Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law

Extract

Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law. By Gianni Vattimo. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 160p. $25.50 cloth, $18.00 paper.

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.