Overview of Limit

Limit (Grenze) is the category through which a something attains its full determinacy by being set off from others – but in a way that ultimately leads to its own dissolution. A limit is not merely an external boundary drawn from without, but the inner moment through which something defines itself by excluding what it is not. In contrast to mere otherness or relation, the limit is the active negation of otherness, a declaration of “not that” – and yet, this very act of negation is what connects the thing to what lies beyond it.

Every something stands in relation to another, but it only becomes fully self-related by positing its non-being — its negated other — as a constitutive part of its being. In this way, limit internalizes the boundary between the thing and its other. The contradiction follows that the more a something is itself through its limit, the more it also points beyond itself – since the limit that defines it also defines what it is not, and thereby opens onto that other. The limit, then, if Hegel is right, is not a hard border but a site of mediation and passage.

Hegel shows that the logic of limit leads to a reversal: the thing that sets itself apart by its limit is, by that same gesture, brought into relation with its beyond. What is outside the limit becomes essential to what is inside. Thus, a thing’s attempt to preserve its identity through self-limitation ends by surpassing itself, pointing toward its own finitude. Limit becomes the field at which something's effort to be what it is collapses into what it is not – not by accident, but by necessity.

This immanent self-transcendence of the thing through its own limit marks the beginning of the dialectic of finitude, wherein every finite being reveals its inherent tendency to go beyond itself and bring itself to an end – not despite its limit, but through it.