On the other hand, something resists even the God of the revealed religions. Even God prescribes limits for Himself. This brings to mind the Quaestio Quodlibetalis in which Aquinas asks himself utrum Deus possit reparare virginis ruinam, that is, whether God can remedy the fact that a virgin has lost her virginity. Aquinas’s reply is clear: If the question concerns spiritual matters, God can certainly remedy the sin committed and restore the state of grace to the sinner; if it concerns physical matters, with a miracle God can restore the girl’s physical integrity; but if the question is logical and cosmological, well, not even God can ordain that what has been has not been. Let us leave it open as to whether this necessity was freely laid down by God or whether it is part of divine nature itself. In any case, from the moment He is, even the God of Aquinas is limited by it.
1.12 Positive Conclusions
After having said that nothingness and negation are pure effects of language and that being always manifests itself in the positive, one might wonder whether it is not contradictory to speak of its limits and its capacity to refuse. Let us therefore correct another metaphor, which struck us as so handy for rhetorical reasons, to make clear what we wanted to suggest. Being says no to us in the same way a tortoise would say no if we asked it to fly. It is not that the tortoise realizes it cannot fly. It is the bird who flies; in its own way it knows it can fly and does not conceive of not being able to fly. The tortoise proceeds on its earthbound path, positively, and does not know the condition of not being a tortoise.
Of course, the animal also encounters obstacles that it senses as limits, and it seems to struggle to remove them; just think of the dog who scratches and barks at the door while biting the handle. But in such cases the animal is getting closer to a condition similar to our own; it manifests desires and intentions, and it is with respect to them that the limit is set. A closed door is not in itself a no; on the contrary, it could be a yes for those who, inside, seek privacy and protection. It becomes a no only for the dog planning to cross the threshold.
It is we, given that the Mind can provide imaginary representations of impossible worlds, who ask things to be what they are not.
And, when they carry on being what they are, we think they are telling us no, and setting limits for us. We are the ones who think that our leg (in articulating at the knee) can describe some angles, from 180 to 45 degrees, but it cannot describe an angle of 360 degrees. The leg—for what little a leg can be said to «know»—is unaware of any limits and is aware only of possibilities. To us who capriciously would like to live on, death appears as a limit, but for the organism it arrives when things go exactly as they must.
Being never tells us no, except in our metaphor. Simply, faced with a demanding question on our part, it does not give the answer we would have wished. But the limit is in our desire, in our reaching out for absolute freedom.
Of course, in the light of these resistances, the language of the Poets seems to occupy a free zone. Liars by vocation, they are not those who say what being is but seem to be those who instead often permit themselves (and us) to deny its resistances—because for them tortoises can fly, and there can even be creatures that elude death. But their discourse, in telling us sometimes that even the impossibilia are possible, brings us face to face with the immoderate nature of our desire: by letting us glimpse what could be beyond the limit, on the one hand they console us for our finiteness and on the other they remind us how often we are a «useless passion.» Even when they refuse to accept the resistances in being, in denying them they remind us of them. Even when they suffer on discovering them, they let us think that perhaps we have identified them (and hypostatized them into laws) too soon—that perhaps the resistances could still be got around.
What the Poets are really saying to us is that we need to encounter being with gaiety (and hopefully with science too), to question it, test its resistances, grasp its openings and its hints, which are never too explicit.
The rest is conjecture.
Chapter Two
Kant, Peirce, and the Platypus
2.1 Marco Polo and the Unicorn
Often, when faced with an unknown phenomenon, we react by approximation: we seek that scrap of content, already present in our encyclopedia, which for better or worse seems to account for the new fact. A classic example of this process is to be found in Marco Polo, who saw what we now realize were rhinoceroses on Java. Although he had never seen such animals before, by analogy with other known animals he was able to distinguish the body, the four feet, and the horn. Since his culture provided him with the notion of a unicorn—a quadruped with a horn on its forehead, to be precise—he designated those animals as unicorns. Then, as he was an honest and meticulous chronicler, he hastened to tell us that these unicorns were rather strange—not very good examples of the species, we might say—given that they were not white and slender but had «the hair of the buffalo» and feet «like the feet of an elephant.» He went on to give even more detail:
It has one horn in the middle of the forehead very thick and large and black. And I tell you that it does no harm to men and beasts with its horn, but only with the tongue and knee, for on its tongue it has very long spines and sharp…
It has the top of the head made like a wild boar … It is a very ugly beast to see and unclean. And they are not so as we here say and describe, who say that it lets itself be caught in the lap by a virgin girl: but I tell you that it is quite the contrary of that which we believe that it was. (Polo, The Description of the World, ed. and trans. A. Moule and P. Pelliot, London: Routledge, 1938)
Marco Polo seems to have made a decision: rather than resegment the content by adding a new animal to the universe of the living, he has corrected the contemporary description of unicorns, so that, if they existed, they would be as he saw them and not as the legend described them. He has modified the intension and left the extension unchanged. Or at least that is what it seems he wanted to do, or in fact did, without bothering his head overmuch regarding taxonomy.1
What would have happened if Polo had arrived in Australia rather than in China and spotted a platypus along some riverbank?
The platypus is a strange animal. It seems to have been conceived to foil all classification, be it scientific or popular. On the average about fifty centimeters long and roughly two kilos in weight, its flat body is covered with a dark-brown coat; it has no neck and a tail like a beaver’s; it has a duck’s beak, bluish on top and pink or variegated beneath; it has no outer ears, and the four feet have five webbed toes, but with claws; it stays underwater (and eats there) enough to be considered a fish or an amphibian. The female lays eggs but «breast-feeds» her young, even though no nipples can be seen (the male’s testicles cannot be seen either, as they are internal).
We are not wondering whether Marco Polo would have recognized the animal as a mammal or an amphibian, but he certainly would have had to ask himself if what he was seeing (presuming it was an animal and not an illusion of the senses, or a creature from hell) was a beaver, a duck, or a fish, and in any case if it was a bird, sea animal, or land animal. A nice quandary, from which he could not escape by using the notion of the unicorn; at best he could have fallen back on the idea of the Chimera.
The first Australian colonists to see the platypus found themselves in the same quandary: they saw it as a mole, and in fact they called it the «water mole,» but this mole had a beak, and therefore it was not a mole. Something perceptible outside the «mold» supplied by the idea of mole made the mold unsuitable—because to recognize a beak as a beak we would have to presume that the colonists had a «template» for the beak.
2.2 Peirce and the Black Ink
Had he come across one, Peirce too would have had problems with the platypus, many more than he had with lithium or apple pie.
While it can be maintained that semiosic processes are involved in the recognition of the known, because it is precisely a matter of relating sense data to a (conceptual and semantic) model, the problem, which has been debated for a long time now, is to what extent a semiosic process plays a part in the understanding of an unknown phenomenon. Any semiotician of the Peircean school is convinced that semiosis lies hidden in
