In Praise of the Margins

The history of Western culture, what Heidegger called the “history of metaphysics,” is characterized by the quest for purity of concept, form, and structure. Pure form, a timeless and immutable eidos, is by its very nature universal, intelligible to anyone in any place and time, free from linguistic constraints or logical presuppositions, but above all free from the anxieties of history. In contrast, we have always been obsessed with impurity, residue, and the margin. Realm of the empirical, the changeable, the unpredictable, and the indeterminate, the margin represents the other of rational thought, the a-logon that the spiral of history violently regurgitates, harking back to Democritus’s verse according to which “polemos is the mother and king of all things.” As is well known, according to Nietzsche’s diagnosis, later reformulated by Heidegger, this polarization inevitably marks the fate of the West from the very beginning and its decline into nihilism. But even if one disagrees with the results of this reading, it cannot be denied that at every stage of its development, European thought has struggled—in various forms and along multiple lines—in an attempt to find a stable foundation, a balance in the relationship between purity and impurity, between form and life.

In this brief contribution, we will first attempt to reconstruct the interweaving of this history through several key stages, ultimately assessing some of its significant consequences for our daily way of inhabiting the world and understanding life. Specifically, we will attempt to trace the genealogy of two thought processes that have characterized—and to a large extent characterize—Western culture: the mathematization of nature and the self-foundation of the self. Second, we will seek to demonstrate how underlying every purity lies an irreducible impurity, or, in other words, that every pure form emerges and is rooted in an empirical fabric of presuppositions. Through these stages, we will demonstrate how empirical impurity embodies the irreducible and ineliminable margin that innervates every process of subjectivation, through which the self becomes itself.

1. Mathematize nature

Ever since philosophy began to take its first steps in Classical Greece, humanity’s fundamental need has undoubtedly been to “bring order” and “make intelligible” the environment in which it lived. As many scholars of antiquity maintain, Greek philosophy introduced and inaugurated the theorein, that is, the theoretical posture or attitude that, decisively distancing itself from archaic mystical-religious worldviews, would decisively shape the Western spirit. In other words, in Classical Greece, thaumazein emerged for the first time, that wonder at being from which, according to Aristotle, all thought originates. Moreover, in Greek mythology, Thaumas was the father of Iris, the messenger whom Plato identifies with philosophy itself. With Plato and Aristotle, the idea that knowledge can be pursued in itself, not as a function of some practical necessity, thus makes its way:^[1] from that moment, philosophical discourse takes the form of an “invisible community”[2] of individuals engaged, despite their mutual differences and according to their own sensibilities, in the rational discussion of sets of “ideas” or ideal norms. In this sense, at the centre of philosophical (and subsequently scientific) activity is the process of idealisation: both philosophy and modern science, which will inherit its inspiration, imply the reference to entirely peculiar objects, precisely the “ideas” or “categories” or even “essences”, a potentially infinite number of idealities to which the empirical world constantly refers. It is precisely in this intertwining of the natural and ideal worlds that, in ancient times, disciplines such as mathematics and geometry arose: for example, while the latter emerged with the practical purpose of drawing boundaries between plots of land or constructing irrigation canals, it later developed through theorems constructed purely ideally, no longer requiring empirical grounding. Thus, philosophical and scientific theorein always required a distancing from the empirical and the grasp of a world of ideal essences that could be rigorously investigated: along this line, Aristotelian and Stoic logic provided essential methodological tools for the development of modern science.

It was during the 17th century, however, that a true revolution took place: completing a slow but unstoppable process that had begun during medieval Scholasticism and continued thanks to absolute geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Bernardino Telesio, and many others, Galileo Galilei explicitly stated for the first time that mathematics constitutes the language of nature. Indeed, if, through “sensible experiences,” we observe nature in a regular, controlled, and repeatable way—so to speak, “neutralizing” the observer until he becomes an observer x—we will then discover the universal laws that govern the behavior of nature. And these laws “speak” that particular formal language that is mathematics, universal precisely because it is independent of any particular language. Einstein himself would affirm the epochal significance of Galileo’s thought: “Galileo’s discovery and use of scientific reasoning was one of the most important events in the history of human thought and marks the true beginning of physics. This discovery taught us that intuitive conclusions based on immediate observation cannot always be trusted, since they sometimes lead us astray.” (Einstein & Infeld 1976, p. 19) On one condition, however: that natural entities be reduced, through an operation of abstraction, to geometric entities, which by definition are perfectly regular. Galileo wrote in 1638:

Of these accidents of gravity, of velocity, and even of shape, since they vary in infinite ways, no firm knowledge can be given: and therefore, to be able to treat this matter scientifically, it is necessary to abstract from them, and having discovered and demonstrated the conclusions abstracted from the impediments, we must use them, in practicing them, with those limitations that experience will teach us. And the benefit will not be small, because the materials and their shapes will be chosen to be those least subject to the impediments of the medium (Galileo 1968, VIII, p. 276).

Rhetoric aside, one could argue that modern science was born precisely from this choice—not a discovery—of Galileo: thanks to it, the chaos of nature becomes intelligible, the variables (mass of bodies, velocity, acceleration, force, etc.) become separately investigable according to the needs of a possible observer. If the senses alone cannot give rise to a reliable science, as they are always subject to change and exposed to the deceptions of intuition, the reduction of the indeterminacy, randomness, and complexity of nature to the regularity of geometric form and mathematical language allows the staging of a perfectly contrived nature—fully compatible (at least apparently) with what was still evident in those centuries of the Aristotelian-inspired Thomistic theology, strenuously defended by the Counter-Reformation Church.

From this perspective, Descartes merely offers more refined tools for the scientific investigation inaugurated by Galileo: if the Cartesian axes allow us to geometrically represent the Galilean principle of relativity (and with it the inertial reference systems), the second and third rules of the method[3] are based on the typically modern conception of a uniform nature, according to which explaining a phenomenon in a very limited reference system would allow us to explain other much larger phenomena, never entirely observable, simply by applying the necessary geometric proportions. We will have to wait for general relativity and quantum physics to definitively put this very powerful but naive vision of nature out of play. And it is precisely in this linear vision of nature that classical physics is rooted, which finds in Newton one of its founding fathers and in Kant its first epistemologist. In fact, thanks to the fundamental principles according to which «absolute space, as far as its properties are concerned, has nothing to do with external conditions: it maintains its regularity and similarity forever» and «absolute, pure and mathematical time flows without being conditioned by any external factor» (1965, p. 102), Newton manages to formalize the famous equation that describes the universal gravitation of the Earth, thus showing how mathematical language allows the universalization of observations which, by their nature, always occur within a limited reference system. As is well known, Kant would clarify the conditions for this operation, demonstrating that the mere inductivist model of the empiricists does not allow for the foundation of any universal science of nature. In the Critique of Pure Reason, it is clear that physics, as a synthetic a priori discipline, can only begin from an experience already filtered by the pure forms of space and time, and then develop through the application of mathematical and geometric language, itself founded on the same a priori forms. This gave rise to the so-called constructivist model of nature, in which empirical observation is followed by a synthesis or mathematical modeling of nature, aimed at obtaining universally intelligible laws that can uniformly predict its behavior. This vision certainly had a decisive impact on scientific practice in the contemporary age; Hempel wrote in 1952:

Scientific research in its various branches does not limit itself to describing individual phenomena in the world of experience, but attempts to discover regularities in the flow of events and therefore aims to identify general laws that can be used for the purposes of prediction, post-vision [postdictation, i.e., determining aspects of the past in the light of current observations], and explanation (p. 99).

Explaining and predicting: this is increasingly the task and the realistically pursued and attainable goal of a science that has definitively taken leave of every form of metaphysics. Moreover,

There is no special method that guarantees success or makes it likely. Scientists solve problems not because they possess a magic wand—a methodology or a theory of rationality—but because they have studied a problem for a long time, because they know the situation well enough, because they are not too stupid (although today there is a suspicion that almost anyone could become a scientist), and because the excesses of one scientific school are almost always balanced by the excesses of some other school (Feyerabend 1975, p. 246).

2. Rationality and passions

Modern science is thus constituted as a purely rational practice that, through logical-mathematical language, is able to formulate plausible hypotheses and predictions about the behavior of nature, or rather of a nature reduced to a complex set of geometric entities. To be able to carry out these operations, however, the observer must in turn satisfy a fundamental requirement: to paraphrase Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), he must be able to “distinguish the true from the false” (1969, p. 32), that is, proceed according to a rigorous method that allows him to stick to what is evident and absolutely certain, thus leaving aside all that is uncertain that derives from his own and others’ opinions, from sense impressions, from the customs and traditions of a certain place, etc.

In short, it’s about adhering to pure reason, excluding the passions, that is, the sphere of the affects. It’s well known that, in late-antique culture (particularly in Epicureanism and Stoicism), passions were always conceived as something that could affect individuals, just as if they were illnesses. Therefore, allowing ourselves to be possessed by passions, almost as if they were alien atmospheres that could suddenly strike us, influencing our reason, is not only immoral, but profoundly dangerous, as it places us “outside ourselves,” consigning us to the senselessness and silence of the Logos. It is no coincidence that, as Foucault reminds us in The History of Madness (1961), the modern conception of madness as a form of unreason, which is also at the same time a moral inability to master the passions, developed hand in hand with the solidification of the Cartesian model of the subject: in other words, if grasping the true meaning of the world requires decoding its intimate rational (logical-mathematical) structure, then giving in to the passions means not only staining oneself with moral guilt, but above all precluding oneself from any form of knowledge of reality. The madman – subsequently called the “alienated” – is then he who, unable to manage the excesses of his own soul, becomes “other than himself,” imprisoned in the world of error, and breaks that correspondence intellectus ac rei which, as reiterated by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, is the essential criterion of truth.

This theme of the management of passions, summarily reconstructed here (though we should certainly also mention the decisive role of Christianity, which, at least from Paul onwards, made the mastery of passions an essential feature of ethics), silently contributes to the foundation of the modern subject: a self-founded subject – cogito, ergo sum –, identical to itself, fully coinciding with itself. In short, a subject without margins. The case of Descartes is certainly emblematic, as it recapitulates and relaunches Stoic and Christian echoes in the form of a methodology that aims to make reason transparent to itself. In the Discourse on Method, in fact, he states that nothing, except thoughts, exists entirely in our power, so that, after having done our best with external things, everything we fail to succeed in is absolutely impossible for us. […] But I confess that it requires long practice and often repeated meditation to accustom ourselves to considering all things from this perspective; and I believe this was the secret of those philosophers in antiquity who were able to escape the dominion of fortune and, despite pain and poverty, dispute happiness with their gods. In fact, […] they were so perfectly persuaded that they had nothing in their power except thoughts, that this alone was enough to keep them from feeling attachment to other things (1969, pp. 150-151).

If in the Discourse on the Method Descartes explicitly takes up the Stoic thesis – found in Epictetus – according to which the only thing we are truly masters of are our thoughts, in The Passions of the Soul of 1656 he firmly states that “those in whom the will can naturally most easily overcome the passions and arrest the bodily movements that accompany them, undoubtedly have the strongest soul” (1969, p. 731); however, “there are very few men so weak and irresolute as to will only what passion dictates” (1969, p. 732). Certainly, in the Middle Ages as well as in the Renaissance and in the modern age there are currents of thought that claim the priority of passions over reason: both on the side of Christian thought – think for example of Pascal, who states that “there are reasons that reason does not know” – and on the side of eighteenth-century materialist libertinism – in this case one certainly thinks of De Sade. Yet, these experiences have always been on the margins of the dominant rationalist culture, the true mainstream of modern thought, which loudly repeats that passions must be limited and subjected to rationality. Nor is this a vision characteristic only of the so-called rationalist current (initiated precisely by Descartes and continued by other giants of Western philosophy such as Spinoza and Leibniz), since empiricism, on the subject of passions, also seems to share the same orientation. For example, in the Essays on Natural Law of 1660, Locke states that the tyrant governs “not for the good of those under him, but for his own advantage […], for the gratification of his own ambition, revenge, cupidity, or other unruly passions” (1954, pp. 18-19).

By eliminating (or at least limiting) the passions, according to the Cartesian project, which fully becomes the project of modernity, we will free ourselves of every margin, that is, of every type of “distraction” or “deviation” from the synthetic power of reason. This serves as a true “law”: essentially, reason fulfills its own internal norm if and only if it proceeds to exclude affectivity from the activity of thought. Kant himself takes this line: in the Critique of Practical Reason of 1788, he notes how empirical motives (or self-love) represent the counterpoint to moral law, the factum of pure reason as containing within itself the purely formal determination of its own action. If the first theorem states that “all practical principles which presuppose an object of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are by and large empirical, and cannot give rise to any practical [moral] law” (Kant 1994, p. 135), the second states that “all material practical principles are, as such, of the same kind, and belong to the general principle of self-love, or of one’s own happiness” (p. 137). These two statements are based on the thesis according to which all material practical rules place the determining ground of the will in the lower faculty of desire and, if there were no merely formal laws of this faculty that sufficiently determined the will, a higher faculty of desire could not even be admitted (p. 139).

In short, for Kant, passion, which always possesses an empirical content of desire, is placed on a clearly inferior level to formal law, which as such is purely rational: therefore, passion constitutes the other of the transcendental subject, that residue of ineliminable impurity that must be perpetually kept at bay, “managed”, contained, since the moral destiny of man depends on this containment.

3. Identity as a margin

In the previous sections, we attempted a cursory reconstruction of the dual distinction, rooted in modernity, between life and form on the one hand, and between reason and passion on the other. These are two sides of the same cultural project, founded on the construction of a world of pure forms expressible through logical-mathematical language by a transparent, self-founded, and fully self-centered subject. If, however, we choose to deconstruct their genealogy by exposing their presuppositions, thus highlighting the arbitrariness—albeit highly productive—of these concepts, we find ourselves hypothesizing a scenario in which the margin, the residue, the impurity (of the subject and the world) are ineliminable. Or rather, they constitute the very condition of possibility for any operation of reducing consciousness and the world to the pure form.

To try to think about the priority of the margin over identity, the best traveling companion is undoubtedly Jacques Derrida.[4] If we wanted to identify a key notion that could serve as a common denominator for all the concepts at play in Derrida’s theoretical journey, we would be almost forced to turn to the term purity, in constant reference to its opposite, contamination. Their relationship can be summarized as follows: purity is impossible because contamination is necessary. This translates into the impossibility for presence to give itself as absolute presence, but also – and simultaneously – the impossibility of a pure alternative between absence and presence, involved in a dialectic of reciprocal reference. How should we deal with this double impossibility? How should we approach the (metaphysical) texts of the Western tradition? Here the space opens up for Derrida’s reflection on the notion of deconstruction. With this expression, Derrida never intended to indicate a concept, but rather his own relationship with the Western metaphysical text, a relationship that, while not limited to mere description, cannot be interpreted exclusively in a destructive manner. For the French philosopher, deconstruction is a way of reading the history of Western thought capable of moving beyond the alternative between dissolute critique and unconditional adherence; that is, a reading modality that, starting from the most intimate layer of a text, refers it to its own margin, to that which transcends it while still having its roots in it. Derrida writes: “In this way, deconstructing philosophy becomes thinking the structured genealogy of its concepts as faithfully and internally as possible, but also from a certain outside that it cannot qualify and name” (Derrida 1975, p. 49). Deconstructive activity is thus exercised on the impervious boundary that divides the metaphysical edifice from its exterior: as Derrida states, it is not merely a genealogical investigation of concepts, but more radically a rethinking of that very genealogy that leads it to its most extreme edges. Deconstruction thus reveals itself as the practice of contaminated thought, that is, of thought capable of establishing itself within the dialectic between practice and thought while always keeping in mind its own original contamination: a complex and by no means linear activity, yet the only one capable of undertaking the arduous project of thinking the impossibility of purity.

An opposition of metaphysical concepts (for example, word/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face confrontation of two terms, but rather a hierarchy and the order of a subordination. Deconstruction cannot limit itself or immediately proceed to neutralization: it must, through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, effect a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system (Derrida 1997, p. 392).

Therefore, presence always presents itself as already originally lost, cancelled, multiplied and fragmented: this does not imply, of course, that absence always prevails over presence, but that the latter – and consequently all the values connected to it, such as identity, integrity, etc. – is established only within a relationship with otherness, therefore through an internal multiplication. According to Derrida, presence is a non-original effect[5] which nevertheless cannot free itself from the origin. But what is the originary for Derrida? The originary certainly does not exist because if it were it could only exist in the form of presence: the originary is that which exceeds presence since it establishes it and as such never presents itself. The originary is not the origin, but that which is at the limit, that which, given the is, is at its extreme limit. Clearly, this statement is contradictory according to classical logic; we remain stuck, once again, on the originary as undecidable. As Derrida writes, “such a game, difference, is then no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual process and system in general” (Derrida 1997, p. 38). Ultimately, the thought of différance is a thought of the implexe, of that which is not simple and cannot constitutively be so. Implexe means dialectical movement, an opening beyond the indivisible nucleus; it refers to an endless and originless deferral, that is, to the impossibility for a single entity to posit itself as a totality, as an absolute presence and absolute adherence to itself. Undoubtedly, we must place ourselves within différance, investigating its structure of undecidability beyond any attempt to transcend it in an ultimate synthesis. But at the same time, it must not be hypostatized as an absolute to be assumed as an accident of being. What is given to thought in différance is something that différance itself cannot master as such, almost cannot see: not the void of an unfathomable nothingness, but the driving force of differential dynamics in its play of infinite references.

We must develop a strategy of textual work that, at every moment, borrows an old term from philosophy and immediately discredits it […] For this reason, the work cannot be simply theoretical or conceptual or discursive: I mean of the type of a discourse entirely regulated by essence, by meaning, by truth, by the will-to-say, by consciousness, by ideality, etc. What I call text is also what inscribes and practically overflows the limits of such a discourse (Derrida 1997, p. 392).

Derrida’s writing is therefore no longer merely the means of expressing his thought, but the active practice and practical discussion of his theses; it is the constant thematization of the fragility of any ultimate position that claims to be based on the evidence of presence or on perfect conceptual transparency. This is why, if we intend to respect the spirit of Derrida’s thought, we must recognize that not only did Derrida dedicate a single text to différance, but his entire work is permeated by it, and even where he doesn’t explicitly name it, it operates subterraneally, deploying all its infinite and indefinable possibilities.

From this perspective, deconstruction marks yet another increase in fidelity, as often happens, to a certain phenomenological inspiration. As you know, for Husserl there is more than one reduction (eidetic and transcendental). Transcendental reductions themselves multiply, becoming more radical in a sort of hyperbolic increase. And since they intersect, interconnect, or interrupt each other, one might think of this multiplicity as polyphony—more than one alter ego within the same ego, etc. If every language, as already suggested elsewhere, is in itself a sort of spontaneous eidetic and transcendental reduction, therefore also natural and more or less naive, the multiplicity of reductions can be rendered by the more or less disconcerting concert of multiple voices. Deconstruction, through all these reductions, is not only more than a language, but is already more than a voice (Derrida 2006, p. 39).

4. To conclude

Concluding the journey described here, the fruitfulness of the deconstructive approach to the history of Western thought must certainly be highlighted. Unless we perpetuate forms of naive metaphysics, the rigid distinction between life and form, reason and passion, must be relocated within an extremely more complex conceptual horizon. If logical-mathematical language allows for the advancement of knowledge of the world and the construction of increasingly sophisticated models for understanding and predicting the behavior of nature, a theory of experience cannot fail to take into account the irreducibility of observation to a radically subjective dimension, thus inevitably embodied and oriented. On the other hand, affectivity reduced to passion requires being “managed,” taken charge of, becoming the object of calculation and careful measurement. Only within this dialectic that constantly opposes reason and passion in an attempt to erase that gap that seems to defer, infinitely postponing the moment of their coincidence (that is, the absorption of the latter into the former), can the margin be conceived as a condition for the possibility of identity. In other words, the margin is not that which does not coincide between two identities (concepts, consciousnesses, etc.), but the condition of possibility for the manifestation of those same identities: difference is what makes differ-ents exist, establishing them as non-coincident, as linked to an invisible space that separates them. Therefore, difference/gap/margin are phenomenologically prior to any entity or identity. This opens up a still largely unexplored philosophical horizon: rethinking the process of individuation not as the development of a priori structures, but starting from the margins, the gaps, the non-coincidence of consciousness with itself.

[1] This does not mean, however, that the Greek theorein implies the rejection of practical activity: on the contrary, the ethical-practical vocation of philosophy must be highlighted, that is, the universal task of indicating the guidelines of human practice, no longer inspired by mythical-religious visions but by the rigour of rationality, of the Logos.

[2] The expression is by M. Henry (1990).

[3] The second states that it is necessary to “divide each difficulty to be examined into all the parts into which it is possible and necessary to divide it in order to better resolve it”, while the third prescribes to “conduct my thoughts in order, starting from the simplest and easiest to know objects, to ascend progressively, as if by degrees, to the knowledge of the more complex ones; and assuming an order even among those of which some do not naturally precede others and vice versa” (Descartes 1969, pp. 144-145).

[4] Within the limits of this contribution, it is impossible to reconstruct, even summarily, Derrida’s thought as a whole. We refer to Tarditi (2008) for a more analytical discussion of the cornerstones of his theoretical perspective.

[5] In La différance, Derrida writes: «Presence – and particularly consciousness, the being-with-oneself of consciousness – is no longer posed as an absolute patriarchal form of being, but as a determination and an effect. Determination and effect within a system that is no longer that of presence» (Derrida 1997, p. 45).

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