La metafora dello specchio. Lineamenti per una storia simbolica

Within the history of thought, mirror is not just a metaphor among the others. From its most ancient attestations, this instrumentum philsophiae is necessarily connected to the idea of an adequate duplication of the world. Nevertheless, its primary function is the capacity to include the observer into "the world": the one who watches can watch himself in the mirror. The inquiry of this book draws inspiration from the suggestion to describe the essence of mirrors in connection to the mystery of language, thought and being. Moving from the lands of Greek mythology, the enigma of mirror will be investigated as the enigma of the other and the same, of identity and difference, of truth and illusion, the field in which the constitutive tension of symbol is generated. We will think back the most important moments of the philosophical tradition of our culture, in order to demonstrate that mirror has been, from Ancient Greece to the last age of contemporary thought, the metaphor of philosophy itself. The figure of a man who looks at himself in a mirror epitomizes with the power of symbol the recurring ambition of philosophy to gain an absolute and self-grounded knowledge. At the same time, the figurative adventure of mirror tells the story of that subject that, learning from its reflected image, becomes a knower of himself , but also, as the late Nietzsche suggested, executioner of himself.