Put phylogenetically, this was the fundamental problem—which modernity has prohibited—of the origins of language, at least from Epicurus onward. But while it can be avoided phylogenetically (by pointing to the lack of archaeological evidence), it cannot be avoided ontogenetically. Our own day-to-day experience provides us with the elements, perhaps imprecise but in a certain sense tangible, with which to answer the question «But why have I been induced to say something?»
Structural semiotics has never addressed the problem (with the exception of Hjelmslev, as we shall see): the various languages are considered as systems that are already constituted (and synchronically analyzable) the moment users express themselves, state, indicate, ask, or command. The rest appertains to the production of words, but the reasons why we talk are psychological and not linguistic. Analytical philosophy has contented itself with its own concept of truth (which deals not with how things really are but with the conclusions that should be drawn if a proposition is understood as true), but it has not considered our prelinguistic relation with things. In other words, the statement Snow is white is true if the snow is white, but how we realize (and are sure) that snow is white is delegated to a theory of perception or to optics.
Beyond a doubt the only person who made this problem the very foundation of his theory—semiotic, cognitive, and metaphysical all at the same time—was Peirce. A Dynamical Object drives us to produce a representamen, in a quasi-mind this produces an Immediate Object, which in turn is translatable into a potentially infinite series of interpretants and sometimes, through the habit formed in the course of the interpretative process, we come back to the Dynamical Object, and we make something of it.
It might be observed that, as soon as we get back to the Dynamical Object and start speaking about it again, we are once more at the point of departure, and so we have to rename it using another representamen, so that in a certain sense the Dynamical Object always remains a Thing-in-Itself, always present and impossible to capture, if not through semiosis.
Yet the Dynamical Object is what drives us to produce semiosis. We produce signs because there is something that demands to be said. To use an expression that is efficacious albeit not very philosophical, the Dynamical Object is Something-that-sets-to-kicking-us6and says «Talk!» to us—or «Talk about me!» or again, «Take me into consideration!»
We are familiar with the indexical signs, this or that in verbal language, a pointing finger, an arrow in the language of images (cf. Eco 1978, 3.6); but there is a phenomenon we must understand as presemiotic, or protosemiotic (in the sense that it constitutes the signal that gets the semiosic process under way), which we will call primary indexicality or attentionality (Peirce spoke of attention as the capacity to direct the mind toward an object, and to pay attention to one element while ignoring another).7 Primary indexicality occurs when, amid the thick stuff of the sensations that bombard us, we suddenly select something that we set against that general background and decide we want to speak about it (when, in other words, while we live surrounded by luminous, thermic, tactile, and interoceptive sensations, only one of these attracts our attention, and only afterward we say that it is cold, or we have a sore foot); primary indexicality occurs when we attract someone’s attention, not necessarily to speak to him but just to show him something that will have to become a sign or an example, and we tug his jacket, we turn-his-head-toward.
In the most elementary of semiosic relations, the radical translation illustrated by Quine (1960: 2), before knowing what name the native has assigned to a passing rabbit (or to whatever he sees where I see and understand a passing rabbit), and before I ask him, «What is that thing?»—with an interrogative gesture while, in a way he perhaps finds incomprehensible, I point my finger at the spatiotemporal event that interests me—to ensure that he replies with the celebrated and enigmatic gavagai, there is a moment in which I fix his attention on that spatiotemporal event. I may cry out, I may grasp him by the shoulders, but I shall do something so that he notices what I have decided to notice.
This fixing of my own or someone else’s attention on something is the condition of every semiosis to come; it even precedes that act of attention (already semiosic, already an effect of thought) by which I decide that something is pertinent, curious, or intriguing, and must be explained by a hypothesis. This fixing comes before curiosity itself, before the perception of the object as an object. It is the as yet blind decision whereby I identify something amid the magma of experience that I have to reckon with.
The whole problem of whether, once a theory of consciousness has been worked out, this object becomes a Dynamical Object, noumenon, or the still raw material of an intuition not yet illuminated by the categorical comes afterward. First there is something, even if it is only my reawakened attention; but not even that, it is my attention as it sleeps, lies in wait, or dozes. It is not the primary act of attention that defines the something, it is the something that arouses the attention, indeed the attention lying in wait is already part (is evidence) of this something.
These are the reasons why semiotics cannot avoid reflecting on this something that (to link us with all those who throughout the centuries have tormented themselves over it) we decide to call Being.
1.2 An Unnatural Problem
It has been said that the problem of being (the answer, that is, to the question «What is being?») is the least natural of all problems, the one that common sense never poses (Aubenque 1962: 13–14). «Being as such is so far from constituting a problem that apparently it is as if such a datum ‘didn’t exist’ » (Heidegger 1973: 1969). To the point that the post-Aristotelian tradition ignored the question and, as it were, removed it, which perhaps explains the legendary fact that the text of Metaphysics disappeared, to resurface only in the first century B.C. On the other hand Aristotle himself, and with him the entire Greek philosophical tradition, never posed the question that Leibniz was to put to himself in his Principes de la nature et de la grace: «Pourquoi il y a plutôt quelque chose que rien?»—adding that, at bottom, nothingness would have been simpler and less complex than something. As a matter of fact this question also represents the distress of the nonphilosopher who sometimes finds it too difficult to think of God in His inconceivable eternity, or worse still, of the eternity of the world, while it would be much simpler and more reassuring if nothing existed or had ever existed, so that there would never have been even one mind prepared to rack its brains over why there is nothing rather than being. But if we aspire to nothingness, by this act of aspiration we are already in being, albeit in the form of frailty and sin, as Valéry suggests in Ebauche d’un serpent:
Soleil, soleil!…Faute éclatante!
Toi qui masques la mort, Soleil …
Par d’impénétrables délices,
Toi le plus fier de mes complices,
Et de mes pièges le plus haut,
Tu gardes les coeurs de connaître
Que l’univers n’est qu’un défaut
Dans la pureté du Non-être.
Incidentally, if the normal condition were nothingness, and we were only a luckless transitory excrescence, the ontological argument would also collapse. It would not be worth arguing that, if it is possible to think id cujus nihil majus cogitari possit (that is, possessed of all perfections), since part of this being’s due should also be the perfection that is existence, the very fact that God is thinkable demonstrates that He exists. Of all the confutations of the ontological argument, the most energetic seems to be expressed by the question «Who says that existence is a perfection?» Once it is admitted that absolute purity consists of Nonbeing, the greatest perfection of God would consist of His nonexistence. Thinking of Him (being able to think of Him) as existing would be the effect of our shortcomings, capable of sullying with the attribution of being what has the supreme right and incredible good fortune not to exist. It would have been interesting had there been a debate not between Anselm of Canterbury and Gaunilon but between Anselm and Cioran.
But even if being were a flaw in the purity of nonbeing, we would be ensnared in this flaw. And therefore we might as well try to talk about it. Let us return therefore to the fundamental question posed by metaphysics: Why is there something (whether it is being as such, or the plurality of entities that may be experienced or thought of, and the totality of the immense flaw that has deprived us of the divine tranquillity of nonbeing) rather than nothing? I repeat, in Aristotle (and in the Aristotelian scholastic tradition) this question does not appear. Why? Because the question was avoided by means of the implicit answer that we shall now try to give.
1.3 Why is There Being?
Why is there being rather than nothing? Because there is.8
This is an answer to be taken with the maximum seriousness; it is
