The World of History and the Bonds of Universality

“Normality,” or compliance with primary normativity (as opposed to severe neurologic and/or psychiatric pathologies), is likely a necessary, surely not sufficient condition for a person to actualize the ideal model of human maturity inscribed in Europe’s educational programs. That is, “moral maturity”: upgrading the life of a “normative animal,” more or less blindly following traditional rules, to the life of a free agent: a moral, civil, political subject, an “autonomous life-center.” Facing this “secondary normativity” is far from representing anthropological normality, even in our democratic societies. On the contrary: if defined in post-Kantian terms – and even, simply, in Socratic terms – moral maturity resembles more the issue of an anthropological revolution, one that is still or again and again in the making.