At the time, all I was arguing was that an encyclopedic semantics may be called “weak,” not in the sense that it is insufficient to explain how we use language to signify and define the world, but because it submits the laws of signification to the constant determination of context and circumstances. I wrote:
An encyclopedic semantics has no problem providing rules for the generation and interpretation of the expressions of a language, but its rules are orientated toward contexts, and semantics incorporates pragmatics (the dictionary incorporates, albeit in a semioticized form, our knowledge of the world). What makes the encyclopedia weak, but fruitfully so, is the fact that the representation it provides is never closed and definitive, and that an encyclopedic representation is never global but always local; produced to deal with given contexts and circumstances, the perspective it provides on semiotic activity is a limited one.… The encyclopedia does not provide a complete model of rationality (it does not reflect an ordered universe in an unambiguous fashion), but instead it provides rules of reasonableness, rules, that is, for negotiating at each stage the conditions that permit us to use language to give an account—according to some provisional criterion of order—of a disorderly world (or a world whose criteria of order escape us)” (Eco 1983b: 75).
I was referring back implicitly to a review I had written of the collection of essays edited by Aldo Gargani (1979),2 in which, against a number of “strong” definitions of Reason, either as the ability of knowing the Absolute through direct vision, or as a Platonic belief in a system of universal innate principles, or as the conviction that the order of language mirrors unproblematically the order of the world while truth is always and in every instance adaequatio rei et intellectus (“the correspondence of a thing to the intellect”). I defended the rights of critical reasonableness, of a series of conjectural procedures that called at a minimum for the pooling of certain instruments of verification. And I concluded with a eulogy of the modus ponens, while admitting that it had no place in poetry, dreams, or the language of the unconscious. I ended (parodying the slogans of the Maoism fashionable at the time): “Comrades, long live the Modus Ponens!”—and adding: “As the case may be!”
Can someone who sings the praises of the modus ponens become a charter member of the sect of weak thought?
Be that as it may, such is the mass-media power of the slogan that I have frequently since found myself automatically enrolled among the devotees of weak thought, simply because I once contributed (it obviously didn’t matter what) to a volume with that title. This display of superficiality was joined by a number of professors of philosophy, whom one might have expected to be a little more attentive to what a colleague had written, and several respectable clerics, who had perhaps gotten their notions of philosophy from the conning of glossy magazines.
It is understandable why the question should be of concern to ingenuous realists or guarantors of absolute truths: if thinking in a “weak” way meant asserting that there are no facts only interpretations, the notion of a “fact” as something independent of our interpretations is thrown in doubt, and by the same token we deny the very concept of Truth, falling as a consequence into that murky recess which neoreactionary thought identifies confusedly with “relativism” (just as the ultraconservative Thomists of the nineteenth century saw “the Kantian poison” in every aspect of modern thought).
I do not believe that even the most extremist champion of weak thought insists that there are no facts, only that such notions of fact as we possess come to us through the series of our interpretations—so that we ought not to waste time investigating facts but attempt to understand the mutable history of their representation. What is sure is that the debate between the proponents of weak thought and its opponents turns on whether the preceding affirmation should stop there, or whether it ought not to imply as its natural corollary the issue (to which Peirce was sensitive) of whether or not, against the background of the sequence of interpretations, the ineluctable presence of a Dynamic Object inevitably rears its head. Since the idea of a sequence of interpretations is conceivable and makes sense only if we admit that there is something to interpret, wouldn’t it make sense too to come to grips with that something?
This is the problem I came back to definitively in Kant and the Platypus, but, even prior to that, it was hard to credit me with the idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, considering I had written a book entitled—no less!—The Limits of Interpretation. And the problem had already come up previously in some of my earlier writings. In the face of the affirmation that there are no facts only interpretations, I have always maintained that every fact is the occasion for diverse and conflicting interpretations, but one curious thing about facts is that they resist interpretations they do not legitimate or support. In other words, though it may be difficult to decide whether one interpretation is better than another, we can always recognize untenable interpretations. And finally, though facts are always known and communicable by means of interpretations, they also somehow stand as parameters of our interpretations.
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
