Yet again, all this seems very similar to something that has happened to us before and is happening to us now.
1.9 On the Possibility that Being Might Abscond
Let us abandon our model now, since it has transformed itself into the (realistic) portrait of our being thrown into being, and it has confirmed to us that being can be nothing other than what is said in many ways. We have understood that, whichever way things stand (but even the very idea that things stand in some way might be called into question), every proposition regarding that which is, and that which could be, implies a choice, a perspective, a point of view. Every attempt to say something about that which is would be subject to revision, to new conjectures on the suitability of using one or the other image, or schema. Many of our claimed representations would be perhaps incompatible with one another, but they could all tell a truth of their own.
I would not say that we cannot have any real knowledge; if anything, I would maintain that we have an excess of real knowledge. Some are prepared to object that there is no difference between saying there is no truth and saying there are many truths (even if it were only a very simple double truth). But we might likewise object that this excess of truth is transitory; it is an effect of our groping our way along, between trial and error; it indicates a limit beyond which these different perspectives (all partly true) could one day be combined in a system. And that at bottom our continuous renewal of the question of truth depends precisely on this excess…
It may be that, in our language, there is a superabundance of being. Perhaps when scientists say that hypotheses should not be verified but above all falsified, they mean to say that in order to know, we need to prune away the excess of being that can be stated by language.
In any case, the idea that our descriptions of the world are always perspectival, bound up with the way we are biologically, ethnically, psychologically, and culturally rooted in the horizon of being, would be more than acceptable. These characteristics would not hinder our discourses from corresponding to the world, at least from a certain standpoint, without this leading to our feeling satisfied by the degree of correspondence, with the result that we are never persuaded to maintain that our answers, even when they seem basically «good,» must be considered definitive.
But the problem is not how to come to terms with the fact that being may be talked of in many ways. It is that, having identified the deep mechanism of the plurality of answers, we come to the final question, which is central in what has become known as the postmodern world: If the perspectives on being are infinite, or at least astronomically indefinite, does this mean that one equals the other, that all are equally good, that every statement on that which is says something true? Does this mean that—as Feyerabend said about scientific theories—anything goes?
In other words, the final truth would lie beyond the limits of the Western logocentric model; would elude the principles of identity, of noncontradiction, and the excluded middle; would coincide precisely with the kaleidoscope of truth that we formulate by attempting to name it. There would be no transcendental meaning; being would be the same process of continuous deconstruction that is made ever more fluid, malleable, and elusive by our speaking of it, or—as Gianni Vattimo once said—being would be moth-eaten and friable; in other words, rhyzomatic, a network of jumping-off points that could be traveled along according to an infinity of different options, a labyrinth.
But there’s no need to go as far as Feyerabend, or the loss of transcendental meaning, or Vattimo’s «weak thought.» Let us listen to Nietzsche, still not yet thirty, in Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne (Nietzsche 1873: 355–72). Since nature has thrown away the key, the intellect plays on fictions that it calls truth, or systems of concepts, based on the legislation of language. Nietzsche’s first reaction owes, I would say, a debt to Hume, the second is more decidedly skeptical (why do we designate things on the basis of an arbitrary selection of properties?), the third is a prelude to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (different languages organize experience in different ways), the fourth is Kantian (the Thing-in-Itself may not be grasped by the constructor of the language): we think we talk about (and know) trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but they are metaphors that do not correspond to the original essences.
Every word becomes concept as its pallid universality takes the color out of the differences between fundamentally unequal things: thus we think that in correspondence with the multiplicity of individual leaves there exists a primordial «leaf» on «the model of which all leaves have supposedly been woven, drawn, circumscribed, colored, wrinkled, and painted—but by a clumsy hand—in such a way that no exemplar would seem to be correct and reliable as a faithful copy of the original shape» (360). It costs us an effort to admit that birds or insects perceive the world differently from us, nor is there any sense in saying which of the perceptions is more correct, because we would need that criterion of «exact perception» that does not exist (365), because «nature instead knows no form and no concept, and therefore no genus either but only an x, for us unattainable and indefinable» (361). A Kantism therefore, but without a transcendental foundation and without even a critique of judgment. At most, after having stated that our antithesis between individual and genus is only an anthropomorphic effect and one that does not spring from the essence of things, the correction, more skeptical than the skepticism it attempts to correct, says: «We dare not say that this antithesis corresponds to this essence. This would be in fact a dogmatic assertion, and as such as indemonstrable as its opposite» (361).
It has to be decided, therefore, what truth is. And it is said—metaphorically, agreed, but precisely—by someone who is telling us that something is known only through free and inventive metaphor. In fact, the truth is a poetically elaborated «mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms» that subsequently gel into knowledge, «illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten,» coins whose image has been worn away and are taken into consideration only as metal; so we become accustomed to lying according to convention, in a style that is binding for everyone, placing our actions under the control of abstractions, and having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws and delimitations, constructed entirely by language, an immense «Roman columbarium,» the graveyard of intuition.
That this is an excellent portrait of how the edifice of language regiments the landscape of the entities, or perhaps of a being that refuses to become set within categorial systems, is undeniable. But, even from the passages that follow, two questions are missing: whether by adapting to the constrictions of this columbarium we can manage to reckon with the world in some way (which would be no insignificant observation); and whether it doesn’t happen that every so often the world obliges us to restructure the columbarium, or even to choose an alternative form to the columbarium (which is, at the end of the day, the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms). Nietzsche, who after all supplies us with the image of one of the ways of explaining the world that I outlined in the preceding paragraph, does not seem to ask himself whether or not the world has many possible forms. His is a portrait of a holistic system where no new factual judgment can intervene to throw the system into confusion.
In other words, to tell the (textual) truth, he recognizes the existence of natural constrictions and knows a way of change. The constrictions appear to him as «terrible forces» that put continuous pressure on us, opposing «scientific» truths with other truths of a different nature. But evidently he refuses to recognize those other truths by conceptualizing them in their turn, since it was to escape from them that we forged ourselves a protective suit of conceptual armor. The change is possible, not as a restructuring but as a permanent poetic revolution:
If each of us, for himself, had a different sensation, if we ourselves could perceive now as birds, now as worms, now as plants, or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red and another saw it as blue, and if a third were even to hear this stimulus as a sound, then no one could talk of such regularity in nature. (366–67)
What a coincidence that these lines were written two years after Rimbaud, in a letter to Demeny, proclaimed, «Le Poète se fait voy-ant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens» and in the same period saw «A noir, corset velu des mouches éclatantes» and «O suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges.»
And thus in Nietzsche’s view, art (and with it myth)
continuously muddles the rubrics and the compartments of concepts, presenting new transcriptions, metaphors, and
