After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (After the Empire Series) Book

This is a brief book and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But, the issues addressed are quite intriguing. We learn that Kant was centrally concerned with preserving the moral principles of Rousseau having to do with the liberty and dignity of man, and how these principles have to be preserved against a dialectic of sophistry and materialism that constantly threaten them. The moral image of the world has to be protected from the conditions of the unity of experience which would otherwise threaten them, in a rational way that does not merely establish the moral image as a ungrounded perspective. In the second essay on aesthetics, Henrich explains how the freedom of the imagination, in the formation of empirical concepts through reflecting judgment that begins with particulars, accords with the lawfulness of the understanding, and in his presentation (darstellung) beauty is generated. Especially interesting is Henrich's call to reconceptualize our grounding for rights as they have moved from the egocentrism of the Enlightenment to a logical progression to nihlism.