Hume's law.

The remnants of metaphysical rationalism that persist in Habermas's work, Vattimo charges, abet the legitimation of a world dominated by experts. In all such cases, the effort to identify first principles and universals is inspired by a will to power, a desire to “dominate the totality of things” (p. 10). Today, we see this will to power played out most trenchantly not in neo-Kantian scholarship but in technology or, more accurately, in the technological worldview.

Heidegger said as much, but was captured by a vision of mechanistic and industrial technology. Vattimo highlights the “saving power” of digital technology in the nonfoundational interactivity of a worldwide Web. Electronic technology, Vattimo suggests but does not demonstrate, provides much greater play for emancipation. Just as historiography put an end to the dream/nightmare of the unilinear progress of humans in time, and just as the postcolonial experience marked the end of Eurocentrism and its paternalisms, so global digital communication drives the nail into the coffin of cultural universals.

In a postmodern, digital world, we wander about as tourists in a history park, trying on various masks for size. Nietzsche sharply criticized the vapidity of such an existence. Vattimo, in contrast, believes that the historical tourist more closely resembles Nietzsche's celebrated Overman than his deprecated “last man.” I am not sure Vattimo's recharacterization sticks. To be sure, Nietzsche advocated an aesthetic approach to life. But art is more than entertainment. For Nietzsche, the capacity to be awed by existence was a prerequisite for a truly aesthetic sensibility. Yet such awe has little chance of cultivation in a discount supermarket of ethical, religious, and lifestyle options.

Vattimo argues that our anxiety about the “supermarket culture” is a residue of a neurotic need for paternal authority (p. 58). He maintains that its pluralism does not have to degenerate into “hyperconsumerism, the vacuum of existential significance, and the boredom of an opulent society” (p. 99). The death of God, Vattimo recognizes, is not always experienced as a political renewal that fosters solidarity. Those who mourn the loss of the transcendent may react to its departure by making someone pay for their existential angst. Still, he believes that more violence will come from those anxiously buffing up the shadows of God than those dancing at his wake. To strip away essence and universality is to deprive violence—which, Vattimo admits, will continue as a brute fact—of ethical justification. The fact of violence, in other words, can never become a value capable of institutional support if we are sufficiently postmodern. In short, he believes that irony will inoculate us against our more violent tendencies.

Violence must be reduced, if not eliminated, because pain, like death, “has no dignity” and “merits no respect” (p. 75). The sanctification of suffering (e.g., as educational) can be predicated only on appeal to an essence that we approach by way of (painful) purification. Perhaps. Yet life is a pretty violent affair, with eating and being eaten sitting at its core. Even the pluralism of narratives and conflict of interpretations that Vattimo celebrates can be experienced as a painful Darwinian struggle occurring at cultural and arguably synaptic levels. And while Nietzsche may have endorsed the triumph of art over truth, he did not endorse the victory of infotainment over painful learning. Maybe Nietzsche was clinging to metaphysical apron strings here. But it is not out of line to fear the desiccation of the soul in the postmodern world, to worry that the full richness of a postcolonial encounter is unlikely to occur at Epcot, and to refuse bartering the experience of awe for the absence of pain. In any case, while postmodern irony may inoculate philosophers well enough from their more violent tendencies, it is not clear that ruthless philosophers constitute the chief danger today.

I agree with Vattimo (and Rorty) that getting over metaphysics ultimately amounts to fostering alternative narrative engagements. Given his plea for nonunilinear thinking, however, Vattimo operates at a surprisingly one-dimensional level of conceptual argumentation. Narratives succeed over fundamental ontologies not because they are weak and soft in their conceptual claims, and therefore prove more appealing to nihilists, but because they are powerful and fertile in emotional impact, the stimulation of imagination, and the cultivation of practical judgment in the context of social complexity. In this respect, Vattimo's credentials as a philosopher and cultural critic may be intact, but his strategy as a postmetaphysician demands recalibration.