L'umana generazione e la sua antropologia

A previous question on the human meaning of “generating” concerns its anthropological extention: is it partial (a certain kind of behaviour) or total (generativity of the subject)? The issue of this paper is the second hypothesis. 1. The first perspective on the issue concerns the living body. A very meaningful reference is E. Levinas’s speech on the link between eros and fertility, in which the author shows how from the very inside of f erotical autoreferentiality the dimension of someone beyond the self. The experience of fatherhood opens wide the world of generativity, which covers all kinds of relation where the existence of somebody else is promoted. Fatherhood has a paradigmatic value, like that of “birth” and “acknowledgement”, where the event of being given birth by, or of giving birth to others, takes place. At this level, the relation among men reveals its generative vocation as well as its being consistent as reality “among” the subjects with its own autonomy. 2. The second perspective on the issue concerns the conditions that make relational generativity possible. This has a paradoxical nature: it seems there is contradiction between generation and autonomy of the subjects. The solution can only be a nature of the relation capable of realizing unity where a real distinction of the subjects is maintained. This is (only) the intentional and reflexive nature reflexive nature of the mind. From this goes the issue on having to be moral and the moral criteria of gratuity and work on the relation. 3. Finally, a confrontation is proposed with the philosophical and cultural question of contemporary nihilism presenting a model of anthropological self-comprehension in an extreme contradiction (arelational) with the generative paradigm, especially in a influential author like G. Deleuze, actually in persuasively consistent with the modes of technological post-modernism. This is a negative proof of the fact that the generative anthropology is an important possibility of humanisation for the man of the 21st century as well as of the fact that the human relation becomes unconceivable without certain anthropological premises.