Inventing the Enemy: Essays (7 page)

It is difficult to find among Cardinal Ratzinger’s many writings a definition of truth that does not invoke the truth revealed and embodied in Christ. But if the truth of faith is truth revealed, why contrast it with the truth of philosophers and scientists, which is a concept of another sort, with other purposes and character? It would be enough to follow Thomas Aquinas, who, in
De aeternitate mundi,
knowing perfectly well that to support Averroës’s view about the eternity of the world was a terrible heresy, accepted through faith that the world was created, but admitted that from the cosmological point of view it could not be rationally demonstrated either that it was created or that it was eternal. For Ratzinger, however, in his contribution to a book entitled
Il monoteismo
(2002), the essence of all modern philosophical and scientific thought is as follows:

Truth as such—so it is thought—cannot be known, but we can gradually advance only by small steps of establishing what is true and false. There is a growing tendency to replace the concept of truth with that of consensus. But this means that man becomes detached from the truth and thus also from the distinction between good and evil, submitting completely to the principle of the majority . . . Man plans and “builds” the world without pre-set criteria and thus necessarily exceeds the concept of human dignity, so that even human rights become problematic. In such a conception of reason and rationality there is no space left for the concept of God.

This extrapolation, which passes from a prudent concept of scientific truth as an object of continual investigation and correction, to a declaration of the destruction of all human dignity, is unsustainable. That is, unsustainable unless all modern thought is identified with this line of reasoning: there are no facts but only interpretations, which leads to the declaration that existence has no basis and therefore that God is dead, and finally that if there is no God, then anything is possible.

Now, Ratzinger and the anti-relativists are, generally speaking, neither fantasists nor conspiracy theorists. Quite simply, the anti-relativists whom I shall describe as moderate or critical identify in their enemy that specific form of extreme relativism whereby facts do not exist, only interpretations; those anti-relativists I shall call radicals extend this claim to the whole of modern thought, committing an error that—at least when I was at university—would have failed them in their history of philosophy exam.

The idea that there are no facts but only interpretations began with Nietzsche and is explained very clearly in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873). Since nature has thrown away the key, the mind works on conceptual fictions that it calls truth. We believe we are talking about trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but they are metaphors that do not correspond to the original entities. When faced with the multiplicity of individual leaves, there is no primordial “leaf,” the model upon which “all leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands.” A bird or insect perceives the world in a different way than we do, and it is quite meaningless to say which perception is more accurate, because to do so we would need to have the criterion of “correct perception,” which does not exist. Nature “knows no forms and no concepts, nor even any species, but only an X which for us remains inaccessible and indefinable.” Truth then becomes “a movable host of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms,” of poetical inventions that have become rigid knowledge, “illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten.”

Nietzsche, however, avoids considering two phenomena. One is that, by adjusting to the constraints of our dubious knowledge, we manage to some extent to reckon with nature: when someone has been bitten by a dog, the doctor knows what sort of injection to give, even if he knows nothing about the actual dog that bit the person. The other is that every so often nature compels us to expose our knowledge as illusory and to choose an alternative (which is then the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms). Nietzsche is aware of the existence of natural constrictions, which appear to him as “terrible forces” that continually press in upon us, conflicting with our “scientific” truths. But he refuses to conceptualize them, sensing that it was to escape from them that we built our conceptual armor, as a defense. Change is possible, not in the form of reorganization, but as a permanent poetic revolution: “If each of us had a different kind of sensuous perception, if we ourselves could only perceive things 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 ever to hear it as a sound, nobody would ever speak of nature as something conforming to laws.” Art (together with myth) therefore “constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonyms; 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 dreams” (translation by Ronald Speirs).

If these are the conditions, the first possibility would be to take refuge in dream as an escape from reality. But Nietzsche himself admits that this dominion of art over life would be deceptive, though supremely enjoyable. Alternatively—and this is the real lesson that posterity has taken from Nietzsche—art can say what it says because it is the Individual himself who accepts whatever definition, since it is unfounded. This fading out of the Individual coincided for Nietzsche with the death of God. This enables some Christians to draw from this proclamation of death a false Dostoyevskian conclusion: if God does not exist, or no longer exists, then all is permissible.

But if there is no heaven or hell, then it is the nonbeliever who realizes it is essential for us to save ourselves on earth through benevolence, understanding, and moral law. Eugenio Lecaldano published a book in 2006
²
that claimed, with ample evidence, that only by leaving God to one side can we lead a truly moral life. I certainly do not intend to establish here whether Lecaldano and the authors he cites are correct; I wish only to point out that there are those who claim that the absence of God does not eliminate the ethical problem—and Cardinal Martini was well aware of this when he established a teaching post in Milan for nonbelievers. That Cardinal Martini did not then become pope may cast doubt on the divine inspiration of the papal conclave, but such matters go beyond my competence. Elie Wiesel reminded us, a couple of weeks ago, that those who imagined they could do what they liked were
not
those who thought God was dead, but those who thought they themselves were God (a common failing among dictators, great and small).

In any event, the idea that there are no facts but only interpretations is certainly not shared by all of contemporary thought, the greater part of which makes these objections to Nietzsche and his followers:

1. If there were no facts but only interpretations, then an interpretation would be an interpretation of what?
   
2. If interpretations interpret each other, there would still have to have been an object or event in the first place that had spurred us to interpret.
   
3. If the individual were not definable, we would still have to explain who it is who is talking about it metaphorically, and the problem of saying something true would be shifted from the object to the subject of the knowledge. God might be dead, but not Nietzsche. On what basis do we justify the presence of Nietzsche? By saying he is only a metaphor? But if he is, who says so? And not only that, but even if reality is described using metaphors, in order to be elaborated there have to exist words that have a literal meaning and denote things we understand through experience: I cannot call a table support a “leg” unless I have a nonmetaphorical notion of the human leg, knowing its form and function.
   
4. And finally, in claiming that there is no longer a criterion for verification between one thing and another, we forget that what is outside us (which Nietzsche calls the terrible forces) every so often opposes our attempts to express that criterion even metaphorically—that, let us say, you cannot cure an inflammation by using the phlogiston theory, whereas you can with antibiotics; and therefore one medical theory is better than another.
   

Therefore, an Absolute does not perhaps exist, or if it exists it is neither imaginable nor attainable, but natural forces do exist that support or challenge our interpretations. If I interpret an open door painted in trompe l’oeil as a real door and go to walk straight through it, the fact that it is an impenetrable wall will undermine my interpretation.

There must be a way in which things are or behave—and the evidence is not only that all men are mortal, but also that if I try to pass through a wall, I break my nose. Death and that wall are the only form of Absolute about which we can be in no doubt.

The evidence of that wall, which says no when we want to interpret it as if it were not there, will perhaps be a fairly modest criterion of truth for guardians of the Absolute, but, to quote Keats, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

[Lecture given during the Milanesiana festival of literature, music, and cinema, July 9, 2007.]

T
HE THEME OF THIS YEAR’S
Milanesiana festival is the four elements. To speak about all four would be beyond me, so I have chosen to limit myself to fire.

Why? Because, though still essential to our lives, of all the elements it is the one most liable to be forgotten. We breathe air all the time, we use water every day, we continually tread the earth, but our experience of fire is in danger of gradually diminishing. The role once played by fire has slowly been taken over by invisible forms of energy; we have separated our idea of light from that of the flame, and our only experience of fire now is that of gas (which we hardly notice), the matchstick or cigarette lighter (at least for those who still smoke), and the flicker of candles (for those who still go to church).

A lucky few still have a fireplace, and this is where I would like to begin. In the 1970s I bought a house in the country with a fine hearth. For my children, then between ten and twelve, the experience of fire, of burning logs, of flames, was something entirely new, and I realized when the fire was lit they lost all interest in television. The flame was more beautiful and varied than any television program—it told countless stories, it could flare up at any moment, it didn’t follow the set patterns of the television show.

Perhaps, among our contemporaries, the person who reflected most on the poetry, mythology, psychology, and psychoanalysis of fire was Gaston Bachelard, who could hardly avoid encountering fire during his research into archetypes associated with human imagination from earliest times.

The heat of the fire recalls the heat of the sun, which itself is seen as a ball of fire; fire hypnotizes and is therefore the first object and source of wonder; fire reminds us of the first universal injunction (not to touch it), thus becoming an epiphany of law; fire is the first creature that, as it takes life and grows, devours the two pieces of wood that have generated it—and this birth of fire has a strong sexual significance since the seed of the flame is unleashed through friction—and yet, if we want to pursue a psychoanalytical interpretation, we will recall how for Freud the condition for taking control of the fire is renunciation of the pleasure of quenching it with urine, and therefore the renunciation of instinctual life.

Fire is a metaphor for many impulses, from the fire of anger to being inflamed with amorous infatuation; fire is metaphorically present in every discussion about passions, in the same way as it is always linked metaphorically to life through the color that it shares with blood. Fire as heat governs that maceration of food matter that is digestion and shares with the feeding process the fact that, to stay alive, it must be continually fueled.

Fire is ever present as an instrument for every transformation, and fire is called for when something has to be changed: to prevent the fire from dying out requires a care similar to that for a newborn baby; fire immediately highlights the fundamental contradictions in our lives; it is the element that brings life and the element that brings death, destruction, and suffering; it is the symbol of purity and purification but also of filth, since it produces ash as its excrement.

Fire can be a light too strong to look at, like the sun. But properly harnessed, as in the light of a candle, it flickers and casts shadows, accompanying our night vigils, during which a solitary flame takes hold of our imagination, with its rays that spread out into darkness, and the candle symbolizes a source of life and, at the same time, a sun that dies away. Fire is born from matter, to be transformed into an ever lighter and airier substance, from the red or bluish flame at its base to the white flame at its peak, until it vanishes in smoke . . . In that sense the nature of fire is ascendant, it reminds us of transcendence, and yet, perhaps because we learn that it lives at the heart of the earth, from which it bursts forth only when volcanoes erupt, it is a symbol of infernal depth. It is life, but it also dies down and is continually fragile.

And to conclude my consideration of Bachelard I’d like to quote this passage from
Psychoanalysis of Fire
(1964):

From the notched teeth of the chimney hook there hung the black cauldron. The three-legged cooking pot projected over the hot embers. Puffing up her cheeks to blow into the steel tube, my grandmother would rekindle the sleeping flames. Everything would be cooking at the same time: the potatoes for the pigs, the choice potatoes for the family. For me there would be a fresh egg cooking in the ashes. The intensity of the fire cannot be measured by an hour glass; the egg was ready when a drop of water, perhaps of saliva, evaporated on its shell. I was surprised, then, to learn that Papin watched over his cooking pot using the same methods as my grandmother. Before the egg I had to eat bread soup . . . But on the days when I was on my good behaviour, they would bring out the waffle iron. Rectangular in form it would crush down the fire of thorns burning red as the spikes of gladioli. And soon the
gaufre,
or waffle, would be pressed against my pinafore, warmer to the fingers than to the lips. Yes, then indeed I was eating fire, eating its gold, its odour, and even its crackling while the burning
gaufre
was crunching under my teeth. And it is always like that, through a kind of extra pleasure—like a dessert—that the fire shows itself a friend of man. (translated by Alan C. M. Ross)