11 Gianni Vattimo argues that there is a Heideggerian right and a left (in the same sense as there is a right and a left among Hegelians). The right thinks we should pursue a return to being in the form of an apophatic, negative, and mystical reading; while the left holds that it is a matter of providing a quasi «historicist» interpretation of the weakening of being, and therefore of rediscovering the history of a «long goodbye,» without attempting to lend it currency again, «not even as a term that is forever beyond all formulation» (1994: 18).
12 For a mental experiment in this sense, see my On Truth: A Fiction, in Eco et al. 1986 (now in Eco 1990).
Chapter Two / Kant, Peirce, and the Platypus
1 Sometimes Marco Polo adds to the zoological universe, and through firsthand experience (or by the reconstruction of faithful accounts) he tells us of a sort of cat (in the Italian version, or a gazelle in the original French) that from a «sore» below the navel secretes «musk» that has an exquisite perfume. Today we know the animal exists, and we have identified it as Moschus moschiferus: and while it is not a gazelle, it is not far from one, being a species of deer that, from a pod near the aperture of the prepuce, secretes a musk with a penetrating perfume.
2 See the IX Lowell Lecture, 1865 (WR 1: 471–87); «On a method of searching for the categories,» 1886 (WR 1: 515–28); and «On a new list of categories,» 1867 (WR 2: 49–58).
3 With regard to the sin of compulsive triadism, Peirce offers us a good example in the eleventh Lowell Lecture, where he dares to compare the first triad with the Holy Trinity, and Ground is compared to the Holy Ghost. Which would authorize us to take the whole business less than seriously, were it not for the fact that in all that vagueness there lurks the search for something very important.
4 It is true that often ambiguous shadows gather around the Immediate Object, as when it is said that it too is an icon (CP 4.447), that it is an idea like the Ground and a quality of sensation identified at a perceptual level (8.183), that it is a percept (4.539), while elsewhere it is identified with meaning (2.293). But these oscillations are, if anything, indicators of the fact that in the formation of the Immediate Object there converge all the preliminary moments of a process that establishes itself in it.
5 See Detached Ideas on Vitally Important Topics, 1898 (CP 4.1–5). Even though in CP 7.540 Peirce is wrong about the date of Kant’s death, which he gives as 1799.
6 In Anthropology (I, 38–39) we see how also in his later years Kant delineated (at least as a didactic service) a summary of a theory of signs—not original, with a debt to traditional doctrines, from Sextus Empiricus to Locke and perhaps to Lambert, but one that demonstrates a respectful interest in semiotic thematics. Semiotic interests are also present in such pre-Critique writings as De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principtis § 10. On Kant and semiotics, see Garroni (1972 and 1977), Albrecht (1975, IV), and Kelemen (1991).
7 See note 12 to the introduction by Diego Marconi and Gianni Vattimo to the Italian edition of Rorty 1979.
8 «Of course, in Kant’s thinking, the logical categorial functions play a most remarkable role: but he does not arrive at the fundamental extension of the concepts of perception and intuition in the categorial field … That’s why he does not even distinguish between concepts as general significations of words and concepts as species of direct general representation and finally as general objects, i.e., as intentional correlates of general representations. Right from the start Kant slips on the ground of a metaphysical theory of knowledge because he is preparing the critical ‘rescue’ of mathematics, natural science and metaphysics, even before having subjected knowledge as such, the overall sphere of the acts in which prelogical objectification and logical thought are accomplished, to essential analytical clarification and criticism, and before having brought back primitive logical concepts and laws to their phenomenological origin» (Logical Investigations VI § 66).
9 See Marconi-Vattimo’s objection in the introduction to Rorty 1979: xix.
10 I owe this thought to Ugo Volli (personal communication). For taxonomies in the quest for universal languages, see Eco 1994. See also 3.4.2 and 4.2 in this book.
11 I use the following ciphers for Kant’s works: Critique of Pure Reason (CPR/A and CPR/B, according to whether it is the first or second edition); Critique of Judgement (CJ); Prolegomenon (P); Logic (L). For the CPR, the references are to the pages of the Akademie edition.
12 Published as part of Metaphysik L; in Kants Gesammelte Schrift, Band XXVIII, Vierte Abteilung, Vorlesungen, Fünfter Band, Erste hafte. Berlin: de Gruyter 1968, pp. 2212–2301.
13 In the Prolegomena (§18) there is also mention of a kind of superordinate genus of empirical judgments (empirische Urteile), which are founded in the perception of the senses, and with respect to which experiential judgments add the concepts that originate in the pure intellect. It does not seem clear to me how these empirical judgments differ from perceptual judgments, but I think (unless we want to indulge in Kantian philology) that here we might restrict the comparison to perceptual judgments and experiential judgments.
14 CPR/B: 107. Therefore, with regard to the difference between perceptual judgment and experiential judgment, «the problem has not by any means been solved» (Martinetti 1946: 65). Cassirer (1918) also realized this, but he only mentions it in note 20 to chapter III, 2: «It should be noted that a similar exposition of empirical knowledge … is not so much the description of a fact, as the construction of an extreme case … Kant’s view was that there is no ‘single judgment’ that does not already claim some form of ‘universality’; there is no ’empirical’ proposition that does not include in itself some ‘a priori’ assertions: since the very form of the judgment contains this claim for ‘universal objective validity.'» Why is such an important statement found only in the form of a footnote? Because Cassirer knew he was extrapolating according to common sense and systematic consistency what Kant should have spelled out clearly, by excluding all other ambiguous formulations. Which Kant did not do.
15 Here let us leave open the question as to whether he perceived the stones, but had just, so to speak, removed the percept, or whether he perceived only the moment in which he responded, interpreting memories of still disconnected visual sensations.
16 Marconi (1997) reached me when I had already finished this essay, but it seems to me that the pages he devotes to Kantian schematism (146 ff.) efficaciously emphasize its procedural nature.
17 For the puzzling story of the ruminants, see the Posterior Analytics (II, 98, 15 ff.) and Parts of the Animals (64215–6443 10 and 663 ff.); as well as my «Horns, Hooves, and Shoes: Three Types of Abduction,» now in Eco 1990: 227–33)
18 On the other hand let’s posit from the point of view of a hypothetical Adam who sees a cat for the first time without ever having seen another animal. For this Adam, the cat will be schematized as «thing that moves,» and for the moment this quality it possesses will render it similar to water and clouds. But we can imagine that very soon this Adam will put the cat together with dogs and chickens, among the moving bodies that react unpredictably to his stimulating them and fairly predictably to his calling them, distinguishing them from water and clouds, which indeed appear to move, but are insensible of his presence. Here some would talk of a form of precategorial perception that precedes conceptual categorization, and so the animality perceived on seeing a dog or a cat still has nothing to do with the genus ANIMAL, which has been exercising semioticians since the time at least of Porphyry and his Tree. Nonetheless for the present I do not intend to introduce this notion of the «precategorial,» because, as we shall see in 3.4.2, with regard to the processes known as «categorization,» this form of expression implies a notion of category that is not the Kantian one.
19 This is what in «Horns, Hooves, and Shoes» (now in Eco 1990) I defined as creative abduction. In this regard see Bonfantini and Proni 1980.
20 Opus Postumum: 231, note 1. In the Introduction, Mathieu observes that «even by retaining the necessary structure of the categories one can still take into consideration an ulterior spontaneous activity, which the intellect realizes starting from the categories, but without stopping at them … constructing not simply that which derives from them, but all that can be thought and without falling into contradiction» (p. 21). Perhaps in order to attain all this boldness Kant needed to pass through the aesthetic reflection of
