Therefore, art (and with it myth) “constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonymies; 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 dream” (ibid.: 151).
If these are the premises, our first option would be to reject what surrounds us (and the way in which we vainly try to reduce it to order) and take refuge in dreams as a flight from reality. Nietzsche in fact cites Pascal, for whom, in order to be happy, all it would take would be to dream every night of being king, but he then admits that this dominion of art over life, however delightful, would be a deception. Otherwise, and this is what Nietzsche’s heirs have taken as the real lesson, art can say what it says because it is Being itself, in its weakness and generosity, that accepts any definition, and takes pleasure from seeing itself seen as changeable, a dreamer, extenuatingly vigorous and victoriously weak, no longer as “fullness, presence or foundation, but rather as fracture, absence of foundation, work and pain” (Vattimo 1993: 73). Being can therefore only be spoken insofar as it is in decline; instead of imposing itself, it withdraws. Thus we have arrived at an “ontology organized into ‘weak’ categories” (ibid.: 5). Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is nothing more than the proclamation of the end of the stable structure of Being (Vattimo 1984: 158). From now on, Being will present itself only “as suspension and withdrawal” (Vattimo 1997: 13).
It is not my intention to discuss whether, from the point of view of weak thought, Being should still be written with a capital B (and in fact Vattimo does not do so). I will stick to the mental experiment previously proposed, and I will speak not of Being but of the World (if “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” [“The world is everything that is the case”—Wittgenstein], and if we call World what happens to be the case). The problem is that what prevents us believing that all points of view are equally valid, that the World is merely the effect of language and, in addition to being malleable and weak, is a mere flatus vocis, and is therefore the work of Poets, characterized as daydreamers, liars, imitators of the nonexistent, capable of irresponsibly placing a horse’s head on a human body and turning every entity into a chimera.
The trouble is, in the first place, that, once we had settled our accounts with the World, we would still find ourselves having to settle them with the subject that emits this flatus vocis (a problem which is in any case the limit of any magic idealism). And, in the second place, if it is a hermeneutic principle that there are no facts, only interpretations, this still does not exclude the possibility of “bad” interpretations. There is no winning hand at poker that has not been put together by a choice of the player (encouraged maybe by chance), but this does not mean that every hand assembled by the player is a winning hand. All it would take is for my opponent to respond to my three aces with a straight flush for my wager to turn out to have been a bad bet. There are times in our game with the World when the World responds to our three aces with a straight flush. Furthermore, there are players who make a bet and are eventually obliged to show a hand that, according to the laws of poker, contains no valid combination of cards: and the others, in unison, observe that the player must be crazy, or doesn’t know how to play, or is bluffing. What is the status of bluffing in a universe in which one interpretation is as good as another? What are the intersubjective criteria that allow us to define that particular combination of cards as off the wall? What criterion allows us to distinguish between dreams, poetic inventions, and LSD trips (there are people who after taking LSD have thrown themselves out of windows convinced they could fly and finished up in a heap on the sidewalk—contrary, mind you, to all their hopes and intentions), and, on the other hand, acceptable statements concerning the things of the physical or historical world that surrounds us?
Let us posit, as Vattimo does (1994: 100), a difference between epistemology, as “the construction of a body of rigorous knowledge and the solution of problems in the light of paradigms that lay down the rules for the verification of propositions” (which seems to correspond to Nietzsche’s picture of the conceptual universe of a given culture) and hermeneutics, as “the activity that takes place during the encounter with different paradigmatic horizons, which do not allow themselves to be assessed on the basis of some kind of conformity (to rules or, in the final analysis, to the thing) but exist as ‘poetic’ proposals of other worlds, of the establishment of new rules” (Vattimo 1997: 79). What new rule should the Community prefer, what rule should it condemn as folly? There are still people hell-bent on demonstrating that the earth is square, that we live not on but beneath its crust, that statues weep, that forks can be bent by television, that the apes are descended from man—and we have to come up with a public criterion by which to judge whether their ideas are in some way acceptable.
In a debate that took place in 1990 (published in Eco 1992), on whether or not criteria for textual interpretation exist, Richard Rorty—broadening the discourse to include criteria for interpreting things in the world—argued against the notion that the use of a screwdriver for screwing in screws is imposed by the object itself, while its use for opening a package is imposed by our own subjectivity (he was discussing my distinction between the interpretation and use of a text (cf. Eco 1979).
In the oral debate, Rorty had polemically asserted his right to go so far as to interpret a screwdriver as something useful for scratching your ears. This explains my reply, which still survives in the printed version of the debate because I was unaware that in the version of his contribution submitted by Rorty to the publisher that example had been left out. Rorty had evidently concluded that it was more of a boutade than a logical argument, but since another critic (less inclined to self-criticism than Rorty) might still conceivably use the wisecrack as an argument, my objection is still valid: a screwdriver can certainly be very useful for opening a package but it is not advisable to use it for poking about in your ear, because it is too sharp and too long for the hand to be able to exercise control over its movements; and therefore it would be better to use a light plastic stick with a wad of cotton at either end. Which is the same thing as appealing to the notion of affordance proposed by Gibson (1966) or to that of pertinence with respect to a practice proposed by Prieto (1975). There is something about the conformation of my body and that of the screwdriver that does not permit me to interpret and use the latter as the whim takes me.
This is why, in Kant and the Platypus, I argued that we have to recognize a hard core of being, such that some of the things that we say about it or for it cannot and must not be taken as “valid” (and if they are said by the Poets they should be taken as valid only insofar as they refer to a possible world and not to the world of real facts).
In speaking of a “hard core” I did not mean something like a “stable kernel” which we might identify sooner or later, not the Law of Laws, but, more prudently, lines of resistance that render some of our approaches fruitless. It is precisely our faith in these lines of resistance that ought also to guide the discourse on hermeneutics, because, if that discourse were to assume that one can say anything and everything one pleases about being and the World, the intellectual and moral tension that guides its continual interrogation would no longer make sense—and it would be content to amuse itself with the Futurists’ parole in libertà. In any case, Heidegger himself recognized limits, otherwise he would not have concentrated so much on the problem of Death—the limit, the cosmic tendency, par excellence.
When we claim to have learned
