Misure e confini porosi: la comparsa dell’altro o dell’altra

Abstract

The idea of limit is fundamental in the classical world. However, as shown in his The Nicomachean Ethics, according to Aristotle the ‘measure’ refers to people, to situations. Then, to upset measures, limits and proportions there is the ‘Other’. The otherness seen as something often ‘incomprehensible’ to the eye, using Karl Jaspers’s words. Ethically speaking, even the idea of freedom should be combined with the one of responsibility, in a kind of loop relationship where they both limit each other. Nevertheless, as claimed by Luigi Pareyson, freedom has ontologically ‘no limits’. All things considered, it is in the ‘tension’ that rides between limit and ‘trespass’, in the ‘porosity’ of boundaries that the moral, cognitive, affective, volitional and aesthetical life of each man or woman and of each culture feeds itself, together with the organization of different disciplinary fields.