Gianni Vattimo: An Introductory Reading to Nietzsche

Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) is an Italian philosopher who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Turin. He is a philosopher of hermeneutics (the philosophy of interpretation), working in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but one who situates it historically in the late-modern rather than as a meta-theory of interpretation. In the opening chapter to his book ‘The Transparent Society,’ Vattimo discuses culture, communication, and the movement from modernity to postmodernity (Matthew E. Harris, “ Gianni Vattimo On Culture, Communication, and the Move From Modernity To Postmodernity,” Journal for Communication and Culture 2, no. 1 (spring 2012): 31. Full text: http://jcc.icc.org.ro/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/JCC_vol2_no1_Matthew_Harris_pages_31_48.pdf).
In his book ‘Nietzsche: An Introduction,’ Gianni Vattimo indicates that Nietzsche research has produced a whole variety of conclusions and perspectives. Many important and influential readings have been achieved on Nietzsche’s philosophy. For example, the work of Martin Heidegger is considered one of them. Heidegger points out that Nietzsche should be related to Aristotle, and he should not be considered as metaphysical thinker. Heidegger confirms that Nietzsche is not only a mere philosopher but also a philosopher in the technical sense of the word. Wilhelm Dilthey groups Nietzsche together with Emerson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Tolstoy and Maeterlinck, whose counterparts in other parts of European cultural history were men such as Marcus Montaigne and Aurelius (Gianni Vattimo: Nietzsche: An Introduction, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 1).
Vattimo confirms that it is not his concern to synthesis the interpretative thesis/antithesis (Heidegger/Dilthey), but to read Nietzsche as a philosopher in a full sense of the word. Furthermore, the other purpose is to locate the particularity of Nietzsche’s situation (as the thinker who rounds off metaphysics) precisely in his practice of philosophy as literature´-or-philosophy of life, in very much more profound sense than Heidegger’s interpretation wished to concede. Paradoxically, what Heidegger does not recognize in Nietzsche is precisely the way the way Nietzsche practices philosophy. Nietzsche develops in large measure as a dialogue between thought and literature in a way which Dilthey would have consigned to the same category as he consigns Nietzsche. Vattimo declares that he deals here not merely with a reading of Nietzsche but also of Heidegger and, in a more general sense, with a reading of the philosophy of the era which can be regarded, and which both Heidegger and Dilthey, in different ways, regard, in every sense as the end of metaphysics (Vattimo: Ibid., p. 4).

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