An author engaged in ideological battles is rarely valued correctly during his lifetime. George Lukács died in 1971, hence a reassessment of his work is warranted. The essays published in this volume provide a philosophical evaluation of Lukács's work according to the criterion of the consistency of his arguments dealing with Hegel, Marx, Alienation and Aesthetics.
The author's dialogue with Heidegger leads to the positing of his Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and his Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reason) contain a philosophical anthropology whose essential feature is the rehabilitation of the senses as means of knowing. Indeed, Heidegger's method would then lead to the same sort of conceptualization he himself condemns, if Dasein does not see the meanings of entities in the concrete. Such seeing is the seeing of the degrees of meaning of an individual entity. Meaning then becomes the measure of values manifested in the World's Worlding . The author calls this turning of Heidegger to the ontological realm for the standard of values, rather than to the ontic realm of science, the Third Copernican Revolution .
Heidegger wanted to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker. But as a thinker or philosopher Nietzsche can be accused of inconsistency. Even his main objective - the transvaluation all values - may make no sense. This author wants to view Nietzsche as a poet. He opposes the universality of abstract truth to the poetic truth which is the incarnation of the absolute in the concrete and valid only as meaning in a particular context. A large part of the book is devoted to the application of this theory, hence the book is both a hermeneutic study and a practical guide for the interpretation of Nietzsche's controversial topics such as the Death of God, marriage, life and death, or - woman and the Superman ( Übermensch ). Part Three deals with Hermeneutics and Metaphysics, then with Heidegger, Nietzsche and Metaphysics.