From the Tree to the Labyrinth (104 page)

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.

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