From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  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 c
ritic (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 t
he 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.