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.