The Beginning That Wished To Be A Cut

Modernity reconfigures the grammar of origin: it no longer thinks of it as fixed substance or eternal model, but as a rupture capable of clearing the ground and establishing a new regime of truth. The beginning ceases to be the immobile permanence of the classics and becomes a gesture of separation — the foundation is all the more solid the further it moves away from what precedes it. Between the ancient heritage and the modern cut, there is a displacement in the relationship between time and truth: if classical thought subordinated becoming to an immobile principle, modern thought subordinates it to an inaugural point that seeks to be immune to the contamination of history. But the common trait persists — the need for a secure place outside variation —, merely transposed from the “outside of time” to the “before valid time.”

In Descartes, this cut takes the form of a methodical operation of demolition. Hyperbolic doubt is not mere skepticism, but a surgical procedure to purge any trace of inherited uncertainty. The cogito is not eternal like the Being of Parmenides, but it shares with it the claim to immunity: by reducing itself to the act of thinking that thinks itself, it claims a solidity that no historical fact can shake. The Cartesian cut is thus less an abandonment of tradition than its radical rewriting: by rejecting substantialist ontology, it preserves the demand for an uncontaminated foundation.

Galileo translates this rupture to the plane of the relationship with nature. The mathematization of phenomena, the substitution of sensible qualities by measurable quantities, and controlled experimentation establish a new pact between mind and world. The order that previously resided in eternal forms now resides in the invariable laws of physics. Newton inherited and universalized this logic: universal gravitation and the laws of motion not only describe but guarantee an absolute order which, although conceived as new, fulfills the function of the ancient “unmoved mover” — sustaining the regularity of the real from an immutable core, now written in mathematical language.

Kant shifts the origin to a plane even more protected from variation: the transcendental. Here, the foundation is neither an instant in time nor a physical law, but a set of universal and necessary conditions — space, time, categories — that shape any possible experience. This cut is more radical because it is not limited to pushing away the past; it pushes away empirical becoming itself as a source of legitimacy. But the requirement of immutability remains: pure forms are not born, do not transform, do not die; they silently guarantee the structure of what can be known.

Looking closely, one perceives that modernity does not completely break with the classical heritage: the obsession with a foundation immune to change merely changes position. The origin ceases to be in eternity, but continues to be thought of as external to history — whether in the inaugural point of the cogito, in universal equations, or in a priori forms. The rupture with the past is not an abandonment of the logic of the fixed, but its reconfiguration.

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity refuses the claim of absolute cut. Every “foundation” is a product of material and symbolic rearrangements that precede it; every radical separation is, in reality, a suture of inherited elements. What is sought as a pure beginning is already traversed by flows and residues that precede it. Epistemological purification is a localized artifice, not a beginning that isolates itself from the continuous web of reality. The foundation is not an inaugural instant, but a transitory compatibility — an organization that lasts as long as its material support and its symbolic inscription last.

This reading does not invalidate the modern gesture, but prevents its mythification. Without the attempt at cuts, modernity would not have opened the paths of intelligibility that allowed for contemporary science and subsequent philosophical critique. But understanding that every cut is also a fold, every beginning also a prolongation, is a condition for not repeating, in the era of flux, the same illusion of the absolute. And it is precisely there that the passage to the next movement is prepared: when the desire for a cut gives way to the fascination with unlimited becoming, the risk is no longer rigidity, but total dispersion.

"There is no cut that is not also a seam;
every beginning carries the weight of what it intends to leave behind."

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——