Il pudore

(Modesty)

Abstract

Through a deep confrontation with Scheler’s and Bonhoeffer’s conceptions of modesty, the author defines modesty as a threshold-sentiment, which guards a disproportion and keeps memory of a lost nature. The theoretical oscillations in the interpretation of this phenomenon are due precisely to this character of threshold-sentiment, between the bank and the woods. There is modesty not only in the face of the negative but also and perhaps even more in the face of the incandescence of the positive. As a sign of the complexity that constitutes us, modesty — which is intimately tied with truth — protects us on the one hand from cynicism and on the other from the grey-upon-grey of a flattened existence.