The concept of Humanitas is an ancient one (as old as humankind itself, we might say). Reflection on its meaning pervades virtually the entire history of western philosophy. But in the past hundred years – during the twentieth century – the question has undergone an abrupt twist, as a result of the eclipsing of a dual threshold: that which separates Human and Inhuman (Humanitas and Dishumanitas) on the one hand, and that which divides Human and Post-Human (Humanitas and Post-humanitas) on the other.

Humanitas was for a long time the central nucleus of all ethics (the respect of one human being for another) in its sense of ‘benevolence’, Philantropia, the pleasure of associating with the other (Homo sum. Hominis nil a me alienum puto) and at the same time of Paideia, acculturation, the system of forms of knowledge peculiar to the human essence. It was the antithesis of in-humanitas (treating another human being as something extraneous and as an object). But in the twentieth century in-humanitas burst in upon the heart of humanitas: extermination was generated in one of the most acculturated countries and attempted to expel the Other from itself in the name of the ‘Pure Human Being’. The reification of the human being became a mass practice. And even today that attitude imbued with Vernichtung (annihilation) is widespread, along with the ‘rhetorics of the inhuman’ which foment the new populisms (of which the book provides a succinct phenomenology). The dichotomy Humanitas/In-humanitas seems to be superimposed on the traditional distinction of ‘Right/Left’, and in some degree to take its place.

At the same time, with the beginning of the new millennium, the other border which separated Humankind from everything else (the animal world and the world of the inanimate) has fallen away. Ethology discovers the codes of communication and ‘consciousness’ among other living beings; technology produces intelligent machines, possessing ‘cognitive’ powers. Cogito is no longer a human monopoly. The concept of the Post-Human is born, both as a description of a cosmos in which Humankind is no longer unique and master of all, both as a normative aspiration which postulates the extension of the sphere of ‘equal’ relations and of ‘responsibility’ beyond the traditional bounds of Humanitas.

The book examines these ‘crossings of borders’, emphasizing the new ethical and political challenges in the context of the emergence of a ‘third paradigm’ capable of overcoming both that of the ‘ancients’ and that of ‘the moderns’.

«Where did we go astray, before the virus found us revealing our fragility hidden behind the power of progress, science and knowledge? Were we still free, autonomous, when we reacted to the great metamorphosis of the world around us through fear and exclusion, without realizing that we were also transforming our nature into resentment and hate, producing a new anthropology, a new language, a new politics? ... Today, Revelli warns, we are in this transition, a no-man’s land where a system of values fades without a new code of principles being ready to replace it.» Ezio Mauri, La Repubblica