Metafisica e tempo della festa

Abstract

The essay centers on the connection between truth and time. The originarily tragic constitution of such a connection undergoes a turn in the birth of metaphysical thought. Metaphysical thought is here presented as a form of thinking that unfolds entirely within the path of the skeptical, Socratic principle of “knowing not to know” and unrolls ideally in a time without duration, a time unrepresentable to consciousness, a merely logical time. With reference to Aristotle’s Physics, the essay characterizes such a purely rational time as free from movement and places it in relation with the time of festivals. From the perspective of metaphysics, to live the time of festivals means to pause in view of the aporetic condition whose fecundity is theorized in Socratic dialectics and later, in a much more systematic way, in Hegel’s doctrine of the determinate negation.