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become thus even less visible than a dictatorship of customs and opinion,
so feared by nineteenth-century liberals, and more harmful to the human
mind. For Derrida it would be "phallogocentrism," a domination of
human consciousness and behavior by male rationalism. The cause of tol–
eration has been given a new target, more deeply hidden than previous
ones. Where once it was the Catholic Church, then political authoritari–
anism, then customs and prevailing opinion, now it is philosophy, lan–
guage, intellectual education.
This program of liberation amounts to a virtual abolition of philoso–
phy in the form in which it has existed for two and a half millenia. Along
with the concept of truth, other basic notions and distinctions have been
divested of their philosophical legitimacy and come to be viewed as the
potential carriers of oppression: essence, nature, subject-object di–
chotomy, reason, good, evil. Until recently conceived of as "strong
thinking," philosophy must be replaced by something far less demanding,
less authoritarian and patronizing, in short, by "weak thinking" character–
ized by Gianni Vattimo as
il pensiero debole.
What will it be like? Some call
up the ancient quarrel between rhetoric, championed by the sophists, and
philosophy, whose greatest defenders were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
They argue that we are witnessing today the decline of strong philosophy,
inhumanely objective and hierarchical, and the triumph of essentially
weak rhetoric: the criteria of social coexistence, adaptable and malleable,
have begun to playa more important role than the suprahuman criteria of
truth. As Richard Rorty put it, democracy has become prior to philoso–
phy.
What philosophers once interpreted as a disinterested pursuit of truth
has now been replaced by social praxis; by dialogue and communication;
by deconstruction and hermeneutics; by play and spontaneous expression;
by individual or collective therapy. The abolition of philosophy has to
lead to the abolition of the distinction between the center and the pe–
riphery. In the new world there are no peripheries, or - what amounts to
the same thing - there are nothing but peripheries. Some enthusiasts of
"weak thinking," like G. B. Madison, do not hesitate to speak of the new
era in human relations:
The politics of postmodernity, like postmodern philosophy itself, will .
. . no longer be one of opposites. Oppositional thinking goes along
with metaphysical hierarchies, and it is precisely these which are being
undermined by the new postmodern, global civilization now coming
into being. The new era has the potential of being one not of meta–
physical, essence-bound homogeneity and modernistic uniformity but
of difference, particularity, plurality, and heterogeneity. In regard, for
instance, to the new geo-economic order, we are witnessing the
