Challenging the Absolute

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Europes Struggle Against Fundamentalism

By (author) Simon F. Oliai

Not available to order

Publication date:

30 December 2014

Length of book:

166 pages

Publisher

UPA

ISBN-13: 9780761865162

Our contemporary world presents a seemingly inexplicable paradox. It is a world where interaction among societies of different cultural traditions has never been easier. A world in which modern technology has visibly overcome the physical barriers that had long condemned the majority of men to relative isolation from one another. Yet, our world is also one in which the illusion of a lost “original” cultural or religious identity, grounded by a metaphysical absolute, pits men against one another. A physically more accessible world has thus become an increasingly fundamentalist one. In this book, written in the wake of such influential European thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Vattimo, Simon Oliai analyzes the conceptual underpinnings of this paradox and argues that, unless the “European” affirmation of man’s finite existence becomes universal, we shall never rid ourselves, to echo Nietzsche, of the repressive shadow of a long dead metaphysical idol.

Part I: The Use and the Danger of Heidegger for Contemporary Thought
Chapter 2: Safeguarding “Being” from Its Fundamentalist Self-Persecution
Part II: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Historical Destiny of “European” Thought
Chapter 5: Heidegger on the Promise of Art at the Twilight of Philosophy
Part III: On “Europe’s” Endless Struggle Against “Fundamentalisms”
Chapter 7: Thinking the Essence of Neo-Fundamentalism
God-Artist” Can Save Us: Religion as the “European” Art of Safeguarding the Earth with Others

Ever since its first efforts at integration were undertaken, Europe has constituted, historically that is, a space for reconciliation. Moreover, Europe has been founded on values among which tolerance and acceptance of differences occupy a privileged position. Simon Oliai is thus right in underscoring this line of thought whilst insisting on the need for its constant application.