Nor can I omit the various comments and ideas, not to mention the stubborn resistance, offered by the contributors to the anthology Semiotica Storia Interpretazione: Saggi intorno a Umberto Eco (Milan: Bompiani, 1992).2 Finally, the decision to put my hand to these essays after collecting and re-elaborating my various notebooks perhaps came to me following the discussions, diagnoses, and prognoses (still uncertain) offered me by the participants in the Decade at Cerisy-la-Salle in the summer of 1996. At the time, those present must have thought that I appreciated the musical evenings enlivened by generous doses of calvados more than anything else, but I didn’t miss a word of what was said, and I was in difficulty on several occasions.3
My thanks to all of them (especially the youngest of them) for having awakened me from some of my dogmatic slumbers—if not like Hume, at least like old Lampe.
Chapter One
On Being
The history of research into the philosophy of language is full of men (who are rational and mortal animals), bachelors (who are unmarried adult males), and tigers (though it is not clear whether we should define them as feline mammals or big cats with a yellow coat and black stripes). Analyses of prepositions and adverbs (what do beside, by, or when mean?) are less common (but the few we have are very important), while there are some excellent analyses of emotions (such as anger in Greimas), and some fairly frequent analyses of verbs, such as to go, to clean, to praise, to kill. On the other hand no semantic study seems to have provided a satisfactory analysis of the verb to be, despite the fact that we use it in everyday speech, in all its forms, with a certain regularity.
This was more than evident to Pascal (in a fragment from 1655): «One cannot begin to define being without falling victim to this absurdity: one cannot define a word without beginning with the term is, be it expressly stated or merely understood. To define being, therefore, you have to say is, thus using the term to be defined in the definition.» Which is not the same as saying, as Gorgias said, that we cannot speak of being: we speak about it all the time, too often perhaps; the problem is that this magic word helps us define almost everything but is defined by nothing. In semantics we would speak of a primitive, the most primitive of all.
When Aristotle {Metaphysics IV, 1.1) says there is a science that studies being as being, he uses the present participle to on. In Italian this is translated by some as ente, by others as essere. In point of fact this to on can be understood as that which is, as the existing being,1 and finally as what the Schoolmen called the ens, whose plural is entia, the things that are. But if Aristotle had been thinking only of the things of the real world around us, he would not have spoken of a special science: entities are studied, according to the sector of reality, by zoology, physics, and even by politics. Aristotle says to on e on, the being as such. When we speak of an entity (be it a panther or a pyramid) as an entity (and not as a panther or a pyramid), then the to on becomes that which is common to all beings, and that which is common to all entities is the fact that they are, the fact of their being. In this sense, as Peirce said, Being is that abstract aspect that belongs to all objects expressed in concrete terms: it has an unlimited extension and null intension (or comprehension).2
Which is like saying that it refers to everything but has no meaning. For this reason it seems clear why in philosophical language the substantive use of the present participle, normal for the Greeks, gradually shifted to the infinitive, if not in Greek, certainly in the Scholastic esse. This ambiguity is already to be found in Parmenides, who talks of t’eon, but then affirms that esti gar einai (DK 6), and it is hard not to take an infinitive {to be) that becomes the subject of an is as a substantive. In Aristotle being as an object of knowledge is to on, but the essence is to ti en einai {Met. IV, 1028b, 33.36), what being was, but in the sense of that which being stably is (which was later to be translated as quod quid erat esse). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that to be is also a verb, which expresses not only the act of being something (and hence we say that a cat is a feline) but also the activity (and hence we say that it’s good to be in sound health, or to be on vacation), to the point that often (when one is said to be glad to be in the world) it is used as a synonym for to exist, even though the equation leaves room for a great many reservations, because originally ex-istere meant «to leave-from,» «to manifest oneself,» and therefore «to come into being.»3
Therefore, we have (i) a substantive, the ens, let’s call it the existing entity, (ii) another substantive, being, and (iii) a verb, to be. The perplexity is such that different languages react in different ways to it. Italian and German have a term for (i), ente and Seiende, but only one term for both (ii) and (iii), essere and Sein. It was on the basis of this distinction that Heidegger founded the difference between the ontic and the ontological. While French has only one term, être, it’s true that the philosophical neologism étant has been in use since the seventeenth century, but Gilson himself (in the first edition of L’être et l’essence) had difficulty in accepting it, and opted to use it only in subsequent editions. Scholastic Latin had adopted ens for (i), but in a spirit of tormented casualness it also toyed with (ii), sometimes using ens and other times using esse.4
In current English there are only two terms, to be and being, the second usually covering both senses (i) and (ii): for instance, the current translations of Aquinas’s De ente et essentia read On Being and Essence. Some of Heidegger’s translators (see for instance Ralph Manheim’s translation An Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) use essent for (i) but others (see Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper, 1962) translate «Was ist das Seiende, das Seiende in seinen Sein?» as «What is being, what is beingness in its Being?» Peirce proposed to use ens (or entity) for all the things that may be spoken of,5 including not only material entities but also entities of reason, like the laws of mathematics; and that is how ens came to be the equivalent of being, in the sense that it is a totality that includes not only what is physically around us but also what is below, or inside, or around or before or after, and founds it and/or justifies it.
But in that case, if we are talking about everything that can be spoken of, we need to include the possible too. Not only and not so much in the sense in which it has been maintained that even possible worlds really exist somewhere (Lewis 1973), but at least in Wolff’s sense (Philosophia prima sive ontologia methodo scientifico pertractata, 134), according to which an ontology regards the entity quatenus ens est, regardless of all questions of existence, and so quod possibile est, ens est. A fortiori, therefore, not only speculations but also past events would come within the sphere of being: what is, is in all the conjugations and tenses of the verb to be.
By this point, however, temporality (both of the Dasein and of the galaxies) has inserted itself into being, and there is no need for us to be Parmenideans at all costs: If Being (with a capital B) is everything that can be spoken of, why shouldn’t the future also be a part of it? The future looks like a flaw in a vision of being as a compact and immutable Sphere: but at this point we still cannot know if being is not so much inconstant as mutable, metamorphic, metempsychotic, a compulsive recycler, an inveterate bricoleur….
In any case, the languages we speak are what they are, and if they contain ambiguities, or even confusion regarding the use of this primitive (ambiguities that philosophical reflection does not clear up), may it not be that this perplexity expresses a fundamental condition?
In order to respect this perplexity, in the pages that follow we shall use Being in its widest and most open sense. But what sense can be held by a term that Peirce defined as being of null intension? Could it have the sense suggested by Leibniz’s dramatic question «Why is there something rather than nothing?»
Here is what we mean by the word Being: Something.
1.1 Semiotics and the Something
Why should semiotics deal with this something? Because one of the problems of semiotics is to say whether and how we use signs to refer to something, and a great deal has been written on this. But I do not think that semiotics can avoid another problem: What is that something that induces us to produce signs?
Every philosophy of language finds itself
