Social, economic or political, "limits" surround us and frame the field of possibilities.

At a time when we are faced with health restrictions but also with ecological constraints that our planet reminds us of, Europe 1 questioned this notion with the writer and philosopher Roger-Pol Droit.

EUROPE INFO 1

The Covid-19 epidemic and health measures hamper our freedoms.

Our liberal system is confronted with its excesses and the planet reminds us that its resources are not infinite.

Everywhere, limits are imposed on us.

Co-author of the book

the Sense of Limits

 (editions of the Observatory), philosopher and writer, Roger-Pol Droit was the guest of Europe 1 on Monday.

He seeks to rethink this notion, seen sometimes as an unbearable constraint, sometimes as an absolute.

"Our time is living a very intense crisis of limits. It is around limits that all our ideological, political and social quarrels are fixed", notes the thinker.  

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Pandemic reveals "mega-limits"

While he had started writing with Monique Atlan before the outbreak of the pandemic, this book has found a particular echo today.

"We are bumping into limits every day. We are hampered in a way that for many is becoming unbearable and painful. The pandemic has discovered 'mega-limits'."

With the health crisis, we are seeing the limit, among other things, of our scientific knowledge and that of our capacity to organize vaccination.

>> Find all the morning's interviews in replay and podcast here 

The philosopher seeks to send back to back the supporters of total freedom and those who want to "impose limits everywhere".

"To get out of our tensions, we would have to see [the limit] differently, in what it has of subtle, rich, fruitful and vital."

According to him, the limit is a "filter" brought to open the field of possibilities.

Roger-Pol Droit also refers to the Latin etymology of the word: "'limitor' means to open a path, not to close a space but to make it a possibility of circulation."