A dream of trees that conceal nymphs, and of gods in the form of bulls dragging along virgins.
But here the final decision is missing. Either we accept that what surrounds us, and the way in which we have tried to order it, cannot be lived in, and so we deny it and opt for dreams as an escape from reality (which is reminiscent of Pascal, for whom dreaming of being king really every night was sufficient grounds for happiness)—but Nietzsche himself admits (370) that this would be a deception, albeit a supremely light-hearted one that does no harm, and that this would be the dominion of art over life. Or, and this is what Nietzsche’s followers have taken as the real lesson, art can say what it says because it is being itself, in its languid weakness and generosity, that accepts this definition too and takes pleasure from seeing itself seen as changeable, a dreamer, extenuatingly vigorous and victoriously weak.
However, at the same time, no longer as «fullness, presence, foundation, but thought instead as fracture, absence of foundation, in definitive travail and suffering» (Vattimo 1980: 84). Being can therefore be said only insofar as it is in decline, as it does not impose itself but absconds. This brings us to an «ontology supported by ‘weak’ categories» (Vattimo 1980: 9). Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is nothing more than the proclamation of the end of the stable structure of being (Vattimo 1983: 21). Being exists only «as suspension and as shirking» (Vattimo 1994: 18).
In other words: once the principle is accepted that being can be spoken of only in many ways, what is it that prevents us from believing that all perspectives are good, and that therefore not only does being strike us as an effect of language but that it is radically the effect of language and nothing else but the effect of language, and specifically of the form of language that can permit itself the greatest unruliness: the language of myth and of poetry? Being, therefore, would be not only moth-eaten, malleable, and weak but also pure flatus vocis. At this point it really would be the work of the Poets, understood as dreamers, liars, imitators of nothing, capable of irresponsibly putting an equine head on a human body, and turning every entity into a chimera.
Not at all a comforting decision, given that once we have reckoned with being, we find ourselves having to reckon with the subject that emits this flatus vocis (which is moreover the limit of every magic idealism). And that is not all. While it is a principle of hermeneutics that there are no facts, only interpretations, this does not prevent us from asking if there might not perchance be «bad» interpretations. Because to say that there are no facts, only interpretations, certainly means saying that what appears to us as fact is the effect of interpretation but not that every possible interpretation produces something that, in the light of subsequent interpretations, we are obliged to consider as if it were a fact. In other words, the fact that every winning poker hand is constructed by a choice (maybe encouraged by chance) on the part of the player does not mean that every hand the player lays down is a winning one. It would be sufficient if my opponent played a royal flush to my three of a kind, and my bet would be shown to be a bluff. Does our game with being begin as soon as Something replies with a royal flush to our three aces?
The real problem with every «deconstructive» argumentation of the classic concept of truth is not to demonstrate that the paradigm by which we reason might be fallacious. It looks as if everybody is in agreement about this, by now. The world as we represent it to ourselves is an effect of interpretation. The problem has more to do with the nature of the guarantees that authorize us to attempt a new paradigm that others must not recognize as delirium, pure imagination of the impossible. What is the criterion that allows us to distinguish between dream, poetic invention, and an «acid trip» (because there are people who, after having taken the drug, throw themselves out of windows convinced they can fly, only to wind up splattered all over the ground; an end, mark you, in sharp contrast with their hopes and intentions) from acceptable statements on the things of the physical or historical world around us?
We can even posit, as Vattimo does (1994: 100), a difference between epistemology, which is «the construction of rigorous bodies of knowledge and the solution of problems in the light of paradigms that dictate the rules for the verification of propositions» (and that seems to correspond to Nietzsche’s portrait 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.» What new rule should the Community prefer, and what others condemn as folly? There are and will always be those who wish to demonstrate that the world is square, or that we do not live on the exterior but on the interior of its crust, that statues weep, that you can bend forks on television, or that apes descend from men—and to be flexibly honest and not dogmatic we likewise need to find a public criterion with which to judge whether their ideas are in some way acceptable.
In a debate held in 1990 (now in Eco 1992) with regard to the existence or otherwise of textual criteria of interpretation, Richard Rorty—broadening the discourse to include criteria of interpretation of things that are in the world—denied that the use made of a screwdriver to tighten screws is imposed by the object itself, while the use made of it to open a parcel is imposed by our subjectivity (he was discussing my distinction between the interpretation and use of a text; see Eco 1979).
In the oral debate, Rorty also alluded to the right we would have to interpret a screwdriver as something useful to scratch our ears with. This explains my reply, which also remained in the printed version of the debate, without my knowing that in the speech sent by Rorty to the publisher the allusion to ear scratching had disappeared. Evidently Rorty had interpreted it as a simple boutade, an off-the-cuff remark made in the course of the conversation, and therefore I refrain from attributing this no longer documented example to him. But if Rorty does not use it, someone else might, and therefore my counterobjection is still valid. Indeed, I reconfirm it in the light of that notion of pertinence, of the perceptual affordances I talk of in this volume (3.4.7). A screwdriver can serve also to open a parcel (given that it is an instrument with a cutting point, easy to use in order to exert force on something resistant); but it is inadvisable to use it for rummaging about in your ear, precisely because it is sharp and too long to allow the hand to control the action required for such a delicate operation; and so it would be better to use not a screwdriver but a light stick with a wad of cotton at its tip.
It suffices to imagine a possible world in which there is only a hand, a screwdriver, an ear (or at most a parcel and a screw) for the argument to acquire all its ontological value: there is something in the conformation both of my body and the screwdriver that prevents me from interpreting the latter at my whim.
Now, so we might get out of this tangle: Does there exist a hard core of being, of such a nature that some things we say about it and for it cannot and must not be taken as holding good (and if they are said by the Poets, let them be held good only insofar as they refer to a possible world but not to a world of real facts)?
1.10 The Resistances of Being
As usual, metaphors are efficacious but risky. By talking of a «hard core» I do not think of something tangible and solid, as if it were a «kernel» that, by biting into being, we might one day reveal. What I am talking about is not the Law of Laws. Let us try rather to identify some lines of resistance, perhaps mobile, vagabond, that cause the discourse to seize up, so that even in the absence of any previous rule there arises, within the discourse, a phantasm, the hint of an anacoluthon, or the block of an aphasia.
That being places limits on the discourse through which we establish ourselves in its horizon is not the negation of hermeneutic activity: instead it is the condition for it. If we were to assume that everything can be said of being, the adventure of continuously questioning it would no longer have any sense. It would suffice to talk about it randomly. Continuous questioning appears reasonable and human precisely because it is assumed that there is a Limit.
One can only agree with Heidegger: the problem of being is posed
