يناقش الكتاب القلق السائد في عصرنا هذا حيال مسألة القيمة . فعلى مدى قرون خلت، انضوت قضايا القيمة تحت ثلاثة عناوين رئيسة - الخير (إثيكا "الأخلاقيات")، والفن (استطيقا "علم الجمال")و الله (الدين) . بيد أن صدمات الضمير المعاصرة أثارت قناعة متزايدة بأن القيمة باتت أكثر التباساً، وغموضا، بل وحتى غياباً. موت الإله، نهاية الفن ، أزمة الأخلاق. هذه هي الموضوعات المتكررة، في عصرنا التي سعى، ولايزال، الفلاسفة للاعتراف بها ، سواء اتفق المرء مع ذلك التوصيف أم لم يتفق . وتأتي المواضيع التي يناقشها الكتاب على الاختلافات التي شابت مثل هذا الاعتراف في الفكر القاري الأوروبي، بدءا من كانط وكيركيغارد ووصولا إلى هايدغر ودريدا.
Richard Kearney is the Charles Seelig professor of philosophy at Boston College and has taught at many universities including University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.
He studied at Glenstal Abbey under the Benedictines until 1972, and was a 1st Class Honours graduate in Philosophy in the Bachelor of Arts graduate class of 1975 in UCD. He completed an M.A. at McGill University with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and a PhD with Paul Ricœur at University of Paris X: Nanterre. He corresponded with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and other French philosophers of the era. He was also active in the Irish, British, and French media as a host for various television and radio programs on literary and philosophical themes. His work focuses on the philosophy of the narrative imagination, hermeneutics and phenomenology.
"The following is Kundera's version of the "end of modernity" thesis: The irresistible flood of received ideas, programmed into computers, propagated by the mass media, threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era. . . . however heroically the modern novel may struggle against the tide of kitsch, it ends up being overwhelmed by it. The word "Kitsch" describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas…. Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby to gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as the mass media come to embrace and to infiltrate more and more our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code."