Redescubrir el sentido del límite”. La dimensione dell’oltrepassamento nella filosofia di Antonio Pieretti

On the occasion of the prestigious publication of Antonio Pieretti’s Compostela seminars, edited by Marcelino Agís Villaverde and entitled Antonio Pieretti, Filosofía y sentido de la vida. Discursos Compostelanos, this work aims to draw attention to some of the most important themes he addressed throughout his philosophical engagement – namely, the question of limit, of finitude as a locus of possibility for openness toward meaning, toward transcendence, and toward metaphysics. In his 2021 article Redescubrir el sentido del límite, relational issues (those between Leib and Körper), human fragility, and the crisis of anthropocentrism clearly emerge. Yet the fundamental objective of this essay becomes that of grounding itself in the experience of limit, in fragility, as an authentic possibility for building something new. Pieretti’s well-known expression “thinking metaphysics in light of its overcoming,” with reference to Heidegger, was intended to convey the value of such openness. However, in his view, this value can only emerge once, from reflecting on the dimension of infinity, one returns to consider the finite – and from the finite sets out again in order to restore to that thinking a fully human meaning. Metaphysics thus becomes not a dimension alien to the human being, but rather the path that the human being can and must learn to traverse in order to move beyond, on the one hand, an overly “human” sense of metaphysics – too bound to the categories of the intellect – and, on the other, something too detached from the life of a being that is generated and “inhabited” by the infinite. Here, then, lies the solution for a new anthropology, no longer merely anthropocentric, but oriented toward the common good of all beings on this earth. In this sense, going beyond an overly human metaphysics makes sense precisely in order to encounter within the human the dimension of an “elsewhere,” beyond disorientation. It is an anthropology, that is, capable of embodying the demands of living beings by rediscovering in limitation the richness of a connection that binds us here, yet also elsewhere, beyond.