Abstract

The question of order is problematical from two main points of view: the former concerning its origin and the latter dealing with the relation between order and its dialectic opposite, the disorder. Bernhard Waldenfels offers us valuable theoretical means to recast the conceptual galaxy of order and its epistemology: relating to the phenomenological lesson about the paradox of foundation and going into the investigation of “threshold” phenomenons, he suggests to overcome all the metaphysical dualisms in a responsive perspective. This means not only that it does not exist a cosmos set against the chaos , but neither just relative orders, contractually established and inseparable from as many relative disorders . These conceptions forget the diachronic phase shift of ordering, reducing it to its description; in this way order becomes a totality, and from totality to totalitarianism or universalism is an even too short step. Rather, the responsive perspective means that ordering is a spurious foundation and disorder is not another, outside, world. Both what exists having a certain consistence and what at the same time threatens that consistence belong inviolably to the same order, which is inviolable exactly because it is an unique order