We use expressions to express a content, and this content is carved up and organized differently by different cultures (and languages). Out of what is it carved? Out of an amorphous magma, which was there before language performed its vivisections and which we may call the continuum of the content, all that can be experienced, all that can be said, all that can be thought—if you will, the infinite horizon of all that is, was, and will be, either of necessity or by contingency. It would seem that, before a culture has organized it linguistically in the form of content, this continuum is everything and nothing, and therefore eludes all definition. Nevertheless, when Hjelmslev (1943: 13 and 46–48) speaks of this amorphous continuum that every language organizes in a different way, he says that linguistic chains such as I do not know, je ne sais pas, en tiedä, naluvara, jeg véd det ikke, despite their differences, express the same mening, that is, the same thought. The Danish term mening is a cognate of meaning, and for the English version of his work Hjelmslev accepted the term purport. How can an amorphous continuum have a meaning or a purport?
As a matter of fact Hjelmslev was not speaking of a linguistic phenomenon but rather of an extralinguistic one: he said that the purport could be described by various extralinguistic disciplines. Thus languages are obliged to recognize extrasemiotic constrictions that they cannot ignore. In other words different expressions such as it is raining, il pleut, and piove all refer to the same phenomenon. Which amounts to saying that in the magma of the continuum there are lines of resistance and possibilities for flow, like the grain in wood or marble that makes it easier to cut it one way rather than another. Every culture runs up against the extralinguistic problem of rain; it rains or doesn’t rain in every culture, and tertium datur only when it drizzles or when hoarfrost forms.
If the continuum itself has lines of tendency, we are not entitled to say whatever we like. There are directions, maybe not compulsory directions, but certainly directions to which entry is forbidden. There are things we cannot say. It doesn’t matter if these things were once said. We subsequently “banged our heads into” evidence that convinced us that we could no longer say what we formerly said.
Although we talk about encountering something that obliges us to recognize lines of tendency and resistance, we are not yet ready to start defining “laws.” If, on the path I am taking through the woods, I find a boulder blocking my way, I have no choice but to turn left or right or decide to go back (though, unlike Chrysippus’s dog, I could also stop and lean back against the rock and dedicate the remainder of my life to contemplating the Tao). But I have no reassurance that the decision I make will help me get to know the woods better. The occurrence merely interrupts my initial project and induces me to come up with another. Stating that there are lines of resistance does not amount to saying, as Peirce claims, that there are universal laws that operate in nature. The hypothesis of a law is only one of the ways in which we can react to the encounter with a resistance. Habermas, in seeking to identify the kernel of Peirce’s criticism of Kant’s thing-in-itself, stresses the fact that Peirce’s problem is not saying that something (hidden behind the appearances that aspire to mirror it) has, like a mirror, a reverse side that eludes reflection, a side that we are almost certain to discover one day, so long as we can circumvent the figure that we see: the fact is that reality imposes restrictions on our knowledge only in the sense that it does not permit false interpretations (Habermas 1995: 251).
Stating that there are lines of resistance simply means that, even if it appears as an effect of language, the World always presents us with something that is already given and not posited by us. What is already given are precisely the lines of resistance.
In Kant and the Platypus, I expressed my opinion that the appearance of these resistances is the closest thing we can find, before any First Philosophy or Theology, to the idea of God or the Law. Certainly, this is a God who manifests Himself as pure Negativity, pure Limit, pure “No”—something quite different from the God of revealed religions, of whom he retains only the severest traits, as exclusive Lord of Interdiction, ever intent only upon repeating “Of this tree thou shalt not eat.” Since, however, a tendentious reader has seen in these affirmations of mine a proposal for a new proof for the existence of God, I find myself obliged to make up for his lack of sensitivity to the stratagems of elocutio by pointing out (as in the most desperate cases we may be obliged to explain we were making a joke) that the lines of resistance are not a metaphor for God, but, on the contrary, the idea of a God who says “No” functions as a metaphor for the lines of resistance.
And, seeing that our need not to be misunderstood compels us to explain even our metaphors, labeling them as such, let me make it clear that it is also a metaphor to say that the lines of resistance confront us with a no. The World says no in the same way a mole would say no if we asked it to fly. It is not as if the mole is aware that he cannot fly. The mole proceeds on his terrestrial and subterranean way, and does not know what it means not to be a mole. He plays the mole to his own moliness.
To be sure, animals run into obstacles too, and struggle to overcome them: think of the dog that barks and scratches at the closed door and bites at the handle. But in a case like this the animal is already approaching a condition similar to our own; it evinces desires and intentions, and the limit is a limit with respect to its desires (or its instincts). A closed door in and of itself is not a no, indeed it could be a yes for someone seeking privacy and protection behind it. It becomes a no only for the dog who wants to come in.
It is we who, since the Mind can also provide imaginary representations of impossible worlds, ask things to be what they are not and, when they continue to be what they are, conclude they are answering no, opposing a limit. But the limit lies in our desire, in our aspiration toward absolute freedom. Death itself appears to us as a limit, when as living creatures we fear it. But at the moment of death it arrives just when things are going exactly the way they must go—the very idea that death arrives is no more than a metaphor: no one arrives, heart and brain simply stop, from the most natural causes.
In the face of the already given, we proceed by conjecture, and we do our best to get others to accept our conjectures. That is to say, we publicly compare our conjectures with what others know of the already given. It may be that this attitude does not define a “strong” thought, in the sense in which the various tribunals of Reason and Faith (more closely related than may appear at first blush) see themselves as strong. But it certainly defines a thought that continually runs up against the “forces” that oppose it. And since racing improves the breed, a conjectural thought, while it may not be strong, may not be weak either, but it will be well-tempered.
If Vattimo were to admit that his “weakness” is also a metaphor for a well-tempered thought, he would be welcome to become a member of my sect. But if a weak thinker should happen to agree with Nietzsche that everything is a metaphor, could we still recognize a metaphor for what it is?
A further revisited version of the paper delivered at the conference, attended by Gianni Vattimo, entitled “Autour d’Umberto Eco: Signes, réprésentations,
