From the Tree to the Labyrinth (101 page)

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.