From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation by Umberto Eco
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 a
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 c
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).