Chesterton: La paradoja como apertura a lo real. Perspectivas sociales y jurídico-políticas

A good part of the crisis of Postmodernity is given by the image of the world that it inherits from Modernity. In the latter, a rationalist thought prevails, tending to focus exclusively on the measurable and calculable, which ends in a disjunctive thought, which separates, asking all analysis for the clarity and distinction typical of mathematical sciences. Postmodernity, fed up with the sterility of this model of thought, rejects it, embracing an anti-rational and deconstructivist discourse: everything is a story, thought and language cannot reach whatever reality is. In today's society this postmodern vision proliferates, along with fragments of the previous modern vision: scientism, which declares knowable only what has been achieved by the scientific method; rationalism, which does the same with what has been achieved by pure reason... In any case, all these approaches reveal themselves to be enormously radical: they take a partial explanation (the goodness of science, or of reason...) and try to explain with it all aspects of reality. Faced with this disjunctive and reductionist thinking, the paradox (understood in a rhetorical and non-mathematical sense) is capable of bringing together different elements in the discourse that have no place together in a rationalist discourse. In the paradoxical and copulative discourse, this elements show the necessary openness to the different edges of reality, and the different methods with which it can be analyzed. This is what is analyzed in the disertation, focusing on the writer G.K. Chesterton: the use of paradox as a suggestive and copulative discourse, capable of overcoming the narrow epistemologies that characterize Modernity, and the cancellation of the epistemology at all that's tipically postmodern. It is shown how the paradoxical discourse emerges and supports the reflections of the author in several of the areas of thought in which he focused, to result in a rich and open discourse. The thesis consists of nine chapters, the first three being devoted to introductory questions: 1) a biographical review of the author; 2) a definition of the paradox, its scope and its types; 3) a characterization of Modernity and postmodernity based on the philosophy of Jesús Ballesteros. A second block follows, in which 5) the paradox as a philosophical tool in Chesterton and 6) the paradox as a style, are analyzed. The third block analyzes parts of the author's speech: 6) the paradoxes of the madman (questions of epistemology are seen); 7) the paradoxes of gratitude (where he talks about being open to reality); 8) political paradoxes; 9) the paradoxes in relation to the Catholic Christian faith, which the author professed and in which he defended was realized the correct relationship of the human being with the reality that surrounded him.