This book aims above all to achieve two things: first, to create the impression that the dominant continental thought, represented by the philosophical authorities that emerged around the time of the French May of '68, no longer responds to the needs of thinking about our present. Its second objective is more controversial and ventures a hypothesis. Contemporary thought struggles to connect with current problems when it opted for the Heideggerian abstraction of Being instead of pursuing the thought of the earth as transcendental of original experiences, characteristic of the later Husserl.

The renowned philosopher and intellectual José Luis Villacañas analyzes the history of 20th-century continental philosophy to reconstruct this decision between Being and the earth. He seeks to identify what philosophical politics were undertaken around 1929, what paths were followed, and what bifurcations opened up, thus determining the course of contemporary thought. The author studies the legacy of the later Husserl and his preoccupation with the lifeworld, Plessner's philosophical anthropology of the body, as well as the motives for ontological difference in Heidegger and his dispute with Cassirer in Davos regarding Kantianism, culminating in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of nature and Derrida's arch-trace. This exploration reveals how a philosophy centered on the question of Being constituted a Gnostic flight from a world that wants nothing to do with humanity or the earth—the true transcendental of all philosophy.