De Consolatione Philosophiae, Umberto Eco

Contents
De Consolatione Philosophiae
Cogito Interruptus
Language, Power, Force
In Praise of St. Thomas
The Comic and the Rule

Cogito Interruptus

Some books are easier to review, to explain, or comment on aloud, than they are simply to read; because it is only by applying yourself to a gloss that you can follow their argumentation without distraction, their implacable syllogistic necessities, or the precise knots of relation. This is why books like the Metaphysics of Aristotle or the Critique of Pure Reason have more commentators than readers, more specialists than admirers.

And there are, on the other hand, books that are extremely pleasant to read, but impossible to write about: because the minute you start expounding them or commenting on them, you realize that they refuse to be translated into the proposition “This book says that.” The person who reads them for pleasure realizes he has spent his money well; but anyone who reads them in order to tell others about them becomes furious at every line, tears up the notes he took a moment before, seeks the conclusion that comes after his “therefore,” and cannot find it.

Clearly it would be an unforgivable sin of ethnocentrism to consider “not thought out” a Zen tale that follows ideals of logic different from those to which we are accustomed; but it is also certain that if our ideal of reasoning is summed up in a certain Western model, consisting of “whereas” and “inasmuch as,” then in these unreviewable books we find illustrious examples of cogito interruptus whose mechanism we must bear in mind. Since cogito interruptus is common both to the insane and to the authors of a reasoned “illogic,” we must understand when it is a defect and when a virtue, and (against all Malthusian custom) a fertilizing virtue, what’s more.

Cogito interruptus is typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols or symptoms. Like someone who, for example, points to the little box of matches, stares hard into your eyes, and says, “You see, there are seven . . . ,” then gives you a meaningful look, waiting for you to perceive the meaning concealed in that unmistakable sign; or like the inhabitant of a symbolic universe, where every object and every event translates into sign something hyper-Uranian that everyone already knows but wants only to see reconfirmed.
Cogito interruptus is also typical of those who see the world inhabited not by symbols but by symptoms: indubitable signs of something that is neither here below nor up above, but that sooner or later will happen.

The reviewer’s torment lies in the fact that when a person stares at him and says, “You see, there are seven matches,” the reviewer is already helpless to explain to others the scope of the sign or the symptom; but then when the same person adds, “And consider also, if you want to dispel any doubt, that four swallows flew past today,” then the reviewer is really lost. None of this means that cogito interruptus is not a great prophetic, poetic, psychological technique. Only that it is ineffable. And it takes real faith in cogito interruptus—and a wish that readers understand me—for me to venture to speak of it, no matter what. In discussions of the universe of mass communications and of the technological civilization, cogito interruptus is very fashionable among those whom, on other occasions, we have called the Apocalyptics, who see in the events of the past the symbols of a well-known harmony, and in those of the present the symbols of an inescapable fall (but always through clear references:

Every girl in a miniskirt is entitled to exist only as a decipherable hieroglyph of the end of the world). This view was unknown until today to the so-called Adjusted, who, on the other hand, do not decipher the universe but live in it without problems. Still the attitude is observed by a category we could define as the Hyper-Adjusted, or pentecostal Adjusted, or still better as Parusiacs, affected by the Fourth Eclogue Syndrome, megaphones of the golden age.

If the Apocalyprics were the sad relatives of Noah, the Parusiacs are jolly cousins of the Magi. Recent Italian translations allow us to consider together two books that, in different ways and decades, have had a great success and are listed among the texts to be consulted for any discussion of contemporary civilization. Art in Crisis: The Lost Center by Hans Sedlmayr is a masterpiece of apocalyptic thought;

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan is perhaps the most enjoyable and successful text offered us by the Parusiac school.
The reader who deals with both of them is prepared for a dialectical kermesse, an orgy of comparisons and contradictions, in order to see how differently two men reason who see the world from such radically opposed standpoints; but instead he realizes that the two men reason in exactly the same way, and, what’s more, they cite the same supporting arguments.

Or rather, they cite the same events, one seeing them as symbols and the other as symptoms, one enduring them with grim, lamenting significance, the other with a light-hearted optimism, one writing on paper edged in black, the other on a lacy wedding invitation, one prefacing it all with a minus sign, the other with a plus sign— both, however, neglecting to articulate equations, for cogito interruptus demands that symbols and symptoms be flung by the handful, like confetti, and not lined up, bookkeeper style, like little balls on an abacus.

Art in Crisis dates from 1948. Fairly removed historically from the days of wrath when they burned works of degenerate art, it still retains (we are discussing the book, not the author’s biography) some fiery echoes. And yet anyone ignorant of Sedlmayr’s position in the context of the historiography of ideas, reading the first chapters now, would find himself following a discussion (conducted sine ira et studio) of the phenomena of contemporary architecture, from the English gardens and Utopian architects of the Revolution, seen as supporting documents for a diagnosis of the period.

The cult of reason that generates a monumental religion of eternity, a taste for the mausoleum, whether gardener’s house or museum, that reveals a search for chthonic forces, occult and profound relationships with natural energies, the birth of an idea of the aesthetic temple from which the image of a determined God is absent; and then, with Biedermeier, a move away from the great themes of the sacred and a celebration of the cozy, the private, the individualistic; and finally, the birth of those secular cathedrals, the Universal Expositions.

From the worship of God to the worship of nature, from the worship of form to the cult of technology: This is the descriptive image of a “succession.” But the moment this succession is described as “decreasing,” the diagnostic conclusion becomes a part of the description: Man is plunging downwards, because he has lost the center. If you are clever enough at this point to skip several chapters of the book, many traumata of reading will be eliminated, because in the concluding chapters Sedlmayr supplies the key to understanding the symbols he handles in the middle chapters. The center is man’s relationship with God.

Once this affirmation is made (Sedlmayr, who is not a theologian, doesn’t bother to tell us what God is, or what man’s relationship with Him consists of), it becomes possible even for a child to conclude that the work of art in which God doesn’t appear and in which there is no dialogue with God is a godless work of art. At this point there is a wealth of begged questions: If God is “spatially” up above, a work of art that you can look at even upside down (Kandinsky) is atheist.

To be sure, Sedlmayr would have only to interpret in another key the same signs that he singles out in the course of Western art (Romantic demonism, Bosch-type obsession, Brueghel grotesques, and so on) to conclude that man, in his whole history, has apparently done nothing but lose the Center. But the author prefers to cling to philosophemes worthy of the rector of a seminary, on the order of “in any case we must bear firmly in mind the principle that, as man’s essence is one and the same in all times, so also that of art is one, however different its external manifestations may seem.” What can be said to that?

Having defined man as “nature and supernature” and having defined supernature in the terms in which Western art depicted it for a certain period, the author obviously concludes that “this detachment is thus presented as contrary to the absence of man (and of God)”—inasmuch as the essence of both is deduced from a special iconographical interpretation that has been made of it once and for all.

But to arrive at these pages of laughable philosophy, the author has bid for the admiration of the literate masses and through some exemplary pages of tea-leaf reading.

How do you read tea-leaves? For example, you become terrified by the tendency of modern architecture to ignore the site, to confuse up with down, and your dejection reaches its nadir with the arrival of the cantilever, “a kind of materialistic canopy.” The cantilever trauma pervades all of Sedlmayr’s discussion: This horizontalization of architecture, which allows, between one floor and another, the emptiness of glass walls, this renunciation of vertical growth (except by the superimposition of horizontal levels) seems to him the “symptom of a negation of the tectonic element” and of “detachment from the earth.” In terms of construction science, it never occurs to him that a skyscraper can stand up better than the apse of Beauvais, which