From the Tree to the Labyrinth

18

Weak Thought versus the Limits of Interpretation

In 1983, a symposium entitled Il pensiero debole (Weak Thought), edited by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovati, was published by Feltrinelli. The notion of “weak thought” had been proposed by Vattimo, and in that collection of essays thinkers of various stripes were invited to discuss its definition. To my knowledge, not all of those invited to join in the debate agreed to take part, and so my own contribution appeared in a context in which those who bought into the project of “weak thought” were more numerous than those with reservations. Furthermore, in their introduction, Vattimo and Rovatti, after pointing out that the essays in the volume were not to be lumped together under the label of a school, “given the heterogeneous provenance and theoretical orientations of their authors,” nonetheless claimed that what they all had in common was the idea that the various discourses on the crisis of reason had still not thoroughly explored “the experience of the forgetfulness of being, or the ‘death of God’, of which Heidegger and especially Nietzsche had brought the tidings to our culture” (p. 9).

Anyone rereading my contribution to that symposium—entitled “L’antiporfirio” (“The Anti-Porphyry”: a good deal of which is recapitulated in the Chapter 1 of this book)¹—will observe that I showed no interest in the theories of Heidegger or Nietzsche or in the death of God, so much so that Cesare Cases, in a review in the periodical L’Espresso dated February 5, 1984, could write: “with the exception of Umberto Eco, who sticks to the encyclopedists, the others see it [i.e., weak thought] embodied above all in Nietzsche.”

What possible connection could I have pointed out between a hypothetical metaphor of “weak thought” and the encyclopedists? On that occasion I argued against the model of thought represented by dictionary semantics, to which I opposed an encyclopedic semantics. My presentation (though it took up and anticipated what is for me a central theme which received its definitive formulation the following year in the 1984 Italian edition of Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (see Greimas and Courtés 1982) was not totally alien to Vattimo and Rovatti’s proposal, since I argued that, from the point of view of an encyclopedic semantics—dominated by the Peircean idea of interpretation and hence of unlimited semiosis—no thought expressed in language ever claims to reflect in a definitive fashion the Dynamical Object (or thing in itself) but is aware that what it is putting into play are Immediate Objects (pure content), interpretable in their turn by other expressions that refer back to other Immediate Objects in a self-sustaining semiotic process.

Naturally, I alluded to the question, developed at length elsewhere, that, from the Peircean perspective, the “flight” of the interpretants does not resolve our conception of the world into a mere sequence of interpretations, but generates habits and therefore modes of transformation of the natural world. In that communication, however, I was content to take for granted as obvious my conviction that semiosis is an activity that takes place in a world of facts, since the position of weak thought had not yet been summed up in the catchphrase according to which there are no facts, only interpretations. In other words, I had not yet realized that the return to Nietzsche on the part of many of my accidental fellow travelers implied this very catchphrase; and I became aware of it only when, as we shall see, the slogan was also attributed to me.

At the time, all I was arguing was that an encyclopedic semantics may be called “weak,” not in the sense that it is insufficient to explain how we use language to signify and define the world, but because it submits the laws of signification to the constant determination of context and circumstances. I wrote:

An encyclopedic semantics has no problem providing rules for the generation and interpretation of the expressions of a language, but its rules are orientated toward contexts, and semantics incorporates pragmatics (the dictionary incorporates, albeit in a semioticized form, our knowledge of the world). What makes the encyclopedia weak, but fruitfully so, is the fact that the representation it provides is never closed and definitive, and that an encyclopedic representation is never global but always local; produced to deal with given contexts and circumstances, the perspective it provides on semiotic activity is a limited one.… The encyclopedia does not provide a complete model of rationality (it does not reflect an ordered universe in an unambiguous fashion), but instead it provides rules of reasonableness, rules, that is, for negotiating at each stage the conditions that permit us to use language to give an account—according to some provisional criterion of order—of a disorderly world (or a world whose criteria of order escape us)” (Eco 1983b: 75).

I was referring back implicitly to a review I had written of the collection of essays edited by Aldo Gargani (1979),² in which, against a number of “strong” definitions of Reason, either as the ability of knowing the Absolute through direct vision, or as a Platonic belief in a system of universal innate principles, or as the conviction that the order of language mirrors unproblematically the order of the world while truth is always and in every instance adaequatio rei et intellectus (“the correspondence of a thing to the intellect”). I defended the rights of critical reasonableness, of a series of conjectural procedures that called at a minimum for the pooling of certain instruments of verification. And I concluded with a eulogy of the modus ponens, while admitting that it had no place in poetry, dreams, or the language of the unconscious. I ended (parodying the slogans of the Maoism fashionable at the time): “Comrades, long live the Modus Ponens!”—and adding: “As the case may be!”

Can someone who sings the praises of the modus ponens become a charter member of the sect of weak thought?

Be that as it may, such is the mass-media power of the slogan that I have frequently since found myself automatically enrolled among the devotees of weak thought, simply because I once contributed (it obviously didn’t matter what) to a volume with that title. This display of superficiality was joined by a number of professors of philosophy, whom one might have expected to be a little more attentive to what a colleague had written, and several respectable clerics, who had perhaps gotten their notions of philosophy from the conning of glossy magazines.

It is understandable why the question should be of concern to ingenuous realists or guarantors of absolute truths: if thinking in a “weak” way meant asserting that there are no facts only interpretations, the notion of a “fact” as something independent of our interpretations is thrown in doubt, and by the same token we deny the very concept of Truth, falling as a consequence into that murky recess which neoreactionary thought identifies confusedly with “relativism” (just as the ultraconservative Thomists of the nineteenth century saw “the Kantian poison” in every aspect of modern thought).

I do not believe that even the most extremist champion of weak thought insists that there are no facts, only that such notions of fact as we possess come to us through the series of our interpretations—so that we ought not to waste time investigating facts but attempt to understand the mutable history of their representation. What is sure is that the debate between the proponents of weak thought and its opponents turns on whether the preceding affirmation should stop there, or whether it ought not to imply as its natural corollary the issue (to which Peirce was sensitive) of whether or not, against the background of the sequence of interpretations, the ineluctable presence of a Dynamic Object inevitably rears its head. Since the idea of a sequence of interpretations is conceivable and makes sense only if we admit that there is something to interpret, wouldn’t it make sense too to come to grips with that something?

This is the problem I came back to definitively in Kant and the Platypus, but, even prior to that, it was hard to credit me with the idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, considering I had written a book entitled—no less!—The Limits of Interpretation. And the problem had already come up previously in some of my earlier writings. In the face of the affirmation that there are no facts only interpretations, I have always maintained that every fact is the occasion for diverse and conflicting interpretations, but one curious thing about facts is that they resist interpretations they do not legitimate or support. In other words, though it may be difficult to decide whether one interpretation is better than another, we can always recognize untenable interpretations. And finally, though facts are always known and communicable by means of interpretations, they also somehow stand as parameters of our interpretations.

In 1986, I wrote an essay on Latin thought for a symposium edited by Georges Duby. In it I identified the notion of limit as the fundamental concept of Latinity. From Greek rationalism to its medieval progeny, knowing meant reconstructing causes. To explain the world we must postulate the idea of a unidirectional causal chain: if a movement goes from Alpha to Omega, no force can make it invert its direction and go from Omega to Alpha (in Aesop’s fable the wolf is cheating because he claims to turn this principle on its head). The necessary foundations of this idea of a unidirectional chain are the principles of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle or the excluded third (principium tertii exclusi). The typical way of reasoning of Western rationalism is based on the modus ponens: if p then q; but p: therefore q.

Latin rationalism had basically accepted the principles of Greek rationalism, transforming and enriching them, however, in a juridical-contractual direction, so as to set up as a fundamental principle the notion of limes or frontier, and hence limit. The obsession with the spatial frontier is present in Latin culture right from its foundation myth: Romulus draws a line of demarcation and slays Remus because he has violated it. If the frontier is not recognized there can be no civitas. Bridges are sacrilegious because they cross the sulcus, the circular moat of water that defines the limits of the city, so much so that they can only be administered under the ritual control of the pontifex. The ideology of the pax romana is based on the precise nature of its boundaries. The strength of the empire lies in knowing on which vallum, within which limen, its system of defense must be organized. When this notion of boundaries was no longer clear, when the barbarians (nomads who had abandoned their territories of origin and crossed all other territories as if the territories belonged to them, only to abandon them the following day) imposed their nomadic vision, whereupon the capital of the empire could be moved anywhere and, little by little, losing its center and its periphery, the empire collapsed.

When he crosses the Rubicon, Caesar is aware of committing a sacrilege, and he knows, that, once he is on the other side of the river, he cannot turn back: alea jacta est (the die is cast). Not only space, but time too had its limits: we cannot fix it so that what has already happened did not happen. The direction and order of time, which establish a linear cosmological continuity, become the system of logical subordination in the consecutio temporum. The ablative absolute establishes that, once something has happened or been presupposed, it can no longer be placed in discussion.

In his Quaestio quodlibetalis V, 2, 3, Thomas Aquinas asks “utrum Deus possit virginem reparare” (“Can God repair the loss of a girl’s virginity?”). His answer is that God certainly has the power to forgive or therefore repair the moral wound, just as he has the power to work miracles and give the girl back an intact hymen; but he cannot bring it about that the violation never occurred, because this negation of what has already happened would be contrary to God’s very nature. For God too alea jacta est.

Still, in addition to Aristotelian logic, hermetic thought too is part and parcel of the Greco-Roman heritage. The Greek world was always attracted by the infinite, which has neither limits nor direction, as well as by the figure of Hermes, at once father of the arts and protector of thieves and merchants, juvenis and senex at one and the same time. In the myth of Hermes, the principles of identity, contradiction, and the excluded middle are contested, the causal chains are twisted into spirals in which what comes after may precede what comes before.

Now, if I go back and review the entire gist of my philosophical reflections, I realize that I always placed them under the sign of the limit—confining my fascination with the limitless to my occasional narrative divagations, where my intentions were to present it as grotesque.

It might be objected that, though I began my philosophical research with studies on the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, I later turned my reflection to the infinity of the interpretations of a work of art, and this is precisely why a work I wrote in 1962 was entitled L’opera aperta (The Open Work). The closing pages of the book were devoted to the most limitless and open of works, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Consequently, when, almost thirty years later, I came to write The Limits of Interpretation, some critics were led to wonder whether I had reneged on my eulogy of an open interpretation. But what they failed to take into account was that it should have been evident (starting with the very title of The Open Work) that what interpretation was supposed to “open” was nonetheless a work, and therefore a form, something that preceded the act of interpretation and in some sense conditioned it, even though it did not steer it toward a unique end. In fact I was following (though in a secularized version) the thought of Luigi Pareyson,³ based upon a constant dialectic between the legality of a form and the initiatives of its interpreters, between faithfulness and freedom (see Pareyson 1954).

This was the course I had already embarked upon in 1979 with Lector in fabula (The Role of the Reader), which, from its very title, on the one hand announced the importance to the life of a text of the interpretive collaboration of its empirical reader, while defending on the other the rights of the fabula to design its own Model Reader.

If these were the premises, it was natural that eventually (in The Limits of Interpretation) I should find myself criticizing the various forms of deconstruction (especially the American varieties, for which Derrida was not wholly responsible)⁴ which could be summed up in Valéry’s affirmation, according to which “il n’y a pas de vrai sens d’un texte” [“there is no true meaning of a text”].

I was following a principle along the Popperian model, according to which, though we cannot recognize “good” interpretations, we can always point out which are the “bad” ones. In this way, the text became the parameter for judging its interpretations even though it was precisely and only the interpretations that could tell us what the text was. At this point it ought to be clear that, from the point of view of the dialectic between an object and its interpretations, all differences between facts and texts disappear. And not in the fashion that many American analysts ascribe to continental philosophy, by insisting that facts are texts too or may be analyzed as texts (a position assumed by some poststructuralist tendencies), but, on the contrary, by affirming that texts are facts (i.e., something that exists prior to its interpretations and whose rights of precedence cannot be called into question).

Elsewhere I have attempted to demonstrate how not even the most radical of deconstructionists, though they may maintain that every interpretation is a misunderstanding or a misprision, can deny the text a controlling role over its own interpretations. Given two texts Alpha and Beta and an interpretation Gamma, is it possible to decide whether Gamma is an interpretation of Alpha or of Beta? If it is not possible, if Gamma could be seen indifferently as an interpretation not only of Alpha and of Beta but also of any other text, then there would be no interpretations, only production of texts without any relationship between them, pure solipsistic babble. If on the other hand it is possible, then we have a parameter that permits us to discriminate between reliable interpretations and unreliable ones. In order to conclude, for instance, that Gamma is not an interpretation of Beta, we must still affirm that Beta is not the Thing it is talking about. Now, not even the most rabid advocate of deconstructionism would ever affirm that the 1825 Iliade by Vincenzo Monti (well known to be a free translation of previous translations of Homer) could be read as if it were a translation of the Aeneid. Homer’s Iliad, then, is a text (an object, a fact) that determines the recognition of Monti’s Iliade as one of its possible interpretations, at the same time as it excludes the sixteenth-century Italian translation of the Aeneid by Annibal Caro from the ranks of possible translations of the Iliad.

Is it possible, given an object that exists prior to its interpretations, that the interpretations of that object could be so different from one another, perhaps potentially infinite, or at least indefinite in number, without however our being able to ignore that they have to do with something that precedes them?

In Kant and the Platypus I proposed a mental experiment. Let an elementary model be constructed that contains a World along with a Mind that knows and names it. The World is a whole made up of elements (we could call them atoms, in the sense of the Greek stoicheia), structured according to reciprocal relations. As for the Mind, we do not have to think of it as a res cogitans: it is simply a device for organizing sequences of elements valid as descriptions of the real World or of possible worlds. These elements could be understood as neurons, bytes, or stoicheia, but for the sake of convenience let’s call them symbols.

By World we mean the universe in its “maximal” version, inasmuch as it includes both what we consider to be the current universe and the infinity of possible universes. This universe can therefore also include God, or any other original principle.

Theoretically, there would be no need to assume that we have on the one hand a thinking substance and on the other the universe of things that may be thought. Both atoms and symbols may be conceived of as ontologically homologous entities, stoicheia made from the same basic material. The Mind should be thought of simply as a device that forms part of the World; or alternatively the World should be thought of as something capable of interpreting itself, which delegates part of itself to this purpose, so that among its infinite or indefinite number of atoms some serve as symbols that represent all the other atoms, exactly as when we human beings, speaking of phonology or phonetics, delegate a limited number of sounds to represent every possible phonation. The Mind ought, then, to be represented, not as standing in front of the World, but as contained in the World, and it should be structured in such a way as to be able to speak, not only of the World (which is opposed to it), but also of itself as part of the World, and of the very process by means of which it, as part of what is interpreted, can function as an interpretant. At this point, however, we would no longer have a model, but exactly what the model is attempting, however clumsily, to describe.⁵

Let us agree, then, for the sake of convenience and in the interests of simplification, to think of a World on the one side and on the other a Mind that interprets it, enriching it at the same time with fresh possible configurations.

FIRST HYPOTHESIS. Let us imagine that the World is made up of three atoms (1, 2, 3) and the Mind of three symbols (A, B, C). They could combine in six different ways, but if we limit ourselves to thinking of the World in its current state (including its history), we might suppose it to be endowed with a stable structure given by the sequence 123 (as in Figure 18.1). If knowledge were specular, and the truth Aquinas’s adaequatio rei et intellectus, the Mind would assign nonarbitrarily symbol A to atom 1, symbol B to atom 2, symbol C to atom 3, and would represent the structure of the world with the ordered triplet of symbols ABC. In point of fact, the Mind would not be “interpreting” the world but representing it in a specular fashion.

Figure 18.1

But if the assignment of symbols to the atoms was arbitrary, then the Mind could also assign A, B, and C to any of the atoms it so desired, and by combinatory calculus it would have six possible ways of faithfully representing the same 123 structure. The six descriptions would furthermore be six specular representations in six different languages, but the metaphor of six different specular images of the same object suggests that either the object or the mirror moves each time, providing six different angles.

SECOND HYPOTHESIS. The symbols used by the Mind are fewer in number than the atoms of the World. The symbols used by the Mind are still three, but the atoms of the World are ten (1, 2, 3 … 10). If the World were still structured in triplets of atoms, by factorial calculus it could group its ten atoms in 720 different ternary structures. In that case the Mind would have six triplets of symbols as in the first hypothesis (ABC, BCA, CAB, ACB, BAC, CBA) to account for 720 triplets of atoms (as in Figure 18.2). Different worldly events, from different perspectives, could be interpreted by the same symbols. For example, we would always be obliged to use the triplet of symbols ABC to represent 123, or 345, or 547. This might constitute an embarrassing superabundance of homonyms, but it might also permit us to discover (creatively) that between, let’s say, the worldly triplets 123 and 345 there exist analogies or elements in common, to the point that they can be represented by the same triplet of symbols. The poverty of the Mind therefore would not preclude it from making more and more fresh discoveries.

Figure 18.2

The problem would be no different—it would just become more complicated—if the World were not ordered in a stable way, but chaotic (and capable of evolving and restructuring itself over time). Constantly changing the structures of its triplets, the language of the Mind would have to keep constantly adapting itself to the changing situations.

And if, on the other hand, the World were hyperstructured in a stable way, that is, if it were organized according to a single structure given by a particular sequence of ten atoms, the Mind would still only have six triplets of symbols to describe this hyperstructure. It would be obliged, then, to attempt to describe it piecemeal, from local points of view, and would never be able to describe it in its entirety. But it would be precisely the choice of these partial solutions that made ever more innovative and original points of view possible.

THIRD HYPOTHESIS. The Mind has more elements than the World. The Mind has ten symbols at its disposal (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J) and the World only three atoms (1, 2, 3), as in Figure 18.3. This is not all—the Mind can combine these ten symbols in duplets, triplets, quadruplets, and so on. Which is the same thing as saying that the cerebral structure would have more neurons and more combinatory possibilities among neurons than the number of atoms and their combinations identifiable in the World.

Figure 18.3

Clearly, this hypothesis would have to be abandoned immediately, because it conflicts with the original assumption that the Mind is part of the World. In order to consent this hypothesis, the Mind would have to step out of the World: it would be a kind of intensely thinking divinity compelled to account for an extremely impoverished world, a world that, on top of that, it does not know, because it was cobbled together by a Demiurge with no imagination. We could also think of a World that somehow secretes more res cogitans than res extensa, a World that has produced, that is, a fairly limited number of thinkable structures, using few atoms, and is holding others in reserve to use them as symbols of the Mind. It would follow that the Mind would have an astronomical number of combinations of symbols to represent a 123 structure of the world (or at most its six possible combinations), always from a different point of view. The Mind could, for example, represent 123 (by combinatory calculus) by means of 3,628,800 decuplets, each of which would not only be designed to account for 123 but also for the day and the hour when it is represented, for the internal state of the Mind itself at that moment, and for the intentions and purposes with which the Mind was representing it. There would be an excess of thought with respect to the simplicity of the World, and the supply of possible representations would exceed the number of possible existing structures. And maybe this is what really happens, seeing that we are able to lie and construct fantastic worlds, and imagine and anticipate alternative states of things (Figure 18.4).

Figure 18.4

FOURTH HYPOTHESIS. The Mind has ten symbols, and the atoms of the World are ten. Both Mind and World can combine their elements, as in the third hypothesis, in duplets, triplets, quadruplets … decuplets (see Figure 18.4). The Mind would then have an astronomical number of propositions at its disposal to describe an astronomical number of worldly structures. And this is not all—given the abundance of as yet unrealized worldly combinations, it could plan modifications of the World, as it could be continually taken by surprise by worldly combinations it had not foreseen; in addition to which, it would be kept very busy explaining in different ways how it itself worked.

What we would have would be, not so much an excess of thought with respect to the simplicity of the world—as was the case with the third hypothesis—but a kind of constant challenge among contenders fighting on potentially equal terms, though in fact changing weapons with each attack and putting the adversary at a disadvantage. The Mind would confront the World from an excess of perspectives, the World would elude the snares of the Mind by constantly changing the rules of the game (including the Mind’s own rules).

Now, it is not a question of deciding which of the four hypotheses is the correct one. The mental experiment was designed to demonstrate that, however things may go, not only is it possible for a plurality of interpretations to coexist with the presumed legality of the interpreted object, but also that it would not even make sense to try out all the interpretations unless we were to presuppose that there was something there to interpret.

I believe that recognizing the legality of the object leads us to distinguish a philosophy of conjecture and interpretance from a philosophy of weak thought. There is a minimal and noningenuous definition of realism, according to which a realist is someone who believes that things go a certain way—even though we may not know which way and may never succeed in knowing. And even if they were convinced that they will never know how things go, this kind of realist continues to investigate how they go, hoping to reach a satisfactory approximation, and forever prepared to correct their interpretations should things oppose the slightest resistance to their “readings” of them. The point is that this realist of ours starts out from the premise that, even if things were to go a different way every day (if the world had no rules), this too would still be the way things went (the ironclad law that guarantees permanent irregularity). So that, though we may accept that the descriptions we give of the World (or of a text as World) are always prospective, this ought not to prevent our readings from attempting to keep pace with the world, at least from a certain point of view, without ever pretending that the said readings, even when they seem on the whole to be “good,” are to be considered definitive. And, since in this series of interpretations we stick to the parameters offered by the facts to be interpreted (even if only locally and from a certain perspective), we must presume that the readings we give of the facts may be accurate or they may be completely off the wall.

But did anyone ever really believe that there are no facts, only interpretations? Vattimo and Rovatti were not wrong in appealing to Nietzsche, because that is where this very theory is explained, in an especially intense manner in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” (“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”) (1873), a text I already discussed in Kant and the Platypus. Since nature has thrown away the key, the intellect plays with fictions that it calls truth, or a system of concepts, based on the legislation of language. We think we are talking about (and knowing) trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but they are metaphors that do not correspond to the original essences. Every word immediately becomes a concept, draining away with its pallid universality the differences between fundamentally unequal things: so we believe that compared to the multiplicity of individual leaves there exists a “primal” leaf “from which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, dyed, curled, painted—but by a clumsy pair of hands, so that no single example turned out to be a faithful, correct and reliable copy of the primal form” (Nietzsche 1873: 145). It is difficult for us to admit that birds or insects perceive the world differently from us, and it makes no sense either to say which perception is the correct one, because this would call for that criterion of “exact perception” that does not exist because “nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us” (ibid.: 145).

Truth, then, becomes “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,” produced poetically, only to become fossilized into knowledge, “illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions” (ibid.: 146), coins whose images has been rubbed away and are now considered simply as pieces of metal and no longer as coins. We thus become accustomed to lying according to convention, having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws and delimitations, entirely constructed by language, an immense “Roman columbarium” of concepts, the graveyard of intuition.

No question but that this is a fascinating account of how the edifice of language regiments the landscape of the world, but Nietzsche fails to consider two intuitively evident phenomena. One is that, if we adapt ourselves to the constrictions of the columbarium, we can still manage to give some kind of account of the World (if someone goes to see a doctor and tells him he has been bitten by a dog, the doctor knows what sort of injection to give him, even if he is not familiar with the particular dog that bit him). The other is that every now and then the World forces us to adapt the columbarium, or even to choose an alternative model to the columbarium (which is, at the end of the day, the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms).

Nietzsche is undeniably cognizant of the existence of natural constrictions and can see a way to change. The constrictions seem to him to be “terrible forces” that constantly press upon us, countering “scientific” truths with other truths of a different nature; but he evidently refuses to recognize them by conceptualizing them in their turn, given that it is in order to escape them that we have wrought, by way of a defense, our conceptual suit of armor. Change is possible, though not in the form of tinkering with the structure, but instead in the form of a permanent poetic revolution: “if each of us still had a different kind of sensuous perception, if we ourselves could only perceive now as, variously, a bird, a worm, or a plant does, or if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second person were to see the same stimulus as blue, while a third were even to hear it as a sound, nobody would ever speak of nature as something conforming to laws” (ibid.: 149).

Therefore, art (and with it myth) “constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonymies; it constantly manifests the desire to shape the given world of the waking human being in ways which are just as multiform, irregular, inconsequential, incoherent, charming and ever-new, as things are in the world of dream” (ibid.: 151).

If these are the premises, our first option would be to reject what surrounds us (and the way in which we vainly try to reduce it to order) and take refuge in dreams as a flight from reality. Nietzsche in fact cites Pascal, for whom, in order to be happy, all it would take would be to dream every night of being king, but he then admits that this dominion of art over life, however delightful, would be a deception. Otherwise, and this is what Nietzsche’s heirs have taken as the real lesson, art can say what it says because it is Being itself, in its weakness and generosity, that accepts any definition, and takes pleasure from seeing itself seen as changeable, a dreamer, extenuatingly vigorous and victoriously weak, no longer as “fullness, presence or foundation, but rather as fracture, absence of foundation, work and pain” (Vattimo 1993: 73). Being can therefore only be spoken insofar as it is in decline; instead of imposing itself, it withdraws. Thus we have arrived at an “ontology organized into ‘weak’ categories” (ibid.: 5). Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is nothing more than the proclamation of the end of the stable structure of Being (Vattimo 1984: 158). From now on, Being will present itself only “as suspension and withdrawal” (Vattimo 1997: 13).

It is not my intention to discuss whether, from the point of view of weak thought, Being should still be written with a capital B (and in fact Vattimo does not do so). I will stick to the mental experiment previously proposed, and I will speak not of Being but of the World (if “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” [“The world is everything that is the case”—Wittgenstein], and if we call World what happens to be the case). The problem is that what prevents us believing that all points of view are equally valid, that the World is merely the effect of language and, in addition to being malleable and weak, is a mere flatus vocis, and is therefore the work of Poets, characterized as daydreamers, liars, imitators of the nonexistent, capable of irresponsibly placing a horse’s head on a human body and turning every entity into a chimera.

The trouble is, in the first place, that, once we had settled our accounts with the World, we would still find ourselves having to settle them with the subject that emits this flatus vocis (a problem which is in any case the limit of any magic idealism). And, in the second place, if it is a hermeneutic principle that there are no facts, only interpretations, this still does not exclude the possibility of “bad” interpretations. There is no winning hand at poker that has not been put together by a choice of the player (encouraged maybe by chance), but this does not mean that every hand assembled by the player is a winning hand. All it would take is for my opponent to respond to my three aces with a straight flush for my wager to turn out to have been a bad bet. There are times in our game with the World when the World responds to our three aces with a straight flush. Furthermore, there are players who make a bet and are eventually obliged to show a hand that, according to the laws of poker, contains no valid combination of cards: and the others, in unison, observe that the player must be crazy, or doesn’t know how to play, or is bluffing. What is the status of bluffing in a universe in which one interpretation is as good as another? What are the intersubjective criteria that allow us to define that particular combination of cards as off the wall? What criterion allows us to distinguish between dreams, poetic inventions, and LSD trips (there are people who after taking LSD have thrown themselves out of windows convinced they could fly and finished up in a heap on the sidewalk—contrary, mind you, to all their hopes and intentions), and, on the other hand, acceptable statements concerning the things of the physical or historical world that surrounds us?

Let us posit, as Vattimo does (1994: 100), a difference between epistemology, as “the construction of a body of rigorous knowledge and the solution of problems in the light of paradigms that lay down the rules for the verification of propositions” (which seems to correspond to Nietzsche’s picture of the conceptual universe of a given culture) and hermeneutics, as “the activity that takes place during the encounter with different paradigmatic horizons, which do not allow themselves to be assessed on the basis of some kind of conformity (to rules or, in the final analysis, to the thing) but exist as ‘poetic’ proposals of other worlds, of the establishment of new rules” (Vattimo 1997: 79). What new rule should the Community prefer, what rule should it condemn as folly? There are still people hell-bent on demonstrating that the earth is square, that we live not on but beneath its crust, that statues weep, that forks can be bent by television, that the apes are descended from man—and we have to come up with a public criterion by which to judge whether their ideas are in some way acceptable.

In a debate that took place in 1990 (published in Eco 1992), on whether or not criteria for textual interpretation exist, Richard Rorty—broadening the discourse to include criteria for interpreting things in the world—argued against the notion that the use of a screwdriver for screwing in screws is imposed by the object itself, while its use for opening a package is imposed by our own subjectivity (he was discussing my distinction between the interpretation and use of a text (cf. Eco 1979).

In the oral debate, Rorty had polemically asserted his right to go so far as to interpret a screwdriver as something useful for scratching your ears. This explains my reply, which still survives in the printed version of the debate because I was unaware that in the version of his contribution submitted by Rorty to the publisher that example had been left out. Rorty had evidently concluded that it was more of a boutade than a logical argument, but since another critic (less inclined to self-criticism than Rorty) might still conceivably use the wisecrack as an argument, my objection is still valid: a screwdriver can certainly be very useful for opening a package but it is not advisable to use it for poking about in your ear, because it is too sharp and too long for the hand to be able to exercise control over its movements; and therefore it would be better to use a light plastic stick with a wad of cotton at either end. Which is the same thing as appealing to the notion of affordance proposed by Gibson (1966) or to that of pertinence with respect to a practice proposed by Prieto (1975). There is something about the conformation of my body and that of the screwdriver that does not permit me to interpret and use the latter as the whim takes me.

This is why, in Kant and the Platypus, I argued that we have to recognize a hard core of being, such that some of the things that we say about it or for it cannot and must not be taken as “valid” (and if they are said by the Poets they should be taken as valid only insofar as they refer to a possible world and not to the world of real facts).

In speaking of a “hard core” I did not mean something like a “stable kernel” which we might identify sooner or later, not the Law of Laws, but, more prudently, lines of resistance that render some of our approaches fruitless. It is precisely our faith in these lines of resistance that ought also to guide the discourse on hermeneutics, because, if that discourse were to assume that one can say anything and everything one pleases about being and the World, the intellectual and moral tension that guides its continual interrogation would no longer make sense—and it would be content to amuse itself with the Futurists’ parole in libertà. In any case, Heidegger himself recognized limits, otherwise he would not have concentrated so much on the problem of Death—the limit, the cosmic tendency, par excellence.

When we claim to have learned from experience that nature exhibits stable tendencies, there is no need to think of complex laws like the law of universal gravity, but of experiences that are simpler and more immediate, like the apparent rising and setting of the sun, the fact that things fall downward and not upward, the existence of species. Universals may well be a figment and an infirmity of thought, but once a dog and a cat have been identified as belonging to a species, we immediately learn that if we couple a dog with a dog what is born is a dog, and if we couple a dog with a cat nothing is born—and even if something were born it would be unable to reproduce itself.. This does not yet mean that what we have recognized is the reality (Darwinian or Platonic) of genera and species. All it is meant to suggest is that speaking per generalia may well be a result of our penuria nominum, but that something resistant has driven us to invent general terms (whose extension we can always revise and correct). The objection that biotechnology may one day render these tendencies obsolete and create a new species halfway between a cat and a dog is not relevant. The fact that a technology (which by definition alters the limits of nature) is required in order to violate them means that the limits of nature exist.

We use expressions to express a content, and this content is carved up and organized differently by different cultures (and languages). Out of what is it carved? Out of an amorphous magma, which was there before language performed its vivisections and which we may call the continuum of the content, all that can be experienced, all that can be said, all that can be thought—if you will, the infinite horizon of all that is, was, and will be, either of necessity or by contingency. It would seem that, before a culture has organized it linguistically in the form of content, this continuum is everything and nothing, and therefore eludes all definition. Nevertheless, when Hjelmslev (1943: 13 and 46–48) speaks of this amorphous continuum that every language organizes in a different way, he says that linguistic chains such as I do not know, je ne sais pas, en tiedä, naluvara, jeg véd det ikke, despite their differences, express the same mening, that is, the same thought. The Danish term mening is a cognate of meaning, and for the English version of his work Hjelmslev accepted the term purport. How can an amorphous continuum have a meaning or a purport?

As a matter of fact Hjelmslev was not speaking of a linguistic phenomenon but rather of an extralinguistic one: he said that the purport could be described by various extralinguistic disciplines. Thus languages are obliged to recognize extrasemiotic constrictions that they cannot ignore. In other words different expressions such as it is raining, il pleut, and piove all refer to the same phenomenon. Which amounts to saying that in the magma of the continuum there are lines of resistance and possibilities for flow, like the grain in wood or marble that makes it easier to cut it one way rather than another. Every culture runs up against the extralinguistic problem of rain; it rains or doesn’t rain in every culture, and tertium datur only when it drizzles or when hoarfrost forms.

If the continuum itself has lines of tendency, we are not entitled to say whatever we like. There are directions, maybe not compulsory directions, but certainly directions to which entry is forbidden. There are things we cannot say. It doesn’t matter if these things were once said. We subsequently “banged our heads into” evidence that convinced us that we could no longer say what we formerly said.

Although we talk about encountering something that obliges us to recognize lines of tendency and resistance, we are not yet ready to start defining “laws.” If, on the path I am taking through the woods, I find a boulder blocking my way, I have no choice but to turn left or right or decide to go back (though, unlike Chrysippus’s dog, I could also stop and lean back against the rock and dedicate the remainder of my life to contemplating the Tao). But I have no reassurance that the decision I make will help me get to know the woods better. The occurrence merely interrupts my initial project and induces me to come up with another. Stating that there are lines of resistance does not amount to saying, as Peirce claims, that there are universal laws that operate in nature. The hypothesis of a law is only one of the ways in which we can react to the encounter with a resistance. Habermas, in seeking to identify the kernel of Peirce’s criticism of Kant’s thing-in-itself, stresses the fact that Peirce’s problem is not saying that something (hidden behind the appearances that aspire to mirror it) has, like a mirror, a reverse side that eludes reflection, a side that we are almost certain to discover one day, so long as we can circumvent the figure that we see: the fact is that reality imposes restrictions on our knowledge only in the sense that it does not permit false interpretations (Habermas 1995: 251).

Stating that there are lines of resistance simply means that, even if it appears as an effect of language, the World always presents us with something that is already given and not posited by us. What is already given are precisely the lines of resistance.

In Kant and the Platypus, I expressed my opinion that the appearance of these resistances is the closest thing we can find, before any First Philosophy or Theology, to the idea of God or the Law. Certainly, this is a God who manifests Himself as pure Negativity, pure Limit, pure “No”—something quite different from the God of revealed religions, of whom he retains only the severest traits, as exclusive Lord of Interdiction, ever intent only upon repeating “Of this tree thou shalt not eat.” Since, however, a tendentious reader has seen in these affirmations of mine a proposal for a new proof for the existence of God, I find myself obliged to make up for his lack of sensitivity to the stratagems of elocutio by pointing out (as in the most desperate cases we may be obliged to explain we were making a joke) that the lines of resistance are not a metaphor for God, but, on the contrary, the idea of a God who says “No” functions as a metaphor for the lines of resistance.

And, seeing that our need not to be misunderstood compels us to explain even our metaphors, labeling them as such, let me make it clear that it is also a metaphor to say that the lines of resistance confront us with a no. The World says no in the same way a mole would say no if we asked it to fly. It is not as if the mole is aware that he cannot fly. The mole proceeds on his terrestrial and subterranean way, and does not know what it means not to be a mole. He plays the mole to his own moliness.

To be sure, animals run into obstacles too, and struggle to overcome them: think of the dog that barks and scratches at the closed door and bites at the handle. But in a case like this the animal is already approaching a condition similar to our own; it evinces desires and intentions, and the limit is a limit with respect to its desires (or its instincts). A closed door in and of itself is not a no, indeed it could be a yes for someone seeking privacy and protection behind it. It becomes a no only for the dog who wants to come in.

It is we who, since the Mind can also provide imaginary representations of impossible worlds, ask things to be what they are not and, when they continue to be what they are, conclude they are answering no, opposing a limit. But the limit lies in our desire, in our aspiration toward absolute freedom. Death itself appears to us as a limit, when as living creatures we fear it. But at the moment of death it arrives just when things are going exactly the way they must go—the very idea that death arrives is no more than a metaphor: no one arrives, heart and brain simply stop, from the most natural causes.

In the face of the already given, we proceed by conjecture, and we do our best to get others to accept our conjectures. That is to say, we publicly compare our conjectures with what others know of the already given. It may be that this attitude does not define a “strong” thought, in the sense in which the various tribunals of Reason and Faith (more closely related than may appear at first blush) see themselves as strong. But it certainly defines a thought that continually runs up against the “forces” that oppose it. And since racing improves the breed, a conjectural thought, while it may not be strong, may not be weak either, but it will be well-tempered.

If Vattimo were to admit that his “weakness” is also a metaphor for a well-tempered thought, he would be welcome to become a member of my sect. But if a weak thinker should happen to agree with Nietzsche that everything is a metaphor, could we still recognize a metaphor for what it is?

A further revisited version of the paper delivered at the conference, attended by Gianni Vattimo, entitled “Autour d’Umberto Eco: Signes, réprésentations, interprétations,” (“Apropos of Umberto Eco: Signs, Representations, Interpretations”) held in Sofia in November 2004 (originally published as “La notion de limite” [Eco 2005]), and subsequently reelaborated as “Weak Thought and the Limits of Interpretation” (Eco 2007).

1. See Eco (1985c).

2. My review was published in Alfabeta, January 1, 1980, and later reprinted in Eco (1983c).

3. [Translator’s note: Both Eco and Vattimo were students of the philosopher Luigi Pareyson.]

4. For Derrida, deconstruction was not a method of artistic or literary criticism but a method of interrogating philosophical texts, and he always maintained that every reading should respect certain garde-fous or guardrails that would act as philosophical checks on the free drift of interpretation.

5. I realize this hypothesis comes close to Schelling’s notion of the Absolute, in which there is no longer any difference between the subject thinking of the thing in itself and what was previously considered the thing in itself. But perhaps Schelling was much less of an “idealist” (in the negative sense of the term) than has been thought—and was instead something of a Spinozan. I had no intention of saying that nothing exists outside of thought and that the world is the creation of the subject, but that subject and object are two aspects of the same universal substance—and that we (that is, culture) assuredly know the world in the form in which we think it, but we think it in that form precisely because we are part of it.