(DOWNLOAD) "Nihilism As Emancipation (Report)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Nihilism As Emancipation (Report)
- Author : Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 54 KB
Description
How can we speak about emancipation, that is, a process of liberation from constraints in the direction of greater freedom, autonomy, and possibility of choice, while associating it to concepts such as those of nihilism or hermeneutics? First of all, we should note that--as I had the occasion to show and illustrate in a number of books--the terms of nihilism and hermeneutics are here used as synonyms. Nihilism is understood in the sense inaugurally outlined by Nietzsche: the dissolution of all ultimate foundations, the awareness that--in the history of philosophy and Western culture in general--'God is dead' and 'the real world has become a fable'. Is this valid only for Western thought and culture? This first difficulty is not thematically discussed here; yet, Nietzsche--and Heidegger, and Marx before him, and even Hegel--teach us that the growing awareness that we think only within the ambit of Western culture is indeed part of such culture and its nihilism, since the very idea of a universal truth and a transcultural humanism (as for example in the doctrine of natural law or ultimate grounds) matured precisely within this given culture. When Western philosophy becomes aware of this, it becomes nihilistic; it takes note that its reasoning is always historico-culturally situated, that even the ideal of universality is 'comprehended' from a determinate point of view. But with this nihilism becomes hermeneutics: a thought that knows it can aim at the universal only by passing through dialogue, agreement, or caritas, if you like it (see my Belief and After Christianity). 'Veritatem facientes in caritate': translated into the terms of today's philosophy, this Pauline motto--which moreover echoes, maybe not from afar, the aletheuein of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics--means that truth is born in agreement and from agreement, and not vice versa, that we will reach agreement only when we have all discovered the same objective truth. Emancipation is for us the meaning of nihilism proper if we read this Nietzschean term in the light of another crucial expression of the German philosopher: 'God is dead, and now we wish for many gods to live'. The dissolution of foundations (in which we can even recognize the moment of the passage from modernity to post-modernity--see my The End of Modernity) is that which frees us--once again, with a profound echo of the Gospel 'The truth shall make you free'. Does this mean that 'knowing how things "really" are will free you'--finally discovering Pythagoras' theorem? The necessary geometrical order of the world? Einstein's relativity? No. Rather, it means that 'truth is only that which frees you'; truth is thus first of all the 'discovery' that there are no ultimate foundations before which our freedom should stop, which is instead what authorities of every kind that want to rule precisely in the name of these ultimate foundations have always sought to make us believe. Hermeneutics is the thinking of accomplished nihilism, the thinking that aims at a reconstruction of rationality after the death of God, in opposition to any drift towards negative nihilism, that is, towards the desperation of those who continue to grieve because 'there is no more religion'.
 "Nihilism As Emancipation (Report)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}