by Umberto Eco
This is where the folly or madness really gets going. Manzoni knows, or suspects, that the history of this delirium is not just a psychiatric history, but the history of a machination, or at least the history of a metastasis of demented semiosis, since he declares that “the most interesting and instructive aspect that we can study, when considering human errors—especially those of the crowd—is their mode of progression, the shapes they take on and the methods they adopt to obtain entry into the minds of men and dominate them” (p. 580). It seems to me that there is no better way to indicate a process of formation of public opinion through a distorted interpretation of signs, whether it occur for casual and instinctive reasons, or as the result of a project or “wicked plot” (p. 579).
Prepared for by the protracted deceit of the experts, who under various pretexts had denied the contagion, and by the simple fear of the uninformed, who out of natural passion had attempted to suppress the evidence, the popular semiosic ability, which throughout the course of the novel has combated the word of the schemers, has become definitively corrupted. The story of the anointers is a story of collective dementia, in which a distorted meaning is attributed to every symptom, or in which every fact, every gesture, forcibly isolated from its everyday context, from the customary scenarios, is transformed into a symptom of a single obsessive signified. People recognized as strangers by their dress are seen as anointers, an elderly man is lynched because he has dusted a pew, Renzo is practically lynched because he knocks on a door. Someone asks directions, removing his hat, and people immediately suspect that he has the powder he plans to throw at his victim in the brim of his hat; someone else touches the facade of the cathedral to see what the stone feels like, and the crowd charges at him like a wild beast …
The system of normal expectations collapses. Don Abbondio, seeing the bravoes, had seen something unexpected, because he knew what he was supposed to see and what, if he saw it, would be a harbinger of bad news. Now no one can see anything anymore, no one expects anything; or rather, they see and they expect, they expect and therefore they see, always the same sign. A single signifier for a single signified. That is what obsession is like; that is public madness.
14.8. In Conclusion
Verbal language versus popular semiosis? To invalidate this conjecture all we have to do is to observe how Manzoni, in his novel, celebrates the defeat of the word and the triumph of popular semiosis, precisely by means of the narrative word. But this objection strikes at the implicit semiotics of Manzoni, who is not celebrating the limits of language, but demonstrating how an author can set forth (in words, of course) his pessimistic conception of the power of the word. A happy contradiction, that becomes somewhat less contradictory when we realize that every novel presents itself as a machine (necessarily linguistic) which strives to bring to life, linguistically, signs that are not themselves linguistic, signs which accompany, precede, or follow language, with their own instinctive and violent autonomy.
This ability that verbal language has to evoke that which is not verbal has a name in rhetorical terminology: hypotyposis.
Since we cannot avoid using words (“talking—just talking, by itself—is so much more easy than any of the other activities mentioned, or all of them put together, that we human beings in general deserve a little indulgence in this matter” [p. 583]), we will say that Manzoni’s I promessi sposi succeeds in elaborating and exemplifying its own implicit semiotics, and presenting itself as a verbal celebration of popular semiosis, only thanks to an uninterrupted chain of examples of hypotyposis.
A linguistic machine that celebrates itself by negating itself, the novel tells us something about other ways of signifying, and it suggests that, as a verbal object, it is at the service of these other ways, because it is a narration not of words but of actions, and even when it narrates words it narrates them to the extent to which they have assumed the function of actions.
This essay originally appeared in Manetti (1989) and was republished in Eco (1998c).
1. [Translator’s note: This is a literal translation of Manzoni’s Italian. Bruce Penman’s English translation (Manzoni 1972), which we have otherwise followed and to which subsequent page numbers in the text refer, does not follow Manzoni’s precise wording at this point and omits the adverb “really” (davvero).]
15
The Threshold and the Infinite
Peirce and Primary Iconism
This essay was written in response to a number of objections raised by the section in my Kant and the Platypus (hereinafter K & P) in which I proposed the notion of “primary iconism” to explain the perceptual processes. I hypothesized a starting point or primum, which was at the origin of all subsequent inferential processes. The fact that I insisted on this point reflected a concern first evidenced in 1990 with my Limits of Interpretation and which became clearer in philosophical terms in the opening chapter of K & P, where I postulated a “hard core of Being.” The nucleus of my thesis was that, if and precisely because we are arguing for a theory of interpretation, we cannot avoid admitting that we have been given something to interpret.
Let me make it clear from the outset, if it were not already obvious, that the primum that forms the starting point for any interpretation may also be a previous interpretation (as when, let’s say, a judge interprets the statements of a witness who gives his own interpretation of what took place). In such cases too, however, the previous interpretation (to be interpreted) is taken as a given, and that, and nothing else, is what is to be interpreted. If anything, the interesting problem is why the judge decides to start from that particular piece of evidence and not another. But this is precisely the theme of what follows.
15.1. Peirce Reinterpreted
Having made that clear, let me recap briefly what I said in K & P. First of all, I put this whole discussion into a section (2.8) entitled “Peirce reinterpreted.” This title was ambiguous since it could be understood in two different ways: as just one more interpretation of Peirce’s theory (but such, naturally, as to present itself as the only faithful and trustworthy reading) or as a free reformulation of some of Peirce’s suggestions.
The fact that what I was proposing was meant in fact to be a reformulation ought to have been clear from the section’s beginning, where I reminded the reader that Peirce, in endeavoring to steer a course between Ground, perceptual judgment, and Immediate Object, was attempting to solve, from the standpoint of an inferential view of knowledge, the problem of Kantian schematism. Since, however, Peirce himself had given not one but several different answers, I felt authorized to come up with one of my own, without claiming it was his. In fact, I wrote: “And so I don’t think it is enough to trust in philology, at least I have no intention of doing so here. What I shall do is try to say how I think Peirce should be read (or reconstructed, if you will); in other words, I shall try to make him say what I wish he had said, because only that way will I be able to understand what he meant to say” (K & P, p. 99).
Suffice it to say therefore that my proposals regarding primary iconism were all my own work and that, not being Peirce, I have the right to think differently from him, so I can’t be accused of saying something that cannot be justified from the standpoint of Peircean semiotics.
As the Italian proverb says, it’s not fair to throw a stone and then hide your hand in your pocket (tirare il sasso e nascondere la mano). Not only were my proposals constantly based on Peirce’s texts, but the problem at issue touched closely on one of the fundamental principles of his semiotics, his anti-intuitionism, a principle with which I am still inclined to agree. Finally, the object of my discourse was precisely that stage of the semiosic process that Peirce called Firstness, and it is undeniable that Peirce identified Firstnesss with the Icon (as he identified Secondness with the Index and Thirdness with the Symbol), and this explains my use of a term like “primary iconism,” despite the fact that for some time now I have been attempting to demonstrate that “iconism” is an umbrella term that covers a
range of phenomena differing considerably among themselves.
Reflecting today on what I wrote ten years ago, I believe we must make a clear distinction between “-ists” and “-ologists.” Thinkers who have not created a militant posterity are the objects of straight historiography and philology (of the kind “what did Plato really say?” or “what was Aristotle getting at?”) and the people who write about them are the “-ologists,” if we are at liberty to coin terms such as “Plato-oloists” or “Platologists,” in other words, specialists on Plato. There also exist, however, thinkers of whom many people still declare themselves to be militant followers: hence, there have been and continue to be Neo-Aristotelians, Neo-Thomists, Neo-Hegelians, and Neo-Kantians, and these are the ones I call, for convenience, “-ists.”
What distinguishes an “-ist” from an “-ologist”? The “-ologist,” often engaging in honest-to-goodness textual criticism, is supposed to tell us if such and such a thinker really did say such and such a thing. For example, a Thomologist has to admit that Thomas Aquinas really did say that original sin is transmitted by the semen like a natural infection (Summa Theologica, I–II, 81, 1), whereas the soul is individually created, because it cannot be dependent on corporal matter. (Thomas was a creationist not a traducianist). For Thomas vegetables have a vegetative soul, which in animals is absorbed by the sensitive soul, while in human beings these two functions are absorbed by the rational soul. But God introduces the rational soul only when the fetus has gradually acquired, first the vegetative, then the sensitive soul. Only at that point, when the body has already been formed, is the rational soul created (Summa Theologica I, 90 and Summa contra gentiles II, 89). Embryos have only a sensitive soul (Summa Theologica I, 76, 2 and I, 118, 2) and therefore cannot participate in the resurrection of the flesh (Supplementum 80, 4).
This is what makes a Thomologist. A Thomist on the other hand is someone intent on thinking ad mentem divi Thomae, as if Thomas were speaking today. Thus, a present-day Thomist might develop Saint Thomas’s premises to define lines of ethical conduct with regard to the current debates on abortion, the use of stem cells, and so on.
I still maintain that there exists a third position, between “-ists” and “-ologists,” and the best term I can come up with is that of “reconstructionists.” I take this position because, in my first work of philosophical history, devoted to the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, I found myself faced with the following problem: Thomas never devoted a specific text to aesthetics but simply scattered his works with statements regarding the nature of art and the beautiful. If he had had to write a specific text (the hypothesis is not too far-fetched, since for some time a De pulchro et bono, which turned out to be the work of his teacher Albertus Magnus, was attributed to him) or if he had been quizzed about it (then, in his own times), what would he have said, in the light (and only in the light) of the system that was in fact his (as even the “-ologists” describe it)? When one conducts experiments like this, one runs the risk of discovering that any system, subjected to an inspection of this kind, may reveal a few cracks. This is precisely what happened to me in the case of Thomas, in which, while recognizing that he had an implicit theory of beauty which could readily be reconstructed, I finally pointed out an aporia to be found in his system (precisely when that system was faithfully interpreted, as an “-ologist” ought to interpret it).
I am still pleased with the vaguely Gödelian flavor of that conclusion, but the purpose of this whole preamble is to say that in K & P I had made the “-ist” choice, while the objections subsequently brought against me (see section 15.2) were aimed at reconstructing the problem from an “-ologist” point of view.
My starting point was in fact a suggestion made by Armando Fumagalli (1995: ch. 3), who saw in the post-1885 Peirce an almost Kantian return to the immediacy of intuition, antecedent to any inferential activity (the Ground is no longer a predicate but a sensation, and indexicality becomes the kind of experience which takes the form of a shock; it is an impact with an individual, which “strikes” the subject without yet being a representation). In this connection, I attempted to say why precisely Peirce’s Firstness was exactly that, a “firstness” (primità), a sort of auroral moment that gives rise to the perceptual process. Speaking of the Ground, Peirce informs us that it is a Firstness, and if on occasion it has been interpreted as “background” or “basis,” or “foundation,” it is certainly not so in an ontological sense but in a gnoseological one. It is not something that presents itself as a candidate to be a subjectum, it is a possible predicate itself, more like the immediate recognition expressible as “red!” (comparable to the response “ouch!” to a blow that causes pain) than like the judgment expressible as “this is red.” In that phase there is not even something that resists us (this would be the moment of Secondness), and at a certain point Peirce tells us that it is “pure species,” in the sense of appearance, aspect (cf. Fabbrichesi 1981: 471), and he calls it icon, semblance, likeness.1
Peirce says that the idea of the First is “so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it” (CP 1.358). The Firstness is a presence “such as it is,” a positive characteristic (CP 5.44), a “quality of feeling,” like a purple color noticed without any sense of the beginning or the end of the experience, it is not an object nor is it initially inherent to any recognizable object, it has no generality (CP 7.530). Only when both Secondness and Thirdness come into play can the interpretive process begin. But Firstness is still “mere maybe” (CP 1.304), “potentiality without existence” (CP 1.328), “mere possibility” (CP 8.329), and in any case the possibility of a perceptual process (CP 5.119), something that cannot be thought in an articulate way or asserted (CP 1.357). Elsewhere, by feeling Peirce means “that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists of nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is” (CP 1.306).
I thought I had recognized that, though this Firstness had the character of a nonmediated apprehension, it still could not be assimilated to Kantian intuition: it is not at all an intuition of the manifold offered by experience, but instead something absolutely simple, that I tried to assimilate to the phenomenon of qualia (cf. Dennett 1991).
Apropos of a quale Peirce is still not talking about perceptual judgment but about a mere “tone” of consciousness, which he defines as being resistant to all possible criticism. Peirce is telling us not that the sensation of red is “infallible,” but simply that once it has been, even if it was an illusion of the senses, it is indisputable that it has been. In this connection I gave the example (and it wasn’t meant to be flippant) of the housewife in the commercial, who declares: “I thought my sheet was white, but now that I’ve seen yours …” Seeing the detergent commercial, Peirce would have told us that the housewife initially perceived the whiteness of the first sheet (pure “tone” of awareness); then, once she had moved on to the recognition of the object (Secondness) and set in motion a comparison packed with inferences (Thirdness), she was able to declare that the second sheet was whiter than the first. But she could not cancel out the preceding impression, which as a pure quality has been, and therefore she says: “I was sure [before] I had seen something white, but now I recognize that there are different degrees of whiteness.” Only at this point, reacting to the album (white) of at least two different sheets, has the housewife moved on to the predicate of the albedo (whiteness), that is, to a general which can be named and for which there is an Immediate Object. It is one thing to perceive an object as white, without having become aware as yet that we are dealing with something external to our awareness, and it is another to perform the prescission whereby one predicates of that object the quality of being white.
But how are we to justify the fact that the starting point of all knowledge is not inferential in nature, because it is immediately m
anifest, without being open to discussion or denial, when Peirce’s entire anti-Cartesian polemic is based on the assumption that all knowledge is always inferential in nature?
15.2. Peirce and the Coffeepot
In his doctoral thesis Claudio Paolucci (2005) maintains with a wealth of arguments that there is no “realistic” turning-point in Peirce that leads him to consider the possibility of intuitions of a Kantian type, and in so doing he is very polemical in his criticism of both Fumagalli (1995) and Murphey (1961), to whom Fumagalli is referring. Let me say at once that I have no intention of contesting this contestation of Paolucci’s. I simply want to point out that in K & P I wrote: “Fumagalli observes that we have a Kantian return here to the immediacy of intuition, prior to all inferential activity. Nevertheless, since this intuition, as we shall see, remains the pure sentiment that I am confronted with something, the intuition would still be devoid of all intellectual content, and therefore (it seems to me) it could withstand the young Peirce’s anti-Cartesian polemic” (p. 99).
