Again Hofstadter (1979: 723) lists a series of bizarre objects that nonetheless strike us as similar from some points of view or, rather, that share a common «conceptual skeleton»: a tandem unicycle, a piano concerto for two left hands, a one-voice fugue, the art of clapping with one hand. In all these cases we would have «a plural thing made singular and repluralized wrongly.» I would say: «We have a context that demands two actants, we isolate only one of them and put it back into the original context to perform the function of two actants.» Here I think it can be said that no element of perceptual iconism subsists. The rule can be expressed in purely propositional terms; the sense of familiarity aroused by these strange objects springs from reflection and interpretation, it is not immediately given. We apply the rule, and we immediately find an example that Hofstadter did not make but could have made: we find an activity with two actants, for example, the snap of two fingers; we isolate one actant only, the thumb; we put it back into the original context to perform the function of both actants, and we have the snap of one thumb.
Naturally it might always be said that each of these «scenes» could be mentally visualized (in a way similar to the impression one receives when confronted with «impossible figures»). But I would say that this is a consequent and nonnecessary interpretative effect. I do not think anyone could visualize a biciphalus and a pentacalidus (because these are two objects that I have just invented), but I believe it is possible to identify a conceptual skeleton common to a monociphaloid biciphalus and a pentacalidus with two calids.
6.17 The Mexican on a Bicycle
Along the scale that leads by degrees from a maximum of alpha mode to a maximum of beta mode, we pass through a maximum of extremely high definition surrogate stimuli (the waxwork figure) and a maximum of abstraction, where the stimuli (even if still visual) no longer have pictorial efficacy but only plastic value. Let us look at figure 6.9, which reproduces one of those very well-known visual «puns» called Droodles.
Figure 6.9
As some will know and others will not, the solution is «bird’s-eye view of a Mexican on a bicycle,» and once the key has been found, aided by a certain degree of goodwill, we can identify the sombrero and the external part of the two wheels. But with just as much goodwill we might also see a Mississippi paddle steamer or Cyrano and Pinocchio sitting back to back under a beach umbrella. This is why, during the polemic on iconism, the (perfectly correct and indispensable) principle was assumed that from a suitable point of view and in an appropriate context anything can resemble anything else, all the way to the equally famous black square that is to be read «black cat on a moonless night.» What perception gives me, in the case of the «Mexican» droodle, is not much help when it comes to making an interpretative decision. I certainly perceive two concentric circles and two radically flattened semiellipses. Let us admit that we are instinctively led to identify only one flattened ellipse, partly hidden by the larger circle; a whole psychological tradition is there to confirm this, even if we failed to notice it ourselves, and this is always a good proof of the inferential nature of perception. But in order to decide that those forms represent a given object or a scene, I must possess or guess the key (a verbal one in this case, unhappily). Afterward, I can adapt what I perceive to what I know.
So, between the sixties and the seventies the polemic focused on a relaxed use of the notion of «likeness» (which exempted many people from the need to establish rules of «similarity»), and therefore there was more argument about those so-called iconic signs with «symbolic» characteristics (in the sense of Thirdness), such as the Mexican Droodle, than about photographs or hyperrealist representations. This also explains why opponents of iconism pointed out that the iconist position was weak with regard to iconography and diagrammatics in general.
Much emphasis was—very rightly—laid on beta mode, but alpha mode was left in obscurity. In the heat of the debate, which has never completely died down, we neglected, and perhaps still neglect, to identify (according to individuals, cultures, circumstances, and contexts) the threshold between the two modes and to recognize its «fuzzy» nature.37
Endnotes
Introduction
1 Domenico Porzio, «Introduzione,» in J. L. Borges, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori 1985: xv–xvi.
2 In order of appearance: Giovanni Manetti, Costantino Marmo, Giulio Blasi, Roberto Pellerey, Ugo Volli, Giampaolo Proni, Patrizia Violi, Giovanna Cosenza, Alessandro Zinna, Francesco Marsciani, Marco Santambrogio, Bruno Bassi, Paolo Fabbri, Marina Mizzau, Andrea Bernardelli, Massimo Bonfantini, Isabella Pezzini, Maria Pia Pozzato, Patrizia Magli, Claudia Miranda, Sandra Cavicchioli, Roberto Grandi, Mauro Wolf, Lucrecia Escudero, Daniele Barbieri, Luca Marconi, Marco De Marinis, Omar Calabrese, Giuseppina Bonerba, and Simona Bulgari.
3 In alphabetical order (except for the two organizers, Jean Petitot and Paolo Fabbri): Per-Aage Brandt, Michael Caesar, Mario Fusco, Enzo Golino, Moshe Idel, Burkhart Kroeber, Alexandre Laumonier, Jacques Le Goff, Helena Lozano Miralles, Patrizia Magli, Giovanni Manetti, Gianfranco Marrone, Ulla Musarra-Schroeder, Winfried Nóth, Maurice Olender, Pierre Ouellet, Hermann Parret, Roberto Pellerey, Isabella Pezzini, Maria Pia Pozzato, Marco Santambrogio, Thomas Stauder, Emilio Tadini, Patrizia Violi, Tadaiko Wada, Alessandro Zinna, and Ivailo Znepolski. But if I am to talk of critical contributions to my work, I feel must not omit other reflections—even though not immediately connected to the themes discussed in this book—that came to me only while I was putting the final touches to it. I want therefore to mention the contributors to the following anthologies: Rocco Capozzi, ed., Eco: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997); Peter Bondanella, Umberto Eco: Signs for This Time (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Norma Bouchard and Veronica Pravadelli, eds., The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation: Eco’s Alternative (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 1999); Thomas Stauder, ed., «Staunen über das Sein»: Internationale Beiträge zu Umberto Ecos «Insel des vorigen Tages» (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997).
Chapter One / On Being
1 In difficulty, Seneca (Ad Lucillum, 58,5–6) was to translate this on as quod est.
2 «Nominalism vs. Realism,» 1868 (WR 2: 145). For analogous positions see also Hartmann (Zur Grundlagung der Ontologie, Berlin, 1935): the Aristotelian formula, inasmuch as it starts from the concrete entities but wishes to consider that which is common to all, expresses being, i.e., that for which the entity is an entity.
3 Gilson 1984. In scholastic language, at least, «existence is the condition of that which whose being develops from an origin … It is rightly said that if God is, he doesn’t exist.» Gilson’s text contains a wealth of reflections on philosophical lexicography, of which I make free use also in the paragraphs that follow.
4 For these oscillations, cf. M.-D. Philippe 1975. For example, in the De ente et essentia we have the quod quid erat esse, the esse actu simpliciter, the esse quid as esse substantiale, the divine esse tantum, the esse receptum per modum actus, the esse as an effect of the form of matter, the esse in hoc intellects the esse intelligibile in actu, the esse abstractum, the esse universale, and the esse commune… The permanence of these ambiguities is also discussed in Heidegger 1973, iv B.
5 «One, Two, and Three,» 1967, WR 2: 103.
6 I hope that one day this will be translated into German; that way, in Italy at least, philosophers will take it seriously.
7 «On a new list of categories,» 1867 (WR 2).
8 «Of reality as pure reality it can neither be said that it is because it could be, nor that it is because it could not be: but solely that it is because it is. Reality is wholly gratuitous and unfounded: dependent wholly upon freedom, which is not a foundation, but an abyss, that is to say a foundation that always denies itself as a foundation» (Pareyson 1989: 12).
9 In What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger reminds us that it is different to grasp the totality of the entity in itself and the sensation of being at the center of the entity in its totality. The first thing is impossible, the second happens to us all the time. And as proof of this he cites the states of ennui (which are applied to the entity in its totality), but also the joy felt in the presence of the beloved being.
10 The problem is: Do I draw definitions from the evidence that gives me the sensation (and the subsequent abstraction of the phantasm) or is it the precognition of the definition that allows me to abstract the essence? If the active intellect is not a repository of previous forms but the pure mechanism that allows me to identify forms under way in the synolon, what is this faculty? It is easy to fall into the Arab heresy and say that it is unique for everybody, but saying that it is unique does not mean that it is immutable and universal; it could be a cultural active intellect, it could be the faculty of identifying and carving out the forms of the content. In which case the code, supplied by the segmentation brought about by the active intellect, would determine the nature
