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
