A defense of the critical faculties that keep us from settling for the status quo. Drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo develops a philosophy to combat the newest enemy of freedom and democracy: complacency toward reality. Resistance to reality becomes our best hope for countering the ongoing indifference to our fate.

Developed from his popular Gifford Lectures, this book advances a critical approach that recovers our interpretive powers and native skepticism toward normative claims. Though he recognizes his ideas invite charges of relativism, the philosopher counters with a discussion of truth, highlighting its longstanding ties to history and social circumstance. Truth is always contingent and provisional, and reason and reasonableness are bound to historical context. Truth is therefore never objective, and resistance to reality is our best hope to defeat the indifference that threatens the scope of freedom and democracy.